Now you have to show loyalty. And enthusiasm. And hack on the product in your free time. And install your employer's app on your personal devices.
An app that knows your personal financial details, tracks your fine-grained location, reads your personal contacts and SD storage, and can transmit all of this to your employer[0].
Will PayPal also go above and beyond the employment relationship for their employees? Will they show the same loyalty in return[1]?
Yep, I understand why a company would want employees who do all those things. Employees who do all those things is a great signal that you are on the right track, and some of those things in and of themselves will produce benefits for your product, sure.
But you can't get those things just by ordering your employees to do them. Even if you somehow get your employees to pretend to have loyalty and enthusiasm by ordering them to, that is -not- a signal that you're on the right path, and won't produce those benefits.
Yea, I agree with Marcus's message: Dogfood our products! But I don't agree with his methodology for achieving it: chiding workers. What he should have done is require feedback from all workers on why they do or don't use the app (they can use third party anonymous surveys for that).
I agree with you 100% that a company is stepping way over the line when it tells employees what software they should install on their personal devices, how they should pay for their own purchases, etc. (And after treating his employees like he owns them, the CEO will whine about how hard it is to find good developers.)
That said, people who create intrusive software to track the intimate details of their users are hypocrites if they'd object to being tracked by that same software themselves.
But you can't get those things just by ordering your employees to do them. Even if you somehow get your employees to pretend to have loyalty and enthusiasm by ordering them to, that is -not- a signal that you're on the right path, and won't produce those benefits.