Well then the entire world should rejoice that people like yourself and OP are not in control of other peoples livelihood.

Really? This is not only a worse-than-useless, waste-of-user-time feature on its own, but it actively interrupts the user to get their attention!

So, this PM decided to put into a production environment a feature that interrupts a customer's workflow for no good benefit. It doesn't even benefit Microsoft, so he's not even being a bandit.

This is the very definition of stupid. Hurt the other guy, hurt yourself, for no benefit to either [1].

So, why would or should any employer continue to pay a person who performs such an obviously stupid action in a production environment to continue in the same position?

We may have a right to jobs if we continue to produce output that benefits the customers and employer, not simply because we continue to exist. Start harming your customers and/or employers, and why should you continue to receive their resources?

[1] http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/serendipia/Stupidity.html

The question was not whether or not an employer should continue to pay a person.

The question was whether or not some angry internet person should be responsible for the livelihood of a developer of a product they are having difficulty with.

Oh, so it'd be ok if the "angry internet person" hust happened to be the PM's boss, noticed this abomination & fired them?

Indeed, if more "angry internet people" (with good clear points like this one) actually provoked performance reviews, we might have better software.

Quit the sophistry. The guy had a real point and you're merely trying to make distracting noise.

Your skewed view of my words led you to a strange end point.

Ill quit the sophistry when you stick to arguments that make sense.

It's telling to see how casually the notion of personal accountability in the workplace is discarded. For the record, OP getting his wish still leaves the individuals responsible in control of their own livelihood, they just chose poorly.

What about all the people who have lost their jobs after a company goes under due to horrible product teams? If someone isn’t pulling their weight, you have to boot them for the greater good.

Those people and that scenario have nothing to do with what I'm talking about.

An unrelated end user of a product should have no power over a persons work status just because they don't like the product.

> the greater good

subjectivity at its finest

Oh I see, yeah I agree. “Person responsible for X should be fired” is something I see all the time, but it never occurred to me that it might be a serious request.