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Massive Layoffs At AOL
JLavezzo writes "Several news sites are reporting that the United States' largest ISP has laid off 750 employees. My sources at AOL put the actual number at approximately 950 regular employees and 300 contractors from various departments including new technology and marketing. The contractors aren't mentioned by the news outlets. Severance packages are known to include up to four months pay and keeping laid off employees on the AOL payroll through February (to retain health insurance). With most of the layoffs coming from the Northern Virginia offices, what are their hopes for finding new jobs?"
Even though AOL is heading downhill and many people are happy to see them head that direction; it's never good news to hear that many people getting let go. I always hoped AOL would evolve and not sink.
I'm friends with Tag Loomis (guy who programmed shoutcast) over at Winamp. He's a really nice guy.
They had 3 programmers working on winamp, he never did work on winamp, only shoutcast.
They also had a visualization skin programmer too.
They were all fired, and he's the only one left, and sole programmer of Winamp now.
I've brought several bugs to his attention, but he just can't keep up doing it all alone..
He tells me that he expects nullsoft to be terminated soon because it's definately not making them any money. He says the only reason AOL bought them was so they could compete with Media player if they decided to push advertising for it. Kind of like netscape competing with IE.
I asked him what he'd do if he's fired... he said he's probably start delivering pizza again, cause he's looked and looked for a job to transfer to and can't find one.
He worked for Pheonix bios for several years, and if you have that bios your system is likly running code he's written.
Admittedly, as I'm cleared, I have a far easier time finding work in DC Metro, but this area is about as recession-proof as it gets. . .
Yeah, clearances help, but Homeland Security is hiring people, either directly or as contractors, by the metric butt-load. DOD is growing, as are some new dot-coms in Northern Virginia.
Now, if you're in Marketing or Biz Dev, it may be another story. . . .
This layoff was announced weeks ago, it's really no surprise. But for the employees who are staying, AOL rented the new Udvar-Hazy Smithsonian Air & Space Museum for the Christmas party.
Ecce potestas casei!
Sure, but they need to lower their expenses first if they're going to lower their cost. How do their lower their expenses? Firing a few hundred employees is a place to start...
Computers are just a fad anyway. You might as well major in Betamax.
Well, that kind of severance package seems to me to indicate the economy is strong, So I would guess the skilled employees will find work fast. 20,000 people at AOL though....What the hck does an ISP need with 20,000 people, even AOL's size? It makes me wonder just how skilled the newly unemployed were....
I once got passed over for a job because I did not have a University degree, I have a 3 year community collage diploma. Now I thought this was odd, because the job was to modify and maintain source code that they had purchased from my ONE MAN company a few years before.
Now I don't think Raven ever much thought about Hiro except when Hiro made himself a target. Hiro chased him down in the bamboo farm, Raven didn't even bother to see if his impromtu spear hit paydirt. At the raft, Raven only showed up long enough to kill the with man with Reason, the only one Raven saw as a threat. Sure, he tried to give Hiro the virus at the Black Pyramid, but he was trying to give every hacker the virus. The point is, while Raven was a major factor to Hiro, Hiro was barely a blip on Raven's scope. The only fight that occured was the virtual one that Raven eventually fiured out he didn't need to fight to win (And Raven did win, the Virus program was kicked off. Raven hadn't been told to stop Hiro from dropping his anti-virus).
YT, well now I see why Raven has "Poor Implulse Control" tatooed on his forehead.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
- Arbitrary, usually laying off good people on succesful projects that show lots of promise (e.g. WinAmp).
- Timely. This is two (or is it three?) years in a row they've done the "oops, we're not as profitable as we need to be for Q4 so let's shitcan some folks" thing right before X-mas. Happy Holidays!!!
- Generous. Last year they offered the rank-n-file folks 2 months notice + 2 months severence. Managers got 4 months severence plus the full "Manager Incentive Bonus" (~3 months salary, I believe). Plus any accrued vacation is paid off, of course. Sounds like they're doing the same again this year.
- Great for morale. I was in a group of ~15 people that lost half their team last year. 12 months later, all but 1 of the remaining team is somewhere else, or actively looking for a job.
And, yes, I was laid off last year, and couldn't have been happier about it. It's a hell of a lot harder to find a company willing to pay for a 5-7 month vacation than it is to find another job.And to top it all off, all the AOL options that have been issued for the last 5 years are worthless and likely to stay that way, so nobody's crying over the loss of those.
Northern Virginia and the DC metro area are actually a great place to be in IT. Because of so many government jobs, we are largely recession proof. My advice is to get a job for Uncle Sam. There is not a lot of difference now between IT wages for the government and in the private sector at this point because the government still applies an IT bonus to your salary calculation and private sector salaries went down. New York City and DC are still the best places to be in IT.
Look, I worked at AOL tech support for a year. In some towns, you can't throw a rock without hitting someone who hasn't (Ogden, Tucson, Reston, Jacksonville, etc).
This is how it goes: normally, it's your first "real" tech job. Before this, you were the guy your friends and relatives called for help. In my case, it was my first job, ever. No McDonalds, no BK or Gap, or Orange Julius in the mall. Straight to the tech world. Your parents will be so proud.
Then you actually start working there. The hell that is (nearly) 24/7 tech support with some of the dumbest people, both coworkers and customers, is nearly endless. You realise how large and illiterate most of America (nay, the world) really is. Not computer illiterate, the plain' old fashion kind.
You enjoy the banana splits every time the stock splits, but you're a part time employee 'cause you're workin' your way though school. So you don't get any stock. Your fellow coworkers try to plan a coup and go on strike, form a union or something (which is strictly forbidden in the contract agreement). But it falls flat and you watch some good men and women go down. You get a small promotion.
Then you get sucked into the workload, dumping your calls at 7 minutes, 'cause hey, you have an average call time to maintain. Fuck being helpfull, if granny's PC is taking too long to boot or you thought you'd try to blindly import her mail from Eudora or Caldera on an OS7 Mac, tough shit. She gets the dreaded call transfer.
By trying out some of our special offers, she can get a month of free service. No really, it is a good deal. The trust that we've maintained over the last 6 minutes is a great thing to shatter with that "please hold." Hopefully she'll hang on the line just long enough that she'll be the 10th tel-save today, lest your boss compare your marketing transfer scores to the woman with the honey-sweet voice a few cubes down.
Screw women, this is where you become a man. A hardened, overtly-bitter and disgruntled man. You also hone your skills in down pat. Everything can be done with your eyes closed "sleeping" at your desk, or shooting nerf balls at the hottie down the row. Don't worry, she'll never know it was you. The security guy at the front desk might, though.
It only takes a few months to hate all people and computers. But at 17-24 years of age it will look damn fine on your resume. Future employers will go "wow, AOL, huh?! How'd you like that?"
And like Michael Bolton, you'll tell them it was great. And you can't really pick out your favorite moment.
As for people over the age of 30 wearing birkenstocks or tie-dyed shirts, please don't. It's just sad. We know you like your Mac. It says so right on your shirt. And no, you're not really "the" mac daddy. But nice try.
Anyways, you needed a goot boot in the pants to get you into a "real" tech job. Because by now, you realise that AOL isn't. So mourn for a few days, then get your ass in gear. You've got Interviews.
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
Having been through a "massive layoff" in the bubble-burst days, one nice thing was that there exists the WARN act which dictates that if a company of at least certain size (which I'm sure Time Warner is) is laying off more than 50 people in one metropolitan area, they are obligated to give 2 months notice. For us this turned out to be two additional months to the severance, since the management doesn't really want you to show up at the office once you've been given your notice.
Overall this is bad news, since this area (VA/DC/MD) has now pretty much two kinds of techies - those who have clearance, and those who are unemployed, and the AOL layoffs sure do not help.
Have you tried here?
If you hold TS or higher(I know they claim there is nothing higher, but the kickers like SCI require a more in depth background investigation, so I think its a matter of semantics) one of the requirements is a being in the pool for random drug tests.
I must say that I am suprised you got past adjucation with that attitude toward drug use. They tend to not like anything more than experiementation in the softer drugs (weed). When did you get your clearance?
For anyone wondering why people get clearances denied, this site can give you a pretty good idea on the general reasons people are denied clearances.
About a year ago, I was talking with a US Army recruiter about enlisting in the US Army. I got as far as MEPS. I passed the ASVAB and the physical, but they denied me enlistment after the security interview, which started out as a 10-page written questionnaire.
I answered "yes" to several questions that they wanted me to answer "no" to, but there were two that especially seemed to require a lot of "further clarification":
- On the last page, just before a long affirmation about "this knowledge is true to the best of my knowledge and belief...", etc., etc., there was a question about like "Have you ever [...] misused [...] an information-technology resource?" I said "yes", and mentioned something that hadn't made my teachers happy during high school, about nine years before; I later found out that the high-school's disciplinary records have been destroyed from that time. However, if you think about it, downloading an illegal copy of a popular song off KaZaa is a forbidden use of an information-technology resource; I suspect the majority of the kids who did that stuff in Abu Ghraib had been regular KaZaa users...
- The other thing was that I had visited a professional counsellor or therapist several times, all within a year or two, plus or minus, of the computer-related incident. They decided to totally misread the examining doctor's statement for something that was not in the record, and disqualify me as medically unfit by reason of depression (apparently). Of course, perhaps a college graduate who wants to join the Army is crazy. It may be that anyone who wants to join the Army has a little something wrong with them...
Just to answer certain questions in advance: Yes, I observe the Word of Wisdom (sorry about the JavaScript-wrapped text); drug use has always been a complete non-issue. No, I do not beat my wife. That's right, I did not go to BYU; I went to MSU instead, and they do not have an honor code that requires clean-shavenness. I know the Army has a dress code, and I told the recruiter that I would be perfectly willing to abide by it once enlisted; I had obeyed a similar dress code for two years as a missionary. Yes, I should probably be doing something else besides responding in detail to five-hour-old Slashdot postingsIn other words, I'm NOT a one-trick pony. I style myself a "Network and Systems Admin", NOT a Unix admin or a Windoze admin. Flexibility is the key word here: pick up new skills as you go along, blend them in to the portfolio. And, unlike a lot of people, it wasn't "below me" to work for Club Fed during the go-go Dotcom days.