More Massive Layoffs at AOL 220
dawnzer writes "It looks like AOL read the comments from Slashdotters saying that 950 employees do not constitute a 'massive' layoff. Several news sites are reporting that AOL is getting ready to cut 5,000 jobs, or roughly 26 percent of their global workforce. Now that's more like it."
It was predictable (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that's more like it?? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll bet you'd be a lot less glib about it (and way more pissed off) if it was your job on the line. Especially if you saw people making comments like that!
Economic Perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Now that's more like it?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not Cool... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not Cool... (Score:1, Insightful)
When a company starts laying off people, it's a sign that they are having hard times. When that company happens to be a really crappy company that does things that annoy the masses, the masses have cause for celebration.
You may not agree with the other posters that AOL is despicable enough to warrant celebration when they go down, but don't act like you're god's gift to humanity because you would never want to see anyone lose their job, no matter how unethical that job may have been.
Re:Economic Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
They do serve a unique function: Spam control.
They've been known as the 800 lb. anti-spammers for several years now. Read what you want to in the news about Microsoft's efforts, but fan away the smoke and there's nothing left but the mirror you're standing on. Microsoft has made some money, directed it to their "big three" (Huey, Dewey, and Louie - aka Marketing, PR, and Sales), and Dewey has done a good job of ensuring they make a lot of press by looking terrific. When you hear a consensus of HotMail issues and bCentral.com ratified in the anti world, then perhaps it's safe to venture back online. Microsoft's anti efforts are supposed to be a hammer, looking at 2003-U-CAN-SPAM as a blueprint. Has the volume decreased?
Aside from AOL, how many other Fortune 500 companies are actually doing something about spam generated by their resources, either by providing online services or have zombies?
By-and-large, AOL has had at least one person monitoring SPAM-L beyond the PORN (Post Once, Read Nothing) factor, where others such as Tropica have done. When questions have arisen, AOL has been pretty open about what they're doing and resolving issues. If they were like everyone else, they'd have left the guy who walked with their member list go. They pursued his hairy ass and taped his buns together.
Oh, and Louie could be generating more local (U$) income if the piracy@microsoft.com address actually worked. If you send them too little info, they tell you they need everything. Send everything along with an explanation at the top, and it'll be rejected, telling you it looks too much like spam. Send them text asking which way they want it and silence. Send plaintext message + ROT13 for the headers+payload, silence. Plaintext explaining you are unable to send anything, the response is, "We're working on it." So much for being a good guy. (actually, it started as an experiment and I had to see what happened all of the way around.
Re:Not so bad, either.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's one of the risks inherent in participating in a capitalist economy. The potential exists to do very well, but there is also the potential that things might slip in the opposite direction. Is it cool? Not really, because it does tend to disrupt peoples' lives. Do I feel sad for them? Not really, because it's all part of the game called "US of A". And let's not forget that there are other parts of the world where just getting a single meal is the biggest worry.
more money in the economy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Now that's more like it?? (Score:5, Insightful)
At that point I reminded my rep that the Attorney General in my state (NY) had already filed a case against AOL for doing exactly what she was doing then (strong arming people and not allowing them to cancel their services when asked). I told her I would call the AG with a compliant and use her name. At that point she finally cancelled my services.
AOL has a well established record of legal violations and disgraceful business tactics (not to mention dumb ones). The people who willfully and knowingly performed these things are sleaze bags (and it seems AOL had LOTS of them). I find a lot of things deserve compassion in the world but f00kin AOL and its army of creep employees aint one of them.
Re:Not so bad, either.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Now that's more like it?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Bull
I know several people who are very smart, can jump into just about anything, and beat the pants off anyone... with years of experience to show for it.
But, because they were managers, and don't have 10 years of experience with version a.b.c of a specific financials package, the hiring company doesn't want to waste their time.
Or they make the interview and get rejected because of a bankruptcy 6 years ago that was the fault of an ex-wife.
Or since their last job paid them 40% more than the going rates, there's no way they'd be happy at this job.
Or, you're "grossly" over qualified and we can't expect that you'd want to stay here long enough to be worthwhile.
etc...
Re:Now that's more like it?? (Score:2, Insightful)
To all those who are still there, save yourself. To all my fellow refugees, I hope you are enjoying sleeping better at night. I know I sure am.
All just ants anyway.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, if this happened to a relative of yours or a friend, I doubt that you'd be so cheery. Happily, in this case, you've got an axe to grind and you have no personal stake in the lives of the people affected. Congradulations, you have scaled the moral high ground and can now lob down spitballs on the people beneath you without worrying about friendly fire incidents. I bet from all the way up there, they just look like ants anyway.
Stay tuned for the posting of the layoff dates so that you can be ready to show up at your nearest AOL office and jeer the people being escorted out by security. I'm sure they deserve everything they get because they worked for AOL. Make sure and wear your "Don't be Evil" T-shirts for maximum effect.
Re:I can't wait til AOL is gone. (Score:2, Insightful)
That's how capitalism works (Score:5, Insightful)
Note that there's no need to get doom and gloom about it. I know that for the average citizen unemployment and inflation are signs of the apocalypse, and politicians use them as such in campaigns... then proceed to forget that they promised solving both. That's because they're not. Read something about keynesian economics [wikipedia.org], which is how the economy works nowadays, and especially about the Phillips curve [wikipedia.org].
In a nutshell, there's a corelation between the two, and if you push one down, the other one goes up. And what governments can do is pick a point on the curve and try to keep the economy around that point.
What does this have to do with this? Well, it's darn simple: for the last 60-70 years (depending on the country) everyone had the unemployment basically where they wanted it. In spite of the constant "waah, another company lays off 5000 workers, our country is doomed" scares, that's never actually been a long term problem. So some other company or several smaller companies will figure out "hey, look at all the workers we could hire in city X" and proceed to do so.
Incidentally that kind of a correlation isn't even just an effect of the last century, but you can see effects as far back as, say, the 1300s and 1400s. The plagues and resulting utter lack of unemployment for, say, peasants, caused a massive inflation and were in the end the cause of the Renaissance.
And you can see the same economics at work on a smaller scale in the limited domain of IT in the dot-com bubble, where lack of enough workforce caused the salaries to spiral up out of hand, and the cost of any resulting program reflected it. There the impact was absorbed by the rest of the society, but imagine the same economy-wide. If for every job there wasn't a pool of unemployed workforce, and companies had to pay a premium even to get receptionist, you'd see the prices rising accordingly.
It may seem calous and lacking empathy to say that someone has to be unemployed for the economy to work, and it partially is, but that's how it works. Rebelling against it is like rebelling against gravity: not very productive. We have to work with what works, not with what would be an idealist utopia. All we can do to make it more palatable is to offer some unemployment benefits and some government demand for work and move on.
And at the risk of going off topic, that's another reality that we have to live with: that governments actually have to do that kind of thing. In spite of bullshit pseudo-economic theories idealizing lean governments and some idealized image of unrestricted 19'th century capitalism, it stopped working that way in the Great Depression. That's when the economy of scarcity ended. The countries that got out of the crisis fast were the ones whose government overspent: be it FDR's New Deal, or Germany's and Italy's spending on armament. The countries which didn't, got to enjoy a jolly good depression until WW2: e.g., Canada.
Funny what things you get to learn when you take your economic theories from real economists, instead of from novelists. (*cough* Ayn Rand *cough*) But that's another discussion for another time.
Biggest mistakes of AOL (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing new (Score:2, Insightful)
Large corporations tend to be constantly hiring and growing, unless a hiring freeze is actively on--and even then they make strategic exceptions. All mid and upper-mid managers are ever hungry for a larger team because that boosts their power and profile over time within the company. The whole hiring process in a large corporation is usually a lot less self-aware then in a small business--they don't know who or what they really need for the long term good. So, it can only be so efficient--a lot of screw off and/or incompetent and/or unpleasant-personality people end up getting in to large corporations by putting on a reasonably good face during the interview process. After getting in, they're entrenched. They float around at a few projects underperforming and being disliked, going under a variety of different managers until nobody want to deal with them any more. I've seen some employees do this for years and years. It tends to be damned hard to get rid of them because no lower-level manager wants to have to personally deal with their firing. For HR legal reasons, unless they blatantly break a major company rule or kill someone, you have to painstakingly document exactly why they cannot do their job to fire them for cause. Not to say that everyone who gets laid off is bad, but a lot of times their section has more bad people then not so they get swept up departmentally.
After several years, the barnacle-class of people accumulates until they comprise about 10% to 20% of the mass population. Upper management then periodically recognizes that the company needs to shed some unneeded employees, but know it's perceived as unfair and politically unpalatable to demand personalized firings, so they come up with a neutral reason... a company-wide "slowdown". It serves as a good unchallengeable excuse to get rid of extras and undesirables. To try and do it without using trumped-up news and mass waves invites a constant bunker mentality and an excessive amount of infighting, paranoia, and company politics.