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"I'm utterly appalled at Tim Armstrong's attitudes towards the lives of his employee's children. Apparently it's possible to pay a programmer $100K/year, but s

• danielharan 13y ago
  Not said, but isn't that exactly what his cost cutting implies?
  • ericd 13y ago
    No, because he wasn't cutting the medical benefits at all.
    • danielharan 13y ago
      Thanks!
    • mbreese 13y ago
      No, he was cutting benefits in general and used healthcare expenses as a rationale for it. This may be a good thing for the company's bottom line, but the optics are horrible. Even if the policy was sound (and I'm not sure it is), the delivery ruined it. It will be hard to say how he can be an effective leader at this point.
      • ericd 13y ago
        I don't see how you were disagreeing with me? He was making the 401k plan marginally worse, not cutting benefits in general. I wasn't saying anything about his ability to lead going forward, just that if their medical policy is going to continue to be willing to pay for these unusual events in the future that he probably doesn't view them as unacceptable.
        • mbreese 13y ago
          He is cutting benefits overall, not completely, but it is still a cut. AOL decided to keep medical benefits high at the expense of retirement benefits. This is probably the right call, but the way that it was presented just made the entire thing look awful. Regardless of what benefits were cut, citing specific instances of medical care as a cause for the cuts is such a horrendous mistake that it will be difficult for him to effectively lead. That was my addition. When your employees turn against you, and you have made such a blunder publicly so as to make potential employees not want to join AOL, it will be hard to lead. And the worst part is, it's not necessarily the cut itself that is the issue, but how it was presented and rationalized. Had he just said that healthcare costs are increasing, so to avoid cutting health benefits we are reducing (marginally) your retirement benefits, he might have been okay. I mean, look at the way this sounds: Why is my 401k contribution lower this year? Because your coworkers had babies. That may not be what he said, but that's where the story went.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
• scotty79 13y ago
  Sometimes it's not about what you say but about what people infer about what you think from what they've heard.
  • pg 13y ago
    Depends what you mean by "about." Do you mean 1. People often attack you for some belief they mistakenly attribute to you. or 2. What you actually say or believe doesn't matter. If people want to make up some belief to attribute to you in order to attack it, that's fine. If you mean 1, I agree. But I would hope that here, at least, we wouldn't sink to that sort of mob behavior.
    • davidw 13y ago
      He announced the company would be giving less money to employees, and blamed it on some babies, when he's earning, by himself, much more than the two incidents cost, and supposedly presided over a successful quarter. Seems, if nothing else, a poor way of handling things. Even if you're a "tight-fisted homo-economomicus shareholder" the end result is bad, because in the end his gaffe and the subsequent publicity meant that he reversed the cuts, so the company won't get to keep that money. I'm not against high pay for executives or that kind of thing, so I'm fine with him making oodles of money if he's doing a good job. Part of doing a good job in that position, though, is not sticking one's foot in one's mouth. Also: I think there are certainly times when people just try and twist words to score political points, whatever the actual facts. This case doesn't strike me as one of those, really.
      • yummyfajitas 13y ago
        He announced the company would be giving less money to employees, and blamed it on some babies... He announced the company would be giving the same money to employees but the distribution would change: more healthcare (as mandated by Obamacare), less 401k.
    • ekidd 13y ago
      In my case, I read the mother's article first, and then Tim Armstrong's original remarks and followup statements. This substantially colored my reading, and not for the better. If I brought political biases to my reading, they had more to do with a pre-modern conception of loyalty: true authority is built on loyalty towards those who are led. And I looked at this from the perspective of a parent, and from that perspective, the lives of children often weigh heavier than things like self-survival. AOL absolutely did not desert these parents, and that's where my post was is undeniably in the wrong—and where I wanted to revise it shortly after posting, before I got caught by noprocrast. Now, I've said things in my life which were dumb and out-of-place. (In this thread, even.) And upon re-reading, I'm willing to extend Tim Armstrong the benefit of the doubt: he may have hit upon a spectacularly poor way to explain why employees were losing benefits, despite having the best of intentions. But his remarks could be easily and predictably de-anonymized, with obvious consequences: On Thursday, within minutes of Armstrong’s utterance, my husband began fielding questions from colleagues: Wasn’t the CEO talking about his baby? And not did these remarks effectively single out a specific employee, they also singled out a specific 1-year-old girl—who already has significant problems—and they linked her to the company-wide benefit reductions (at least for those coworkers who knew the parents). And this is where I got too angry to read Tim Armstrong's actual words accurately. Which I regret.
• tlogan 13y ago
  What did he say?
• dkural 13y ago
  What is your interpretation Paul? What did he say? Do you think Tim did anything wrong or do you advice that Tim sticks to his guns on this one & shouldn't have caved in with that second memo?
  • pg 13y ago
    What did he say? http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2014/02/8539961/armstrong-distressed-babies-figured-401k-roll-back http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2014/02/8539961/... He shouldn't have mentioned specific cases. If he felt the company had to cut elsewhere to compensate for high medical costs, he should have left it at that level of detail. But I don't see how you get from what he actually said to I'm utterly appalled at Tim Armstrong's attitudes towards the lives of his employee's children. Apparently it's possible to pay a programmer $100K/year, but spending ten times that to save the life of one of his employee's children is absolutely unacceptable. Frankly, posting and upvoting that sort of comment is the behavior of a lynch mob.
    • davidw 13y ago
      > Frankly, posting and upvoting that sort of comment is the behavior of a lynch mob. Have you been reading the comments on the many political articles that now cross the front page of this site? The quoted comment is fairly tame stuff compared to some of the opinions expressed in those threads.
      • tptacek 13y ago
        Yes. For instance, this thread, unlike others, has not included anyone directly advocating violence.
    • JimmyM 13y ago
      I'm acutely aware that I'm effectively posting on your territory, but the term "lynch mob" seems to be almost comically inappropriate as a description of what actually occurred.
    • dylandrop 13y ago
• dylandrop 13y ago
  "We had two AOL-ers that had distressed babies that were born that we paid a million dollars each to make sure those babies were OK in general. And those are the things that add up into our benefits cost. So when we had the final decision about what benefits to cut because of the increased healthcare costs, we made the decision, and I made the decision, to basically change the 401(k) plan." -- Armstrong Whether or not it's absolutely unacceptable to him is debatable, but it is clearly acceptable to use the cost of preserving the lives of his employees' children as a scapegoat, when many other expenses (large engineering salaries, "digital prophets" [1]) could have been noted as examples of excessive expenditures. What ekidd is mad about, and I think reasonably so, is that the attitude of "oh, our employee's child almost died which was costly, so let's cut some benefits" as an acceptable mindset to Armstrong is very troubling. In so doing, he is passing on the price of expensive healthcare costs from AOL to his employees, in the form of a slashed 401k. Now that seems to be pretty close to ekidd's paraphrase -- Armstrong does consider it unacceptable for AOL to pay for his employee's child's healthcare, because he wants to pass on that cost to his employees vis-a-vis 401k cuts. Now at least in my view, I'd hope my employer would place employees' wellbeing first, and consider cutting benefits as a last possible option, but maybe you have a different view. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/shingy-aol-digital-prophet-2014-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/shingy-aol-digital-prophet-20...
• deveac 13y ago
  >Did he say that? Setting aside the fact that the post above is obviously not quote from Armstrong, we can't say for certainty what he said because all we have is a reported quote in the press with the sources cited as an unnamed AOL employee's transcript of the call. The alleged quote from the transcript is: >“Two things that happened in 2012,” he said, according to a transcript provided by an AOL employee. “We had two AOL-ers that had distressed babies that were born that we paid a million dollars each to make sure those babies were OK in general. And those are the things that add up into our benefits cost. So when we had the final decision about what benefits to cut because of the increased healthcare costs, we made the decision, and I made the decision, to basically change the 401(k) plan.” If you believe the quote is accurate, Armstrong is clearly singling out these two babies as contributing to the reason why the 401k plan was changed. But we lack all of the surrounding context, and the quote above wasn't even continuous. It does, however, fit the mold of televised arguments he gave on the subject. Obamacare and rising health care costs were cited and a decision to not completely absorb those and pass some of the increase to employees in the form of other benefit reductions was the argument he made in a few different places. A poor comment to make considering the whole point of insurance and how it works, as well as the size of AOL's insurance risk pool IMHO, but then, I don't know if he even made that comment or qualified it with something like "But this is exactly the kind of worthy benefit and cost we believe should be prioritized above certain other existing benefits." Given his response, it gives me the impression that he made a comment to this effect, and that it was a poor one to make, but that's just an impression. And it's even harder to say where his heart is on the matter. At the very least he has mentioned in interviews that they actively prioritized their benefits package in light of costs, and clearly healthcare was a higher priority than the 401k benefits that were cut. So for the poster to conclude that Armstrong deems covering the costs of these sick babies "unacceptable", I don't see it. The opposite, if anything. Whether or not he used the sick babies to rhetorically deflect from the fact that AOL is choosing not to absorb all of the rising costs and is passing them on to employees...well that is another story in my mind.
• ekidd 13y ago
  I wrote in haste while the mother's article was fresh in my mind and I was still assimilating Armstrong's latter statements, and it colored my reaction. I went back to rewrite exactly that part 10 minutes later and I was locked out by noprocrast. Consider my post retracted (and feel free to moderate as you wish, up to and including deleting my account). I still have deep problems with his statement, and I haven't figured out how to articulate them better yet. But for now, my apologies to Tim Armstrong—whatever he said does not justify my hasty and unacceptably uncharitable reading.