10 ms·

To give you some perspective. When Time Warner and AOL merged back in 1999, AOL was valued at $166 Billion.

by WDCDev 11y ago

ra1n85 11y ago
Recently, a woman that I shared an elevator with commented on my laptop - she noticed that I worked at a large tech company. She commented that she too had worked for a large tech company at one time - AOL. I smiled. She then immediately recounted the day she and her entire floor were laid off unceremoniously. Luckily, that was about the time that we reached her floor.
- earlyriser 11y ago
  Honest question: why do you say luckily?
  - 67726e 11y ago
    No the commenter you're asking, but I've never had a constructive conversation with "those types" - the kind who go out of their way to talk about getting laid off from a tech company. Of all the ones I've spoken with, it followed the pattern of "BigCo outsourced jobs to those darn Foreigners, and I got laid off, and it will happen to you too!". In particular I worked with a former DBA for IBM at a grocery store in highschool, so I used to hear these tirades. What I never heard was any constructive career advice, or any details other than the outsourcing and cheap foreigners. Now the cynic in me says if low wage, and probably lower skilled workers can take your job, you probably suck. Regardless, it has always struck me a bit like talking to that xenophobic uncle at Thanksgiving type scenario. Nothing good to come.
    - AwesomeGriffin 11y ago
      > probably lower skilled workers can take your job, you probably suck More probably these decisions are made at a very high level and the individual abilities of these workers aren't even taken into consideration. The real lessons here are never trust your employer, loyalty is a two-way street and always have an exit plan.
      - 67726e 11y ago
        I suppose, but to turn around and complain about how you haven't been able to find work for the past 5-10 years seems to indicate there might be something beyond "I got laid off because of outsourcing."
        nostrademons 11y ago
        That something is usually "my skillset became overly specific to my employer, so that once I was laid off, I had nothing of value to anyone else." There's a lesson in that too: even people who were quite talented and hungry in their younger years can find themselves pigeonholed into a corner when they tie their fate to a single big company.
      - janesvilleseo 11y ago
        Exactly. I was having this conversation with fellow employees. He brought up that they have a 1.5 - 2 year plan to phase out his entire department and moving everything overseas. I was just shocked that he was literally watching time tick by until his job was over. He was been with the company for 8 years. I asked why he stayed and it came down to security. He has kids and needs the insurance.
        sliverstorm 11y ago
        I hear that while it can be depressing to stay while the department is transferred overseas, companies will often sweeten the deal to make it worth your while- despite the fact they are getting rid of you, they still need the transition to happen gracefully, and to transfer knowledge to the new team.
        unchocked 11y ago
        Damn fine time to push for a raise!
      - xacaxulu 11y ago
        Great point here. Never stop interviewing, always maintain your network connections, and make sure development that you do is associated with your personal brand so that it's portable. There's always a company willing to pay you more, treat you better, give you more interesting assignments, or ALL OF THE ABOVE.
    - HarryHirsch 11y ago
      if low wage, and probably lower skilled workers can take your job, you probably suck The alternative hypothesis is that you are overqualified. You may not have been overqualified when you took the position but now you are. De-skilling is a very real phenomenon in the workplace. The xenophobic uncle has seen more than you and may well be the wiser man. Sometimes the country on the other side of the border is the enemy.
      - cpach 11y ago
        ”Sometimes the country on the other side of the border is the enemy.” What do you mean by that?
      - paulhauggis 11y ago
        "The xenophobic uncle has seen more than you and may well be the wiser man. Sometimes the country on the other side of the border is the enemy." Open source has also cut many jobs and devalued salaries, but many don't see it this way. As businesses get more tech savvy (which is happening fairly quickly), they realize that they don't have to pay software engineers to build software any longer. They can take open source, which many engineers and good developers toiled away on for years, and pay what I call a 'software mechanic' considerably less money (and they don't need nearly as much experience) to add features to it. It makes outsourcing very easy and a realistic option. I predicted this 10 years ago when everyone said free software was the future and Stallman somehow thought that all developers would become government workers (his dream was to have all software "free" and have the government pay developers salaries for the good of everyone). I just don't understand why people in the tech community try so hard to give all of their leverage away to big companies.
        brandonmenc 11y ago
        > Open source has also cut many jobs and devalued salaries The flip side is that open source fueled the web explosion. Example: you don't need a multi-million dollar IT team to have a storefront, because you don't have to hand-build a framework. How many people here are making over $100k/yr doing computer stuff for a business that wouldn't have dreamed of hiring someone to do computer stuff twenty years ago? Without open source, we'd probably just have a small priesthood building WebObjects front-ends to mainframes, and only Fortune 500 companies would be able to afford a web presence.
    - steego 11y ago
      > What I never heard was any constructive career advice, or any details other than the outsourcing and cheap foreigners. I don't think the purpose of their tirade was to provide you with career advice. It sounds like they were bitter that they invested time and energy in their career and they were resentful of managers replacing them with an option that seemed cheaper. They probably grew up in a time where you could work for a company for life. I bet IBM seemed like a great place to work when they started. Can't you empathize with them even if you find yourself making better life choices?
      - wpietri 11y ago
        Yeah, I have had a number of reasonable conversations like this with people. For a lot of people, I think part of the purpose of the conversation is offering a warning (combined with a bit of venting). That they aren't explicitly saying, "And the moral of the story is..." doesn't mean there isn't something that we can't learn from it.
      - rpcope1 11y ago
        Can confirm about IBM. Dad spent the majority of his career at IBM as an engineer working on various mainframe platforms (and some AS/400 stuff later on); he mentioned that in the 70's an IBM check was about as good as gold; they were all promised pensions and that they'd be taken care of out into retirement, hence why there were many "lifers" like dad. The culture back then was such that if you changed jobs every single year, "there must have been something really wrong with you, since you couldn't hold a job down." Fast forward to the late 2000's and IBM had kind of been turned on it's head; Dad was real close to retirement and hoping to get out with a pension while he still could but got cut a year before he could retire, when IBM moved a huge swath of it's big iron resources to Indian firms, which is a hell of a shame. I've met a lot of these guys, and while it's unfortunate that many of them can't adapt, I think there's a serious lesson to be learned here, as they got pretty screwed by their employer. This is the reason unless I have some very personal involvement in something I'm doing, I won't break my back for my employer, I won't work 80 hours a week, I won't deal with someone jerking my chain, because you better bet few (if any) employers will ever do the same for you, and I'd hate to get later into life like that and realize I committed a huge part of my life uncompensated to an organization that didn't ever really care about me. I think that's at the root of what has torn a lot of these guys (and gals) up, is that's not how it was seen 40-50 years ago.
    - worklogin 11y ago
      >if low wage, and probably lower skilled workers can take your job, you probably suck Or the company is short-sighted, undervalues the skill and experience of onshore jobs and overvalues the $$ they're saving on paper. I bet a buffalo nickel you've never personally seen how offshoring affects a team/department.
    - sliverstorm 11y ago
      [...] you probably suck It doesn't matter how good you are when your whole department or office is axed. The wheat is thrown out along with the chaff. if low wage, and probably lower skilled workers can take your job What actually happened in many cases was executives thought low wage unskilled workers could do your job, and over the course of a few years discovered whoops, no, they really can't. Jobs are then repatriated. Then a few years later some executive gets a bright idea... It seems to be a cycle these days.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
    - fgsfdsfgsfds 11y ago
      I hate this attitude. It reeks of privilege and naivety of the working world outside the speaker's bubble, which is especially ironic considering that its proponents are usually very liberal (and thus love to talk up how pro-worker and considerate of their privilege they are, except when it concerns xenophobic straw conservatives). But I digress, so let me tell a story instead. My dad was working in $TECH_FIELD for a subsidiary of a multinational megacorp ($BIGCO; you might have heard of them). Said subsidiary had decided to branch out into providing $CERTAIN_KIND_OF_TECH_SERVICES to $OTHER_BIGCOS. My dad's team was one of the few that got their work done without trying to play "the game" too hard. Almost everyone else in the company would fight them every step of the way, fighting to gain control over a certain aspect of his account (for the power and influence, of course), then never ever doing any work towards it, forcing my dad's team to pick up the slack for everyone else while they took the credit. Say, a team would receive the job of designing $TECH_SOLUTION, but the deadline would loom and my dad's team would never, ever receive the design from the design team for him to implement, so it would end up being all on him and his teammates to design and implement $TECH_SOLUTION. So it was just under a dozen people with my dad, working their asses off to provide services to this particular account. A friend in middle management let slip once that they were the only profitable account in the entire division, and their customer was the only one happy about the service they were receiving. After a few years of depressingly poor management and vicious office politics, $BIGCO decided it was time for a change, and brought in a new CTO to turn the ship around. Naturally, said CTO decides that the best course of action would be to lay off almost the entire team working on the only profitable account in the whole fucking division, and replace them with offshore contractors. Only a few months before a critical infrastructural change required by the contract needed to be completed, and just over a year before the contract was to expire. I'm sure you can see where this is going. My dad was one of the few spared from this show of gratitude, and was promptly tasked with training the offshore workers. Pretty straightforward, right? Employees are just cogs. It doesn't matter if they've spent decades, almost their entire working careers, mastering this field. You can just take any random college graduate and bring them up to speed in a month, right? Better yet, get an offshore one that costs a 10th or a 20th of what a Red Blooded American would demand, and pocket the difference. That's like, free money! Wrong. Said contractors barely spoke English, and knew less about $TECH_FIELD than I did. As futile as it would be to train a western college grad up to the required proficiency before the deadline, it is downright impossible to do the same with language barrier erected in front of you. My dad and the rest of his team would spend hours on the phone with the outsourced workers, trying to walk them through a process, starting from very basic first principles that anyone with their degree in their field should know, and... silence. Needless to say, my dad and most of the other remaining members of the team got out of there ASAP. $BIGCO realized their incompetence too late, tucked their tail between their legs and tried to hire back the laid off team members, but unlike most of the stories you had scoffed at, they were all able to get new jobs in the mean time. Service quality plummeted, the customer was appalled when they realized what had happened, and when the time came, decided not to renew their contract. A few months later, $BIGCO decided to get out of $BUSINESS and laid off the rest of the division. --- Ok, so what can we learn from this? Let's consider a few (not necessarily mutually exclusive) possibilities: 1. (Some) corporations are mind-boggling stupid, with the foresight of a goldfish, and greed that would make Ebeneezer Scrooge blush. They will happily ruin a profitable business to save a few pennies in the short term. 2. (Some) offshore firms from third world countries know this, and build their business around pulling fast ones on these stupid corporate executives. They tell them everything they want to hear about how the workers in $COUNTRY are just as good as the ones in America, but will work for pennies on the dollar, and so much harder! Then, when they seal the deal, they go out and hire a bunch of newly minted college grads with zero experience in said field, and tell them to play the part while they cook up some nice resumes. Yeah, I said it. It's stupid enough to begin with to fire 75% of a business, leave it in the hands of a few college grads, and expect everything to work out. It's downright suicide when you consider the rampant degree and resume fraud that these offshore firms perpetrate, and how brazenly corrupt many universities from the third world are. And the beautiful thing is, the language barrier makes it extremely difficult for management to tell that anything is wrong until it's already too late. 3. Of course not all foreign workers, or even all foreign workers from the third world, are like this. When people talk about incompetent offshore workers taking their jobs, this is the kind of downright fraudulent practice they speak of, not the honest workers that really are just as good as their western counterparts (and will probably end up moving as soon as they can...) 4. Don't be intellectually lazy and lean on the perception of racism or xenophobia. Said stupid corporations will also happily fire older workers with decades of experience for clueless American college grads, and ruin businesses that way. It never occurs to them that you can train young employees while the old guard keeps things running smoothly, because they're seeking the petty short term profit at the long term detriment to the business. Why? 5. Corporations are managed by psychopaths. They ruin their businesses in these ways because the go-getters all want the short term boost in profitability that will promote them up the corporate ladder quickly enough that they won't have to deal with the consequences. Even if it destroys the company, these psychos will have long since bounced to another job beforehand. Said psychopaths wage wage war in the office. An interpretation that I didn't initially consider of my dad's story was that maybe said CTO or one of his new managers was deliberately trying to justify axing the division by destroying the only profitable team. So it's also entirely possible that in many cases of offshoring, the "incompetent" actions of the corporation at large is really just one person trying to snuff out someone else vying for the promotion they want. --- So, all of this giant wall of text considered, my point is that, well, there are a lot of reasons beyond employee incompetence why a corporation might offshore a worker. It's intellectually lazy and downright rude to imagine some straw factory worker screaming "DEY TOOK ERR JEERRRBS" and shut off your brain every time you hear someone complain about the practice. As for the question of "what about the guy that got offshored and has been unemployed since," I have more stories (some my own, some from others) I could tell, but since I've already overstayed my welcome, I'll be explicit: Economic downturns suck. Getting laid off or offshored during one could very well leave you unemployed for years, during which no one is willing to hire you. Even when the economy picks back up, it's going to look bad on your resume if you spent years unemployed (or employed in an unrelated field). It's even worse if you're older, and ageism kicks in. In this scenario, you'd probably need to change careers to survive. As programmers, this doesn't sound so bad to us, because we know (knock on wood) that some kind of programmer will be demand for the foreseeable future, and we should always be able to change a technology "stack" or platform or whatever and find a new job doing very similar things. But not everyone is as fortunate as us. For most people, having to change careers means throwing everything away and learning something new. If you need to do that to keep the lights on, you do it, but it gets harder and harder to do so as you get older. So don't be so hard on people that made the wrong choice and picked a career that disappeared from under them.
- fallous 11y ago
  I too worked for AOL at one time, after they bought Netscape who happened to be my employer at the time. I very quickly took a severance option they were offering. There were also plenty of developers that fell under the iPlanet umbrella working for Sun/Netscape that later felt the axe. Don't think that everyone who worked at AOL were a bunch of "you've got mail!" chatroom admins.
  - toxican 11y ago
    >Don't think that everyone who worked at AOL were a bunch of "you've got mail!" chatroom admins. Who in this community would think that??
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - dboreham 11y ago
    otoh I don't think anyone who came to AOL that way would say "I worked for AOL". I'd say I worked for the part of AOL that used to be Netscape, or at least "AOL West". I seem to recall saying something like "I work for Sun but my paycheck comes from AOL, for tax reasons...".
  - diggum 11y ago
    AOL was briefly on my paystubs for awhile as well. My first tech job was at Sprynet in the mid 90's, when it was first owned by Compuserve, then Worldcom, then AOL, then Mindspring (when I finally got out,) and shortly after, Earthlink. Wow, I just discovered Wikipedia has no page for Sprynet. Now just who do I contact about getting that edited?
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Small company pages are commonly deleted from Wikipedia, for having no links.
mathattack 11y ago
And much of the current value is from acquisitions made since then.
ghshephard 11y ago
And one of AOL's acquisitions, Netscape, was worth $10B when the deal closed in 1999.
consptheorist 11y ago
and with factoring the effect of inflation in the equation, the picture looks way worse and bleak!
tootie 11y ago
AOL might be the ultimate company that missed the boat. They practically owned the internet in America in the 90s and just let the whole thing get away. They had pole position to be Google+Facebook at once.
- georgeott 11y ago
  They owned a closed "Walled Garden" version of the internet. Once the open internet took off, AOL was doomed.
  - r00fus 11y ago
    They had years to invest in the open internet, buy out a successful internet venture, or adopt internet features into their offering. They failed to do all of the above, and are now in the dustbin of history (and to me, are solely remembered for their acquisition of nullsoft who then created Gnutella - predecessor of P2P file sharing services).
    - wpietri 11y ago
      I think they are a great Innovator's Dilemma example. Quarter to quarter and manager by manager they could always do better denying the coming reality. I'd bet there were plenty of people within AOL who knew they were fucked in the long term, and I'm sure some of those actually tried to change things. But it's extremely hard to do anything that threatens existing revenue streams. Eventually the innovative people leave and you're left with the people who can't see the decline or are ok with trying to squeeze the last few drops of cash from the remains. And really, in some ways they're only around now because they did manage to change a little. They've collected some decent content brands, which was basically an investment in the open internet.
      - x0x0 11y ago
        I read a perfect parallel: real networks employees knew their product was shit. But making it not shit would wreck the company: As employees, we weren’t proud of our business tactics, and we griped about them frequently. The topic came up at company meetings, round table conversations with executives, and through a lot of water cooler conversation over email, during lunch, and across the foosball table. One day my manager showed me a horrible graph. It was pretty simple: the graph was steady, then it dropped straight down, then after a short period, the line shot straight back up and stayed level again: “That’s what happens when we do the right thing”, he said while pointing at the drop, “and that’s how much money we lose. We tried it just to see how bad it was for our bottom line. And this is what the data tells us.” “Wow,” I said, taken aback. My employer clearly had two options: “do the right thing” or “be profitable”. That was the position they had maneuvered themselves into through a series of bad management decisions. My manager then said, “More than half the company would have to lose their job in order for us to stop these tactics ... so are you volunteering to be one of them?” https://medium.com/launching-ux-launchpad/the-graph-that-changed-me-385ff833f9c8 https://medium.com/launching-ux-launchpad/the-graph-that-cha...
aylons 11y ago
At first, I read the deadline as $4,48, mistaking the B for an 8. That I didn't got think twice to interpret this way reveals how far down AOL went, at least in my opinion of it.
etr71115 11y ago
$228 billion in 2015 $
cmurf 11y ago
No that's backwards. AOL bought Time Warner for $165B. Their valuations relative to each other was 55/45, so actually AOL was valued at more than $165B. But yes in any case, AOL was worth quite a bit more in 2000 than 2015.
CyberDildonics 11y ago
Adjusted for inflation that should be well beyond the GDP of New Zealand.

To give you some perspective. When Time Warner and AOL merged back in 1999, AOL was valued at $166 Billion.

by WDCDev 11y ago

To give you some perspective. When Time Warner and AOL merged back in 1999, AOL was valued at $166 Billion.

Recently, a woman that I shared an elevator with commented on my laptop - she noticed that I worked at a large tech company. She commented that she too had worked for a large tech company at one time - AOL. I smiled. She then immediately recounted the day she and her entire floor were laid off unceremoniously. Luckily, that was about the time that we reached her floor.

earlyriser 11y ago
Honest question: why do you say luckily?
- 67726e 11y ago
  No the commenter you're asking, but I've never had a constructive conversation with "those types" - the kind who go out of their way to talk about getting laid off from a tech company. Of all the ones I've spoken with, it followed the pattern of "BigCo outsourced jobs to those darn Foreigners, and I got laid off, and it will happen to you too!". In particular I worked with a former DBA for IBM at a grocery store in highschool, so I used to hear these tirades. What I never heard was any constructive career advice, or any details other than the outsourcing and cheap foreigners. Now the cynic in me says if low wage, and probably lower skilled workers can take your job, you probably suck. Regardless, it has always struck me a bit like talking to that xenophobic uncle at Thanksgiving type scenario. Nothing good to come.
  - AwesomeGriffin 11y ago
    > probably lower skilled workers can take your job, you probably suck More probably these decisions are made at a very high level and the individual abilities of these workers aren't even taken into consideration. The real lessons here are never trust your employer, loyalty is a two-way street and always have an exit plan.
    - 67726e 11y ago
      I suppose, but to turn around and complain about how you haven't been able to find work for the past 5-10 years seems to indicate there might be something beyond "I got laid off because of outsourcing."
      - nostrademons 11y ago
        That something is usually "my skillset became overly specific to my employer, so that once I was laid off, I had nothing of value to anyone else." There's a lesson in that too: even people who were quite talented and hungry in their younger years can find themselves pigeonholed into a corner when they tie their fate to a single big company.
    - janesvilleseo 11y ago
      Exactly. I was having this conversation with fellow employees. He brought up that they have a 1.5 - 2 year plan to phase out his entire department and moving everything overseas. I was just shocked that he was literally watching time tick by until his job was over. He was been with the company for 8 years. I asked why he stayed and it came down to security. He has kids and needs the insurance.
      - sliverstorm 11y ago
        I hear that while it can be depressing to stay while the department is transferred overseas, companies will often sweeten the deal to make it worth your while- despite the fact they are getting rid of you, they still need the transition to happen gracefully, and to transfer knowledge to the new team.
        unchocked 11y ago
        Damn fine time to push for a raise!
    - xacaxulu 11y ago
      Great point here. Never stop interviewing, always maintain your network connections, and make sure development that you do is associated with your personal brand so that it's portable. There's always a company willing to pay you more, treat you better, give you more interesting assignments, or ALL OF THE ABOVE.
  - HarryHirsch 11y ago
    if low wage, and probably lower skilled workers can take your job, you probably suck The alternative hypothesis is that you are overqualified. You may not have been overqualified when you took the position but now you are. De-skilling is a very real phenomenon in the workplace. The xenophobic uncle has seen more than you and may well be the wiser man. Sometimes the country on the other side of the border is the enemy.
    - cpach 11y ago
      ”Sometimes the country on the other side of the border is the enemy.” What do you mean by that?
    - paulhauggis 11y ago
      "The xenophobic uncle has seen more than you and may well be the wiser man. Sometimes the country on the other side of the border is the enemy." Open source has also cut many jobs and devalued salaries, but many don't see it this way. As businesses get more tech savvy (which is happening fairly quickly), they realize that they don't have to pay software engineers to build software any longer. They can take open source, which many engineers and good developers toiled away on for years, and pay what I call a 'software mechanic' considerably less money (and they don't need nearly as much experience) to add features to it. It makes outsourcing very easy and a realistic option. I predicted this 10 years ago when everyone said free software was the future and Stallman somehow thought that all developers would become government workers (his dream was to have all software "free" and have the government pay developers salaries for the good of everyone). I just don't understand why people in the tech community try so hard to give all of their leverage away to big companies.
      - brandonmenc 11y ago
        > Open source has also cut many jobs and devalued salaries The flip side is that open source fueled the web explosion. Example: you don't need a multi-million dollar IT team to have a storefront, because you don't have to hand-build a framework. How many people here are making over $100k/yr doing computer stuff for a business that wouldn't have dreamed of hiring someone to do computer stuff twenty years ago? Without open source, we'd probably just have a small priesthood building WebObjects front-ends to mainframes, and only Fortune 500 companies would be able to afford a web presence.
  - steego 11y ago
    > What I never heard was any constructive career advice, or any details other than the outsourcing and cheap foreigners. I don't think the purpose of their tirade was to provide you with career advice. It sounds like they were bitter that they invested time and energy in their career and they were resentful of managers replacing them with an option that seemed cheaper. They probably grew up in a time where you could work for a company for life. I bet IBM seemed like a great place to work when they started. Can't you empathize with them even if you find yourself making better life choices?
    - wpietri 11y ago
      Yeah, I have had a number of reasonable conversations like this with people. For a lot of people, I think part of the purpose of the conversation is offering a warning (combined with a bit of venting). That they aren't explicitly saying, "And the moral of the story is..." doesn't mean there isn't something that we can't learn from it.
    - rpcope1 11y ago
      Can confirm about IBM. Dad spent the majority of his career at IBM as an engineer working on various mainframe platforms (and some AS/400 stuff later on); he mentioned that in the 70's an IBM check was about as good as gold; they were all promised pensions and that they'd be taken care of out into retirement, hence why there were many "lifers" like dad. The culture back then was such that if you changed jobs every single year, "there must have been something really wrong with you, since you couldn't hold a job down." Fast forward to the late 2000's and IBM had kind of been turned on it's head; Dad was real close to retirement and hoping to get out with a pension while he still could but got cut a year before he could retire, when IBM moved a huge swath of it's big iron resources to Indian firms, which is a hell of a shame. I've met a lot of these guys, and while it's unfortunate that many of them can't adapt, I think there's a serious lesson to be learned here, as they got pretty screwed by their employer. This is the reason unless I have some very personal involvement in something I'm doing, I won't break my back for my employer, I won't work 80 hours a week, I won't deal with someone jerking my chain, because you better bet few (if any) employers will ever do the same for you, and I'd hate to get later into life like that and realize I committed a huge part of my life uncompensated to an organization that didn't ever really care about me. I think that's at the root of what has torn a lot of these guys (and gals) up, is that's not how it was seen 40-50 years ago.
  - worklogin 11y ago
    >if low wage, and probably lower skilled workers can take your job, you probably suck Or the company is short-sighted, undervalues the skill and experience of onshore jobs and overvalues the $$ they're saving on paper. I bet a buffalo nickel you've never personally seen how offshoring affects a team/department.
  - sliverstorm 11y ago
    [...] you probably suck It doesn't matter how good you are when your whole department or office is axed. The wheat is thrown out along with the chaff. if low wage, and probably lower skilled workers can take your job What actually happened in many cases was executives thought low wage unskilled workers could do your job, and over the course of a few years discovered whoops, no, they really can't. Jobs are then repatriated. Then a few years later some executive gets a bright idea... It seems to be a cycle these days.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - fgsfdsfgsfds 11y ago
    I hate this attitude. It reeks of privilege and naivety of the working world outside the speaker's bubble, which is especially ironic considering that its proponents are usually very liberal (and thus love to talk up how pro-worker and considerate of their privilege they are, except when it concerns xenophobic straw conservatives). But I digress, so let me tell a story instead. My dad was working in $TECH_FIELD for a subsidiary of a multinational megacorp ($BIGCO; you might have heard of them). Said subsidiary had decided to branch out into providing $CERTAIN_KIND_OF_TECH_SERVICES to $OTHER_BIGCOS. My dad's team was one of the few that got their work done without trying to play "the game" too hard. Almost everyone else in the company would fight them every step of the way, fighting to gain control over a certain aspect of his account (for the power and influence, of course), then never ever doing any work towards it, forcing my dad's team to pick up the slack for everyone else while they took the credit. Say, a team would receive the job of designing $TECH_SOLUTION, but the deadline would loom and my dad's team would never, ever receive the design from the design team for him to implement, so it would end up being all on him and his teammates to design and implement $TECH_SOLUTION. So it was just under a dozen people with my dad, working their asses off to provide services to this particular account. A friend in middle management let slip once that they were the only profitable account in the entire division, and their customer was the only one happy about the service they were receiving. After a few years of depressingly poor management and vicious office politics, $BIGCO decided it was time for a change, and brought in a new CTO to turn the ship around. Naturally, said CTO decides that the best course of action would be to lay off almost the entire team working on the only profitable account in the whole fucking division, and replace them with offshore contractors. Only a few months before a critical infrastructural change required by the contract needed to be completed, and just over a year before the contract was to expire. I'm sure you can see where this is going. My dad was one of the few spared from this show of gratitude, and was promptly tasked with training the offshore workers. Pretty straightforward, right? Employees are just cogs. It doesn't matter if they've spent decades, almost their entire working careers, mastering this field. You can just take any random college graduate and bring them up to speed in a month, right? Better yet, get an offshore one that costs a 10th or a 20th of what a Red Blooded American would demand, and pocket the difference. That's like, free money! Wrong. Said contractors barely spoke English, and knew less about $TECH_FIELD than I did. As futile as it would be to train a western college grad up to the required proficiency before the deadline, it is downright impossible to do the same with language barrier erected in front of you. My dad and the rest of his team would spend hours on the phone with the outsourced workers, trying to walk them through a process, starting from very basic first principles that anyone with their degree in their field should know, and... silence. Needless to say, my dad and most of the other remaining members of the team got out of there ASAP. $BIGCO realized their incompetence too late, tucked their tail between their legs and tried to hire back the laid off team members, but unlike most of the stories you had scoffed at, they were all able to get new jobs in the mean time. Service quality plummeted, the customer was appalled when they realized what had happened, and when the time came, decided not to renew their contract. A few months later, $BIGCO decided to get out of $BUSINESS and laid off the rest of the division. --- Ok, so what can we learn from this? Let's consider a few (not necessarily mutually exclusive) possibilities: 1. (Some) corporations are mind-boggling stupid, with the foresight of a goldfish, and greed that would make Ebeneezer Scrooge blush. They will happily ruin a profitable business to save a few pennies in the short term. 2. (Some) offshore firms from third world countries know this, and build their business around pulling fast ones on these stupid corporate executives. They tell them everything they want to hear about how the workers in $COUNTRY are just as good as the ones in America, but will work for pennies on the dollar, and so much harder! Then, when they seal the deal, they go out and hire a bunch of newly minted college grads with zero experience in said field, and tell them to play the part while they cook up some nice resumes. Yeah, I said it. It's stupid enough to begin with to fire 75% of a business, leave it in the hands of a few college grads, and expect everything to work out. It's downright suicide when you consider the rampant degree and resume fraud that these offshore firms perpetrate, and how brazenly corrupt many universities from the third world are. And the beautiful thing is, the language barrier makes it extremely difficult for management to tell that anything is wrong until it's already too late. 3. Of course not all foreign workers, or even all foreign workers from the third world, are like this. When people talk about incompetent offshore workers taking their jobs, this is the kind of downright fraudulent practice they speak of, not the honest workers that really are just as good as their western counterparts (and will probably end up moving as soon as they can...) 4. Don't be intellectually lazy and lean on the perception of racism or xenophobia. Said stupid corporations will also happily fire older workers with decades of experience for clueless American college grads, and ruin businesses that way. It never occurs to them that you can train young employees while the old guard keeps things running smoothly, because they're seeking the petty short term profit at the long term detriment to the business. Why? 5. Corporations are managed by psychopaths. They ruin their businesses in these ways because the go-getters all want the short term boost in profitability that will promote them up the corporate ladder quickly enough that they won't have to deal with the consequences. Even if it destroys the company, these psychos will have long since bounced to another job beforehand. Said psychopaths wage wage war in the office. An interpretation that I didn't initially consider of my dad's story was that maybe said CTO or one of his new managers was deliberately trying to justify axing the division by destroying the only profitable team. So it's also entirely possible that in many cases of offshoring, the "incompetent" actions of the corporation at large is really just one person trying to snuff out someone else vying for the promotion they want. --- So, all of this giant wall of text considered, my point is that, well, there are a lot of reasons beyond employee incompetence why a corporation might offshore a worker. It's intellectually lazy and downright rude to imagine some straw factory worker screaming "DEY TOOK ERR JEERRRBS" and shut off your brain every time you hear someone complain about the practice. As for the question of "what about the guy that got offshored and has been unemployed since," I have more stories (some my own, some from others) I could tell, but since I've already overstayed my welcome, I'll be explicit: Economic downturns suck. Getting laid off or offshored during one could very well leave you unemployed for years, during which no one is willing to hire you. Even when the economy picks back up, it's going to look bad on your resume if you spent years unemployed (or employed in an unrelated field). It's even worse if you're older, and ageism kicks in. In this scenario, you'd probably need to change careers to survive. As programmers, this doesn't sound so bad to us, because we know (knock on wood) that some kind of programmer will be demand for the foreseeable future, and we should always be able to change a technology "stack" or platform or whatever and find a new job doing very similar things. But not everyone is as fortunate as us. For most people, having to change careers means throwing everything away and learning something new. If you need to do that to keep the lights on, you do it, but it gets harder and harder to do so as you get older. So don't be so hard on people that made the wrong choice and picked a career that disappeared from under them.
fallous 11y ago
I too worked for AOL at one time, after they bought Netscape who happened to be my employer at the time. I very quickly took a severance option they were offering. There were also plenty of developers that fell under the iPlanet umbrella working for Sun/Netscape that later felt the axe. Don't think that everyone who worked at AOL were a bunch of "you've got mail!" chatroom admins.
- toxican 11y ago
  >Don't think that everyone who worked at AOL were a bunch of "you've got mail!" chatroom admins. Who in this community would think that??
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- dboreham 11y ago
  otoh I don't think anyone who came to AOL that way would say "I worked for AOL". I'd say I worked for the part of AOL that used to be Netscape, or at least "AOL West". I seem to recall saying something like "I work for Sun but my paycheck comes from AOL, for tax reasons...".
- diggum 11y ago
  AOL was briefly on my paystubs for awhile as well. My first tech job was at Sprynet in the mid 90's, when it was first owned by Compuserve, then Worldcom, then AOL, then Mindspring (when I finally got out,) and shortly after, Earthlink. Wow, I just discovered Wikipedia has no page for Sprynet. Now just who do I contact about getting that edited?
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Small company pages are commonly deleted from Wikipedia, for having no links.

mathattack 11y ago

And much of the current value is from acquisitions made since then.

ghshephard 11y ago

And one of AOL's acquisitions, Netscape, was worth $10B when the deal closed in 1999.

consptheorist 11y ago

and with factoring the effect of inflation in the equation, the picture looks way worse and bleak!

tootie 11y ago

AOL might be the ultimate company that missed the boat. They practically owned the internet in America in the 90s and just let the whole thing get away. They had pole position to be Google+Facebook at once.

georgeott 11y ago
They owned a closed "Walled Garden" version of the internet. Once the open internet took off, AOL was doomed.
- r00fus 11y ago
  They had years to invest in the open internet, buy out a successful internet venture, or adopt internet features into their offering. They failed to do all of the above, and are now in the dustbin of history (and to me, are solely remembered for their acquisition of nullsoft who then created Gnutella - predecessor of P2P file sharing services).
  - wpietri 11y ago
    I think they are a great Innovator's Dilemma example. Quarter to quarter and manager by manager they could always do better denying the coming reality. I'd bet there were plenty of people within AOL who knew they were fucked in the long term, and I'm sure some of those actually tried to change things. But it's extremely hard to do anything that threatens existing revenue streams. Eventually the innovative people leave and you're left with the people who can't see the decline or are ok with trying to squeeze the last few drops of cash from the remains. And really, in some ways they're only around now because they did manage to change a little. They've collected some decent content brands, which was basically an investment in the open internet.
    - x0x0 11y ago
      I read a perfect parallel: real networks employees knew their product was shit. But making it not shit would wreck the company: As employees, we weren’t proud of our business tactics, and we griped about them frequently. The topic came up at company meetings, round table conversations with executives, and through a lot of water cooler conversation over email, during lunch, and across the foosball table. One day my manager showed me a horrible graph. It was pretty simple: the graph was steady, then it dropped straight down, then after a short period, the line shot straight back up and stayed level again: “That’s what happens when we do the right thing”, he said while pointing at the drop, “and that’s how much money we lose. We tried it just to see how bad it was for our bottom line. And this is what the data tells us.” “Wow,” I said, taken aback. My employer clearly had two options: “do the right thing” or “be profitable”. That was the position they had maneuvered themselves into through a series of bad management decisions. My manager then said, “More than half the company would have to lose their job in order for us to stop these tactics ... so are you volunteering to be one of them?” https://medium.com/launching-ux-launchpad/the-graph-that-changed-me-385ff833f9c8 https://medium.com/launching-ux-launchpad/the-graph-that-cha...

aylons 11y ago

At first, I read the deadline as $4,48, mistaking the B for an 8. That I didn't got think twice to interpret this way reveals how far down AOL went, at least in my opinion of it.

etr71115 11y ago

$228 billion in 2015 $

cmurf 11y ago

No that's backwards. AOL bought Time Warner for $165B. Their valuations relative to each other was 55/45, so actually AOL was valued at more than $165B. But yes in any case, AOL was worth quite a bit more in 2000 than 2015.

CyberDildonics 11y ago

Adjusted for inflation that should be well beyond the GDP of New Zealand.