Anti-AOL.org - AOL news, humor and more!.

Humor &
Information

AAO's Home

AOL Humor

AOL Info

Special Features

Interviews

Just the FAQs Ma'am

FAQ Index

Anti-AOL.org

alt.aol-sucks

alt.o-s.a-o

alt.aol

Gettin' Personal

Dan's Diversion

KnightHeart's Realm

Cool Stuff

'Love' letters

Linkage

Legal Junk

Legal Junk

Interview With an ex-AOL Employee

A short while ago, we (Knight and Dan B.) met on IRC with the first source of "inside AOL" material and conducted a small interview with questions that we would think readers would find interesting, and here are the results.

Questions asked by Dan can be found in bold red, while Knight's questions are in bold blue and the source's answers are in regular black.

"Ok...first off I suppose is laying a base...so you worked for AOL correct?"

Correct. I worked in the (Location deleted) call center for about a year and a half.

"What capacity were you employed in? Like Tech Support...billing?"

Tech support. I started off as an associate and was promoted to full consultant after 11 months.

"Was AOL an employee friendly company to work for?"

Then, yes, now, no way.

"Did they offer incentives? Were they understanding of things like requests for time off?"

There was a 180-degree turnaround. They were not good with time off at all. If you wanted any off, you had to request it from your coach. Later, you had to get permission from TCS, and they only let you go if they felt they had enough staff. They gave people a lot of problems if they were sick and had to leave. People were fired often for that, and no one gave you nay explanations of what to do to take it off.

But they gave stock options, a dollar raise if you stayed for 3 months, health benefits, tuition benefits, and really good training then.

"In your opinion was the turnover rate high?"

Yes. A coach I had said once that AOL had run 15,000 people through the center in 2.5 years, and they currently employee only 1000, so there was almost a full turnover in half a year. In fact, I went from being #365 in seniority for shift bids to #65 in just one year, and that was after they moved over 80 people from Billing, too. So there were 380 there at that point in total. It was not necessarily a good thing for others or me as they threatened people constantly. If there were any problems they would just fire you. That hung around my neck like an anchor...I was always wondering...when?

"That doesn't sound good...not a healthy place to work to say the least."

No, it's not. Plus, they threaten employees when they leave. If you talk, you're not allowed on AOL property, even if you are married and your spouse is still working at AOL. See what that would do to a person? Get fired and you can't see your wife.

"Talk?"

Tell people why you were warned, fired, disciplined, tell when new stock offerings/splits would happen, anything, especially if you criticize the company. You'd be fired almost immediately.

"Sounds like you were working for the mob rather than a large corporation."

Yeah..heh..toward the end it was like that. I remember when they "gang-banged" (they surround you, walk you out, take your badge, etc.) a guy I knew. He was fired with no warning. Just fired. AOL, though, got two coaches to claim he'd been warned, so he couldn't get unemployment from the state. What's worse is that the guy had kids, too.

"hrmm...Shows what AOL thinks of its employees."

Yup. They used to beg to get people, now they look at it like it's a meat grinder. They are bugging another friend of mine now, claiming she needs to have less than 1% idle to make her quit...right before she gets her stock.

"If I recall correctly, Knight mentioned something about having to be approved to...uhhh...take care of business in the little boys room."

Yep. Not everyone has to do that; the rule comes and goes. They change the rules daily to trip people up, since if it's oral, you haven't any proof for a complaint.

"That is odd...most companies look at it as cheaper to keep employees that train new ones."

Yes, but they work people hard, and too hard. If they burn out it's easier to fire and re-hire someone now. Plus, they'd get the benefit of no having to pay stock benefits, too.

"Fired for having a case of the runs...now that would be an interesting lawsuit."

Not impossible...They fired a guy whose kidney failed on the floor, but he thought he was having a heart attack at the time. They took his badge while he was on the ambulance gurney, believe it or not. They also like to fire most of the pregnant women.

"Now you said you started when things were different...better even. What do you think prompted the change?"

The man they had running members services was a really nice, gung ho fraternity type of guy. He runs the technology group now, so when he left, they put in his second in command, whose main claim to fame was that he whittled some IBM division from 3000 down to 750. They wanted to reduce expenses, and he did it the way they liked.

Since AOL is obviously not making enough money just with the ISP biz, and stock may not stay up forever without any results, that motivates the workforce the most.

"Is there room for individual opinions in the AOL corporation?"

Well, I'll answer that with an example. A friend of mine mentioned that Sherlock was causing people's call times to rise at a company brainstorming session. AOL's response was to monitor him for two days due to his "bad attitude."

"What about working for AOL disgusted you the most?"

Easily, it was how much we hurt the members who called in. We were lying to and misleading them when they asked for help. We had to blame their phone lines, their computers...everything but AOL, even though we knew it was AOL that hosed things. There were many times AOL wouldn't put up keywords to solve problems, or even make an attempt to take care of their problems. Man, women would call in crying, about the problems they were having with AOL, and how the last rep just made fun of her. She just wanted the problem fixed, and my coach told me to give her some silly answer and drop the call. Treating people like that really offended my morals. I recall when AOL hosed a woman's video driver once while she was reinstalling AOL 4, and a superior told me to tell her it was a virus, not AOL that made it so she couldn't boot into Windows.

"What was the last straw? What made you finally quit?"

The last straw? I had long been hearing about AOL abusing members and other employees; plus, I had nearly chronic diarrhea from worry about the job's requirements itself, sleeping problems unless I drank at night, and my health started to suffer, so I decided to sell my stock and leave.

I knew people who had to drop percoset to make it through a shift smoke pot, let alone those who would have sex in the parking lot just to get rid of the stress. A custodian who managed the cleaning staff said he'd seen people drop their headsets and scream until they were taken out. We were being told we couldn't have a personal identity. Ugh, that really pissed me off!

One guy, they found under his desk behind the chair. It took a while to find him, though...Plus, near the end of my time there, we weren't supposed to say anything negative, especially about AOL itself.

"You know people will consider this to be quite exaggerated, right?"

Yes, but it is true. You could ask Dionysos, and he can verify this material. Although, he left before I did.

"Have you personally seen any SAVES not cancel a member who still wanted to cancel, and allowed them to continue being billed?"

Yes, I have. That, or they'd tell them their billing date was 3 days later than it really was, so that the member had to pay for the next entire month. In fact, that happened when I was being mentored for SAVES. The guys did it to people, usually foreigners, that they didn't like. And if they cancel, they didn't get a refund, or the SAVE would claim that they were issuing a refund, and their coach wouldn't approve it later, even though he would say it was approved when it was being done. In any case, the member would end up screwed. I knew a bunch of people did things like that. They'd even tell the member that they would get a free month to stay, but the SAVE would then not apply it to the account. This was so, when the member would call and complain about being billed for that 'free month,' AOL could say that there wasn't an entry for the freebie, and we were to tell the member "too bad."

"They offered me 7 months when I left :)"

You want to know how much you'd have really gotten? Only one month.

"What percentage, in your opinion, of AOL techs have real knowledge?"

About 20%. Earlier on, I'd have to say about 50% had real knowledge, with 10% really knowing shit deeply. AOL is losing those people too now, due to burnout. It used to be different, but now AOL is like tech K-Mart...dumb, worthless people.

I remember when a tech rep asked me once what "tn3270" was. He told a member we didn't support it, and when I told him it was telnet-a client that could be used with AOL-he didn't even know what telnet was. He had never heard of it, and told the member that we supported "the Internet," not telnet.

What's really funny is when a good tech gets a 42k$ a year job. They report to work for the last time and mock their coaches, make fun of AOL, and as they leave say stuff like "take my badge, if you think you can make your fat butt reach the door."

"About the mail system: sometimes it doesn't seem to play well with the rest of the internet, like mail either gets lost for hours or days, never gets there at all, or is garbled when it does."

Yep, that's pretty common. They have older separate mail servers, not much security, and they break down a lot...almost every day.

"Why is it that AOL refuses to improves this and or support Internet standards?"

Because not enough people cancel to make it worthwhile...on any given day, probably 3 to 10% of the email servers go down. People call in and yell at the techs, then they get Telsaved... It happens, most of the time, near the end of the quarter. They call in, more ad money rolls in, and we look better. So the member ends up dropping the problem and staying.

Also, AOL don't have enough real cash in general, so they literally can't fix all the servers. That's one of the reasons why AOL 5 was sent out despite having so many bugs. AOL did it so that they could up the stock price to add more modems before they were sued.

"Incidentally...we all have our opinions, but how much longer do you think AOL will be able to hold on to MSIE as it's internal browser, and what do you think the future will hold for Netscape?"

Forever. There were supposed to be plans for AOL, on AOL 6, to be able to use Netscape, but AOL had an agreement with Microsoft that stated that we would be offered in the online services folder if we used only Microsoft Internet Explorer, so I personally don't think Netscape will ever be used, even when the MS contract expires.

AOL Overbilling | AOL 5.0 Bugs | AOL's Borg Mentality | AOL Tech Support | AOL Interview