'Abel, you're fired!' Hear AOL supremo axe exec during conference call AOL boss Tim Armstrong appears to have axed a senior exec on the spot for pointing a camera at him during a conference call with about 1,000 Patch website staff. While in the middle of threatening the troubled hyperlocal news network with redundancies, Armstrong suddenly turned to Patch's creative director Abel Lenz and let …
Ahh!, well you have a proper job like. Us random contract free form self employed plebs are still picking up the pieces on support type stuff from AOL's 90's marketing drive - you know cup coasters and all. (Mind it passes the time, and sometimes we do get a proper coding gig that pays well - sometimes, but mostly at night).
Which is just being stupid, drives up the cost of business and lengthens the dole queue. Or gives you "outsourcing" or "repetitive temp workers". Which the people who bemoan "unfair dismissals" then moan about.
It also means that the bureaucracy takes it upon itself to micromanage others' decisions. Certainly a formula for success.
@Destroy All Monsters
Yeah, I can totally see how at-will employment (ie no notice) is much better for everyone and definitely doesn't lead to total bollockery like employees refusing to document their work or job procedures in an effort to use obscurity as defence against being sacked.
Oh, wait...
Problems can happen in any environment, but good management (ie an effective regular performance evaluation mechanism, coupled to procedures - agreed to in a contract by both sides, natch- that provide effective mechanisms for either side to have problems raised and addressed) combined with some basic employee rights to not be randomly fucked over at no notice (and obligation to not attempt to fuck off at no notice if another more tempting offer should appear) tends to lead to more stability. Which, surprisingly, helps businesses stop worrying about people fucking off and get on with actually doing whatever they do to earn money...
Completely agree. Sadly, once dismissed, these lame-duck employees make their way back into the workforce to drag down another company.
CEOs should be given the right to conduct summary executions at will, and incentivise poor performers with proven motivational tools such as water-boarding and the rack. Good performers should be rewarded with the occasional chunk of raw fish, but also be subjected to random electroshock therapy, and batteries of drug, intelligence, and emotional tests - this will avoid the onset of complacency.
Human Resources should live up to their name and know exactly how many calories each employee is worth, should the staff protein intake require supplementing.
On the contrary, quite a lot of the fundamental employment legislation — e.g. the Equal Pay Act 1970 — was brought in only either to meet EU obligations or to bring UK law into line with European expectations with an eye towards future membership.
The way EU law works in the UK is that it has to be explicitly enacted by our parliament. They have an accelerated process for a lot of the piecemeal regulations but whenever something big comes along they often write a full-blown domestic bill for it.
This just in: CEO of a completely failing has-been company is an asshole, talks about how awesome it is that he likes to fire people, and then fires people.
Seriously, he's doing Abel a favor by cutting him loose from a ship that isn't just sinking, it's already underwater but the people on board are still holding their breath. Doesn't mean they're not going to drown in the next 60 seconds.
...................who confirm the widespread suspicion that sociopaths appear to have no problem climbing the greasy pole of promotion. Modern capitalism - don't you just love it? For what it is worth I don't think even his mother could love him.
That would explain why I've never heard if it... it's a US only "social" site that's largely redundant already and even my give-a-care knowledge of US states, seems to be missing a few from their home page "Browse by state" list.
This is aside from a long practiced intentional blindness to anything with "AOL" anywhere near it. :)
I've been asking myself, how ever did this shower survive? I got called to rescue more than a few friend's computers from AOL's PC zapping popup ad launching crapware! So MySpace collapsed, but AOL survived, go figure. They had no ability for lock-in, so why didn't everyone jump ship?
Would it be malevolent to suggest that if he was fired on the spot for taking a picture* he ought to have switched his camera into Paparazzi mode and taken lots more pictures of his increasingly angry former boss until the security droids showed up?**
*I seem to recall the "AOL Supremo" saying he didn't really care if any of the information was leaked so why the tantrum at a photo?
**That assumes he's in a position where this blemish on his CV wouldn't hamper his finding onward employment.
Patch attempts to create "local" news sites with attendant advertising.
The flaw in the business model is that successful local sites grow from the grassroots, rather than being parachuted in from a large corporation headquartered elsewhere.
Just looking at one of them (and there may be better ones) I could almost hear the tumbleweeds bowling through.
The desperate tone of the CEO is evident in the clip, and no wonder !
"At the time that I was starting to contribute, there were big changes happening in Mozilla-land, most notably AOL laying off basically all of its Netscape engineers." --Blake Kaplan
By amazing synchronicity, I have just been reading about changes to Firefox's html rendering engine. AOL seem to have been firing people for decades.
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