AOL Reviews

I worked at AOL full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – The offices are beautiful and comfortable, the benefits are comprehensive, salaries are competitive and there are plenty of fun employee events.

Cons – The company preaches life-work balance, yet many employees are overworked and stressed. The direction of AOL seems to change every six months, leaving lower-level employees struggling to catch up with the executives' visions. Many higher-level employees are in positions where they're ineffective. There's also a culture divide between AOL and Huffington Post.

Advice to Senior Management – Back up your plans with resources that allow employees to succeed. Aim to move innovate rather than keep up with competitors.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

I worked at AOL

Pros – Company included many innovative and intelligent people.

Cons – There were continuous rounds of layoffs (one major round of layoffs every 2-3 months). Management was not able to provide direction resulting in low morale within the teams supported. After the merger, AOL and TW continued to operate as two different companies and managers of each company never worked together to build on the capabilities of each team. The company is now a shell of what it used to be.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

I have been working at AOL full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Fun extracurricular activities, if you have time to participate in them.
Flexible work arrangements
Good benefits
Great maternity leave
Great family sick time policy

Cons – Ridiculous performance evaluation process with a forced "performance curve/calibration process" whereby good performers end up with bad ratings to meet the "curve" and get stripped of bonuses and/or merit increases.
Incredibly fast paced culture. Constant fire drills due to poor planning. Always several competing projects at hand, and everyone expects immediate turnaround.
Inability to "unplug" from the job - unwritten rule that you are expected to respond immediately to after hours requests and emails.
Flexible work arrangements do not apply to all departments equally - it depends on who you work for.

– I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

I worked at AOL

Pros – Great culture, people and work

Cons – After merger with Time Warner they went into a downward spiral

I have been working at AOL

Pros – great benefits and stability, good perks

Cons – low pay, sluggish stock and too much bureacracy

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

I worked at AOL full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Great brands and future potential

Cons – 20% of the staff does 80% of the work and genuinely cares about what they are working on. The rest are too busy hiding or playing politics.

Advice to Senior Management – Take a moment to step back and take an objective look at the teams and individuals within the company. There are people who care and are willing to step up and are busting their asses to produce great consumer experiences. Unfortunately, they are too often ignored.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

I worked at AOL full-time for more than a year

Pros – telecommuted, flexible, good benefits. I never go the opportunity to visit an actual AOL office my entire term there. so my opinions are strictly from a remote standpoint. I think the company is fairly friendly to telecommuters.

Cons – not much choice in what teams you can move between, but that may have been partly due to telecommuting. I think teams could be more enabled than they are. Several groups seemed very top down and didnt allow teams to figure out the best way to solve problems.

Advice to Senior Management – Empower teams, let them innovate, try to not be top down.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

I worked at AOL full-time for more than a year

Pros – -Incredibly talented technology team
-A good feeling of "team" in some places despite being such a large organization
-Opportunity to work on products and services that are used by a lot of people

Cons – -Large stakeholder groups make it difficult to get things done
-Multiple layoffs distract from doing real work (it's hard to concentrate when everyone is buzzing with worry)
-Frequent reorganizations also distract from doing real work (it's hard to concentrate when everyone is trying to figure out new groups and management structures)

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

I worked at AOL full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Still plenty of smart people working there.
Experience with Industry standard, open and proprietary software and hardware platforms in a large environment.
Pay was always above average although rarely excellent.

AOL has gone through a lot of changes, which I allude to in the "Con" section, but it also still had some possibilities left open when I left. Although contracting from it's greatest size down to a smaller and spun-off successor organization, leaving Time Warner behind can only be considered a plus at this point. There are definitely places that AOL is working to grow in, and honestly, if they make good decisions, like avoiding debacles like Bebo, they can still pull something off.

While I would never suggest someone who has never worked there apply for work there, I know enough people, and have enough experience there, that I might consider a position there again... assuming they can pull it together and get back some energy like they used to have.

Cons – AOL was clearly a company consumed by terrible past business decisions, and so it's outlook was always going to be rocky.

Starting at a time where the millionaires of the IPO and Time Warner merger were not just old stories, it's clear that the AOL I worked for was still a leader, but in it's current incarnation, well past it's prime. While I was never personally affected by layoffs, there was the constant threat of it hanging over the heads of everyone at the end of the year. Many good people were let go in masses at those times.

Note, I have not been at AOL for a while, and when I left, even the headquarters campus was being leased off from the original seven, crowded buildings when I started, down to just three, and the actual HQ for the company had moved to NYC, far from it's technical roots.

Unless you know that you are going to work on something extraordinary there, it's just a job, and it may well be a depressing one at that, considering that if you walk the corridors at CC2/CC1/HQ, you can tell that it used to be something special almost on the order of excitement of working at Google might be today.

Advice to Senior Management – In AOL's current incarnation, I have little advice to offer management, as it has been years since I've been there. All I can say is that AOL needs to find a place in something new. Throw off the old big corporation mindset, and you've got a chance, otherwise, your days of being a leader are over permanently.

Tim Armstrong was a new CEO at the time I left, and at that time, he was trying to turn things around. My impressions at the time of him were a little positive, but not particularly well formed. Past management, however, was ridiculously bad, particularly at the top. A smaller company would have been years dead with those guys in charge if AOL hadn't managed to get so big before they got their hands on the company.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

I worked at AOL full-time for more than a year

Pros – Good paying, swank office (Beverly Hills), fun place, covered underground parking, clean restrooms, top of the line equipment, free food, free BEER (yes, you read that right) and free bicycles to ride around the neighborhood on for lunch or dinner

Cons – So the all of the above sounds great, right? Well, trouble in paradise hits when you have constant lack of job security! AOL is kind of a dysfunctional company, constantly trying to re-invent itself. Currently it's under the dominion of Arianna Huffington, who, on a whim, decided she didn't need my branch of the AOL government anymore! And it doesn't help when your left kind of directionless, which is due to poor communication from management. Although the flip-side to that coin might be ok if you don't like someone hovering over your shoulder all the time...

Advice to Senior Management – Talk to people underneath you more often and it won't be so awkward when you check in on them every three weeks!

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend