I’ve been neglecting this site since December, 2019.
Around that time I went through yet another change in ownership of the company I worked for, or at least a change in the make up of the organization.
I started at a company named Jumptap, which was almost immediately acquired by Millennial Media, which was then acquired a couple of years later by AOL, which was actually owned by Verizon. Three companies, same desk…
A year or so after that, Verizon acquired Yahoo, and attempted to combine AOL and Yahoo into a new company named Oath. Around this point, I and the team I was working with found oursaelves increasingly sidelined, as Yahoo more or less consumed the AOL personnel, either assimilating them into Yahoo-oriented structures or placing them in positions where the sane thing was to leave. Many of the AOL people did leave.
Here’s the thing. AOL was one of the best run, sanest management teams I’ve ever worked for. I was surprised. But it’s true. They were East-coast (based in Dulles, Virginia) and not consumed by the Silicon Valley management bullshit.
Once Yahoo came into the picture, with 9000 head count, AOL’s 4000 headcount was overwhelmed. and the Oath management style became Silicon Valley. Self-centered, self-congratulatory, certain of their ability despite facts – income, profitability, share price – showing they were incompetent.
I stayed until I was laid off with a severance, went to a sports-oriented company, bailed to an insurance start-up, and finally wound up at Toast.
Right in time for Toast to lay off half their staff as the pandemic hit their customers, restaurants, hard.
I survived that. And it is nice to be working for a company that has definitive positive impact. I could never say that for the media/ad companies – when someone asked what my company did, I said, you know those annoying ads that pop up and follow you from device to device? Where if you search for underwear once, it follows you around for months after?
That’s who I work for.
I read after I left that Oath got renamed to Verizon Media. And after that, Verizon dumped Yahoo back on its own at a loss. And AOL is gone, excet for the remnants of email addresses some people still have.
I’ve had servers at Digital Ocean for quite a while, about 8 years now. I’ve been ok with it, but I’ve been working extensively with terraform and AWS at Toast, and I determined to leave Digital Ocean and instantiate my personal websites in AWS.
That’s part of why this website/blog is now coming back to life.
It’s been moved, reconstituted, the posts imported.
—doug