It’s old news, so I am sure many know how AOL’s HQ, in N. VA, has caused property values to skyrocket. It is so extreme, that the natives to Fairfax Co. can no longer afford to live there since property taxes have jumped accordingly. So, what the heck do the AOL employees do all day to make such hyper-super salaries?
Is it like top-secret, hush-hush research, or something? I mean, really! :rolleyes:
Who are these people? They babysit servers 24/7, for goodness sake!
What a cake job! What’s the deal? Overpaid and underworked?
Are you sure you didn’t mean to post this in the Pit? It sure looks like a rant to me.
That’s news to me, and I’ve lived here for quite some time. The DC metro area has high housing prices because the population density is very high, and as a result there’s fierce competition for anywhere to live anywhere close to where employers are. And have no doubt that AOL is only a small-scale employer; they haven’t got anything on the government, its contractors, the other IT companies (Oracle, Computer Associates, Symantec and Sprint all have large facilities in the general area) and the rest. You might be able to make a claim that AOL has had a big effect on Loudoun county’s development, but the county itself sees that as a very good thing.
I used to work in the NOC at AOL in Reston. The department that ‘babysits’ servers is actually pretty small, like 30-40 people. We were hardly overpaid (at the time I made ~36,000, this was in 2000) and definately not underworked. The AOL NOC, at the time I worked there, oversaw the worlds largest privately owned network, something like 40,000 servers in production with thousands of processes. Add to that the thousands of accesss points (dial up numbers), and access providers (sprintnet, UUNET, etc) and and you have a really large amount of things to keep running. There were updates daily, various hardware failures, routine maintence, access provider issues, attacks to handle and actual problems to troubleshoot. The network was really complex and troubleshooting problems could be quite hard. It wasn’t a cake job by any means.
At the main AOL campus they did all the program stuff. AFAIK, the developers made like 70-80,000 a year if they were good. Most of the money came from stock options. I know a couple people who ended up as millionaires because they started with AOL early and their options went through the roof.
The NOC was highly secret. AOL was, and presumably still is, under attack constantly from various people. Then there is all that user information, which AOL has screwed the pooch on a couple times. Some of the processes, like AOLs anti-spam methods were tightly held so that the information could not be used to attack the network. Also, the technology used to keep a million plus users* connected simultaneously while allowing them to use all the AOL functions was pretty tightly held. Getting all those functions to work (Email, chat, IM, games, profiles, newsgroups, AOL content, ads) fairly seemlessly is pretty damned impressive. A lot of thought went into the network. The AOL network is much more complex than your standard enterprise network.
Slee
*I was there the night that AOL broke a million users online simultaneously. That was pretty big. I am sure that the number has increased but have no idea what they run on average during peak these days.
I didn’t deal with the access numbers, that was AOL NET, they were in the same room but other than getting problem reports from them we didn’t deal with the access numbers. IIRC, the AOL NET access numbers used some USR equipement, other than that I have no idea. We also used other providers (SprintNet, etc) and I have no idea what they used. My job was concerned from the moment the user hit the tfep (termnal front end processor) on up. If it broke before that AOL NET dealt with it.
Interesting, thanks Slee This article from the Washington Times just popped up today and it addresses the high property values in the DC burbs. The article claims it is due to increased government spending since 9/11.