R.I.P. EarthLink
Today, internet service provider EarthLink laid off 900 workers, or about half of its work force.
Among those cut were the vast majority of the Marketing Communications Department, where I worked for four years, the department’s VP and the entirety of my old team in the editorial department– including my old boss the editor in chief and my counterpart, the last remaining managing editor.
But while I mourn for my friends and former colleagues, the EarthLink I knew had already died years ago.
When I got there in late 2000, the company was just emerging from its merger with MindSpring and many of the things that made EarthLink an interesting place to work came from the frontier mentality of the internet immediately after the bubble popped. Sure, a lot of crazy no-revenue-model businesses were exploding, but the internet itself was thriving, and so, it seemed was EarthLink. The company was the first ISP to give a pop-up blocker to its customers for free, to ramp up spam protection to a white list, and among the first to have employees blog regularly. And the EarthLinkers were passionate about the internet and about the company.
In addition to the industry itself, a cluster of innovative policies at EarthLink, most of them legacies from MindSpring, made the company a good place to be… a place where the human question was taken seriously, even when that might hurt the bottom line.
One such policy was that a new father got FOUR WEEKS of paid leave to be with the mother and the baby. Even though I was relatively new to the company, I got that benefit, and was there for the magical first month of my daughter’s life. A couple of years later — in the company’s first of many moves to increase profitability by reducing costs — they cut four weeks down to three days.
Another policy: each year every single employee of the company had to spend three hours sitting in the call center, hearing both the questions that our customers asked as well as the abuse that said customers often heaped on the call center employees. It was both enlightening and harrowing. That practice ended when EarthLink shit-canned the call centers in their entirety, moving them offshore to India and the Philippines and putting thousands of hard-working Americans out of work. I have nothing against the good people of India and the Philippines, and since I’m still an EarthLink customer even after I left the company I’ve had occasion to deal with the offshore call centers, and they do good work. But the company was never the same after the U.S. based call centers were thanked and excused.
Finally, employees who reached the seven year mark (which I never did) were entitled to, if you can believe it, a three month sabbatical in order to jump off the hamster wheel and think about their careers and life goals. That policy ended around the same time that as the other changes.
Getting profitable by reducing costs is like a freshly-shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe deciding to go on a diet.
For years, EarthLink has been a company without a mission, without natural growth, and with a desperate hope that Helio or municipal wi-fi would cure its ailments. That’s one of the many reasons I left in 2004.
Today, the company is an empty shell of its former self.
It won’t be long until those last few million dial-up subscribers get bought at a fire sale price.
R.I.P.
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