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HorribleHairyHamster t1_ix01i88 wrote

As someone who worked at AT&T for 5 years, I can attest that this company can do absolutely nothing correctly.

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[deleted] t1_ix0drbp wrote

They weren't even able to do their evil net neutrality plans

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MulciberTenebras t1_ix11fse wrote

Even after helping install their patsy Pai as head of the FCC and bribing Trump (by way of his former lawyer)

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error521 t1_ix1jlfb wrote

While I'm sure no net neutrality is relevant in some negative way somewhere I feel like in retrospect it is fair to say Reddit really overhyped that one

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team-evil66 t1_ix1jzp3 wrote

It is not, allowing Comcast who owns peacock, they can throttle literally any other vendor or service. Just because they aren't doesn't mean it's not in the works

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Nythoren t1_ix1q8dc wrote

My experience with AT&T is that the culture was one of kingdom building. Departments were pitted against each other and the management of each of those departments treated them as their own selfishly guarded fiefs. No cross collaboration, all decisions made in a vacuum, and the focus seemed to be more of "is this good for my department" instead of "is this good for the company".

As an example, there was a contract for a routing system that was about to expire that was roughly $7 mil/year. With the reduced labor costs and efficiency that the system provided, it was saving the company as a whole over $100mil/year. Seems like a slam-dunk renewal. But the department head wanted to cut his costs, so he decided not to renew and instead shut the whole thing down, going back to manual routing. His reasoning? "I don't care about that $100 mil. That's corporate money. I need to cut costs in this department and that $7 mil is an easy choice".

Anecdotal example, but from my experience it was like that pretty well across the board. There doesn't seem to be any true central leadership. It's more like a confederation of city states that is loosely united under the CEO but not really taking any direction from that high up. Maybe they're too big?

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AidanAmerica t1_ix1tr8t wrote

That explains why they had multiple live TV services that competed with each other for a while there. It’s got to be something more complicated than just being too big. When AT&T (the old AT&T that went defunct in 2006) was at its biggest and most monopolistic, it also ran one of the country’s most innovative R&D laboratories, but they kept that technology tightly in their grip except when government regulators forced them to loosen it.

The smartest regulations that the government imposed on them are the ones that forced AT&T to stay primarily as a telephone operator and not get into new industries, because that allowed competitors to come into existence and not be squashed out of existence immediately. For example, a court order that disallowed AT&T from entering the computer business made it so that AT&T could only profit off of UNIX by licensing the source code out to others as a trade secret, allowing computer scientists to learn from and build off of the development that AT&T funded. Then those people built their own UNIX-compatible operating systems, and that’s how we got FreeBSD and Linux, which are used as the basis for every mainstream operating system today (except windows). So because of smart regulation in the 70s, businesses today can reuse that free code, rather than starting from scratch, making modern businesses more efficient. That turned out to be more meaningful than even the breakup of the Bell System

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striderwhite t1_ix0ktne wrote

Lol, well, as someone who has never worked there I was already suspecting that. And I don't even live in the US.

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boissondevin t1_ix16fl6 wrote

The way I like to describe that kind of company:

They go out of their way to do it wrong.

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dewayneestes t1_ix174c6 wrote

I have a friend who worked there 20 years. He agrees.

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offensiveusernamemom t1_ix1p3eb wrote

Same, and even longer. I do think they can do things correctly, but upper management doesn't think making a nice healthy profit and providing a quality service is a solid plan. They want to make Apple money but they were too fucking stupid, 'hey let's get in on this thing all the kids are into" 5 years after it's a thing.

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Poopandpotatoes t1_ix2c397 wrote

Same. Worked for their digital life division. They did everything they could to fuck that up.

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Sivalon t1_ix5pkjo wrote

Say, who runs Digital Life these days?

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csxnewbie t1_ix1d9po wrote

AT&T: Make Bajillions of Dollars for decades in multiple countries

Some Redditor: lol they can't do anything right!

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SalukiKnightX t1_ix1h5j7 wrote

The AT&T that exists today is not the same American Telephone & Telegraph of the past. The original company was broken up in the 80’s creating “Baby Bells” that over time grew and reformed to the point that the current AT&T is just Southwestern Bell (or SBC) with a whole bunch of regional Bell companies under its control.

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