Not that it really makes it any better, but the engineering/tech side is almost completely divorced from the sales side when it comes to work life balance and culture. Most of the complaints I see across the internet come from folks who worked in the sales centers which, even internally, I've heard was a pretty awful environment if you weren't in the top 10%. New agents in particular were burned through quickly as they really only had the worst shifts to pick from, so climbing the ladder was a long and arduous journey.
I worked there for a couple of years and it was honestly a great experience. I'm sure they've "grown up" some more at this point, but at the time it was all the fun, freedom, and flexibility of working at a startup with the security of a company that was essentially too big to fail.
There were a lot of areas, particularly with the more legacy systems, that were super painful to work with. But a lot of the newer, greenfield development was good stuff built on good technologies. I'm not sure how you could have this opinion unless you:
A) Happen to hate all of the technologies chosen
B) Only had the chance to work in the older, shittier systems.
I would echo that the sentiment is mostly for sales roles. With the sheer volume of employee history and churn represented by the sales roles ( phone agents, mostly ) it far outweighs the rest.
To their credit, RV is really an opportunity company. They'll give anyone who can smile on the phone a shot at learning sales. Some folks are awesome at it and could out-earn some early tier tech roles in their compensation for closing sales.
And the "creepy" profiling work that was done on lead gen would basically fit shopping style to an agent who had been shown to be able to close similar shopping patterns.
I worked on the tech side and wasn't enamored by the revenue streams, but if someone was shopping for an 'x' RV sure made it easier to buy it. That was their thing. They didn't do outbound calling unless you called in and asked to talk another time.
The tech side was very exciting. I met very skilled folks from all sorts of disciplines and people pretty much worked shoulder to shoulder, which I've grown to appreciate a lot since working elsewhere.
I did tech training years ago, and the company I contracted for had me interview with some of their team to discuss customized on-site training. I think I got the call because I was one of the closest people to their SC office, and would have been able to do multiple on-site weeks without much issue.
But... someone on the call didn't like my description of classes (like object/class stuff), from what I remember - disagreed with both some of the material and some of what I'd said about classes. FWIR, he didn't like them at all, and thought classes were "too much overhead" or something along those lines. I'd indicated that we could customize the material to focus on whatever they wanted to focus on. They were onboarding something like... 10-15 developers every other week, and this would have been a "crash course"-style "everyone learn the same thing to get started" - a combination of "our internal processes" but also "industry standard stuff" from an outside company.
We didn't get the gig, and I think they just settled on "in house only", IIRC. This was probably... 2009? Knowing they were adding ~20 developers per month was already an indication they were growing organically pretty fast (imo).
> For instance, they purchased more than a million toll-free phone numbers, and each visitor to their marketing website was shown a different one. So when prospective customers called, Red Ventures knew exactly what they had been looking at on the site, which gave the agents what they needed to make personalized sales pitches. This was a pretty high-tech form of digital surveillance in those more innocent times.
Why is this unethical? If you go into a shop, can’t the shop keeper see what you’re looking at and talk to you about that item specifically? Do shops not have surveillance cameras that record your every moment?
I start to see ethical problems when they start selling or sharing the personalized data they collect with other parties, or start tracking you when you’re not on their site.
See harry8's reply.
But my main reason for nipping this in the bud, is a trend I see wherein shitty behavior somehow becomes okay because it looks clever, as in: hey, I didn't think about that. It's not clever, it's deceptive, rat-like, low behavior. That's something else than clever, in my book. And you probably never thought of it because you're a human being, who doesn't regularly come up with ways to f*ck people over.
How so? Most people wouldn't claim it's "unethical" to be addressed by a clerc in context of what they looked at in a store - only in that case you are actually required to interact.
I know what I look like in a shop. I know what the clerk knows about me.
I know what the clerk can only guess about me from my appearance.
This is the clerk picking your damn pocket to find examine the contents of your wallet before returning it without your knowledge. You didn't agree to it. You now don't know what they know - but - and this is the real kicker - you probably think you do.
Nobody ever gave informed consent for of this surveillance which has been a massive bait and switch. It does /not/ map to going into a store and having the clerk watch which product you look at before assisting you.
> I know what I look like in a shop. I know what the clerk knows about me.
Just be clear, we are still exactly talking about a website owner tracking what somebody looked at and passing said information on by utilizing unique phone numbers in case they call? Because I can't help but feel like we escalated this thing a notch to vent on pent-up feelings about privacy in general (which we might actually agree on, but yeah, different scope)
And you're completely aware of that and you know what the person selling to you knows about your actions just like you do in a shop?
No? Ok then. It's one example of many of secret and deceptive surveillance. If you want to be angrier about worse ones please feel free...
As an aside, there have been plenty of things from which we defend ourselves from salesmen. Both ethical and not dating from well before Berners-Lee thought "I can use markup to make a documentation system with this new-fangled tcp/ip thing on unix machines right here at CERN!" Some of us are naturally better equipped to defend against all the techniques than others. Arming con-people grifting from the gullible with additional personal information to use as secret ammunition along side psychological manipulation seems wrong to me. The continuum goes all the way from "no such thing as a bad sale" through all selling is wrong. That's where I sit on that continuum. YMMV.
Is me being completely aware of something the linchpin around which we are going to judge if somebody is interacting ethically with me? Because I can see how that would complicate things. Ethically speaking.
Also I am 100% certain I am not completely aware of what a clerk knows about my actions when I enter their shop. Unless I pessimistically assume "potentially everything", including my exact identity because I live around there somewhere.
That the numbers were toll free is entirely unrelated to the surveillance aspect.
There are companies who provide regular local area numbers, with all kinds of analytics (number of answered calls, average length of time to answer, etc) plus recordings and lots more.
WATS lines (toll-free service numbers) provide additional caller information above and beyond a standard toll line, on the premise that it's the callee who's paying for the call.
This has been a privacy concern for decades.
Services have changed substantially and I'm no longer current on information (WATS itself has been retired), but no, a toll-free call is not the same as a standard POTS / direct-dialed toll number, AFAIU.
That's above and beyond the per-user or per-source tracking accomplished here.
Note that similar schemes can be run via postal mail through specific P.O. Box or department routing addresses.
They did that years ago. These days Google has a product that can dynamically insert a local area code number to link your call to web behavior. Presumably RV and others can do it too, and if it’s integrated server-side it can’t be blocked.
