AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

Re:AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B by everfrustrated on Wednesday October 29, 2025 @02:42PM (#45751225)

I wonder if that's got lost in translation somewhere. I can understand not having on-call operations teams (an anti-pattern) but not having anyone on call at any time seems unlikely. Unless they mean to say its part of all devs job expectations and not a paid extra.

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Re:AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B by veidr on Wednesday October 29, 2025 @03:21PM (#45751712)

I don't want to imply Bending Spoons is this awesome, as I know nothing much about them (except that they named their company after a weird scam, lol), but there's a pretty reasonable principle that might apply here:

If our service goes down for any reason, uh... wait until Monday afternoon, then try again. (Sorry!)

Like, who would die if AOL was down for 36 hours?

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Re:AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B by mikeyouse on Wednesday October 29, 2025 @03:30PM (#45751842)

I think they’re actually named after the scene in the matrix where the little kid (and then Neo) can bend the spoon with their mind.

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Re:AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B by veidr on Wednesday October 29, 2025 @04:26PM (#45752582)

Oh! LOL that's admittedly cooler than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uri_Geller

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Re:AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B by NetOpWibby on Wednesday October 29, 2025 @05:32PM (#45753339)

I've heard this name on the radio in GTA2 for years but I never looked up the name. Fascinating.

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Re:AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B by RajT88 on Wednesday October 29, 2025 @03:54PM (#45752170)

Considering AOL's business model was to keep old folks paying for dialup, and once they moved off of dialup continue paying for access to the AOL portal, a good chunk of their user base may already be dead and still being billed.

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Re:AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B by Barrin92 on Wednesday October 29, 2025 @04:34PM (#45752676)

>but not having anyone on call at any time seems unlikely.

Bending Spoons is Milan based and most of Europe has very strong right-to-disconnect laws. It's not really uncommon here to not have anyone on call unless you're some big multinational.

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Re:AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B by luismedel on Wednesday October 29, 2025 @06:21PM (#45753858)

All companies I've worked at had (paid) on-call set up. The right to disconnect isn't incompatible with business needs and the law contemplates it. Also, nurses and doctors do it too.

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Re:AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B by everfrustrated on Wednesday October 29, 2025 @07:55PM (#45754683)

Yeah that law is really about not taking advantage of low paid-by-the-hour employees vs high paid salaried.

But give people any excuse and they'll run with it.

In the UK custom has always been to require a standard opt-out to be signed as part of hiring process.

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Re:AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B by prmoustache on Thursday October 30, 2025 @05:03PM (#45765322)

On calls are also the norm in Europe.

We get time and money compensation for that.

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