ABOUT THE JOB

EMPLOYER

My employer was America Online, Inc. and I was located at AOL Headquarters in Dulles, Virginia. I worked 5 days a week, Monday thru Friday, with the normal 8 hours a day. My starting time was up to me and was very flexible; the dress code was also very relaxed. My team was AOL Billing Operations, which is critical to AOL and is very technical because the entire process is automated. All 12 members in my team have technical degrees who work within the UNIX environment writing perl, tcl, and C programming; in addition, they work on other fault-tolerant, mainframe computers. Within those computers are the primary billing files, which bill over 1.2 million AOL members daily. A lot of the programming done in my office are sweeps that search billing databases to create reports, recoveries to correct billing errors, development to adapt to new AOL features or pricing plans, and monitoring the colossal billing files and its errors. My team, Billing Operations, is the final step for billing code because before the code gets into production, it must go through the Billing Development and Quality Assurance (QA), which are other large teams. However, errors occur where it would take too much time to fix by going through Development and QA, so some of the work here is ad hoc. Communication between the teams is done through Remedy ticketing software to track code and its fixes.

Primarily, my team works as an internal service, but in some cases with third parties. Work comes from the development process, member services, which are member complaints, the Network Operations Center, housing for our servers, and other internal offices. Third party communications come from other companies that provide special offers and promotions through AOL in addition to payment vendors, who handle the billing process between the banks and credit card companies. My team does a lot of the dirty work in an organization because people expect billing automatically to work without errors; however, it is not always the case. When something is done correctly, it is not rewarded, but if something breaks, the heat directly comes to our team. AOL is in the business of entertainment, and the success of its product relies in part on the billing revenue, so my team’s clients are the AOL members even though there is no direct contact.

My supervisor is Joe, and his title is Technical Manager. He taught me that Computer Science is not just programming because the managing of Computer Science takes as much or more technical and communication skills. He manages the Billing Operations team and does no coding, but he works long hours planning, organizing, and problem solving. I learned about a very important part of my degree, which is the management side. A lot is asked of him each day from the business sense of being a manager, in addition to having the knowledge of technical processes of AOL Billing. It is evidence of hard work and knowledge paying off because it is a well paid position. My manager was also very busy so one of the team members, Jason, was assigned to be my mentor and his position is Operations Analyst. Having a mentor was very positive because he took the time to show me the details of the job and how our team fits in with the organization.

AOL is a very fast-paced company because it has to keep up with the speed of technology and it still has to discover new products to deliver to the members like with AOL Broadband. New releases are coming all the time and a lot is expected from the employees. I was never under pressure, but I saw it all around me like with my manager, who works 10 hours a day, and the team members who work until midnight to have code installed for the next day.

MY JOB

This summer, I had two primary projects. First, I was to implement version control within Billing Operations. The Billing Development and Quality Assurance use Concurrent Version Systems (CVS), but Billing Operations had not yet adapted. I was brought aboard specifically to adapt CVS because it was a project started by my mentor but he was too busy to finish it. To begin my project, I had to become very familiar with CVS and UNIX. I took training on CVS and read documentation on how to set my environment for CVS. My project entailed back loading 160 directories of production software into the Billing Operations repository. Before importing the directories, I had to do a few housekeeping tasks. I would read every script to identify hardcoded passwords, and when I did see them, I documented the files. Next, I needed to search the developer’s directories in CVS for copies of related files to ours in operations. With that information, I modified a modules file, which is a table of keywords that when checked out downloaded operations and development code. In addition, I documented the entire process in an Overview and Procedures document in order to train the other team members. I also presented the changes in a staff meeting with a power point slide show. Some unforeseen problems did arise like the naming convention of the modules keywords. I also realized the success of this project relied on the other employees adopting the new policies because the project depended on their continued use of CVS. My second duty was to write macros for the Remedy ticketing software to make reports on recovery data, and I made a monthly report that was delivered to management.

I was expected to have UNIX and Vi skills coming into the job; however, I took additional training on CVS, korn shell programming, AOL technologies and perl programming. More training was available to me, but those were not required for my project. This position needed to be filled by a Computer Science major in order to minimize the learning curve at the beginning of a job, so the projects could be completed.

All of my co-workers daily tasks are very technical. Two members of Billing Operations team were contracted, and they are not exposed to as much AOL confidential information such as in staff meetings. The rest of the team is very diverse in age and in ethnicity, and thankfully, everyone was very nice and friendly in helping me adapt into the environment.

The most amazing part of this internship came from the diversity of interns in the program. AOL has 18,000 employees, and there were about 80 interns nationwide. At AOL headquarters, there were about 40 interns from all over the country. Schools such as Rice, RPI, Yale, Harvard, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, UVA, Virginia Tech, UMD, and JMU were represented. It was exciting to be a part of such an elite group of interns.

America Online Headquaters and Creative Center 3.

Creative Center 2 at AOL Headquaters Campus.