Thread regarding Optum layoffs

I wish I had read this post earlier. I got laid off from this fake RVO Health company, I was part of Optum. They put me on a 'Performance Improvement Plan' (PIP) for no reason, despite being the best performer on the team from past years. First, they claimed that my work had bugs. I countered them with real statistics and comparisons with other teams. They tried with full force to put me on a PIP, and I thought that being intelligent and a top performer my whole life, I could beat them. So, they resorted to cheap tricks—they didn't let me take bulk PTO, didn't allow me to work outside my region, and started bugging me to turn on my camera. I successfully completed all the challenges they set, and I even started enjoying the challenges as I got overconfident. They kept extending the performance plan unofficially and continued adding difficulties to it, which honestly helped me improve my non-technical skills. After six months of fighting with them, they realized they couldn't fire me using this approach. Then they said, 'Forget everything we did; you are a very good performer, but we are dissolving your position.' They gave me 1.5 months of severance pay and cut all my access right after the call. This company management is of backstabbing. Never trust anyone from senior leadership. They didn't let me get a hint until i was fired.

Very true. Monetization all all cost with a win - loose approach for customers, brands, experienced leaders and employees. They acquire dying brands (TVGuide, CNET, Healthline, ~100 others) with a strong Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP), flip the site to an affiliate marketing content, tailored to top paying sponsors (90% paid media, placement) and maximize the CPC or CPA. Selling cellular, DirecTV, mattresses, electronics great, but healthcare? Beware, the model has made a handful of people very wealthy with the majority grinding and then needing to pick their career up off the floor.

Have to correct myself. The company was Amazon, not Google. Someone was saying Google might lay off thousands of employees and list 10k employees as bad performers.

Well, if anyone is asking about RVO impacting layoffs. My team was impacted. After a 10k raise and a good performance review, I was told my position was being eliminated 6 months later. The guy telling me ended up being a reference for a new job I just took. If you guys are wondering, there is an incredibly outdated and stubborn tech stack in place at part of that merger I think they want to eliminate. Being on the bench for a few weeks obtaining certs for free [why I chose a consulting gig in addition to the work and targeted 9% growth in 2023 unless a depression sets in], makes it pretty clear that those working on that side of the company might be pretty screwed. You can recommend working solutions [which I know are working from past experience and my recent round of interviews] but they will go ignored. If you are working on that side, consider looking into certifications in things like Databricks, AWS, GCP, Snowflake, and Azure. You are going to need the certs. If they are going to start cutting costs, expect Snowflake to go first. Defense, consulting, and insurance are all hiring like crazy right now. Some banks are on the prowl for talent too. The longer you wait to jump ship [if RV decides to gut you], the harder it will be. Google laid of 12k more employees the day I accepted 1 of 3 offers.

Which sectors got laid-off due to the RedVentures + Optum merge this October?

I was recently let go from RV a month before the initial post. No previous warnings and was put on a "Performance Improvement Plan" during my yearly eval. After many years with the company without any prior negative performance reviews. Being confident I could work through whatever they thought the issues were, I met every goal that was set for me in the plan. Once the plan ended I thought that I would be able to put everything behind me and move forward. Not so.
I was told I was being let go anyway, for not meeting expectations, even when I was able to give them a myriad of examples for each line of my career trajectory for my position. The only thing that they could find to say as to why I was being let go was that I had my camera off in zoom meetings sometimes. Doesn't seem like a fireable offense. Especially when half of my teammates rarely ever turned theirs on and said that they had never been told it was an issue. I still talk to many of them regularly.
It makes way more sense now that I have been able to hear from former teammates about what is currently happening there. At least I have peace of mind now, and there is a comfort in knowing that they may actually be getting what has been coming to them for quite some time. They are trying to cut cost any way that they can, and aren't above ruining employee's lives and families' lives in the process to do so. As long as it gets them a little more wiggle room. All while virtue signaling and taking every opportunity to preach about how much they care about "their employee family".
Who knows if this will be enough to put them down for good, but maybe it will be enough to make them take an introspective look at what they have done to myself and many, many, other people that I have known over my time working there since 2014? You hear horror stories when you start, but you don't get the full idea until you land on one of the many toxic teams at HQ in Ft Mill, SC. Now they get to see that you can't feign righteousness and virtue to onlookers, while taking every underhanded opportunity to do the wrong thing when no one can see their true colors. To play off of the last word in that last sentence, I now know that they chose the color red in their name. They aren't above opening throats of employees, or anyone else they can drain, to keep the cult afloat.

Optum bought RV Health (the health vertical of Red Ventures) which is basically Healthline Media. If it were a “Jo--t Venture” I doubt Red Ventures would have walked away with a truckload of $$$.

Red Ventures business is simple they create dozens of clone affiliate sites per business vertical (bankrate.com, creditcard.com, the points guy.com, etc.) they cobble together recycled manufacturer content and shoddy fake reviews to game Google’s Algorithms. Then hey optimize these sites against what ever makes the most money — credit cards, cable, phone, internet, college admission, travel, health insurance, diets, bo--r pills, etc. Red Ventures would sell crack to children if it were legal.

These affiliate sites produce nothing and add zero value to the consumer or the world. RV says their value is in matching people with products and services through expert reviews and testing. They have no subject matter experts, they are literally kids who know nothing about the category. Mostly recent graduates who interned at their church newsletter. Unlike Consumer Reports or Good Housekeeping, RV has no testing labs, nor do they partner with any external labs. The reviews are made up with no science, no scientist, no experts. They plaster their reviews with official looking badges and comparison tables, which their hack designers buy on Envato and Creative Market.

Red Ventures acquired Healthline Media a couple of years ago, thinking they could funnel the massive traffic (200 million users per month) into these shady affiliate finder sites.

When they acquired Healthline Media they believed Healthline’s traffic would feed the top of The funnel. The problem they ran into was two fold:

1. Healthline users are not in the shopping mindset and are not interested in being sold to. The only thing the relentless as----t of native ads did was pollute the brand and destroy Healthline’s editorial integrity.

2. Red Venture and Healthline cultures clashed like Russians and Ukrainians. The real talent at Healthline, those responsible for Healthline’s success bailed. Healthline’s steady rise to the number one health site over several years is almost as impressive as how quickly it’s decline in traffic and credibility has been over the last several months since RV’s incompetent leadership has fully taken over.

Red Ventures miscalculated the fact that Healthline had no real products or IP. Healthline’s only valuable asset was their talent. That is how they grew and maintained their audience, through hard work and a top notch editorial, SEO and design team. All of which are foreign to RV. Sure RV had some surface level knowledge of these things but it was very pedestrian.

After RV’s inept management ra--d and pillaged Healthline from the top down and Healthline’s true talent long gone, they finally realized their acquisition strategy was flawed and they sold the picked over carcass of Healthline to Optum to recoup some of their loss.

Current RV employee here. RV is not cult like. RV is a full-on cult. The cult leader Ric Elias is a narcissist with delusions of grandeur. He’s a future Netflix true crime series about a shady cult business leader, just waiting to happen. The senior leadership team uses "woke washing" to lure in naive fresh out of college cult recruits, who have zero real world business experience and give them inflated titles. They appropriate the language of the companies they acquire just like they do the language of minority groups and social justice causes without making any real, meaningful changes within their organizations to further the goals of those groups. The mid level managers and VPs Perpetuate this veneer of improvement without any substance. Over the past 15 years I have worked at several companies and RV was hands down the most toxic environment, bar none. I wouldn’t wish RV upon my worst enemy.

Except Optum didn't buy Red Ventures...the plethora of online articles clearly explain that...

I dont think you know how it works when optum purchases a company. Ive seen Optum buy a few companies and it works like this. Optum buys the company, temporarily keeps their leadership in charge then cans then and replaces them with Optum leadership. Keep up your RV propaganda though worth only 11 billion lol

@10soh+1gL34SQq Hey troll.. see the articles below. Why do you even care so much? Starting to wonder if you're an Optum exec who's now out of a job since the JV leadership team is pretty much all RV folks. Which btw, if Optum had bought RV, wouldn't they have put their own execs in charge instead of letting RV run things?

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/disruptors/optum-s-new-jo--t-venture-includes-healthgrades.html

https://homehealthcarenews.com/2022/07/optum-red-ventures-reportedly-forming-consumer-health-jv/

https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/optum-red-ventures-partner-consumer-healthcare-platform

you people from red ventures keep calling it a merger its not. RV is a tiny company and Optum bought them. Stop trying to make your tiny company look bigger than they are.

Ex-RV employee here. What some users said above is 100% true. My company was acquired by RV and new leadership completely torched it and everything it stood for. No real understanding of how to build / maintain an audience, over emphasis on short term monetary goals at the expense of the audience. Terrible, cult-like culture that wants to make everyone conform to be an analyst. Analysis on top of analysis on top of analysis - but no way to execute anything or do anything tangible. It was he-l. They ruined Healthline. I have no nice words to say about RV. Would recommend you get your resume together and start looking if this merger(?) is set to go through.

There was a town hall yesterday that included a Q&A with the CEO of the JV. Didn’t really learn anything concrete about his vision for RVO, but we did learn the story of how he met his wife so that’s super valuable. I’m going to scream if I hear one more time that we’re going to change the future of healthcare.

I work for Optum and heard that the parent co (RV) paid off a huge amount of debt from proceeds from the JV. They shared this debt payoff news with a slew of bankers too on an open line. How did they even think that news would stay “confidential”? They want this info to be leaked $$$$

Ready what Moody's has to say...

https://www.moodys.com/research/Moodys-says-Red-Ventures-term-loan-paydown-with-proceeds-from--PR_467723

"Under the terms of the JV arrangement, in exchange for the contributed assets, RV received cash proceeds, which were used to pay down the term loan. UHG will consolidate the financials of RVO Health in its future financial statements."

optum didnt spin off anything to give assets to a tiny pathetic company like red ventures. obviously you are some kind of red ventures propogandist. Not sure why you keep touting your failed company here trying to compare it to Optum.

@Lezo+1gL34SQq RV and UHG each spun off assets to create a jo--t venture in which each company owns a 50% stake. Why is this so difficult to understand? And why do you care so much? Do you even work for one of the affected companies? Some of us actually do and are concerned about the implications for us. Go away and troll somewhere else.

I'm not sure why you keep calling it a merger. A merger would be something like spirit airlines and united airlines merging. red ventures is a tiny company that does 11 billion or less while optum does 100 billion or more. You must be red ventures propogandists coming in here to preach about some "merger" when it sounds like you dont know anything about business. If anything optum just bought the name and its list of proprietary information. Calling it a merger is laughable and you are still a skitzo.

Fitting that The Red Ventures Optum (RVO) merger is named after a health condition "Retinal Vein Occlusion" (RVO) that is a subtle loss of vision that can lead to blindness.

The perfect metaphor for what has happened to both Optum and Healthline. They both lost their vision and are operating blind. Like the eye disease RVO lost its vision so subtly that all red flags were ignored.

They both pushed out people who had experience and skills. Both rewarded people who had little to know experience, based on favoritism, and image over substance. Both chased short term monetary goals at the expense of the customer, over long term sustainable business practices that benefit both the customer and business. Both were looking for a lifeline but instead attached themselves to deadweights who will drag them down.

Both Optum and Red Ventures are performance marketing companies, not health companies, which is why these real white men of genius didn't know enough to not name the merged fiasco "RVO Health."

Spoke to someone at Healthline about REd Ventures record and their take was RV’s plan to pr-------e Healthline and milk it’s massive audience by selling ED pills, diet plans, and mattress failed miserably. They said it was a flawed strategy lead by incompetent president of RV Health and executed by even more incompetent VP of Product. RV finally realized that they knew nothing about running a media company, and they pushed out everyone who did, so they are dumping Healthline on Optum Health before it looses all traffic and value. I’m sure Optum Health will attempt to use Healthline (supposedly unbiased health media publisher) to sell health insurance and Telemedicine. Just like RV, Optum will learn the hard way that Healthline’s audience is not interested in shopping for healthcare products or services, they just want to know if they can avoid going to the doctor by self-diagnosing a tick bite or heartburn and they are willing to ignore a f@ck load of ads to read an article that validates what they already know. And if they can’t get the answer they are looking for from Healthline, there are dozens of other SEO based pseudo health sites who will prop-up their self-diagnosis. The future is not looking bright.

you were saying red ventures was going to buy optum you are still a skitzo

The announcement was made today. The new company name is RVO Health (RVO= Red Ventures Optum) how creative 🙄 but aside from the name announcement and a lot of fake cheering & excitement in the meeting chat, that's all we heard today. RVO Health does have a LinkedIn page now so hopefully the troll calling everyone a skitzo will calm down now.

Any updates?

I just want to hear more from leadership on their vision for the future. I'm assuming we haven't hear a lot since the deal hasn't been finalized but once that happens I really hope they start saying more. Because its not going to put anyone at ease to just preach random BS about growth &, opportunity if they aren't addressing the current issues and how they plan to solve them. This JV is clearly happening because our sectors aren't doing too hot in the first place and we need legitimate help.

It was supposed to be announced Thursday but the rest of the week came & went and nothing was said. I'm thinking it will happen sometime this week.

Anyone know if the deal officially closed yet? They told us it should be done by this past Thursday, but then shared no other updates after that. RV is a weird cult-like company with phony, forced culture, but while I'm happy to be somewhat removed from them, I can't say I'm thrilled about the JV and I'm honestly not sure it's something I want to be a part of.

I personally welcome a layoff. I've been burnt out for a while now but lack motivation to find anything else. Give me the push I need, RV!!

Optum and red ventures ARENT MERGING. the guy who started this rumor doesnt even work for Optum and is a skitzo

@Dvtq+1gL34SQq I think you're correct. It doesn't really make sense on the surface but there must be something the CEOs and executives find attractive about it.

This has to be the d-mbest merger of all times. Who thought it was a good idea to merge two severely dysfunctional companies? Both CEO are trying to offload what remains of the company they gutted thinking the other CEO is a su---r, but they will both end up with each other’s garbage. M&A for id--ts.

I received my "welcome letter" which is kind of interesting to me. It's certainly not a job offer letter that we have to sign. Is this their way of calming fears of layoffs? Until we get an actual offer letter I won't hold my breath.

yes red ventures which is worth 11 billion is going to acquire Optum which is worth 100 billion. Do you realize how ridiculous you sound skitzo? Take your meds

@Afnv+1gL34SQq Supposedly may close as early as tomorrow. I do hope the troll on this thread comes back once the news is announced.

Has anyone heard any updates on this yet? I thought the deal was going to be finalized by this point already but its been crickets from leadership, at least for me.

@pfyl+1gL34SQq so you are some random skitzo who doesnt even work for optum trying to say that optum would sell off part of its business to some company called red ventures. take your meds

youre saying UHG would sell off optum to some sh---y company called red ventures. Take your skitzo meds

@pbpx+1gL34SQq Do some research. Google is your friend. Red Ventures has a health division that owns multiple digital health properties. Why do you find it inconceivable that Optum would partner with them? I do hope you'll come back once the news is public so we can say we told you so.

Reality is that which remains, even after you stop believing it.

What an absolutely bizarre response to my comments. I stumbled across this site after Googling Red Ventures to get an idea of what we're all in for. I'll see myself out and go take those "skitzo" meds now...lol