Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

1000+ Nokia workers have walked out in protest (in English via Google Translate)

translate.googleusercontent.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 170 posts

Re: 1000+ Nokia workers have walked out in protest (in English via Google Translate)

#61

Post by roel_v »

stcredzero wrote: post #38
roel_v wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Finland, where are they going to bleed to? What options do the regular (under 80th percentile) Nokia employees have? If a company of that size were to lay off 100's of technical people here in the Netherlands, that'd be a large supply to absorb for the industry, and especially those with 10-15 years of highly specialized skills (antenna design, phone chipset design etc).

It doesn't matter if the employees leave for startups or other companies, or if they just don't cooperate wholeheartedly. In either case, resources they used to have access to are lost. Management needs to do something, or they'll bleed intellectual captial. If a company of that size were to lay off 100's of technical people here in the Netherlands, that'd be a large supply to absorb for the industry, and especially…

What I meant was, people may not be running so fast if they have no options.

Re: the last sentence, yes that's exactly their problem and why I said 'under 80th percentile'. The best employees know the fat days are over and are moving out asap, leaving the hanger-ons to run the place. The rest can't get other employment so will just sit there hoping for a miracle.

But yeah, bottom line: Nokia is still screwed.

Re: 1000+ Nokia workers have walked out in protest (in English via Google Translate)

#62

Post by SoftwareMaven »

adolph wrote: post #39
marshray wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An executive switches from company M to competitor N then abruptly throws much of N's development investment in the trash and signs a deal to license all of it from M instead, it smells funny. I'm not saying anything actually is wrong, I don't know enough about it to care. But what I do see is Nokia being a big employer and part of national pride for Finland. This will likely become an issue in politics there. They'd…

Doesn't that pretty well describe the reasonably successful approach Apple used in moving to Mac OS X? Sure there are differences: Jobs was at Apple before; Apple bought Next; .... There are also similarities in that the MS/Nokia partnership represents a pivot from the current course that has no migration path other than total change.

Except Apple now owns the technology, which is significantly different than licensing the technology.

Re: 1000+ Nokia workers have walked out in protest (in English via Google Translate)

#64

Post by brk »

If I interpret the page correctly, somewhere between 1000 and 1500 employees at this location ALL worked on the Symbian OS.

THAT might have been part of the problem. 1000+ people for a mobile OS? And people wonder why Nokia can't innovate fast enough to keep up with iOS or Android?

Re: 1000+ Nokia workers have walked out in protest (in English via Google Translate)

#65

Post by pavlov »

enjo wrote: post #55
halo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing how hyperbolic people are being about this, presumably out of blind Microsoft hatred. Pretty much everyone agreed that Nokia's Symbian/MeeGo strategy was a failure, that Nokia were quickly losing marketshare and that they needed a new OS. The only options were Android and Windows Phone 7. WebOS would have been a better fit than either, but that option had already been and gone. I think there are compelli…

I'm not sure everyone here fully appreciates just how bad things are at Nokia. It's been a LONG time coming. Their software development structure, from top-to-bottom, is just awful. You can see it in Symbian (which was developed independently but with much the same issue). I have to tread lightly here, as I don't want to get anybody in trouble... but I can assure you that the new CEO is doing very much the right thin…

Software development is not a core competency (or even a competency) at that company. It's just not. I'm not surprised that about half of tampere left, they are going to be hard hit by this. They should be.. the quality of the work just hasn't cut it.

That's the honest truth. When Nokia opened the Symbian code three years ago, it offered a peek into their software development process... And it wasn't a pretty sight.

I used to spend a fair bit of idle time browsing through the Symbian Foundation wikis and forums (all now offline). It seemed that there were basically two kinds of people working on the operating system. The guys in England, who used to work for Symbian Ltd, were pretty smart but arrogant; in old-school programmer style, they were only concerned with managing some extremely narrow domain and couldn't take any criticism.

Then there were the Finns at Nokia, who were either completely uninterested and oblivious to the world around them, or just obviously incompetent at the job they'd been given. An example of the latter was the "Direct UI" proposal in 2009. It was supposed to outline a completely new touch UI paradigm to ship in Symbian^4. All there was was a few pages in broken English that essentially said "it should be like iPhone because touching stuff is cool".

Unsurprisingly, Symbian^4 was canned last October after years of development. I'd like to know who had made the decision to put the same people who had mismanaged the previous S60 user interface in charge of creating the replacement... But that's how it went at Nokia. No one ever lost their job for screwing up the software -- until now.

Re: 1000+ Nokia workers have walked out in protest (in English via Google Translate)

#66

Post by spiffworks »

sjs wrote: post #16
davidw wrote: post #8

Whether it was Android, Microsoft, or slowly dying, people working there would be affected, so I'm not sure the choice of Microsoft changes things too much from that point of view. With Android, perhaps they could have kept more people on board to hack on it and customize it, but still, the axe was going to fall. Should be interesting to see how this is handled in Finland. Stock is down, layoffs, and some "arrogant f…

Nokia had been moving towards an open-source culture. Those are the types they've attracted the last several years. This is a very radical departure from their previous path.

You should've seen Ryan Paul's twitter feed today. It was brutal watching his love for Meego break down into cynical snark for Nokia.

Re: 1000+ Nokia workers have walked out in protest (in English via Google Translate)

#67

Post by trezor »

marshray wrote: post #9

Let's see 1. Hire someone from Microsoft to run the company 2. He says "our platform is burning, we have to do something drastic" which most people interpret as "prepare to come up with a strategy and fight like hell to win". 3. Guess what, he already had something in mind! It was "throw out our current reasonably successful development efforts and become a licensee of Microsoft's failed platform instead". And piss o…

It was "throw out our current reasonably successful development efforts and become a licensee of Microsoft's failed platform instead".

Reasonably successful? I dare you to name one single Nokia-phone made the last half decade which you would consider relevant.

The truth is that platform-wise and software-wise, the bits you interact with, they've been stagnant since around 2000 and no amount of megapixels or Carl Zeiss optics will be able to compensate for that. They seriously need to throw their old stuff away and start going on something new. Like Microsoft did with Windows Mobile prior to Windows Phone 7.

I'm honestly surprised they didn't do it years ago. Now they've finally gotten a CEO which actually understands this and is willing to act on it. About time! While Microsoft is a risky bet, this move may actually save Nokia from complete annihilation and is certainly better than doing nothing at all.

And so far, Windows Phone 7 looks pretty good. Care to elaborate on how it is a failed platform already? Not disputing it if you have numbers, just that so far I've actually seen more enthusiasm for it than I expected to see.

Re: 1000+ Nokia workers have walked out in protest (in English via Google Translate)

#68

Post by marshray »

halo wrote: post #45
marshray wrote: post #9

Let's see 1. Hire someone from Microsoft to run the company 2. He says "our platform is burning, we have to do something drastic" which most people interpret as "prepare to come up with a strategy and fight like hell to win". 3. Guess what, he already had something in mind! It was "throw out our current reasonably successful development efforts and become a licensee of Microsoft's failed platform instead". And piss o…

It's amazing how hyperbolic people are being about this, presumably out of blind Microsoft hatred. Pretty much everyone agreed that Nokia's Symbian/MeeGo strategy was a failure, that Nokia were quickly losing marketshare and that they needed a new OS. The only options were Android and Windows Phone 7. WebOS would have been a better fit than either, but that option had already been and gone. I think there are compelli…

There's certainly some Microsoft anti-love going on here, but it's also not exactly unfounded or irrelevant. After all, they were supposedly competitors in the cell phone OS market before this move and now it appears that Nokia has psychologically completely caved to Microsoft.

This is not going to go over well in Finland's politics is what I was saying. If this move costs thousands of white-collar jobs, this guy may end up being as popular in Finland as Julian Assange is in Washington DC.

Re: 1000+ Nokia workers have walked out in protest (in English via Google Translate)

#69

Post by beagle3 »

Does this remind anyone else of SGI?

- Total domination of their own field

- Resting on laurels while others snatch the market from under them

- Panic

- Get a CEO from Microsoft

- CEO quickly decides that the O/S developed in house is not worth maintaining. And that the right O/S is no other than Microsoft's offering

- Company continues dive to irrelevance, albeit at a much faster rate than before

Well, the last one hasn't happened to Nokia. yet.

Goodbye old Nokia. You will be missed.

Re: 1000+ Nokia workers have walked out in protest (in English via Google Translate)

#70

Post by peterb »

stcredzero wrote: post #40
robgough wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but those employees work for a company that was out of touch with the market. Something has/had to give. I think the move to WP7 may well be a savvy one (though I too would like to have seen a demo of it running), but can completely understand the employees concern. Perhaps it would have made more sense to be more specific about what is going to happen with their employees, and done it internally - before ru…

I think the move to WP7 may well be a savvy one So was ObjectShare's move to Java. That's not the issue. The issue is management being so out of touch with the employees. It's like a car with a loose steering linkage. Lots of things can go wrong, but a mechanism by which you'd even feel those things is also compromised.

They know exactly what they are doing. They are "knifing the baby". Some employees will suffer, but it is for the greater good. If the company fails (look at Nortel), then everyone suffers.
Post reply on HN