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Nokia to axe up to 14,000 jobs to cut costs

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Nokia to axe up to 14,000 jobs to cut costs

#81

Post by contrarian1234 »

dagw wrote: post #52
contrarian1234 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"companies have to actually follow laws“ What? Nokia won't follow laws in other countries? "No firing of individuals without cause" That's generally the distinction between firing and laying off. Layed off employees generally get unemployment. "7 months until your employment actually terminates" You continue working at a company that you will have to leave? What incentives do you have to keep putting in any effort? D…

Aren't you in a weird limbo for months/years on end where you don't know if your position will be terminated? Isn't that every day at a job in an At-Will state in the US? Also if you quit of your own volition while the unions are negotiating you get nothing. If you wait until the unions are done negotiating and get laid off you get several month of severance pay. In fact quitting while layoffs are being discussed has…

This is generally speaking not a problem. It's technically possible, but generally in at-will states in the US, for exactly that reason, there is a strong incentive to not "randomly" lay people off b/c the company gets a reputation for being unpredictable and people don't feel secure in their jobs. They start to view their jobs are more transitory and it erodes company loyalty

Most companies will intentionally avoid doing layoffs and only do them in these large batches when there are financial necessary (like the tech sector layoffs we saw recently). Only "shitty" companies lay off people randomly to balance/adjust the books

Re: Nokia to axe up to 14,000 jobs to cut costs

#83

Post by kioleanu »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #51
kioleanu wrote: post #15

Mmm let me guess. McKinsey came to town?

Did they hire 20000 contractors at crazy rates?

No, they’re famous for pushing for cutting costs from unnecessary resources, like good employees most of the times they’re hired.

One example from my anecdotes is when they did consulting work for a telecom in my home country and pushed for firing half the technicians who were working in pairs. One of the reasons they were working in pairs was safety, like one holding the ladder and they used this as an argument and said they can just be replaced by a safer ladder. Said and done. After the fourth accident the telecom outsourced the jobs to an external company that only sent… two people teams

Re: Nokia to axe up to 14,000 jobs to cut costs

#84

Post by speed_spread »

dagw wrote: post #52
contrarian1234 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"companies have to actually follow laws“ What? Nokia won't follow laws in other countries? "No firing of individuals without cause" That's generally the distinction between firing and laying off. Layed off employees generally get unemployment. "7 months until your employment actually terminates" You continue working at a company that you will have to leave? What incentives do you have to keep putting in any effort? D…

Aren't you in a weird limbo for months/years on end where you don't know if your position will be terminated? Isn't that every day at a job in an At-Will state in the US? Also if you quit of your own volition while the unions are negotiating you get nothing. If you wait until the unions are done negotiating and get laid off you get several month of severance pay. In fact quitting while layoffs are being discussed has…

> quitting while layoffs are being discussed has to be among the dumbest financial decision

I understand how one would want to stick around not to miss out on a juicy package but this seems counter productive for the employer, the employees and society in general. I can assume that the productivity impact is non negligible, with many workers sitting on their ass waiting to be laid off. Conversely, some workers might have immediate opportunities elsewhere which they can't take for fear of losing out on the bonanza. Finally, If everybody hits the job market at once when it's done there's more chance that the package money is going to get spent just looking for another job.

There really should be a fair retroactive + proportional compensation mechanism for people leaving on their own during the "negotiation" period.

Re: Nokia to axe up to 14,000 jobs to cut costs

#86

Post by upupupandaway »

RecycledEle wrote: post #16

A year before the first iPhone was released, I told Nokia they needed to take their N700 Internet Tablet, add voice calling and text messaging, and offer it in many screen sizes like 3", 4", 5", 6", and 7". If they had followed my advice instead of laughing at me they would still be the largest cell phone maker on planet Earth.

I worked there for a long time. The development of Maemo and what came after it was one the biggest slow motion software fuckups at all time. At one point we had:

- Symbian S60, S80, S90. --- Symbian ˆ2, ˆ3, whatever that fuck that was. ----- Something called Open C, to facilitate porting since Symbian was a pain in the ass. ----- EasyApi (Lol). - Maemo - Qt on Maemo - Qt on Symbian - A new Qt-based UI for Maemo that I forgot the name. Orbit I think. - Its version for Symbian (which was called Morbit). - Harmattan (not a UI framework but it was a version of Maemo, a new one) - Then came the Meego disaster.

All at the same time. It was absolutely incredible how we could develop so many development/UI frameworks/OS at the same time and be wrong at all of them. What you see as the best device (N950) was built on a platform that was already dead because the higher-ups decided to merge that with Intel (with a new UI framework if I remember it) and Harmattan was already dead.

I left that company 10+ years ago and I still suffer at how complacency ruined what was the best employer I've ever had. On the positive side, people from the right sides of Nokia had enormous reputation in the marketplace, so for components such as cameras, radios, modems, etc. for all major phone makers (including Apple) you can be 100% sure Nokia people to this day work on it. One imaging team in Finland was hired as a full group by Samsung.

Good times.

Re: Nokia to axe up to 14,000 jobs to cut costs

#87

Post by csomar »

tgaj wrote: post #34
trustingtrust wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of 5G deployments shifted to Nokia after Huawei ban and Nokia also dominates a lot of GPON FTTH deployments for end to end solutions.

Not suprisingly, most people commenting in this thread have no idea about Nokia and what they are doing. They are really big and somehow succesful company, but no one can escape recession.

Depends on your definition of big: https://g.co/kgs/8Zh7NM

Re: Nokia to axe up to 14,000 jobs to cut costs

#88

Post by upupupandaway »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #33
RecycledEle wrote: post #16

A year before the first iPhone was released, I told Nokia they needed to take their N700 Internet Tablet, add voice calling and text messaging, and offer it in many screen sizes like 3", 4", 5", 6", and 7". If they had followed my advice instead of laughing at me they would still be the largest cell phone maker on planet Earth.

You and loads of other people in Nokia. Including me. The N800 actually had a silly webcam and skype running on the device. And Google used it to dual boot early versions of Android on it. This was before they had the first nexus phone to work with. The only thing it lacked (on purpose) was phone functionality. They were just stubbornly betting the company on Symbian and never committed properly to making a flagship…

Now it's easy to see the Windows Phone as a dumb decision, but for us insiders at the time it was a bit of a desperate situation as there was no solution in 4-5 years given the absolute zoo of frameworks that took over the company. I remember being told by my VP that Anssi Vanjoki cried when the OS+Framework+Hardware situation was clearly demoed to the leadership. He knew it was over.

Re: Nokia to axe up to 14,000 jobs to cut costs

#89

Post by upupupandaway »

pjmlp wrote: post #78
RecycledEle wrote: post #16

A year before the first iPhone was released, I told Nokia they needed to take their N700 Internet Tablet, add voice calling and text messaging, and offer it in many screen sizes like 3", 4", 5", 6", and 7". If they had followed my advice instead of laughing at me they would still be the largest cell phone maker on planet Earth.

We used to tell on the internal shows for products to be announced, that Linux based devices like the N700 that the biggest missing feature was a radio antena, however the feedback was always that they didn't want to step into Symbian business unit. Back on those days UNIX versus Symbian culture didn't get much along, when the board brough Elop, and what was essencially a UNIX shop working across HP-UX, Solaris, Red-…

The only other choice was Android. I was in a team close to the decision. The roadmap (optimistic) shown to the board where we could have a product line based on Meego covering mid-range S60 to something close to the iPhone was three years away.

Re: Nokia to axe up to 14,000 jobs to cut costs

#90

Post by upupupandaway »

csomar wrote: post #70
RecycledEle wrote: post #16

A year before the first iPhone was released, I told Nokia they needed to take their N700 Internet Tablet, add voice calling and text messaging, and offer it in many screen sizes like 3", 4", 5", 6", and 7". If they had followed my advice instead of laughing at me they would still be the largest cell phone maker on planet Earth.

I still remember the N900 when it was first launched. It was revolutionary. Period. It's unfortunate we ended in this situation where phones are just incapable of doing anything but being a camera.

The Maemo dev conferences held by Nokia when the N900 launched had that nice air of old-school-unix-hacker culture. It was inspiring.
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