Up and coming Nokia Job Cut in San Diego

[masayako]

I’m working in Motorola now, here is what we ‘predict’ the job cut in Nokia future. Based on converstation with my Nokia buddy:

There’s going to be huge Nokia Job Cut in San Diego:

Between Aug 8 – Aug 19, 2006 (06wk32 to 06wk33), Nokia will probably announce 50% to 2/3 job cut in San Diego.

The job cut will roughly affect 500 to 650 people. Everyone will get laid off and then only 50% to 1/3 of the people will get re-hired for the upcoming GSM project.

They don’t need all the workforce so they only re-hire the ones they want to keep.

With this upcoming news adding to the already declining housing market. I assume more houses will be added to the inventory and price drop will accelerate even more.

I’m currently a happy renter with my sister in North County now. She wanted to buy a 1.5 million home in Carmel and after I talked her out, we are both renting together. Imagine the saving by NOT buying a crazily priced house. It’s just amazing how much freedom we have!!

[an]

Hey masayako, I’m also working at Motorola. Nice to see a fellow Motorolan on here :-). I total agree about Nokia. However, I’m not sure if they will rehire much. The last rumor I heard is management here is still trying to get GSM projects from TX R&D center. So I think worse case scenario is they won’t rehire anyone. I hear 8/8/06 will be the day that they’ll announce the exact details. So we’ll see next week what will happen. My name is Son Bach if you want to look me up on the company directory.

[PerryChase]

Do you guys know who owns the patents on WiMax? Who will benefit from this technology?

On CDMA2000 and WCDMA, I don’t know that this technology will big revenue producer because I just can’t see consumers spending big bucks on mobile internet, especially when WiMax is on the horizon.

Personally, I would never use a CDMA phone because I like the convenience of moving my sim card to any handset I like.

I wonder how many homes the Nokia layoff will add to the housing inventory in this declining market.

[an]

If I’m not mistaken, WiMax patents are owned by many companies. I don’t think anyone company own a commanding share of WiMax like QCOM in respect to CDMA. So like GSM and WCDMA, many company will benefit.

I don’t know how successful WiMax will be since there’s a huge cost associated with setting up the network. WCDMA is fast enough for now I think and there’s still plenty of head room left in it as well. Same goes for CDMA2000. The only reason CDMA phones are more expensive than GSM/WCDMA phones is because of QCOM royalties.

I would that if 1/2 of nokia employees own a home, you’re looking at no less than 300-400 people that need to sell if they can’t find a job asap.

[ybc]

On WiMax, Intel and Motorola both push it hard, partly because they don’t benefit much from existing technologies (from infrastructure side for Motorola). Its core technologies is similar to OFDM, and Qualcomm bought OFDM pioneer Flarion, so Qualcomm should be a player too if WiMax takes off. The “if” is big — even though WiMax itself is a good technology, standards are not firm yet, especially for the roaming part. So by the time that standards get set and the whole value chain (devices, infrastructure, etc) gets established, CDMA EV-DO RevA and HSDPA would have been widely deployed. So WiMax will more likely be supplemental to the existing wireless infrastructure, likely providing high speed data access for hot spots.

It’ll be interesting if NOK rehires here… I assume that they will always want to have some R&D people close to Qualcomm?

[JES]

One would think that would be the case. Most wireless companies have at least a small prescence in San Diego and Nokia should be no different. I am surprised to hear about the news about these layoffs! Nokia San Diego has not had any WCDMA or GSM projects up until now, except for some small testing in cooperation with their European counterparts. No real GSM or WCDMA projects. I would be surprised if they suddenly got into the business since their folks in TX and elsewhere are well positioned to take on any projects in those technologies. They have laid off workers in TX as well these past two years, so I don’t know what they have left remaining.

Is the entire Nokia San Diego site shutting down?

[JES]

Also, WCDMA and CDMA2k are very different technologies and I don’t know if you can take a guy who has been doing CDMA work for 3 years and instantly train him to do GSM, EDGE or WCDMA. Best to hire someone who has worked directly with that technology recently don’t you agree? It can be done, but what I have seen is that the folks that know each technology tend to know nothing about the other and the learning curve is steep and takes time. Especially if you hope to design cutting edge devices and you are up against competition that has this stuff mastered. Nokia worldwide should have some resources to put towards this if they indeed are going to do this in San Diego. But re-hiring 300 CDMA engineers may not be the answer! Or if they do there is a great opportunity for a company to do on-site training:)

[solman]

These layoffs will not affect the housing market whatsoever. Check out monster.com. 420 openings in engineering in San Diego in the past 60 days. Those people will get re-hired by the likes of TI, Moto, or QCOM.

[carlislematthew]

Personally, I would never use a CDMA phone because I like the convenience of moving my sim card to any handset I like.

Me too, but most people with GSM phones have locked phones and can’t use a SIM from another GSM provider anyway…

[masayako]

“Is the entire Nokia San Diego site shutting down?”

No. They will rehire a small percentage of people to do GSM/WCDMA. 50% or less. The rest will be let go.

[an]

I think rehiring is still a rumor, we’ll find out next week, but other rumor i hear is that they will completely layoff. Also, you have to think why would they rehire CDMA developer to develop WCDMA/GSM product. They’re very different. It would also be much cheaper for them to just hire GSM/WCDMA engineers in Dallas than here. It would also be more cost effective to have WCDMA/GSM R&D center(s) in one area than spread it out across the united states.

[LA_Renter]

“Check out monster.com”

Monster is a joke! How many of those are real jobs?

[bob007]

i got a couple of jobs through monster

[JES]

I’d say many are real jobs, but then some are clearly already filled and HR has to post them to meet their internal reqs.

[bob007]

that sucks

[Author]

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