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Alcatel-Lucent To Cut 10,000 Workers, Calls It "Shift Plan"
Dawn Kawamoto writes "Alcatel-Lucent is planning to cut 10,000 workers by 2015. The telecom equipment maker's newly minted CEO calls this restructuring part of his Shift Plan. Under this plan, Alcatel-Lucent wants to save 1 billion Euros in costs and refocus its operations on next-gen IP networking, cloud and ultra-broadband access and away from legacy technologies like its 2G and 3G wireless. In the meantime, Wall Street thinks it may be cleaning itself up for a sale of some of its assets or its operations to Nokia, which will need to bolster its telecom equipment business after selling its smartphone operations to Microsoft. But a Nokia-Microsoft deal may be too little, too late."
Unless you're in senior management, you have absolutely no control over your future. I can do the best job, get top ratings for performance, but if I'm unlucky and am working on the wrong projects... poof no job. Layoffs are done by cutting whole programs, without even attempting to retain the best talent. We're chattel, nameless drones who are viewed as necessary evils. Worse, I may be potentially viewed as substandard by future employers because the product I was working on wasn't viable, as though I had any opportunity to influence it's direction.
I truly enjoy writing software, but I would never recommend this career to my children or grandchildren. Way too much volatility coupled with abusive employers...