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."

Comments

Fire people

[ColdWetDog]

Refocus on some vague next gen thing.

Where have we seen this movie before?

Nothing to see here, move along.

Re:Fire people

[RichMan]

You missed the important part

As CEO collect outrageous bonus.

Re:Fire people

[i kan reed]

And jump ship before the long-term consequences of your actions become apparent.

Re:Fire people

[clarkkent09]

Strange how shareholders are willing to pay CEOs large amounts of money just in order to ruin their company. Or maybe that's not how it is in reality.

Justifications for cutting ppl

[Anonymous Coward]

"We will cut 100k ppl because... cloud....4g.....outsourcing....smartsizing"
*Shareholders applauding to buzzwords*

RIP Bell Labs

[ErichTheRed]

A-L has been going down the tubes for quite a while. It's pretty amazing to think that part of the company used to be the mighty Bell Labs. You know, Unix, the transistor, one of the last corporate-funded basic research institutes... It kind of makes me want to have the old AT&T monopoly back just to have that.

Admittedly, they probably do have huge legacy costs in the form of less productive employees and products that don't make them as much money anymore. Also, the telecom landscape has changed a lot over the years. I work for a similar company, and while our group works on newish stuff, there's a ton of older products just sitting around that used to be very high margin and no longer have the revenue to support their costs.

That said, it's never good when an older, established company suddenly announces a monster layoff like this. In the older companies, you just know it's going to be 10,000 58-year-olds in the developed countries who will suddenly find themselves out of work with zero prospects for new employment, hanging on until Social Security kicks in. That's the sad part of these "smartsizings" -- when you're just a number in a spreadsheet, companies have no idea how much you still have to offer in terms of talent and experience. I'm approaching the ripe old age of 40 now, and am constantly staying on top of all the new stuff just to keep the skill set sharp. That's one thing I could do without in the IT "profession" -- so much new buzzwordy stuff is rehashes of technology decades old with better supporting technology. Too bad Gartner and their ilk are the only ones that CIOs listen to!

I'm getting tired of this industry

[DontBlameCanada]

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...

Re:I'm getting tired of this industry

[ScottCooperDotNet]

medicine, law, banking, government work, education...

More professionalism and stability and experience makes you more valuable.

Each of those fields have guilds (or unions) that keep the barrier to entry high, so the compensation stays high. For example, the trend for lower-cost routine medicine done by Physician Assistants, Nurse Practitioners, and even Pharmacists is being negated by even higher professional requirements. Many of those jobs once only required a Masters, will now require a Doctorate. Thanks to the American Medical Association and doctors' control of state licensing boards, the increase in cost in this area is disregarded under the guise of 'quality'. There was a recent story about a doctor in Oklahoma who used Skype to treat patients, and the state board came down on him hard, not because he caused harm to a patient, but because remote medicine causes harm to their business model.

Lawyers used to have an apprentice system, where one could 'read the law' under another practicing attorney and become a lawyer in one's own right. Now, years of classroom time is required, and courts often won't allow anyone who hasn't taken the Bar Exam to practice law before them, and to even take the exam, law school is required.

Teachers now have educational-specific degree requirements, so even if you have a Masters in your field (for example, mathematics) you cannot teach Algebra 1 to high school students, or often even teach in a classroom at all. Teachers' unions and state boards restrict who can teach, so if you wanted to take a year or two out of your main career path and be a teacher, you can't. Again, under the guise of 'quality'.

So maybe what we need is our own IT Guild, that licenses software developers, sets professional standards, and puts up barriers to entry. If software engineering was held to some of the standards physical engineers have, like safety, security, stability, we'd be able to push for state licensing, and we'd have the ability to say no to poor coding hackjobs our bosses ask for. We could even have a tax on code produced outside of the country, to negate the cost savings of moving projects overseas. I doubt it will happen though, we pay for our freedom with the risks of not having our own IT Guild.

Re:I'm getting tired of this industry

[wiredlogic]

Of course. Those pesky employees negatively impact profit margins. Without them the shareholders can extract maximum value from their investment.

Re:I'm getting tired of this industry

[Grishnakh]

So what we need to do, then, is to create a guild to monopolize IT services and programming. We'll call it the "Coding Guild". Then members of this guild can have different titles, such as "Guild Programmer", "Guild Administrator", "Guild Architect", "Guild Tester" (sometimes called "Guild Testsman"), etc. And we can even have a handy slogan: "He who controls the code, controls life."

Re:I'm getting tired of this industry

[ebh]

I'd be delighted if one of my kids told me he or she wanted to be an electrician. There will always be a demand, there are fun toys and interesting tech to play with, there are physical things you can look at and say, "I built that!", and unlike plumbers, you don't often deal with raw sewage.

You don't get vilified as lazy and overpaid by the lumpen like teachers, or publish-or-perish while bowing and scraping for grant money like professors. You're not in college and beyond until your late 20s or longer, like doctors, not to mention the insane student loan debt and crushing malpractice premiums.

And, you're not subject to the whims of either the stock market or PHBs or drunken executives the way we in the corporate world are.

'Shift Plan', because...

[jlowery]

'Shaft Plan' was a little too insensitive.