The inside view - Motorola Cork - it`s The Final Countdown
The inside view - Motorola Cork – it`s The Final Countdown
On March the 9th, 95% of employees at Motorola Cork received their final dates of employment in Cork.
About half of the 330-350 left the organisation on 31st March 2007.
Of the half that is left, about 2/3 of those are leaving at the end of April and the majority of the remaining engineers and managers are leaving at the end of May.
I received my own ’severance’ date of 30th April, and today 26th April I am packing my boxes of belongings, pencils, books, notes, training material - collected or hoarded over a 10 year period… difficult to know which ones I may need again in the future…
Almost 10 years devoted to Telecoms software engineering, developing a huge variety of projects.
Time has come to move forward and look to a huge bright challenging future.
The past 10 years, I have met many good bright people here at Motorola in Cork - the best developers and engineers I have ever come across have been in my most recent group - the Sys-Admin team. It has also proved that a work-hard, play-hard motto does work well. Working with groups on the EMX, NetPlan, iDEN and UMTS/CDMA OMC products, it has been a barrel full of experiences.
When I joined back 10 years ago, we had a site with 220 people. It was intimate enough and young enough - that Thursday nights became Motorola night in Cork city, with a few Pubs and nightclubs befitting hugely from our atmosphere. In fact I recall some nightclubs which would have seemed quite busy on a Thursday night, would have had 5 people if Motorola employees had not been there.
So it was like a big happy family then. Sports and Social events were well attended, and frequent.
There were 2 divisions of work- EMX, the Analog switch - and the OMC-, Operations and Maintenance of a GSM network.
I recall many individuals maintained their own websites, with a split of content between fun and work. Light Bantering associated gifs and jpgs of celebrities with people in Cork. It was fun, light, and at times became known as a ‘gif’ war, where several guys kept coming up with new images which each associated with the others. It was fun. Image editing tools were the order of the day.
The Motorola canteen - In 1997, at 11am you gave your individual order for lunch. Lunchtime was 12:30-1:15, where you bought what you ordered.
In 1999 to 2000, there was a new canteen built and opened - no more having to order in advance – you decided in the canteen - there was a choice of 3 main courses (including 1 vegetarian dish), soup, sandwiches and filled rolls, and a salad bar – the canteen had expanded with the size of the organisation in Cork - at its peak Motorola Cork had in close to 700 people on site. At one time there was over-capacity at Cork Motorola, and many employees were temporarily located in a neighbouring ‘Jacobs Engineering’ facility.
The Cork site also had a prefab attached to the main building - accomodating overflow, which was hot when the sun came out, and from all the PCs in the unit - and cold in winter.
With Cork’s expansion and doubling the size of the facility, everyone was eventually accommodated in the main building. But that was more than 7 years ago, and Motorola Cork and the global IT, Telecoms and Cork services industry were booming.
With dot-com ‘crash’ in the early 2000s and a slow-down in the ‘silicon valley’ in Ireland, reports were heard of individuals who left Motorola Cork – to go to abroad for a year, to return a year later to find a collapsed Irish IT industry – finding it extremely difficult at the time to find relevant work.
Motorola layed-off 10,000’s of employees worldwide. Cork escaped the hatchet of any culling back then.
What was introduced in Cork was a recruitment freeze, so by natural attrition the numbers dropped by 56 in 2001, 34 in 2002, just 13 in 2003 (height of the industry-downturn), 35 in 2004, 20 in 2005. That’s a workforce reduction of 158 employees.
In the meantime also Motorola PCS division became a separate entity – Freescale, and took their section of the business – approx 100-150 employees at the time out to their new facility by Cork airport.
During 2006, Voluntary Redundancy was first announced of up to 150 personnel in April. Through negotiation and intake by other parts of the Cork org, there were only 29 redundancies at the time – who left in June of last year. It is believed that more than 100 actually applied for Voluntary redundancy at the time.
A second round of Voluntary and Involuntary Redundancies followed in November/ December, with 59 leaving. An additional 34 people left, by handing in their own notice, during 2006. With 122 leaving in 2006, this took the workforce down to approx 330-350.
Follow previous threads on this, and what happened early this year, on how Brenda Herold announced to the Cork workforce that all engineering functionality was being removed from the centre and that the Cork site was to close: Motorola - the inside view to 330 Redundancies from Cork
Over the past 10 years, for work I have travelled to Chicago (USA), Dallas (USA), Swindon (UK), China and Brazil. With work friends developed here, my travels have taken me to Paris - and a Euro-2000 European Championships Tour of Brussels, Bruges, Rotterdam and Amsterdam and to a few locations across Ireland.
My final day onsite in Motorola Cork is tomorrow, 27th April.
As the door closes behind, and cherished memories, laughs and good times are remembered, the pain and stress and tough times are all forgotten - at least for the moment.
Regards to all,
The inside-view.
[…] EuropeanIrish.com have an ‘inside view’ article on the shutting down of Motorola Cork. Here are my own brief thoughts as I look back on my time there. As a 2001 graduate I started my working career in Motorola Cork. 2001 was just about the worst year to look for a job as a graduate with an electrical/electronic degree. I almost didn’t take the initial offer from Motorola. At the time I had two concrete job offers, including Motorola, and I was waiting to hear back from a number of other companies. I told one recruiter from Alcatel that I might turn down all the current offers, take the summer off and re-apply in the Autumn. Thankfully she told me to take one of the two current offers as the scene was changing fast and there would be few companies recruiting within a couple of months. So taking on board her advice and wanting to stay in Cork I ended up in the GSM Base Station Systems software group. Looking back I didn’t realise at the time that the variety of projects I got to work on was somewhat priviliged. A lot of engineers end up getting stuck in one area, often gaining some domain knowledge by fixing bugs before going on to work on features in that domain. At almost the start of my time there I got to work on a critical software element of a massive project to introduce new radio hardware into one of Motorolas base stations. Not only that but I got to work with a very dedicated and skilled group of engineers to make it happen. A lot of the good memories are not the result of the big corporate system that was at play in Motorla, but rather down to a handful of dedicated and helpful engineers who really cared about the work they produced. Working in the BSS group was a great fit. I worked at the level of assembly programming an MMU on a PowerPC based network communication processor right up to writing application code for implementing 3GPP spec defined call processing features. Alas the BSS group in Cork was closed down in 2005 and the work shipped to China. The writing had been on the wall for that move way back when I had joined in 2001. At that point the BSS group were training up 5 Chinese engineers on site in Cork. Concerns about training up people to take our jobs were allayed with the assurances that there was plenty of work to go around and we need a development presence in China close to our customers. As a result of the loss of the BSS group my last few months before quitting Motorola in the summer of 2006 were served out working as a Systems Engineer. I got to work on a high-tier element management system for WiMAX. Although it was nice to explore the land of UML, requirements and architecture it made me long to get back into the embedded realm. So I finished in the summer of 2006 and took away the great memories and immense amount of engineering skill and knowledge I managed to glean over my 5 years in Motorola Cork. Now I’m working for a small company just down the road and back working on embedded software. Hopefully the engineers pouring out from Motorola over the next months will find suitable work. I wish them all well. Bye, bye Moto. […]
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