RIFed!

To the uninitiated, RIF means reduction in force.

On February 15th, Nokia announced that they would be reducing staff in their IT organization.  A total of 90 people globally were said to affected.  Finland was to be affected first, then the folks Stateside.  Apparently, there are complicated labor laws in Europe and so it took them a while to get to us in the States.

We had received little information until finally meeting invitations were received by all.  In those meetings you were to be told if you were staying or going.  I was told today that I was going.

I was prepared for this news, but still surprised.  In January, I received my best review yet, though all my reviews have always been better than average.  In addition, I’m on a team that already is short-handed and serves a business with aggressive goals.  I’m involved in two high-priority initiatives targeted for June 30th deployment.  The funny thing is, we just yesterday met to begin to explore who might back me up while I’m gone on my upcoming vacation.  In the end, no one really had the time, but we decided we’d explore it as the time grew closer.  So to me, this decision does not appear to be in harmony with business needs and competencies.  I am sure there will be some interesting fallout once our business partners learn that their goals may be affected by these cuts.

Quite frankly, this is a change for me that has been a long time coming, and though this is not necessarily on my terms, I am looking forward to what’s next.  I will make that the subject of some future blog entry as I figure it out.

Its fair to say that Nokia has some challenges ahead to right their ship.  Many of the points that I made in my Why IT Sucks post were inspired by some of my recent experiences there.  Based upon the feedback inspired by the Reddit readership who visited the entry, my experiences there are not unrepresentative of the industry as a whole.  But anyway, they really need to consider their management approach in both their business and technical areas.  We rarely saw our line or organizational management wandering the aisles or asking questions.  There are opportunities for them to get to know “the factory”, improve it, and be better equipped to manage and sell its services.  Without knowing its people or processes, its inevitable that each may go astray.

On the bright side, while at Nokia, I was able to supplement my Java skills and to be a part of bringing complex systems into being.  We introduced the Spring Framework to the company as well as other frameworks like the Acegi Framework for Security.  Not only did we introduce it, we built a federation of 20+ web apps that are happily deployed on a WebLogic Platform, but none of these apps use session beans or entity beans.  We introduced lightweight J2EE into the company successfully and we did so based upon our own initiative.  This is to say that we found the framework, we learned it without any formal training, and we deployed it successfully.  This is quite a feather in our caps.

I did introduce Ruby and Rails where I could, but quite honestly it just doesn’t appear to be taking hold.  Nokia is really a Java shop and they announced recently a desire to move to LAMP architectures.  I don’t disagree with LAMP architectures, but I think Ruby and Rails would enable cleaner application architectures to evolve.  I don’t think this was even considered because the idea of LAMP architectures came from Finland and there doesn’t appear to be too much awareness of Rails in Finland.  Apparently Jarkko isn’t spreading the word well enough.

To be fair to Nokia, they have at least been pretty fair with the termination process.  Some companies put you out on the street with little notice and with little regard to your financial situation.  Nokia has defined a transition period, where I will transition whatever I know and whatever I am involved in, followed by another period where I am not required to be onsite or carry any responsibilities.  The point of this period is to look for employment.  Thereafter, there is a lump sum severance which is reasonable given my 5-year tenure.  Suffice it to say, this is the best I’ve been treated and I am thankful.

So with that, its on to what’s next and I’m looking forward to the ride!