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Thanks much for the update. I extremely am glad to hear things are going well. It got really dicey there from around 2002 onward. But from 1985 ( or before, rea

Thanks much for the update. I extremely am glad to hear things are going well. It got really dicey there from around 2002 onward. But from 1985 ( or before, really ) to then, Dallas was poppin'. We almost have to have different versions of what is meant by "telecoms" because it's all changed radically. The optical business is pretty bleak. It's the last vestige of the more old-school telecoms left. You also see Cisco pivoting these days.

hga 10y ago
Where wasn't it dicey in telecom in 2002 onward? It's been noted the dot.com bust was more of a telecom bust than anything else. I had the ... special privilege of going to work for Lucent in January when they had 106,000 employees (and an Oracle licence for that many seats). When I left in December they were on their way to a planned 35,000, and were eventually bought by Alcatel. It could have been worse, look at Nortel....
- hga 10y ago
  Oops, that was "January 2001" when I started at Lucent, by 2002 they were clearly doomed, e.g. the last project I worked on, a media gateway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_gateway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_gateway to pair with their then very successful SoftSwitch), was deemed utterly essential for Lucent's future (I read the marketing research documents, which said there was no future for integrated switching systems like the storied 5ESS, who's people worked on this project), and the project was clearly doomed. E.g. not only was first it absolutely minimally resourced, it was then not spared company wide layoffs, and they made a point of boasting about laying off one of the most visible and productive members of the team, undoubtedly to show us no one was deemed essential, and also undoubtedly because he was pointing out problems. The project was canceled not all that long after I left, "and the rest is history".

hga 10y ago

Where wasn't it dicey in telecom in 2002 onward? It's been noted the dot.com bust was more of a telecom bust than anything else. I had the ... special privilege of going to work for Lucent in January when they had 106,000 employees (and an Oracle licence for that many seats). When I left in December they were on their way to a planned 35,000, and were eventually bought by Alcatel. It could have been worse, look at Nortel....

hga 10y ago
Oops, that was "January 2001" when I started at Lucent, by 2002 they were clearly doomed, e.g. the last project I worked on, a media gateway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_gateway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_gateway to pair with their then very successful SoftSwitch), was deemed utterly essential for Lucent's future (I read the marketing research documents, which said there was no future for integrated switching systems like the storied 5ESS, who's people worked on this project), and the project was clearly doomed. E.g. not only was first it absolutely minimally resourced, it was then not spared company wide layoffs, and they made a point of boasting about laying off one of the most visible and productive members of the team, undoubtedly to show us no one was deemed essential, and also undoubtedly because he was pointing out problems. The project was canceled not all that long after I left, "and the rest is history".