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Nokia’s collapse turned a sleepy town in Finland into an internet wonderland
- m12k 7y agoI think this is a great example why we as a society shouldn't coddle corporations just because they provide jobs. When they fall, others take their place, and many smaller companies make for a much more healthy and dynamic job market than a single monolith.
- jenscow 7y ago"don't put all your eggs in one basket"
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- timonoko 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulu_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulu_child_sexual_exploitation...
- welly 7y agoNot sure how this relates to the story. Why did you post it?
- timonoko 7y ago"Nokia's collapse turned a sleepy town into creepy town" Except it has always been creepiest place in Finland thanx to Laestadians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laestadianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laestadianism
- ahbyb 7y agoThis is unfortunately very common in Nordic countries right now.
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- dvfjsdhgfv 7y agoAh the glorious old days of Oulu FTP... http://ftp.lanet.lv/ftp/mirror/x2ftp/msdos/programming/formats/00index.html http://ftp.lanet.lv/ftp/mirror/x2ftp/msdos/programming/forma...
- kepponen 7y agoCurrent Oulu resident here, working in the IT sector as well. Less than ten years ago, atmosphere was quite pessimistic when Nokia was laying off lot of people, which also heavily affected also multiple sub-contractor companies. However, everything has gone lot better than anyone expected and currently there are more IT sector employees in Oulu than in the golden ages of Nokia.
- ptah 7y agowhat would you credit for this better than expected outcome?
- atupis 7y agoNot living Oulu but living Finland. Oulu is pretty remote even in Finland's standards so people don't move out so easily. That created a situation where startups had suddenly lots of highly skilled engineers to hire cheaply and that created a boom in the town.
- kepponen 7y agoThere are various reasons in my opinion. People, who were laid off from Nokia, were highly educated and many of them were well-respected in their fields so it is quite easy to lure some new companies to Oulu (Mediatek, Nordic Semiconductor etc.) In addition, people were also used to make business internationally so it was lot easier to start new companies with that kind of experience.
- shusson 7y agoIn general, do you need to speak Finnish to work in Oulu?
- Maxion 7y agoPretty much yes. While you can find tech companies that hire exclusively English speakers A LOT of companies require fluent Finnish, even when the internal language is Finnish. Finland is still in many ways a very conservative society.
- ossworkerrights 7y agoNokia is a perfect example of corporate arrogance: “we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost” said the CEO at the time. Yet they did everything wrong.
- thepangolino 7y agoI’ll never forget how they jumped from a burning platform to a sinking ship.
- ossworkerrights 7y agoIf they had the culture of acquiring up and coming start-ups, such as the one making Android, there would have been an excellent result. I fell like most EU based companies lack such culture, and the result is that once great companies face great failures (unless the EU bails them out or taxes their competitors).
- lerpoel 7y agoThat jump, however stupid it was at the time, is the key to Nokia existing at all in its current form. The Nokia management used the Microsoft money to buy Siemens part of NSN (Nokia Siemens Networks) and managed to turn it around somewhat, in a situation where it looked like Ericsson and Huawei were going to be the only survivors. I was working for a subcontractor to Nokia during 2010-2016 and we were dumbfounded in the beginning, but as the years went on that turned into a belief that Nokia scammed Microsoft in that sale.
- ahje 7y ago> a belief that Nokia scammed Microsoft in that sale That's what I've heard too -- They knew they were going down and simply took the opportunity to dump the handset business on Microsoft while securing funding to allow the network business to grow.
- dx034 7y agoNo matter who got the better deal, I wouldn't call it a scam if two billion $ companies agree on a price for a business after due diligence. Sometimes both win (because one can use the asset better than the other), sometimes the price is too high or too low. Doesn't mean they got scammed.
- new2628 7y agoTo be honest, "sleepy Finnish town" sounds much more appealing than "internet wonderland".
- rebuilder 7y agoIt does, until you visit one that has lost its jobs...
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoThis. There are plenty of rather grim Finnish factory towns that lost their industry and never found anything to replace it. Kemi, just up the road from Oulu and fully dependent on a couple of failing pulp mills, is a good example.
- pongogogo 7y agoThe bridge program sounds amazing, not sure I grokked it correctly and the article only mentions it in passing but it sounds like they let some of the staff they made redundant take some of the firm's IP with them to help them strike out on their own? Does anyone have more details on this?
- dry_soup 7y agoThis is what I could find: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25965140 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25965140 Not just IP, but also funding for new companies.
- PeterStuer 7y agoOulu is my favorite town in Finland. Its post Nokia prosperity is most certainly due to Finland's generous social security allowing its people the time and means to recover without having to abandon and emigrate, and also the significant stimulus the state put forward to new entrepreneurial initiatives in the region. There's definitely lessons their for the rest of Europe.
- outime 7y ago> to recover without having to abandon and emigrate Very true! Many colleagues I met here were ex-nokians. It seems that the market was able to absorb at least a bunch of them over time.
- barney54 7y agoThe article also notes that Oulu has inexpensive housing. Inexpensive housing is a lesson many cities could use—from Berlin to London to San Francisco. Having affordable housing help everyone from people with high-paying tech jobs to have the time to find new work, to people with lower incomes.
- kmlx 7y ago1. if you want inexpensive housing then you need to find enough voters that would take a X% haircut on their investment in their own home. good luck with that. 2. i don't think you realise just how small oulu actually is. mega-cities like tokyo, sydney, london or nyc are hugely complex machines.
- MagnumOpus 7y ago> then you need to find enough voters that would take a X% haircut on their investment in their own home Or build entire new cities. This is what the UK did after WW2 [0], building dozens of new cities of 100k to 250k people, most notably Milton Keynes, Peterborough and Northampton. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdo...
- Sharlin 7y agoUniversity of Oulu, incidentally, is where IRC was born in 1988.
- dharma1 7y agoIndeed! Wonder why Jarkko Oikarinen (and others) semi-abandoned the project. With a little bit of a makeover it could have rivalled Slack, Whatsapp etc
- mxuribe 7y agoWell, there's the matrix protocol (and separate apps like Riot.im, Quaternion, pattle, etc.)...which does incorporate - at least at a high level - some similar concepts to IRC, though with modern adaptations like encryption, etc.
- dharma1 7y agoyep, love Matrix. It's the best open source project in the space. Just wonder why IRC was effectively abandoned
- bluedino 7y agoAll the time I spent on x2ftp.oulu.fi finding DOS and game programming information...
- jbverschoor 7y agoSame here :-)
- swebs 7y agoWell it's nice to see Oulu in the international news for a good reason for a change.
- Nessa 7y agoWow that's pretty cool.... Apple been taking over the states
- Nessa 7y agoPretty cool I've heard about Finland too.Well Samsung kinda lost too PS Apple has everywhere wired up....
- iikoolpp 7y agoI find it very hard to feel any sympathy for any Finn giveen that I don't consider them people, or even really human.
- cyborgx7 7y agoI know this is meant as friendly banter, but reading this kind of stuff still grosses me out.
- dang 7y agoWe've banned this account for trolling. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- hourislate 7y agoI like to take every opportunity to tell people, I had the pleasure of working with a lot of folks from Nokia. They were the most talented and hardest working people I have encountered in my 30 years in the IT Industry (and I have been around). The Company was overflowing with brilliant people and was a wonderful employer.
- danans 7y agoThe question I have is what if any lessons can be taken from Oulo's experience and applied to places like Lordestown, OH (losing their GM plant). On the surface, a big difference seems to be that the current talent pool of Oulo is R&D heavy, vs the assembly labor heavy Rust Belt cities and towns. The workers of Oulo, despite their initial misfortune and pessimism, faced a growing market for their skills - the government just needed to facilitate their transition to a new set of employers and ventures. Does such a market exist for Rust Belt assembly workers? Probably not making the same things they made before - the auto industry is in major turmoil as it transitions to a structurally different transportation future. I'd love to see a future where the collection of assembly skills those workers have are put to use to build the wind turbines and batteries that we desperately need, but it seems like there are both cultural and political hurdles in the way of that happening.
- bitL 7y agoSo you had a company that dominated the highest growing market in the world, and now you have a bunch of barely profitable startups and small businesses, and that's supposed to be a great outcome?
- pergadad 7y agoThe city succeeded to keep talent because they invested in them. Somewhat unrelated but this really reminds me of Germany's Kurzarbeitslosengeld - short working hour unemployment benefits - which was introduced in the crisis years and is given credit why Germany has high employment and the economy quickly recovered after 2009. Companies were allowed to send employees on "part time unemployment" for a certain period of low work. So eg 300 staff get 60% hours and work 3/5 days per week and get 3/5 of their full time salary and in addition 2/5 of what they would get as unemployment benefits. This kept workers in employment, unemployment and benefit payouts low and helped make it easy for companies to keep skilled staff - and for staff to stay in employment and maybe upskill themselves in their spare time. The scheme had some issues but overall a similarly positive impact. I wish more countries & companies would recognise the benefits of investing in and catering for staff, rather than to see workers as replaceable widgets.