I worked at Nortel before and during the collapse. It was a wild ride... stories abound. 100K+ employees... and they couldn't hire them fast enough. Many s

I worked at Nortel before and during the collapse. It was a wild ride... stories abound. 100K+ employees... and they couldn't hire them fast enough. Many stories of Nortel hiring who ever they could just so the competition couldn't get them. The second most memorable day (the first being 9/11) was when Clarence Chandra did an all-hands webcast... "the perfect storm" presentation. This was the beginning of the end... we just didn't know how bad it would get. Massive projects were cut...and the employees with them. You are talking hundreds of people a week. I recall many of the people I worked around... packing up and moving home (often someplace in China) immediately. When people were laid off, they were allowed to hang out...use their computer...access stuff...before actually having to leave weeks later. I didn't work on the HW side, but I can tell you the SW repos were barely protected. The CMS (Livelink?) was pretty wide open... and if you could find what you wanted (LOL) easy to leave with it. Security was pretty lax... I'd bet many gigs of files just walked out of there on CDROMS or other media (USB sticks were not common then). I used to dig through all sorts of tech... cool stuff...probably a lot that should have been protected. It wasn't. Security was rarely talked about. All that mattered was the next release date... go go go.