Am not OP. Am Finnish. Basically they went to work to other companies and spun up lot of new ones. There are lots of small and medium sized companies in Finla

Am not OP. Am Finnish. Basically they went to work to other companies and spun up lot of new ones. There are lots of small and medium sized companies in Finland that are operating in technology and hardware. I presume a majority of them had similar salaries as earlier. Engineers have never been well payed in Finland and Nokia knew the market rate very well. It rewarded few individuals very well, but the general salary range was probably nothing special. Finland has lots of engineering activity - always has had. The problem has been marketing this knowhow to external markets. Explosion of Nokia was a blessing for Finland. It was too large for a country this small, and it started domineering investments in all levels of economy. From geek consumer point of view it is a shame their engineering was run down by poor management. But the company was fixed on this course from it's early years. It basically trusted on two things - that radiotechnology would be it's secret sauce for all eternity, and the main point of competition would be it's logistics network. When the radiotechnology used in handsets became commoditized, China basically levelled the playing field regarding logistics and outsourcing, and the software development inside the company remained a second tier effort, it could have not ended any other way (in retrospect).