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On the plus side for Canadian startups: It looks like there will be a glut of highly-competent engineers on the market in the next year or two as RIM sheds sta
by redthrowaway 15y ago
On the plus side for Canadian startups: It looks like there will be a glut of highly-competent engineers on the market in the next year or two as RIM sheds staff. Waterloo is looking like a lucrative place to launch a startup.
- wavephorm 15y agoFacebook is opening an office literally right down the street in Kitchener, in anticipation of RIM's collapse. http://www.techvibes.com/blog/facebook-expanding-its-canadian-operations-to-waterloo-2011-11-26 http://www.techvibes.com/blog/facebook-expanding-its-canadia...
- chollida1 15y ago> in anticipation of RIM's collapse. Is this really a stated reason? I would have thought it was to get Waterloo grads. Waterloo is literally one of the top CS and engineering schools in the world.
- wavephorm 15y agoThat's speculation on my part and others, a reporter normally would not publish something like that.
- chollida1 15y agoAh, ok, then I strongly suspect the main reason is the University of Waterloo and Facebook's decision has very little to do with RIM.
- a3camero 15y agoI'm a Waterloo graduate. A Microsoft recruiter told me of any school they hire the most from Waterloo. There were endless tech company visits when I was there. RIM isn't the only company in Waterloo either: Sandvine, Sybase, etc.
- latch 15y agoI don't want to compare RIM employees to Nortel employees, but...I was in Ottawa through most of Nortel's disaster, and "glut of highly-competent engineers" it was not. Surely employees play a significant role in how insanely horrible RIM products are compared to the competition.
- redthrowaway 15y agoGiven that RIM has recruited heavily from U of Waterloo, U of T, and the like, I would hope they have some top-notch technical talent, there. RIM's failures seem to be driven by upper management more than the rank-and-file. Even if the engineers were mostly incompetent (unlikely), there would still be some world-class talent there ready for poaching. Now, whether a startup could compete for that talent against the likes of a pre-IPO facebook is another matter.
- elithrar 15y agoI would expect the highly driven, world-class talent to have moved on swiftly after completing their grad program, if RIM's failures go all the way up. You can be a technically brilliant engineer, but if you have a horrible sense of business/intuition, it's still possible to 'maroon' yourself at a stagnating company. There's a lot to be said for the "safe" option.
- Bikepump 15y agoAs a UW grad, I can tell you that most of the best talent from those universities does not go to RIM, and hasn't for a number of years. Sure they have a few really excellent people, the few who want to sacrifice better opportunities to stay local and don't find Google (who have a Waterloo office) appealing, but the majority of the people in my graduating class who went there aren't engineers I'd want to work with. And very few of the people they hire would make it through the hiring process of top companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, etc.
- jarek 15y agoThis is accurate. RIM used to be a hot place to go to until 2006 or 07 or so. It's not the first or the second choice for the good people these days. I'm sure there's some talent left to be picked off though.