Alcatel-Lucent To Cut 10,000 Workers, Calls It "Shift Plan" 75
Dawn Kawamoto writes "Alcatel-Lucent is planning to cut 10,000 workers by 2015. The telecom equipment maker's newly minted CEO calls this restructuring part of his Shift Plan. Under this plan, Alcatel-Lucent wants to save 1 billion Euros in costs and refocus its operations on next-gen IP networking, cloud and ultra-broadband access and away from legacy technologies like its 2G and 3G wireless. In the meantime, Wall Street thinks it may be cleaning itself up for a sale of some of its assets or its operations to Nokia, which will need to bolster its telecom equipment business after selling its smartphone operations to Microsoft. But a Nokia-Microsoft deal may be too little, too late."
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What does the last link have to do with the submission?
1) if they're trying to sell to Nokia, then they'll be SOL if Nokia is struggling too much.
2) it's a slashdot "cloud" article, which seems to be slashdot's version of AllThingsD or something similar. To tell you the truth I kinda liked it. The layout and info is nice. I know I'm supposed to shake my fist and say "Garr! Dice Holdings!" but whatever.
Fire people (Score:3)
Refocus on some vague next gen thing.
Where have we seen this movie before?
Nothing to see here, move along.
Re:Fire people (Score:5, Insightful)
You missed the important part
As CEO collect outrageous bonus.
Re:Fire people (Score:5, Insightful)
And jump ship before the long-term consequences of your actions become apparent.
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Strange how shareholders are willing to pay CEOs large amounts of money just in order to ruin their company. Or maybe that's not how it is in reality.
Shit Plan (Score:1)
Couldn't agree more. Unless you are cutting some CEOs and directors.
Justifications for cutting ppl (Score:2, Insightful)
"We will cut 100k ppl because... cloud....4g.....outsourcing....smartsizing"
*Shareholders applauding to buzzwords*
Alcatel makes decent Android phones (Score:2)
In India; Alcatel makes smartphones for Idea Cellular; and they are quite good. Very rugged; good specs; fairly low cost - $120 for a 5" smartphone.
Wonder if this move is to get eventually swallowed like Nokia - except the CxOs; nobody else benefits.
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In India; Alcatel makes smartphones for Idea Cellular; and they are quite good. Very rugged; good specs; fairly low cost - $120 for a 5" smartphone.
Wonder if this move is to get eventually swallowed like Nokia - except the CxOs; nobody else benefits.
My understanding is that they have only lent their name to the phones and don't actually have anything to do with them but are made by a 3rd party.
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This is the CEO implementing the classic death spiral - reduce employees rapidly to get a few good financial quarters until the customers desert. It can be difficult and expensive for customers to change vendors so you have time to collect enormous sums before the eventual collapse of earnings. I hear there is even a Harvard business school class on how to convert a dying company's assets to personal wealth.
OTOH, when a company is struggling and have been losing money for years you do need to cut costs. And Alcatel-Lucent has been losing money for a while. According to the article, they want to cut "sales, support and administrative areas" - in addition to legacy tech. So it looks as if they are trying to preserve most of their R&D.
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#define X 10000
#define Y -10000
#define Z MAXINT
Sounds like the Same Old Shift (Score:1)
Take the assets of a struggling company, combine them those of another struggling company, and combine both of those with a third struggling company and what do you get?
A blue chip stock, that's what! Definitely time to hand out performance bonuses to top management.
Just liquidate already (Score:2)
RIP Bell Labs (Score:5, Insightful)
A-L has been going down the tubes for quite a while. It's pretty amazing to think that part of the company used to be the mighty Bell Labs. You know, Unix, the transistor, one of the last corporate-funded basic research institutes... It kind of makes me want to have the old AT&T monopoly back just to have that.
Admittedly, they probably do have huge legacy costs in the form of less productive employees and products that don't make them as much money anymore. Also, the telecom landscape has changed a lot over the years. I work for a similar company, and while our group works on newish stuff, there's a ton of older products just sitting around that used to be very high margin and no longer have the revenue to support their costs.
That said, it's never good when an older, established company suddenly announces a monster layoff like this. In the older companies, you just know it's going to be 10,000 58-year-olds in the developed countries who will suddenly find themselves out of work with zero prospects for new employment, hanging on until Social Security kicks in. That's the sad part of these "smartsizings" -- when you're just a number in a spreadsheet, companies have no idea how much you still have to offer in terms of talent and experience. I'm approaching the ripe old age of 40 now, and am constantly staying on top of all the new stuff just to keep the skill set sharp. That's one thing I could do without in the IT "profession" -- so much new buzzwordy stuff is rehashes of technology decades old with better supporting technology. Too bad Gartner and their ilk are the only ones that CIOs listen to!
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"A-L has been going down the tubes for quite a while. It's pretty amazing to think that part of the company used to be the mighty Bell Labs."
Not really, bad or short sighted leadership can take even the biggest company down to the rocks in a short time. When all that matters is "next quarters profits" your company will be in the shithole within 5 years.
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Yes, but in A-L's case, they made the mistake of Carly Fiorina. She did what a lot of companies did, she lent money to her customers to buy Lucent stuff. Alcatel was incredibly blind to buy Lucent. After 3 years at L, Carly gave H-P the kiss of death, her being a serial failure.
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Yes, but in A-L's case, they made the mistake of Carly Fiorina. She did what a lot of companies did, she lent money to her customers to buy Lucent stuff. Alcatel was incredibly blind to buy Lucent. After 3 years at L, Carly gave H-P the kiss of death, her being a serial failure.
It started well before Fiorina. And I was dumbfounded at the idea of it when I started working there. Merging with Alcatel was just a cash infusion for Lucent and now it's back down to the bottom. Who will be the next buyer to keep it going!
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While many good people lost their job in Nortel, there was a LOT of deadwood at Nortel. Kanata has never been the same since.
We had one upgrade with Nortel telecom equipment, where I had one engineer and five (or six) project managers. You need one or sometimes even two good project managers, but never FIVE, especially when the engineer is doing all the heavy lifting (figuratively and literally). So by charging us $300/hr, we knew we were subsidizing several crappy layers of ineffeciency.
A-L may in a si
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I remember when Nortel was at it largest I had a job and part of my responsibilities involved going around to install software. One of the problems Nortel had was that the level of a manager was determined by the number of people reporting to them. So if a manager wanted to go up a level they either got another project or hired more people for their existing projects. Some of the new people that they were hiring in 1999 were only there to boost numbers because they had trouble turning on the computer.
I'm getting tired of this industry (Score:5, Interesting)
I truly enjoy writing software, but I would never recommend this career to my children or grandchildren. Way too much volatility coupled with abusive employers...
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medcine, law, banking, government work, education...
More professionalism and stability and experience makes you more valuable.
Yeah "right now" (Score:2)
Government is not 100% stable, but it is far more stable than other alternatives.
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Which government? There are thousands of them after all, just in the US.
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Each of those fields have guilds (or unions) that keep the barrier to entry high, so the compensation stays high. For example, the trend for lower-cost routine medicine done by Physician Assistants, Nurse Practitioners, and even Pharmacists is being negated by even higher professional requirements. Many of those jobs once only required a Masters, will now require a Doctorate. Tha
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So what we need to do, then, is to create a guild to monopolize IT services and programming. We'll call it the "Coding Guild". Then members of this guild can have different titles, such as "Guild Programmer", "Guild Administrator", "Guild Architect", "Guild Tester" (sometimes called "Guild Testsman"), etc. And we can even have a handy slogan: "He who controls the code, controls life."
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I have absolutely no problem with school boards requiring teachers being trained in how to teach. I wish universities had the same requirement. I was in university in the early to mid 1990s and had very little respect for my professors. Sure they may have known about their specific sub-field of study but that doesn't mean they are familiar anymore with the broad subject matter or even know how to teach. For many of them teaching was something that they only did because it was a requirement. They were a
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Who else to come up with terms like "Shift Planning" / 'Right Sizing' / 'Realignment'
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I'd be delighted if one of my kids told me he or she wanted to be an electrician. There will always be a demand, there are fun toys and interesting tech to play with, there are physical things you can look at and say, "I built that!", and unlike plumbers, you don't often deal with raw sewage.
You don't get vilified as lazy and overpaid by the lumpen like teachers, or publish-or-perish while bowing and scraping for grant money like professors. You're not in college and beyond until your late 20s or longer,
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The only long-term "stability" I've seen lately isn't even really stability -- it's contract work. I'm still an FTE simply because I have a family and don't want a divorce because I'm travelling around the country 300 days a year. But, I have many people I've worked with who have quite the lifestyle simply because they make multiples of a typical full time salary by stitching contract jobs together. It's amazing to me that a company doesn't hire permanent staff because it's "so expensive' and then turns aro
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I've spent about half my 30-year career as an employee and half as a contractor (which I am now). When you count benefits and everything else, the difference in net cost to the client isn't as much as you'd think. The advantage to the client is disposability. While it may look like companies fire their employees as easily as they throw out their cafeteria trash, there's more overhead involved in getting rid of an employee (even without tenure, collective bargaining,etc.) and WAY more when hiring an emplo
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Of course. Those pesky employees negatively impact profit margins. Without them the shareholders can extract maximum value from their investment.
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It's not just the tech industry it's every industry now. The stock market demands an easy solution to slowing revenue growth and all too often the "easy" solution is to chop some staff because everyone only looks at the short term. Even the government is doing this in order to reduce our taxes in order to try and get re-elected. We are going to get into trouble with all of this short term thinking.
The dream of the Nineties (Score:2)
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(Alcatel-)Lucent involved in a new massive layoff? It's another 90s revival. The scars never quite healed from starting my career there in the 90s.
I still work there. Amazing that through what seems layoffs continuously since 2001 that we are still around. I guess the cash infusion from merging with Alcatel helped push us along for a few more years. Though from what I know, due to unions and such in the EU, they are overstaffed there but it is very difficult to layoff.
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Whoopsie (Score:2)
'Shift Plan', because... (Score:4, Funny)
'Shaft Plan' was a little too insensitive.
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Who is the CEO that won't risk his neck
For his brother man?
SHAFT!
Can you dig it?
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Check it out! [youtube.com]
Calls It "Shift Plan" (Score:2)
Laid off employee shows up on Wheel of Fortune. "Thanks, Jack, I'd like to sell an 'R'..."
More like... (Score:2)
SHIT PLAN.
Oooooh. Someone else said it, but I don't have any followup, just wanted to do that one bit and this bit after it.
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You're not shit canned, you're shift planned!
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Oh dammit!!!
Shift Happens
So late to this party
You say Tomato.. (Score:2)
Your first rodeo? (Score:2)
i think... (Score:1)
Hopefully, Google will buy it (Score:2)
patents (Score:2)