by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Friday October 12, 2012 @05:46PM (#41636489)
Nokia subcontracting 101: Expand your budget and pump as much cash you can out of Nokia before they do a reorganization shuffle, if the numbers look good sell the subcontracting company for cash - lie to 3rd party investors that the budget figures aren't from short term contracting to Nokia.
Besides, if you don't have specs on what you should be contracting and the target sdk changes every 6 months, what does it matter if you put the Indians on the project payroll? it's not like you're going to get anything shipped, since Nokia fails to specify even vaguely what the code should do - the contractors who knew what OS they were aiming for were lucky(Nokia road maps were lies, treachery and deceit - every single one of them for past 10 years! EVERY SINGLE YEAR!).
They had more people working on concepts than actual working people working on what the next shipping product should behave like and those few people were so detached from development teams it wasn't even funny.
Posting as anon due to having done some work for the organization, as an outsider, as someone who worked at a 3rd party who shipped code embedded in firmware and as someone who worked for platform development. As far as I know some phones sold today still have couple of lines code from me - lines that could have been written by anyone out of school, but the tough part was waiting, waiting for graphics that wouldn't render on the shipping libraries, waiting for design specs. What good is a crack development team if the client supposedly has legions of UI experts but is unable to assign them to do any decisions? and what's the point of having dedicated graphics contractors if they don't bother to know the platform they're drawing their vector graphics for? what's the point of having project state management diagrams when every item on them is a variation "waiting for another team"? what does it matter to use Indians if once the specs do come in you have to wait for another team to finish their part of the api - that they were supposed to do 9 months ago but didn't since the platform was supposedly axed already - so you can actually do something resembling the specification within the limits your code is allowed to work under?
And SYNERGY! Few of you reading might get what that means but the way Nokia handled SW versioning would make for good source material for a really bizarre book. Only thing sadder than it was the usage of Visual SourceSafe at a contractor.
Nokia middle management was for the past 10 years mainly concerned about how to exit from the company - the usual plan was arranging Nokia contracts to preferred contractors, personally preferred contractors. This was a game in Finland in which hundreds of millions exchanged hands, code and product turn to secondary products used to screw both domestic and foreign investors out of their money due to unjustly inflated company value. How about a company doing only contracting to Nokia being sold at a value of 600 000 euros per employee due to their ultimately very temporary Nokia contract? Of course it is not he stupid who asks but who pays, but some of these cases are more than just borderline fraudulent.
One good example of this is how Symbian OS in it's later incarnations has wifi hotspot functionality built in, however you need a 3rd party UI to turn it on - the needed headers and platform security signing rights were given only to a certain company favored by a middle manager.
Kudos to those who managed to stay motivated to write code under these circumstances - of course few of them were very handsomely paid for their part in it, but most were not and were rather just used as peons in order to inflate budgets, to get more budget.
So management and contracting was in such a state that it wasn't that out of question to bring an outsider to clean house - but I really doubt that anyone thought that Elop would manage to fuck up even more than the old management. It's like Ford telling people to not buy the T-Model because he's going to license Citroen CV after the WW2. Elop was acting like a MS fanboi and couldn't hide it. He should have just kept nibbling on his pinkyfinger and said that they were working on something and only release information when they had something actually for sale, but for his motives it fit to accelerate the demise of non-wp platforms.
And the Nokia execs you see on news? THEY'RE JUST SALESMEN! JO HARLOW IS JUST A SALESWOMAN! ELOP IS JUST A SALESMAN!
subcontracting (Score:5, Interesting)
"...bad code written in India..."
"...communication problems..."
I'm shocked. How upper management types keep justifying this model with "lower costs" is completely beyond me.
Re:subcontracting (Score:1)
Nokia subcontracting 101: Expand your budget and pump as much cash you can out of Nokia before they do a reorganization shuffle, if the numbers look good sell the subcontracting company for cash - lie to 3rd party investors that the budget figures aren't from short term contracting to Nokia.
Besides, if you don't have specs on what you should be contracting and the target sdk changes every 6 months, what does it matter if you put the Indians on the project payroll? it's not like you're going to get anything shipped, since Nokia fails to specify even vaguely what the code should do - the contractors who knew what OS they were aiming for were lucky(Nokia road maps were lies, treachery and deceit - every single one of them for past 10 years! EVERY SINGLE YEAR!).
They had more people working on concepts than actual working people working on what the next shipping product should behave like and those few people were so detached from development teams it wasn't even funny.
Posting as anon due to having done some work for the organization, as an outsider, as someone who worked at a 3rd party who shipped code embedded in firmware and as someone who worked for platform development. As far as I know some phones sold today still have couple of lines code from me - lines that could have been written by anyone out of school, but the tough part was waiting, waiting for graphics that wouldn't render on the shipping libraries, waiting for design specs. What good is a crack development team if the client supposedly has legions of UI experts but is unable to assign them to do any decisions? and what's the point of having dedicated graphics contractors if they don't bother to know the platform they're drawing their vector graphics for? what's the point of having project state management diagrams when every item on them is a variation "waiting for another team"? what does it matter to use Indians if once the specs do come in you have to wait for another team to finish their part of the api - that they were supposed to do 9 months ago but didn't since the platform was supposedly axed already - so you can actually do something resembling the specification within the limits your code is allowed to work under?
And SYNERGY! Few of you reading might get what that means but the way Nokia handled SW versioning would make for good source material for a really bizarre book. Only thing sadder than it was the usage of Visual SourceSafe at a contractor.
Nokia middle management was for the past 10 years mainly concerned about how to exit from the company - the usual plan was arranging Nokia contracts to preferred contractors, personally preferred contractors. This was a game in Finland in which hundreds of millions exchanged hands, code and product turn to secondary products used to screw both domestic and foreign investors out of their money due to unjustly inflated company value. How about a company doing only contracting to Nokia being sold at a value of 600 000 euros per employee due to their ultimately very temporary Nokia contract? Of course it is not he stupid who asks but who pays, but some of these cases are more than just borderline fraudulent.
One good example of this is how Symbian OS in it's later incarnations has wifi hotspot functionality built in, however you need a 3rd party UI to turn it on - the needed headers and platform security signing rights were given only to a certain company favored by a middle manager.
Kudos to those who managed to stay motivated to write code under these circumstances - of course few of them were very handsomely paid for their part in it, but most were not and were rather just used as peons in order to inflate budgets, to get more budget.
So management and contracting was in such a state that it wasn't that out of question to bring an outsider to clean house - but I really doubt that anyone thought that Elop would manage to fuck up even more than the old management. It's like Ford telling people to not buy the T-Model because he's going to license Citroen CV after the WW2. Elop was acting like a MS fanboi and couldn't hide it. He should have just kept nibbling on his pinkyfinger and said that they were working on something and only release information when they had something actually for sale, but for his motives it fit to accelerate the demise of non-wp platforms.
And the Nokia execs you see on news? THEY'RE JUST SALESMEN! JO HARLOW IS JUST A SALESWOMAN! ELOP IS JUST A SALESMAN!