Well...I have survived the latest Motorola Layoff. It has actually affected the Plantation facility here in Florida heavily...at least as far as my area is concerned. They laid off ~350 people in one day! The only good news out of all of this is that each person that was "impacted" gets a two month notice (they are still employees for the next two months) and then they get a decent severance package. There are a lot of associates that I know personally that will no longer be working for Motorola in 2 months...including a member of my ward.
But...at the same time, and because of the large number of engineers that are being laid-off, there are several companies that have come to South Florida to interview. They include Foxcon (a Tiawanese Company), RIM (they make the Blackberry phone), Qualcom, Microsoft and Freescale (a Motorola spin-off). The most intriguing of these is RIM because they are setting up a R&D facility here in So. East Florida...and it will probably be very close to Motorola. In fact, they had an interviewing event this last Friday and Saturday and a lot of engineers that I know at Motorola were there interviewing, including myself, my co-workers and even my boss...all of whom were not "impacted" by the recent layoffs. RIM is expecting to hire quite a few people (probably a couple of hundred), and they will probably choose the best people for the job...regardless of their current employment status. If this happens it will really hurt the development of our current iDEN products...but with the recent layoffs and with Motorola spinning off Mobile Devices (their phone development business), nobody feels that they have any job security. We haven't received any decent cost-of-living increase in a while, and all of our bonuses have been really low (at least compared to previous years). Mobile Devices has been losing money for the last ~2 years...and there is no guarantee that anyone in our facility that works for Motorola's Mobile Devices will even have a job a year from now. Can you blame people for looking elsewhere?
It's no wonder RIM had such a huge turnout at their event...especially considering that their products are very similar to what most of the engineers at my facility have been doing for the past several years.
I still don't know if I'll accept an offer even if I get one...but it is a really interesting prospect.
I'll keep you posted!
2 comments:
Wow, that is pretty interesting- definitely keep us posted. It'll work out for the best, I'm sure.
I was laid off a year ago. The position I found was 25% more pay. I wish Motorola had laid me off earlier :-). No place is like Motorola. And that is what makes it so cool in all those other places: they are different! I'm not just joking but saying that leaving Moto might not be the end of the world. It might even be a suberbly satisfying new beginning for you. Best of luck
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