| I worked for Ericsson for 8 years in San Jose office. All your observations are accurate. I can't say about Ericsson's wireless products, but from IP networking, here are few more things: 1) Market & Competition: As mentioned in another thread below, Chinese competitors were severely undercutting us (there was constant threat from Huawei). One customer in middle east that I worked with comes to mind. We were developing a complex feature for them (Bridge Virtual Interface [BVI] over VRRP and few more protocols). 2-4 engineers in San Jose and 1-2 at customer site. Huawei had close to 200 engineers on site to address any issue. We just didn't stand a chance. Chinese companies have huge advantage over West/European companies. Relatively inexpensive, high quality labor. 2) Commoditizing of IP Networking: Ericsson's investment in IP networking was a huge sunk cost. Traditional networking industry is getting commoditized. It's very inexpensive to make a whitebox switch covering good 90% use cases. Therefore,
* Cisco's revenue of core networking products is on steady decline
* Brocade is being broken up on to pieces and being sold
* Juniper has been on market for sale (at least rumors)
* Ericsson laid off pretty much everyone in Redback last year and partnered with Cisco in 2015.
* Only Arista Networks is doing well. It's very hard for networking companies to survive any more on core, edge or campus switching products alone. 3) Engineering vs Management: Ericsson brought management heavy style to workplace. It was very different to SV culture. In 2007, from concept to delivering a feature required writing 3 documents. By 2015, we had to write 6 documents. Feature velocity came to a crawl. Engineers clearly felt pulled back. Brilliant engineers, industry stalwarts, started leaving one by one. 3) Compensation: Ericsson's benefits was employee friendly, particularly for engineers with families. Decent work-life balance, good vacation policy, generous health insurance and 401K policy. The base pay was horrible. This is one of the reasons attracting young talent became hard. New college grads were getting offers in $120K-$140K range at other companies (heck, the summer intern I mentored got an offer more than my base pay :)) 4) Culture: Slow to pivot. Cisco innovated the idea of spin-in/off to quickly develop products. But Ericsson (and others) took too long to change course. We were always playing catch up. |