[Hongwei]

My parents lost a small fortune in 2001 riding the tech crash down (Nortel was a good chunk of that). I've been trying to explain to them (1st gen Chinese immigrants) for the past three years that Nortel was killed partly by focused Chinese spying and IP-theft by Huawei. CSIS has know about this for years. They (my parents) just wouldn't believe it until I showed them this article.

Their former university classmates (who also immigrated to Canada) are likely part of the 20 people that jumped ship to Huawei and implicitly may have leaked data before then.

I'm glad this article got through to them, that it isn't just politics and Huawei & the CCP really did go offside.

[zyang]

I interned at Nortel in early 2000's right before it all went down. I can tell you the engineering culture was rotten within. No-one was doing anything useful for years. Many orgs were built around milking the ancient layer 2 passport switch. The layer 3 router meant to compete with Cisco was 3 years late and only sold a few dozen units. There was accounting fraud going on at the highest level - delivery trucks circles around to pad the books.

I'm sure the hack happened. I just don't think it would had made any material impact - there was simply not much to steal ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[freshhawk]

I was also there as an intern around the same time.

It was an insane place to get my first "office job" experience. Entire buildings of hundreds of people all working on powerpoint reports about potential training ideas for future projects to improve the production of the powerpoint presentations made to summarize the reports on internal "sales" numbers that are then filed without anyone reading them because everyone knew they were too fudged to matter and the internal competition thing was a smokescreen for fraud anyway. Who was embezzling what this week were conversations coop students got to overhear.

I was there shortly before the whole thing collapsed and right before it did, in my department, there was a lot of boat shopping combined with clock watching as they waited for options to vest before the whole thing fell apart (everyone knew it would soon).

[chvid]

We killed our own telecommunications industry by first throwing it into a massive bubble and then starving the shit out of it.

It wasn't killed by spying Chinese communist; if anything it was killed by the flipside of our capitalist system. The "madness of crowds" that drives "hot" industries through periods of massive over-investment followed by massive under-investment.

[treeman79]

Sounds like it was badly miss managmed. Better companies outsold it, causing it to file bankruptcy.

This is one of the points of capitalism, Bad / wasteful decisions lead to failure. Better managed companies rise. Consumers get better products cheaper.

[jbay808]

I'm sure it looks like that inside many big companies. There's a reason that FAANG+ companies fought over Nortel's patent trove. Nortel tech is still in a lot of today's most valuable products, covering things from BGA routing techniques to wireless communications. The area still supports an ecosystem of small manufacturers of world-leading optics and photonics components. That says something, at least.

[dehrmann]

Someone I worked with in 1006 who I think was at Bay Networks and jumped ship to Cisco had similar feelings about Nortel. Nothing about China, but it was already a sinking ship.

[koheripbal]

Chinese nationalism is potent. ...and it's somewhat understandable to internalize some of the pride of being part of a global power that is on the rise.

For those of us of Mediterranean decent, it would be as if the Roman Empire has been rebuilt and were expanding its influence globally. It would be hard for most people not to feel some element of subconscious or conscious pride.

The same feelings helped prop up the new Caliphate in the middle east recently (until it became obvious how brutal ISIS was).

Everyone wants to be part of something bigger than themselves.

[calyth2018]

I work with a ton of ex-Nortel engineers in town. All of them agree that the company was grossly mismanaged. The CxOs fudge the accounting, ignored warnings about their systems, and the burden of Nortel's fall should be mainly shouldered by management.

Huawei hacks are the sideshow, the burning tire fire of management is the main act.

Your parents aren't the only ones burnt by Nortel. Lots of Nortel employees indulged with the paper gains of their stock, only for it to crater and created lots of financial strain.

But like most articles with a question as the title, the answer is typically no. This article, frankly, is trying so hard to rewrite history, to divert attention from the main act to the side show.

[mytailorisrich]

Nortel was not killed by Huawei or a hack. It was killed by bad management.

The article tries to paint the picture of a fantastic company but that was not the case. It was mismanaged (and the article provides some glaring examples, including fraud), slow, bloated, it was really struggling in the cellular space.

Even the account of the hack shows how badly Nortel handled it.

There's always the temptation to find an external scapegoat but the buck does stop with Nortel's management.

[dig1]

The same happened to Nokia. People usually say that Microsoft killed it, but it was already pretty much behind everything when Microsoft took it.

Too much bureaucracy, everything outsourced, management out of touch with anything, meetings after meetings... Hell, I remember two/three weeks of meetings to replace apache proxy with nginx. Actual replacement and configuration update would take a couple of minutes.

[jiggawatts]

"But what if something goes wrong!?"

[vkou]

I find it hard to believe that the company was so incredibly fragile that it, uniquely among its competitors was killed by Huawei stealing some of its IP.

Far more likely, there's no shortage of other reasons that led to its downfall, but it's easier for the people responsible to blame spies.

[refurb]

I thought the article did a decent job of explaining that.

Nortel without the IP theft was certainly on shaky ground.

It sounds like the IP gave Huawei an opportunity to catch up more quickly and with Chinese govt cash, pull the rug out from under Nortel.

[close04]

> the article did a decent job of explaining

I'll take this with a grain of salt. To this day Bloomberg still stands by its "The Big Hack" article (Supermicro, Amazon, and Apple being hacked with the tiny Chinese chip), containing claims that have been thoroughly refuted (and ridiculed) since then, and about which even their own sources were very incredulous. The CEO of Apple called it "100 percent a lie", which is a very harsh word in this context. Those were lower standards than the ones we're held to when commenting here on HN.

I don't know how that article came to be but such precedent puts their tech articles into serious question. Obviously such articles about major Chinese interference and hacks are great with the readers and get a lot of attention. But while the premise may be true (the Chinese hack most likely happened), the implications and the interpretation of the reporter are on shaky ground.

I don't have any further evidence but I'd say that Bloomberg may be pandering to the readers and giving them what they want to hear during these times. And if I were Bloomberg reporters Jordan Robertson or Michael Riley I'd say that even if my sources denied it.

[refurb]

Yeah, that same article was top of mind when reading this article.

It's a little hand-wavy I'll admit. The article makes accusations that they don't back up very well.

That said, I thought it was a decent attempt to be somewhat balanced.

[kevin_nisbet]

I agree with the overall sentiment, but I don't necessarily know if Nortel is truly unique amongst it's competitors.

I worked with lots of the big vendors over the years (I worked at a telcecom operator here in Canada), and you'd get to chatting and they were all under financial pressure internally, lots of layoffs. One time I was visiting one of the big vendors in the US, and our team was joking around how it felt like we were visiting a retirement home, it was like there was no one under 50 in the building (this was mid 2010's). Beers with other vendors, and they'd be talking about how there's an entire floor for like 5 employees and more layoffs coming down.

Because the company survived... doesn't mean it's alive and well.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Embedded hardware companies are skewed to an older demographic because you can't hire significant numbers of younger engineers with the necessary knowledge.

[vaxman]

..and it is illegal to attempt.

As someone who lived it (being younger than young and older than most), the whole notion of young hardware (or software) engineers being somehow “better” stems from (IMNSHO) two factors: 1) their naivety in being willing to sacrifice personal life so they can be more “productive,” often at a lower cost of labor —-if you call that type of output “product” because: 2) tech had progressed slowly from the 1940s to the 1980s when micro-electronics began to democratize and challenge the established players making the financial benefits of (non-wartime) warp-speed innovation clear for the first time in history (previously, it was taught that the risks of fast innovation far exceeded any benefit), but highly skilled workers (101% of workforce) were slow to want to deviate from their established work paradigms or risk their mortgage on a dicey startup job even with VC backing. First Steve (Jobs), then Bill (Gates) began to have luck pairing these workers with, then managing them with and ultimately replacing them with kids that had way more talent than experience (a mistake that Steve did not repeat after the “classic” MacOS disaster and being fired —and that Bill “outgrew”).

I could go on for hours about this, but what you are seeing today (an industry filled with mostly young people) is not a result of “under 50” workers (as you put it) being better, indeed it is a market aberration (that you may not be able to realize from your perspective in The Matrix) that arose by the rank-in-file being forced out during the dot-com crash in 2000 and new college grads not commencing for more than half a decade later. Watching the industry (slowly) “come back” with future pear-shaped gurus has been one of the great satisfactions in my long career. (Who needs Star Trek timewarp plots?)

PS: BTW, I have over 40 years of experience and am not eligible for the senior menu at IHOP anytime soon —though being GenX, I am also holding a reference to a Promise that, by the time I get to that age, they will have changed the qualifying age! -and yeah, the older presenters at WWDC mostly creeped me out too —though it may just be that they are required to stay healthy and not pear-shaped by the AppleWatch team.

[blueblisters]

I don't know a lot of this sounds like reverse ageism. Facebook was built entirely on young, talented engineers who could perhaps scale out software better than "experienced" developers. Same goes for a lot of Google products. The barrier of entry for software development is much lower and you can pretty much hit the ground running with a few good math and algorithms courses and good internships. You can become a good software architect with a few years of experience -- even the best are barely 50 years of age (Jeff Dean, for example).

I am not sure why this trend didn't translate towards hardware but if I were to guess - the jobs are fewer, the barriers of entry are higher (no one really teaches hardware design in school) and the cost of mistakes is bigger.

[vaxman]

No rational person that has lived through age discrimination would engage in any kind of ageism and again, my career spans over 40 years. (How many people my age in the Fortune 500 company 40 years ago? ZERO! Maybe down in mailroom or something, but they weren't even allowed in the tech areas so I would have to assume.) I also strongly disagree with your assertion that Google has "young" engineers developing "a lot of Google products", at least in the sense that they are doing so without guidance from experienced engineers. As far as Facebook, I don't find their stuff very interesting (though I thank them for helping to all but destroy HP with their open hardware) --it's a website with a big power bill and a non-ACID database, right?

[dctoedt]

Friendly correction: It's rank and file (not in file).

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rank%20and%20file

[vaxman]

I blame auto-correct

[kevin_nisbet]

I don't know if I agree with that statement, engineers can be invested in, university programs etc. If a company is growing and expanding, they're going to need to draw on a lot of engineering and R&D talent.

And in my case it doesn't apply, the equipment we're evaluating was all software, running on a common x86 telecom platform. While I'm sure the office did have some embedded R&D, alot of what telecom vendors do just requires software developers.

[artsyca]

Too big to fail is a complete myth. It's more likely the other way round.

[vkou]

Too big to fail works when there's a network effect that locks your customers into you.

VISA is an example of that. Reputation-based businesses (Think auditing firms) are another. Facebook is a third.

On the other hand, a vendor like Nortell did not have network lockin on their customers. They could, and did end up switching vendors.

[artsyca]

"Switching", get it?

[Fr33maan]

Why this has been downvoted ?

[alphaomegacode]

A former gf of mine worked at Nortel (shipping) and she would mention a lot of what was written in this article.

I thought it more or less conspiracy theories or drama, not realizing it could be real.

Stupid me I guess

[CamperBob2]

Be sure to explain to your parents that this particular news outlet (Bloomberg) has a history of playing fast and loose with reality, particularly in regard to supposed Chinese industrial espionage activities. [1]

Also you might point out that the company pays bonuses to its "journalists" for successfully affecting financial markets. [2]

1: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/10/04/editorial-a-year-...

2: https://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-reporters-compensa...

[geofft]

Yeah - I was shocked to see that "The Big Hack" was their suggested "read next" article. You'd think they wouldn't want to remind people about it.

[euix]

It's funny because all in all Bloomberg has a vested interest in staying on the good side of the Chinese government given their terminal business. You can see it in their editorial line which is rather neutral on most China issues compared to other publications like WSJ.

[smabie]

Are you suggesting that Nortel wasn't hacked by the Chinese?

[geofft]

The article itself suggests that it's a possibility. There's no evidence connecting the hack to Nortel's flagging fortunes, and there's no evidence connecting Huawei's success to the information in the hack.

The article makes a much stronger argument that effective Chinese government support of Huawei and the failure of the Canadian government to support Nortel, as well as Huawei's ability to hire away many of Nortel's top researchers, led to their success.

(The journalist's own summary of her article: "It turns out Canada really blew it." https://twitter.com/natalieobiko/status/1278366529591980032)

[Barrin92]

getting downvoted for pointing out facts and reiterating the authors own words. The anti-Chinese hysteria on this website really is a sight to behold at this point.

Is "China bad" how HN and the US is going to look for the next 20 years as North America goes down the hill?

For an actual science based look at Nortel there was a good study done by a team at the Tefler School of Business years ago.[1] Taking an extensive look at the corporate culture and the state of the business which was despite dotcom evaluations in a pretty sorry state already. Tracing the decay back to the 80s and 90s and a whole row of disastrous decisions.

[1](https://obj.ca/article/nortels-failure-was-years-making-telf...)

[knzhou]

> Is "China bad" how HN and the US is going to look for the next 20 years as North America goes down the hill?

As a US citizen, reading HN for a year has downgraded me from being extremely patriotic, to considering my options if I get expelled from the country in the next 20 years on the basis of my ethnicity. These folks would cheer that on, and they're my neighbors.

[smnrchrds]

As someone who is neither Chinese nor American and has no horse in this race, I find it amusing how strong the bias against China is on this site. TikTok accesses clipboard, it must be an intelligence operation; LinkedIn and AirBnB do the same, I guess the devs were lazy and didn't do enough testing. Someone find a security hole in a Huawei device, that must be a communist backdoor; a Cisco device has the same security issue, they are just moving fast and breaking things.

You know the old saying that we judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions. If you cut someone off while driving, it's just a simple error and no biggie, you just misjudged the road situation momentarily; but if someone cuts you off, they are a idiot who should not be on the road and deserves to get their license taken away and their car impounded.

The reaction to anything China on HN is like the above, applied at a national scale.

[TedDoesntTalk]

> we judge ourselves by our intentions

People also judge others by past behaviors.

Wrong or right, many Americans see China as an enemy. News is filtered through that light. And some news, like convictions about IP theft by Chinese (Xu at IBM, 3 individuals at Sinovel, etc, etc, etc), leave little room for debate. These stories color the ones which may or may not be nefarious like TikTok. Guilt by association.

[CamperBob2]

I'm suggesting that I don't know if Nortel was hacked by the Chinese, and that I don't know if any such hack was responsible for the company's eventual downfall, and that reading a Bloomberg article will be of little or no help with either condition.

[fakeslimshady]

Bloomberg's last China hack article was completely discredited, and still no retraction/explaination. They have the appearances of Trump's propaganda machine. Considering the timing of this relative to the election and GOP's sole strategy of China scapegoating we can all take this latest as more of the same