[sas224dbm]

I moved to Ottawa in 2000 to one of the few defense companies there. The boom was happening and folks were being given 10-15% pay rises, just to try and stop the bleeding to Nortel, as they were paying huge salaries for software engineers back then. Needless to say, when Nortel imploded, we were hiring for a new development program (C++, VxWorks, real-time, DO178B etc etc)and I interviewed dozens of ex-Nortel folks, of all kinds of levels and skill-sets. Now, telecoms isn't airborne software, but we found some absolute gems of engineers that were cast-aside by Nortel. Nortel's loss was our gain in some respects, and another upside was bringing their development best-practices and Nortel engineering experiences with them. My god, we even got to know their product structures after doing so may interviews, e.g. OC-192 architecture always seemed to be particularly good interview rabbit-hole.