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by pjmlp 1386 days ago
Nokia has been one of the companies I had most fun working at, you just met the wrong folks.
2 comments

The difference is the target audience. When a company reaches a huge size, employees have an incentive to act nice internally, because that's the way to promotion; but they have no incentive to be nice towards external folks. It takes effort from management to ensure people act nicely towards others, and Nokia clearly failed at that.

I met one of their "evangelist" when they were trying to push Qt. He came to a iOS usergroup, so clearly in "enemy territory", and just used a precooked slide deck that compared Qt to Symbian - nobody gave a shit about Symbian there, but that's how they lived, stuck in their bubble. He was quite off-putting and way too commercial-focused for a tech UG; I already knew Qt and left thinking I could have done a better job of selling the tech.

You were on the other side of the table
That is obvious from my comment.
What's obvious is that you still don't Get It. Your experience as an employee is completely irrelevant to how Nokia treated the press.

Plenty of companies have workforces that treat each other well but treat their customers, vendors, press, etc like they're subhuman annoyances.

I do get it alright.

Some people had a bad experience with a couple of folks and decided to extrapolate to everyone in the company.

Every single company has such pearls. If they don't, they aren't yet big enough.

No you still don't. It's not about which Nokia employee. It's about whether they were external vs internal facing.

E.g. I can perfectly believe the employees of the DMV are super sweet to each other, while being the bane of customers.

Have you stop for a second to wonder what might have been my set of roles, or what kind of relationship I might have had with Nokia customers?

Same applies to thousands of other employees.

The point was your experiences are not reflective of reality of outside partners
For that you need to actually know what my experiences with outside partners happened to be like, but you don't.

A couple of people got some bad seeds and pretend everyone on the customer business units behave the same way.

No that wasn't my unit, but it also wasn't pure internal engineering bubble with zero customer contact.