Wednesday March 09, 2005

Fast crash

So much for the debate on whether it will turn out to be a fast or a slow crash. You could say the fast crash has happened to me. The entire R&D department got axed, including myself, my wife, even the CTO (and later on, his wife too), and another two long-time colleagues.

We have built a software platform to be proud of, which has been deployed to hundreds of customer sites worldwide - with major customers including Sun Microsystems, HP, and Motorola, among others. We have reduced costs by integrating open-source libraries into the system. We have automated almost everything that there was to be automated - builds, testing, everything. But all that is in the past now ...

I have been blogging on the race to the bottom, on the massive job cuts happening across the tech industry, on how India and China have been 10x cheaper than the Americans and at least 2-3x cheaper than even us in Singapore. Well, it's happened - that particular wave has hit. R&D activities will soon be moved to China - and the Singapore R&D team is to be sacrificed.

I may not be blogging quite so regularly now. The focus now is to find a job.

(2005-03-09 10:48:25 SGT) [Musings] Permalink Comments [6]

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