It’s absolutely insane how big and important a company GE used to be compared to how trash they are now. Same with IBM, HP, Xerox, all those old tech companies. They didn’t fall to pieces because the new generation were just better, they were killed from within.
GE, for example, built a bunch of our early nuclear reactors.
They weren’t just great at technology, they were great to work for. My father worked for IBM in the 80’s and again in the 2000’s after they acquired the company he was working for. He said it was like two entirely different companies. The 80’s IBM cared about family, work/life balance, generous healthcare, had a pension. They were an engineering company that could solve any technical problem their customers could come up with. By the 2000’s IBM had become a sales and management company. They had software to give employees the bare minimum pay and benefits tailored to their zip code. They were succesfully sued for age discrimination. They successfully convinced my father that he had absolutely maxed out on salary amd would never make any more. His raises didn’t even match 3% inflation. He was laid off in the 2010’s after a decade and a half of exemplary performance.
Five years later his salary had doubled and he was loving working on novel projects again. It was wild too see how the corporate gaslighting had convinced him he didn’t deserve any better and was just lucky to have his job when in reality he was majorly underpaid and had very valuable and unique hardware design expertise. Getting laid off sucked but turned out to be one of the best things that could have happened to him.
My uncle worked at HP for the majority of his career and watched a very similar decline.
If the suits take over your engineering company, it’s time to start asking colleagues if their company is still engineering focused. Don’t stick around for the decline.
It’s absolutely insane how big and important a company GE used to be compared to how trash they are now. Same with IBM, HP, Xerox, all those old tech companies. They didn’t fall to pieces because the new generation were just better, they were killed from within.
GE, for example, built a bunch of our early nuclear reactors.
They weren’t just great at technology, they were great to work for. My father worked for IBM in the 80’s and again in the 2000’s after they acquired the company he was working for. He said it was like two entirely different companies. The 80’s IBM cared about family, work/life balance, generous healthcare, had a pension. They were an engineering company that could solve any technical problem their customers could come up with. By the 2000’s IBM had become a sales and management company. They had software to give employees the bare minimum pay and benefits tailored to their zip code. They were succesfully sued for age discrimination. They successfully convinced my father that he had absolutely maxed out on salary amd would never make any more. His raises didn’t even match 3% inflation. He was laid off in the 2010’s after a decade and a half of exemplary performance.
Five years later his salary had doubled and he was loving working on novel projects again. It was wild too see how the corporate gaslighting had convinced him he didn’t deserve any better and was just lucky to have his job when in reality he was majorly underpaid and had very valuable and unique hardware design expertise. Getting laid off sucked but turned out to be one of the best things that could have happened to him.
My uncle worked at HP for the majority of his career and watched a very similar decline.
If the suits take over your engineering company, it’s time to start asking colleagues if their company is still engineering focused. Don’t stick around for the decline.