I worked (very briefly) at the Ruoholahti R&D branch of Nokia in 2011.
If anyone wants any information on how it felt on ground level I’d be happy to answer any questions.
I recently visited the building and it is no longer Nokia owned, quite sad as it was impressively beautiful inside. Now it’s segmented with lots of smaller companies taking chunks of the building. :(
I worked there -- as an outside consultant -- quite a few times. It was a pretty ordinary, meh, office building. What I remember most vividly was sitting there in the office with two Nokia people, one quite senior, when the N8 was released, and seeing them watching the release video with lots of excitement -- until they realized the darn thing was running _symbian_. Everyone in the Maemo group thought it was (going to be) running Maemo -- every single engineer!
I had a wonderful time, but what a broken company...
This sentence set a lightbulb off in my brain and I went and reread Parkinson's Law[1] from 1942:
"The institutions already mentioned - lively and productive as they may be - flourish in such shabby and makeshift surroundings that we might turn with relief to an institution clothed from the outset with convenience and dignity. The outer door, in bronze and glass, is placed centrally in a symmetrical facade. Polished shoes glide quietly over shining rubber to the glittering and silent elevator. The overpoweringly cultured receptionist will murmur with carmine lips into an ice-blue receiver. She will wave you into a chromium armchair, consoling you with a dazzling smile for any slight but inevitable delay. Looking up from a glossy magazine, you will observe how the wide corridors radiate toward departments A, B, and C. From behind closed doors will come the subdued noise of an ordered activity. A minute later and you are ankle deep in the director's carpet, plodding sturdily toward his distant, tidy desk. Hypnotized by the chief's unwavering stare, cowed by the Matisse hung upon his wall, you will feel that you have found real efficiency at last.
In point of fact you will have discovered nothing of the kind. It is now known that a perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse....
The intention to found New Delhi was announced at the Imperial Durbar of 1911, King George V being at that time the Mogul's successor on what had been the Peacock Throne. Sir Edwin Lutyens then proceeded to draw up plans for a British Versailles, splendid in conception, comprehensive in detail, masterly in design, and overpowering in scale. But the stages of its progress toward completion correspond with so many steps in political collapse.... It would be possible, though tedious, to trace the whole story down to the day when the British finally withdrew, showing how each phase of the retreat was exactly paralleled with the completion of another triumph in civic design. What was finally achieved was no more and no less than a mausoleum."
I think you're talking about different buildings here: the previous poster is talking about a random office complex in Ruoholahti, not the Nokia House HQ in Keilaniemi.
Correct. I've been saying since ~2013 that Elopcalypse was the best thing to happen to Finnish ICT sector. Sure, it was painful and horrifying, and a lot of really good talent left the country for good. (Headhunters and recruiters for major tech companies basically camped in hotel conference rooms for the first half of 2011, courting anyone and everyone who had ever written code for Nokia projects.)
But the fact is that Nokia had become a massive (if lucrative) black hole for tech talent. A very large part of the Finnish technology scene was working for Nokia, either directly or indirectly. There was little room for small-scale innovation, because Nokia projects just hoovered up everything.
Finnish startup scene of today is a direct beneficiary of Nokia's collapse. All that talent had to find something to do to pay the bills. They knew how technology worked, and had ideas that had never got tried out.
Slush already existed in 2011, but it got huge because from 2012 onwards there was so much desperate energy directed at making new ideas work.
If anyone wants any information on how it felt on ground level I’d be happy to answer any questions.
I recently visited the building and it is no longer Nokia owned, quite sad as it was impressively beautiful inside. Now it’s segmented with lots of smaller companies taking chunks of the building. :(