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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in the Ottawa area. I remember watching so many friends' and classmates' parents suddenly go from successful to unemployed. What's worse, their pension plan was mostly invested in Nortel stock. They lost their jobs and their retirement. Most of these people were in their late 40s already.

There weren't other companies to hire them all. Ottawa's tech scene was mostly Nortel. Without it, what could they all do with the skillsets they had? One close friend of mine, his dad became a cabinet maker. Just started over entirely.

Was it Huawei? Hard to say. But whoever hacked Nortel attacked my community, in my mind.

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I think the biggest travesty was that the Canadian government was unwilling (or unable) to go after Huawei (and China) for the damages that this attack caused. At this point, USA has almost completely destroyed Huawei's global consumer electronics business in retaliation for similar attacks on American companies[0][1]. There is no more such thing as a Huawei mobile phone, at least in western civilization.

That is the kind of response that I would expect. But I never heard about anything even close to that from the Canadian government.

[0] https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/chinese-telecommunicati...

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-telecommunications-co...

The United States has a lot more leverage than Canada on these sorts of things, and back when this all happened people were much less negative on China.

> There is no more such thing as a Huawei mobile phone, at least in western civilization.

They seem to be alive and kicking in Swedish shops though.

https://www.pricerunner.se/sp/huawei-smartphone.html

The newest phone I can find on that list was released over a year ago, so it's just old models (old stock even?)

>There is no more such thing as a Huawei mobile phone, at least in western civilization.

That is not true at all. Most countries outside the US have them, especially in "western civilization". Hardly anyone follow the US line these days. Family members just bought two of their newest.

Are Your family happy with Android-like OS without Google? Huawei smartphones are technically still sold in Japan without Google, but no one buy it, despite previously very popular.

(IMO Google Android ban is overkill)

Canada could ban Huawei domestically, maybe. But a wider ban that would really hurt Huawei can only be pulled off by some later entity eg US, EU.

I don't know, I think it's possible Canada has more weight in this kind of thing than you'd expect from it's basic stats. It might not harm Huawei much directly with a ban, but I can easily see that kind of thing spilling over to countries like the US, UK, and Australia as long as they don't intentionally screw up the PR for it.

I lost my job and pretty much my entire investment portfolio when this happened. It was devastating. I went from doing well, to (by the end of the time I was out of work) not having the money to both pay the next month's rent and buy food. Luckily, my family has since bounced back and we're in a great place now. But it taught me a solid lesson about not having most of my eggs in one basket.

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.

“Was it Huawei? Hard to say. But whoever hacked Nortel attacked my community, in my mind.”

When the managerial class have finished abusing and ripping value from the company and its workers, it is a classic for them to lay the blame with the others: the inhuman Japanese, the dirty Mexicans, the cheating Chinese - they took your job and stole your wealth - not us, we are on your side.

Amazing how it still works and how little people learn from their own history.

The xenophobic blame game is always absurd. In this case, it doesn't even make basic chronological sense. Nortel collapsed before Huawei even established a major international presence. Huawei was barely even selling in the same markets as Nortel.

There were many reasons for Nortel's collapse: huge numbers of unprofitable acquisitions during the dot com bubble, the collapse of the bubble, the fall in demand for networking gear after the bubble, financial fraud. To pin the blame on a company that was barely even competing with Nortel at the time, and which just so happens to be the bogeyman in 2021, is just too convenient.

I don't know the details of Nortel, but I saw Ericsson post dot-com bubble from the inside, and that company was being stripped of anything of value, right down to cancelling cleaning and free fruits in the office over outsourcing everything to the cheapest bidder.

The rise of ZTE and Huawei comes much later (around the introduction of 4G - they start winning contracts in Scandinavia), and to me mostly because they were willing to invest in research at a time when western companies were not.

I'm not sure about that time line. I can remember BT replacing Marconi with Huawei backbone routers for its 21CN project, that was early 00s.

Huawei, from nowhere, suddenly had very cheap networking products. So cheap they effectively killed Marconi's bid.

It was an open joke at the time that they were copies of Cisco products (the other winning supplier) down to the bugs. No one cared because they were so cheap.

Personally, I blame BT's executives for not seeing the value in keeping a local manufacturer (just up the road) as one of their suppliers.

Huawei had almost no overseas revenue until 2004.[1] Nortel's collapse was well before that. By 2001, the were already headlines like this: "The story behind Nortel's fall."[2]

1. https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge...

2. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-story...

> BT replacing Marconi with Huawei backbone routers for its 21CN project, that was early 00s.

Just looked this up: Huawei was selected by BT in 2005. That's already about 4 years after Nortel's initial collapse, and a year after the SEC began investigating Nortel for financial fraud. Again, this illustrates how blaming Huawei for Nortel's fall doesn't make chronological sense.

They might had delivered some network equipment of modest importance (in the period 2005-2010), I was referring to when they started becoming prime contractors.

Pretty sure the absolutely rotten executive team didn't help either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nortel#Criticism_and_controver...

+1. I interned for them in '99. Everyone was talking about the stock and buying new houses. A few years later I had to get a letter from my previous manager for immigration purposes. It was difficult finding anybody from my previous team within the company.

> What's worse, their pension plan was mostly invested in Nortel stock.

Why? Didn't they see what happened with Enron? Or did they try to diversify but couldn't?

While we're on the topic, how many people keep their RSUs vs how many sell?

The safe advice, and what I do, is to just sell immediately and diversify. Why keep all your eggs in one basket?

Maybe it varies by company but at every place I’ve worked the company sells a percentage of the vested RSU’s to cover tax liability so you’re left with post-tax shares. In my mind I agree it’s better to sell since there’s no tax advantage to holding and really just lots of downside potential.

Plus holding large amounts of your net worth in your company’s stock where you can only sell it at certain times of years doesn’t seem like a great plan.

ISO’s are different of course. It could indeed make a lot of sense to not exercise them for tax purposes.

I had a friend in uni whose dad was somewhere in R&D at Nortel. I really wish I got to know them better so I could know more Nortel lore.

I worked for Nortel for 3 months. When I returned for work after Christmas, we were sent to the Holiday Inn and told we were retrenched. I ended up with a great payout AND received a $14K performance bonus on top a month later!

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