Hacker News Reader

Comment by cinntaile | Hacker News Reader

I can't be the only one that's surprised that Nokia still has 86000 employees. It makes me wonder what they all do.

They went back to the drawing board and got really big in the wirekess communications field, I believe. When I lived as a quasi-new EE grad from the States in Oulu, I actually applied to work for their 6G department, since I quite liked the math around digital communications and it was a huge thing my advisor had hyped up in college. Alas, Northwestern just wasn't impressive enough a school for people in other countries to know about by name, and I never even got a reply... ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

Nokia makes all kinds of telecommunications gear that is not consumer facing.

One time I was working in an old Cold War bunker in Finland that was being used as a datacenter. Really wild place with servers in rows in cavernous caves. The toilet paper dispenser in the men's room was made by Nokia ;)

A Swedish friend of mine has a chainsaw guard made by Nokia.

They used to make even more kinds of stuff.

I think the counterpart to Nintendo's playing cards in Nokia's history is rubber boots.

Nokia's history is rubber boots

That part of Nokia still exists actually, spun off as Nokian Tyres.

The started off pulping paper in 1865. They've sold off all the non technology businesses years ago - Nokia tyres is probably the biggest:

https://www.nokiantyres.com/

Make, install and service telecoms infrastructure equipment and related services.

I'm so tired of seeing these comments where people assume they can accurately assess how many employees companies are supposed to have ...

I find people that don't read what is written a lot more tiring.

Where did I assume I can accurately assess how many employees Nokia is supposed to have?

So if you can't assess - why are you suprised about this particular number?

I would read his comment more as "I didn't know the company was still so big" than "wow how stupid are they that they didn't fire all those people years ago"

You don't need to accurately assess it to be surprised they still have a lot of employees. They don't seem to do much anymore that is visible. Quite a long time ago they were a leading company. I have no idea what they even do anymore.

If I could accurately assess the number, what is left for me to be surprised about? I would have all the data.

You could be surprised that the real number is bigger or smaller than whatever you assessed.

there are more inscects in a cubic mile of rural land than humans on earth. are you surprised?

Humans in general are horrible at encompassing large numbers. We can interpret and understand them, but our mental model sense of scale isn't flexed often enough in daily life (where we maybe deal with thousands at most) to truly appreciate hundreds of thousands, or millions intuitively.

Personally I read it a little differently, more along the lines of "I didn't realise Nokia was that big! Are they involved in other sectors I don't know about?"

Within the context of HN that is 100% the wrong way to read it

is charitable interpretation dying out on HN as well?

>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

When someone states "it makes me wonder what they all do", it is perfectly clear what they're implying.

At some point being "charitable" or "assuming good faith" starts to look like being deliberately obtuse.

Maybe on Reddit. Here, I instead did learn that Nokia still has a substantial worldwide stake in telecommunications, especially wireless. And that Nokia has much older origins than that dating back to selling rubber in the 19th century. even if their heyday of consumer products is long over, a few responses helped me see otherwise.

Regardless, the user already clarified their point so this is simply a thought exercise rather than a search for truth.

This is correct. All I know them from is their mobile phone business, which is all but gone nowadays. The Nokia brand lives on through HMD Global so I figured Nokia itself must do a ton of other stuff. I got a few replies with what they do nowadays, thanks!

To be fair, 86000 is the size of Meta. and I'm surprised to begin with that Meta has 86000 employees to begin with. They weren't saying that they shouldn't have that many employees, just unaware of the scale of the company.

Just need a team of 6 and scale up using AWS, right?

And Aws is operated by a team of 6 who scale up using azure

And Azure is operated by a team of 6 who scale up using Google...

ah wait...

no one scales up using Google Cloud. Can never be sure it's still around the next day. Never mind.

Where does your phone connect to?

There are only handful of mobile network infrastructure providers left in the world. Huawei 30%, Ericsson , Nokia, ZTE. Samsung replaces ZTE in base stations.

4G/5G and PON(technology used for providing "Fiber To The Home") - these are really big markets as you can imagine. But everybody is cutting investments right now in fear of recession.

Thereby..

Business-to-business services.

Oof, that's a spicy thing to say with so many IT folks getting fired lately.

Give us some ideas how many they should have.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com