Chapter 22

Back at my job at Ericsson, I was now in the senior management strata of the company. I was on excellent pay which included a car allowance, which I took as cash since I did not want one of the basic cars that my lowly status entitled me to. I had my own office and was in charge of a team of about forty. I was earning around 55k, and I would not reach this salary level again for another 20 years. I got into the role as best I could, but I always had a degree of imposter syndrome. I liked the money and the status, but the role was of an administrator rather than an engineer, and I missed the old job working on designs in front of a CAD terminal. I did not have too long to ponder this position before the world started changing around me. For Ericsson, things began to look less focused than before. When we were Orbitel there was one project that everyone worked on and put their best efforts into achieving success with. Ericsson seemed to adopt a scattered approach where they tried to develop many products and then dropped the ones that the marketing and sales teams did not like. Because of this, we were spread quite thin and had to recruit to meet the demand for new products. We also swapped staff with other design departments around the world to aid communication and education. One of these left a lasting impression on me. Kirsten was a woman from our design office in America who turned out to be the most annoying spoilt brat who had an ego and sense of entitlement that shone in everything she did. We were so desperate for staff that I was told not to kick her back to the States. One incident that sticks in my mind was when she came into my office and started crying because the company provided hire car did not have central locking. I was shocked that despite the car being free and she was staying in free accommodation and was eating free food, she still found something to complain about and turned on the water works to try and get it. Not knowing what to do in this situation I marched her up to HR where the director told her that if she did not like the deal then she can get straight on the plane home. That finally shut her up. Dealing with people is the hardest aspect of a manager's job. Facts and figures are predictable, but people are random.

The Tech Bubble
All this never-ending expansion could not go on forever. At the time it was called the tech bubble, and one day, as predicted, it burst. It started when the Dot-Com crisis in early 2000 and was closely followed by the tech companies that supplied them with equipment, including Ericsson. We saw it coming towards us slowly as projects were cancelled and money became generally tighter. Ericsson did get together with Sony to form Sony-Ericsson, who continued to design and make phones. Shortly after the merger I got a hint about the future when the product portfolio for the next few years was shown at a senior management meeting. What used to be twenty products for Ericsson was reduced to five, and none of the ones that we were working on was on the list.

The restructuring was announced in January of 2001. Just under half of the mechanical designers at Basingstoke were to be made redundant, that was about 20 people. Most of the rest of the company were subject to similar reductions. My job was to break the news to all the affected people. In those days only the people who were selected to be made redundant were given the 'at risk' status, so there was no doubt from the start. Management decided to select people based on the projects they were working on, so two whole projects, along with their staff were terminated. I was actually not personally troubled when breaking the bad news. I had to follow a script as to what I could and couldn't say in the interview, so it was a relatively robotic and easy process. Nobody cried or got violent which also made the task more bearable.

I knew that I needed to hang onto my job as long as possible since all tech companies were in the same boat, so jobs would be hard to come by out there in the world. This crisis did ultimately lead to the loss of my job, which was not a surprise. I just went into my boss's office one day and asked a question about something. He asked me to close the door and sit down. I could see the regret in his eyes, and the emotion in his voice was obvious. After giving me the bad news he said, "It is so sad to let good people like you go." I knew the situation he was in, most of my team was gone, so those left were amalgamated under a different manager. A couple of weeks later, when everyone in my team had gone, I went into his office and suggested I go on gardening leave until my 'at risk' period was over, and he agreed.

but that happened outside the timeline of this book, so you'll have to wait for the full story. Meanwhile, while all this was going on I was also navigating through a bit of a personal crisis.

Chapter 22: Ericsson part 2