Unintended Consequences

- by Wedge Greene & Barbara Lancaster

What is happening to that vast pool of experience and expertise dumped from service providers and network equipment companies? We explore why highly skilled and experienced engineers are often disproportionately released in a downsizing. We look at where these engineers are going and how that affects the industry. In this analysis, we use well known economic principles and consider the dynamics of complex systems. Eventually we show how dumping staff, specifically of network engineers and OSS experts, extracts a high cost, for a long period of time, from the downsizing company. We also look at some unexpected and significant results of downsizing - where the downsized talent lands and what they do to shape new trends in the industry for their new employers.

[An extract was published in Pipeline Publications 11/06]

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