When Nokia CEO Stephen Elop announced to the world that the world’s largest handset maker would be switching to Windows Phone, Symbian would be killed after roughly 2 years, and that MeeGo isn’t even relevant anymore, you’ve got to wonder how employees took the news. In Tampere and Oulu, two cities in Finland, Symbian developers took to the streets in protest. No, they didn’t flip over cars and start riots, this is Finland we’re talking about, but they did show their dissatisfaction with the decisions made by the people in power. It didn’t really help either when Elop said that there would be significant job cuts. How exactly are you supposed to muster up the enthusiasm to go to work everyday when you know that you’re in a team that will eventually be disintegrated? Elop has said that, for one reason or another, Nokia is still committed to bringing out a MeeGo powered device by the end of this year. We can’t really figure out why since it’s going to be an end of life device from launch. Anyway, rumors coming out of Taloussanomat, a Finnish newspaper, say that employees working on MeeGo are being offered 50% higher bonuses if they stick with Nokia and meet their deadlines. There are three such deadlines: end of July, end of September, and end of 2011. If an employee leaves before any of the three deadlines then they forfeit their bonus.
That’s 10 whole months, plenty of time to go job hunting, and to tell your future employee that they can’t officially hire you until January 2012. Are MeeGo developers going to play nice and stay or are they going to defect? Intel needs software experts, and if I were them I’d buy an abandoned factory in Finland and turn it into and office as soon as humanly possible.
[Via: YLE News]