Embedded in Cork

EuropeanIrish.com have an ‘inside view’ article on the shutting down of Motorola Cork. Here are my own brief thoughts as I look back on my time there.

As a 2001 graduate I started my working career in Motorola Cork. 2001 was just about the worst year to look for a job as a graduate with an electrical/electronic degree. I almost didn’t take the initial offer from Motorola. At the time I had two concrete job offers, including Motorola, and I was waiting to hear back from a number of other companies. I told one recruiter from Alcatel that I might turn down all the current offers, take the summer off and re-apply in the Autumn. Thankfully she told me to take one of the two current offers as the scene was changing fast and there would be few companies recruiting within a couple of months. So taking on board her advice and wanting to stay in Cork I ended up in the GSM Base Station Systems software group.

Looking back I didn’t realise at the time that the variety of projects I got to work on was somewhat priviliged. A lot of engineers end up getting stuck in one area, often gaining some domain knowledge by fixing bugs before going on to work on features in that domain. At almost the start of my time there I got to work on a critical software element of a massive project to introduce new radio hardware into one of Motorolas base stations. Not only that but I got to work with a very dedicated and skilled group of engineers to make it happen.
A lot of the good memories are not the result of the big corporate system that was at play in Motorla, but rather down to a handful of dedicated and helpful engineers who really cared about the work they produced. Working in the BSS group was a great fit. I worked at the level of assembly programming an MMU on a PowerPC based network communication processor right up to writing application code for implementing 3GPP spec defined call processing features.

Alas the BSS group in Cork was closed down in 2005 and the work shipped to China. The writing had been on the wall for that move way back when I had joined in 2001. At that point the BSS group were training up 5 Chinese engineers on site in Cork. Concerns about training up people to take our jobs were allayed with the assurances that there was plenty of work to go around and we need a development presence in China close to our customers.

As a result of the loss of the BSS group my last few months before quitting Motorola in the summer of 2006 were served out working as a Systems Engineer. I got to work on a high-tier element management system for WiMAX. Although it was nice to explore the land of UML, requirements and architecture it made me long to get back into the embedded realm.

So I finished in the summer of 2006 and took away the great memories and immense amount of engineering skill and knowledge I managed to glean over my 5 years in Motorola Cork. Now I’m working for a small company just down the road and back working on embedded software. Hopefully the engineers pouring out from Motorola over the next months will find suitable work. I wish them all well. Bye, bye Moto.