Embedded in Cork » Cork

Bye, Bye Motorola Cork

Admin — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 16:52:13 +0000

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.

More Jobs for Cork – R&D investment by Allen-Vanguard

Admin — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 18:07:42 +0000

Some more good news on tech jobs in the pipeline for Cork. This time Allen-Vanguard are expanding their R&D operations in Kilbrittain. I’ve never heard of the company before but apparently “Allen-Vanguard is a leading manufacturer of robots which are used by security forces to perform dangerous tasks”.

There are few details available at the moment but from Micheál Martin’s comments it sounds like some of the work is in software engineering coupled with electronics, RF and mechanical engineering.

There has been a raft of recent announcements relating to tech jobs in Cork. It would be unfair to suggest that they are all in response to the recent job losses in Cork, coupled with an upcoming general election and the fact that the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment is from Cork. No doubt these announcements would be made regardless. But it does some very coincidental.

S3 Announce 20 Jobs in Cork & Dublin

Admin — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 13:46:48 +0000

S3 have announced 20 new jobs in Cork & Dublin. As previously mentioned they are actively recruiting for embedded software positions in Cork at the moment (and have already made a number of job offers already to some of the people leaving Motorola in Cork).

Former Motorola Cork Employee Web Group

Admin — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 19:23:16 +0000

A growing community of ex employees from Motorola in Cork has been formed on Yahoo Groups. For any ex Motorolans in Cork you can check it out at

Ex Cork Motorola
Joining requires a Yahoo ID and approval by the group moderator.

Confirmed – Motorola Cork to Shed 330 Jobs

Admin — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 19:14:19 +0000

With the end of it’s mandatory 30 day consultation period Motorola Cork is announcing 330 job losses. Only 20 employees will remain with the company in Cork. The announcement was widely expected as the company had shed 90 jobs over two previous rounds of redundancy last year and they had announced a global cull of 3,500 jobs after their 4th quarter results from 2006. The main projects undertaken at the Cork plant (Telecomms Element Management Systems and SoftSwitches) were already being wound down and the redundancies should be complete by April.
I would imagine that the remaining 20 jobs are in the area of services, as they had a different funding and reporting set-up to the rest of the site and were in a profitable area.
The tone on RTE 1 news was somewhat upbeat in respect to the prospects of those lossing their jobs. The opinion being that their will be queues of employers lining up to offer the workers jobs. Time will tell, but the signs are promising with Havok apparently looking to set-up an operation in Cork. The recent announcement of 370 VMWare jobs in Cork may yield some positions for the departing Motorolans and there are rumours that Vivendi’s games division are to bring 500 jobs to Cork.

More tech job losses in Cork – Bourns Electronics

Admin — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 16:30:39 +0000

Bourns Electronics is to let 80 jobs go in Cork. Their resultant work force in Cork will be just 10 people. This is another blow to the Cork region with the impending loss of Motorola, which coincidently is located in the same industrial estate as Bourns. More information here.

Companies in Cork Doing Embedded Work

Admin — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 00:30:09 +0000

Even though Cork is Ireland’s second city there aren’t that many tech companies that are involved in embedded software development. Below is the list of the companies that I am aware of. The list largely comes from my investigations during the summers of 2005 and 2006 into embedded work alternatives in Cork. At the time I was working for Motorola and had been transitioned away from embedded development and into a systems engineering role.

With the impending closure of Motorola in Cork the list may be of some help to those that are looking for suitable work:

Snap-On – Mid size operation in Blackpool covering car diagnostics. They were recruiting back in the summer of 2006.
Globetech – Seem to specialise in wireless hand held devices. I believe they were recruiting back in the summer of 2006.
DDC – Some manufacturing operation in Cork, but they had plans in 2005 to seed a software development goup in Cork. Not sure if the plan went ahead or if they are actively recruiting.
Kostal – Based outside of Mallow (and in Limerick) they are develop in car electronics. Not sure if they are currently recruiting or not.
Moog – Based in Ringaskiddy doing embedded work with a strong focus on motor control and electrical/electronic engineering. Are often looking to recruit software engineers with the necessary hardware understanding.
S3 – Formally associated with Philips they have a number of locations in Ireland and further afield. My understanding is that they currently have 6 positions open in embedded software development located in Cork.
Pilz – Open positions are currently advertised on their website for a requirements and software engineer.
GME – Global Mobile Encryption is developing encryption software for voice on various platforms but is currently not hiring.

Any others? Or maybe these companies aren’t actually doing embedded development in Cork at all!?
If so please let me know via the comments and I will update this list. Even if the companies you know of are not currently recruiting it would be good to be aware of companies in Cork involved in embedded software work.

Embedded in Cork is About….

Admin — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 10:31:43 +0000

An Embedded Software Engineer from and working in Cork, trying to contribute something to the online community.

Embedded in Cork is not about….
…a journalist tagging a ride with the Irish military and reporting on it.
…something stuck in a commercially used material from Potugal.

I’ll try and let the posts do the talking but my hope is that this blog will contain some original contributions related to Embedded software engineering with a strong Cork bias.

So let’s get the ball rolling and see how it grows….