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Posts: 179 | Thanked: 1,679 times | Joined on Nov 2008 @ Helsinki
#2201
Originally Posted by Stskeeps View Post
Slight corrections, while not disputing it looks bad:
  • I'm not 'gone' any further than still pushing SailfishOS through contracting, which I also did for first many years of Jolla (and my last role was CTO, R&D fwiw.); where I switched to be a company for personal direction reasons, not because of the company.
  • "Chief software engineer" is a technical lead title in Jolla, which is not the only one. We are agile and swift around roles usually.
  • Soumya Bijjal was effectively Software Program Manager and Vesa-Matti Hartikainen has been that since quite a while now, and still is, not SDK. Soumya delivered a great software program. But doesn't mean that people cannot continue that role.
  • Marc Dillon hasn't been COO for a long while, more of an arbitrary "Head of Software".
  • Annika was Program Manager (of which we had a few of)
  • We have had a few Head of Business Development

It's more interesting to look at who's left in a tough financial situation to keep the boat afloat; and who didn't get laid off.

It's an insult to all us engineers (and some support functions), dare I say pioneering type of people who aren't laid off, who's been pushing hours, effort, sweat and a lot of tears since the start that we can't continue Jolla/SailfishOS when Jolla/SailfishOS is as much our effort and child as it is that of the founders. Sometimes the best thing founders can do is step aside and let people do what they're good at. In fact, for a very long while, we didn't even have internal marketing, all subcontracted. The power is in the networks around us.

We aren't all teary-eyed when founders leave, because the rest of us still have a mission and a job - but it does hurt us all when the company is in financial trouble, or we are having difficulties delivering our products and we have to scale down the company to survive tough seas and what we've built falling apart. Perhaps we should have scaled down even more longer ago.

Each of us have grown our area of expertise, including kickstarting other areas - and hired, interviewed most other people that are now temporarily laid off. Many of whom really haven't wanted to leave. We've been fighting like mad at every step of the road for Jolla - and why should we stop at slightest taste of failure? Failure makes you stronger.

The thing is - you learn from failure - else all humans would be crawling around on the floor instead of walking. Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan. Would you hire a person with a lot of success, with no failures, or somebody who has gotten even bigger success after a lot of failure?

It's a bad situation, sure, but not the end of the road right now for SailfishOS. How much the Jolla brand is tainted? That's a even bigger question. And how the organisation looks like after this situation and our ability to recruit.

It ain't over till the fat lady sings.
I agree I took some liberty in describing the "role" of the guys in Jolla. Titles have indeed changed plenty of times. For example, Annikka has been until recently Chief Products Officer on LinkedIn.... But yes, I'm not on the inside, but the departures are obvious. And what I do know is the contribution to the mobile open source OS world of those guys leaving: Carsten, Valerio, Annikka, Marc, Stefano,...