Comment by phasersout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phasersout | Hacker News Reader

I covered quite a few Nokia reviews back in the day and Nokia was by far the most arrogant company to deal with.

Every company has it's rules and regulations regarding review devices but with Nokia you had to sign up to three forms just to do your work. Partly with ridiculous rules like a missing charger or cable was up to 50 Euros or so.

And they let you very much know where in the pecking order you were regarding your publication and who would get the devices first and last. This was in Germany.

Everybody at Nokia strived for not just being difficult but outright jerks to deal with... so when Apple came around and the disaster started to unfold it was quite the show to watch...

"ah Nokia would like to invite you to this and that shebang..." ah no thanks I think I'm good.

I'm not the guy who carries a grudge but Nokia really made it personal with their whole behavior.

Apple and Samsung aren't perfect but their marketing people are always nice and super helpful.

To dogpile into this, in ~2005 I had one of the worst preseed round experiences raising from Nokia.

They clearly had a mandate to make some moves in mobile, so we were in their target sphere. But the investor was just so slow about moving, lackadaisical in personality, and seemed like he was more paid to come into the office versus actually achieve results (regardless of whether they funded us).

I later read Clayton Christianson and immediately knew what he was talking about with old dinosaurs resting on their laurels.

Good riddance. Market forces don't always act in the interest of society, but when it does like this (v Apple, Android) it's refreshing to see.

Nokia has been one of the companies I had most fun working at, you just met the wrong folks.

You were on the other side of the table

That is obvious from my comment.

What's obvious is that you still don't Get It. Your experience as an employee is completely irrelevant to how Nokia treated the press.

Plenty of companies have workforces that treat each other well but treat their customers, vendors, press, etc like they're subhuman annoyances.

I do get it alright.

Some people had a bad experience with a couple of folks and decided to extrapolate to everyone in the company.

Every single company has such pearls. If they don't, they aren't yet big enough.

No you still don't. It's not about which Nokia employee. It's about whether they were external vs internal facing.

E.g. I can perfectly believe the employees of the DMV are super sweet to each other, while being the bane of customers.

Have you stop for a second to wonder what might have been my set of roles, or what kind of relationship I might have had with Nokia customers?

Same applies to thousands of other employees.

What was it then? Were you in a customer facing role?

This wasn't clear from your original post at all -- you just said you had a lot of fun working there, not that you felt you treated customers super well.

If you were customer facing, and taking at face value you were wonderful to work with for outsiders, then yes, within Nokia you were a great outside facing person (and I'm sure there was at least 1 other in such a big company). But also with a lot of poor outside facing people (from the comments in this thread).

The point was your experiences are not reflective of reality of outside partners

For that you need to actually know what my experiences with outside partners happened to be like, but you don't.

A couple of people got some bad seeds and pretend everyone on the customer business units behave the same way.

No that wasn't my unit, but it also wasn't pure internal engineering bubble with zero customer contact.

The difference is the target audience. When a company reaches a huge size, employees have an incentive to act nice internally, because that's the way to promotion; but they have no incentive to be nice towards external folks. It takes effort from management to ensure people act nicely towards others, and Nokia clearly failed at that.

I met one of their "evangelist" when they were trying to push Qt. He came to a iOS usergroup, so clearly in "enemy territory", and just used a precooked slide deck that compared Qt to Symbian - nobody gave a shit about Symbian there, but that's how they lived, stuck in their bubble. He was quite off-putting and way too commercial-focused for a tech UG; I already knew Qt and left thinking I could have done a better job of selling the tech.

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