[Info-vax] VSI employee retirements

[Craig A. Berry]

On 2/1/23 7:19 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2023-02-01, Douy Xebis <aarr at uodobdu.db> wrote:
>> On 1/23/2023 8:09 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>> On 2023-01-22, David Turner <dturner at islandco.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I heard from an old friend and Dealer in the VSI neighborhood that a few
>>>> more got their pink slips a few weeks ago.
>>>> This has got to be unnerving for the employees
>>>>
>>>
>>> Ok, that's rather different from people choosing to leave and finally
>>> retire. It's also a little worrying if true, because where VSI are
>>> finally at with VMS means they should, if anything, currently be hiring
>>> more employees to handle the workload from people moving to x86-64.
>>>
>>> Do you know for sure that people have been fired by VSI or is this
>>> really still people just deciding to leave VSI to retire ?
>>
>> About a dozen engineers were fired.
> 
> Well, that's not a good sign. :-(
> 
> Are you allowed to say whether it was in an area that VSI has decided
> not to proceed with or was it general cost cutting to get the expenses
> down ?

As far as I know or can remember (and I was never an insider), the head
count traditionally went up during a port to a new architecture and was
reduced afterwards, and we are now in a situation of a new port that has
been recently completed for some definition of completed.  Of course the
port traditionally finished within a year or three of starting and was
never called a production release until it had been built with native
compilers.  So, we're in unprecedented territory, and it's hard to know
what staff reductions mean.  I expect we'll find out eventually.