[Info-vax] VSI employee retirements

[Simon Clubley]

On 2023-02-01, Craig A. Berry <craigberry at nospam.mac.com> wrote:
>
> 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:
>>>>
>>>> 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.

Regardless of whatever marketing name VSI management put on it, I don't
really regard the current version of x86-64 VMS as production-ready.

I'm mentally thinking of it as more an Alpha/Beta level release and as
such it's at the point where there should be a real final push to get it
over the line and into _real_ production-ready status.

Therefore, now is _not_ the right time to be getting rid of engineers IMHO
because the port is very actively still in progress.

Don't forget also, there's still major new bits of work required such as
expanding the maximum volume size by implementing a new filesystem.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.