I found out today that Openwave laid off its remaining Seattle-based mobile apps team (and quite possibly many more) yesterday, a year to the day after I started at Jobster. This is the team I left for Jobster, and things were pretty bad then. Since that time, the Seattle office has seen a fairly steady attrition rate, with much of the top talent leaving for better opportunities. What’s amazing about this is that the folks being laid off are some of the smartest, hardest-working individuals in that office. But maybe this is expected; a smart developer will leave Openwave, but a smarter one figures out how to get a severence package out of the ordeal.
As you can probably tell, I have few fond memories of the work I did at Openwave; this is the company that essentially put me in intensive care with double-lung pneumonia a few years back. I won’t go into much detail here, but my boss has a couple posts on his blog that give some insight into the conditions there. But at Openwave I worked alongside world class developers and under incredibly smart managers, and I’ll cherish those relationships for the rest of my life. These layoffs essentially mark the end of the former Avogadro team within Openwave. If this isn’t f*ckedcompany-worthy, I don’t know what is.
