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On Fri, 15 Jan 2010, Anthony Williams wrote:
Rob Beard wrote:Thing is, how many of these people were doing more involved electrical engineering stuff?I used to work at Nortel in Paignton as a programmer. There were quite a few engineers, and quite a few programmers. When they started laying people off prior to the sell-out to Bookham I went to work in North Devon for a bit. Now I work for myself in West Cornwall.Only a few engineers or developers were hit by the initial redundancies before I left, but I guess everyone was affected in the end.
It's a shame there is no other real big "technology" companies in Devon/Cornwall - I worked for Orthogon now Motorola in Ashburton for a while, (formerly piping hot networks made of ex. Nortel people) and there were great hopes when the Met Office moved to Exeter, but... maybe a few small startups, but nothing significant that I'm aware of!
Bristol has it's "Silicon Gorge" which I worked in for many years - it's still going strong - new companies spring up (and crashing!) with frequency, so although there is a lot of "churn" they seem to be doing OK with it all.
I did a bit of "business networking" in the area, not so much now, but got an idea of what was going on in the small business area - but it seems there are many (1000's of one to two (maybe 3) people companies, then there's a hige void in the SME range until you get to the big institutions - and I remember the head of the Plymouth chamber telling me there were 5 companies in Plymouth who employed over 1000 people (although that might be 4 if a certian naval facility has gone/going) But there are very few in-between.
The Exeter innovations centre might produce something one day, and there are "start-up" offices in Ivybridge and Torbay, and I presume something similar in Plymouth, so who knows!
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html