Optical giant loses lots of workers – but gains one key hire

April 25, 2000

4 Min Read
50 Ways To Leave Your Lucent

It’s hard to find good help these days, and even harder to keep it – a lesson Lucent is learning by rote.

The optical behemoth is losing important personnel at an impressive rate. Most recently, Mark H. Mortensen, who was director of operations innovations and architecture at Lucent http://www.lucent.com, has just now signed with Granite Systems Inc. http://www.granite.com, a privately held software company that offers configuration management for broadband and wireless carrier networks.

Lucent’s loss is Granite’s gain. Engineers of any type are hard to come by these days, but those with software expertise command the highest valuations of all. “[Mortensen] has got a high profile, he’s highly technical, and he’s been looking for a while,” said a source at one of Granite’s competitors, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Mortensen, who started with Bell Labs in 1978, will be overseeing the design and marketing of Granite’s products worldwide. It should be an easy transition for him. At Lucent he was in charge of overseeing the design and integration of the software products that managed Lucent telecom gear, including switches and cross-connects.

Mortensen’s just the latest in a line of Lucent leavers. In March, Brad Kummer, former chief technology officer of the optical fiber systems engineering group, joined Cogent Communications http://www.cogentco.com, an Internet service provider, as chief technology officer of optical transport.

Lucent also recently suffered the loss of seven key staff within its optical component group. And last December Mayan Networks Corp.http://www.mayannetworks.com, an optical networking startup, snapped up an entire team of ATM design engineers from a Lucent subsidiary called AG Communication Systems (see Alan Brown, from Lucent to Mayan ).

So what’s the problem? Actually, there are several – and they apply to other incumbent equipment manufacturers as well as Lucent.

For one thing, a huge amount of money is now being invested in optical startups – and public companies are buying those startups, in increasing numbers, for even more astronomical sums. “This mitigates the risk for Lucent employees to leave and join a startup,” says Jeff Lipton, senior research analyst for photonics and broadband components at Chase H&Q http://www.chase.com.

And leaving Lucent no longer means that engineers have to sacrifice living on the cutting edge of technology. “Lucent and Nortel have always been places where you go to work if you want the best scientific environment. But now that startups are so well funded, they can provide a great scientific environment as well,” says Lipton.

Compensation is another big problem. “It used to be that people had to sacrifice salary in return for stock options [when they went to a startup]. Now they don’t have to. Engineers can command an equal or better salary and get an option package on top,” Lipton says.

Some think attitude may be the reason why Lucent is perceived as losing more employees than, say, Cisco. “Cisco guys want to play the game hard, talk back to you, bang helmets -- just get it done. Lucent guys want to sit round the table, study stuff, and then tell you what to do,” says a partner at a venture capital firm who spoke anonymously. “They have a real problem understanding that they don’t work for the phone company anymore. People leave Lucent because it’s not Cisco and they think they’d have more fun at a startup,” he adds.

Lucent says the attrition is simply a natural fact of operating in the highly competitive optical networking industry. “Turnover in this industry is common. If you look at the numbers, we are actually holding our own very well – and a lot better than some of our competitors in Silicon Valley,” says Frank Briamonte, a spokesperson for Lucent.

On Monday, Lucent announced a key new hire: Deborah C. Hopkins, whom it has brought on board as executive vice president and chief financial officer. Hopkins moved to Lucent from Boeing, where she held the job of senior vice president and chief financial officer. She has a hotshot reputation ( see .http://www. lucent.com/press/0400/000424.coa.html ). by Stephen Saunders, US editor, and Mary Jander, senior editor, Light Reading, http://www.lightreading.com

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