Agere today, Agone tomorrow

Perhaps Allentown's daily newspaper, The Morning Call, put it best in yesterday's edition: "The brief, disappointing life of Agere Systems will soon end."

Oh, how true it is.

On Monday, it was announced that Agere will be swallowed up by LSI Logic Corp. of Milpitas, California, ending Agere's existence, and, more importantly, throwing the futures in doubt of at least some of the 1,500 employees at Agere's World Headquarters (Above, shortly before its completion in 2002) in Allentown, PA.

Once could call it the final blow to the Lehigh Valley - the dream that became a nightmare. It seemed like only yesterday that there was a tech boom, and Lucent (and then Agere) were right in the heart of the boom that eventually went bust.

My favorite ironic memory - a billboard on Route 22 in Allentown that read, "Move over Silicon Valley, here comes the Lehigh Valley." I'd make jokes, but workers losing their jobs is no laughing matter.

One employee quoted in the Morning Call story yesterday morning probably summed up what most Agere employees are feeling:

"It's like our company is being sold out from under us,'' said a 25-year Agere employee who would not give his name. ''Everybody's feeling like there's going to be another giant layoff. There's even more uncertainty than ever before. There's going to be duplication of jobs, so are they going to cut on our side or theirs?"

I really do feel bad for Agere employees - the company is full of brilliant, hard-working minds, and they've suffered from a bad market, bad luck and even worse leadership.

This week, Lucent began operating as Alcatel-Lucent after its merger with the French telecommunications giant was approved by the Bush administration and stockholders this fall. So, Agere joins the family of AT&T spin-offs that have been swallowed up.

Seeing both of these companies go through this brings back some memories, and very few of them are good ones, but as I've written before, I bear the company no ill will. I was treated more than fair during my time there, and I received a very generous severance package, and the company certainly was under no obligation to do that.

But, being downsized, laid off, or whatever PR term a company's talking heads come up with is never a pleasant experience. (Lucent had a marvelously stupid term for it - FMP, for Forced Management Protocol, truly an idiotic PR term if there ever was one. Ironic since I was in PR and I got FMP'd by a PR term!)

Anyway, in the end, the layoff was ultimately good for me and a blessing. I'm not cut out for the corporate world. Like I tell Vandra and my best friend Chris all the time - it's not a put down of people who survive and thrive in the corporate world, but it takes a certain mindset, one I simply don't possess.

Lucent - what might have been...

The other day I read that President Bush has ok'd the proposed merger of Lucent Technologies with French telecom giant Alcatel. The new company will be led by Pat Russo, Lucent's CEO, and will be dubbed Alcatel Lucent. (Will Republicans move to ban the company's products, vis a vis Freedom Fries?) Bush had to approve the merger because of concerns about patents; Lucent's crown jewel is Bell Labs - one of the premier R&D organizations in the world. Many were concerned about the possible loss of technology and even military secrets. Evidently, there will a special panel set up to deal with any transfer of potentially sensitive secrets and technology.

I only bring this up because it brings back many memories for me. It seems like a million years ago that I began working for Lucent, in June '00. The future looked so bright, for me (in the corporate world) and also for the company. I was there exactly five weeks, and Lucent announced it would spin off its Microelectronics Group to form Agere Systems. Great, I thought - the ink isn't even dry on my Lucent business cards and now I'm working for... Well, it took a while to find out that our company would be named Agere Systems, but it might as well been named Anchor Systems, because that's exactly the direction the company went - to the bottom.

The company promptly went from about 19,000 employees to its current level of about 6,500. I was one of the employees involved in the nasty downsizing.

Anyway, just seeing the Lucent "Innovation Ring" in the news always brings back mixed emotions. I bear no ill will toward the company (after all, it helped me get my master's degree), but I still can't help think what might have been had the tech bubble not burst at the end of the 1990s.

However, in the end, I don't miss the corporate world and all the bullshit that goes with it - the politics, the backstabbing, infighting, CYA mentality, heartless and gutless layoffs, and bottom lines meaning more than employees' lives.