Comment Bottom line: SGI sadly mismanaged (Score 1) 181
What hasn't been really brought out is that SGI's problems come from gross mismanagement at the mid and upper levels of the company.
I worked at SGI as a contractor a few years back, and then, they had lots of smart engineers, but no effective communication or strategization of what they were trying to accomplish as a company (except maybe "we want to do K00L stuff!"). Surprisingly enough, I also didn't see any real evidence of a QA process for IRIX (which explains how lousy IRIX is from a stability point of view).
The situation is worse now, because the smart engineers read the writing on the wall, and bailed. And management types who are good and have hot prospects are not going to sign up with a company in as bad shape at SGI.
SGI is the walking dead. All this talk of their technology misses the vital point that you can't operate a large company like SGI without effective management (no matter how cool the technology).
I know people who are very sharp and have left SGI, in their opinion, the best people have already left SGI. The ones who are left either are part of the problem, or else are busy looking for new jobs.
And SGI can't hire good new people because good people don't want to work with the walking dead.
Someone will buy them, to acquire some of the cool hardware technology - but nobody wants IRIX (not even SGI).
I worked at SGI as a contractor a few years back, and then, they had lots of smart engineers, but no effective communication or strategization of what they were trying to accomplish as a company (except maybe "we want to do K00L stuff!"). Surprisingly enough, I also didn't see any real evidence of a QA process for IRIX (which explains how lousy IRIX is from a stability point of view).
The situation is worse now, because the smart engineers read the writing on the wall, and bailed. And management types who are good and have hot prospects are not going to sign up with a company in as bad shape at SGI.
SGI is the walking dead. All this talk of their technology misses the vital point that you can't operate a large company like SGI without effective management (no matter how cool the technology).
I know people who are very sharp and have left SGI, in their opinion, the best people have already left SGI. The ones who are left either are part of the problem, or else are busy looking for new jobs.
And SGI can't hire good new people because good people don't want to work with the walking dead.
Someone will buy them, to acquire some of the cool hardware technology - but nobody wants IRIX (not even SGI).
