Yes, dittoes to what you say about IBM and east coast “mob” mentality. Except that Scott McNeeley was and is a big fan of brining in tons of H1-B engineers, so he’s not on my Christmas list either.
That H1B flood into Sun both hurt the engineering market, and I’ll bet my - ah, wait, I have nothing left to bet with - I’ll bet it had a lot to do with why SPARC lost its dominant position w.r.t. x86. Sun wasted TONS and time and money on projects like millennium that would have benefitted from a smaller but rock solid engineering team.
Yeah Sun blew it. Like Ford when they were printing $15 billion a year on Expeditions and Explorer SUVs. Sun had incredible people like Joy and von Bechtolsheim. Scott was more worried about lowering his golf handicap at his second (more like first) home at Pebble Beach. He is a scractch golfer aka possibly the best CEO golfer. He probably could have turned pro. Also he played a lot of hockey in leagues while running Sun.
Sad.
Yeah Scotty was big on H1-Bs - they also killed Motorola. MOT nuked the place and turned it into Mumbai and it killed MOT.
I once had some minor dealings with GE and IBM corporate. GE were the most arrogant creeps you ever met. This was at HQ in CT. The experience with IBM were possibly worse. Some really devious stuff that felt like the Sopranos.