Only two weeks after news of their shock redundancy, 10% of Parallel Wireless’ ex-employees have already found jobs and 50% are at interview stage, TMN has been told.
Although nobody seems clear on the exact number of redundancies, and Parallel Wireless isn’t saying, it seems likely that around 70% of the 800-1,000 strong workforce was laid off when CEO Steve Papa made the decision to reverse the company’s aggressive expansion plans, and focus on finding a sustainable niche from which to grow.
That sudden pivot took many inside and outside the company by surprise, and released hundreds of skilled workers onto the market, where they are attracting the interest of a large range of companies in the network and tech space.
Those companies showing interest include perhaps naturally, direct competitors to Parallel in the RAN, such as Mavenir, Rakuten, Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and JMA Wireless. They also include a range of Open RAN and mobile network ecosystem players such as Meta, Google, CapGemini, Infosys, Tech Mahindra, Spirent, EXFO, WindRiver, Cisco, Radisys and NEC.
The level of interest indicates that Parallel Wireless’ decision to reconsider its growth plan does not necessarily reflect wider market sentiment around 5G RAN and Open RAN, with a host of companies actively looking to hire.
The success in finding new and potential opportunities is being put down in large part to the visibility of a LinkedIn group for ex Parallel Wireless employees that has generated an in-flow of offers from a host of companies.
The group has 543 members, although not all of those are recent departees, and not everyone made redundant recently is in the group. But group admins estimate that of those recently departed, and in the group, around 10% have already moved on to a new role, with 50% in discussions to do so.
Roles in demand include product managers, L1 engineers, L2/L3 engineers, System Engineers, QA Automation, 5G/4G User Plane, networking data plane software development, AWS Cloud Engineer, Project Managers, Program Managers, pre-sales engineers and Technical Architects.
The group remains solely a resource for Parallel Wireless alumni.
