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HP to cut 25-30k jobs

364 points by somberi 11y ago

cft 11y ago
No problem, the new "technology" in the Silicon Valley is AirBnB and Facebook. Let China do the hard stuff.
- MC7447a 11y ago
  Yeah, because running Facebook isn't hard at all. Maybe you should clue them in how they don't actually need all these positions at all https://www.facebook.com/careers/teams/infrastructure https://www.facebook.com/careers/teams/infrastructure
  - david927 11y ago
    "Never mistake activity for achievement." - John Wooden
matmann2001 11y ago
Is this another classic HP re-org?
iofj 11y ago
HP's new business model for the last 2 years : * cut costs (mostly by disabling essential business functions) * buy back stock using proceeds The result: https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=Linear&chdeh=1&chfdeh=0&chdet=1442377918603&chddm=78200&chddi=86400&chls=CandleStick&q=NYSE:HPQ&ntsp=0&ei=sPD4VcvfAoiI0AT2xIkY https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&... The person in Charge : Meg Whitman. In 2008, she was cited by The New York Times as among the women most likely to become the first female President of the United States. Because what "worked" for HP, we should apply to all of the US. Also see: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-24/why-hewlett-packard-firing-58000 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-24/why-hewlett-packard...
- wpietri 11y ago
  Doing the math on this, they apparently believe that each one of those people is costing the company $108k per year, net. Given that HP's revenue per employee is ~$350k, I find those numbers simply unbelievable. And let's suppose for a second that HP is somehow right. How did they just notice that 10% of their employees are doing something totally worthless? On top of the 55,000 employees that they laid off in 2012? I don't understand how this isn't an admission of total management incompetence. There's also the classic MBA mistake of seeing employees as expenses rather than assets. HP has been investing in these people for years. What a waste to just fire them all. And this is surely damaging another valuable asset, organizational morale. That they couldn't figure out a single valuable thing to do with those assets is just sad.
  - dasil003 11y ago
    The uncomfortable truth at this scale is that some employees are absolutely essential and some are just phoning it in collecting a paycheck. Ideally management would have visibility into where the performers were, but with this many layers of management it's very very difficult to see the forest for the trees. It's one thing to repurpose people when the trend lines are positive or at least flat, but in HP's case there is a real question mark about what growing sectors they can successfully move into. Certainly they still have the talent to do amazing things, but have the leadership with the deep visibility into the organization's inner workings and talent pool and the outward facing vision to actually pull off a reorg like that seems almost impossible.
    - wpietri 11y ago
      If some employees are phoning it in, I think it's worth asking why. It's been a long time since I felt that way at a job, but for me it came out of shitty, disempowering, unrewarding environments. But even running with your argument, that the people laid off are slacking, I think it's an enormous failure that they let 30,000 of those people accumulate such that they were wasting $3 billion per year. Especially given their massive layoff a few years back. And if they've built an organization where it's difficult to tell where they're wasting $3 billion per year, I don't see how that's anything but an enormous indictment of the managers.
olivermarks 11y ago
HP Enterprise are aiming to be operating out of a suburban Palo Alto garage by the end of next year.
- josephcooney 11y ago
  Bangalore garage.
  - hwstar 11y ago
    No: Bangladeshi Garage with a dirt floor.
hardwaresofton 11y ago
Wow this is a pretty huge cut. However, I won't lie/sugar coat it -- I think of HP as one of the most stereotypically bad big companies (where you can go in get a job, and almost never get fired, despite not doing very much work), so this is probably a great move for them. I can't imagine it really takes 300,000 people to do what HP does. I'm sure there are departments that do cutting edge hardware/software work at HP, and I just haven't seen them yet
- nattaggart 11y ago
  After they bought VoodooPC they turned that org into their Envy line which put out industry-leading PC's for a minute. Now it just makes low-end Mac knock-offs :(
  - voltagex_ 11y ago
    The new Spectre is pretty good.
  - prodmerc 11y ago
    Industry leading premium heaters/friers, maybe :-D Those early Envys were hot as hell and the processor was right under the palm rest. Quite an idiotic design...
- kalleboo 11y ago
  The problem is they tend to cut the wrong people. The bloat is usually in middle management (people "fail upwards" to where they can do no harm), but the people who get cut are on the bottom.
- s73v3r 11y ago
  It's not really a great move, because anyone left who is decent is probably going to jump ship due to uncertainty in how the company is going. Simply keeping tabs on the people in the first place, and firing the non-performing ones is a much better way to go. Not to mention that, when it comes to layoffs like this, it's not always performance that gets looked at. It's just as likely that people making a lot of money, deserved or not, will be laid off, and someone who is less talented or hard working, but cheaper to the company, will be kept.
ekianjo 11y ago
> The tech company has struggled over the last decade to keep up with changing demands as customers move away from desktop computers. Maybe, but laptop or desktop, HP has been always synonymous with crappy quality and design - among the worst I have ever seen. I just can't wait for them to stop making PCs so that we can get at least half-decent laptops from other manufacturers.
- brudgers 11y ago
  I have an HP11C calculator I bought in 1989 I still use. It cost almost $100 back then. The first HP printer I bought was a DeskJet 550c. Made a beautiful whooshing and humming noises. Kept it for more than 10 years. When they discovered a tendency for premature wear on the pickup rollers, HP sent me a maintenance kit: one day it just showed up with instructions. I had a zd7000 laptop in the early oughts. It was pretty badass for it's day. Lasted until my boy closed the top with a pen on the keyboard and cracked the screen. HP was a different company that made good stuff.
  - Animats 11y ago
    I have an HP11C too, and a LaserJet 5L printer. Both are over 15 years old, in regular use, and work fine. The printer has had two roller replacements, though. That's HP's problem. Great gear, got the job done, didn't have an addictive replacement revenue model like Apple. People ran HP minicomputers for decades because they Just Worked.
    - cma 11y ago
      Ink?
      - Animats 11y ago
        Toner, which is cheaper than ink.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      Nah, that could've been a solution had they developed a good business model around it. Mainframes come to mind: leased instead of sold. Great margins. HP might have made a really good leasing model that got users continuous improvements on regular refresh cycles with same quality to justify profit margin. Just a thought. Can't sell heirlooms for commodity prices in a commodity market and do good long-term business. ;)
joshmn 11y ago
My father is a field-service engineer for HP in Midwest (based out of Minneapolis, but he has calls all over from Fargo, ND to Mpls, MN to Madison, WI). He is _the_ go-to for their biggest, most senior, most mission-critical clients. He put together UMN's Alpha setup, is the only guy that USPS will call for help, MNSCU, Best Buy, UHG... basically, anyone with an HP setup (server or printer) that's a Fortune 1000 (and some of the smaller guys too) — he's their man. He's feeling the heat. He's made it through the absorption of Compaq, and when Compaq absorbed Digital. He's won a ton of awards with each company he's been at, frequently getting high marks for his professionalism, timeliness, availability, willingness to mentor the new guys, stuff like that. He also brought in more than $4MM in revenue for HP in one fiscal year, even though sales wasn't his job (I think it came out to 28 different contracts?) The next highest was $600k. It's been like that for 25 years. Needless to say, he's pretty damn good at his job. He's late 50s, but in amazing health. My mother, however, is in her 50s, and is in absolutely terrible health. They cannot afford to lose healthcare coverage. My mom wouldn't make it, and my father would probably lose his mind. They just refinanced their 220k mortgage and put new siding on their suburban house, added new gutters, got the roof redone, stuff like that. Please, don't make this about how shitty of an investment that might have been. That's beside the point. He makes a good living — he filed $98k last year, but that's a _ton_ of overtime. All he's known is hardware for the last 30 years. He's not a sysadmin and will never be. He's not some low-level nerd. He's the product of an unnotable tech school and he's worked his ass off to keep things afloat. I don't have the best relationship with him at all, but he's a human and I picked up my people skills (if you can call them that) from him. Who would hire him at this age, with this kind of experience?
- aggronn 11y ago
  If there's as much demand for him as you're describing, he could probably make a much better living doing consulting for these companies than he could working for HP.
  - joshmn 11y ago
    I don't know why I didn't think of this. I'm 24, a bit naive, bleh. I let him know in a text. Thank you. I referred to HN as "my Silicon Valley friends"
bickfordb 11y ago
It's sad that HP+Compaq turned into this zombie company
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Gibbon1 11y ago
  HP/Compaq had the trained staff to do what apple and google have done. But management has been busy busy cutting their way to profitability. Cutting staff to make next years numbers look good is opiate of the MBA.
  - mruniverse 11y ago
    The trained staff probably needed some direction to be an Apple or Google. Or at least motivation. They probably played second fiddle to the sales people. Seemed like leadership was missing. Fiorina and Whitman never seemed interested in tech. They just liked being the boss of something big. Boss of California, boss of US.
  - devonkim 11y ago
    HP/Compaq at one point many years ago could have done what Apple and Google n years ago would have done. Today, the brain drain and demoralization at HP is far too much to overcome unless unprecedented leadership and vision on the caliber of the late Steve Jobs could possibly turn this company around. HP is a good example of why we pay great leaders what they do and... oh wait, the execs at HP are paid pretty fine for such low "performance" at doing anything besides going by the book. But for a long time I've only known HP to focus upon the bottom line rather than the top line.
LandoCalrissian 11y ago
I'm really sorry for all those people. Nothing worse than losing your job. I hope they at least get a good severance. It's a pretty mis-run company that is now having a lot of human collateral damage. Really sad.
- sokoloff 11y ago
  Many things worse than losing your job. Health issues, incarceration, serious problems with your kids, and betraying an old friend by luring him to Cloud City and turning him over to Boba Fett all come to mind...
BogusIKnow 11y ago
"the need for any future corporate restructuring." Ever. Always funny when CEO talk about the future and think about the next quarter.
sliken 11y ago
Heh, it used to be a joke that HP was basically an ink company. Seems to become more true every day.
- steveax 11y ago
  Ha! Anyone remember PrintPaks [1]? A Portland OR company that HP invested in. The model was to churn out "Create a <foo>" kits that were all about using ink. Disclaimer: I worked at a PDX company (ImageBuilder Software) in the 90's that created a number of those kits for PrintPaks, although I never worked on a team that was doing those products. [1]: http://www.abebooks.com/Home-Project-Kit-Includes-Disney-Interactives/1389675014/bd http://www.abebooks.com/Home-Project-Kit-Includes-Disney-Int...
- tsotha 11y ago
  It's really sad. When I graduated from college HP was where you really wanted to work. They had all kinds of cool high tech test equipment and parts. And they had a policy of never laying off people - during industry downturns they'd hang on to everybody and tough it out until the economy recovered. For whatever reason they spun off the high tech bits (as Agilent) and became a PC/printer company. I'll never understand that decision.
jsudhams 11y ago
Most of US big companies are like that if they have more than 200000 people you seriously can cut 30000 jobs any time.
- pferde 11y ago
  I only wish they cut from the pool of useless middle managers (god knows there's an overabundance of them in HPE, and their number seems to increase every day), and not from among people who do actual productive work.
brudgers 11y ago
Yesterday I picked up a rental car. I wanted Cheri listed as a driver. I emailed the photo I took of her driver license before I left the house to the person at the counter. All using my phone. I didn't need a scanner or a printer or ink. I take documents with me using my phone. The printer business ain't like it was.
- wpietri 11y ago
  Perhaps you missed this in the article, but these layoffs are in the Enterprise division. The printer business is separate.
  - brudgers 11y ago
    HP is trying to save its printer business because in the short term that will be better for senior management's options than changing the the company's course. Wall Street will bump the price and HP management will claim success and see their bonuses rise. That's much more attractive than changing course. If the printer business was flush, HP could afford to bet on a diversity of services and products. They would be in the business of making money rather than saving it. 25k redundant staff doesn't speak to a track record of sound management decision making of the sort that would inspire confidence in this decision being a great one. Layoffs aren't innovation.
wsxcde 11y ago
What do you all think a company like HP should do when they (finally) realize that they're overstaffed by a big number like 20%, 30% or 50%? One thing I realized working for a huge company and comparing that with my time at their much smaller competitor was that organizations in huge companies become hyperspecialized. This is great during the good times, because everyone is able to squeeze out that last 5% of performance (or whatever other metric they're optimizing for), and this combined effort allows them to keep their lead over the competitor. But it's terrible during bad times because of the overstaffing. And firing people just makes things worse because the company loses important parts of its organizational memory. Because of the hyperspecialization, no single person/organization knows how to do all the things that need to be done to get the product out the door. And if you fire 10% of your workforce, you're going to forget 10% of the stuff you needed to know to build your products. In fact, you probably lose much more than 10% because people who are actually good see the writing on the wall and leave, taking a disproportional amount of the organizational knowhow with them. I feel like these companies get caught in a death spiral. They can't do things the old way because they don't know how to any more, and they can't do it the way their competitors are doing it either because they never knew how to do that! So they just flounder along for many years slowly becoming less and less relevant. They solution is to luck into a completely different business model that somehow ends up working a la IBM in the 90s. But how realistic is that?
- debacle 11y ago
  > What do you all think a company like HP should do when they (finally) realize that they're overstaffed by a big number like 20%, 30% or 50%? Fire the person(s) responsible for letting things get that bad.
  - bcbrown 11y ago
    That's a punishment, not a solution. Then what?
    - bosdev 11y ago
      Barring any extreme creativity, they should fire those people. It doesn't excuse the incompetence which led to that position though. Working at HP is not a seasonal job.
stevewepay 11y ago
The sad part is that it's Carly Fiorina's fault for turning HP into the mess it was. And now she touts that as the reason why she should be president. It's a sick joke that she thinks gutting one of Silicon Valley's preeminent companies makes her worthy of being president. HP was the first company to pioneer Silicon Valley culture, ie. The HP Way. It was only after Fiorina's tenure that HP turned into a shadow of its former self. They were one of the first to aggressively lay people off in the US and hire in India, and under her, they lost "The HP Way". Every CEO since Fiorina has been a complete joke. Now Whitman is coming in to finish the job.
- seunosewa 11y ago
  What precisely did Carly Fiorina do weong, and what precisely should she have done instead?
  - chrisbennet 11y ago
    That's a good question. I don't know why someone downvoted you. My best friend worked for HP and disliked her but I too would be interested in knowing the answers to your questions.
  - jsudhams 11y ago
    I think she kind of kill the HP Way read http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/2002/2002_04_10.hpway10.html http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/2002/2002_04_10....
    - chrisbennet 11y ago
      Thanks, that article was very helpful.
  - scholia 11y ago
    Spending $25 billion on a PC company was a pretty dumb idea. Spending $25 billion on Compaq, which had spent almost $10 billion on DEC, was even dumber: either it duplicated the existing business (PCs) or complicated the existing business (severs) by adding duplicate products. Trying to buy PriceWaterhouseCooper for $14 billion might have been a good move but it was a dumb price. IBM later bought it for $4 billion. I did go and see her talk at Comdex. She was remarkably clueless about technology.
jwiley 11y ago
Meg Whitman's 2014 compensation was 19.6 million, which is exactly 200 times your Dad's salary.
vinceyuan 11y ago
Is it the result of spending $10.3bn buying Autonomy and $1.2bn buying Palm?
jsudhams 11y ago
Also this is why US should get better immigration policy and allow incoming people rather than outsourcing. My cousin was just hired in hp in India for he get about US$ 5000 per year or Rs 20000 per month(He is very happy as he was getting Rs,9000 with a indian company). whereas in US even for small company that job would be atleast $25000? so no way to compete for USA guys. Just ensure companies create healthy competition for people in the country.
- bkor 11y ago
  You're being totally unrealistic. The salaries are higher because the cost of living is higher. They don't go down because of "competition". Nor should companies rule a country, most just act in their own self interest.
sjclemmy 11y ago
I know a guy who works for HP. He has been wanting to take redundancy for a while but has been turned down. The way he tells it, a lot of the guys he works with leave high priority tickets without looking them up, leave early, start late, surf the web all day, and generally don't work as you might expect. The manager in this situation doesn't seem to do anything about it, and this has been going on for years. I'm not surprised HP are in the predicament they are in, as they've totally mismanaged their business and assets over the past few years - and that business with Autonomy? Wow. Hopefully my friend will be getting his redundancy with this announcement.
paganel 11y ago
HP has become terrible. My girlfriend does some IT procurement from time to time at her job, and that also involves having to buy stuff from HP (nothing big, just the usual). She told me that HP's procurement interface for external entities (or whatever its official name is) is absolutely terrible. It blocks randomly, it's very slow, it takes a lot to fill in all the info, and when you finally give up and call some human from HP you're being told to go back using the interface. It's like they just don't want to take their clients' money.
- buffoon 11y ago
  This. Two weeks to get two hard disks on an enterprise agreement. Bought the damn things off Misco and had them there the next morning. Decided to buy supermicro from now on. Plus Broadcom NICs in 2015. Kill me now.
herojan 11y ago
Automation was supposed to make us all work less, not get everyone fired from decent, safe jobs.
- prodmerc 11y ago
  You forgot the "/s" at the end :-)
- bluedino 11y ago
  Between virtualization, 16-core CPU's, and "the cloud", businesses have been replacing servers at a 1:10 ratio. Good for businesses that buy servers, bad for companies that sell servers like Dell and HP.
alphadevx 11y ago
HP should have done something meaningful in the profitable consumer electronics space with Palm, rather than gutting it. That was an opportunity for some market growth squandered, where else is their growth going to come from? I have lots of sympathy for those losing their jobs, but none whatsoever for the senior management team or board.
- notNow 11y ago
  but none whatsoever for the senior management team or board. Who happen to keep their jobs no matter what happens to the company.
  - alphadevx 11y ago
    Yeah they're keeping their jobs, but all they are doing is managing decline, nothing to take any pride in.
dschiptsov 11y ago
They were dead that very day when they brought that consulting scam company (I forgot its name) because it was clear signal of internal corruption and disconnection from so-called reality. Now it all unwinds.
RaSoJo 11y ago
This is so sad - And HP has an Ad Targeted on the page. Quite a bad targeting decision. http://imgur.com/GegYER0 http://imgur.com/GegYER0
tdicola 11y ago
Is HP one of the companies banging the drum of a tech job talent shortage? Because this is a pretty powerful message of just the opposite.
randomname2 11y ago
So in February HP announced it would fire 58,000 just so the company could spend even more billions on stock buybacks. Since then, buyback activity has gone down a bit and so they clearly needed to spend even more on buybacks. But where get the money? Cutting 30k jobs is a start: https://imgur.com/3MdRKqv https://imgur.com/3MdRKqv
reuven 11y ago
My first job, when I finished college in 1992, was at HP. They hesitated to offer me a job, because they said that when HP offers someone a position, they're basically offering them a job for life. Sure, you can snicker at that comment, since almost no company would (or can, or should) make such a claim nowadays. But people told me that before I got there, in the mid-1980s, there were big problems at the company. Rather than have any layoffs, they reduced everyone's salary by 10%, and told people to only work 9 of every 10 business days. This included everyone, starting with the top managers. I'm not sure if that was the right thing to do for the company. And I doubt many companies would do that today. And if they're talking about shedding 30k people, then HP is planning some drastic changes. But it's sad for me to remember the HP that I worked for at the time, in which there was a strong sense of community, and of "we're all in this together" -- and to think of the people who joined when such an ethos existed, and who will be laid off now. I'm not sure if there's a real alternative, and I'm a capitalist at heart... but it's still sad to see so many people laid off because it's now in style to break companies apart.
- seibelj 11y ago
  I just think it's the wrong way to look at things. It's better to cut 30,000 to save the company, than to keep everyone hired and wait for every employee to be out of work.
  - reuven 11y ago
    Maybe. And I fully admit that given those two choices, it's better to save the company and lay of 30k people. But I do have to wonder how the company grew to be so bloated and large. Perhaps it was unfair for HP to hire them to begin with. I fully recognize that at the end of a day, an unprofitable company doesn't do anyone any good. It's just sad for me to think that the only way to make the company profitable is to lay off such a huge number of employees. I also know how big-company layoffs often work; they often don't take someone's quality of work into consideration, but rather the project or division in which they worked. Thus, I'm sure some great people will be looking for jobs, through no fault of their own.
Altay- 11y ago
The most shocking part of this story is that HP still employs 300,000+ people...
- scholia 11y ago
  IBM has a smaller turnover and employs even more....
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    IBM blacklists anyone who ever quits. Its emotional blackmail - "You'll never work in this industry again!" They're experts at giving the impression of career growth while underpaying.
    - enraged_camel 11y ago
      Not sure why you were downvoted. I've heard the exact same thing from people working there and have worked there.
    - navait 11y ago
      [Citation Needed] - I've seen people who have worked at IBM multiple times, and certainly nobody has ever said that to me.
    - atomicUpdate 11y ago
      Both versions of our IBM stories are obviously anecdotal, but just to show you're not 100% correct, they told me the door was always open if I ever wanted to go back. I also knew several people that had come and gone.
abebaaphumein 11y ago
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linkydinkandyou 11y ago
It's Carly Fiorina's legacy! And Meg Whitman carries her torch.
norea-armozel 11y ago
I do hope the Board of Directors sells off the Machine assets to a company that could actually pull it off (that's not Intel) like Microsoft or even, hell, Apple. The idea of moving processing to a memory-centered architecture just seems very interesting and possibly useful in non-trivial situations. And for that idea to die horribly with a company ill equipped just bothers me. If they're hurting enough to layoff tens of thousands people, surely they can sell off the technology to settle some of their debts and live. Just an idea.
- Swannie 11y ago
  Assuming you mean the non-memristor version of the machine? Microsoft are not a hardware company by any stretch. There are a few hardware engineers in small areas (Xbox, handsets, Surface), but almost none in server. Apple mostly make consumer facing equipment, again, no enterprise/server heritage. If not HP, then who has a true system development background? Well, not sure why you say not Intel. They are one of the few that actually does systems development. IBM makes the most sense. They've distances themselves from x86, and still maintain a system development mindset, including heavy investment in big data processing. They have the OS development skills. After IBM, there are a few maybe's: Google would be a realistic company too, as they have shown system engineering skills, end to end, including a lot of OS development work. Facebook - continue to do full system engineering in areas they believe are differentiators. I could see them doing something similar for analytics crunching. Outsiders: Oracle could be viable. There must be a few Sun guys left there that do system development, and they need to show they are still relevant in big data, but they don't spend much in R&D. Cisco - continue to do full system engineering, but would likely break this by making it too network centric. No real OS development heritage. Broadcom - continue to expand their areas. This would be a huge step for them in systems integration, but not big at all in terms of silicon and interconnects.
aNoob7000 11y ago
I guess the shortage of tech labor is over. :)
norea-armozel 11y ago
In an unrelated industry, Beechcraft (Hawker-Beech I believe it's called now) has a similar blow out. Too many managers and not enough actual workers making product. And to make it even worse, outsourcing integral parts of the aircraft to Mexico: fuel bladders, electrical components, and etc (and sadly they refused to properly train the Mexican workers in any of it). What are they doing now under Textron? Quietly returning those outsourced jobs to Arkansas instead of Salina (Kansas), focusing on making actual aircraft, and scuttling middle management and other other useless cruft from the company. Too bad no one with a similar attitude can just swoop in and buy out HP like how Beechcraft was bought out by Textron.
alistproducer2 11y ago
I work for a big company that uses HP software. It's horrible. If HP is anything like the company I work, HP is full of people getting free money for showing up and doing nothing. My thing is, if you know you are getting free money you have to expect it to end at some point. Have a contingency plan.
mkhpalm 11y ago
You know layoffs are coming up when your boss starts announcing things like dress codes in R&D due to "customer complaints". Severance packages are way more expensive than people leaving on their own.
- qzcx 11y ago
  The executives completely renounced the whole dress code thing though. It was some middle manager who though it would be a great idea for his unit and got slammed after it hit public media.
mrbgty 11y ago
It's much easier to buy companies (revenue) than to produce it yourself. This is their strategy. Buy companies to get revenue up, then cut costs via layoffs where there's overlap.
USNetizen 11y ago
Although this may seem bad for many of these workers, I know of a lot of other tech companies that will be chomping at the bit to pick up many of these talented affected workers, though it may require a relocation in some cases. As for HPE moving to these "low cost centers" for their talent, this is actually something I've seen happening where many larger companies are moving to smaller and mid-sized cities farther inland or down south in the U.S., places with adequate amenities to support their infrastructure and a decent workforce, but also within striking distance of large metros. The overhead and salaries in the DC beltway and Silicon Valley, for example, can be as much as 30-50% higher than locations just a couple hours drive away from them. So such a move to lower cost of living areas makes sense from a business perspective if you're running a services company in the IT industry and especially if you're serving cost-conscious government clients which HP has been doing in a big way lately.
mead5432 11y ago
When I first read the HN title, I thought it was that HP was going to cut somewhere between 25 and 30,000 jobs.
ashwinaj 11y ago
To me it's kinda obvious that any "major event" i.e. merger, large acquisition, split, extremely bad quarter etc. in a big company is an excuse to let people go. IMO the only way to survive these "events" in a big company is to make sure you are indispensable (which is not a reflection of how smart you are) or be politically astute. Despite this there are no guarantees, you just have to keep your eyes and ears open to the on goings of your company.
godgod 11y ago
This is a good thing for the survival of the company. I worked at HP and let me tell you, from what I saw, HP was the most bloated company I have ever seen. The horrible work ethic by the full time employees wasn't the exception but more the rule. I saw jsut about every employee take half day lunch breaks, and they'd hire contractors to do their work. I found it so disgusting that I exited the company. The full time employees I saw did NOTHING all day. They were basically all 25 year career employees that sat around doing NO actual work and they could get away with it because their manager and their managers manager was doing the same thing. HP is a horribly run company. Just about everyone there at least in the division I worked at was dead weight just showing up to collect a huge paycheck.

364 points by somberi 11y ago

cft 11y ago

No problem, the new "technology" in the Silicon Valley is AirBnB and Facebook. Let China do the hard stuff.

MC7447a 11y ago
Yeah, because running Facebook isn't hard at all. Maybe you should clue them in how they don't actually need all these positions at all https://www.facebook.com/careers/teams/infrastructure https://www.facebook.com/careers/teams/infrastructure
- david927 11y ago
  "Never mistake activity for achievement." - John Wooden

matmann2001 11y ago

Is this another classic HP re-org?

iofj 11y ago

HP's new business model for the last 2 years : * cut costs (mostly by disabling essential business functions) * buy back stock using proceeds The result: https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=Linear&chdeh=1&chfdeh=0&chdet=1442377918603&chddm=78200&chddi=86400&chls=CandleStick&q=NYSE:HPQ&ntsp=0&ei=sPD4VcvfAoiI0AT2xIkY https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&... The person in Charge : Meg Whitman. In 2008, she was cited by The New York Times as among the women most likely to become the first female President of the United States. Because what "worked" for HP, we should apply to all of the US. Also see: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-24/why-hewlett-packard-firing-58000 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-24/why-hewlett-packard...

wpietri 11y ago
Doing the math on this, they apparently believe that each one of those people is costing the company $108k per year, net. Given that HP's revenue per employee is ~$350k, I find those numbers simply unbelievable. And let's suppose for a second that HP is somehow right. How did they just notice that 10% of their employees are doing something totally worthless? On top of the 55,000 employees that they laid off in 2012? I don't understand how this isn't an admission of total management incompetence. There's also the classic MBA mistake of seeing employees as expenses rather than assets. HP has been investing in these people for years. What a waste to just fire them all. And this is surely damaging another valuable asset, organizational morale. That they couldn't figure out a single valuable thing to do with those assets is just sad.
- dasil003 11y ago
  The uncomfortable truth at this scale is that some employees are absolutely essential and some are just phoning it in collecting a paycheck. Ideally management would have visibility into where the performers were, but with this many layers of management it's very very difficult to see the forest for the trees. It's one thing to repurpose people when the trend lines are positive or at least flat, but in HP's case there is a real question mark about what growing sectors they can successfully move into. Certainly they still have the talent to do amazing things, but have the leadership with the deep visibility into the organization's inner workings and talent pool and the outward facing vision to actually pull off a reorg like that seems almost impossible.
  - wpietri 11y ago
    If some employees are phoning it in, I think it's worth asking why. It's been a long time since I felt that way at a job, but for me it came out of shitty, disempowering, unrewarding environments. But even running with your argument, that the people laid off are slacking, I think it's an enormous failure that they let 30,000 of those people accumulate such that they were wasting $3 billion per year. Especially given their massive layoff a few years back. And if they've built an organization where it's difficult to tell where they're wasting $3 billion per year, I don't see how that's anything but an enormous indictment of the managers.

olivermarks 11y ago

HP Enterprise are aiming to be operating out of a suburban Palo Alto garage by the end of next year.

josephcooney 11y ago
Bangalore garage.
- hwstar 11y ago
  No: Bangladeshi Garage with a dirt floor.

hardwaresofton 11y ago

Wow this is a pretty huge cut. However, I won't lie/sugar coat it -- I think of HP as one of the most stereotypically bad big companies (where you can go in get a job, and almost never get fired, despite not doing very much work), so this is probably a great move for them. I can't imagine it really takes 300,000 people to do what HP does. I'm sure there are departments that do cutting edge hardware/software work at HP, and I just haven't seen them yet

nattaggart 11y ago
After they bought VoodooPC they turned that org into their Envy line which put out industry-leading PC's for a minute. Now it just makes low-end Mac knock-offs :(
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  The new Spectre is pretty good.
- prodmerc 11y ago
  Industry leading premium heaters/friers, maybe :-D Those early Envys were hot as hell and the processor was right under the palm rest. Quite an idiotic design...
kalleboo 11y ago
The problem is they tend to cut the wrong people. The bloat is usually in middle management (people "fail upwards" to where they can do no harm), but the people who get cut are on the bottom.
s73v3r 11y ago
It's not really a great move, because anyone left who is decent is probably going to jump ship due to uncertainty in how the company is going. Simply keeping tabs on the people in the first place, and firing the non-performing ones is a much better way to go. Not to mention that, when it comes to layoffs like this, it's not always performance that gets looked at. It's just as likely that people making a lot of money, deserved or not, will be laid off, and someone who is less talented or hard working, but cheaper to the company, will be kept.

ekianjo 11y ago

> The tech company has struggled over the last decade to keep up with changing demands as customers move away from desktop computers. Maybe, but laptop or desktop, HP has been always synonymous with crappy quality and design - among the worst I have ever seen. I just can't wait for them to stop making PCs so that we can get at least half-decent laptops from other manufacturers.

brudgers 11y ago
I have an HP11C calculator I bought in 1989 I still use. It cost almost $100 back then. The first HP printer I bought was a DeskJet 550c. Made a beautiful whooshing and humming noises. Kept it for more than 10 years. When they discovered a tendency for premature wear on the pickup rollers, HP sent me a maintenance kit: one day it just showed up with instructions. I had a zd7000 laptop in the early oughts. It was pretty badass for it's day. Lasted until my boy closed the top with a pen on the keyboard and cracked the screen. HP was a different company that made good stuff.
- Animats 11y ago
  I have an HP11C too, and a LaserJet 5L printer. Both are over 15 years old, in regular use, and work fine. The printer has had two roller replacements, though. That's HP's problem. Great gear, got the job done, didn't have an addictive replacement revenue model like Apple. People ran HP minicomputers for decades because they Just Worked.
  - cma 11y ago
    Ink?
    - Animats 11y ago
      Toner, which is cheaper than ink.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Nah, that could've been a solution had they developed a good business model around it. Mainframes come to mind: leased instead of sold. Great margins. HP might have made a really good leasing model that got users continuous improvements on regular refresh cycles with same quality to justify profit margin. Just a thought. Can't sell heirlooms for commodity prices in a commodity market and do good long-term business. ;)

joshmn 11y ago

My father is a field-service engineer for HP in Midwest (based out of Minneapolis, but he has calls all over from Fargo, ND to Mpls, MN to Madison, WI). He is _the_ go-to for their biggest, most senior, most mission-critical clients. He put together UMN's Alpha setup, is the only guy that USPS will call for help, MNSCU, Best Buy, UHG... basically, anyone with an HP setup (server or printer) that's a Fortune 1000 (and some of the smaller guys too) — he's their man. He's feeling the heat. He's made it through the absorption of Compaq, and when Compaq absorbed Digital. He's won a ton of awards with each company he's been at, frequently getting high marks for his professionalism, timeliness, availability, willingness to mentor the new guys, stuff like that. He also brought in more than $4MM in revenue for HP in one fiscal year, even though sales wasn't his job (I think it came out to 28 different contracts?) The next highest was $600k. It's been like that for 25 years. Needless to say, he's pretty damn good at his job. He's late 50s, but in amazing health. My mother, however, is in her 50s, and is in absolutely terrible health. They cannot afford to lose healthcare coverage. My mom wouldn't make it, and my father would probably lose his mind. They just refinanced their 220k mortgage and put new siding on their suburban house, added new gutters, got the roof redone, stuff like that. Please, don't make this about how shitty of an investment that might have been. That's beside the point. He makes a good living — he filed $98k last year, but that's a _ton_ of overtime. All he's known is hardware for the last 30 years. He's not a sysadmin and will never be. He's not some low-level nerd. He's the product of an unnotable tech school and he's worked his ass off to keep things afloat. I don't have the best relationship with him at all, but he's a human and I picked up my people skills (if you can call them that) from him. Who would hire him at this age, with this kind of experience?

aggronn 11y ago
If there's as much demand for him as you're describing, he could probably make a much better living doing consulting for these companies than he could working for HP.
- joshmn 11y ago
  I don't know why I didn't think of this. I'm 24, a bit naive, bleh. I let him know in a text. Thank you. I referred to HN as "my Silicon Valley friends"

bickfordb 11y ago

It's sad that HP+Compaq turned into this zombie company

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Gibbon1 11y ago
HP/Compaq had the trained staff to do what apple and google have done. But management has been busy busy cutting their way to profitability. Cutting staff to make next years numbers look good is opiate of the MBA.
- mruniverse 11y ago
  The trained staff probably needed some direction to be an Apple or Google. Or at least motivation. They probably played second fiddle to the sales people. Seemed like leadership was missing. Fiorina and Whitman never seemed interested in tech. They just liked being the boss of something big. Boss of California, boss of US.
- devonkim 11y ago
  HP/Compaq at one point many years ago could have done what Apple and Google n years ago would have done. Today, the brain drain and demoralization at HP is far too much to overcome unless unprecedented leadership and vision on the caliber of the late Steve Jobs could possibly turn this company around. HP is a good example of why we pay great leaders what they do and... oh wait, the execs at HP are paid pretty fine for such low "performance" at doing anything besides going by the book. But for a long time I've only known HP to focus upon the bottom line rather than the top line.

LandoCalrissian 11y ago

I'm really sorry for all those people. Nothing worse than losing your job. I hope they at least get a good severance. It's a pretty mis-run company that is now having a lot of human collateral damage. Really sad.

sokoloff 11y ago
Many things worse than losing your job. Health issues, incarceration, serious problems with your kids, and betraying an old friend by luring him to Cloud City and turning him over to Boba Fett all come to mind...

BogusIKnow 11y ago

"the need for any future corporate restructuring." Ever. Always funny when CEO talk about the future and think about the next quarter.

sliken 11y ago

Heh, it used to be a joke that HP was basically an ink company. Seems to become more true every day.

steveax 11y ago
Ha! Anyone remember PrintPaks [1]? A Portland OR company that HP invested in. The model was to churn out "Create a <foo>" kits that were all about using ink. Disclaimer: I worked at a PDX company (ImageBuilder Software) in the 90's that created a number of those kits for PrintPaks, although I never worked on a team that was doing those products. [1]: http://www.abebooks.com/Home-Project-Kit-Includes-Disney-Interactives/1389675014/bd http://www.abebooks.com/Home-Project-Kit-Includes-Disney-Int...
tsotha 11y ago
It's really sad. When I graduated from college HP was where you really wanted to work. They had all kinds of cool high tech test equipment and parts. And they had a policy of never laying off people - during industry downturns they'd hang on to everybody and tough it out until the economy recovered. For whatever reason they spun off the high tech bits (as Agilent) and became a PC/printer company. I'll never understand that decision.

jsudhams 11y ago

Most of US big companies are like that if they have more than 200000 people you seriously can cut 30000 jobs any time.

pferde 11y ago
I only wish they cut from the pool of useless middle managers (god knows there's an overabundance of them in HPE, and their number seems to increase every day), and not from among people who do actual productive work.

brudgers 11y ago

Yesterday I picked up a rental car. I wanted Cheri listed as a driver. I emailed the photo I took of her driver license before I left the house to the person at the counter. All using my phone. I didn't need a scanner or a printer or ink. I take documents with me using my phone. The printer business ain't like it was.

wpietri 11y ago
Perhaps you missed this in the article, but these layoffs are in the Enterprise division. The printer business is separate.
- brudgers 11y ago
  HP is trying to save its printer business because in the short term that will be better for senior management's options than changing the the company's course. Wall Street will bump the price and HP management will claim success and see their bonuses rise. That's much more attractive than changing course. If the printer business was flush, HP could afford to bet on a diversity of services and products. They would be in the business of making money rather than saving it. 25k redundant staff doesn't speak to a track record of sound management decision making of the sort that would inspire confidence in this decision being a great one. Layoffs aren't innovation.

wsxcde 11y ago

What do you all think a company like HP should do when they (finally) realize that they're overstaffed by a big number like 20%, 30% or 50%? One thing I realized working for a huge company and comparing that with my time at their much smaller competitor was that organizations in huge companies become hyperspecialized. This is great during the good times, because everyone is able to squeeze out that last 5% of performance (or whatever other metric they're optimizing for), and this combined effort allows them to keep their lead over the competitor. But it's terrible during bad times because of the overstaffing. And firing people just makes things worse because the company loses important parts of its organizational memory. Because of the hyperspecialization, no single person/organization knows how to do all the things that need to be done to get the product out the door. And if you fire 10% of your workforce, you're going to forget 10% of the stuff you needed to know to build your products. In fact, you probably lose much more than 10% because people who are actually good see the writing on the wall and leave, taking a disproportional amount of the organizational knowhow with them. I feel like these companies get caught in a death spiral. They can't do things the old way because they don't know how to any more, and they can't do it the way their competitors are doing it either because they never knew how to do that! So they just flounder along for many years slowly becoming less and less relevant. They solution is to luck into a completely different business model that somehow ends up working a la IBM in the 90s. But how realistic is that?

debacle 11y ago
> What do you all think a company like HP should do when they (finally) realize that they're overstaffed by a big number like 20%, 30% or 50%? Fire the person(s) responsible for letting things get that bad.
- bcbrown 11y ago
  That's a punishment, not a solution. Then what?
  - bosdev 11y ago
    Barring any extreme creativity, they should fire those people. It doesn't excuse the incompetence which led to that position though. Working at HP is not a seasonal job.

stevewepay 11y ago

The sad part is that it's Carly Fiorina's fault for turning HP into the mess it was. And now she touts that as the reason why she should be president. It's a sick joke that she thinks gutting one of Silicon Valley's preeminent companies makes her worthy of being president. HP was the first company to pioneer Silicon Valley culture, ie. The HP Way. It was only after Fiorina's tenure that HP turned into a shadow of its former self. They were one of the first to aggressively lay people off in the US and hire in India, and under her, they lost "The HP Way". Every CEO since Fiorina has been a complete joke. Now Whitman is coming in to finish the job.

seunosewa 11y ago
What precisely did Carly Fiorina do weong, and what precisely should she have done instead?
- chrisbennet 11y ago
  That's a good question. I don't know why someone downvoted you. My best friend worked for HP and disliked her but I too would be interested in knowing the answers to your questions.
- jsudhams 11y ago
  I think she kind of kill the HP Way read http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/2002/2002_04_10.hpway10.html http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/2002/2002_04_10....
  - chrisbennet 11y ago
    Thanks, that article was very helpful.
- scholia 11y ago
  Spending $25 billion on a PC company was a pretty dumb idea. Spending $25 billion on Compaq, which had spent almost $10 billion on DEC, was even dumber: either it duplicated the existing business (PCs) or complicated the existing business (severs) by adding duplicate products. Trying to buy PriceWaterhouseCooper for $14 billion might have been a good move but it was a dumb price. IBM later bought it for $4 billion. I did go and see her talk at Comdex. She was remarkably clueless about technology.

jwiley 11y ago

Meg Whitman's 2014 compensation was 19.6 million, which is exactly 200 times your Dad's salary.

vinceyuan 11y ago

Is it the result of spending $10.3bn buying Autonomy and $1.2bn buying Palm?

jsudhams 11y ago

Also this is why US should get better immigration policy and allow incoming people rather than outsourcing. My cousin was just hired in hp in India for he get about US$ 5000 per year or Rs 20000 per month(He is very happy as he was getting Rs,9000 with a indian company). whereas in US even for small company that job would be atleast $25000? so no way to compete for USA guys. Just ensure companies create healthy competition for people in the country.

bkor 11y ago
You're being totally unrealistic. The salaries are higher because the cost of living is higher. They don't go down because of "competition". Nor should companies rule a country, most just act in their own self interest.

sjclemmy 11y ago

I know a guy who works for HP. He has been wanting to take redundancy for a while but has been turned down. The way he tells it, a lot of the guys he works with leave high priority tickets without looking them up, leave early, start late, surf the web all day, and generally don't work as you might expect. The manager in this situation doesn't seem to do anything about it, and this has been going on for years. I'm not surprised HP are in the predicament they are in, as they've totally mismanaged their business and assets over the past few years - and that business with Autonomy? Wow. Hopefully my friend will be getting his redundancy with this announcement.

paganel 11y ago

HP has become terrible. My girlfriend does some IT procurement from time to time at her job, and that also involves having to buy stuff from HP (nothing big, just the usual). She told me that HP's procurement interface for external entities (or whatever its official name is) is absolutely terrible. It blocks randomly, it's very slow, it takes a lot to fill in all the info, and when you finally give up and call some human from HP you're being told to go back using the interface. It's like they just don't want to take their clients' money.

buffoon 11y ago
This. Two weeks to get two hard disks on an enterprise agreement. Bought the damn things off Misco and had them there the next morning. Decided to buy supermicro from now on. Plus Broadcom NICs in 2015. Kill me now.

herojan 11y ago

Automation was supposed to make us all work less, not get everyone fired from decent, safe jobs.

prodmerc 11y ago
You forgot the "/s" at the end :-)
bluedino 11y ago
Between virtualization, 16-core CPU's, and "the cloud", businesses have been replacing servers at a 1:10 ratio. Good for businesses that buy servers, bad for companies that sell servers like Dell and HP.

alphadevx 11y ago

HP should have done something meaningful in the profitable consumer electronics space with Palm, rather than gutting it. That was an opportunity for some market growth squandered, where else is their growth going to come from? I have lots of sympathy for those losing their jobs, but none whatsoever for the senior management team or board.

notNow 11y ago
but none whatsoever for the senior management team or board. Who happen to keep their jobs no matter what happens to the company.
- alphadevx 11y ago
  Yeah they're keeping their jobs, but all they are doing is managing decline, nothing to take any pride in.

dschiptsov 11y ago

They were dead that very day when they brought that consulting scam company (I forgot its name) because it was clear signal of internal corruption and disconnection from so-called reality. Now it all unwinds.

RaSoJo 11y ago

This is so sad - And HP has an Ad Targeted on the page. Quite a bad targeting decision. http://imgur.com/GegYER0 http://imgur.com/GegYER0

tdicola 11y ago

Is HP one of the companies banging the drum of a tech job talent shortage? Because this is a pretty powerful message of just the opposite.

randomname2 11y ago

So in February HP announced it would fire 58,000 just so the company could spend even more billions on stock buybacks. Since then, buyback activity has gone down a bit and so they clearly needed to spend even more on buybacks. But where get the money? Cutting 30k jobs is a start: https://imgur.com/3MdRKqv https://imgur.com/3MdRKqv

reuven 11y ago

My first job, when I finished college in 1992, was at HP. They hesitated to offer me a job, because they said that when HP offers someone a position, they're basically offering them a job for life. Sure, you can snicker at that comment, since almost no company would (or can, or should) make such a claim nowadays. But people told me that before I got there, in the mid-1980s, there were big problems at the company. Rather than have any layoffs, they reduced everyone's salary by 10%, and told people to only work 9 of every 10 business days. This included everyone, starting with the top managers. I'm not sure if that was the right thing to do for the company. And I doubt many companies would do that today. And if they're talking about shedding 30k people, then HP is planning some drastic changes. But it's sad for me to remember the HP that I worked for at the time, in which there was a strong sense of community, and of "we're all in this together" -- and to think of the people who joined when such an ethos existed, and who will be laid off now. I'm not sure if there's a real alternative, and I'm a capitalist at heart... but it's still sad to see so many people laid off because it's now in style to break companies apart.

seibelj 11y ago
I just think it's the wrong way to look at things. It's better to cut 30,000 to save the company, than to keep everyone hired and wait for every employee to be out of work.
- reuven 11y ago
  Maybe. And I fully admit that given those two choices, it's better to save the company and lay of 30k people. But I do have to wonder how the company grew to be so bloated and large. Perhaps it was unfair for HP to hire them to begin with. I fully recognize that at the end of a day, an unprofitable company doesn't do anyone any good. It's just sad for me to think that the only way to make the company profitable is to lay off such a huge number of employees. I also know how big-company layoffs often work; they often don't take someone's quality of work into consideration, but rather the project or division in which they worked. Thus, I'm sure some great people will be looking for jobs, through no fault of their own.

Altay- 11y ago

The most shocking part of this story is that HP still employs 300,000+ people...

scholia 11y ago
IBM has a smaller turnover and employs even more....
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  IBM blacklists anyone who ever quits. Its emotional blackmail - "You'll never work in this industry again!" They're experts at giving the impression of career growth while underpaying.
  - enraged_camel 11y ago
    Not sure why you were downvoted. I've heard the exact same thing from people working there and have worked there.
  - navait 11y ago
    [Citation Needed] - I've seen people who have worked at IBM multiple times, and certainly nobody has ever said that to me.
  - atomicUpdate 11y ago
    Both versions of our IBM stories are obviously anecdotal, but just to show you're not 100% correct, they told me the door was always open if I ever wanted to go back. I also knew several people that had come and gone.

abebaaphumein 11y ago

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linkydinkandyou 11y ago

It's Carly Fiorina's legacy! And Meg Whitman carries her torch.

norea-armozel 11y ago

I do hope the Board of Directors sells off the Machine assets to a company that could actually pull it off (that's not Intel) like Microsoft or even, hell, Apple. The idea of moving processing to a memory-centered architecture just seems very interesting and possibly useful in non-trivial situations. And for that idea to die horribly with a company ill equipped just bothers me. If they're hurting enough to layoff tens of thousands people, surely they can sell off the technology to settle some of their debts and live. Just an idea.

Swannie 11y ago
Assuming you mean the non-memristor version of the machine? Microsoft are not a hardware company by any stretch. There are a few hardware engineers in small areas (Xbox, handsets, Surface), but almost none in server. Apple mostly make consumer facing equipment, again, no enterprise/server heritage. If not HP, then who has a true system development background? Well, not sure why you say not Intel. They are one of the few that actually does systems development. IBM makes the most sense. They've distances themselves from x86, and still maintain a system development mindset, including heavy investment in big data processing. They have the OS development skills. After IBM, there are a few maybe's: Google would be a realistic company too, as they have shown system engineering skills, end to end, including a lot of OS development work. Facebook - continue to do full system engineering in areas they believe are differentiators. I could see them doing something similar for analytics crunching. Outsiders: Oracle could be viable. There must be a few Sun guys left there that do system development, and they need to show they are still relevant in big data, but they don't spend much in R&D. Cisco - continue to do full system engineering, but would likely break this by making it too network centric. No real OS development heritage. Broadcom - continue to expand their areas. This would be a huge step for them in systems integration, but not big at all in terms of silicon and interconnects.

aNoob7000 11y ago

I guess the shortage of tech labor is over. :)

norea-armozel 11y ago

In an unrelated industry, Beechcraft (Hawker-Beech I believe it's called now) has a similar blow out. Too many managers and not enough actual workers making product. And to make it even worse, outsourcing integral parts of the aircraft to Mexico: fuel bladders, electrical components, and etc (and sadly they refused to properly train the Mexican workers in any of it). What are they doing now under Textron? Quietly returning those outsourced jobs to Arkansas instead of Salina (Kansas), focusing on making actual aircraft, and scuttling middle management and other other useless cruft from the company. Too bad no one with a similar attitude can just swoop in and buy out HP like how Beechcraft was bought out by Textron.

alistproducer2 11y ago

I work for a big company that uses HP software. It's horrible. If HP is anything like the company I work, HP is full of people getting free money for showing up and doing nothing. My thing is, if you know you are getting free money you have to expect it to end at some point. Have a contingency plan.

mkhpalm 11y ago

You know layoffs are coming up when your boss starts announcing things like dress codes in R&D due to "customer complaints". Severance packages are way more expensive than people leaving on their own.

qzcx 11y ago
The executives completely renounced the whole dress code thing though. It was some middle manager who though it would be a great idea for his unit and got slammed after it hit public media.

mrbgty 11y ago

It's much easier to buy companies (revenue) than to produce it yourself. This is their strategy. Buy companies to get revenue up, then cut costs via layoffs where there's overlap.

USNetizen 11y ago

Although this may seem bad for many of these workers, I know of a lot of other tech companies that will be chomping at the bit to pick up many of these talented affected workers, though it may require a relocation in some cases. As for HPE moving to these "low cost centers" for their talent, this is actually something I've seen happening where many larger companies are moving to smaller and mid-sized cities farther inland or down south in the U.S., places with adequate amenities to support their infrastructure and a decent workforce, but also within striking distance of large metros. The overhead and salaries in the DC beltway and Silicon Valley, for example, can be as much as 30-50% higher than locations just a couple hours drive away from them. So such a move to lower cost of living areas makes sense from a business perspective if you're running a services company in the IT industry and especially if you're serving cost-conscious government clients which HP has been doing in a big way lately.

mead5432 11y ago

When I first read the HN title, I thought it was that HP was going to cut somewhere between 25 and 30,000 jobs.

ashwinaj 11y ago

To me it's kinda obvious that any "major event" i.e. merger, large acquisition, split, extremely bad quarter etc. in a big company is an excuse to let people go. IMO the only way to survive these "events" in a big company is to make sure you are indispensable (which is not a reflection of how smart you are) or be politically astute. Despite this there are no guarantees, you just have to keep your eyes and ears open to the on goings of your company.

godgod 11y ago

This is a good thing for the survival of the company. I worked at HP and let me tell you, from what I saw, HP was the most bloated company I have ever seen. The horrible work ethic by the full time employees wasn't the exception but more the rule. I saw jsut about every employee take half day lunch breaks, and they'd hire contractors to do their work. I found it so disgusting that I exited the company. The full time employees I saw did NOTHING all day. They were basically all 25 year career employees that sat around doing NO actual work and they could get away with it because their manager and their managers manager was doing the same thing. HP is a horribly run company. Just about everyone there at least in the division I worked at was dead weight just showing up to collect a huge paycheck.