There's many reasons for layoffs besides the belief that employees are negative / insufficient value. For example, companies do lay-offs in smaller quantities s

There's many reasons for layoffs besides the belief that employees are negative / insufficient value. For example, companies do lay-offs in smaller quantities simply because a high level business objective wasn't met and a division is going to be disbanded as a strategic decision. In HP's case, I'm pretty sure that HP management feels that these targeted employees work for divisions that management can't foresee sufficient profit to keep operating which has increasingly become based around service and support for the old Compaq lines of business. HP has tried desperately to break into higher margin enterprise software and services for at least two decades now with mixed results and after failing to increase their brand value on the hardware side to approach something like Apple (I looked at HP's on the book assets compared to their market cap a few years ago and they were worth less than if they liquidated according to their market cap). Buying VoodooPC a while ago is an example of trying to increase brand value by associating themselves with "high end" stuff with corresponding mark-ups. Organizational morale at HP has been pretty dire for at least a decade by now with few bright spots of news and a revolving door of leadership. I left HP in very early 2010 after a few years there when I was acquired in, but in hindsight I should have left probably the second I heard of the acquisition and cashed out what I could of my NQSOs / ISOs. I've been calling them the Walmart of tech years ago before these recent stories about Amazon showed up because unlike Amazon, the stories of poor pay, long hours, and consistently below-market compensation are very, very common at HP.