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Hewlett Packard Enterprise Is Said to Plan About 5k Job Cuts
- tiernano 9y agoTitle should really be HPE, since hp is the consumer side, and the jobs effect the enterprise...
- k3oni 9y agoYou're right, changed to HPE.
- rm_-rf_slash 9y agoMaybe I'm just not as knowledgeable as the elite of the hackerati, but I haven't noticed HP doing anything relevant in at least 10 years. These days everyone I know codes on a Mac. Most bulk order desktops I see are Dells. I ask seriously, with no intention to troll: what is HP good for these days?
- maxxxxx 9y agoMy work laptop is a HP and actually not that bad.
- daxorid 9y agoFor those of us who hate OS X and prefer to work on Linux, the HP Spectre line runs most modern distros just fine out of the box.
- marvel_boy 9y agoIs not MacOs a Unix[1]? [1]https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/1489/is-mac-os-x-unix https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/1489/is-mac-os-x-un...
- daxorid 9y agoYes, but: 1. The UI is horrible and not amenable to sufficient customization. Xfce, bspwm, and i3 are all substantially better from a user experience and getting-things-done standpoint. 2. The availability of tooling for basically everything other than graphics design or video editing is significantly worse than for Linux.
- s73ver_ 9y agoThe availability of tooling is just fine. You may need to compile from source, but that shouldn't be a big deal. Otherwise there's also MacPorts, Homebrew, and fink for pre-built packages. The UI thing is entirely subjective.
- alexnewman 9y agoTotally agree with all of this. Also it's getting more and more closed every day
- skrebbel 9y agoThis article isn't about the laptop and printer manufacturer, it's about a gigantic enterprise software consultancy.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ecshafer 9y agoHp does a lot of servers, switches, blade systems, and plenty of other Enterprise equipment. As well as all of the different management software that runs them. They are also a major open stack contributor. Your point of view is too common here, people only look at the consumer products and have no knowledge of operations.
- murph-almighty 9y agoSomething tells me that even that will get a little shaky as the public cloud grows, unless they nab a contract with Amazon/Microsoft/Google to provide servers for their cloud services.
- HateInAPuddle 9y agoThey are still huge in the server market.
- richardknop 9y agoEnterprise. Basically horribly overpriced clunky systems for back offices of non tech companies. For example CRMs or any custom proprietary stuff, usually involving lots of Java and XML, integrations with other horrible enterprise systems from other players in the field like Oracle, SAP etc. It's really hard to understand this from HN startup / open source / Go/Rust/NodeJS bubble but most of IT is enterprise and it's the reason why companies like HP, Dell, Oracle, SAP are making billions of dollars even though to average HN poster paying for any of their horrible products seems crazy. Edit: and as somebody mentioned also selling all sort of server / networking stuff
- nsxwolf 9y agoIf you can't understand why enterprises don't just hire a couple engineers to rebuild everything in Go/Rust/NodeJS and save millions of dollars in enterprise software expenses, you probably really are in a bubble.
- richardknop 9y agoI can understand it. Just commenting on what I suspect is majority HN view. Lot of people here are from startups or from Silicon Valley etc. I'd also like to mention massive waste of money in enterprise IT though. I have seen big enterprise companies buy licenses for products from a consultancy company which costs tens of millions per year and it never ends up being used ;) Rewriting everything in a hipster / HN favorite language is obviously naive but there is a lot of money being wasted now in enterprise IT that could be saved and used more efficiently (like R&D and innovation). Enterprise is area ripe for disruption imho.
- rwmj 9y agoTo some extent, SaaS is the disruption. Which companies run their own email servers or CRM? Quite a few now use GApps (ugh), SalesForce or similar.
- richardknop 9y ago
- zero_one_one 9y agoThey also create several workstations used quite extensively in the video editing world, along with other power-user oriented industrial uses
- ausjke 9y agoHP Z800 workstation is great for me, though not video editing.
- zero_one_one 9y agoIf you don't mind me asking, what are you using the horsepower for? Is it in use for day-to-day operations?
- ausjke 9y agobuild machine that is, my build normally takes 1-4 hours on my PC, on Z800 it can finish in 20 minutes with 12 cores and 48GB DDRs.
- dagw 9y agoThe higher end HP Z series workstations are incredibly solid and popular (if a bit pricy) especially among people running heavier engineering software or high end video editing. And everybody I know that needs a portable machine to run AutoCAD on has a Zbook. But this is about HPE which is the company that sells Servers, networking equipment and enterprise "Solutions", not the company that sells computers and printers.
- pascalxus 9y agoSomeone above mentioned that they do defense contract. From what I understand, once you get something like that with the government, your pretty much locked in and get vast amounts of revenue repeatedly year after year. The government, can't just switch to another provider, because often times the provider needs to go through some big expensive review process.
- balozi 9y agoJust in time for quarterly earnings report.
- zero_one_one 9y agoCould we be possibly be looking at HP taking HP/UX the same way that Oracle took Solaris? i.e. tossing it overboard?
- planteen 9y agoOracle is killing Solaris. At least HP has a recent precedent with licensing the rights to another OS (VMS) to a separate company to let its life continue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS And I doubt that HP/UX was 5,000 people within HP.
- zero_one_one 9y agoMy concern would be that as they look to carve off the less profitable areas of their enterprise divisions, that the HP/UX team (as a smaller subset of the overall quoted number of 5000) and in turn the HP/UX product as it stands at the moment, could potentially be marked to suffer the same projected fate as Solaris.
- planteen 9y agoYeah... I mean how bright of a future does HP/UX have as long as it is tied to Itanium? It seems like a x86-64 port is necessary for future life.
- zero_one_one 9y agoAgreed... although x86 port for Solaris from SPARC wasn't enough to keep Solaris alive and kicking, despite the huge advancements Sun had made with the kernel and filesystem etc.
- tootie 9y agoI remember the heyday of Unix, but I haven't seen a single Unix system in about 10 years.
- X86BSD 9y ago
- simonh 9y agoNo wonder Meg wanted the Uber job.
- skrebbel 9y agoThis article says that HPE has 50k employees. According to Wikipedia, they have almost 200k. Who's right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett_Packard_Enterprise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett_Packard_Enterprise
- richardknop 9y agoHP Inc has around 49k employees (consumer computer / printers), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has 195k. According to Wikipedia. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Inc. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett_Packard_Enterprise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett_Packard_Enterprise
- yeukhon 9y agoWowowo, 195k employees? So many! Do they really make that much of money? What are the 195k workers for? Dell has way less as a whole company (even after the merge) [1]. [1]: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4104846-dell-technologies-dvmt-q2-2018-results-earnings-call-transcript https://seekingalpha.com/article/4104846-dell-technologies-d...
- WorldMaker 9y agoAmong other clients, HPE is a giant defense contractor supporting military hardware and software. HPE also inherited HP's research labs, which Dell never quite had anything similar too, and medical division where they make a lot of very important medical/hospital devices. ETA: HP at one point was much more similar to GE than Dell, and HPE is all the "fun" stuff that wasn't Dell-like. (The Dell like side is what got spun off into "new" HP.)
- mfer 9y agoHPE still has labs? Note the last time anything was published by labs... https://www.labs.hpe.com/publications https://www.labs.hpe.com/publications
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dingo_bat 9y agoTitle should be HPE.
- pm90 9y agoThe cloud market is super competitive right now. HP tried to develop its own OpenStack based cloud but AFAIK it didn't turn out very well at all. I'm wondering what their strategy is going forward. Are they still in the cloud business or are they gonna stick to the hardware/server side of things.
- nepotism2018 9y agoLike many, HP didn't know what openstack is for (on-premise or public cloud)
- phillu 9y agoCan you explain what you mean? What is OpenStack for?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- vthallam 9y agoProbably, the comment meant that OpenStack works best only in specific scenarios, like Private Cloud for Enterprises with strict compliance and regulatory requirements. Rackspace seems to be trying to do more in this area.
- jonathantm 9y agoYes. Very.
- nepotism2018 9y agovthallam cleared up what I meant, apologies
- Top19 9y agoTheir mistake was buying this cloud company, Attunity, for $11 billion, and then realizing the company had completely defrauded them with fraudulent accounting. They had to do a 100% write-off.
- fetus8 9y agoAs an HPE employee, we've been hearing of major layoffs for the last few months, and they're supposedly going to start in November...
- lost_name 9y agoNot that this is really any help, but an acquaintance of mine works for HPE and notified he was being laid off yesterday, and his last day is today. He was with HP (now HPE) for maybe 4-6 years.
- adrianN 9y agoHow is that legal?
- enraged_camel 9y agoHow is what legal?
- EliRivers 9y agoOne day's notice of redundancy. In many countries, in the circumstances at hand, it's not legal.
- nulagrithom 9y agoHow is it legal to tell someone they won't be working at their job anymore, with one day notice and presumably unemployment benefits considering it's part of a reduction in force? I would certainly hope that remains legal.
- pavlov 9y agoThat's the American expectation, but most European employment legislation disagrees -- that's probably the root of the question.
- fred_is_fred 9y ago
- alexnewman 9y agoAny HPE software engineers looking hit me up at posix4e at gmail .com
- saip 9y agoLikewise, any cloud infrastructure engineers in the Bay Area that might be looking, shoot me a mail - sai at floydhub dot com
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- alexnewman 9y agoWe don't require legal APPROVAL for open source
- genzoman 9y agoI worked for HP during their split. HPE paid some firm 500k for their new logo. Their logo is a green rectangle, something you could do in MS Paint in literally a second. HP/E is way too bloated and IMO has very poor management. They have a nice patent portfolio, though.
- fetus8 9y agoAccording to my direct manager, HPE's management structure is going to be the hardest hit with these layoffs. I think she used the term "streamline" to describe what they're trying to do with the management structure.
- adam12 9y agoSo by your logic, the more you pay for something the more complex it should be?
- Quarrelsome 9y agopretty much. Or rather: the more you pay for something the harder it should have been to produce. I think in almost every situation you shouldn't be spending a half-mil on a logo redesign. That's super excessive.
- atbentley 9y ago99 percent invisible has a podcast discussing this issue with a designer who takes the opposite position. A main point is that a simple, reproducible logo is ideal. http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/negative-space-logo-design-michael-bierut/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/negative-space-logo-de...
- nradov 9y agoSure simple is good but a rectangle? Come on.
- planteen 9y ago
- tootie 9y ago"she said she’s pushing to cut “layers” in the organization and become more efficient" I hate this kind of nonsense. You can't just get rid of thousands of people then say "efficiency" and retain full productivity. At a place like HP that's bidding on 8 or 9 figure deals, you absolutely can't function without a sizable bureaucracy.
- wmccullough 9y agoBingo. YMMV, but in my experience the majority of inefficiency is caused by middle managers who are too busy trying to "win" political capital or burn down perceived enemies. After watching HPE for a number of years my guess is that in a few months they'll add double or triple this number of layoffs to an offshore team.
- alexasmyths 9y agoSadly, there is another economic reality: most good businesses are actually very inefficient and could cut 10% without missing a heartbeat. Here's the key: when businesses develop dominance in a market, they get fat margins - and they often just 'hire'. It becomes instinctive to think that 'people create value' and so they hire. Moreover - VP's, Directors, Managers are all trying to build their status, and they 'push to hire'. I worked at a post-startup-stage high-growth company, and my VP was given directive to 'hire 100 people'. Completely not driven by business needs, or project needs, or ROI. 'Just hire'. There is sometimes good strategic reasoning for 'just staffing' up i.e. scrape all of the talent in an area way from competitors, be a 'real company' to validate the upcoming IPO etc.. but it's really perverse. Google, FB, MS - all guilty of this. Regular companies just the same. I'll bet 1/2 of finance today could be replaced by computers - or frankly nothing. 1/2 of Hedge Funds could just put their money in indexes, drop their staff and get the same results. Large successful companies often spend billions on 'new projects' that are doomed to fail - one could argue that 'failure' is part of the innovative process, yes, but it might be more efficient to invest/partner with startups. When big, lumbering companies start to wane, well, they can't afford all the graft and have to start letting go. It's an odd cycle, and it's surprisingly not as directly related to productivity as we might want to imagine. I once worked with a large internal marketing team of maybe 25 people, they did almost nothing. Nobody was really sure what they were there for. They 'did stuff'. They were smart, nice. But they were very irrelevant - and I took pains not to discount their effort, i.e. not realize that they were 'important but unrecognized' cogs in the wheel. No. They were hired 'for hiring sake' and 'worked' for the sake of 'work'. This is common. A lot of big, entrenched industries are like this.
- fred_is_fred 9y agoHaving previously worked at HP for 10+ years I can clearly state that HP is always in the midst of some layoff. After the first Carly purge of 2001 they decided to make it stealthy instead of big bang. Edit: I decided to share what the Carly purge was like. We all knew that on a certain day we'd have the layoffs. Walk into the office. Conference room doors had windows on them, they were all papered over. Conf rooms had lots of boxes of tissues and bottles of water. You'd sit at your desk and someone would come by and tap you on the shoulder. It was pretty miserable. After that experience I think they decided that they'd announce stuff like this but do it much lower key, not all on the same day and very privately.
- CydeWeys 9y agoWow. After something like that happened I'd start looking for a new job regardless of whether I was laid off or not. Similarly, I started looking to leave my first job out of university when they started offshoring some of the engineer positions to Ukraine. They weren't laying anyone off in the US but it was clear that they were trying to hire more people in Ukraine, which might put downward pressure on the wage raises of the US-based workforce, so I started looking and got out of there within months. The offshoring never did quite work out for them though (turns out that it's hard to offshore consultants).
- praneshp 9y ago> Wow. After something like that happened I'd start looking for a new job regardless of whether I was laid off or not. I think this usually factors into the number of people laid off. Yahoo did a pretty similar layoff in early 2016, after promising 15% cut in workforce. The number of people that left on the day of was much lesser, but an equal number of people left in the aftermath. My old team went down from 30+ to around 5 before hiring other people and building up to a reasonable size again.
- fred_is_fred 9y agoThe economy sucked in 2001 and I was in that weird position where you're in between new college hire and experienced (2-3 years). I tried looking for a job, it was terrible. I ended up sticking around.
- bryanwb 9y agoMeg is running this company into the ground. Carly helped kick off the process
- CommieBobDole 9y agoI've watched the slow-motion trainwreck that is HP and HPE though the lens of working with ArcSight, a very expensive and formerly segment-leading enterprise SIEM tool. HP spent a billion and a half dollars to buy them in 2010 and then immediately didn't seem to be able to do anything with it. They ignored needed updates while competitors got better every year. They didn't even seem to be able to actually sell the thing - I had a large client who wanted to upgrade to the latest version (more than a million dollars in licensing costs alone), and couldn't get anyone at HPE to return their calls to actually sell him the thing; after six months of trying to give them his already-approved budget, they gave up and bought a competing product. Now they've sold it off to Micro Focus, who seem to be a company whose business model is milking dying software for support and professional services money. HPE is an organization that has grown so dysfunctional that it's essentially incapable of operating. Somehow I doubt laying off 5k people is going to help that very much.
- vram22 9y agoMicroFocus bought some other well-known software company in the last few years, right? Can't remember the name, but it was a well-known one. Novell or SUSE maybe?
- buzer 9y agoThey bought Attachmate which gave them NetIQ, Novell & SUSE
- csours 9y agoHoo boy. See also pretty much everything on this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Interactive#Products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Interactive#Products All of those products were good for their time, but they never really advanced. As one small example, LoadRunner is load testing software. When writing load tests you use it in interactive mode, but it would be nice to actually run the tests from a server in the background. You can do this... but any errors will POP A MODAL WINDOW! Serious-fucking-ly!
- 9y ago
- tostitos1979 9y agoAnyone know which division HP Labs falls into?
- pbhowmic 9y agoI have been contracting with HPE for some time now and I went through the HPE/HPI split and asset spinoffs to DXC & Microfocus. I did not realize until now that HPE headcount had shrunk to the point where 5000 layoffs represented a 10% reduction in the workforce.
- s73ver_ 9y agoYou know, the thing that really gets me about these things is this: Most of the people getting laid off did nothing wrong; all most of them are guilty of is choosing the wrong company to work for. Meanwhile, the executives and managers are guilty of mismanagement, yet they're getting rewarded for doing this.
- cosinetau 9y agoWhen engineers make mistakes in software, do we not want forgiveness? A chance to learn from mistakes? I get the ire, but the world is a dirty place.
- s73ver_ 9y agoWhen I make mistakes in software, I don't get rewarded for it. And it sure as hell doesn't mean a lot of people lose their jobs.
- csnewb 9y agoI'm in ArcSight/HPE now under Micro Focus. Does this news still affect us?
- JBlue42 9y agoWhy do people keep putting forth Meg Whitman for a possible presidential run? Obviously, even a baboon would be better and more consistent than the current POTUS but HP has such a terrible reputation and seems like it's always in crisis mode, laying people off, etc. not to mention they can't even keep a support page up. I guess she's making money for someone and those folks would like to see her in office but maybe we should stop thinking that CEOs are qualified to run the country. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/71kkr0/thank_you_hp_for_your_great_printer_support/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/71kkr0/thank_you_...
- akhilcacharya 9y ago....they..don't? Are you confusing her for Carly Fiorina?
- JBlue42 9y agoNo. She's CEO at HP and, at least in LA, I've heard rumbles of people talking about her for a possible run. There's even an article today from Forbes: http://fortune.com/2017/09/22/hp-hpe-meg-whitman/ http://fortune.com/2017/09/22/hp-hpe-meg-whitman/ She tried to be governor and I think ever since a few people have put her on a short list. At the end of that article, she seems to be portrayed as uninterested in the proposition.
- akhilcacharya 9y agoThere is zero path for that after both endorsing Romney and Clinton.
- zghst 9y agoWell unlike corporations, governments have completely different pressures than the market. Being president is much different than a track record of strong corporate performance. Since the US is an oligarchy, its about being well connected, the ability to source and channel political talent, and represent the voices of the elites.
- cosinetau 9y agoLast year before I graduated, I was offered a very lucrative software engineering position in Nowhere, Arkansas. It seemed interesting, but in my 10$/hour opinion I had other goals for myself, and there didn't appear to be a community that would help me grow where they wanted me to work. On top of this, one of their VPs made a hard sell of the position, which, didn't make me feel particularly comfortable so I politely declined. This article didn't mention Arkansas, or Software positions at all. I'm curious in any SME's opinion if I've dodged a bullet? IBM is also building up a cloud provider solution, in addition to Google, Microsoft, and Amazon's solutions. I feel like a lot of shops are pretty entrenched in AWS, and HPE is kinda new and seems to be pivoting a lot. Somethings got to give in that market, no?
- sgs1370 9y agore: IBM, I'm not sure that SoftLayer/bluemix is getting a lot of traction. AWS: IMO they are the leader to be defeated by the competitors, doing well, cutting prices, making it easy for devs. Google: have heard positive signals especially around ML. MSFT: don't know a lot but I heard they are going to let you run your own Azure on-prem. HPE as a IAAS provider? I doubt it
- zghst 9y agoI am glad I didn't accept their job offer. Nice people though.
- iokevins 9y agoHP Alumni resources: http://www.hpalumni.org/index http://www.hpalumni.org/index Excellent resource for HP/HPE staff leaving the company.