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Having 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

Having 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 ago
Wow. 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 ago
  The 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.
deleted 9y ago
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gozur88 9y ago
What's really sad about this is when I graduated from college HP was a highly sought after place to work because they had a lot of "cool" products and prided themselves on never having had a layoff. Then they spun off the interesting bits as Agilent and decided competing head-to-head with other conglomerates in saturated markets was a good business plan.

CydeWeys 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. 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 ago
The 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.

deleted 9y ago

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gozur88 9y ago

What's really sad about this is when I graduated from college HP was a highly sought after place to work because they had a lot of "cool" products and prided themselves on never having had a layoff. Then they spun off the interesting bits as Agilent and decided competing head-to-head with other conglomerates in saturated markets was a good business plan.