
HP to cut 25-30k jobs - somberi
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34265094
======
joshmn
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?

~~~
jfoutz
Your dad needs to think about the next best 5 guys, and how to pick them up
for cheap when the layoffs happen. At his age striking out on his own will
seem absolutely terrifying.

Work on him for a few months. He must have built up some serious contacts over
the years. His pitch is straightforward. HP can't actually support their
products anymore, they don't have the staff. He knows the hardware inside and
out. Sell support contracts. Snipe the best after the layoffs.

You don't look for a job when you need one. this rumor is going to terrify
customers. Since he has good personal relationships with those fortune 1000,
he needs to monetize that. He must have some idea of what HP charges for his
time. He can send the new guys, and come in to rescue at the end.

I know this sounds crazy. Think really hard about it though. There isn't
anyplace that will hire him at 100k. He needs to set up his own shop. Think of
it this way, 0.05 < P(new_biz_fail) < 0.1. What is the chance of him getting a
good new job in 6 months? i'd guess less than 10%. With your mom, he needs to
bring in serious cash. He's in a position to do that. If he picks good
helpers, it won't consume his life, anymore than the current job. He really
only needs 1 contract, and can build from there.

It sounds super scary. Hell, it is super scary. If he needs stability for the
next 15 years or so, this is a really good way to do it. Really, in his
position, as good as he is, it's less scary than going and looking for work.

~~~
joshmn
This sounds like a great idea, but I don't know if he's such an entrepreneur
or risk-taker. Some people are, some people aren't. It's a natural thing.

I'm not sure of the papers he's signed (non-competes...), or the contracts
that HP has with their customers (there must be some), but... he could
definitely "get the band together" and pull off such a feat. Again, I think
this goes back to the contracts he had.

He's one of 4 remaining from the "blue days" (time with Digital); I think
they'd be able to pull it off if they did go this route. They're all pretty
awesome.

~~~
jasode
_> He's one of 4 remaining from the "blue days" (time with Digital); I think
they'd be able to pull it off if they did go this route. They're all pretty
awesome._

From personal experience, I want to add some long-term expectations about
commanding premium consulting rates -- especially as it relates to vendor-
proprietary knowledge.

I used to work for an enterprise software firm and was on their "crisis
firefighting team". I'd travel to customer sites at less than 24 hours notice
and fix their worst problems. These were the problems that were escalated to
the CEO.

When I left the company and struck out on my own as a freelance "subject
matter expert", I was able to command $300k a year for a few years. My
background and rate was easy to sell: I was trained directly by the people who
wrote the software.

The thing is that I always knew I was living on borrowed time because that
high income was based on my previous association of being in the "inner
circle" of how the software works. I had to diversify my skills away from that
software because with each year that passed by, I became more of an "outsider"
just like everyone else.

To relate to your dad's situation ... yes he's very good at what he does, but
_some_ of that value may also be his inside feed of information from HP. After
he's separated from HP, as each new generation of server & printer hardware is
released, his "aura" of HP knowledge can become outdated and less relevant
value for customers. In other words, he needs to charge whatever premium rate
he can, save as much as he can, all with an eye towards diversifying his
income. Diversity could mean new tech skills such as learning AWS architecture
or buying real estate to get income from rental properties.

~~~
paulmd
For people who work with legacy technologies, it can actually be the reverse
situation. Yeah, your knowledge of The Latest Hipster Web Framework becomes
less valuable year on year, but the situation is a little different for senior
personnel running Fortune 50-level ops on legacy technologies. They aren't
exactly churning OpenVMS systems architects out of coding boot camps. It's a
lot the same situation as COBOL programmers are in - they're not something you
need a million of, the work may not be 100% stable, but when you do need them
they're fixing mission-critical systems that have millions/billions of dollars
of business riding on them and the rates are astronomical.

------
iofj
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&...](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)

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...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-24/why-hewlett-packard-
firing-58000)

~~~
wpietri
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.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_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?_

The keyword to search for in the economic literature is "labor hoarding". In
short, companies tend to (by default) keep employees until well after they are
no longer useful. Then some sort of a shock causes the company to shed the
deadwood all at once.

This is management incompetence, but it's exceedingly common. If you ever see
a company (e.g. Netflix) which sheds employees regularly, that's a very good
sign.

~~~
mercer
Could you argue that in a broader sense this exact same thing happens not just
on the company level, but on the level of entire economies? I recall reading a
few articles on how recessions/depressions often have a way of shaking up
industries to align (or rather, catch up) with new innovations/developments.

~~~
kaffeemitsahne
It's like a spring/mass dragging across a rough surface: it stays behind until
the tension gets too much, and then skips forward. You can find this effect in
a lot of places.

------
stevewepay
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
What precisely did Carly Fiorina do weong, and what precisely should she have
done instead?

~~~
jsudhams
I think she kind of kill the HP Way read
[http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/2002/2002_04_10....](http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/2002/2002_04_10.hpway10.html)

~~~
chrisbennet
Thanks, that article was very helpful.

------
wsxcde
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
> 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
That's a punishment, not a solution. Then what?

~~~
bosdev
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.

------
reuven
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
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
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.

~~~
scottkduncan
A lot goes back to the EDS acquisition, which seemed doomed almost from the
start. A poorly planned acquisition + longstanding internal issues will almost
inevitably get you to this kind of outcome.

------
paganel
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
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.

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

~~~
josephcooney
Bangalore garage.

~~~
hwstar
No: Bangladeshi Garage with a dirt floor.

------
ekianjo
> 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
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
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
Ink?

~~~
Animats
Toner, which is cheaper than ink.

------
norea-armozel
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.

------
hardwaresofton
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
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 :(

~~~
prodmerc
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...

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

~~~
scholia
IBM has a smaller turnover and employs even more....

~~~
JoeAltmaier
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.

~~~
navait
[Citation Needed] - I've seen people who have worked at IBM multiple times,
and certainly nobody has ever said that to me.

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

------
BogusIKnow
"the need for any future corporate restructuring."

Ever.

Always funny when CEO talk about the future and think about the next quarter.

------
tdicola
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.

------
jsudhams
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
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.

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

~~~
Gibbon1
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
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.

------
LandoCalrissian
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
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...

------
mkhpalm
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
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.

------
USNetizen
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.

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

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

~~~
tsotha
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.

------
ashwinaj
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.

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

~~~
bluedino
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.

------
randomname2
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)

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

~~~
MC7447a
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
"Never mistake activity for achievement." \- John Wooden

------
alistproducer2
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.

------
sjclemmy
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.

------
norea-armozel
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
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.

------
alphadevx
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
_but none whatsoever for the senior management team or board._

Who happen to keep their jobs no matter what happens to the company.

~~~
alphadevx
Yeah they're keeping their jobs, but all they are doing is managing decline,
nothing to take any pride in.

------
dschiptsov
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
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)

------
mrbgty
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.

------
aNoob7000
I guess the shortage of tech labor is over. :)

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

~~~
pferde
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.

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mead5432
When I first read the HN title, I thought it was that HP was going to cut
somewhere between 25 and 30,000 jobs.

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matmann2001
Is this another classic HP re-org?

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

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godgod
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.

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brudgers
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
Perhaps you missed this in the article, but these layoffs are in the
Enterprise division. The printer business is separate.

~~~
brudgers
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.

