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HP Lays Off Unix/IA-64 gurus
A reader writes "On Tuesday HP announced that it is closing a lab in NJ. This was an HP-UX development lab, responsible for porting HP-UX to IA64. The lab employed top engineers, including some who have worked in Unix kernels for over 20 years (originally from Bell Labs, Novell, and other companies). " That report came from a soon-to-be former employee.
They've got Compaq. When 64-bit computers become mainstream, they can either go the "Compaq" way and use Windows or TRU-64. Or go IBM's way and stick with Linux. There is really no need to have a third way which is a waste of time porting things in and out. I think R&D should be better spent in improving e-paper or faster scanners/printers.
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Makes sense that HP would axe the lesser of the two operating systems.
It's not about products, it's about people. In the R&D business, that's where all the value is. Getting rid of people who are probably in the top 1000 kernel engineers in the world make no sense at all. Why not assign them to merge the best bits of HPUX and Tru64? After all, HP has PA-RISC people, Compaq has Alpha people, but Itanium is a new platform.
This is Fiorina screwing up, again, that's all. I wouldn't be at all surprised if these engineers found a warm welcome waiting for them at Sun or IBM.
At first I was going to agree with you whole heartedly. However, when I thought about it I realized something. In the computer industry it can be difficult to teach old dogs new tricks. Mainframe programmers don't do well in the world of Unix, simularly Apple people don't cross over to Intel well either.
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These guys are incredibily intelligent, but if they don't want to learn something new, it would take a lot of time and money to convince them to do so. I'm sure their salaries were already well above six figures, and it was probably in HP's best interest to let that kind of expense go. They can start fresh with new minds that they can manipulate for a lot less money. It may take a little more time to get them up to speed, but I've got a lot of friends jumping at the chance to play with 'big iron'. They'll work for a lot less money, and get comparable work done in just a little more time. They can also hire four or five new guys for the price of one of the old ones. More man power gives them a larger resource for creativity, more man time, and better 'employee redundancy', which geeks world wide know how great redundancy is.
Business is business, no room for emotion wasted on the trusty old porch dog. Sometimes you need to bring in a new pup (or two, or three, or four
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Silicon Valley doesn't take SGI seriously any more. Ever since 3D graphics hardware became cheap, SGI has been lost in search of a market niche. They've tried selling servers, creating a Silicon Studio division, making NT workstations, acquiring Cray, getting out of NT workstations, dumping the Silicon Studio division, acquiring Intergraph to get back into NT workstations... Nothing worked. Their basic problem, that their stuff costs 2-3x what comparable stuff costs from others, has yet to be solved.
It will be sad if HP goes that route.
Sounds like you've bought into the major management fallacy of our times - that you can cut one good experienced developer and replace him with 3-4 inexperienced developers for a lower total cost and still get equivalent quality. This is the same fallacy that has led to the wholesale replacement of experienced employees by cheap H1B-visa holders.
The results of the H1B replacement have been extremely poor - almost universally you hear about projects that have gone down the tubes after the transition to H1B. Many times the reason for failure is couched in terms that are not easily linked to the management decision to toss their experienced people, because management is extremely blame adverse. But unless the people are doing the equivalent of "sweat-shop" programming - there is no way that tossing experience in favor of a direct lower cost is going to produce a better product.
At the levels these people people work at, computer science is an art - you make decisions based on prior experience and an instinct based on years of experience discovering what works and what doesn't work. You put a bunch of newbies in there and they will spend the same time taking all the wrong-steps that the experienced people did ten years ago, meanwhile product quality goes out the window and so does time to market. It isn't about teaching old dogs new tricks - the old tricks are fundamental nowadays - just as you don't re-invent the shape of the wheel either.
Plus, if you had read the article, you would see that the people in that lab come from a wide range of backgrounds, they aren't all HPUX crusties - in fact most of them came from Bell Labs just a few years ago. They certainly don't fit the profile of a bunch of old computer geezers who don't know their way around a modern OS or a modern CPU (they were porting to Itanic, some would call that a post-modern CPU - others might call it trash, but that's another story).
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Of the 120 people, 23 (the best, I assume) were offered jobs in Fort Collins, where a part of the HP-UX work gets done anyway. Also, this is only a fraction of the 1000 or so HP-UX engineers...most of which sit in the Bay Area or Colorado.
The sky is not falling. HP-UX will still be the only non-Linux Unix shipping on Itanium when McKinley rolls around. It looks like Sun and IBM have shelved their ports, for now at least. Don't you think HP gets this?
I've watched fresh college grads who happen to know Java develop a database application from scratch, and it was really sad. No recoverable transactions. No real data structure design. No programming discipline. No documentation. No nothing. I truly feel sorry for the customer who has paid for nothing.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
If HP is laying off hackers in NJ, it's not because of their technical value, it's because NJ is Siberia as far as HP is concerned. HP's decision makers are out west. If there is a pile of work to do (and revenue to be made), the suits would rather have it done in their own profit center. And when money is tight, they cut loose the remote location that doesn't have the political clout to defend itself. Having hacked UNIX since the 1970's, I've certainly seen this happen before - I've had it happen to me before.
Because of that forward product motion, customers could standardize on the HP platform, and buy 3rd party apps and other items that ran under HP/UX (Oracle in particular, since HP/UX is widely used as a base for client/server). With HP/UX 11i as their main server OS, they had some serious scalability and reliability going for them. HP/UX will be supported for the next few years, of course, but once that ends, customers will have the future budgetary choices of sticking with whatever direction Carly takes them in, or abandon HP for a more consistently-managed vendor (i.e. IBM). Bet they pick the latter choice.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
The latest version of SUSE now includes a new LVM. This LVM uses the same commands and arguments as HP. SUSE has a white paper on the new LVM implementation somewhere on their site.
SUSE also includes the ReiserFS journaling file system. By the way - Linux can store ACLs on most of it's JFS implementations - HP-UX cannot (you can only use ACLs on HFS, not VxFS). Care to explain this brain-damaged design?
Yes, Linux still has problems with enterprise scalability, but not the problems you've mentioned.
p.s. I'm pretty ticked off that RedHat seems to have done nothing with the LVM - not a peep.