Slashdot Mirror
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.
...are on the downward slope. The BEST thing about HP was their engineering. I bought a new Omnibook 6000 in June and love it.
How are they supposed to compete in the upcoming 64-bit arena if they are laying off key development personnel? Leave it up to Compaq? Look what they did with Alpha. I guess I'll be building my own Itanium system in about three years...
At a presentation I recently attended concerning Linux for zSeries (zSeries is IBM's new 64bit mainframe platform) the comment was made that one of the big research firms (don't remember which...) had said that in seven years there would only be three operating systems: Windows, Linux, and zSeries(also what IBM calls the 64bit replacement for OS/390). Could this be the start of that? I'm not suggesting that Linux will replace HP-UX today or this year, but could they be holding off on the port since Linux already runs on IA-64?
Just wondering.
Politics, Culture, Food?
Everyone says they want linux to be the next big o/s. Then, when Linux starts grabbing market control from other groups, the same people wine and complain! If open source takes market share from closed source competitors, some people will be laid off. It's not that complicated.
It seems to me that laying off some of your top OS engineers is really stupid. HPIX may not have been the best flavor of unix out there, but it did provide an alternative. I'm really saddened by how many OS's and architechtures ar biting the dust at the moment. Looks like it's gonna be a one chip three OS world in not too long....
:-)
Moderators: please browse at 0. I may have made some stupid comments in the past, but I do have something of value to say occasionaly
For the record, most of the Florham Park site was not working on IA-64, and will not be let go.
Reading the article and the brief comment about it on Slashdot, I get the feeling that this should not have happened and that it is a bad move by HP for those gurus.
Let me first tell you that I feel sorry for those guys, just like anyone else, but at the same time I want to point out that this is the natural of evolution/change.
Some may argue that those guys are so-important/good and should not have been let go, or that the project at hand is so-important/good et. al..., and so on.
I think we need to look at this, and everything else, as part of what makes us "advance" forward and look ahead. To me this is nothing but "change-in-action" for which without "change" we will never see beyond our current perspective.
I am very confidence that those HP engineers (and the project) that are being doomed today, will go out and come back with a much superior product now that they are faced with higher challenges due to this "change" that has been forced upon them.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
If linux wants to stay alive, though, and maintain it's buzz, it has to do one thing: Don't fully emulate windows. Reason? OS/2 did it, and so all the developers said, "Why should I port to OS/2? That OS runs windows anyway"
In today's environment, it doesn't really matter if she's good. These executives sit in their offices and make decisions for people that they've never met and whose jobs they know nothing about. She says she can do it, HP's board of directors let her try until it gets so bad that they have to oust her, then she'll get her parachute and some other moron will say that they have the magic beans and that they'll make everything better. And for some reason, people always want to believe it.
Killing HP/UX probably isn't a bad move anyway. Killing TRU64 probably isn't a bad move, either. Is anyone still buying and using significant numbers of these things? When I worked for MCI Worldcom 3 years ago, they INSISTED on using Digital UNIX instead of Solaris or Linux... Man, I bet that Manager/Director is real happy now... Actually, I bet he got promoted out of his job before the shit hit the fan.
That's the way it works: Do your worst, and then get out before the shit hits the fan. This is why I'll always be an engineer and I never want to manage, ever again.
HP engineers are nice because they are into the team thing
I wonder how long until Intel or AMD get down there and start recruiting
realistically Intel needs help with IA64 because it's compiler is not really up to scratch (witness the compaq/digital guys moveing to intel)
AMD needs to get O/S AND Compiler to work on x86-64 realistically the new win2k kernel to work on it
so I dont think that they will be unemployed for long
its a big gaff on HP part because HP-UX was going to be the successor going from PA-RISC to IA64 meaning that customers had very little to worry about compared to True64 customers
the only real big guys not laying off core people seems to be SUN
(remember that alot of linux people got layed off as well recently )
so remember good engineers are never in need of a job just projects that need good engineers the problem is of course finding the true good engineers
regards
john "curently trying to get a job" jones
The capricious way that companies seem to be doing this (I shudder to think what else will happen during this merger), is staggering. If I ran a company I wouldn't let experienced engineers loose on the streets and give them a possible reason for a grudge. Someone is going to snap them up and the short term profit of axing them will be a pittance compared to the revenue and goodwill you lose from them in the long run. Think about what DEC/Alpha engineers did for AMD and then think about what these people could do for IBM or SUN or any number of companies.
The analyst in the article said it does not make any sense and he's right. This leads me to believe that their strategy is not as coherent as they claim. What's going to happen when they tell their customers "Not only are we giong to sell you an Intel box for your server, but it's not going to have HP-UX on it." Thus, the original reason for buying an HP (their architecture and software) is now gone. If they think their "brand" is something else, then they will be horribly surprised when their customers say "well as long as we're changing platforms and OSs I think I will check out what Sun and IBM have to offer." No one is strong enough in times like these to crap on valuable employees and customers this way. Doesn't anyone understand that this is the time to keep valuable employees and steal them from others? When the dust settles it will be painfully obvious that they need them.
"The plural of anecdote is not data." -- Roger Brinner
The people saying that HP is dropping everything to concentrate on Linux are nuts. Linux won't scale to 64 processors, it only recently lost the 2-gig filesize limit, HP has no hope of getting these scalability features past Linus, and there are other reasons why many still consider Linux a toy.
These layoffs a terrible move for HP in general. They need to develop two separate OS roadmaps, one assuming that the merger goes through, and one that assumes that it will be blocked.
Each roadmap needs to address all the important OSes (HPUX, Tru64, OpenVMS, MPE/ix, Linux) and the processors (Itanium, PA, Alpha).
Before they fire anybody, they need to share the roadmap with the public. This layoff makes HP appear to be backing away from the Itanium architecture and the HP-UX OS.
A tasteful merger of HP-UX and Tru64 can occur (and heck, TruHP might fix some of the big flaws in both), but it looks like taste is out the window as this hatchet-job proceeds.
Forgive me for not having too much sympathy, but I doubt these guys are too unhappy. Unlike the hundreds of thousands of now out of work mid and junior level dotcom techies, these guys are some of the best UNIX gurus in the world. That means that they already made a ton of money, and probably recieved incredible severance packages. They will now all be able to spend a few months with their families or vacationing, and as soon as they want to return to work, they can, because they have the skills and knowledge that will always be in demand, no matter how bad the US Economy gets.
On the upside, this might mean that the new HPaQ corporation is planning to dump some of their traditional UNIX plans in favor of moving to Linux. This would certainly make sense, given that both vendors have close relationships with intel, encourage Linux as the native OS for IA-64, and have had problems being strongarmed by Microsoft in the past.
In this editorial in a recent EE Times issue, Rick Merrit, discussing hardware spending, writes "I doubt [Fiorina] has the taste for the engineering costs. Maybe she really is poised to reverse HP's three-year slide in R&D expenditures as a percentage of sales, but the move to acquire a company [Compaq] that spends even less on engineering speaks otherwise."
Think about what DEC/Alpha engineers did for AMD and then think about what these people could do for IBM or SUN or any number of companies.
Indeed. There's a Sun billboard near Boston that I drive by every once in a while that says "Alpha Engineers: we've got a better job for you."
The fact is, Carly could get a wild hair and decide that Itanium/NT is the way to go, and the HP-UX bloodbath would then commence. The customer base has absolutely no idea how this is going to work out, to say nothing regarding Tru64 or OpenVMS.
I had been led to believe that there were some rather intense political struggles between Ft. Collins and NJ, which your viewpoint seems to back up. These sort of internal struggles are of no real value to your customer base.
However, I have also been led to believe that the NJ team bore most of the responsibility for porting the HP-UX kernel to the Itanic. Losing this team is perhaps Carly's first salvo in slaughtering Ft. Collins. Remeber, Carly already has said that you could "drive a truck through HP's high end." What makes you think that you're so safe? I don't see this woman as a staunch defender of either HP-UX or Tru64.
As a customer, can you actually convince me that I should see this differently?
HP's Oregon office is strictly in the hands of an openly Mormon management. What the hell does this matter? According to a number of non-Mormon friends who work at the company, or who used to work at the company, the Mormon management goes out of their way to fast-track other Mormons who may be much less skilled than their non-Mormon counterparts.
An example: a guy I know, incredibly skilled at his job, has worked at this office for 14 years. He's been passed over for promotion the last three times, and every time to a Mormon with far less experience. The last time a wet-behind-the-ears snot-nosed kid with less than five years of experience got the job even though the kid has no experience in programming at all!
This is all anecdotal but I've heard two-dozen stories along the same lines as the one above, especially in the last five years. How can a company make informed decisions if it promotes, in part, on religious affiliation???
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?