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HP Lays Off Unix/IA-64 gurus

Posted by Hemos on from the bad-times-for-everyone dept.

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.

3 of 341 comments (clear)

  1. Re:RE : HP layoffs by amorico · · Score: 5, Interesting
    if anything , it's a testament to the crappy way big corporations treat loyal and qualified employees
    Exactly! Instead of figuring out ways they can be rid of the expensive employees, why don't companies see them as valuable employees? People who have been in the industry that long have valuable experience and so what if they are not working on the project of the moment. I have met people like this. You don't fire them, you beg them to stay and hope your junior employees don't piss them off.

    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
  2. Linux doesn't scale to SuperDome-levels. by emil · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. But what about Tru64 and OpenVMS? by emil · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?