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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.
...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...
After all, HP is acquiring Compaq, and with it Tru64 Unix. Makes sense that HP would axe the lesser of the two operating systems.
*** Quantum Mechanics: The Dreams of Which Stuff is Made ***
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.
In light of the merger announcement you couldn't expect them to keep two versions of UNIX around.
For the record, most of the Florham Park site was not working on IA-64, and will not be let go.
So, how many people are we talking about here? 20? 100? Maybe they will disperse into existing Linux companies (Redhat, Suse, etc...) and improve the overall state of Linux. Maybe start a slew of consulting companies. Either that, or exploit all those backdoors they built in HP-UX, just in case they ever got fired.
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.
¦ ©® ±
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
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
Interviewer:So, Mr. Ritchie, you claim you're a C programmer, yet you've never taken a class or been certified as one, right? And you claim decades of experience in Unix, yet you don't have any certifications? Sorry, don't call us, we'll call you...
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
In case anyone is interested, FuckedDistro.com is available.
The CEO says:
But axing the development group may run counter to statements CEO Carly Fiorina recently made that the computer-and-printer giant plans to increase research and development staffing.
H-P executives say:
H-P executives let go the majority of workers at the company's Enterprise Intel Architecture Lab in Florham Park, N.J. The facility, which specializes in Unix operating software that can work on both on traditional RISC-based and Intel-brand chips, will close.
Not only is HP shooting itself in the foot by dumping its best and brightest in PH-UX research, but it looks real stupid when everyone is following conflicting plans. Hey, HP, how about dumping some of the mangement drones that pulled this one off.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
This is soooo misguided! Software that is 30 years old is probably the only software in the world that has all of its bugs worked out. If it is still useful then use it, don't worry about how old it is. Having looked at the minimalism of plan 9, I can't say I've ever been tempted to use it. Plan 9 suffers from reinvention syndrome; the creators want to create something that perfectly represents the abstractions they were trying to create in Unix; but it doesn't balance use with ideal in any pragmatic way.
Similar to Plan 9 was the old NT3.51 kernel, a perfect microkernel architecture. Dead slow because nothing but the kernel was running in ring 0, so even video access had to go through a couple of layers of OS context before modifying a register, but beautiful in its construction.
Utility trumps perfection.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
They could work on it in their spare time like the rest of us. Or, perhaps get hired by the likes of Red Hat, SuSE, MontaVista, or Lineo. Just becuase they're hurting has little to do with Open Source- it has much more to do with the economy being the way it is right now (and will be for some months yet, it seems...)
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
More IT layoffs in NJ, eh? I probably should have gone to the Rutgers career fair this morning.
grep -ri 'should work'
Perhaps after swallowing Compac, they need to trim something to improve the (short-term) bottom line?
And, of course they can't layoff any sales/marketing people, and all those tech-support people have to stay, so...
Mind you, the long-term bottom line might not be too rosy.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
If HP-UX goes away I won't miss it. I work with HP-UX, AIX, IRIX, Solaris, and Linux machines all day, and HP-UX is in a dead heat with AIX for my least favorite. In answer to those that say "see, Unix is dying, look at HP-UX!" I point out that many Unix people don't like HP-UX and use Solaris or Linux or FreeBSD when they can get away with it. I really don't understand why people could prefer HP-UX, AIX, or IRIX if given a choice. I only have grown to accept Solaris more because they seem to be moving to having GNU versions of the standard tools available on install. The GNU fileutils and bash are two of the best things about Linux distros, aside from TCO and hardware support that is..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Um, HP-UX 11 *is* 64-bit. This bunch is/was just working on porting HP-UX to IA64 - the PA-RISC chips have been 64-bit for a while, as have MIPS, SPARC, etc.
I print, therefore I am.
This article is written by someone who quite simply doesn't know all the facts.
I work at HP, so I have some insight about what is going on here.
While it is unfortunate for those involved, it makes no sense for HP to keep a small facility like that open. Sitting here in Fort Collins, I can survey rows of empty cubicles and much larger base of people to support.
Here and other sites, there is a ton of IA64, HP-UX, and Linux work going on. The article would make you think it was all done at this small plant in NJ, but it just isn't so. In no way does this closing represent a lessening of HP's support for IA-64, HP-UX, or Linux for that matter.
...in the IT industry getting sacked. If the top 1% of the industry's getting laid off, that IS news, sadly enough.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
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.
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.
A year from now, when they want to have a 64-bit UNIX product,
They'll use one of the ones they already have...
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?
It seems to me that laying off some of your top OS engineers is really stupid.
I used to work there, and 90% of us (including myself) did not want to move to California. At Florham Park we got the best of both worlds, a west coast style company, without moving to the west coast. There are many costs with operating a division across the country. You get about 4 hours of communication a day. You get in and work for 3 hours, then you get an hour of phone time, then you go to lunch, then you get another 2 hours of phone time, them they go to lunch, then you get maybe 1 more hour of phone time. Besides the fact that collaboration when you're not face to face just doesn't happen (and there was a minor culture clash anyway which is problematic).
I'm sure the top unix gurus working there were given the opportunity to move to California. Most of them probably declined.
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.
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.
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.
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."
I use UNIX, because it is 30+ years old. What other software has aged so gracefully to be:
1) Understandable and predictable from the kernel on up.
2) Immensely useful with a uniform and powerful set of interfaces.
3) Scalable so that my programs work without recompilation from my dinky workstation to that new Sun Fire 15K.
4) Solid as a rock. The only time I have seen Solaris crash was due to a diagnosable and easily fixed mismatch between the video driver and the kernel version.
5) Rewarding. There is always something new to explore in UNIX.
6) Smart. The basic prinicples of UNIX make it a joy to work with (see #7, below).
7) Simple. Yes, UNIX is simple!!!
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Yeah, why don't we just deport all those freeloading foreigners anyway?
Please, don't make gross generalizations like that. You don't need an H1B to be an incompetent newbie, and you can be an H1B-holder and a good programmer.
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."
Windows NT is arguably 23-year-old technology, as it is based on VMS. VMS was first released in 1978. Whippersnapper.
"30 year old technology" is not a valid criticism of Unix. Think of Unix as having been tested and refined for 30 years. The light bulb is "100 year old technology" (more or less), but we all use them. They're a lot better now, aren't they? Tested and refined over 100 years.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
On the other hand, there are talented CS people out there who find themselves getting MCSE certified because their managers demand it, or simply for the hell of it.
My Clients Support Extravagance
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?
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.
Rob Pike's paper tends more to support my position than yours. He complains about the sad state of OS research, but he certainly recognizes that there isn't any demand for it.
In other words: No Unix does not need to be replaced. As Pike writes in his conclusion: "People have decided how they want Operating Systems to work. [...] Research has effectively been sidelined." Not that I agree with his gloomy assessment of the world, but we would surely both agree that there isn't any call for new disruptive research.
Nor do I think that there will be a need for disruptive rather than evolutionary research until one of the prime factors changes; where wearables, home servers, and good speaker independent voice recognition are some examples of new products which could lead to new disruptive operating systems research.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
if anything , it's a testament to the crappy way big corporations treat loyal and qualified employees
;) All these engineers they're laying off will probably end up with IBM, Red Hat or Sun with an axe to grind. Research lab UNIX (tm) types don't leave the scene to flip burgers at McDonald's. This will come back to bite HP in the ass.
Exactly. This reminds me of all those Digital techies in the Alpha division jumping ship when Compaq took over because their corporate culture sucked and they weren't treated as valuable, talented people. Where did alot of those dudes end up? AMD. And Compaq's blunder has come home to roost against Wintel in the Athlon, with x86-64 as an encore to *really* rub Wintel's face in the dirt.
Now it's HP's turn to step on their dicks....oh I forgot, Carly doesn't have one
Win32 is not NT; it's just a service, much like OS/2, VDM and Posix APIs on NT. The "real operating system" is fairly close to VMS. No too surprising, considering David Cutler created NT for Microsoft. There has even been some feature-exchange between NT and OpenVMS.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Certainly UNIX has gone through a sort of dark age. The most exciting development for UNIX in my opinion is the recent reemergence of loosely coupled computing. The XML proposition of data that is free of semantics or methods is really very similar to UNIX's concept of 'everything is a file.'
Reuse of code in an OO development model is restricted to reuse only where you can comply with the uses envisioned by the original author. Data reuse that is independent of the original author's intended uses vastly increases the possibility of radical new uses.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
The group that's getting canned sounds like the folks who were part of USL, the AT&T spinoff meant to commercial Unix from Bell Labs. These are the guys who sued BSDI way back in 1991 to prevent cheap Unix from getting to the masses, back when a source license cost $250k. Really good engineers though and it's a shame they're being let go.
See if you can pass any of the first year courses at IIT in India and get back to me.
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?
6) Smart. The basic prinicples of UNIX make it a joy to work with (see #7, below).
>>>>>>>>
Actually, this is a very good example of how newer OSs are better in some respects. The whole "everything is a file" thing has been streched *way* beyond practicality. My videocard really isn't a file. It doesn't make sense to treat it as a block device or a character device. Win2K, for example, one up's UNIX by treating everything as an object, something that is a much more general (and sane) abstraction. So, no, everything that can be done has *not* been done. What would really be interesting to me would be to see something stable and well-tested like UNIX used to try out some new OS concepts (like OO or new VM techniques, or presistant storage).
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
SGI got squeezed out because it tried to protect its margins by going further and further upmarket as workstations became commodity products. In the process the volume shrank to the point where they simply didn't sell enough stuff to cover their R&D costs. Once they had to cut back on R&D they were not upmarket much longer.
The high end server market was once dominated by performance concerns. Now it is dominated by reliability concerns. The profit to be gained in squeezing the last ounce of power out of the Itanium is negligible.
If the ASP outsourced hosting model takes off the demand for high reliability transaction systems will be very different. Instead of a large number of medium to high performance systems there will be a much smaller number of ultra-high performance systems sold. The performance won't come from putting 64 processors into a high end box however, it will come from putting a few thousand loosely coupled processors in a large rack and feeding it a couple of terrabytes of RAID disk.
HP's merger with Compaq is about building a dominant position in the volume PC market, printers, desktop PCs, home PCs, handheld devices. For the same amount of effort required to build a O/S kernel on a new processor HP can develop three or four mass market products that are much more likely to generate profits.
If the Compaq merger completes HP will have two high quality UNIX builds to choose from. Porting of the Mach kernel based Digital Unix is likely to be easier since it has been ported several times already.
The only surprising thing about the announcement is that the engineers are being laid off rather than re-assigned. That would indicate to me that HP is retreating on the whole UNIX front and not just on HP/UX.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Once upon a time DEC has cut Dave Cuttler (sp?) and his group.
Result: M$ has piched up the group that made them NT. They would have a very hard time getting it sooner without ex-DEC-ers' experience.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
... layoffs are done by HR! :-(
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Oh, it wasn't the CEOs direct decision? Well, it's her responsibility if HP loses 100 of its best skilled people.
HP will be down the hill in three years (mark my words), but Miss Fiorino will be playing golf in Pebble Beach with her ex-board apologists and a cushy severence package.
Given the fact, that she not only missed three announced quarterly goals and heads full blast for a merger, which will be a major disaster (3 major - and 1 minor OS lines, different architectures and quite different cultures), I don't think this assessment is overly harsh.
Do I sound bitter? You bet, and I don't even work for HP. I did work for DEC however from 90 through 94, that was about the time when the big downward spiral gained momentum. I saw in real life how the tech company with the bloody best engineering* was killed by slick talking MBAs in expensive suits (agreed that Ken Olson also has his share, but he wasn't the one that ultimately killed DEC [arguably]). Oh, and Mr. Palmer in his white Porsche didn't really offer much more to the company then a slick hairdo.
Don't even get me started what happened after the sale to Compaq. A company who knows (or knew) how to assemble and market boxes, period. After buying DEC for it's enterprise services and customer base in short order they killed VMS (that started already at DEC; but Compaq didn't have a clue about what to do with it), the engineering departments, the Alpha chip and of course, allienated a fiercly loyal customer base...
I totally agree with your post, I was not ranting against it, my rant is directed to people who - for their own personal gain and ego - kill the finest companies in their industry.
* You can argue that of course, but when you look at things like DECnet, the Alpha chip or clustering, DEC sure as hell had a 5-10 year lead technologically.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
If so, it can reasonably be maintained as an add-on to the standard kernel.
While you don't want the same os on a mainframe and a wrist watch, it can reasonably be two configurations of the same OS framework.