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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.
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.
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
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.
... ).
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 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?