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HP to Layoff 15,000 Employees
William Robinson writes "ZDNet reports that HP is planning to layoff 15000 employees. IT, sales and services will be among the areas particularly hit, although the sweeping cuts will be felt throughout the company, according to a close source to the company." From the article: "HP is expected to announce the layoffs as early as Monday, but employees are not expected to be immediately notified of their status, the source said, noting such a practice is common in corporate America. More high-level discussions on the layoffs will occur late next week and employees may get a greater sense of their specific status sometime thereafter."
People had good jobs (that is jobs that paid well relative to the wealth of their countries) before the rise of the modern corporation. Further economic theory indicates that wages will tend to stabilize at roughly the added value that employees bring to an economic enterprise, again this is independent of the existence of corporations or not. Oh and considering that jobs are created by CEOs and shareholders is like arguing that wars are won by kings.
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. So now you have 15,000 less people to lead/manage but you still have the same number of executives and managers. That seems to create a very top heavy structure and those tend to fall over both in the management world and the engineering world.
The more cynical side of me tells me that the execs and managers have more pull so would put up more of a fight if laid off. I'm sure the top level execs know the middle level ones at personal level so found it harder to laid them off. Instead, the little peons on the bottom who they barely know or care about can fend for themselves.
HP Services has roughly 65,000 employees, but analysts are predicting HP will lop off only about 8 percent here because the company is working on edging out IBM Global Services, EDS and Accenture for corporate contracts. "We estimate that HP has roughly 20,000 salespeople, with the majority in (enterprise server group) and Services, and that CEO Hurd is likely to look to streamline the organization, moving away from HP's current 'matrixed' selling organization to focus on more direct accountability," Sacconaghi said.
I really hate the word "accountability" when used in isolation. From my experience, if accountability is the only method being used to solve problems, people start playing politics and the blame game. Bueraucracy goes through the roof and everything has to be documented in case the problem doesn't get solved. You end up spending more time covering your ass than solving the problem. You also end up taking a toll on teamwork.
It seems to me that their current strategy is to lower costs so they can lower their margins to compete. Not a bad plan but there are other avenues. I know at my company, we're more than willing to pay more for better service and reliability. The initial contract cost isn't the only factor. We have to think about the cost of downtime.
Noncritical research and development (R&D) could also be impacted, analysts suggest. HP's R&D spending is nearly $1 billion higher than all of its relevant competitors combined, according to an independent benchmarking analysis done by Sacconaghi's firm. The comparison was designed to mirror the one that Hurd has professed as his method for bringing costs back into line. "We suspect that Hurd might be able to lower HP's annual $3.5 billion in R&D by $250 (million)-$500 million through the elimination of non-core projects, Sacconaghi said. So they're going to gut the thing that made HP great in the first place. I don't know what they consider non-critical R&D but a lot of innovations aren't obviously useful at first. Didn't a division of HP invent the optical mouse? I wonder if that was considered critical at the time.
Again, I'm not a CEO. I'm all for making an organization more efficient but I wonder if they're making the right cuts. It's sad to see the "Grey Lady of the Silicon Valley", the engineers' corporation get hacked to pieces.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Good business plans dont require sacrifice, bad ones do. HP isnt in the shitter because 15,000 employees decided to slack off - management FUCKED UP. But they are in charge, so there is no way they're going to be held responsible.
A four month CEO is cutting R&D at a TECH company, firing IT workers, and hiring more managers - this is good?? I guess those 120 days on the job does give him the right to slash the pensions on engineers who have been their for 20+ years. After all, those idiots were trying to invent things to make the world better, when they should have been in business school....eck.
And I love this:
And they certainly won't celebrate the 150,000 people who still *do* have jobs created by the likes of HP.
Absolutely, and I'm sure if someone raped your daughter you wouldn't complain - you'd be celebrating that they didnt do it to your wife too!
Apologist.
Hewlett-Packard (HP) was once known for how much they cared about their employees.
It just goes the show that short-term, bottom-line only thinking really isn't good business sense.
It's been my experience that people who do the non-specialized business work tend to think that their "leadership" is invaluable to the company, when in reality it is easily reproduced. An engineer can rise to the occassion and be a good leader, but a person whose formal training is just "business" or a MBA and a liberal arts background cannot just rise to the occassion and be a replacement engineer. Leadership is something that is half nature, half nurture. Most people I've ever known, myself included, who are good at leading have a very strong natural knack for leading and organizing.
Personally, I would want efficiency-minded former engineers to head an engineering company I was the CEO of. I'd want these former engineers because they'd know what's bullshit and what's not and that'd keep my company's ass farther away from the fire. We're sentient beings, not hive workers. To paraphrase Heinlein, specialization is for insects, there is no reason why someone who spent most of their career as an engineer cannot have a good sense for business and be a good business leader.
Since the buck clearly doesn't stop at the CEO's desk in most situations, I don't see why stockholders waste tens of millions of dollars of their company's money on them. At a company like HP, the CEO is naturally going to be detatched from most of the company's operations and excuse me, but I just don't see why any company would sacrifice anyone who could contribute to R&D of new products when cuts in middle and upper management employment and salaries would yield decent results.
Which is more likely to bring a higher ROI: firing many of the people capable of making new products and keeping many of the middle managers and their upper management ilk, or trimming top down? Maybe if HP put many of those people on some good projects, they'd do a lot of good for the company. It'd be ironic if several groups from the 15,000 who get laid off end up founding companies that make the next iPod, Tivo or something like that.
I'm not saying that many of them shouldn't have been laid off, just that it is incredibly stupid to fire people who can make products if assigned properly, but not cut back severely on upper management's pay and the ranks of the middle managers. When Sun laid off a number of its Solaris and Java developers, but didn't fire McNealey, that loud mouth imbecile, I just shook my head. In order to save money and face, our shiny suit wearing business elite would rather fire people with very hard to find engineering skills that could make or break the success of their products than cull the ranks of their own.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
I don't want to get in the way of your tear, but I think NAFTA was very much a bipartisan effort.
The idea had been talked about long before Bush I was in office, he had some discussions about it. President Clinton signed the NAFTA deal on Dec 8, 1993. And I believe it was ratified by a Senate and House, both with Democratic majorities. (57-43 Dems in the Senate, and 258-176 Dems in the House) You can check which party was in government in recent history at this link.
Cheers.
Never confuse feeling with thinking.
That's the brutal logic of capitalism and capitalists for you. I'd bet that 50% of the people on Slashdot see corporations/employers not as social institutions that are a component of the community, but rather as functional institutions that are part of a capital economy. The survival of "the economy" (i.e. capital flows) is seen as important; the survival of people is not.
Just watch any story about failing companies on Slashdot and you'll see just how many posters argue that a company that isn't profitable right now absolutely should go out of business because it "can't compete" in the "free market." Nevermind whether the company was competitive in the past or could be competitive again in the future with proper (i.e. less greedy and short-sighted) management, or the fact that in that "should go out of business" trope, hundreds or even thousands of lives may be ruined--when the improvement of lives is, ostensibly, the reason for commerce in the first place...
Capitalism is always short-sighted because the capitalists (in the orthodox sense--those people who have capital) will always see their holdings increase, regardless of the longevity of any particular enterprise. That's where this attitude of "bad business should fail" comes from--it's cultural brainwashing from those who control the economies through their wealth. It is their vested interest that unprofitable ventures should fail immediately, so that capital can be transferred to other ventures, in order to minimize losses and maximize profitability on an ongoing basis. If and investment in B will yield a 50% higher/faster return than an investment in A, capital will shift to B to maximize the profits of those who control, even if A was still nominally profitable, and even if thousands of non-capital-holding lives utterly depend on A. Capitalism is fundamentally anti-humanist that way.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
I love the logic. "If you don't like it, quit. Nobody forced you to take the job. You knew the rules."
Only the rules are the same anywhere, because we're all a part of the same "free market" capitalist economy.
So then the idiots say "Well then, don't take a job. Nobody's forcing you to work."
Only then how is one to eat?
People like you are effectively arguing that this is utopia. And it's not an uncommon argument, I hear it all the time and see it on Slashdot as well: the free market is perfect. If you don't like it, tough shit, it's because you must suck and not be able to compete.
So--what's the solution for those who can't compete? Kill them? Let them starve? If you're born IQ 90 and simple, you deserve to be "outcompeted" by everyone else and end up jobless, homeless, and dead (because we don't believe in social welfare in the free market)? How is this different, morally, from the Nazis, eugenics, and the termination of "defective" humans?
It's 2005. We should be past all of this. People should simply fucking CARE ENOUGH TO BE WILLING TO SACRIFICE SOME OF THEIR OWN WEALTH FOR THEIR FELLOW HUMANS.
Especially CEOs making more in one year than anyone needs to live comfortably for an entire LIFETIME, in a nation based on a Judeo-Christian faith that claims to believe in sacrifice and brotherhood, that claims to support individual "freedom." Freedom for who? Only the wealthy? Only the perfect? Everyone who isn't defective? Freedom to do what? Be "out-competed" into unemployment, homelessness, the grave, and then to be blamed for it because you just "couldn't compete?"
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Do you have any evidence of this, like a link to support your claim? Didn't think so.
The 9/11 victims fund had enough money to pay each family 1.6 million dollars, if it was split evenly.
Instead, they used a formula based on how much income a persom was making.
It is possible for the family of a janitor to get $300,000, and a stock brokers family to get 4.35 million dollars.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0104/p11s1-coop.html
What made it all worse, is the government told all the families if they sued or disagreed with the distributation of funds, they would be denied any government victims money. So what is a poor family to do? They can't hire a lawyer and fight. A few of the ultra rich families decided to sue anyways, they must have felt that getting 10 times as much as everyone else was not enough for their "loss".
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Sure, CEOs should make more then the average workers at a corporation but exactly at what gross multiple of average salary wages is too much for a CEO to be making?
c net )
It has been shown that european CEOs salrays are often a much smaller multiple of median workers salaries I recall. BusinessWeek, which has tracked executive pay for half a century, figures that CEOs of the country's largest corporations last year (2003) were paid about 300 times the average factory worker. In Europe, in contrast, chief executive pay tops out at 30 times the average worker. Americans might defend this disparity by declaring that U.S. companies are better run, but are these companies more than 10 times better run?
Additionally according to Kevin J. Murphy, E. Morgan Stanley Chair in Business Administration, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California: 'Since 1970, cash compensation for CEOs has gone from 25 times the pay of the average worker to about 90 times the pay of the average worker. Total compensation, including stock options measured at grant value, went from just over 25 times average worker pay in 1970 to a peak of almost 600 times average worker pay in 2000, and has now (2004) dropped down to about 360 times average worker pay.'
I dont know about you but I have to say I am sure that being a CEO is a hard job and requires a variety of skills and risks to be taken, but it is not such a specialized set of skills that warrants 600:1 pay disparity I think. Yes, capitalism exists to reward those who take the greatest risk but if you are a CEO making multi-millions a year regardless of company performance all one needs to do is survive for a few years and then then bail out on your disgustingly obscene Golden Parachute(tm) and be set for life while the company you leave lay in ruins and the common worker gets the shaft.
At least thats how I see it in the light of what that bitch Carly did to Hewlett-Packard (oh, and dont call it HP, then your parodying Carly's attempt to make everyone forget how Walter Hewlett spoke out against the merger between Companq and Hewlett-Packard http://news.com.com/2100-1001-858499.html?legacy=
But are you using natural as a proxy for desirable? A lot of things are natural. Having cavities in your teeth is natural, is that a good reason not to go to the dentist? We have a lot of people who are such devout capitalists that they think anything explained by market forces must be AOK.