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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."
"Starting this year, HP will strive to build every one of our consumer devices to respect digital rights."
I guess the market has spoken, where's Carly now?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I guess this averages out with management's planned $10 million per executive along with the $1000 normal employee package.
Remember folks, outsourcing is good for the economy!
Bob: "We find it's always better to fire people on a Friday."
Bob: "Studies have statistically shown that there's less chance of an incident if you do it at the end of the week."
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
HP is getting rid of anything that might distinguish it from a box-mover like Dell. Just look what it did with the technology assets it got from DEC and Compaq.
In the short term it should improve profitability. I'm not so sure about the long term, though.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
The "indispensible" ones usually have the attribute of time urgency to get things done... and getting another job is now on their list.
The "useless" ones lounge around.
When the managers get around to announcing exactly who is gonna be affected, they get to choose among the useless ones, as the "indispensable" ones by that time already have jobs... working for their competitors.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Yes, they still employ 150,000 folks. However, the company is fundamentally addicted to H-1b/L-1 visas and has a lackluster recent record at serious technical innovation. For a company like HP to seriously thrive, they _must_ innovate. At this point, HP is more the preserve of bean counters than inventors.
Thy are no planning, its already been started month ago, my team got laid off couple weeks ago. and before us, atleast 15-20 people got laid off out of around 200 people at Dearborn, MI location. and thy are planning to reduce atleast 30% of work force, and off shoring to Toronto, Malasiya and India, and replacing with cheap contract.
Fucking disgusting what has happened to HP over the last 5 years. Compaq merger was a disaster. Carly was a disaster. Hewlett and Packard would be astonished at what their company is doing today. I feel really sorry for all the HP workforce that've had to endure this b/s.
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.
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It does seem to be as the parent post suggests.
Just making a search using the term 'Service' at HP India produces 192 new positions.
Job Search HP India
(Scroll down if you don't have a vertical monitor / insane resolution)
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Going on previous layoff stories, I give it about 30 seconds before the first "see how evil corporations are?" reply.
Riiiight.. So you're only avoiding the flamewar by pre-emptively taking the troll bait and posting some non-responses to straw man arguments?
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
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.
There are lots of good scientific devices companies. Hopefully in the long term we will have more companies like what HP was in 1970,80 or 90 emerge and do what the old HP used to do.
The above is not a troll. Milton Friedman would get modded troll by the shortsighted dumb asses here.
This all started with Bush Sr, and his NAFTA, to export jobs to Mexico. I remember the lies, how it would stregnthen the American workforce.
Now the current Bush is exporting jobs to India.
Anyone see a pattern of what the republicans are doing? They got the idea, they no longer need American workers. So they started transfering jobs outside of the USA.
How many more decades do we have before the USA is on par with Mexico in terms of wealth. We will have the likes of Ted Turner owning 2 million acres of land. We will become a nation where 4% of the population lives in gated and gaurded communities, and everyone else will live in an apartment, in places filled with violence, and we will be called sub-human.
Remember, it was not that long ago when families only needed one person to work, to pay the bills, to feed the family. The past 10 years, most families have both parents working. And in the next 10 years, we will see both parents working multiple jobs. But it is okay, I am sure Sony will have the next generation playstation by then.
How can any country justify having CEO's that make $10,000,000+ a year, and having janitors who make $5.75 an hour? It is like what happened with the World Trade Center, when the government was cutting checks to families of survivors. The valuable lives got checks in the millions of dollars, the janitors families got 1/10th of that. It is like Baseball, I remember being a kid when it was a big deal for a player to sign a 1 million dollar deal. Tickets were cheap. Hot dogs were cheap. Heck, the ballpark was a cheap evening, and you would get fed. Now players demand $100 million contracts, and there is advertising in every corner of the ballpark and hot dogs cost $4.50, parking is $15, tickets are over $40. Normal blue collar families no longer go to the ballpark, but that does not matter because teams found they can make more money selling the best seats to corporations. I guess it is a nice benifit for salespeople and executives, to go somewhere they believe is popular, even though they know little about the game or players.
I hope my kids don't have the future I think they will. A small studio, with advertising inside the apartment that can't be turned off. Working 6 days a week, 10 hours a day, and still not having enough to eat good food. And having a police that exists not to protect people, but to keep the poor out of the rich neighborhoods.
Money is evil. It makes people do horrible things.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Regarding wages stabilizing relative to employees' worth, what you say would only be true without external interference.
And comparing CEOs and shareholders to kings? Precious few kings ever brought the seed capital to create their kingdoms or funded quarterly losses in anticipation of future payback.
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.
If you think of the modern corporation as a machine for making money then it makes sense to re-engineer its cogs periodically.
Unfortunately the cogs in this case are people. Where I work they laid around 100 people off 3 years ago and there is still a lingering feeling of resentment. However, the company is now profitable , so at least some people got to keep their jobs - better than everybody hitting the unemployment line, right?
Fortunately for us and unfortunately for uncreative management, layoffs are not a panacea - they've got to keep a few of us monkeys around (at least in the forseeable future), right?!
I don't know what happened to HP the past 15 years. When I was a kid, there was only one King of laser printers, and that was HP. Nobody made better laser printers in the world.
3 or 4 years ago, a friend purchased a HP computer, it had windows ME on it. She was in college, and she called me a few times while she was writing papers and got the blue screen of death. There was nothing that could be done to save the paper. Hours of work went down the drain. I know... I told her "save your work more often". But that computer was a horrific peice of crap. I did a clean install with the CD's thinking that might help things, but it took me a while to realize that Windows ME did not work well with that HP computer.
It is too bad HP merged with Compaq, at least Compaq made good computers.
It seems like there is a pattern. Merge two large companies into a super large company, then fire people and give managers bonuses.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
HP the corporate entity appears as far as I can tell to have just brought together some bright engineers and some manufacturing plants, and put the result within the reach of consumers willing to exchange currency for it.
Is it possible, at all, that somehow this transaction (the engineers designing the computers and printers and such, the plants that manufactured computers and printers and such off those designs, the consumers who decided the thus manufactured products were worth expending their money on) could have somehow come to pass and functioned in some way other than the specific system of a government-created incorporated entity (in this case named "Hewlett Packard") which acts as a legal personage and exclusively accepts all responsibility and blame for actions taken by employees and investors; is owned by a collection of "shareholders" chosen because they hold pieces of paper obtained through cryptic dealings in New York; and is run by a board chosen by those shareholders?
Because if this specific system (the government-licensed "corporation", the stockholders, etc) is in fact the only way that all those people creating and buying hewlett packard computers could have come to pass, then we can call the board of HP "responsible" for all the good things that have resulted from HP's existence. But I'm pretty sure there's more than one way this could have all happened. Which starts to make it seem kind of reasonable to start looking for other ways to think of the HP board. Like, "parasitic middleman".
There's this old (and usually just implied) idea that because something good happened in a capitalist or corporatist system, capitalism or corporatism itself gets to take credit for it. Regardless of the claims of libertarian theologists, I have trouble taking this seriously; capitalism doesn't create wealth, it only distributes it. Nevertheless, capitalism does do a pretty good job (compared to some other systems, at least) of not actually standing in the way of the people who are creating wealth. So that's good, I guess. But what just seems batshit loony to me is when some group of people tries to stand up and take credit for all the good things capitalism makes possible-- saying that hey, all those things we assume capitalism gets to take credit for? well actually I get to take credit for it-- and claim this credit because, um, well seemingly just because they're rich.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
It's inept management to shitcan 15k people, since it's inept management to "suddenly" find yourself with 15k redundant people who need to be shitcanned all at once.
But my guess is that someone's just assuming that they can can 10% of the workforce and nobody'll notice the difference and they'll net about a billion after expenses in extra profit.
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!
HP is firing 15,000 employees on top of the 3,000 jobs they already have cut since November.
IBM announced cutting 10,000 to 13,000 jobs in Europe just last month.
Ford and General Motors can't sell cars and are at risk of defaulting on their debt -- their credit rating has been cut down the minimum by ratings agencies.
So is this the freight train of a bull economy everyone is raving about? I'm an amateur financial enthusiast but I strongly suggest anyone thinks twice before buying any mutual funds in this climate. Stocks are at 4 year highs and future prospects don't look positive at all
You could argue the reverse - in 2 years, HP may need to layoff even more people, and then you would have spent 2 years paying 15,000 employees you could have done without. Any company that waits 2 years to respond to market conditions won't last long.
It's also possible HP has already waited 2 years before doing these layoffs, and now it is even more obvious they need to pull the trigger.
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!
I left HP's services organization in May, and I have to say that it was a wonderful move.
I worked for them for 4 years, and there seemed to be no interest in employee development. I was making a good salary, but found no interest in spending a few thousand a year to develop skills and interests among the talented employees. The reason I stayed as long as I did was the fact that I was on an account contracted for a long enough period of time, that my job appeared safe, but with HP, I felt like I was "playing not to lose".
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
I'd be far more willing to listen to your Japanese CEO if most Japanese business weren't back to relying on the same style of loans that dashed their economy into the ground just a decade ago. With their government manipulating the economy with artificially low long-term interest rates, the rules are very different there. Government banking owns most of the country because of hyperinflation and most everything has to be done on credit. Quality of life and personal ownership are very different there -- people are taking out "generational loans" where they're promising their grandkids will finish paying for their houses, property transfer taxes are upward of 50%, and it all comes tumbling down any time the economy can't sustain double digit growth. And when companies fail there, as thousands do every month, it's the taxpayers who eat the loss through more inflation and taxes, not the shareholders.
And they're cutting sales people! I don't think that many companies go under because they make too many sales, eh?
If you want to argue semantics, then by your account the biological father could rape an adopted child, and thats ok.
The point here is that corporations don't give out jobs because they are nice people, they hire people. Now if someone gives you something and then takes it back, well thats a dick move.
If they promise you a pension and then take it back because they cant run a business for shit, well, that cant even be accounted for by witty speech. We are punishing people for working hard, and being loyal - this is disgusting and wrong.
HP isnt in the shitter because 15,000 employees decided to slack off - management FUCKED UP.
Do you consider perhaps that management fucked up by creating a bloated personnel heavy organization? Big companies grow out of control during good times by hiring tons and tons of people they may not really NEED. When times get tough expendible employees are just as fair game as other belt tightening measures IMO.
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
Are these workers entitled to those jobs? They took those jobs knowing fully well what the rules of the game were - that the shareholders and management can fire them if they think that is in the interest of the corporation.
If those workers didn't like that, they could've:
a)taken different jobs or
b) started their own businesses or
b) write to their representatives to change the political system - a workers revolution and to each according to their needs.
It really ought to be a matter of common sense that employees won't know their status immediately. Someone decides at a high level that they're going to change their priorities, and each division needs to cut their spending by a certain percentage. That percolates down, with managers at each level deciding which portions of their organization are most valuable and efficient. Sometimes whole divisions will be cut or merged (with cuts delegated down) and often the cuts will go down to the individual employee level. As much as it sucks to be uncertain about this, employees now have some warning and time to prepare their resumes and ask their contacts in the industry about positions while management carefully weighs how to do this in a manner that will best serve the company, so that they won't have to do anything else of the sort in the foreseeable future.
If you think about it, having the CEO and VPs make check marks on a list of people they've never even met and announce that without warning would be far, far more evil.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Being one of the resident curmudgeonly grammar freaks, I feel inclined to point out that "layoff" is a noun, and "lay off" is a verb (phrase). Therefore, it isn't possible to "layoff" someone; instead, you must lay them off.
As for the layoffs... well... I really believe in free, borderless markets. I really really do. But I think we can take a lesson from the EU, and require an adherence to a minimum set of criteria before granting full trade privileges. Giving other markets power without responsibility is a bad thing; without some sort of market synchronization we're just shooting ourselves in the foot.
What if we could say "Okay, India, we'll have completely free trade with you if you become a member of WEFTA (World-Encompassing Free Trade Agreement) and have your economy up to minimum standards within five years."
Maybe a four-tiered system could be made:
This is a bit more complicated than the current EU system, but the idea is the same: Don't let our jobs, our money, our very economy go to those who aren't gonna play by the rules. Small economic variations in WEFTA would exist and would be allowed (it's cheaper to live in a small town in Ithaca, NY than it is in Beverly Hills, CA) for free-trade regions but this $1-an-hour-factory-in-Mexico phenomenon wouldn't exist to pull jobs from the lower rungs of the U.S. (or any full WEFTA member) economy.
If only we could get our Congress to get their charbon and acier together.
Previously it was the US and GB providing technology to the world. Now it's the opposite - the world provides technology for HP - and people expect that the same amount of people are needed to be employed for the latter as the former? Good grief.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Coaching it in terms of wealth "relative to the wealth of their countries" is about the least useful comparison you could make. The second highest quarter in any nation without a US style economy are worse off than our bottom quarter.
Nonsense. Germany has worker protection and their 3rd quarter is better than our 3rd quarter. Their 2nd quarter is pretty close and their 4th quarter is far far better. Oh and the US hasn't had its major cities destroyed and a good chunk of the male working population killed within the last 100 years; so our economy should be far far healthier than theirs.
If you're going to compare any two periods, look at people's quality of life, not their wage compared to their neighbors'.
That's silly, technological improvements overwhelm differences in distribution of wealth. You need to subtract technology off and to do that you need to look at their wealth relative to the wealth of their society.
Regarding wages stabilizing relative to employees' worth, what you say would only be true without external interference.
Well yes.
And comparing CEOs and shareholders to kings? Precious few kings ever brought the seed capital to create their kingdoms or funded quarterly losses in anticipation of future payback.
And the CEOs and shareholders of HP did do that?
A community of corporations acting as social institutions instead of economic institutions would starve. Good intentions and warm feelings alone never created anyone dinner and a house to live in.
"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."
And I guess you have the right to comment on the management of an giant international corporation.
You just sound naive when you boil complex policies down to a few sentences on a web board.
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
Board of directors: "That's the first time and the last time we ever let a woman run our company."
This instance does not speak for all women, but this definitely will not help them either. Thanks, Carly.
Ah yes, other benighted sod that regurgitates Republican dogma. <sigh>
The undeniable fact is that state and federal governments are heavily influenced by business interests. Regulations, wage requrements (?), forced (?) benefits, excessive (compared to...?) taxation, and inflation of currency (huh?) combine to create country that has a quality of life that's roughly on par with other developed nations. Laissez-faire capitalism is just as wretched as iron fisted socialism, and Western Europe has done an excellent job of achieving a healthy balance between the two extremes.
Funny how the US ranks 6th in overall quality of life (with Norway being #1 and Canada #3), as stated in a BBC article.
they condemn the CEOs and shareholders who created all these jobs for taking profits when the times are good, but would never accept the alternative -- advocating sacrifice from the employees when times are bad.
As a major HP customer, all I have to say is "instability is bad". I don't care about the shareholders - and I have the expectation that HP management and employees will be there to support me. If it wasn't for the customers, HP wouldn't have seen the light of day.
Um, yes, they did for 150,000 years of human history, before humans decided to "advance" by settling down and beginning to accumulate goods, and thus, wealth.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Sorry, I think your vision of Chile is a bit flawed. Discussion is getting a bit off-topic now (but still has something to do with the main post anyways... hell, it's the first time I have actually heard a north-american talk about wage differences and things like that. It impressed me :) ).
:p
:) ?
I'm trying to attack the 'uncivilized culture' most american/outsiders seem to have of latinamerica, more specifically this country.
The north american vision of latinamerican countries , for the most part it seems, is as was described on the upper post, but it isn't all like that, in reality.
I do have to speak locally (and Chile's one of the best places right now in south america to live: Bolivia's boiling with civil unrest, Argentina's still recuperating, etc. ), but situation isn't that bad. I don't know what place you are living right now, but the post-apocalyptic place the guy described isn't the norm (hell, I haven't heard of any place like that). Even if the comment was hyperbolic, I still think it doesn't connect with reality.
While I don't know all cities here, for the most part life is as 'normal' as your every-day american one. Sure, we might have less hi-tech stuff, our cultures may be different, but people don't suffer from "not having enough to eat good food". Makes us sound barbaric
Of course there are problems, and they are big. Social injustices, like wage differences, are very real. But isn't that a problem everywhere
BTW, where are you living?
-Zer0s
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
You seriously expect human nature to shy away from self gain? We are a selfish species, deal with it and aplaud the few exceptions to the rule
Maybe you didn't get to this part:
b) write to their representatives to change the political system - a workers revolution and to each according to their needs.
I'd like to inject a little bit of concrete food for though into the argument. I just took a look over at HP's Job Application Page. It would seem the Indian facilities are constantly in a hiring phase (it's been like this for months, if you check regularly).
You had nomads slitting each others' throats to steal their food, furs and women. Or you had local warlords - be they priests or kings - creating tiers of people who benefited under the warlord's charge. The upper echelon shared agreements with the top as to how they divvied up the enslaved population in exchange for protection from aggressors and the warlord himself.
How many people of the lowest here - the sales and support employees could be saved by dumping say the top 3 wage earners at HP.
Having had to call the support line at HP for a faulty bit of hardware recently I have to say they need more phone agents.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
Umm, that doesn't really work. Revolution tend to only make things worse and representatives only care about their spongers.
No, priests and kings only arise once populations stop and begin to accumulate wealth post-agriculture.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
All that HP offers for home computers is Windows.
HP is still supporting Microsoft's monopoly for home computers.
You've found the problem with layoffs: the decision isn't made by an impartial observer, it's made by the managers, the people LEAST likely to go after their own. You can't even trust a consultant to get it right, since the guy you hire is going to be an ex-manager, whose only direct contact with your company is through the managers.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
the price of ink cartridges will skyrocket...
just a hunch
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
I don't work for, near, or against NCR in any market, I just live here. My perception has been that Hurd took NCR and focused them on ATM machines, their core business. Lots and lots of other unrelated things were shed, including long-term employees and facilities. Most recently, NCR has turned over maintenance of their world-class headquarters to a local office-real estate company (Miller Valentine). Their ATM sales, by the way, are in competition with the infamous Diebold, Inc. And in that market, Diebold is innovating with ways to keep banks coming back to them. NCR just never seemed to get the hang of it.
Now back to HP and the recent high speed printing invention , and I would have to say we can all expect HP to shed all the unprofitable businesses and focus heavy on the printing. Well, heavier than they already do.
I expect that if HP is in some select-contract, highly-profitable, niche market that they will stay there. NCR has their TeraData database. HP had, during the merger claimed that Compaq's worldwide sales and services forces would allow them to dominate global industries, but I don't think that really every took foot they way they wanted to. So, unless they drum up something other than calculators and home PCs, those segments are likely to get hit hard. Hurd likely won't wait for the home PC market to do something unique because they've had a couple of dozen years to find a niche and haven't. I'd better say goodbye to the calculator segment too before Cringely goes around saying something stupid like "you saw it here first."
So that leaves the saturated inkjet market. Since the DMCA cannot be used, and since we're already paying $3,800US per gallon of ink, increasing profitability will be difficult to do without large customer outbursts. Of course, NCR was so full of waste, those of us in Dayton didn't think they could ever shed all of it and yet they did.
Have you ever considered that maybe they had 15,000 more employees than they needed? I think HP should be congratulated for keeping people in jobs for so long even though they didn't need them.
If a company hires a thousand workers that they don't really need, then lays them off a year later, should they be condemned for laying off a thousand people or commended for giving a thousand people a year's wages?
As for your talk about pensions and being there for twenty years, no-one's entitled to a company pension or even a job. In a capitalist society, no company owes you a living, a job is a two-way agreement that either party can end at any time. I'm sure that if you found a better job you wouldn't keep working at your old company out of a sense of loyalty, you'd move to the better arrangement. That's what HP is doing, moving to a better arrangement of fewer employees and thus fewer costs.
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!
That's a terrible analogy, as bad as I'd expect on this site. A company is employing 150,000 people, that's a hell of a lot. Yet you're complaining because you want them to employ 165,000. That's terrible. The company I work for employs about 900 people, should I criticise them for not employing 990? But what would they need the other 90 for? That doesn't matter, it's evil not to hire 10% more people than you need!
What I personally dislike most about this is the way this number is determined. In stead of a carefull evaluation of the employed personnel and required personnel, companies look at their cash balance and determine the amount of people they need to fire.
Although I can understand sometimes this is the only way to save a company, I suspect that in 9 out of 10 cases this is a message to the shareholders at the expence of employees. Which, in the end, probably hurts the company more than it helps, because simply fireing people alone isn't going to do much good.
On the other hand I also think many of these messages of mass-layoffs are never completely realised. Maybe it's mostly a way for the upper management to send a message to the shareholders: "look we're really taking care of the problems", while in reality only part of the proclaimed number of people is fired in a big reorganisation.
I'm only speculating here though, can someone enlighten me?
I do pity the middle managment that need to actually fire so many people though. It sure can't be much fun for them. Even worse, with a bit of bad luck they are fired as well when their work is done.
As for the layoffs... well... I really believe in free, borderless markets. I really really do. But I think we can take a lesson from the EU, and require an adherence to a minimum set of criteria before granting full trade privileges. Giving other markets power without responsibility is a bad thing; without some sort of market synchronization we're just shooting ourselves in the foot.
What if we could say "Okay, India, we'll have completely free trade with you if you become a fully-compliant member of WEFTA (World-Encompassing Free Trade Agreement) and have your economy up to minimum standards within five years."?
Maybe a four-tiered system could be made:
This is a bit more complicated than the current EU system, but the idea is the same: Don't let our jobs, our money, our very economy go to those who aren't gonna play by the rules. Small economic variations in WEFTA would exist and would be allowed (it's cheaper to live in Ithaca, NY than it is in Beverly Hills, CA) for free-trade regions but this $1-an-hour-factory-in-Mexico phenomenon wouldn't exist to pull jobs from the lower rungs of the U.S. (or any full WEFTA member) economy.
If only we could get our Congress to get their charbon and acier together.
I strongly suggest anyone thinks twice before buying any mutual funds in this climate
My oil stocks are going through the roof!
Western Europe has done an excellent job of achieving a healthy balance between the two extremes.
Which is why they have double digit unemployment.
True but, sadly, there are millions who don't get the joke -- they believe it's for real. No doubt, their grandparents believed Martians really were invading Earth in October, 1938.
Discussion System prefs link: http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm
I'm not sure how it works in every company, but in the huge tech corporation that employs me, your manager has nothing to do with your laying off other than telling you about it. Human Resources decideds who is going to be laid off, tells the manager what names are on the list and he relays it to his employees on the morning that the layoffs occur.
First of all, I want to say that you are right about many things, especially hiring former engineers to managers in engineering company.
...But then again, why should I care that other people ruin many companies. Just more opportunies for those who do know what they are doing ;-)
The thing that needs to be discussed here is, if HP is or is not an engineering company. They do work with technology, but I would argue that their fields of technology are mature and don't involve as much engineering and innovation than they did before. That's why I categorize them more as marketing and assembly company. If you look at their products: Workstations, Laptops, Servers, Printers, Scanners & Cameras, one can argue that they are all commodized. The technology needed is allmost the same from manufacturer to manufacturer. Only way to add value to these offerings is to use branding and design to create added value in customers mind, the other way is to offer services.
I think that the problem with HP is that they were first engineering company and were on the edge of the technology cycle. As the times went by, they loosed technology battles and had to retreat from many fields. They had create success with imaging products, but what they did forget todo was to invent new things. As the result of innovating hard, and inventing lazy, they became marketing and assembly company. In away one can say that HP and Compaq merger was the last knot that transformed HP from engineering to marketing. The problem with HP now is that thought they have transformed, they have still lot's engineering. Bigger problem is that all places in the market have been taken by others. Dell is the king of assembly companies and they really can't beat them. Same goes with IBM in the entreprise arena. Most of the real engineering is done by other companies ie. Intel, Microsoft, Sun, Novell, Redhat, Oracle etc.. So the big question is what is HP going to do? I hope that their answer isn't just to trim down, that wouldn't in the long run give them reason to be alive.
It's a good question how HP could have avoided all this and what went wrong. A good place to put blame is Carly and other MBA's, but that is insufficient. In my view HP just got too big, they lost their concentration times ago. They should have spinned imaging and customer sides of HP away, or transfered the enterprise and engineering sides to a new company. It's very hard to be a company with many faces, and there isn't so many companies in the end product field that have done this with success.
Maybe all this and other fallen angels of technology industry could have been avoided by better education. As a soon to be graduating economics student (from computer science, don't ask) I have to say that the blame lies in business education. Many people start business studies with idea of doing something cool with customer products (think of likes L'oreal, Coca-cola, Tivo etc..) and they end up in some industrial company with no idea what is going on. The worst thing is that many people that do work industrial area treat these industries as the same as your regular consumer industries. When you have people saying "it's just technology" or "I don't have to know the details" or "just say which one is better" then you know there is much wrong in the picture.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
for HP.
What is needed now in PCs/servers AFAIC is someone to drive down the costs of thin-clients, clustering, and modular computing. Given HP's history, this will likely be missed by a full light-year as they retrench in more of the same that got them where they are now.
What exactly is the cost of HP-UX compared to Linux and what are the comparitive support prices compared to say, Red Hat or SuSE? Or BSD for that matter if you want to put it closer to the System V side? What exactly do they have to offer there?
What are they going to give me that I can't get cheaper by leaps and bounds from Dell or for that matter Systemax?
What are they going to offer me for my ongoing needs and is their (*gag*) "vision" going to fit with what I'm doing? Or are they going to follow Redmond's lead not to mention the various hardware standards groups rather than innovating?
I don't see HP (*cough*) "getting it".
My wish list is simple, btw. Given I can get fully packed desktops for under $500, I want a blade server where the backplane and hot swap power supplies with one master board costs no more than a standard whitebox server and each blade is under $500 given that it is stripped of unneeded sound, graphics, and other tchotchkes as well as case and power supply. Why should I be paying over $1000 for a blade when I can get a whitebox with a comparable processor for under $750 and that comes with all sorts of things left out of the blade?
One of the few areas you pay a premium for them to leave something out that you don't need. You're bribing them not to put it in.
I want a *nix to do load-balancing, failover and load-sharing clustering with remote network boot thin client serving much like I could get for free with a few spare days of recompiling various distributions and project sources. I'm willing to pay but if it is going to cost an arm and a leg and get me less support than asking a couple questions on various web forums does, no dice.
Given what I am looking for and knowing what I do of HP, I am not holding my breath. This is just one of many many areas HP could have tried to get into where no one else is bothering. Instead we got the Compaq merger, we got Carly Fiorina and the saga of her removal, anything but a forward looking company doing anything to compete. We got craptastic personal PCs that Dell or even the average local whitebox maker could beat. We got Vectras that weren't offering anything that other business box builders couldn't offer and for less. We got a company living on their printer division's glory days while a host of competitors ate away at them, nibbling like carpenter ants.
We got the HP name and that was it, but we also got the decline in value of the HP name at the same time. So... what was the point? I'm sure that's on the minds of those being laid off as they recount their time at HP. What was the point?
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Do you consider perhaps that management fucked up by creating a bloated personnel heavy organization? Big companies grow out of control during good times by hiring tons and tons of people they may not really NEED. When times get tough expendible employees are just as fair game as other belt tightening measures IMO.
Did you consider that HP management screwed up big time by buying Compaq, which was in a race to the bottom with Dell? And nobody ever figured out what Carly meant when she said she was turning HP into an "internet" company, whatever that might mean, but hey, it was the tail of the dot.bomb era. She took HP into a very low-margin business that had nothing to do with the company's strengths. The only reason HP has too many employees is because recent HP management lost a lot of HP customers. Carly got millions to walk away. What will the employees get?
HP bought both Compaq who had bought DEC. I am under theimpression the Compaq piece is the most underperforming due to the relentless efficiencies of DELL
What kind of complex policies you are talking about?
Managing coorporations is more like that - managing. It is very hauting task - but it is NOT complex. It requies talent, knowledge HOW to manage PEOPLE who manages problems.
You want to know where is problems with those companies? They DON'T KNOW HOW TO MANAGE THEIR PEOPLE. Because NO ONE REQUIRES CEO TO DO THAT.
Everyone things - well, I got power, I got money. Fuck that! Do you have influence to workers of your company? Respect? If you don't then you are FUCKED UP. Your company is FUCKED UP.
What I have seen recently that usually CEO are some person with high ambitions but very low self-esteem and most important - VERY low respect from others.
It is NOT complex. It just requires RIGHT person to be in CEO place - not someone with big balls.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
I'm wondering what sources BBC used though, according to the CIA factbook the USA has a literacy of 97% and a gdp of 40k. This kind of measurements are debatable at best anyway. I mean look at the criteria they used:literacy... How the hell does that make you happy? A high life expectancy... Those japanese fellas sure don't drink enough to be happy. I'd be able to create any outcome I whish just by selecting the right parameters. Let's use the number of murders per capita, Japan would probably first and the USA not even in the top 10. If you let people judge for themselves you get very interesting outcomes (couldn't find any good sites to link). Americans would probably have a pretty high place, being as stubbornly optimistic as they are.
Are these workers entitled to those jobs? They took those jobs knowing fully well what the rules of the game were - that the shareholders and management can fire them if they think that is in the interest of the corporation.
Why should employees who did a good job suffer for the incompetence of management which was hired much later than most of the employees? How should employees who hired on in the 80s know that Fiorina would be hired as CEO and wreck the company twenty years later? Shareholders don't fire anybody - management does that.
Was it in the interest of the corporation that the directors hired Fiorina for millions? Was it in HP's interest to buy out her worthless Lucent stock options for millions more? Did it really benefit the corporation to pay her more millions to go away rather than just firing her? You seem to have a strange concept of what is in the interest of a corporation.
I think the idea of the incompetent executive is somewhat of a myth.
Look at companies that made their fortune on innovative engineering, and were then led by bean counters, such as SGI and HP.
J - Nonsense. Germany has worker protection and their 3rd quarter is better than our 3rd quarter.
Germany's unemployment rate is currently about 12%. Germany's second quintile disposable income for 2004 was about 19k Euros, roughly half the US disposable income for the same group. Further, a much smaller percentage of them own homes and businesses.
Lets stick to the topic. You made a very specific claim about standards of living. I can give other examples. As for owning homes and business vs. renting what the transfer of wealth away from the bottom 99% of Americans is what people are compaining about.
J - technological improvements overwhelm differences in distribution of wealth. You need to subtract technology off and to do that you need to look at their wealth relative to the wealth of their society.
One needs to look long and hard to find quality of life improvements that didn't start in or become affordable through corporations.
That's begging the question. Corporations have controlled a good deal of the economy in the west and most improvements in the last few hundred years have come from the west. If you want to open it up to all time periods then
1) Irrigation
2) Rotations farming
3) Food storage
4) Written language
5) "Domestication" of farming plants
6) Domestication of animals.
Are pretty big ones corporations had nothing to do with I don't think they've come up with anything that's advanced standards of living like those. In the last few hundred years:
-- Virtually all literature
-- The interstate highway system
Are good examples.
Should I keep going on?
Now lets start talking about state assistence. That is where the government starts development on a technology and then transfers it to business computers being the best example.
And comparing CEOs and shareholders to kings? Precious few kings ever brought the seed capital to create their kingdoms or funded quarterly losses in anticipation of future payback.
And the CEOs and shareholders of HP did do that?
Compare recent years' earnings to your average money market account. In quarters where they haven't lost money, they'd still have been better off with their money in the local bank. Shareholders who didn't sell and finalize a bigger loss still are continuing to eat it.
You are showing higher returns not that CEOs and current shareholders paid out of their pockets the seed capital....
Hate to make a me-too post, but I think your analysis of HP is spot-on. They've become a commodity marketing company that is unfortunatly still thinking and staffed like a top-tier engineering and sales company (in other words, like IBM). Sadly, it wouldn't suprise me to see HP come out of this less with less than 25% of the employees they had a few years ago.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Tech companies biz model seems 2b 30% H-1's, 40% outsource, and the rest of us schmucks.
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."
This nation is based on English common law and the fundamental rights of Man. The judeo Christian sttuff is just cheerleading. Anyway, to respond to your point, what you do is save 10-15%, retrain, and work to increase your own powerbase. If you've been at HP for 20 years, you should have a good $300k minimum. You're an engineer, you're smart, so use what you've got!
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
That is the in-vogue theory. However, there is a strong case to be made that salaries are determined more by the relative power of employee and employer than by "added value". This is not a Marxist position, but one supported by Keynes, Sraffa, and the empirical data.
The book Debunking Economics ought to be required reading. It's a critical look at the claptrap that passes for high-school economics.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
"Hewlett and Packard would be astonished at what their company is doing today."
The company Hewlett and Packard founded is now called Agilent. What HP does now has nothing to do with what they did originally.
Vote for Pedro
Your moral argument against the quoted line of reasoning is spot on. But as some are only swayed by "scientific" arguments, I wanted to point out that there are many counterarguments within economic theory itself to the free-market apologists. I highly recommend the book Debunking Economics as a critical examination of the claptrap taught in introductory econ.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
It's astounding that with u.s.'s economy based mostly on selling, they're getting rid of mostly sales jobs. It's everywhere in the news: u.s. doesn't belong in implementation and design because the culture emphasizes selling. Getting rid of selling jobs is like making someone who doesn't like coleslaw eat coleslaw. Furthermore, sales jobs are the ones that lead to the executive jobs but they're keeping the executive jobs.
If you don't understand what you're doing, then you can't successfully manage it.
This isn't always true, but it's true such a large percentage of the time that only a fool would bet against it.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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?
The Nazis gave eugenics a bad name. Consider that forced sterilization was widely practiced in the US before the Nazis picked up on it. We now live in a world that's heavily focused on allowing even the most defective DNA to be passed on from generation to generation. This is not necessarily a good thing. I'm not all out supporting eugenics here, but couldn't the forced reproduction of defective DNA cause us not to evolve properly as a species in future?
People should simply fucking CARE ENOUGH TO BE WILLING TO SACRIFICE SOME OF THEIR OWN WEALTH FOR THEIR FELLOW HUMANS.
Many of us do. Without the good of the greater whole, charities could not exist, and there are thousands of them. Sure, the government forces you to hand over large sums of money so it can pay welfare, defend the country, and so forth.. but a significant amount of money is given voluntarily. Consider the crazy sums of money that organizations like the EFF and the Perl Foundation get each year.. that money doesn't come by force.
I found it interesting that the article noted, "additional cuts may lower morale.." uh...morale was already in the pit. It can't get much lower, even in the divisions that are money makers.
Part of the reason I ended my eleven-year career in May was layoffs. I simply hated waiting for the other shoe to drop. People would just disappear, and you'd find out later that they'd been laid off. (WFR'd in HP speak.) Being told by my manager that, "We're pretty safe (from lay offs) but NO GUARANTEES..." about drove me NUTS. Also, when the CEO comes to town and makes a specific point that HP has more IT people than sales people, it's time for an IT guy to take serious stock of the situation.
In the long term I think Hurd will be good for the company, and I wish my former compatriots the best of success. A lot of fat needs to be trimmed, but the question is, "Can he tell the difference between fat, muscle, and bone?" There's a whole lot of fat in middle management right now.
"That's no moon"... Obi-Wan Kenobi
People should ... CARE ENOUGH TO BE WILLING TO SACRIFICE SOME OF THEIR OWN WEALTH FOR THEIR FELLOW HUMANS.
Especially CEOs...
I see. Other people than you should care enough to sacrifice their wealth.
Also, where did that wealth come from in the first place? Did someone "sacrifice" it to those other people than you? "Sacrificing" wealth doesn't create wealth. It may move it around, but it doesn't create it. Investing in product development and serving customers creates wealth, but that's not a sacrifice, because it yeilds more than it costs.
So--what's the solution for those who can't compete?
Charity. Voluntary charity. The kind where the person that needs help asks for help. And then someone helps them voluntarily. And then they say "thank you" when they get help. And they try hard to be worthy of the help that they recieved.
See almost every society throughout the history of the world for examples of this concept.
In India, Malaysia, and other countries with unenforcable intellectual property law, does the employee's work still belong to the company?
For example, an Indian worker creats the embedded C++ code for an HP printer, is that embedded C++ code property of HP or can the employee give it away?
I would agree over the short term that is absolutely the case. What is why I phrased this so weakly, "will tend to stabilize at" rather than something much stronger like "will tend te be" or "will be".
Now as for the why this is true, consider either extreme and how it would tend to correct
1) If there was lots of unemployements and employees are much cheaper than the added value they bring employers will tend to hire quickly. This leads to less unemployment. After a while there is little unemployment and the employees can shop between jobs.
-- That's why for example the US employers worked so hard to push through the H1B program and the Indian outsourcing. If there wasn't unemployement in tech they wouldn't have been able to maintain the political power.
2) Conversely assume that employees have lots and lots of power. As a result they drive up wages beyond what they add to the company and companies become less and less profitable. This creates a lack of investment and economic growth slows. As productivity increases the need for workers declines and unemployment increases.
You can mutter about Germany's unemployment rate and all of this all you want, but you have to realize that NOBODY defines unemployment the same. Here in the US, anyone that hasn't found any kind of job, regardless of their education in 6 months is considered willfully unemployed, and just plain is not counted!
Half the working population could up and lose their jobs, and assuming they haven't found jobs in 6 months, they're as good as forgotten. That's almost how bad it was during the great depression, where it was about one in three without a job.
Of course, they do this so they can put a positive spin on the bullshit that they plan to happen. i.e. the massive re-distrubution of wealth that's set to occour in the world. Instead of some of us doing well, and the the rest just getting by, we'll all be middle class slobs, and the place to put your hands on the money will where the money travels through... i.e. the international banks.
I don't know how they define it in Germany, do you? So, it's like comparing oranges and grapes.
In other news, the word 'They' has announced today a 25% letter reduction, the vowel department will be among the areas particularly hit.
I guess I may be burning karma and grousing, but I'm willing to forfeit ALL my remaining karma, and any Meta Mod points to say the following:
/. gave me the benefit of the doubt and tried to pull teeth at HP and failed, or gave up with one, "We don't discuss layoff policy before the PR department has seen a designated newspaper publish it, and even after then, we refer inquiries to the published paper or our website after we've made it official on our website..."
I reported this FRIDAY, 15 July at 1207 (and I am sure the paper was printed before 6AM Friday, which means ), and even put it in my journal, and even bought the Friday paper to have a hard copy. I think it would have made better excitement than to wait for SUNDAY just to see ZDNet's blurb. I guess ZDN *could* have had a writeup on it first, but I
"googled" keywords and Google turned up junk from 2 years prior, but not a single word for Friday. I guess nobody reads the papers fast enough to stir things up so Google caches things before the ZDN's word gets priority over Google.
TFA header/byline as timestamped on ZDN is:
"HP to slash approximately 15,000 jobs
By Dawn Kawamoto, and Michael Singer, CNET News.com Published on ZDNet News: July 16, 2005, 8:00 PM PT"
Saturday NIGHT, no less...
I suppose it *is* possible someone at
To get a submission posted before the regulars, is it necessary to add more redundant verbiage and speculation than the FA itself? Or wait for ZDN and on-site papers to display the content?
Karma Purged/forsaken....
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Which works fine if you accept the assumption that the economy is usually at or near equilibrium, or moves from one equilibrium point to another. OTOH if you view the economy as a dynamical system governed by nonlinear mathematics, your argument breaks down. It makes sense at the two extreme examples you gave, but lots of counterintuitive stuff can happen in the middle.
As for which assumption is preferable, most economics is built on the first, while Debunking Economics makes a case for the second. It's worth reading if only to consider an alternative viewpoint.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
Even Forbes posted by 12:25 PM Friday , beating ZDN/CNET by some 1.25 days.
http://www.forbes.com/markets/2005/07/15/hewlett-
Does any submitter/top posting authority at
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
HP seems hellbent on self destruction.
First the utterly pointless merger with Compaq.
Then the abandonment of developing HP-PA in favor of developing Itanium.
Then dissolving the Itanium partnership.
Now, inflicting DRM on all their consumer products. Woo hoo, because it worked so fucking well for Sony that Apple ground them to dust.
If I were an HP shareholder, I'd be demanding executives heads on platters about now...
I'm going to pick it up (won't help for this debate). As for at or near equilibrium I think America is pretty close (+/- 50% for the average worker) that is on a log scale it never gets totally out of wack. I think most economists would consider me a sceptic for not saying +/-5% for almost all workers, but I'd agree the evidence against it being this close is far stronger than the evidence for it.
Compaq merger against the will of the HP founders.
Carly makes big bucks for failure.
The R&D staff is worthless where no market exists for the innovation.
Dumping sales staff IS the definition of business failure.
Growth is the measure of business success.
There is no growth where R&D & sales are cut to pay for the golden parachutes.
Bush's new SEC nominee will prevent any derivitive actions.
HP is a goner.
according to this article, you can get a PC from HP with decent performance for as low as $250? 1 option includes Athlon 3000+, 256MB RAM, 40GB drive, Win XP home, integrated video and sound, and a keyboard and mouse.
Does their cost cutting measures allow them to sell cheaper pcs? Is support for these machines going to suffer?
Vote for Pedro
Why not blame the corporation?
You may show examples of why the Feds (and States) should be blamed ALSO, but that doesn't exhonerate the corporations. (P.S.: Saying that you may show such examples doesn't imply that I believe you have. I do, in fact, believe that one could come up with acceptable examples...but you haven't.)
I'd be quite willing for you to relocate to Dubai, since you seem to know it and like it. I doubt that most of us speak the local language.
That said, I do believe that with different governing laws it would be possible to generally have decent corporations. I'm not quite certain what the culture that did that would look like, but I suspect that it would have a strong central authority, which would likely be worse (eventually, if not immediately) than the corporations that it was regulating.
Other possibilities include requiring corporations to actually suffer the equivalent of criminal penalties when they commit criminal acts. I'm not quite sure what this would look like, but currently a corporation can commit premeditated murder and NOBODY gets significantly punished, even when they are convicted. So it wouldn't look much like the current state.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Here's a chance to talk about a leftist crackpot idea ;). Let us assume that is it my responsibility - and yours, everyone's - to build and maintain a society where the basic needs of every individual is met. How then do corporations fit into this picture?
;)
One theory goes that corporations are simply the complications of this "inhumanity" where wealth naturally collects and distribution is thwarted in the name of the great distributive system itself: capitalism.
Consider, corporations are proxies which have the power of ownership - private property. Corporations have an advantage of efficiency when we consider large resources and complex tasks. This makes them akin to machines. As a body, any task is broken into smaller tasks and responsibility is spread into a chain. The weakest link defines the chain and thus the entire responsibility of this great machine can easily fail. As humans - remember our axiom - we place a huge amount of resources in corporations and therefore a large amount of our ability to fulfill our responsibility in these machines.
I think of Assimov's 3 laws of robotics - so well interwined and seemingly effective. By breaking one law, the illusion fails and all the laws are broken. But we would love to believe the illusion can be held up, so we repeat the laws to ourselves. We even have the machines repeat the laws. Ultimately, the machines, our proxy workers designed for efficiency, fail to assume our responsibility.
With a corporation, the general effect is that responsbility is far more difficult to handle than with a more direct ownership model. If you think about it, it's a ridiculous notion to believe that a corporation will have responsibility. Groups have jobs, incentive structures, and rules, but the central responsibility - which we assumed at the beginning - is not delegated evenly. It is not delegated at all, for the most part. How can you regulate humanity to humans? It certainly can't be "cost-effective".
We are thus back to punishing individuals, only this time we have made the task more complicated. Now corporations get in our way of responsibility, because they allow people to amass great wealth and power, all while hiding behind a corporate curtain. What's more, they allow us all to participate as consumers, share-holders, etc.
If the machine breaks the laws, are it's part's responsible? No, we attach responsibility to people. But people will always blame the machine - those who stand to gain from the machine's product will always place responsibility on the machine. Ironically, since we all own pieces of this great machine, these individuals are essentially blaming all of us. While citing the virtues of private property, a CEO may very well place the blame of some action on the organization as a whole - "inefficiences" or "the markets" or "competition". In effect, the CEO - a the model of centralized wealth in a capitalist system - is distributing the blame (responsibility-wise) while keeping the money. Thus the machine - and the hive of poorly coordinated machines that make an economy - really is a proxy, but for who's interests?
Honestly, if we actually take up the responsibility as outlined, I am not sure the answer to that question. Do we get a good trade for owning stock in a corporation? All I know is I'm not quiting my job just yet
Yes, you're right. And there are arguments that bridge the two, like the one that I usually make, though I didn't this time: in an economic marketplace designed to encourage, reward, and sustain only certain types of behavior (willing all others to be eliminated), we risk ending up in a social and behavioral universe populated by very successful people whom we envy or respect materially but would utterly hate to know personally, left to choosing among a realistically limited selection of very productive tasks that we're tired of doing yet will have to do (as ruthlessly as everyone else) for the duration of essentially meaningless, übercompetitive lives.
Wealth is only meaningful as the means to an end (comfortable survival, whose end in turn is the ability to carry on a meaningful social existence and interaction, as we are social beings). The moment we turn wealth into an end in and of itself and decide to use the ability to create wealth as our criteria in a darwinistic selection mechanism, we risk creating a world populated with such ruthless, single-minded, or backward characters that it's not worth living in or surviving for in the first place.
It's the critical theorists' view, essentially: before one adopts methods and positions that are unassailably rational, one should consider carefully the ends that the given type of rationality so successfully produces and whether they are as desirable for society at large and for the individual as a complete, multifaceted being as they are for a single "successful" individual when considered only in the single context of said rationality.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
how long?
...
/. can even afford the median value home here?
What doesn't seem to be apparent to some is that HP employs some 9,000 in the SF Bay Area.
TFA, by Teresa Poletti, Mercury News July 15,2005|Friday:
"On Thursday, Cindy Shaw, an analyst at Moore & Cabot, issued a report citing a Silicon Valley insider who said HP may announce a management reorganization as early as Monday that could include widely expected layoffs. Shaw's report was the first to predict job cuts could be as high as 25,000. HP employs 9,000 in the Bay Area and 150,000 people worldwide.
But analysts believe Hurd needs to cut more for the company to be competitive."
Well, imagine what could happen to the Silicon Valley real estate market if, say, 5,000 or 2,000, or even 500 of those homes, homes which could be county-value-assed at over $450,000 and and FMV/market-appraisable at $650,000 or higher suddenly go on the market in the next 4 months when the style-of-living wipes out much of the severance checks or goes to buying up 100 lottery tickets per week, filling up the Porshes that end up being towed after the BMW and the high-and-dry trailer-lodged boat.
People will be scrambling to sell them before school resumes for many of the students, hoping to appease the buyers who may be parents. Right now, in San Jose, HUNDREDS of townhomes and condos are under construction, building going on as if the bubble is still here. If other large employers based here follow HP's move (by choice or necessity), I wouldn't be surprised to see many more existing homes in the Valley to compete with unfinished residential units.
How many of us on
Worse, this layoff could have silent, delayed but eventually painful trickle-down repercussions:
-Vendors' orders owed to HP not fulfilled
-Vendors' orders owed BY HP not fulfilled
-Vendors have to lay off due to payments delays
-OEMs and others cancel orders due to web of other orders breaking down
-County/state payroll taxes dropping due to laid off workers
-Unemployment counts going up
(Watch for the dry dipsticks in DC fail to count the HP Layoffs, or to report them as a tiny but negligible "blip" on the radar, as if the humans are "discountable"...)
And, we've been told "We're at the bottom of the 'V', and we're going to pull up hard and fast..."
Sure, I've never seen a rollercoaster that slammed into a vertex without shattering its passengers or without jumping the tracks and scaring the hell out of the patrons in the line waiting for that ride...
They *could* have described the bottom as a "mild, shallow, but long 'V' that we have to traverse for some time, but we'll come out of it in OK shape...".
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Well said! What kind of lives are we going to have if we accept as dogma "You have to compete to survive?" Are we going to have the lives of wild wolves and other animals? Even dogs live better than that.
Absolutely correct. The rationality of the whole takes on a mythic intentionality that no single individual has the power to challenge or escape. Even those at the top don't enjoy pure benefit because they then live constantly under the threat of behavioral "laws" that goveren economics, mass movements, revolutions, etc. They, too, are subject to the rational "laws" of a whole that lies beyond either the logic or authority of any one of the individuals that it was designed to free.
The fundamental problem then is the adoption instrumental rationality as an end in and of itself, something that is all to easy to do when it is such a powerful means to measurable and thus easily conceptualizable and endlessly reproducable results--which then, because of their "measurable" nature--are mistaken for "gains" in empowerment and improvements in living standard that, considered in isolation, are undeniably "good" in any particular instance.
Who can argue with any one given increase in wealth? Any one reduction in crime? Any one dissolution of a social ill? And yet, considered together, the relentless accumulation of increase in wealth, reduction in crime, and dissolution of social ills leads to virulent nationalism, pseudo-communist totalitarianism, rampant, ruthless capitalism, etc.
You've essentially just described the Frankfurt School problem--the possibility that the enlightenment has failed us. Rationally unassailable, measurably productive, undeniably "good" and beneficial at any one datapoint, the enlightenment and its quest for "rational," measurable gains, systematization, and progress nonetheless as a "lifestyle" rather than simply a "tool" has come to dominate and tyrannize everyone living within its logic to much the same extent that pre-scientific forms did--in slightly different ways, but nonethless still tyranny. Progress is good. But subservience to the relentless quest for progress and sublimation of self and society to it (think Progress' [i.e. Progress prime, like acceleration vs. speed]) is just as ruthless and harmful as is the state of total lack of progress from feudalism or worse, because measures of progress (which always appear in isolation to lead to a net increase in happiness) are nonetheless different quantities from direct measures of individual happiness or even collective morality. These quantities are not directly linked in linear fashion, something that seems irreconcilable but, given twentieth century history, can not be denied to be true.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
" I got a good chuckle out of that but CEOs make a lot of money because they're worth a lot of money."
As a rule? Or just specific CEO's?
Do you think Carly Fiorina was worth all that money? Do you think she did such a fabulous job that her severance package is worth more than the severance package of the 15,000 soon-to-be laid off HP workers?
Or is a CEO only worth as much as they can create wealth? In other words, a CEO that loses money, loses market share lays off people is worth what? A lot? A little?
Is a good CEO worth a lot? Probably. Is a bad CEO worth a lot? I think they have a negative worth associated with them. So why is it that CEO's are rarely punished for doing a poor job? I mean just losing your job and being given a $21M severance package hardly seems like punishment to me, but perhaps I live in the wrong social circles?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
You can't shrink your way to profitability. At least not in the long term.
Not sure who said it, but it seems to be correct. Companies that are laying off lots of people are on the path to being bought out by someone else. At best.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
"You knew the rules"
Yeah...like the one which says that every employee has to be loyal to the company, but the company doesn't have to be loyal to it's employees.
I always love that: in the big bad world of business, it's A-OK to fire a tenth of your workforce (especially the tenth which DIDN'T get the compnay into that situation), because that's just business. But at the same time, your employees have to be loyal to the company to get hired or to work there (ie don't ever critisice the company).
Personally, I think it went wrong when corporations got the same rights as humans (owning property etc), because corporations never have and never will have what humans do: a concience and moral character. A corporation exists solely to earn it's shareholders money. But what was left out was the fact that corporations don't operate in a vacuum; they operate in a society. Allowing them basic human rights without being able to punish them like humans is where it went wrong. Allowing them to spend their way out of trouble when doing morally reprehensible things (like poluting, making cost/benefit analyses concerning human deaths) instead of giving them a deathsentence (in the states where that's applicable) means they can have human rights without human duties.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
There is an interesting study at http://www.timbro.com/euvsusa/
No doubt many will disagree with the study (such is the nature of economics) but it is still an interesting read.
Good business plans dont require sacrifice, bad ones do
Actually sometimes good business plans do require sacrifice. Look at IBM, they had layoffs in the 1980s because they were shifting their business from hardware to services. HP's business has not been working, they may be looking at a shift.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Try again. As a worker, your state takes some of your money to go to unemployment. Then when you lose your job, you collect it based on how much you used to make and for how long.
While I agree that I have put tens of thousands of dollars into the unemployment system that I'll never see, I wouldn't call this a charitable contribution. Also, if I collect it, I have to pay taxes on it. Twice! Cool, eh?
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.
As an investor I see this and think "hmm, not only is this company about to take a huge one time charge, productivity is going to suck for the forseeable future. This company is going to produce nothing this year."
I think that's probably right. Above we were arguing about the economic health of the population that the "health of economy". In the USA there is a moderate correlation in the mid term and a negative one in the short term between the two (most likely).
In any case the issue here is corporations not regulation so the Europe thread isn't really too relevent; they also have private sectors which are corporate dominated (in many ways moreso than in the US). The real difference is the ratio of the private sector to their public sector.
Wow this is very important timing to the economy. Over 50% of the U.S's real estate profits are derived from about 10 states, CA being the biggest one. There is already plenty of talk about the Housing Bubble.
Second quarter profit 1.3 Billion. See http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/investor/financials/quart ers/2005/q2.html "HP had a solid quarter," said Mark Hurd, HP chief executive officer and president. "We grew revenue 7%, non-GAAP earnings per share rose 9% and we generated $2.4 billion in cash flow from operations.
t ers/2005/q1.html
First quarter profit 1.3 Billion. See http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/investor/financials/quar
Tell me please. If it is making over a billion per quarter in profit, why will they fire people who made it happen?
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
Good! Homes are overvalued compared to income levels anyways!
If I had mod points, I'd mod this up.
Apologist
Certainly sounds that way to me.
Beautifully put (your whole response). Anything more is simply unnecessary. I'll just tip by hat and be on my way.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
Obviously HP has a hardon to grab anyone high up at Dell seeing as the bulk of their focus was beating Dell. That being said that article says nothing of what his compensation package is when he leaves Hewlett-Packard years down the road. Of course there is this then:
Mott will also receive "targeted long-term performance cash of $7 million for the 2005-2008 performance cycle, of which $5 million is guaranteed," the filing said.
So if this guy completely fucks up...he gets 5 million spread out over 3 years. Or he makes:
YR 2005
690000 Base
690000 Short-term 100% Bonus
1000000 Relocation Allowance
2200000 Signing Bonus
1666666 "Performance" Cash (Worst Case)
1421580 Vested Value est. @ $24.94*57,000 Shares HPQ Vested (285,000 vest at 20% per year)
YR 2005 Total = $7,668,246
YR 2006
690000 Base
690000 Short-term 100% Bonus (Ends Y06)
1666666 "Performance" Cash (Worst Case)
1421580 Vested Value est. @ $24.94*57,000 Shares HPQ Vested (285,000 vest at 20% per year)
YR 2006 Total = $4,468,246
YR 2007
690000 Base
1666666 "Performance" Cash (Worst Case)
1421580 Vested Value est. @ $24.94*57,000 Shares HPQ Vested (285,000 vest at 20% per year)
YR 2007 Total = $3,778,246
YR 2008
690000 Base
1421580 Vested Value est. @ $24.94*57,000 Shares HPQ Vested (285,000 vest at 20% per year)
YR 2008 Total = $2,111,580
YR 2009
690000 Base
1421580 Vested Value est. @ $24.94*57,000 Shares HPQ Vested (285,000 vest at 20% per year) FULLY VESTED
YR 2009 Total = $2,111,580
Total Monies gained by Mr. Mott after being at Hewlett-Packard for 5 years:
$20,137,898
And that good people is if he performs POORLY. Please also, do not forget its not outside the realm of possibility for the executives to "re-target" their performance goals so instead of missing them for their pay bonuses they actually hit them fully due to newer, lower targets.
So the question I ask is, what do the people immeadiately under Mott make that are just one level below him? And so on and so forth.
"What if I need to circulate my resume?"
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
/Especially CEOs.../
I see. Other people than you should care enough to sacrifice their wealth.
I think a lot of people dislike CEOs (and other top-level execs) for a few reasons:
1) They get paid a literal fortune, often 50 times what an engineer/programmer gets or more (and so 100 times that of a "normal" position, 200 times that of a janitor, etc)
2) People don't understand what they do and so don't value it (witness the posts here essentially saying that engineers are irreplacable, while anyone can manage)
3) If you or I fuck up big time, we get fired. If an executive-level employee fucks up big time, they get a huge pay-off ($40m for Carly?) and walk into another similar job somewhere else (not that they *need* to work!)
For example, the previous chairman of the company I'm at burnt through about £12billion (about 80-90% of the company's cash reserves) all-but crippling it, then left with a multi-million pound pay-out.
Besides that, there's an old saying - "from each according to their means, to each according to their needs". CEOs and their ilk have the means to provide for an awful lot of needs...
Charity. Voluntary charity. The kind where the person that needs help asks for help. And then someone helps them voluntarily. And then they say "thank you" when they get help. And they try hard to be worthy of the help that they recieved.
I see people on the streets everyday trying to live off that sort of charity. I don't see too many people giving.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Damn, you are one successful troll. I'm surprised no one has seen through you yet...
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
And when they do fail, it's usually not much of an event, unless the failure is one of large porportians.
When one of these large companies goes down, it brings a bit of the GNP down with it. The GNP doesn't really mean too much to the man on the street, as he's not holding any shares or likely to be employed by any of the fortune 100. But it does concern our government. That's because the goernment has become a branch of the corporations in an economic sense. So the government will bail out Fannie May, various Savings and Loans, and a few choice friends, allowing you to pay for it all over again.
I'm not totally against the government bailing out corporations when it provide more good to the people than non-interference. But it seems that the government is burning it's candle at both ends. It's promoting the well being of the corporation to the detriment of human rights, a stable workforce, and even jobs within our borders, and then acts the part of noble rescuer when these beasts fail, allowing us to pick up the check. It wouldn't be so bad if corporations didn't flaunt thier misdeads so blatantly.
Note that HP had a great calculator division which brought in over 6 millon a year and employed 30 people before it was cut in a move like this one. The decision was made on the grounds that nobody would notice lack of R & D for a few years. Now that it's many years later, people have noticed, and HP Calculators are a thing of historic glory.
No, not really. Don't forget Germany is still trying to integrate the former DDR (East Germany). They took on a large region which was almost totally destroyed. Bringing the former DDR up to scratch still has many years to go.
Great Britain and Ireland have LOWER unemployment rates than the United States (US is 5.5% unemployment, GB has 4.8%, Ireland 4.3%). Ireland's growth rate is slightly higher than the US, and Great Britain's is slightly lower than the US.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Like in Norway. In 2004 ~4.3%
e .html
http://www.indexmundi.com/norway/unemployment_rat
E. Perkele
Fire one million. One of the smaller companies, so nobody notices.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
... that it never says something like
"...planning to layoff 15000 employees. Management, Human Resources and Marketing will be among the areas particularly hit..."
Or is it just me?
This isn't true, according to Snopes:
http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/unemploy.htm/
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Even if they did have double-digit unemployment, it doesn't really matter because those countries have a comprehensive welfare state which will take care of you if you are ever jobless.
You might want to read this article I wrote a while back.
Part of the issue:
citizenship is a form of property right-like a share in a large condominium. Letting companies import workers in a specific profession dilutes the property rights of condo owners in that profession-and has the effect of letting employers pay in immigration rights rather than cash. The "market value" of an H-1b visa right now is around $50,000. If companies paid that in visa fees, there would be much less of an issue(also if the visas were up for public auction without being tied to a particular job/profession).
Now, that aside, I'm not sure if the move of countries like Canada to let folks essentially buy residency rights(i.e. by promising a certain level of investment) is a good idea. H-1b is nothing but a corporate welfare program though. Companies pay in green cards rather than cash. The real issue is why major companies are so dependent on these kinds of subsidies.
The job of the government isn't to enforce some kind of utopia property rights applicable only to the very wealthy. The job of the government is to create a situation in which the broad base of its citizens have decent life-while being a good "international citizen". The present US government isn't doing that job-and is in fact liquidating the assets of the broad base of citizens for the profit of wealthy elites(technies and African Americans have been among the hardest hit BTW).
Just FYI, the group among which immigration is the hottest issue according to Pew Research are the heavily black "Disadvantaged Democrats". The way immigration continues is massive buying of corrupt politicians. Most Americans want less immigration.
If it is making over a billion per quarter in profit, why will they fire people who made it happen?
Since there is no such thing as "too much profit", cutting your labor expenses will obviously increase next quarter's profit. And then next quarter a new round of layoffs will increase next quarter's profit and so on until no one works for the company and you have maximum profit.
Of course, since they laid off all of the people who made it happen, they're going to fall behind in R&D, etc. their stock price will plummet and someone will end up buying them out for their name.
Repeat after me, "stock price is all that matters".
Ian(aka sanity) let me be blunt:
You take wealth and property rights of the rich _much_ too seriously. If work can be done without creating enormously wealthy individuals, there is a big incentive to do so. H-1b in the US was largely a way to prop up wealthy interests(and was largely a creation of these absurd trade decifits the US has due to international currency arrangements).
H-1b never delivered on its promise to create jobs in the US. H-1b never had broad, popular support-it was a scam facilitated by the willingness of congresmen in the US to sell their offices.
Your argument is very well thought out and one of the best I've read on slashdot...
I was also a full subscriber to the invisible hand theory of freemarket economics once upon a time. The elegance of Adam Smiths arguments is very compelling, and if you look back in history it seems the natural evolution of an enlightened society.
However, somewhere between highschool and adulthood, 2 major flaws became apparent.
The first problem is inflation. Just as a currency devalues if the supply increases, so does the value of human labor. Adam Smith was writing in the late 18th century. England, along with mos t of the rest of Europe was still recovering from the ravages of the Black Plauge, assorted wars, and general bad health care/nutrition. Communication was slow and travel difficult. In other words the pool of labor was very small. With a small labor pool each persons economic value is much greater, meaning they can earn vastly more.
Fast forward to the early 20th Century in the US where "modern" free market economics gets its start. Again we have a relativly isolated landmass. We also have huge natural resources and land. Communication is better but still nothing like today. Travel while easier is still not trivial - no superhighways or 747s. Slavery has ended. We again have a relativly small labor pool and a great deal of resources. Thus the value of the human laboror is again high. Since Labor is one of the scarcest resources it can buy much more, and the "free market" works... for a while.
Then we get the robber barons, the monopolists, the "fat cats" etc. The Free market is showing its flaws. Unions start, and begin to restore the value of labor again by creating a artificial scarcity. WWI occurs but as black tuesday and the depression showed it was not quite enough and the flaws of "pure capitalism" begin to become obvious.
Then we get WWII. This has an interesting effect. Just when the middle/lower classes in the US need it most, we again get a significant reduction in the labor pool. The flip side however is that the other 50% of the population begins to enter the labor pool. Free market is shored up again, labor is expensive and we get the "golden age" of the 1950's and early 60's.
Korea and Vietnam happen and reduce the labor pool again, but the rising population numbers are only slowed not stopped - We get the "silver age" of the 80's. Good if you were _already_ middle/upper middle+ but the cracks are really beginning to show for the rest of the workforce. The world is getting smaller, communication is getting better, and the value of the person is diminishing with both global AND local population increases.
During the 40's 50's 60's smart economists are realizing that "pure" free market is not such a good idea. It ends up with mono-cultures and robber barons, and "noble" families - all of which defeat the benefits of capitalism - diversity, competition, and opportunity.
This begins the efforts of regulation. In a capitalist society power follows money. This means that those with the most money - the "nobles", the monopolies, the large corporations, have the power - Power that directly grows in proportion to the population as the individuals power shrinks. A few idealistic men and women tried to put a check on this power with regulation to protect the workers, the buyers, the children, and the environment. This helped for a bit (again see the 80's) but eventually money and ruthlessness has again overpowered idealism. The established interest already had the resources to circumvent regulation - and after a recovery they produced the new de-regulation politicos of today.
To sum things up. Capitalism is a bad idea. Like democracy it the only thing it has going for it is that its better than most of the other methods we have found - the exception perhaps being socialism. I understand your fears, but England, Sweden, Iceland, and others of the northern western states with socialist leanings do seem to be doing pretty well.
I was under the impression that Compaq wanted to emulate IBM in provide a full business solution including services. Rather than grow their own, they acquired DEC which had been make good inroads in that direction. The dot.com boom which favored younger companies over older ones created the "currency" for these upside-down type mergers.
DECs respected hardware division which created the PDP, VAX and Alpha didnt really mesh with Compaq's or HP's hardware directions, so were allowed to languish. For some time the Alpha was considered the best CPU chip in the business, far more interesting than anything out of Intel.
Eurozone unemployment is at 8.8% and Ireland has the lowest at 4.2%, as of May 2005. Its disgraceful tripe like the parent post that make slashdot what it is today.
And while America is doing slightly worse at 5.0%, some fun facts about those stats...
Although the number of jobs in June exceeded its level at the start of the recession, this is really an indication of how sluggish the jobs recovery has been. In June 2005, the U.S. economy had 1,026,000 (or 0.8 percent) more jobs than it had in March 2001, when the recession began. In every previous recession since World War II the number of jobs at this point in the economic recovery was at least 4.9 percent higher than it was at the beginning of the recession.
May was the 32 nd straight month in which more than one out of every five unemployed workers had been looking for work for more than six months, the longest such period on record. June saw some improvement, with the share of long-term unemployed dropping by 2.3 percentage-points to 17.8 percent. However, such a high long-term unemployment level is unusual when the unemployment rate is low; historically, 5 percent unemployment rates have been accompanied by average long-term jobless rates of 10.7 percent.
Average hourly wages were 2.7 percent higher in June 2005 than in June 2004. But, since the inflation rate was 2.8 percent between May 2004 and May 2005, inflation-adjusted wages actually fell during the past year.
Check your facts before you flame, troll.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
A four month CEO is cutting R&D at a TECH company
... and hiring more managers - this is good??
Compaqard isn't much of a research firm anymore. They sold off most of their interesting assets to IBM, Intel, TI, ARM, Motorola and Hitachi. DEC wasn't so much bought as it was speculatively transferred; Compaqard owns essentially nothing they got from DEC anymore. Their research and development has been a money hole for five years straight.
Why cut an R&D lab which has been failing for half a decade? Oh, I don't know, because the dead weight has to go, maybe? When you merge two leviathan corporations, each of which had recently eaten a few other leviathan corporations, bad groups inevitably emerge. It's a bit silly to suppose that every R&D group has the right to continue; many of them are working on crap, or aren't up to their tasks.
Consider for example value PCs and printers. Both HP and Compaq had lines of each. HP's printer line was significantly superior to Compaq's, but Compaq's value line enjoyed a much stronger popular recognition than HP's.
Now, you could keep both lines around. When the two companies are distinct, that's a good idea - Compaq will still make marginal profit on printers, and HP on value machines. However, when the two companies merge, it's asinine for them to compete with themselves, when the same resources could be going into the stronger of each in each category. So, push the Compaq printer group into HP, and the HP value line into Compaq.
Now, that's good - you get fewer organizations operating at a higher profit margin. Unfortunately, you also get a lot of redundancy - there's no good reason for two ombudsmen, no good reason for two historians, no room for two lead managers in each group.
What you're really looking at is the multiple year fallout from those mergers. Some colliding projects are being merged; when one's seriosly behind, it's being dropped. Redundant individuals are being removed. They've spent a few years figuring out exactly who knows what they're doing and who doesn't, and now they're acting on it.
All in all, cutting 10% of your work force as chaff after the effective merger of Compaq, HP, DEC is quite good.
management FUCKED UP.
Let's see. Management isn't effective, so they want new managers. No, that doesn't make any sense at all. (cough)
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.
As the head of the company, the first day on the job not only gives him that right, but in fact that obligation. The specific purpose of a CEO is to increase the profits of the corporation. If, when getting this job, they spent four months looking for changes to make, and this is the first one, yes, I think that's perfectly reasonable.
In fact, 10% is relatively common for CEOs entering a company on the downslide. Would you rather they tank one in ten jobs based on merit and need now, or all of them based on inability later?
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!
This is a fundamentally flawed analogy, based on the presumption that the absence of a second deleterious effect - another rape - is equivalent to the loss of a positive effect - the jobs.
This is, no offense, absurdism in its most literal sense. If, for example, I were to offer a scholarship from personal funds to the tune of one hundred thousand dollars a year, and then business realities forced me in later years to scale back to eighty thousand dollars a year, your analogy would read like this:
[fake quote]
And you certainly aren't celebrating the eighty thousand dollars I'm still giving away annually.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Here's some scoop from a Bulgarian. Programming here pays about $750 per month. I imagine that in other IT-related jobs the salary is about $400 per month (at most). People at my age (almost 25) that work in the IT business are usually well educated, with a university degree, and quite competitive. Many choose to leave the country and work abroad, as thus they can get better salaries, in fact too may leave the country as we have a severe negative demographic growth crisis at the moment.
Now, something scary. Most of us Bulgarians hope our salaries will reach the salary levels of west Europe, but it is much more likely that the opposite will come true: qualified westerners will have to reduce their needs until they fit into our mold.
Ouch.
So, outsourcing hurts us too, although it doesn't seem like that from the short-sighted point of view shared by most IT people I know (including myself for that matter) who are more than content to take salaries two or three times higher than the country standard, and buy dirt cheap goods. Well, practice shows that countries accepted in the EU usually raise their prices to match the EU prices, but salaries rise little.
Did the horse and buggy makers "complain" when the automobile come along - or did they get into the business of auto repair?
Fact is fact, ahole.
What you're really ranting about is the inequity of those who write the rules writing them in their own favor. But you don't know that yet because you haven't sat down to think it through all the way yet. Take a few weeks out, have a bottle of wine or two, relax, and think about what really causes the problems in society.
And quit ranting against capitalism. There is no other way.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.