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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."
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.
People had good jobs (that is jobs that paid well relative to the wealth of their countries) before the rise of the modern corporation. Further economic theory indicates that wages will tend to stabilize at roughly the added value that employees bring to an economic enterprise, again this is independent of the existence of corporations or not. Oh and considering that jobs are created by CEOs and shareholders is like arguing that wars are won by kings.
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. So now you have 15,000 less people to lead/manage but you still have the same number of executives and managers. That seems to create a very top heavy structure and those tend to fall over both in the management world and the engineering world.
The more cynical side of me tells me that the execs and managers have more pull so would put up more of a fight if laid off. I'm sure the top level execs know the middle level ones at personal level so found it harder to laid them off. Instead, the little peons on the bottom who they barely know or care about can fend for themselves.
HP Services has roughly 65,000 employees, but analysts are predicting HP will lop off only about 8 percent here because the company is working on edging out IBM Global Services, EDS and Accenture for corporate contracts. "We estimate that HP has roughly 20,000 salespeople, with the majority in (enterprise server group) and Services, and that CEO Hurd is likely to look to streamline the organization, moving away from HP's current 'matrixed' selling organization to focus on more direct accountability," Sacconaghi said.
I really hate the word "accountability" when used in isolation. From my experience, if accountability is the only method being used to solve problems, people start playing politics and the blame game. Bueraucracy goes through the roof and everything has to be documented in case the problem doesn't get solved. You end up spending more time covering your ass than solving the problem. You also end up taking a toll on teamwork.
It seems to me that their current strategy is to lower costs so they can lower their margins to compete. Not a bad plan but there are other avenues. I know at my company, we're more than willing to pay more for better service and reliability. The initial contract cost isn't the only factor. We have to think about the cost of downtime.
Noncritical research and development (R&D) could also be impacted, analysts suggest. HP's R&D spending is nearly $1 billion higher than all of its relevant competitors combined, according to an independent benchmarking analysis done by Sacconaghi's firm. The comparison was designed to mirror the one that Hurd has professed as his method for bringing costs back into line. "We suspect that Hurd might be able to lower HP's annual $3.5 billion in R&D by $250 (million)-$500 million through the elimination of non-core projects, Sacconaghi said. So they're going to gut the thing that made HP great in the first place. I don't know what they consider non-critical R&D but a lot of innovations aren't obviously useful at first. Didn't a division of HP invent the optical mouse? I wonder if that was considered critical at the time.
Again, I'm not a CEO. I'm all for making an organization more efficient but I wonder if they're making the right cuts. It's sad to see the "Grey Lady of the Silicon Valley", the engineers' corporation get hacked to pieces.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
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.
Good business plans dont require sacrifice, bad ones do. HP isnt in the shitter because 15,000 employees decided to slack off - management FUCKED UP. But they are in charge, so there is no way they're going to be held responsible.
A four month CEO is cutting R&D at a TECH company, firing IT workers, and hiring more managers - this is good?? I guess those 120 days on the job does give him the right to slash the pensions on engineers who have been their for 20+ years. After all, those idiots were trying to invent things to make the world better, when they should have been in business school....eck.
And I love this:
And they certainly won't celebrate the 150,000 people who still *do* have jobs created by the likes of HP.
Absolutely, and I'm sure if someone raped your daughter you wouldn't complain - you'd be celebrating that they didnt do it to your wife too!
Apologist.
Hewlett-Packard (HP) was once known for how much they cared about their employees.
It just goes the show that short-term, bottom-line only thinking really isn't good business sense.
It's been my experience that people who do the non-specialized business work tend to think that their "leadership" is invaluable to the company, when in reality it is easily reproduced. An engineer can rise to the occassion and be a good leader, but a person whose formal training is just "business" or a MBA and a liberal arts background cannot just rise to the occassion and be a replacement engineer. Leadership is something that is half nature, half nurture. Most people I've ever known, myself included, who are good at leading have a very strong natural knack for leading and organizing.
Personally, I would want efficiency-minded former engineers to head an engineering company I was the CEO of. I'd want these former engineers because they'd know what's bullshit and what's not and that'd keep my company's ass farther away from the fire. We're sentient beings, not hive workers. To paraphrase Heinlein, specialization is for insects, there is no reason why someone who spent most of their career as an engineer cannot have a good sense for business and be a good business leader.
Since the buck clearly doesn't stop at the CEO's desk in most situations, I don't see why stockholders waste tens of millions of dollars of their company's money on them. At a company like HP, the CEO is naturally going to be detatched from most of the company's operations and excuse me, but I just don't see why any company would sacrifice anyone who could contribute to R&D of new products when cuts in middle and upper management employment and salaries would yield decent results.
Which is more likely to bring a higher ROI: firing many of the people capable of making new products and keeping many of the middle managers and their upper management ilk, or trimming top down? Maybe if HP put many of those people on some good projects, they'd do a lot of good for the company. It'd be ironic if several groups from the 15,000 who get laid off end up founding companies that make the next iPod, Tivo or something like that.
I'm not saying that many of them shouldn't have been laid off, just that it is incredibly stupid to fire people who can make products if assigned properly, but not cut back severely on upper management's pay and the ranks of the middle managers. When Sun laid off a number of its Solaris and Java developers, but didn't fire McNealey, that loud mouth imbecile, I just shook my head. In order to save money and face, our shiny suit wearing business elite would rather fire people with very hard to find engineering skills that could make or break the success of their products than cull the ranks of their own.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
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
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
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.
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.
...
I'm from the USA (native balding white guy, mid 30's), and know it pretty well - as I spent 2001-2004 living in a RV traveling the states working internet job via cell phones.
I have spent the last year living in Chile in a decent site city (200,000 people).
You pretty much describe Chile and MUCH of the world "outside the USA" from what I have studied
Have you considered that maybe this is just the natural rebalance of wealth?
Frankly, the USA as it was from WW2 - 2000 could prove to be unsustainable... at least without some form of rebalance. Even if the average person in the USA were knocked down by 50% income... still better off than MANY places in the world.
And JAPAN in the 1980's and 1990's took a lot of the real wealth... cherry picked Hollywood, etc. Turned Tokyo into a city more expensive than NYC as quick as they could.
BTW, here in Chile the latin american tradition of close family is more responsible for the 'small studio' part... they actually share a house with many generations of the same family living under one roof. More family ties, less stress, more simple pleasures. The point is, there are cultural reasons too - not just financial.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
I love the logic. "If you don't like it, quit. Nobody forced you to take the job. You knew the rules."
Only the rules are the same anywhere, because we're all a part of the same "free market" capitalist economy.
So then the idiots say "Well then, don't take a job. Nobody's forcing you to work."
Only then how is one to eat?
People like you are effectively arguing that this is utopia. And it's not an uncommon argument, I hear it all the time and see it on Slashdot as well: the free market is perfect. If you don't like it, tough shit, it's because you must suck and not be able to compete.
So--what's the solution for those who can't compete? Kill them? Let them starve? If you're born IQ 90 and simple, you deserve to be "outcompeted" by everyone else and end up jobless, homeless, and dead (because we don't believe in social welfare in the free market)? How is this different, morally, from the Nazis, eugenics, and the termination of "defective" humans?
It's 2005. We should be past all of this. People should simply fucking CARE ENOUGH TO BE WILLING TO SACRIFICE SOME OF THEIR OWN WEALTH FOR THEIR FELLOW HUMANS.
Especially CEOs making more in one year than anyone needs to live comfortably for an entire LIFETIME, in a nation based on a Judeo-Christian faith that claims to believe in sacrifice and brotherhood, that claims to support individual "freedom." Freedom for who? Only the wealthy? Only the perfect? Everyone who isn't defective? Freedom to do what? Be "out-competed" into unemployment, homelessness, the grave, and then to be blamed for it because you just "couldn't compete?"
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Hi, welcome to America. I'll be giving you a brief synopsis of how a free market works.
In a free and open job market, you have people and you have jobs. Many people have the ability to do more than one kind of job. Likewise, most jobs could potentially be filed by one of a relatively large set of people.
Some jobs are able to be done by lots of people, like being a cook in a fast food restaraunt. Some people are willing to take that job because they do not have a skill set that enables them to work a different job, or maybe because they like it. Anyway, the worker and the business agree on compensation for the job that is agreeable to both the business and the worker. If there is someone willing to do the same job for less, then the worker should get paied less. If there is nobody that can do as good of a job for the same price, the worker can ask for more money and may get it.
For a job like a CEO or Baseball player, there is incredible demand to get the absolute best people for those positions. If you are the best baseball player, you can demand a lot of money, because there is demand to have the absolute best player on your baseball team: it would help you win, wins help you sell more tickets and advertisements, and people want their team to win. If your team is a perpetual loser, you won't sell as many tickets. (Unless you are the Cubs, because of Cubs Fans like Me).
Likewise, Good CEOs can demand a premium. Someone who can manage a business effectively has a skillset that is in high demand. If you can make your company that earns 1 Billion / year, and grow that profit by 20%, you are worth a lot of money. Stockholders are willing to pay these high salaries because there is the perception that a good CEO can lead a company to be more profitable.
Of course, this is all based on perception. If killing the R&D saves money now, but you lose out on the next major innovation, you've screwed yourself. But that's how the market works, and your competition (who did the right R&D) will beat you. As they should.
Now you may notice that America isn't exactly a free market. Even when Southwest airlines is making money, the Government gives billions of dollars to airlines who didn't make good business decisions. Unfortunately, the Government has, over the last several decades, gotten more involved with business. This leads to situations where bad businesses are rewarded, in many ways at the expense of better businesses. This makes those better businesses less competitive in the global marketplace. Which means that jobs will flow out of America into places where the work / pay ratio is better.
The good news is that you have the freedom to do things you think will be successful. Is there demand for baseball games for blue-collar folks? Start up your own baseball league, sell tickets for $5, sell beer and hot dogs for $1 each, and pay amateurs a few extra bucks to come out and play in front of some people. Will people come out to your park? Maybe. But maybe people won't really want to come to your baseball stadium and see fourth-rate baseball played. And that's the risk you take in a capitalistic society. If you want the best baseball players to come and play for you, you'll have to pay them what they demand. And if you have to pay them a lot, you'll have to earn lots of money. It's just the way things work.
Of course, there's another way to do things, the socialist way. The government makes sure everyone has a good lifestyle, regardless of what they do. The government also tries its best to make sure the best people don't get too far ahead of the worst people. The government has a hand in almost every part of the economy. Europe does this a lot, and the lowest standard of living in Europe tends to be better than the lowest standard of living here. And w
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
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.
Socialism scares me. The direction of America scares me. Patton said ``America loves a winner. America will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise a coward. Americans play to win. That's why America has never lost a war, for the very thought of losing is hateful to an American.'' I wonder if now this is no longer true; Americans love losers and cannot tolerate a winner. And it's sad, really, because Americans have the opportunity to become winners. We're just choosing to bring everyone down to the loser level, making sure nobody gets ahead, so that nobody will be left behind.
I agree, in the pre-1990 era, America did love a winner. So did I. When a freind of the family succeeded and got a great job, or got accepeted to medical school, or did something really good, everyone was happy. People would celebrate, there would be large meals, everyone felt good.
What has changed?
Those are a few reasons why America no longer loves a winner. The avarage American is not greedy. We want a nice house, a yard for the kids to play in, a car, food in the fridge, money for a vacation, and a retirement fund. The problem is, that lifestyle is not middle class anymore, it is becomming upper class.
Is it any suprise that parents are threatening teachers, that if their kids don't get "A"'s in all their classes, get accepted to the best schools, that parents will sue teachers, or get a gun and kill a teacher. I think in Texas some mom killed another cheerleader so her daughter could get on the team and have less competition. In the papers, at a youth baseball game a father beat up an umpire for calling a third strike on his son, when the father thought it was a ball.
Think about this very carefully. People are scared there will be no future. They are fighting like 10 wild hyinas over a found carcus. We are loosing our humanity when we degrade ourseleves to fight for a basic survival.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Western Europe has done an excellent job of achieving a healthy balance between the two extremes.
Which is why they have double digit unemployment.
Do you have any evidence of this, like a link to support your claim? Didn't think so.
The 9/11 victims fund had enough money to pay each family 1.6 million dollars, if it was split evenly.
Instead, they used a formula based on how much income a persom was making.
It is possible for the family of a janitor to get $300,000, and a stock brokers family to get 4.35 million dollars.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0104/p11s1-coop.html
What made it all worse, is the government told all the families if they sued or disagreed with the distributation of funds, they would be denied any government victims money. So what is a poor family to do? They can't hire a lawyer and fight. A few of the ultra rich families decided to sue anyways, they must have felt that getting 10 times as much as everyone else was not enough for their "loss".
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
"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
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
But are you using natural as a proxy for desirable? A lot of things are natural. Having cavities in your teeth is natural, is that a good reason not to go to the dentist? We have a lot of people who are such devout capitalists that they think anything explained by market forces must be AOK.