Slashdot Mirror
HP To Cut Back On Telecommuting
Makarand writes "Hewlett-Packard, the company that began
making flexible work arrangements for its employees starting in 1967, is cutting back on telecommuting arrangements
for its IT employees. By August, almost all of HP's IT employees will have to work in one of 25 designated offices during most of the week. Those who don't wish to make this change will be out of work without severance pay. While other companies nationwide are pushing more employees to work from home to cut office costs, HP believes bringing its information-technology employees together in the office will make them swifter and smarter and allow them to be more effective."
News just in...
HP moves all nationwide offices to india, any employees who refuse to move are out of a job without servernce pay....
Could they do that, and if they can't, can they move them into offices? I guess its a contract thing, something for me to look out for if i ever telecommute..
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
From an article I read on the effect of telecommuting, employees are *more* effective, or accomplish more, in less amount of time, when working from home, as it allows for a more relaxed atmosphere, among other benefits.
But it's been a little while since I read the article, and I may have it wrong.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
The problem is not the technology, its the people. We allow all of our developers to work at home, providing them with the equipment (VPN, 2nd computer, etc) and technology (1/2 of broadband expenses) to make it possible. But most developers end up coming into the office. Most of them have found that they either A. Lack the self discipline to keep up the pace when working at home and B. They do not have enough access to their co-workers at home despite access to the technology. A lot of our work is multi-discipline, multi-language (Java, C++, C) and spans everything from drivers to applications, our developers simply need real-time access to their peers in order to do the work.
When we have tried this with other aspects of our business it has had similar results. Most people simply lack the self discipline to make turn the telecommuter opportunity into a reality (for them).
This is the first sign that the "pendulum" is swinging toward having local job creation again. HP admitted that having the IT folks TOGETHER makes them better. You couldn't be more apart than California and India.
Of course, your programmers have been telling you this for YEARS, but it takes a pointy-haired boss to implement it.
That's what really pissed me off when I was in the biz. I would ask to work from home and I was ALWAYS told that, "No, we need you here to do your work."
So, I would commute in every fucking day. Then, you guessed it, my job (and others'), were sent over seas to India. Yep, they needed their IT workers there all right!
I've always wanted to be able to telecommute. Some days I just can't be bothered to get dressed. I want to watch TV during the day, listen to music, sleep in without anyone noticing and in general not have to talk to my coworkers unless I need to. oh and the most important thing.. be around to receive my freakin mail. Too many mail order companies bow down to the pressure of the delivery companies to the point that I can't get an item I have paid for delivered to where I work (even if I am going to be there and have photographic ID) or even get a phone call 5 minutes before it is delivered so I can leave work and be there to receive it. If the company offers selective delivery it's usualy 5 or 6 times the normal delivery price. I was even once posted a delivery card with the wrong reference number on it only to find out after the item had been returned. This was after quoting the number 5 times in different phone calls. This madness has to stop!
i think hp is on its way to make his work force very mad... and the net effect is not going to be the one expected. i wonder how much time will take executives to come to the reversal of its decision, as it will come to this point i am sure.
Romans also had the same problem with slaves. For some reason they couldn't exercise as much influence over their slaves when they worked from home. Of course, instead of whips and chains, HP has employee surveillance and the threat of outsourcing to keep their staff in line.
What's interesting is their non-IT employees can continue to telecommute. I would guess that the IT folks being forced to relocate and physi-commute aren't too happy about that.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
I hope they've thought this through. They say that high performers can keep telecommuting, but I somehow doubt they'll allow that due to morale issues. The clued people who can perform while telecommuting are the same people who can easily find new jobs. If I was being asked to relocate because they won't let me telecommute anymore then I'd consider if I really want to work for a company that says they no longer trust me.
When you lay off your least valuable folks and then start doing stuff like this your most valuable folks start looking. You end up with the people that aren't good enough to get hired elsewhere but probable were gonna be on the next layoff list. Yeah, that's really the kind of people I want supporting my mission-critical gear...
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
Before I get hammered this is the right thing to do. Flexibility is great and being able to work for a few hours on Friday from home when taking comp hours for the rest of the day is efficient and great. Or working from home when you are waiting for the guy of the telecom. Great that's good for the firm and the worker.
But telecommuting for most of the time is stupid and neither good for worker nor firm.
1) My problem is distraction, when I have to finish something I can work from home, that's ok. But if nothing is pressing on me hard I'm simply not disciplined enough. For this a work environment is great to keep focussed.
2) Teamwork. I'm working in an international firm and it is working by and large, but Messanging, calls, emails only get you so far. Being able to walk 5 meters and chat someone up is completely different. It is very complicated to coordinate work over three continents and too many timezones.
3) Teamwork Part 2, how will you develop something like Teamspirit and good cooperation if you have only seen most of your team a couple of times?
4) line between work and home. I do work enough, when I'm coming home and can say so it's over let's go drink a beer or watch some TV, that's refreshing.
So I'm all for flexibility but please don't overshoot.
I coulda SWORN the idea behind telcommuting was that you didn't waste time driving or putting up with office-related BS. I know that having a home office alows greater flexibility (which apparently is a bad thing to HP). But as introverted and "leave me alone and let me work" as most programmers and IT personnel are, why would you force them into a room and waste more of their time getting to an environment they hate? I smell backlash. This is akin to offering insurance benefits and then recanting after years.
Touting MyEclipse AJAX Tools
From TFA:
In an office, ``you're able to put teams together that can learn very aggressively and rapidly from each other,''
Agreed, IMO lower skilled work environments are much better suited to home working. For example call centre work etc. The only reason I say this is that everyday I go into work and I learn something new from the people around me. Not to say this is "agressive" but if I get stuck on a bit of code, or perhaps a general concept I know that others around me may be able to help, and if they cant then we have discovered something that we as a group are lacking in.
Otherwise these thing go unnoticed, you recieve no critism and do not learn as effectively. Ideally in a team the stronger members of the group can carry the weaker members until they have caught up with the rest.
I cant see how this could be as effective in homeworking, in fact some animosity may occur towards weaker members due to percieved "lazyness" when actually they are just have legitimate trouble with their task.
My current contract reads that should the company choose to relocate me, they are responsible for all expenses, but I am compelled to do the reloc.
Is your employer also responsible for expenses related to relocating your spouse and children, if any? Or are such contracts designed exclusively for single people?
Probably some HP manager saw how great people can hack stuff at a Hackathon, so they decided to Put People Together.
Seems like the 21st century's super-efficient leveraging communications technology suddenly isn't good enough for efficient, productive communication anymore...?
Hm, tell that to any company that sells software for digital groupware/communication/...
Yet another reason to boycott HP and it's crappy products.
Anyone working in IT should cease recommending HP products immediately in a show of support to the HP employees being bent over by them on this.
If anyone can give me a citation for the following story, I'd be really grateful.
Some time prior to 1990 I read a story about research done at HP on employee performance. They decided to find a correlation between employee performance and school performance. They found no correlation. It didn't matter where you went to school. It didn't matter how many degrees you had. It didn't matter what your marks were. That wasn't surprising. The Navy had discovered the same things many years previously. What was surprising was the discovery that the highest performing employees were the ones who hung around the water cooler.
Gregarious people make better employees. If you put people together, you get better work. Laying off the people who won't come in to the office seems like quite a good move.
Many bosses like to be able to pop in unannounced to check up on employees and keep them honest. That's not so easy when they telecommute. It's hard to tell how long they "worked".
As the price of gas soars, it's becoming irresponsible to force all this commuting. Even if it's just 1 or 2 days a week, it reduces traffic. pollution and improves employees lives.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
How can you measure efficiency if the guy works at home? That's the problem.
I knew you could. This appears to be a company floundering around trying any possible solution to its business problems than the real one - return to making a high quality product and then stand behind it. Yes, let's blame those slackers that are at home drinking coffee on company time rather than the idiots that decide corporate policies. My last HP purchase was a LaserJet IIP some twenty years ago. When it finally went to printer heaven, I looked around at what they were offering, read the user comments on service and support and bought a Brother. By the way, is this the same HP that 'believes' that end users will pay more for a replacement ink cartridge than a new printer? Can you spell 'doomed'? I knew you could.
The building management teams are going nuts trying to fit more people in less capacity. They weren't warned about the telecommuting initiative when planning began for the consolidations.
Many staff are having their cube-space halved, some of the hot-desking areas are not much bigger than 1sq metre. Teams that are being told they have to come back in are sometimes getting half the cubes they need for the number in the team, so many have to hot-desk.
Adding to this, HP's closing many smaller outlying sites and those people have to travel to the bigger sites. The buildings will certainly be crammed to the rafters with people.
Apples and oranges people. The difference between telecommuting and outsourcing is that in outsourcing there's still a company on the other end managing the workers. While in telecommuting there's just the employees. The HP and Apple situation aren't the same.
Here are my thoughts on this:
l -telecommuting-for-its-it-division/.
* 180-degree turns are traumatic, and don't turn out well. This is one such change, and it will be messy and painful. It will alienate a lot of bright folks. From a management standpoint, it's not right. Change is best done gradually, and by co-opting people.
* Making the bright people come into the office in order to straighten out the poor performers, as HP's CIO hints, is yet another silly decision. Yes, I can tell you certain IT personnel should be on-site, but not everyone needs to be there. If HP's IT workforce is peppered with poor employees, this is a recruitment/management issue, not a telecommuting issue. The decision is a non sequitur. If your tire is flat, plugging the exhaust pipe won't solve the problem. Seems to me a much better solution would be to pair up the poor performers with good performers who live in the same area, and have them work together on issues, whether it's at someone's home or my IM/phone. Training would also be another solution.
I wrote about this in more detail here: http://www.comeacross.info/2006/06/04/hp-to-cance
ComeAcross -- You never know what you'll find.
There are a lot of computer companies that, in my opinion, sell garbage products, products that cause IT professionals grief, or would if they weren't eliminated.
HP's products are worse than garbage, in my experience. They are scary garbage. I tried to un-install an HP printer driver and the un-install program deleted more than 900 files in the WinNT folder, files belonging to the operating system, not HP.
An HP technical support person told me to solve a problem with an HP printer driver by renaming an HP file so the driver could not be used.
Another HP technical support person told me to solve a problem with an HP network printer driver by not trying to use the network facility.
When installing an HP printer, it has been common that there are error messages. This is during installation. We stopped buying HP products because of that.
It's sad to see HP on a downward spiral. Lou Platt was a terrible manager. Carly Fiorina was FAR worse. I'm guessing the company is rated about 0.1 Enron now.
Watch for this: The top managers of HP will destroy the company, but will still take home tens of millions of dollars in salary and "bonuses", as Carly Fiorina did. Top managers have become enemies of companies and enemies of society.
I don't know if this is true, but it has been said that HP would not be profitable if the company could not sell Inkjet printer ink for $800 per gallon. If that is true, then it is possible that HP is not primarily a computer company, but is primarily an "expoiter of customer ignorance" company.
HP was once a company admired by everyone.
I agree with previous comments that probably HP is planning to fire the employees.
Nicole C. Wong, the author of the article did a surprisingly good job in writing it. Normally business writers are clueless about technology.
--
Edwards: George W. Bush is the "worst president of our lifetime".
I don't remember who said, "Change is the only thing that really stays the same", but it's appropriate. There are advantages and disadvantages to working at home, and HP has decided that this week they want to reap the benefits of team-based collaboration. Maybe it's as simple as a new manager wanting to have whatever managers are n levels below him directly indoctrinate these telecommuters to his way of thinking.
I hope they let the employees keep their VPN equipment and computers at home, and give them comp time for clever ideas they implement from home. Otherwise, HP will certainly lose its most dedicated workers. And, if they have built up a slacker culture that exploits telecommuting and rips off the company, one can only hope they will lose that too, but I think it's a little less certain.
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
If I could telecommute, I would gladly keep an "always on" webcam available so anyone who wanted could peer in if they wanted. I'd even let it record so it could be reviewed.
I'm not one to usually do so, but I'd trade that bit of liberty for the convenience of telecommuting. I don't mind if people want to watch me work.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Right, and don't forget to put the right cover sheet on your TPS report.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
Kind of like in those IBM advertisements in magazines where the guy goes crazy and duct tapes the entire office staff together. That'll certainly make everyone collaborate better.
And sweet sassy molassy is the IT department horrible. We have a 30 page document for getting anything fixed. We call a number that routes us to India (actual HP India, not an outsourcer though) who are typically not at the office. They gather the details and then when they are near a computer they put in a trouble ticket, which gets routed to someone in Boise, Palo Alto or Colorado. Who then call us for details. Its good times.
Collaboration is crushed when your customer is in California (the pointy-hair who wants some software) and the worker is in India. Same as if the worker is at home.
the big problem with ending telecommuting to bring the teams together is that each team is scattered over the 25 sites. until the teams are changed so the whole team is in the same office this just adds real commute time to the day before you can call or im your colleagues in some other part of the world. ok, yes I'm bitter about it.
What does a manager do all day when the staff are working from home?
Manager job security might just depend on there being an office full of people.
...and found that, as with almost any situation, there were good and bad things associated with it.
the good: i can work in my underwear if i like, i can set my own hours, i can get a sandwich anytime i'm hungry, i can smoke at my desk, and i can accomplish more in 40 hours than someone who's constantly bothered by office distractions.
the bad: i stopped taking showers and wearing clothes regularly, i got migraine headaches from concentrating too hard, i gained weight, my house stinks like cigarettes, and sometimes house distractions are worse than office distractions.
what did i learn? one thing was that i noticed my bosses started heaping more work on me because they wanted me to work overtime. i guess those who worked at the office regularly put in overtime because the distractions caused them to require more time to finish a project than had been planned. of course, i was salaried, and would have none of unpaid overtime, so i concentrated even harder and shut out more of what was going on around me in order to finish my work in 40 hours/week. the result? migraine headaches.
the thing that irked me the most about telecommuting is that the office dwellers sometimes forget that those who work elsewhere can't attend company picnics, softball games, or lunch for all at the local restaurant. so when they email all@companynamehere.com and announce that tonight's softball game is at 6:30 instead of 6:00 it leaves a 'left out' kind of feeling to those who work there but can't be around physically.
it lasted 3 years. that was all i could take. incidentally, the migraines are gone.
When you recognize love in another and realize how precious it is, everything else seems so insignificant.
"By August, almost all of HP's IT employees will have to work in one of 25 designated offices during most of the week. Those who don't wish to make this change will be out of work without severance pay."
And the beatings will continue until morale improves.
Regards;
Perhaps they realized that there's value in gosipping over the coffeepots, durring 'break' times. Engineers are used to kibizing on each other's projects.
Apples and oranges are both fruit. There are similarities to companies deciding to end remote working.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
The more the new executives and managers chase the bottom line, the more HP will suffer (the more brilliant people will leave), and the worse they will fare in the market. I expect someone to acquire HP for the name at some point in the not-to-distant future. No doubt it will seem like a smart move to the new Wal-Mart managers, when looking at the "bottom line".
If you're the type who needs a work environment to keep focused it would be better not to telecommute, but I bill less when the customer lets me work at home and get more done. It's not that hard to monitor performance in a remote development environment. Either someone is making their milestones or not, closing trouble tickets or not. I can look at their code and tell how long it should have taken vs the actual billing. What I save in clothes, gas and commute time is invaluable. My equipment, my dev environment, my work space at home are all set up for how I work.
A phone list and a speaker phone is all I need for quick consults, fax machine for paperworks, we keep code libraries in common access areas accessible via VPN if I need something. I find interaction at work actually detracts from production more often than helping it. There are times when face to face meetings are unavoidable, like gathering requirements and monitoring user interaction on betas, but other than that I'd say a full 75% of interuptions at the office are at best unproductive and frequently just plain annoying. If I have to forward my office phone, my productivity tanks. If I can check messages a couple times a day that's better.
For people interested in playing politics or needing interaction with other people, an office is necessary. For me the more you leave me alone, the more I'll get done. Sometimes I'll collaborate with other developers...I work with a graphics guy in California regularly. We can work together almost like we're in the same room. We've had three way phone confernces where we've all been hammering away on our part of the app, yapping back and forth on the speaker phone. It was very much like being in an office.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Here is an interesting problem. You as a telecommuter live about at least 200+ miles from the nearest work center. Will the company pay for the expense of you to move in closer plus the cost of housing ? Some people might choose to live in rural areas since cost of living such as property is much cheaper than living in a big city.
In my experience. I live in Colorado. In my old job with a manager who was an asshat, it mentioned to me that if I wanted to continue to work, I should consider jobs in the Washing DC area. I asked if there would be relocation reimbursements. He told me of course not. With my refusal to move to the East Coast, he told me it would be detrimental to my career. I am still paying for my refusal such as getting turned down for a promotion. The company I work for, if you are turned down for a promotion, you cannot apply for another one for at least 2 years.
If there are issues with the performance of some, that is cause to change the system, not throw everything out and make it worse for the majority. The 'everyone round the watercooler, discussing problems' idea in reality doesn't require the watercooler - it requires the culture where those that have the knowledge are recognised in their passing it on. I'll bet that it isn't in HP.
Two obvious solutions could be tried. Either companies could be forced to pay the commuting costs of their staff (that would make them understand that fuel costs are not a joke); or the HP staff could club together and pay to get this jerk wacked. Overall the second is probably best for the long term future of the company.
Managerial ability seem to always be inversely proportional to face time.
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
That business with Apple (at least as described in the Slashdot link) is simply insane. I doubt it's generalizable to anything, although your distinction between telecommuting and outsourcing is obviously correct.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
In her internal consulting role, she liases with HP people both in Europe and the USA - consequently, she can start work at 7am (for the Europeans) and finish as late as 9pm (for the Americans). No, she doesn't do a 14-hour day everyday but I would say that she averages out about 10 hours per day and she *does* work all of that time - so whilst she's contracted for a 40-hour week, she easily puts in 45-50 hours a week based on the number of days she works from home currently.
Her current office, in Reading, is about 30 minutes drive from our home - she goes in about twice a week, she tends to start for 8am in the morning and aims to finish about 5pm to the gym on her way home. So whilst she does do 8 hours in the office a day, it's generally less hours per day than working from home.
Now consider this. The Reading campus is closing in July and she (and her colleagues) are being moved to the Bracknell campus, about an additional 30 minutes on her travel time from our house. She will not be able to have her own desk because (apparently) HP have a *shortage* of several thousand permanent desks in the UK - so even when she gets to her office, she's no guarantee of getting a desk.
So, in summary, now that she will have to spend two hours in the car daily (as opposed to one hour twice a week), she will make up that additional travel time from the additional hours she put in at home each week because she sees no reason why her personal & entertainment time needs to suffer - consequently, HP get less work out of her.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Happens when you piss off your employees so the smart ones get jobs elsewhere and you're left with the dregs who can't. Could someone tell HP manglement "Dilbert" is supposed to be a humour strip, not a documentary?
Unfortunately, hp is planning on 'nearshoring' large portions of its technical support workforce by year's end.
Nearshoring , in the oh-so-clever corporate parlance of our day, is the term for getting all the financial benefits of normal outsourcing (ie., India) with all the benefits of ... staying in the in the same hemisphere ("Hey, we're only shipping jobs out of the country a LITTLE ways!"). Costa Rica seems to be a potential favorite for the pending hp move.
Carly Fiorina was the strongest proponent of sending American jobs to India, effectively creating an entire industry of telecommuting.
Now HP is saying telecommuting is bad?
Face it. Corporations want to be slave-drivers, and it's only through democratic lawmaking that we keep them from getting their wish.
Rather than deal with the source of the problem just uproot the entire system. Dealing with the source of the problem would require managers to actually expend some effort to figure out who is valuable and doing work and who is not.
This is just a typical least effort solution to a problem. Not suprising that Wall Street views this guy as a brain child as that group is quite content to view the world using simplistic numerical equations. This group is also driving most of corporate world to short term thinking and solutions that often lead to their demise or stunt the growth of the company.
And no, I am not an HP employee.
--
Q
(ObDisclaimer: I work for HP IT. But if you're looking for a "Randy Mott/Mark Hurd Sucks" message, this isn't it. HP has a very vocal set of internal fora for bitching at management. I do my whining through the media which might actually effect change. Slashdot, I'm afraid, isn't it).
Firstly, the policy of colocation is not just tied to telecommuters - the idea is to centralise a highly distributed IT workforce. So, eventually, nearly all IT workers will need to relocate to a few central locations. The teleworkers are just first on the list for relocation.
Secondly the problem for many IT firms is not telecommuting per se, it's the fact that we've just sleepwalked into teleworking without a clear business analysis as to whether the business operations can effectively sustain this model of working in each case. Sometimes they can, sometimes they can't. Now, this is a historic failure of management - senior employees get sufficiently pissed off with life in the Bay Area, or Houston, or Atlanta, and feel the need to get a quieter life in Dogshit, Nebraska. Fine and dandy - but it's effective management to say "Sorry, we can't have you in your current job doing that". Neither mean, nor incorrect - just a manager doing his/her job in keeping the department going. But we don't do that - we just say "Yeah, sure. Get an ADSL line, we'll be cool". Sometimes it's true - sometimes it's not. Now - how do you pull that position back into line? In HP, that's Randy Mott's problem. He's got a system that's been allowed to grow wild in many areas and is, to all intents and purposes, out of control.
Randy Mott has an extremely aggressive set of targets in trying to push up the efficiency of HP's IT. Maybe he's going about it the wrong way - if so, he'll pay with his job.
--Ng (not in any way speaking for HP, HP IT, or Randy)
I've seen this happen. Large business unit in company looks around and figures out they have a lot of deadwood telecommuting from home all over the country. Rather than go through the hard exercise of identifying and firing the deadwood, they tell everyone they can't telecommute anymore and have to move to one of x possible sights.
What happens is predictable. The deadwood moves, because they can never find a job this good again. A lot of the top talent, who really liked where they lived, and really likes the telecommuting lifestyle, looks around and discovers it can go work somewhere else, frequently at higher pay. The top talent makes for the door.
In essense, it's a great way to reduce your org to only dead wood.
I'd like to give HP a great big "F-U!" for being one of the companies that has encouraged the company I work for to go with an open space floor plan. Contrary to management's belief, we all want our damned offices back.
The founders of HP are rolling over in their graves with what the current management has done to destroy that company.
Sorry, HP printer ink is $8,000 per gallon, not $800.
I would know more about HP if I thought it was safe to buy HP products.
$17 for 24 refills
>a few employees abused the flexible work arrangements ... admitted to
>driving a tractor during conference calls about project updates.
This all might've been avoided if certain persons STFU about the tractor story.
HP has moved away from innovation and toward the bottom line. HP was very successful and well known for many years due to the unusual quality of its corporate culture and products. But the above poster's comment about HP/Wal-Mart is dead on.
It appears HP decided to copy Dell, who admitted they were a marketing and distribution company and not a "technology" company.
At face value it seems logical to copy your most profitable competitor. However, there is also the issue of niche. There may only be so much room for Walmartization of PC's. There is also a niche for innovation, which HP *was* well-qualified to shift into similarly to how Apple's niche or specialty is user interface (both hardware and software-wise), not price.
By trying to me-too Dell, HP will shoot itself in the foot because it is not geared towards what Dell does, alienating its innovation-hungry work-force in the process. Thus, it will be neither innovative enough nor cheap enough (Dell-style). They should take a lesson from Apple, not Dell.
Table-ized A.I.
I'd like to see our gov't give tax breaks to companies who allow a significant portion of their workforce to work from home. It gets these 1-hour commuters off our roads. I'd also like to see income tax breaks for employees who live within a 15 mile radius of their office or who use public transportation/alternative methods to get to work. I'm sick and tired of reading about these idiots who have these 60 mile commutes to their work office so they can keep their kids in a good school district and remain with their employer. I'm far from a tree-hugger, but these people are just wasting resources and clogging our roads with traffic. Let them work from home! If they can't get their work done, fire them.
I find that I can't work as effectively from home as I can from work, despite having access to the same tools. Granted, I'm more comfortable at home, but there's something about the physical separation of work and home that makes it easier to concentrate on work at my workplace and, conversly, more difficult to concentrate on work when I'm at home in my pajamas. It's as if, by hopping in my car and going to work, I enter some kind of "work mode" where I'm not as likely to waste hours reading slashdot or wikipedia. Even when nobody else is at work, on a Sunday.
You're losing your friends, (in some cases) your non-progeny family, your girlfriends (or boyfriends), ... and if they keep treating you as though those have no value it'll be a damn sight harder to convert your status to married!
A company ought to pay an unmarried person more to move than a married person since the cost to the employee to move their spouse, etc. are an order of magnitude less than the cost to an unmarried person to re-acquire the friends, girlfriends/boyfriends, etc. needed to get them back in the same position with respect to acquiring married status.
Decent companies pay you for any losses you may experience selling your old house when they move you, but they won't re-imburse you for the unmarried relationships you lose nor will they take the impact of those into consideration when deciding who to move.
Because we all know that Bush and his cronies are all about fiscal responsibility and small government......HAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHA
just the sort of intelligent choice one would expect from HP!
:-)
A merger with Sony just on the horizon ?
Has it dawned on any of you that HP might be doing this because telecommuting just isn't that successful?
The future is not for people to schlep their butts across suburbia to a centrally air-conditioned box of glass and steel.
Many teams in HP are spread all over the world - some in Ireland, some in Germany, some in Singapore, some in San diego, some on Corvalis, some in Vancouver, some in Murray Hill, some in Houston, all over the place, and a bunch of codemonkeys in India. And everyone has different skill sets. The idea is to pool people over the web with necessary skills in situ, so you get the best work from people wher ethey are. It's all data - that moves much more easily and cheaply than people.
They've spent years putting together these teams and they actually do work, and work well.
When gas hits $5 a gallon, you're going to see this nonsensical policy rolled back jiffy quick.
HP is in a death spiral, and this kind of reactionary management nonsense is simply indicative of that very spiral.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I'll put on my odd-jobs-and-freelancer hat:
Choices choices choices: Take 25 minuts to get to work, +x amount of gas +y amount of little nagles that are anoying at work+ manditory lunch.
OR work from home and get as much or more done.
Now I admit their are times when wokring in the office is nice. But the reality for HP is that they will not only have to pay for the workers, but the associated costs as well ie: Network, power, offspace etc. Management by objective, Managment by objective and comerce by objective as well-they'll make up the costs one way-or another. i
Oh well.
Not like anyone in comerce these days gives two cents about anything.
If HP doesn't get enough of it's telecommuters to quit, I bet they start layoffs next. Will be interesting to see if any of the telecommuters who move and then loose their jobs anyway blog about it.
That is what it is all about. Keep squeezing. Squeeze from all directions.
First insult with no raises for years. Insult by sticking victim in a stupid cubicle, then as it becomes prohibitive to commute, say we are not going to permit any tele-commuting. Let us not forget refusal to refresh a 4-year old laptop. HP would not have any available, would they?
Actually they want to terminate any/all compensation they provide for tele-commuting. That would be a high speed connection. If you are working from home to escape cubicle hell, we will show you! What can we do next to insult you and convince you to move on?
Here is how you know it is not quite time: HP does still provide coffee if you will go to office. When that goes out, you know the bell has rung.
The architect of the HP division's change, Randy Mott, is regarded by Wall Street as a mastermind of operational efficiency based on his days as chief information officer at Wal-Mart Stores and Dell.
Heh. It's a cheap stealth layoff. Quite a few of the telecommuting workers won't go along with the change, and will find other work. Telecommuting IT employees tend to be more senior (both higher salary, and older). This both gives HP IT a dodge around US laws establishing protected-class workers (over age 40), and allows a fairly cheap staffing reduction:
By August, almost all of HP's IT employees will have to work in one of 25 designated offices during most of the week. With many thousands of HP IT employees scattered across 100 sites around the world -- from Palo Alto to Dornach, Germany -- the new rules require many to move. Those who don't will be out of work without severance pay, according to several employees affected by the changes.
Employees who don't play along are not laid off, but instead either quit or are terminated for cause. This dodges the legal issues (42 USC 2000e and the ADEA, see also http://www.eeoc.gov/), and avoids severence pay and contract issues.
Randy Mott is known as a real "fix it" guy in IT Management circles. This move will get him well on the way of accomplishing a streamilining of HP IT. (IT workers are probably well aware of what management streamlining means for them...)
Hurd is a well-documented cost cutter and Mott is just one of his axmen. HP's IT department will be cut by more than half over the next two years, so they can afford to piss off the smart folks, leaving the younger, lesser-paid people behind. They want everyone in the office working together because that's they only way they'll survive once all the experience people have left or have been fired. HP: Just Another Big Company.
Maybe they feel they have to call in the application developers because the quality of their work is so bad! For example, they have absolutely terrible printer drivers and ridiculously bloated installation packages for the all-in-one Officejet series of printers. The installation of the driver is abandoned if there is one single glitch in the application software installation. Candidly, I don't think these 'work from home' issues have anything to do with quality control. I suspect that is just a reflection of narrow minded 'decidor' with an open ear to office gossip and jealousy. I did the best work of my career working from home. Several times my manager came to me and told me how great my work had become. He also told me about people complaining and making false statements concerning my lack of office presence. Thank goodness, he stood his ground and did not act on this petty jealousy and false innuendo. Anyhow, maybe HP is just sweeping everyone up for closer scrutiny before the next big round of layoffs. From a software bloat perspective, maybe cutting back on developers and middle managers won't be such a bad thing. Clearly, there are some types of people who can work from home and some people who can not. Most people know and can tell you which category they fall into.
"At drinking time I left Meyer at the wheel and went below and broke out the very last bottle of the Plymouth gin which had been bottled in the United Kingdom. All the others were bottled in the U.S. Gin People, it isn't the same. It's still a pretty good gin but it is not a superb, stingingly dry, and lovely gin. The sailer on the label no longer looks staunch and forthright, but merely hokey. There is something self-destructive about Western technology and distribution. Whenever a consumer object is so excellent that it attracts a devoted following, some of the slide rule and computer types come in on their twinkle toes and take over the store, and in a trice they figure out just how far they can cut quality and still increase market penetration. Their reasoning is that it is idiotic to make and sell a hundred thousand units of something and make a profit of thirty cents a unit, when you can increase the advertising, sell five million units, and make a nickel profit a unit. Thus the very good things of the world go down the drain, from honest turkey to honest eggs to honest tomatoes. And gin."
The Dreadful Lemon Sky © 1974 John D. MacDonald
Due to this policy change we are losing some of our best IT workers. These people have been ranked at the top for many years and the new policy will force them out of HP. Who wants to move to Houston? In previous years IT workers have been forced out of the office to work from home because it was cheaper, now they are forced back into the office. The move package will not pay for the complete move and if you do move, you could be laid off the next month.
Remember that HP is attempting (and succeeding VERY well) a huge cost-cutting effort. One of the largest efforts in this attempt is the effective reduction of headcount by around 10%. This effort (end to telecommuting for IT) is targetted at about 1500 (1%) employees. Many are biting the bullet and moving. Some have been able to locate new postions within the company. A very large percentage will leave HP. Most of the 1500 employees effected have been with the company a very long time. Most were with HP during the internet boom when the company was doling out multiple raises in a year in an attempt to keep talent while dot coms were very attractive. Thus, these employees are making FAR TOO MUCH money and it whacks HP's ability to reduce IT expenses to the desired target level. Once the "expensive" headcount is out-of-the way, there may be a return to normalcy. Don't be surprised, however, to see the tactic used in a few other of the companies areas. I'd be willing to bet on a return to "normal programming" in 24 months. Occupancy rates will become more important. Benefits related to fuel costs will attract talent coming out of education. Most remaining US-based IT employees (project managers, architects, technical leaders) do not work with other IT professionals. They work with business teams who report to other organizations for brief periods for a project. They then move to other projects and business teams. Ither IT professionals (developers, administrators) will be outsourced. So, to the current HP employee, I suggest patience and acceptance. For those that can (lots of years, but not enough to retire), consider split residence. The $2K per month may turn into an investment if you only have to do it 18 months. It's hard! Sorry for the ramble.
There is also a niche for innovation, which HP *was* well-qualified to shift into similarly to how Apple's niche or specialty is user interface (both hardware and software-wise), not price.
Exactly right. Somebody at HP said, "we're going to compete with Dell on Dell's turf, by Dell's rules, with higher expenses than Dell."
I'd like to know which business school that guy went to.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I know of HP IT in Palo Alto, CA location. And I can tell you despite Randy Mott's best efforts to get rid of shadow IT, it reigns supreme to-date. Most folks telecommute and nothing ever seems to get done. Just check the HP parking lots on Mondays and Fridays and you'll know what I mean.
I know of one guy who never shows up to work, he's comes to the office less than twice a month, never gets any work done and boasts of his connections to senior VPs, enough to scare his boss from taking any action. He actually runs a private karate training class for kids during office hours.
Most of the top HP employees have left HP, only the slackers and bottom dredgers are left. Because of the layoff fear no one wants to attract attention or solve real problem. Everyone is just hunkered down and looking after their backs.
I think Randy Mott is doing a great job of bringing discipline back to HP, if Mott is not successful, HP as we know it will not exist in another 5 years. Mark my words.
Hmmm, I don't get a cubicle or telecommuting cost relief. As a services employee who works at a customer site (where I share a small office with two others) I get no support from hp except an old laptop. Never mind that somehow I'm expected to fill out my electronic timecard, reimbursement forms, etc. Yes, I get to subsidize a multi-billion dollar company by paying for my own Internet access (the customer does not allow me to use my laptop or access hp internal resources from their facility) in my "free" time after I get home from a two hour (round trip) commute to my customer's facility .
The "HP Way" is dead and buried with it's founders only to be replaced with two lower case initials that mean nothing.
HP is going to lose a lot of talent. These naive moves look really good on paper to either executives or stockholders, but when you get right down to it, controversial HR-related movements tend to be in the wrong direction. When Best Buy decided to go "Accenture" and turn their IT staff into contractors, the cruddy folks floated and everyone else who saw this as a negative took a swim. I know one guy who went from IT analyst to "reports to the CIO." At the Carlson Companies (Radisson Hotels, TGI Friday's, cruise lines, etc.), they did this about 9 months ago, and turned their staff into IBM Global Services contractors. Once again, a lot of the good talent just swam away. These would be the folks who ran the web servers, managed the security systems, Unix admins, etc. Wow, those middle managers who just stayed put were just soooo indispensible.
I think a lot of corporations make decisions that make sense at some shallow level. Take Sun dumping 5000 jobs. If you get right down to it, companies never announce that they are doing a massive internal staff audit and identifying and firing the lazy idiots, clever troublemakers/self-oriented saboteurs (the ones that pass for doing a good job by solving a problem they invent), the inane gossips, the skimmers, and everyone else that deserves a kick in the pants.
As much as I cannot stand many professionals who are in HR, Human Resource Management is vital to a company. I think it is done fairly well in some businesses, such as hospitals, yet where the service/product output isn't so clean-cut, more innovation and analysis is required than is usually present for other business needs.
Wouldn't it be nice if the Dilbert comics were about non IT/Engineering industry? Those of us in this tech market could then laugh at all the funny shenanigans that go on in a lawyer's office, or a carpet-cleaning company. Instead, everyone laughs at our dysfunctional business circumstances, day in, day out.
In an office, ``you're able to put teams together that can learn very aggressively and rapidly from each other,'' he(Mott) said.
What I haven't heard mentioned about this plan is that remote employees are not required to relocate to a site with their team. Just one of the "core" sites.
Allow me to repeat for emphasis:
Relocating telework employees are not required to move to the site where their core team resides.
This means that the stated goal - to increase productivity through interpersonal interactions - is a farce.
+5
Actually, this may just be a step in the process. First tell people that they have to report to SOME location. Later get them to the SAME location (by mandate, atrition, etc).
Which genocide?
Nobody is puposefuly exterminating anybody.
If rich countries wanted to stop immigration they would do so in no time, it is not that difficult to put a border guard every 500m in a porous border.
But politicians in those places know about this and milk the situation for all what is worth: lettinng enough immigarnts in in order to keep the economy nicely churning along while at the same time looking tough with those bastard immigrants stealing our jobs.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
>Not me. Any company that would rate me based on the number of hours I worked
>and not my productivity is not a company that I would want to work for. Anyone
>can put in long hours doing nothing, and that doesn't help the company at all.
You'll notice that nowhere did I say or imply that I would not want or expect to also be rated on my productivity, or that I would want or expect to be rated soley based on the number of hours I worked. That should have been a given.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.