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HP To Cut 30,000 Jobs
Axolotl_Rose writes with news that Hewlett-Packard is preparing to cut around 30,000 jobs, close to 10% of its total workforce. CEO Meg Whitman reportedly wants to use that money instead for new products and for bolstering the sales force. From the NY Times:
"China, which is one of H.P.’s highest growth areas, will probably be spared, as will its research and development efforts. Ms. Whitman, who became H.P.’s chief executive last September, 'is trying to build a new company,' one senior executive said of the job cuts. 'You can count this as a part of that.' The final plan is expected to be announced on Wednesday, when H.P. announces earnings for its second fiscal quarter. Considered a slow-moving giant in the tech industry, H.P. had revenue of $127 billion in fiscal 2011, but net earnings of just $7.1 billion. While it has a leading position in the sales of low-margin personal computers, H.P. has been late or unsuccessful in many recent tech trends like providing cloud computing services for big companies and smartphones and tablet computers."
An article at Forbes suggests HP should instead 'retool' those jobs by recruiting makers and hackers, TED conference speakers, and others who have experience building and inventing things.
HP still has a R&D division? Has hell frozen over? Is a CEO being intelligent for once??
Why not just cut 300,000 right away and get ahead of the game for once?
I have a friend who works at HP, and he's constantly tell me how they're overworked due to constantly lowering employee count. /sarcasm
I'm sure cutting out 10% of the workforce, shoving even more extra work on everyone else, will just be a huge moral boost.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
The modern CEO doesn't grow his company in the long-term. He doesn't build good products and increase sales, putting profits back into R&D, new products, and new hires. He doesn't pay shareholders modest dividends and tell them about his long-term strategy for slowly growing and maintaining a profitable company. That shit is old school!
The 21st century CEO boosts short term profits by cutting jobs and forcing existing workers to pick up the slack. He shows the shareholders that the next quarter's profits are great and they call him a visionary. He hides debt with a shell game, cuts workers to hide sales declines, and outsources everything he can to some sweatshop that produces crap product to lower prices. The 21st century CEO looks AMAZING on paper.
And in the long-term...well, who gives a shit about the long-term? By then the 21 century CEO has long since bailed out with his golden parachute. Let Uncle Sam bail them out.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Anyone who watch Meg Whitman run for governor should realize by now that she is an abject retard.
I wouldn't put her in charge of a car wash, much less a multinational company.
I guess after that other Republican candidate, Carley Fiorina started driving HP into the ground they needed another mentally handicapped Republican to finish the job.
You may not be a native English speaker, so you may not be aware of the fact that we have no gender-neutral, third person, singular pronoun for a person. One must choose either "he" or "she" or the much more awkward "he/she." I supposed one could also go with "it" but most humans take offense to being called an "it" for some reason. Being as most CEO's are men, I chose "he" in this instance. I think that's a reasonable choice.
And as for Meg Whitman, well I'm sorry if I may have offended the woman who just threw 30,000 families into dire crisis. I suppose she'll just have to live with it.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Well - in Whitman's defense, HP needs to retool itself. If their claim to fame is personal computers, they will be an also-ran within 5 years. They need to retool with services, get in on the cloud-storage/processing game, and start putting out products and services that people are interested in. Otherwise, they can sit in a corner with Gateway and talk about the olden days.
That, unfortunately, takes drastic measures. Apotheker had the right idea, but just executed it in the worst possible way. Now the question is whether Whitman has the right idea, AND can execute on it. Cutting 10k workers sounds harsh, but it's a nasty requirement for effecting a turn-around.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Carly Fiorina gutted the company and put it into a tailspin. Hurd took over and promised to fix things by gutting the company. Now Whitman has taken over and promised to fix things by gutting the company. I hate to see HP go, at one time it was a great company, but they lost their way under Fiorina and never recovered.
There is nothing quite as beautiful as seeing the plane in free-fall and on fire behind you, as you float to your new private island on a parachute stitched from gold thread and destroyed lives.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I'm sure that with the EDS acquisition, as well as all the other companies HP went out and bought, there are tons of people hiding out waiting to see which group of employees survives the merger. With the PC and printer divisions merging, that looks to me like a lot of sales guys, account managers and customer liaison people are going to be looking for work as well. HP has 300,000 people or something like that. It's kind of like IBM -- once a company gets too big, people can build themselves a very safe spot without doing too much work simply because it's too hard to keep track of everything.
I've had some limited experience with EDS, and from what I saw, there's LOTS of room to cut there. Outsourcing contracts can only support so many project managers, support staff and liaisons-to-liaisons without affecting the number of actual workers who do work.
The problem is that mass-firings like this, especially ones led by management consultants, tend to gut product engineering and design teams, and leave the overhead in place. Even though Whitman may be sparing HP Labs, which was cut to the bone under Fiorina and Hurd, that doesn't account for the everyday hardware engineers who have to design HP's next products. If HP wants to stay successful long-term, they need to ignore the typical McKinsey speak and keep the people who can build stuff that HP can sell.
I'm working in one of the very few dinosaur-era fields that actually needs to buy good-quality PCs and servers for customer projects. Think stick-in-the-mud customers, low or no network bandwidth and old applications. HP and Lenovo are basically the only choices if you want a decent, well-made business grade PC with a warranty and stable configuration. All the hardware manufacturers need to lay off the cloud kool-aid and realize that there will be a balance between local, private and hosted for quite a while. Not every business is ready for the cloud, the cloud doesn't make sense for some businesses, and even the cloudy people need decent machines to run VMWare, Hyper-V, Xen, etc. on. In HP's case, I'm sure the McKinsey people read the Gartner people's Magic Quadrant stuff, concluded that every business will be in the cloud by 2017, and recommended that HP get out of the traditional PC and services business, and become strictly a cloud provider. Problem is, when the social media/Web 2.0/cloud bubble pops, things are going to swing back to a sane mix of hosted and local, and HP might not have anything good to offer anymore.
If you get one person doing the work of three, that's management success and you should get a big bonus.
If that person does 3 jobs badly, that's his personal failure and should be noted in his next performance review!
0 1 - just my two bits
"While it has a leading position in the sales of low-margin personal computers."
How ironic and sad that this is HP's claim to fame now days. There was a time when this was simply so not true. There was a time when you bought HP stuff (and you paid top dollars for you), you knew you could throw it against a wall or drive a car over it and it just kept working. Quality was #1, bar no competition. That was back when the engineers still had a bit of say in what went down there.
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
Actually, the use of "singular they" is a gender-neutral option in English. I've seen it used more lately, although my middle school English teacher would probably cringe at the idea; it still sounds wrong, somehow. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they