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HP Cuts Workforce By 5%, Looks To Probe GM Hires
dcblogs writes "Hewlett-Packard's reduced its workforce last year by 17,800 employees, more than half-way to its restructuring goal. But some key IT workers left unexpectedly and have taken jobs with HP customer, General Motors. GM, which outsourced its IT for years to EDS, announced plans last year to in-source its IT. HP acquired EDS in 2008. On Nov. 30, 18 employees of HP's Global Information Technology Organization in Austin 'resigned en masse and without notice' and 'immediately began working for General Motors in Austin in GM's new IT Innovation Center,' according to court papers. HP is asking the court for approval to depose some of the exiting workers to determine whether employment contracts were violated. 'HP expects that additional resignations will follow as the departed employees will likely seek to build out their teams by filling in with subordinate employees from HP,' the company said."
..."you can't leave unless WE fire you". Nice way to build loyalty!
Employees don't want to work for HP anymore, and HP gets closer to its "restructuring targets" without even having to fire them!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If I were a recruiter I'd look at HP as a wonderful place, bountiful and full of talent ready and in fact desperate to be harvested.
I know three of the people who left and I had heard of their terrible work environment for months once HP got hold of EDS. GM offered several a good deal to come over since they were all experienced with their systems, gave them significant pay raises, decent benefits and control of their own group. Who wouldn't leave?
Fiona destroyed HP. She turned the company from an engineering and design heavyweight into a commodity hardware business.
Short term profits resulted and after a year or two and the death of the real engineering progress was complete they began the long slow slide into irrelevance. The fact is we live in a complex world economy where you innovate or die. HP stopped innovating because it was "too expensive". Yes they wiped out all those expensive engineering salaries and boosted short term profit. And several years down the line when HP hasn't innovated anything you see a huge dramatic loss of profit.
You don't want to be in the commodity business, there's no profit in it. You want to be in the innovative cutting edge area where you can charge premium profit margins (ask apple). Being in that space costs money and lots of engineering resources. HP surrendered that market under the leadership of Fiona. HP's board of directors has been a collection of has-been CEO's that are riding the company into oblivion since before Fiona was hired. The Hewlett and Packard families were railroaded a long time ago, the only ones left are trying to milk the cash out of HP before it deteriorates into nothingness.
HP could have owned the smartphone market and dozens of other highly profitable sectors had they spent the money on engineering and development instead of deciding that they only wanted to do printers and computers.
The supreme court of Canada recently made a very radical decision I think regarding a bunch of guys who left a big bank here. Basically the court decision was that people can work wherever the hell they want for whomever will have them. The court seems to have completely tossed out the idea of an employee having any kind of non-compete as violating their right to work. But the decision went much further. It wasn't just about working for the competition or even stealing former employees but the court even said stealing old clients and their phone numbers was fine as long as it was reasonable that the employee could have remembered that data. So if an employee even wrote some names and numbers down it was fine as long as it was a reasonably memorable list. In the particular case the employees were dealing with a fairly small elite clientele so the bank really lost big time. Again the court said that you can't make an employee forget stuff.
This of course is a Canadian supreme court case but I went to a lecture given by a supreme court justice who said that most supreme courts look to other supreme courts around the world that are based upon the English system of law as the same sort of cases tend to crop up in the various courts at similar times. So without a doubt the US courts will at least glance at this outstanding decision supporting workers rights.
To me the answer is quite simple. What is HP doing for any employee the day they leave? Absolutely nothing. So what should an ex-HP employee do for HP after they leave? Absolutely nothing. As for any contract. You could sign a slavery contract but any court would toss it out in a second. The key to a contract is that there is an exchange. If I promise to give you a gift of $1,000,000 tomorrow for absolutely nothing on your part you can't actually sue me when I don't deliver. There has to be an exchange. When the employee stops paying the employee the contract has ended regardless of what extra bits HP might wish for. I suspect that this will be going to the supreme court in the US as people will think that it is "unfair" for the employees to be so disloyal and some lower courts might be so foolish as to fall for this argument. But the law is not about fairness. It is about rules; and contract law is fairly old and boring that way. So it will be interesting to see how this all turns out. Personally I was surprised to see our supreme court side so thoroughly with the little guy when the other side was one of the biggest banks in Canada.
When my company outsourced, our top IT people were rebadged as HP and remained onsite. They are still valuable employees who know the company intimately, and should we ever insource, they'd be the first employees we'd rehire. This isn't rocket science.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
As IT professionals, we are one of the few sectors this economy with any job portability. After years of dealing with the specter of outsourcing hanging over our heads, I say kudos to the ex-HP, current GM employees. If companies respect IT talent and want to keep it, the ought to start treating IT employees better.
I think we have all, at one point or another during our careers, thought something along the lines of... "If I leave this place, they are going to be in trouble and have a real hard time replacing me." or "This place sucks, I am going to go somewhere else where I will get better (pay, benefits, respect, etc)"
Orignally, they started by making world-standard test equipment. Now, that would be Fluke. Later, they provided high-quality 'mini' computer-and-terminal systems to medium-size businesses. That business is long-gone. They used to make high-quality desktop computer systems. Now, they still 'sell' computers but they don't seem to have much to do with the hardware and software but just put the H-P badge on plastic junk. Asus is probably the rough equivalent, now, of what HP used to be in computers. In printers, HP invented 'inkjet' printers but have long-since lost their lead to Canon and Epson. They invented the first 'laserjet' relatively inexpensive desktop laser printer but have lost most of that business as well. So what exactly is HP's business these days? Calculators? I guess they still sell a couple models of those but their products were designed decades ago and are probably pretty much legacy business now. As a company, HP is the victim of years of horrible mismanagement at the top. Even if we assume that they have somehow, against all odds, managed to develop some actual management ability from within, can a company as broken as HP ever recover? The workers jumping to GM are just carving out a little piece of what's left of HP for themselves to preserve their jobs. Can anyone blame them?
So HP lays off almost 20,000 people.
They have several employees that have worked to do outsourced work for GM.
GM announces they will no longer outsource the work that these employees were doing. They will do it in-house now.
HP Employees conclude from this, that they will soon lose their jobs, as the contract will get cut.
They smartly apply at the very place they've been doing work for... and easily get the jobs because they clearly know how to do them.
Nothing in violation of their contracts had to happen here. Those employees jobs were in clear jeopardy. If HP doesn't want their employees looking for work, they need to make them feel secure. This was obviously not happening.
How come HP has to ask the court to determine whether employment contracts were violated?
HP forgot to hire people to read the employment contracts, or what?
HP's legal department left for GM already.
Years ago, they split the company in two. The part that did the original work in electronics that started in the 1930s became Agilent. The part that specializes in selling printer ink kept the HP brand.