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HP CEO Meg Whitman To Employees: No More Telecommuting For You
McGruber writes "AllThingsD has the news that Hewlett-Packard has enacted a policy requiring most employees to work from the office and not from home. According to an undated question-and-answer document distributed to HP employees, the new policy is aimed at instigating a cultural shift that 'will help create a more connected workforce and drive greater collaboration and innovation.' The memo also said, 'During this critical turnaround period, HP needs all hands on deck. We recognize that in the past, we may have asked certain employees to work from home for various reasons. We now need to build a stronger culture of engagement and collaboration and the more employees we get into the office the better company we will be.' One major complication is that numerous HP offices don't have sufficient space to accommodate all of their employees. According to sources familiar with the company's operations, as many as 80,000 employees, and possibly more, were working from home in part because the company didn't have desks for them all within its own buildings."
This one was aimed at Microsoft, but HP certainly deserves it too.
http://2eq9hztv2wc1k6odx469m9znq0.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/Screen-Shot-2012-11-06-at-10.53.18-AM.png
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
NSA has killed telecommuting as we knew it for the foreseeable future (20 years, at least, hence).
CEO makes blanket policy decision, backs it up only with "Because I said so," film at 11. In other news... this is the human equivalent of marking your territory by peeing on something, then kicking up grass. Will it screw a lot of things up? Of course. Will anyone complain? Assuredly not. Is it news? No. We have a term for this kind of behavior in corporate america: Tuesday.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
This is just typical - they're trying to shed employees, cut staff, make money. That's what the Compaq merger was about. It had nothing to do with computers and had everything to do with Compaqs crappier HR policies which were adopted as HPs, saving the company millions, forever. My wife lost a week and a half of vacation time because of that. Dicks.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Hey Meg,
Just a word of warning; this will not work. If they can't figure out how to communicate with IRC and all the rest of the internet at their fingertips, they're sure as fuck not gonna get along any better when you cram them in a conference room at the ass crack of dawn and shake them up to see if they fight.
Sincerely,
The Whole Motherfucking Internet.
Meg is a copycat CEO.
So on the one hand due to executive incompetence, product quality suffers, sales go down and the stock tanks, then some CXX suggest cutting down on office space and having employees telecommute to save on overhead, then due to executive incompetence and marketing/sales trumping product design and innovation, sales go down, and the stock tanks. Now they say they need employees to come in to the (now non-existent) offices, yet something tells me that it's just another example of executive incompetence resulting in poor sales, bad products and the stock tanking.
This Sig does not Exist.
Yeah, if you're going to do something like this, you need to give your developers something to believe in, a reason to work for the company. Otherwise your developers will see it and find another place to work.
And honestly, it's not clear at all that HP has anything to believe in. If you say, "During this critical turnaround period, HP needs all hands on deck," you better have an actual way to turn the company around.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Suddenly require them to come into the office. Many won't be able to, so you can downsize without the bad publicity or cost of layoffs/severence-pay.
From what I hear, Dunder Mifflin has some spare office space - which is already stocked with HP computers.
yeah.. during the planning stage for the "shift".. wtf do you need people sitting in the office unsure of what they should be doing?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Why now?
During this critical turnaround period, HP needs all hands on deck. We recognize that in the past, we may have asked certain employees to work from home for various reasons. We now need to build a stronger culture of engagement and collaboration and the more employees we get into the office the better company we will be. Belief in the power of our people is a core principle of the HP Way Now. Employees are at the center of what we do, we achieve competitive advantages through our people. HP has amazing employees who are driving great change. We believe the more employees we have working together, the better for HP and our customers.
How does this support the company strategy end culture?
We want to make HP a great place to work and build a stronger HP Way Now culture of engagement and collaboration. Employees who are more connected tend to be more collaborative, productive, and knowledgeable They will also have a greater sense of the company goals and experience a greater sense of pride in HP. We believe that having employees work from the office will unite and inspire them to achieve higher levels of operational excellence and innovation.
if it's so much better for the company then why the hell were you "asking" people to work from home in the first place?!
P.S. prepare to be disappointed.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
My wife works for HP (as a telecommuter) and she's pretty high up - and I'm pretty sure this is false. There were rumors of a 'no telecommuting policy' for the last couple of months, but nothing came of it. I'm guessing Meg & Co took heed of the negative feedback on that idea.
Please. Carly killed it over a decade ago.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
The HP way died a long time ago. Pre Fiorina at the very least.
Well said.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Even better yet, offices are standing-room only.
...so they can 'innovate' by not being able to hear themselves think because of the 'collaborating' going on at the desks around them.
I work in a place like this. Its easy to identify the people that are actually getting shit done. They have headphones to block out all the jabbering.
I work for a small virtual company - 30 employees in 5 states.
The luxury of a small firm is you can be sure everyone pulls their weight.
When you have tens of thousands of employees, statistically speaking, you will have tons of "dead wood". Maybe there will be "secret" exceptions to the "no telecommute" rule, maybe not.
Whether this works out for HP or just drives the cream of the crop to smaller companies, time will tell.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I work for HP, many levels below our CEO.
This undated document has not been distributed to employees. Most of us first heard of it today in the tech press. There is no actual *room* at all the HP offices to pull in all the employees. In fact, I understand that back when HP first started pushing telecommuting, they took the opportunity to do the logical thing, and shrink and close most of their field offices.
So, short form, this news isn't news, because it's not a happened, and probably isn't.
Putting a few more slugs in a very dead, rotting horse then beating it.
The HP Way died on a dark winter's day in 1999, when Bill Hewlett experienced a failure of willpower reminiscent of the fall of Isildur, and failed to drown Carly Fiorina in his swimming pool.
To be completed in a few years here in Cupertino. Almost all the real estate for it is coming from former Hewlett-Packard sites. As far as I know, the only part that isn't is Pruneridge Avenue between Wolfe and Tantau. I understand they'll be plowing that under as well.
There were two campuses. One was Ridgeview Court, which sprawled across seven or eight buildings south of Pruneridge. (I'm pretty sure these were among Tandem Computer's facilities before Compaq and then HP.) The other was a campus to the north of Pruneridge. It's all being torn down for Apple's new digs.
HP also had a facility in Mountain View too. Something's happening there now, I think, but it had been empty since roughly 2002.
All they've got now, for the most part, is a complex in Sunnyvale that used to belong to Palm, and Phillips before that, no bigger than anyone else's in the neighborhood.
I realize these are only a few sites in Silicon Valley, but the same thing probably happened in other places across the country where HP had a presence. It's a pity HP couldn't have been a bit more forward-thinking, but that died with the HP Way about the time what's-her-name finished having her way with the company.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
.
Contrary to the opinion of most [clueless] managers, it is not about the slackers.
,
It is about communication among the team.
If you hire good employees, then you should not need to be concerned about the number of hours they are working, except to make sure they are not working too many hours.
.Lee Iacocca - "I hire people brighter than me and then I get out of their way."
why do shitty CEOs still get jobs? What HP investor could possibly want that idiot in charge?
Just when I finally got rid of all my pants.
Subject says it all.
Oh, so you still think you work for HP?
Ummm, how about doing what they were doing at home, except at the office?
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
What if you telecommute because you are disabled and it is the only way to get to work?
Meg Whitman - a totally hideous person - mean, small, vindictive - has no ideas of her own, so she's just stealing Marissa Mayer's bad idea. Both are insanely wealthy people who literally have no clue how the proles who work for them actually live their lives. Step by step, the US stumbles toward its own French Revolution, but ours will make the one of 1789 look like a walk in the park.
"We now need to build a stronger culture of engagement and collaboration "
That's why half the damn company works in India. If they really cared about that, they would not only bring everybody into the office, but also hire people back here in the US. It's only about power, jumping on this new corporate bandwagon, and making it look like people will somehow be more productive or accountable.
Those deck chairs aren't going to move themselves...
Feeding their dog? Walking around in their underwear? Reading Slashdot?
Don't that's going to cut it at the office. :)
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
If that's what you tell me for putting my resources at the company's disposal, for saving them money by providing my own "office" along with my own office supplies and blur the line between work time and leisure time enough that a call at 10pm usually starts with "oh good, I see you're still logged in...", expect my 2 weeks notice in the reply.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If that was the case, we'd get to call our times playing with our friends a "business meeting" and claim it's part of our working hours.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeah, if you're going to do something like this, you need to give your developers something to believe in, a reason to work for the company. Otherwise your developers will see it and find another place to work.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was exactly what they are after. Removing existing perks (such as working from home) is a good way to increase the rate of natural attrition. It is a standard management technique: basically you annoy your staff so that they find jobs elsewhere, and you don't replace them. If your company was in enough trouble that you are going to need a round of redundancies, doing this means that you save a money by not having to pay those employees out, as they are the ones that resigned.
My objection to this technique has always been that by doing this, you essentially lose the people that have skills and can get jobs, and keep the people who don't have skills and can't get jobs, weakening your company. I'd generally rather choose who to make redundant, even if it costs a bit more, and keep the people who I know are actually productive around.
But bean-counters rarely seem to have the capacity to understand that argument.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
The reason they need all hands on deck is to rearrange the chairs.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
More importantly....
It's 2:00AM, some "very important server" has just gone down.
[Pointy Headed Management]"We have to get this server working or we'll lose millions an hour"
[Worker]" Sure, no problem, I'll drive in which should take 2 hours so I don't telecommute."
This decision might not be as stupid as it sounds. In a lot of cases, "telecommuting" actually means "not working". It's easy enough to stay on top of one or two people who like to work from home a lot, but it's almost impossible to manage several employees remotely. Didn't Yahoo eliminate telecommuting recently, as well? I believe their decision was done, partially, because the IT guys discovered that many employees were only sending one or two emails per day (average employees sent way more) and often never logged in via VPN for multiple days in a row. Obviously, there's work that can be done without a connection to the company network, but there isn't three days worth of it each week. Far too many people think that working from home means that one should act like they're at home when, in fact, they should be acting like they're sitting in a very odd looking room down the hall from their regular office.
Also, face-to-face meetings are a good way of getting things done. Yes, conference calls and email are great, but being in the same room as everyone else can make certain meetings a lot easier. They're open to abuse, but so are conference calls and email. In fact, I find that conference calls tend to be even worse than in-person meetings because everyone has to dick around with calling into the system, figuring out who is on the line, trying to mute/unmute their phones, figuring out who is making all the noise, etc.
It's not even dumb that they announced this before they had desk space for these people. If they tried to buy the cube farms first then people would be criticizing HP for spending money on useless desk space. Also, investors might get word of new desk space and freak out over "secret plans for [something]". Obviously, HP doesn't expect everyone to stop telecommuting tomorrow. It's going to be phased in over some time.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Oh that's an easy problem to solve: ``HP Announces 80,000 Jobs To Be Eliminated''.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
She gets people into the office, the rest is up to them! :-)
Doesn't HP make inkjet cartridges? Who would want to work from home making those things. Got to be messy work...
I've been telecommuting full time at home for over 7 years. Over half of our company is full time telecomuters spread across the USA. We are very successful at it and work very hard.
It is not like people imagine it. You wake up and get to work in the home office and stay disciplined. A lot to times you put in extra hours too. You get a lot more work done because you don't have office politics. Lots of phone calls, conference, video chat, and texting. If people don't see you fully engaged, producing, you will get fired. --- It is that simple. But you don't deal with traffic, hearing people backstabbing in adjacent cubicles, and all the bullshit that you wish you could get rid of to get your work done...
Sure you can take a break now and then, but if you get into goofing around people will be quick to notice just the same in this day in age. As long as you work hard and produce major results who cares. Studies have shown time and again that telecommuting produces greater results. Just don't do half and half. -- I don't think that works really well and leads to the stigma.
Meg and Carley are totally ignorant on full time telecommuting and the huge benefits. I think they are these hardcore career obsessed women who look down at family orientated women and say "heck no to those people telecommuting"... If they could they would probably ban maternity leave or kids to work as distractions. 20% of workers telecommute. Their mentality is that people are lazy by design an they need their people to be in cubicles.
In today's day in age unlike the 90's you've got instant messaging, facetime/skype, google video/chat... Most EDA tools can be local and licensed via a VPN license server.... I've been in countless meetings where we video collaborated work in real-time seamlessly. You don't need an office anymore for many types of industries. We would do complex engineering design online all the time.
It is ironic they don't like telecommuting but they force many of their employees to full time collaborate via video chatting, email, text to all the other divisions around the world....
We are headed to a contract for hire employee world as employers try to find legal ways not to offer health benefits, or trim staff like we're JIT inventory. It just makes sense that knowledge work be telecommute. It is far more efficient, cheaper for the company, and greater results.
Since HP, Intel, etc are companies where 30% is office politics and fun and games (I happen to know personally) they would benefit significantly.
yeah.. during the planning stage for the "shift".. wtf do you need people sitting in the office unsure of what they should be doing?
One word: Scrum. They're probably hoping that if they get enough devs stuck in an eternal round of pointless meetings (at work, and not at home where you can surf pr0n or game a little with the phone on mute), maybe something useful will come out of it from which they can then build new business.
I mean, how the hell else do you think Windows 8 got built?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
[Worker]" Sure, no problem, I'll drive in which should take 2 hours so I don't telecommute."
I did that once (I lived 90 minutes' drive away)... it was the first and last time they ever thought a physical presence in a 'war room' to fix a gimped VM was that important to have.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
:-)
I wonder if it's possible to get lost in reorganizations and end up collecting a salary but not have to work.
Paying and not allowing you to work is not the same thing: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/22/new-york-teachers-paid-to_n_219336.html
It's 2:00AM, some "very important server" has just gone down.
[Pointy Headed Management]"We have to get this server working or we'll lose millions an hour"
To which I would reply: "I thought you moved all those jobs it India so that we could have a 'Follow the Sun' model and none of us would have to woken out of a sound sleep, Bangalor will take care of it. Well, what happend to that plan?"
Another day closer to redwood heaven
My objection to this technique has always been that by doing this, you essentially lose the people that have skills and can get jobs, and keep the people who don't have skills and can't get jobs, weakening your company. I'd generally rather choose who to make redundant, even if it costs a bit more, and keep the people who I know are actually productive around.
Correct, mostly. I have seen this happen in a number of companies I have worked out, The mgr starts a round of layoff, either by laying people off of annoying workers until they quit, what also happens is that the smart, talented workers they want to keep read the writing on the wall and leave. The mgt tries to compensate by ramping up the off shore offices but soon discover that it's damn near impossible and really expensive to replace the good people who walked out.
Rinse then repeat.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
Surely it's going to work. This is the cheapest way to get a lot of people to just resign without severance pay. Just like they suddenly decided to cancel *all* external hires in Europe about a 18 months ago, killing many profitable projects with that decision, in the end they will come up with a much leaner work force that is way more eager to keep their job than the oversized bureaucratic non-functioning organization they have had for many years. Either that, or they will go belly up. They could alternatively get their shit together and actually start managing, but that would require an effort and look bad towards shareholders because it would mean long term investments and not better quarterly results.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Usually, when a business is in deep trouble, the management starts removing perks of all kinds (even the ones that don't cost anything). When they get strict about office hours, take the funny posters down and push the dress code, update your resume, you're about to need it.
HP bought EDS 5 years 5 months ago. That's the firm my brother was happily telecommuting for, for years. I guess he was expecting this to happen eventually. After all, why else would government work be privatized and then bought and sold by the likes of Ross Perot and Meg Whitman? It was all part of the nefarious plan to contract to perform government work for less by avoiding the costs that the government customarily pays its employees. Its like union busting but on a larger scale, and NOW its payday for them! But please America, don't be so naive that you don't see the truth about corporate America and the state of the economy. Its all just smoke in mirrors, and they intend to lower their costs and increase their profits now that they have stolen the business from you citizens. So, isn't it about time we stopped these assholes?
This is a well known scenario called the dead sea effect.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Nissan motor company. But they also had a CEO that could execute. With a katana if necessary.
how many dogs do you have, that that takes a significant part of your day?
and underwear, don't get me started on what a productivity killer those suckers are.
Apparently they already found a partial solution to that problem last month.
And that was just a lame excuse. She obviously had other motives for cancelling telecommuting as there is no need for a VPN for real work. SSH does not require a VPN. Nor do version control systems (git, bzr, svn). Nor do HTTPS for the intranet or IMAPS for the mail. Not even SIP or Skype for calls needs a VPN.
VPNs only add an extra layer of complexity and add little to nothing in return. That goes double for PPTP, which is garbage.
So regardless if her telecommuters were productive or unproductive, VPN use is an irelevant metric.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Well, Mark Hurd actually had recovered a lot of the ground HP lost when Fiorino sunk the company. But the board of directors were so used to having a complete loser running the company that as soon as they could pin something on him, they ran him out and replaced him with the biggest idiot they could find after a quick world-wide search. Then they felt comfy again, and when they realized that they hired a CEO that was possibly TOO terrible, they replaced him with the closest thing they could find to Carly Fiorino.
But bean-counters rarely seem to have the capacity to understand that argument.
Most companies cannot really evaluate people. They don't know the value of the people they employ. Bonus are given based on the success of the project you are working on and external sign of failure of you direct colleague. Deep down, bean counter know that. They know that if they are going to cherry-pick people, at best they will fire random people.
Also, when you pay executive hundred of times the salary of regular employee, at some point you start to believe they are worth it. With a team of rockstars like that, why would you care about relative performance of cheapo employee ?
Perhaps more interesting is the memo that broke today from when HP was delisted fro the Dow Jones Industrial Average (having occurred last month):
"I hope that every HP employee took today's announcement personally," she said in the one-page internal memo on September 10. Calling HP's departure from the benchmark index it joined in 1997 a "blow to our brand," Whitman said the moved showed many people still harbored doubts about her turnaround plan. "We need to make every sale," she stressed in the memo, which was seen by Reuters. Whitman's urgency is easy to understand. Two years into what she has always described as a five-year effort, HP's sales and profits are still sliding and Wall Street is losing patience. The stock has fallen 17 percent in the past three months and is down more than half its value since 2010.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/08/us-hp-restructuring-analysis-idUSBRE9970XL20131008
So Whitman has a turnaround plan which is clearly failing. This kind of "employees need to get more intense" plea is usually one of the last gasps of a failing company, IMO. Also notes that one her major moves was to throw executives out of their offices and into an open cube farm. So "rearranging the deck chairs" is quite literally part of what she's doing.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Windows 8, the flop that made WinME look popular, was built because Ballmer saw in the financial times that Apple was the richest company and totally flipped his shit, THAT is how it got built. BTW I love how the apologists claim its "innovation" when IRL all they did was take the same strategy they had for a decade and flip it 180, instead of sticking teeny tiny desktops onto smartphones they took a UI designed for a teeny tiny cellphone and stuck it on a 30 inch high def non touch desktop....brilliant. About as "innovative" as sticking bicycle handlebars on a pickup and its gone over about as well.
As for HP? if they don't get a CEO that has a plan and knows WTF they are doing i don't care where they work, the company is still toast. When you look at the amount of money pissed down the drain in the past half dozen years there the fact that their stock isn't penny ante just shows how little connect between wall Street and real life their is, because it seems their "strategy" is "Buy something for WAAAY too much money, not have a clue WTF to do with it, take a bath, write it down, rinse and repeat".
At the end of the day none of these PC companies can change the reality which is thus...once AMD and Intel went from MHz wars to Core wars computers went from "good enough" to insanely powered with so many spare cycles that for the average Joe its like using a top fuel dragster to go to the store so there simply isn't a need to replace them before they break anymore. Even my gaming customers are on 3 and 4 year old chips because the quad and hexacores are just insanely overpowered and on the laptop front those C2Ds and Turion X2s do everything Joe average wants to do on a laptop.
So they can stick all their employees in an underground lair for all the good it will do, PCs have become appliances and like the washer and dryer just aren't getting replaced until they die. There really isn't anything any of them can do and until some new way of programming comes out that can make writing programs for multicores that will scale with cores as easy as writing for a single core? Then the OEMs are just gonna keep having shitty quarters. I predict the same will be happening to phones and pads within the next 2 years as you already have Nvidia up to pentacores and Samsung up to hexacores so just like PCs it'll be a race to the bottom and once everybody who wants one has a multicore it'll be stagnant for them as well.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Sure. I worked at a startup once where one junior scripter just stopped coming in. It was right after a bit of a reorg, so nobody was really sure who his boss was. He hadn't been there long and came in with a huge hiring spurt, so nobody missed him. What he was doing was so unimportant, nobody noticed the lack of output. We figured it out 3 months later- he hadn't signed up for direct deposit, so the paper checks piled up on his desk and was eventually noticed by our receptionist. If he had just been smart enough to have set up deposit he likely could have gotten checks until the buyout.
In the end I don't think he ever got paid for more than a month or so of that time- he claimed he put in a 2 week notice via email, he was already working somewhere with a better offer.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
My objection to this technique has always been that by doing this, you essentially lose the people that have skills and can get jobs, and keep the people who don't have skills and can't get jobs, weakening your company.
Most techniques for getting rid of unneeded workerssuffer that problem to some degree. Even if you keep the redundancies secret right up to the time you make them people will still wonder "am I in the next round".
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Move? I heard about a guy that throws them! Across the room! He is also free for hire now.
Actually, it started back when Yahoo ordered the same thing. Shit, it all goes south from here. I just wish these companies have concrete plans to turn their fortunes around, plans that actually require all workers to be in the office.
IMNSHO prolonged telecommuting works for a very small percentage of workers. I have done telecommuting a lot and I know I get distracted by domestic issues. I also have witnessed other people loose themselves in telecommuting. Deteriorating rapport with co-workers and with management. Becoming unappreciated and therefore unproductive. Basically loosing the plot. All hazards in telecommuting.
If you have a clear task that requires your full attention, if your domestic situation enforces your dedication and if you are highly disciplined then it might work for you for a limited period. Eventually you will have to reconnect with people at business. And no, none of us is so exquisite to justify longer term telecommuting.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
If you say, "During this critical turnaround period, HP needs all hands on deck," you better have an actual way to turn the company around.
Yep most people will interpret it as "During this potential nosedive period HP needs to limit your chances of jumping ship"
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
oomer??! She is!! My first though when reading the headline was that this broad MUST be a baby boomer for requiring workers to come in just for face time. I was right. Idiot. Can't wait until our generation takes over.
On a related note, I am only using Windows 8 right now b/c it cost me $40 during their "initial sale period". You know what? When you are using it in desktop mode (using the various shortcuts that you should be using anyway), you don't actually get reminded that you are using the bastard child of Windows 7 and a phone OS. It actually feels like Windows 7.
Well, that's perfectly understandable. If her effect on the pool water quality was anything like what she did to HP, he'd have been stuck with 30000 gallons of toxic waste in his backyard.
Log in or piss off.
HP clearly has too much empty real estate they can't sell so their accountants told them to use it all. Whether they have 80,000 seats open or not isn't the point - 'people will make do' typically 3 to an office.
HP clearly wants to throw as much US employment out the window as possible. What better way to do that when your staff quits on their own. No lawsuits no severance. And better yet America's Next Top Female Executive of the Ages, Marissa Meyer (All Hail and Amen: we're down to only 8 columns a day on her over at Henry Blodgett's Business Insider) did it already. So they won't even get much bad PR from it.
But importantly - HP has no earthly fucking clue what they are doing. And this is more of that. They were sitting around the Boardroom one day and one of them mentioned "Hey are there any companies out there we can buy for an absurd premium, fuck up and write off 90%?" Not hearing any good ideas, their response was "Well ok then let's fire our American workforce on the sly. We're run by a woman so how bad could the fallout possibly be?"
And off they went.
[Worker]" Sure, no problem, I'll drive in which should take 2 hours so I don't telecommute."
I did that once (I lived 90 minutes' drive away)... it was the first and last time they ever thought a physical presence in a 'war room' to fix a gimped VM was that important to have.
Well, there are issues with opening remote access to "a very important server", that will "lose millions an hour". I don't care how secure you think your remote access is, it isn't.
We're talking about a person who is probably intimately involved with the construction and maintenance of core infrastructure. Security included.
If he cannot keep his home and VPN infrastructure secure, it's likely that he cannot keep the in-house infrastructure secure either.
Very, very few IT shops live in a physically-isolated "glass house" anymore.
What I'd be wondering is why is my job value millions an hour but I'm getting paid 30?
I'd be wondering why some CEO gets millions because their "leadership" gets the company a billion but my job, which makes billions, apparently, gets me thousands.
In short, I'd be asking "Can't the CEO do this? They're paid the big money."
HP is also a consulting company. Perhaps they should work on new killer apps to use all those new CPU cycles and actually give people a reason to buy new computers. HP could get into 3D printing and mass market it.
HP needs R&D right now. Most companies cut it in 2008 and they need it badly at this point.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
This is the kind of decision-making that earns people of her class millions if not up-front, then at least in out-the-door compensation. Low-risk to her ass, while such a major-change seems both plausible and relatively do-able as she seems to be smart, with no concept or care for how things have actually been done up until now, and the people involved. Hell, Marissa Meyer at Yahoo already has enacted this thinking months ago; and not the freshest of ideas. Meg thinks her bosses on the board will appreciate such a decisive move, and also The Changes She Enacted. This piddly decision has CYA written all over it. It takes no measure into the talent that chooses to telecommute (using HP IP and modern-technology) into consideration, or their personal investments, and certainly stresses the workforce and pool of talent.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
In the Netherlands, It is rare that an ad does not carry a 'we don't want to a 9-5 attitude' message for a given typical IT, web-developer job. While I have noticed ads in the US promoting quality of life outside of the office. What a switch in the last decade or so of my doing I.T. here (in the Netherlands)
I think you overpayed by about $35 based on my comparisons between Win 7 and Win 8. I will say however that Win 8 seems like a mild improvement over Win 7 once you stop using it the way MS thinks you should
I predict the same will be happening to phones and pads within the next 2 years as you already have Nvidia up to pentacores and Samsung up to hexacores so just like PCs ...
galaxy s4 and note 3 already have 8 cores.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
expect my 2 weeks notice in the reply.
I'm sure they expect many 2 weeks notices. A move like this is probably a precursor to a mass layoff, unless of course they 'meet their numbers' in people who quit due to the new policies.
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
Now, now, those were heady days before we knew things like 9-11 and that Cisco wasn't the end-all company that she thought it was... or its mandatory firing of the bottom 10%... that she salivated over and tried to impose on a company that had never even seen a single lay-off.
Whacky fun.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
Completing time sheets when you're spending less than your baseline 40 hours working can bring a person otherwise behaving ethically to begin employing creative justifications to explain how sitting in your underwear in a spare bedroom reading slashdot is billable to the project's marketing budget
She should have used this opportunity to say, "A lot of us are telecommuting nowadays, but our collaboration tools suck. Let's fix that." Instead, she resorted to the more archaic solution. And that is why they will fail. They need to look to the future, not the past.
Bah, this is just a sneaky way to start lay offs. They have 80 000 without a desk, what should they do?
Well, my company went to "Open Seating" cubes. You don't have an assigned seat. The desks that exist are oversubscribed 1.25 people to 1. If everyone were to show up to work the same day some people won't have a seat, but most of the time it works out. Some people have meetings or vacation or business travel and don't need a desk *cough*party line*cough*.
In order to facilitate this, my company has some "mobile desks", where if you're gone for >15 min you're supposed to pack all your stuff up so someone else could potentially sit there. There are also normal cubes, but there's no permanent storage for your family photos or books or notes.
depending on which country you live in... No 8 core for you USA!!!
if they don't get a CEO that has a plan and knows WTF they are doing
I assure you that most CEO's indeed have a plan and have a very good idea about what they're doing. Except usually that plan has everything to do with manipulating the short term stock price and CEO bonus levels and nothing to do with the long term health of a corporation.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Sounds like an understatement.
Come into work, but there will not be parking available, and you will have to stand in the halls all days and share an power outlet with 50 other people (oh, and our internal network will be overloaded, so good luck collaborating with anyone else).
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
That's a good point. HP has a huge printing infrastructure and the manufacturing facilities in place to crank out 3D printing machines at a much lower cost than you can get today. They totally dropped the ball by not jumping on that. I don't think having their work from home employees come in to work will fix that.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
If your company tries this then just leave. This happened to a friend of mine; his company tried to crack down on telecommuters and they lost critical employees.
I am sick of being at the mercy of managerial whim and fashion.
While funny, it does bring up a serious note. Why are programmers and for that matter any cubicle jockey required to wear "business" clothes? Does a dress shirt and tie help you work?
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
everyone can attend more meetings - where all the real work gets done!
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
As for HP? if they don't get a CEO that has a plan and knows WTF they are doing i don't care where they work, the company is still toast.
"But that bitch Marissa did it, and the analysts all rave over her! Desks? Bah, those slackers don't really need desks, buy a few thousand bean-back chairs for 'em!"
That's an answer to why.
As near as I can tell, how is they took a look at the tech support flowchart and decided to make it impossible to follow. I spent a lot of time yesterday trying to help someone set up a printer. There's a Settings button on the main menu that has nothing to do with printers. There's a devices button on the main menu that goes to a completely useless bar telling me I have nothing I can send (?). If I click search, I can type in printer and get nothing, but there's a different settings button on the search screen. If I click the other settings button and then type printer in the box and hit enter, i get a useless screen which supposedly lists my devices (I suppose if the printer was already added it would be listed here, maybe?) but no button to add a printer. If I type printer in the box and don't hit enter, I finally see the Devices and Printers screen, where I can add a printer.
I think I'll stick to 7, thanks.
According to an article on the HP site! http://h30565.www3.hp.com/t5/Feature-Articles/Telecommuting-Creates-Happier-and-More-Productive-Employees/ba-p/1834?jumpid=reg_r1002_usen_c-001_title_r0001
According to sources familiar with the company's operations, as many as 80,000 employees, and possibly more, were working from home in part because the company didn't have desks for them all within its own buildings."
I hear Alcatel-Lucent has some new space available!
"We're getting our fat, legacy ass kicked in virtually every market space, because we've failed to keep up. So instead of asking the hard questions, like 'Why the hell didn't we keep up with a changing market for printer, PC's, servers, etc.', we're just going to throw shit at the culture wall to see if anything sticks."
Maybe HP could sell its sorry ass back to Agilent, since the latter seems to be the only viable remnant of the dismemberment committed during Fiorina's Folly. That would give the current HP a way to gradually back out of what has become a commodity business and get back to innovating.
I wonder if either HP or Agilent has a Carly-faced dartboard or two lying around...
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
I would think HP having a CEO that's not a sexual depraved incompetent moron would help a lot more.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
HP is really just an example of how something seen as too big to fail and too politically well connected to prosecute when they break the law (eg. the surveilance thing) can attract people that want to set up their idiot children into high level executive jobs. It's an attempt to redo fuedalism.
Had is the word. Most of their newer printing stuff is minor tweaks on major designs that were developed at branches that were shut down. The don't have the people left that can do major R&D.
That happened in just about every technical and a lot of office jobs where I live about ten years ago - job ads about "flexible working hours" which really meant the normal office clerks on a low salary were expected to come in on weekends and stuff paper into envelopes instead of employing enough people to finish it during the week. It's normally a sign of a failing business but it became expected as the norm.
The don't have the people left that can do major R&D.
Nor write printer drivers. All you get now are Universal drivers which are pretty close to worthless.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
That's great and all but... remote administration from 2 hours away means remote access from 2 continents away. Is it really in your long term interest to want this?
Where is moderation: -1 False?
What company do you own? I'd like to know so I don't accidentally buy stock in it. Since you think your management style is so brilliant, so won't mind telling us, right?
It doesn't matter if you work form home and dial in to a virtual meeting or do so from the office. Unless you divide things up where one project is at one location only.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Opinions or something supported by data?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Similar experience for me.. When i telecommute i just get a lot more done, when i'm in the office i waste time and money on travel, spend half the day gossiping, or being distracted by someone else who wants to gossip, find myself unable to concentrate due to background noise and can't wait to leave and do so as early as i can, have to keep going out to buy drinks or lunch because theres not enough space in the shared fridge etc.
In terms of actual results, i can get a lot more done at home with no distractions and a ready supply of food and drink.
Lots of people spend all day "in the office" and "staring at their computer screen" but they're not working, they're on facebook, slashdot, playing games or something else. Just because someone's in an office doesn't mean they're working.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Will ending telecommuting now be the sign of a C suite that is out of ideas? As far as I can tell, Mayer at Yahoo and Whitman at HP both are scrambling for ways to justify their enormous salaries. I guess the hail-mary strategy is end telecommuting and piss off the stars in the company.
Good luck with that strategy.
-ted
it's kind of baffling though, why have inferior hardware in the us?
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
These key people are in demand across their industry. Watch as people jump ship. But then, if HP has lost its sense of direction, cutting staff, key or otherwise, might just be the point of this exercise.
Have gnu, will travel.
Any reasonable person knows that whether or not telecommuting actually works depends entirely on the employee, assuming the job is telecommutable.
One of the biggest reasons telecommuting fails at large companies like HP is that, while it may actually work and increase productivity among a select few employees, everyone else sees telecommuters as "privileged" people who are getting an unfair perk, and it leads to problems just about everywhere else.
As with anything that is seen as a "perk" by the masses, you either have to give it to everyone, or no one.
I own a small company and telecommuting not only works for us, but it saves our hide, especially in the winter when we frequently find we just can't get to the office even when we want to. The work can still get done.
Anyhoo... I can see where it would be problematic at a place like HP.
ok, Bill and Dave, you heard her, get out of the garage and back into your cube!
It's my experience that for many people, excessive casualness at work leads to treating work as casually as one may treat one's free time. Given how many people spend their free time particularly passively, this can be a problem.
Wearing attire different for the time when one works for someone else than one wears for one's self can help reiterate to the person that professional time is just that, professional.
Certainly there are examples of this not holding true, as there are individuals that will act professionally in casual attire, and there are individuals that will act casually in professional attire, but it seems to hold that more people are professional when in professional attire than are professional when in casual attire.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Unlike most people at her organization, CEO hiring and firing policies ensure that she will be well-compensated no matter the outcome, so making a flashy change that brings attention to her management is more important than the results of that change.
Paid to fail.
At least the EPA and HP could have negotiated a superfund site cleanup agreement like Motorola did with so many of their polluted sites...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
it's like the Uncanny Valley. you need to be either right here or very far away.
And the good people walk out with all the system knowledge.
I know of a bank that basically retrenched almost their entire I.T. staff and replaced them with more "cost effective" offshore solutions. I was called in for a meeting and they wanted me to "change one of the files" my company sends them.
Me : We don't send ANYONE files, we do send SWIFT messages though.
Them : No, No, you do send us a file, every day it arrives, on this server, and then we process it, we just need you to make a change to the layout
Me: Ummm no dude, we don't send files.
Them : But then where does it come from?
Me : Ask your I.T. guys
Them : *Blink* *Blink* Ummm
So somewhere in their big ass corporate office was a machine quietly accepting our SWIFT messages and turning them into a flat file for their mainframe to crunch, and the only person(s) who knew about it had left the company.
I heard through the grapevine a while later that they went head hunting for the old staff members and were politely told to go forth and multiply.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
I used it for a while on a new laptop that came with it. Classic shell makes me not want to vomit so much, but I still think you paid $40 for the worse product when Linux is free.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Once our company forced us to stop telecommuting and come in to the office, it strongly incentivised turning off my remote devices (work pager, work cell-phone, work laptop, &c.) once I got home. If I'm spending two extra hours each day (10 hours a week) just commuting, that's enough of a commitment.
-Bob-
Shouldn't everybody opposing the change have left the last time? http://slashdot.org/story/06/06/04/0753232/hp-to-cut-back-on-telecommuting
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
I have a crazy idea; how about not making garbage?
Maybe that'll add a bit of value to the company. Maybe devoting resources to the people that, I don't know, create everything you sell would work out OK. Perhaps if you left them the fuck alone to work in whichever way suited them best would benefit you and them.
Nah. It'll never work. Start the layoffs!
BS. Wearing a monkey suit might be good if you spend a lot of your time out and meeting business-persons. In the workplace, it's often uncomfortable and distracting.
Where I work, weather ranges from -30c to 30+c depending on the time of year. Wearing a suit is sweaty, uncomfortable, and frankly results in some personal odor issues for people who are prone to perspiration.
We also have people who bike/walk to work. They wear reasonable clothes for work, but they're also easy to change in/out of.
Suits make suits feel better, but they're not for everyone. While a Hawaiian shirt and a g-string aren't work appropriate, reasonably comfortable clothing is fine for most people. Starting a professional, respectful workplace starts with attitude, not clothes.
Because nothing improves morale like being stuck in traffic for 30-60 minutes each direction so you can sit in a low walled cubicle with your over-cologned and over-perfumed coworkers trying not to listen to them think out loud for most of 8 hours. And in this case, even the dehumanizing cubicle might be too much for employees to ask for.
Six months down the line, when those people are in the unemployment line and have given up looking for work, it'll be "We need more H1B visas, we can't find enough workers!"
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Why make your bed if you're just going to mess it up again tonight? It sets the tone.
My objection to this technique has always been that by doing this, you essentially lose the people that have skills and can get jobs, and keep the people who don't have skills and can't get jobs, weakening your company.
I'm not sure on that point. It is the logical assumption, but the real world is more complicated. You are simply assuming that HR depts can universally identify & hire talent. There are many examples where highly qualified intelligent people can't find jobs, and underqualified people pick up jobs easily. Interviewing is a skill, resume-building is a skill, networking is a skill, even finding where to apply for a job is a skill. Being good at your job doesn't automatically mean you are good at any of those job-finding skills. It skews towards talented people having an easier time locating a job, but it is by no means a foregone conclusion. I'd wager that just about every interviewer here has found and hired "the perfect candidate" for a job, who was not, in fact, the best choice.
As another response indicated, companies have trouble evaluating their own employees, much less people that walk in off the street based on a few hours of conversations, and words written on a sheet of paper.
Since when USA became a comunist country? Working as much as i you are willing to, getting as much benefits, as you see fit...
Well, they just removed a big reason for employees to NOT be looking for another job. Now, if they want to downsize, that's one thing but this way what you get is downsizing via exodus of your best employees. On the other hand, what you end up left with is all of the most desperate employees which you can then proceed to abuse with impunity. But that kind of work atmosphere is why Steve Ballmer is out of a job. Hopefully there's a chair-throwing range nearby that Meg can use to get up to speed...
I have worked in large corporate environments where sitting at a desk in some building owned by the corporation really didn't add much value. I was still isolated from most of my colleagues as we were all spread to the 4 winds to begin with.
I suspect that these people that work at HP will still be telecommuting once they are forced to commute to an office.
That is possibly the reason they were allowed to telecommute to begin with. Their boss and their "customers" were already in another state.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
So wearing something that's horribly uncomfortable will make you more "professional" and more productive? This sounds rather dubious to me.
and blur the line between work time and leisure time enough that a call at 10pm usually starts with "oh good, I see you're still logged in..."
This happened to me at my last job (a telecommute position); I was still logged into Skype a little after midnight and my boss called me up (he lived in the UK). What a PITA. I was careful to sign out of Skype much earlier after that.
I once bluntly told a supervisor that they had just laid off all of the wrong people.
All of the old timers with the most direct experience and lots of tribal knowledge were just shown the door. Compared to that, what was left were just a bunch of "entry level graduates".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I was thinking that too. Standard Silicon Valley procedure. The other big one is "We're combining these two sites, even though some of you already commute over an hour and this will make it longer, but we promise there will be synergy with you all working together."
How can a blanket policy like this work for a company of their size and business and geographic diversity? Some divisions/offices will see some improved productivity while others will have destructive interference. Good luck breaking even on this. OTOH, if they want to trim headcount then mission accomplished.
...to be treated as such:. It's worse than that. After once being treated as an expendable asset, the smart ones internalize the lesson that it's "just a job no matter where you go" and the lack of investment carries over to subsequent employers. Ultimately the entire workforce becomes tainted by the shitty HR policies in use today.
Had is the word. Most of their newer printing stuff is minor tweaks on major designs that were developed at branches that were shut down. The don't have the people left that can do major R&D.
When you get rid of (spin off) your R&D department that tends to happen.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Funny, but in all seriousness, guessing Jerzy Kaltenberg meant this: http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/10/08/1341234/alcatel-lucent-to-cut-10000-workers-calls-it-shift-plan.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
Yeah, if you're going to do something like this, you need to give your developers something to believe in, a reason to work for the company. Otherwise your developers will see it and find another place to work.
if the only thing keeping you working for a company is that you get to "work" at home, then you're a drain on resources and the company is better off without you.
It's my experience that for many people, excessive casualness at work leads to treating work as casually as one may treat one's free time.
that's just not true in high tech. if you are the type of person that needs to have formality to be productive, then you should look into a career in the armed forces.
That's the great thing about a free market. You don't have to hire me, and I'm by no means obligated to work for you. And I guess I may speak for the both of us when I say that we're both very happy about that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is reversible. I've been at companies where I was treated as valuable and non-expendable, and companies where I was an expendable asset. Guess who got the extra effort when needed.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You never lived outside of airports, did you?
hell, even getting from downtown to the airport can take 2 hours, depending on the time of the day.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Exynos eats batteries like nobody's business as I understand it.
What's really baffling is how did a dual core A7 running at 1.3Ghz beat an 8 core Exynos chip running at 1.6Ghz by such huge margins.
I'm sure she won't mind ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It's my experience that for many people, excessive casualness at work leads to treating work as casually as
It's my experience that other people most certianly do judge me (and probably you) by looks, including dress. There was one period early in my career where I decided to dress as casually as I could get away with. I also grew my hair down into a ponytail. Slowly while this was going on, somehow at work my perception changed from a bright young go-getter to a useless slacker.
When things got the worst for me career-wise, I decided to physically clean up. After all, its trivial to do. Certianly much easier than actually changing my attitude, right? So I started dressing up. One day at work I just started showing up in dress slacks and shoes, tie and jacket. breifcase instead of backpack. I cut the ponytail off.
It wasn't as obvious during the slow transformation, but the sudden change back was dramatic. Overnight I was right back to being a praised go-getter. Not only that, but I noticed that salespeople in stores would talk to me again, as would panhandlers. When I was ponytail guy, car salemen in patrticular would just act like I didn't exist. Even if I was there to buy something.
If you haven't tried it yourself, you'd be absolutely amazed how much other people's perception of you is based on looks. The thing is, dress and hairstyle are pretty much entirely in your control. You may have a style of each you prefer, but from a strict economic perspective, if you don't do both to maximize your preception at work, you aren't hurting anyone but yourself. So that's what the value of ties is.
The whole experience also left me with a new appreciation for folks with ethnic, weight, or general attractivness issues. While I was being studiously ignored by car salesmen until I left, there was a black guy on the lot getting the same treatment. I could go home and cut off my pony-tail. What could he do?
On the other hand, I clearly see the advantages of being in the same room with people when communicating with them. Face to face is far faster and more effective than any other form. You can just turn around in your chair and ask Bob something.
I'm not anti-telecommuting, but for *creative* work in particular nothing beats face to face.
expandfairuse.org
Yes, like it's sooo comfortable to have a gag wrapped tightly around your neck. Or wear super-thin shitty pants that offer no warmth whatsoever. Why don't you get a clue, you fucking moron? Fuck off. And take your shitty "business casual" clothes with you.
I work at a Fortune 100 company, and we are well along in converting our spaces to more collaborative, open space. While we are encouraged to work at home if compatible with our purpose and function, the goal here is to maximize use of the real estate. Fair enough.
I see HP making this announcement for two reasons:
1. Advance notice for those who will not convert to in-office workers. Let them find other opportunities.
2. Fewer workers means less real estate, and of course voluntary layoffs.
Good plan. HP could use some vitality, and you can't easily get that with workers at home. Not easily.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I'm not required to wear "business" clothes. As long as I don't stink, or come completely naked, nobody cares.
True, I am no cubicle jockey. I sit in a open space office. Where we dream of having cubicles, and do occasional work on the side.
I don't have to "guess". And it is reversible ... but some large percentage of the workforce is always going to be going to the next gig with a bad taste in their mouth from their latest stint as a corporate condom.
Couple o' bits:
1) "millions an hour" is pure hyperbole if we're talking about any server that isn't processing stock trades in realtime.
2) VPN is your friend, but only if you take the time to do it right. Learn to architect it, build it, and secure it. At home, you have a hard cable going from your work laptop to the cable modem - no exceptions. I've logged into live banking sites that way with no ill effects or undue exposures.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Somehow I'm pretty certain they know they don't have the capacities. What they hope for is that enough people realize that they're better off leaving rather than commuting to work every day because it's simply unfeasible for them to do so.
The rest will probably be crammed into the space 'til enough of them are fed up with literally sitting on top of each other to quit.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And the tone is "I'm going to hang myself with this noose?"
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
That's what they are counting on...it's a passive/aggressive move to claim ideological territory internally and silence critics.
IMHO both Yahoo and HP did this precisely b/c it reduces staff. Yes it is monumentally stupid to do this, but really is it any more 'stupid' than the idea itself?
Marissa Meyer and Meg Whitman are sort of the gender-flip Zuckerberg and Gates, IMHO...
different management styles but they share the "bottleneck features to control" philosophy to everything they do in biz...
Thank you Dave Raggett
Because you are falling for the same mistake of looking at the MHz and not how they have pipelined it? I have placed a 1.8Ghz C2D and had it smoke a 3.8Ghz Pentium D simply because with the shorter pipe the C2D gets a hell of a lot more work done per cycle while the P4 just blows through power while spinning its wheels. Its the same thing with the first gen Athlon X2 and the later designs like Thuban, a lower clocked Thuban will stomp the X2 even with all but one of its cores turned off because it had a better design and could get more work done per cycle.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You know, there are different thicknesses of fabric available for pants, right? You can get pants made of something as thin as seersucker or of something as thick and warm that British Northerners would envy. Denim didn't exist until the late 1800s and wasn't socially acceptable until the fifties, there are plenty of options, all machine-washable.
You can also buy collared shirts that are actually sized for you at the neck and then either tie a necktie appropriately to fit the collar, rather than the neck, or you could look at various clip-on ties. Given the nature of technology sometimes a clip-on is safer if one works around higher voltage or spinny or shreddy things. Or you could wear a banded-collared shirt, that doesn't have a folding collar and instead has a more jewelled topmost button.
I have the opposite problem of you apparently, it's very hot here much of the time. I have a very, very thin button-up shirt and very thin yet durable slacks. I also have found that dress shoes support my feet much better than sneakers.
There are lots of options besides n00bs suxx0rs printed t-shirts, and many of those options will give you a better shot at promotions.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Where did I say suits?
Even the most professional of workplaces that I've been in generally limit the required dresscode for outerwear to long-sleeve, button-up-the-front, collared shirts, dark or neutral slacks, dark shoes without logos on them, and ties. Most places forego ties or make them optional during certain seasons, and a few allow clean, new-condition black or grey demim pants in place of slacks.
A suit wouldn't do well for me in my professional environment, but a long-sleeve dress shirt and slacks work fine. I don't wear a tie, but if I had to I could make it work with a minimum of fuss.
Off work I wear mostly printed t-shirts and denim shorts or jeans.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
You and I clearly have not worked in the same companies. I find that it's more true, not less, and that all sorts of things like absenteeism, tardiness, and behavior are directly tied to it.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
clearly different by region. here in silicon valley, everywhere i've worked, what matters is getting things done not your attire ... as it should be. i've worn shorts, a t-shirt, and sneakers to work pretty much every day for the last 15 years.
it's probably eliminated me from certain career paths, and rightly so. i'd be terrible at those jobs. i want to work with people that are there because they are competent not because they know how to dress.
yeah but P3 and P4 are different architectures.
doesn't Apple use a rather standard ARM architecture?
They'll spend at least a week trying to find and set up desks, obtain computers, work out how everything works in the office, set up their development environments, go through 'if there's a fire walk out of the door' training and so on. That's assuming they're not spending all their time urgently finding a new home, new schools and movers (or just a new job).
Then they'll spend another week or two being really pissed off at the disruption. People generally do get pissed off at change, but it's worse if you're suddenly finding your working day is two hours longer with no extra pay because you have to trudge back and forth to the office (which always feels the worst at first). That'll be worse for some than others because of different distances and because no doubt some will be using extra time and flexibility to drive children to school or nursery. Then they'll be pissed off at having to use work computers which aren't set how they like them, don't have the extra monitor, don't have the special keyboard/mouse they find more comfortable, have an cheap uncomfortable chair they didn't choose carefully for themselves. And, of course, they'll be pissed off at the sudden noise and annoyance that kills developer productivity in offices.
People get used to those things - although quality of life will no doubt be persistently lower, and people don't really get used to increased noise. I can't help thinking that some will have reduced working hours because there just aren't enough hours in the day any more, and that some will be looking for a better deal with other employers.
Working in an office has some advantages, of course....but even if it works perfectly there's going to be a big one-off cost, as well as a bunch of ongoing disadvantages.
There really isn't a "reference design" when it comes to ARM as its more like the GPUs by AMD and Nvidia where they put out a basic design that a few follow and the rest tweak it in this way or that. Some have better processes and are able to OC easily, some tweak the pipeline, ARM has a bazillion variants out there which is why you can't treat it like X86.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It sounds to me that HP is trying the Yahoo model, which of course comes from the Google model thanks to CEO Mayer. Whether a stodgy old stalwart like HP is agile enough institutionally to make this work remains to be seen. Who knows, maybe they'll spin off Rational again as they try to deal with the fallout of having their people on site.
I work at a place where it's okay to work from home occasionally, but there isn't enough permanent office space for everyone, so the powers-that-be instituted a "mobile officing" model for those like sales that don't necessarily need a permanent workspace. They built some open cubicles and conference rooms where people can sit for a time and connect to the network and make phone calls. There are lockers available for people to use to put their stuff in. Since everyone is issued a laptop, they carry their work with them and just use a docking station to connect.
So Meg wants everyone to traipse on in from their homes to the cube farms which are noisy, crowded, and as such, on the verge of constant chaos. I know. I've been there.
Suits make suits feel better, but they're not for everyone. While a Hawaiian shirt and a g-string aren't work appropriate,
While the g-string isn't appropriate attire, when I worked in Hawaii, a Hawaiian shirt can certainly be considered professional attire. I'm not talking about the cheap '5 for $20' ones. The nice ones are about $50 or so, probably higher for more special ones (silk, or hand made, not just brand). I saw professionals in banking, law offices, architectural firms, insurance, all different fields, wearing Hawaiian shirts on a daily basis.
Also, in regards to the people biking into work, I did that after I got married while in the military. We lived about 6 miles off base. Riding in the early morning, at a comfortable pace, and with a shower before changing into my cammies at work, and working either in an air conditioned space or in a breezy open-air hanger, I still sweated like a pig all morning. I would never be able to ride to work at a professional job with that result.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Some of us are social animals. Others are hermits. While others, considering the cost to commute, will rather work from home. If we work from home, we then require heating, A/C and electricity to pay, so the trade off is time savings.
Also, for help desk, one cannot slack off. Tallies are kept. For software development, one is driven by the need to achieve.
I am in Montreal Quebec, so, a) Electricity is super cheap, gasoline is super expensive (taxes), and traffic horrid, ergo, working from home 4 days per week. With one day at the office, I am revitalized. I see people, I share a lunch, a coffee, and discuss technical stuff. Both kinds of in/outs are great.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Too many hoops to jump through to get the same experience I get with Windows. Don't get me wrong - I loved (and still love) Linux since I was young. But, as I get older, want good user experience with minimum hassle. Until Linux gets the same 3rd party support (e.g. Netflix, etc.) as on Windows, I don't mind spending $40. That's less than what I spend going out on a single Saturday night.
Of the programmers I've worked with in the last 20 years, I can only think of a handful that ever wore a tie to work - and usually that was because they were going to a traditional funeral later in the day.
The dress code everywhere I've worked was, well, that there was no dress code beyond what decency laws required. I suppose if someone had come in wearing just the barest of swimsuits every day, that might have prompted some "counseling" but it never happened so I don't know. I've never talked to anyone I've ever managed suggesting/urging/requiring that they dress differently or in any particular way.
Perhaps you're working at the wrong companies or in the wrong geographical area.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading