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HP Makes More Money, Cuts 16,000 Jobs
jfruh (300774) writes "Good news for HP: Profits are up by 18% over the previous year! Bad news for HP: A lot of those profits are from post-Windows XP PC upgrades, and company revenue actually dipped 1%. The solution, according to CEO Meg Whitman, is "continuous improvement in our cost structure," which means firing thousands of people. At the end of the next round of layoffs, the company will have shed 50,000 employees since 2012."
New submitter Deveauxes (3664417) links to a similar story from CNN's news service, according to which "HP said the latest layoffs would come across all its business units and geographic locations, and would generate $1 billion in annual savings beyond the $3.5 to $4 billion projected from the previously announced cuts. 'No company likes to decrease the work force, and we recognize that this is difficult for employees,' CEO Meg Whitman said in a conference call with analysts. 'I think everyone understands the turnaround we're in.'"
How many H1Bs will replace them?
I really don't understand people who insist that a company should be forced to take a loss before they cut their workforce. It's the cost of being more efficient. Don't like it? get off Slashdot and write a letter to your local newspaper editor. Inefficiency creates jobs and your posting to Slashdot is putting your local newspaper owner, postman and lumberjack out of work. Stop being a hypocrite about it.
Oh, any while you're at it be sure to deliver it down to the drop box in your horse and buggy. Your local whip manufacturer will love you for it.
I'm sure there will be a 'Center of Excellence' in India or China that they are creating so the net loss is only 3 thousand or so.
By the time Meg and Carly are both done there isn't going to be an HP anymore. Meg wouldn't be a republican if she didn't destroy HP.
Portions of HP's business are dying or changing radically. Wishing otherwise while retaining unneeded employees will not help. Better to do it now and position for the changing market than carry a sea anchor.
They used to make really cool, quality stuff (Agilent Technologies anyone?) Now they're reduced to selling disposable printers and ink that costs more than vintage Dom. Gee thanks, Carly.
got rid of ALL the employees!
I suggest they start at the top!
1. Build a product people want to buy. Do not shit on your customers. (HP is now failing here)
2. Support your products to a reasonable degree. (HP is failing here too)
3. Treat employees like valued portion of the business. (Huge HP failure here)
There you have it. The SROP (standard republican operating procedure) is now being followed at HP. HP is on a death spiral into garbage land. A few key wealthy republicans are profiting massively, and working people are getting screwed.
Wasn't HP the one that, not long ago, hired and fired about 5 CEO's in the course of 7 years. Paying each a 8 figure severance package on their way out?
There goes the last of the DEC workers...
I say the 50,000 employees all team up and create a company named Homeward Bound (HB). Seems appropriate since HP sent them all home. They can sell software as a service, cheap servers, re-badge some cheap laptops and tablets, and maybe sell a few printers. Then they should do something different and maybe provide support from regional offices -- you call and you get someone within driving distance of your site, who can show up and actually help you solve your problem.
Where do you get that? Wikipedia says 262,569 Initial+Renewals+Extensions in 2012, which would make 20K off by a factor of 13.
Sure, but that includes the elderly and children and people who dont' work, and people who work in areas not eligible for H1Bs. There are, and this is a hotly debated number, perhaps 2.4M STEM related jobs (of which HP itself only employs a cross-section of) and of that under 10% are open. There are over 11 million STEM degreed americans out there who have given up on STEM, probably due to dropping salaries and incessant layoffs.
Anyway hopefully as HP lays off STEM job holders, the H1B count can be lowered by that number (some large fraction of 16K jobs). Of course that won't happen because salaries might go up.
so, the comparison should be against how many IT Professional not the "entire country".
All of my calculators used to be HP, all of my bench equipment was HP or Tektronix. But these days, I no longer own an ink-jet printer, so I don't buy printer ink, so HP has nothing for me.
There are many brands that no longer represent their heritage: Philips, Zenith, Bell Labs, Kodak...
It's sad, but it's life, HP hasen't been a "high tech" company foe several years, they have been a "re-brander" of Chinese consumer products.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Don't they have a strategy? Some innovation that they could invest on to stay ahead? That would be more promising for the future than reducing workforce.
Capitalism.
More info here: https://www.adbusters.org/
It proves that if you can give a corporation tax breaks and throw off the shackles of regulation, they will do better and want to hire more people. Oh...wait.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
They could totally turn themselves around if they offered exactly what just about everybody wants..
A ROCK SOLID home multifunction office machine. Rock Solid meaning slick bomb-proof drivers as well as a machine that didn't crap out on a black and white report because the yellow ink was low. This machine would also need a paper feed that didn't require the moon to be in proper alignment during a squirrel sacrifice in order to feed mostly whatever you put it in.
Then, offer them like cell phones. Charge less up front but only a bit less. Quit selling junk and hoping to cheat everybody on ink. Let me sign up for a quality service and ink renewal plan that works like a cheaper version of a smart phone. Make it as trouble free and pain free as your average smart phone. I'll sign up tomorrow.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Outsource out whatever you can and cover the rest with H1B imports. The stock price will go up, for a while, and everyone will live crappily ever after.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
>"Apparently, that is how capitalism is supposed to work."
You are quite correct. Even if it is sarcasm.
A company is the product of free market evolution, and a company *MUST* produce the maximum output with a minimum input.
The opposite of this is a governmental organization or a charity --- HP is not a governmental organization, nor a charity.
You are right even if it is for the wrong reasons.
Any honest company will tell you they do not exist to create jobs, just look at any of the Silicon Valley companies --- most of them exist to destroy jobs. P.S. Linux and open source don't exist to create jobs either, the goal of open source --- which is a noble one and the correct one --- is to expand freedom and reduce costs --- which *EXACTLY* what they should be doing.
I am not personally for increased costs for a commodity product --- an operating system or a work processor or a phone --- I want maximum utility at minimum cost.
Or shall you berate Wikipedia for putting major financial strain on the Encycopedia and book reference industry?
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Just in case other people notice, the SSL certificate for the Slashdot login page expired today.
Shocking.
HP is screwed up. Who actually likes their products anymore that has a clue? Even their printers are nothing special anymore. That company has no market. The only time I see HP stuff as at big box stores where they're competing for the least informed computer purchases.
Does the smart money buy HP? When was the last time it did?... Exactly. HP is a dying company.
Current management needs to get the axe and the company needs to be restructured there after.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Thanks to you, HP tries to make money from ink.
Ink. And not by making decent printers and ink, but by
playing games with the cartridge sizes (18ml vs 30ml, anyone, with a dash of DRM.)
The real HP is called Agilent.
It looks more like dying off if you ask me.
WTF else did you expect? They admit to hating everyone that isn't an old white rich person so why should we be surprised when one of them does the happy dance for putting 16,000 more people out on the streets. I worked there for almost seven years, and the toxic environment was stunning. I saw people fired for being uncomfortable around guns. Those Republicans can tell when someone isn't such a violent thug that they're willing to own a gun so they fire us. They have destroyed this country, and now they are working on destroying more of the world. Just look at how excited Whitman was about the US trying to incite a war in Ukraine. That is their way.
MBA1: We should fire all the workers, look how much money we would save. MBA2: Brilliant!!
Being an Indian, I understand the frustration when support goes out to some dude in India who barely speaks English. I have been there myself, not only that, I have been asked how I made it to Canada.
Nonetheless, those that do make the H1B cut are not the same that answer those phone calls. H1B may be fresh grads, however most have engineering degrees, at the start of which they had to compete against 500,000 applicants for a under 10000 seats. Further, seats in Computer engineering which are valued more so than others are probably around 1000.
Furthermore, there is a contrast in fee, in US, a student might have to bail out if he cannot afford the education, so not only do you have to be smart, you have to be rich, contrasting that to peanuts, the competition gets very very tough back in India.
So joke all you want, those that do make it to US are rather smart and hard working.
I'm not saying they are not exploited, they are. The solution is simple, the employer has to prove, H1B is needed as local talent cannot be found, if thats the case, do not tie H1B to an employer, let the employee roam free. You will see a drastic cut in H1B and abuse of new immigrants.
Now there's 15,000 more people vying for the first post in Slashdot stories.
As others have commented, HP used to be a great company. I have a stack of what used to be very expensive electronics test equipment in my home lab, all of it with an HP label, except for a Tektronix scope. The equipment I have is between 20 and 50 (!!) years old but it works flawlessly and accurately.
HP started Silicon Valley.
But Hewlett and Packard died and the bean counters took over.
HP is the poster child for how greed can completely destroy a company. Simple case in point, an "honest broker" would sell printers at a fair price, and sell the ink at a fair price as well. The product would compete on its merits. Instead the crooks at HP will sell you a $50 printer to get you hooked, and then sell $40 ink cartridges that are 1/4 full. Instead of investing in way to make their printers better value, the invest in ways to embed DRM in the print cartridge because that's how they can maximize profits. A child can identify this as immoral. I personally am looking forward to the final end for this disaster, like Zenith, RCA and other former greats.
The bean counters spun off the equipment branch into Agilent and moved it Malaysia; sending the know-how on how to build the world's best test equipment overseas. Does the US have the capability to manufacture the world's best test equipment anymore? Hell no, the "tribal knowledge" is lost. It will be impossible to get this back, unless the Malaysians decide it will be cheaper to ship the whole factory back to the US. Good luck on that.
This is also why you can't get to space in an American rocket anymore, better brush up on your Russian skills. America is so medicated with the TV, hearing about Kimye and whoever Miley was twerking with last week, its a disaster.
How does she have a job? I can fuck up more than her if that's what they want.
And don't forget it's a three year period, so the actual number of H1-B visa holders in the company could be as many as triple that. It will actually be somewhat less, because not everyone stays for the full three years, but there are certainly at least half a million people in the country on the H1-B visa. And that's not counting the other work visa types, such as the L-1. When you consider that the total number of engineering, programming, and technician jobs is around 4 million, it becomes clear just how big an impact visas have.
I say the 50,000 employees all team up and create a company named Homeward Bound (HB). Seems appropriate since HP sent them all home. They can sell software as a service, cheap servers, re-badge some cheap laptops and tablets, and maybe sell a few printers. Then they should do something different and maybe provide support from regional offices -- you call and you get someone within driving distance of your site, who can show up and actually help you solve your problem.
On a related note, Dell had one service technician for the entirety of southern Maine when I was a freshman in college.
He drove two hours to come and fix my computer under warranty when there was an issue. He stayed despite a snow storm and was generally just a decent guy.
That was fourteen years ago. It took little over a decade to piss all of this away.
Anyone else noticed the obviously pre-meditated attempts at injecting clumsy Republican-bashing in every single story for which there is even the slightest semblance of relevancy. I honestly think it's an organized campaign.
She can't outsource American citizens and make things appear better; that is, other than deporting a bunch of people... which was probably in her campaign platform. (No, I'm not saying that would help the country but it would be consistent reasoning.)
So... did HP rob the pensions yet?
How can anybody let her get away saying such extreme BS like that? Corporations and capitalists LOVE to fire employees. That is point of the game; to pay as little as possible and get as much for the shareholders as possible. They ONLY hire people out of extreme necessity and as soon as it's possible they fire people. They aim low as possible in every nation they reside in. That is just good business. They resent having to pay anybody because that is overhead taking away from their profit margins.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
HP has nothing that is unique. They are losing market share in every market segment they are in. I don't see them surviving in the long run.
Unless you were comparing ancient P-class HP blades to more recent IBM blades, "no contest" and "junk" are both complete and utter BS. I've also managed a variety of blades and rackmount servers for 10+ years and they're on par with each other, each having both advantages and disadvantages. I actually prefer the HP blades (C-class), especially as of Gen8. The old P-class blades were an interesting attempt but not quite there yet. HP discontinuing the P-class and superseding them with the C-class was the right decision and put HP ahead of the competition for several years until things caught back up.
The entire premise of this post is built on stupidity escalation.
Corporations often pass off short-term financial hardship (mainly of the cash flow variety) as a legitimate reason to prune staff—generally fooling no-one, yet successfully biding time in the PR war saying nothing much at all until some new outrage of the moment shifts the spotlight to a different circus ring. Among the best-paid professionals in our society are the engineers of running issues aground against the acidic shoals of going nowhere fast with the greatest expense (first, we kill the injunctions). Business as usual, on both fronts.
This is irritating, so we pretend to become stupid as bricks in turning the table, as if the converse contains the least shred of cognitive viability: that any company not under present fiscal duress could not possibly benefit under best management from another round of lay-offs.
If anything, the converse is even dumber than the original stonewall, and about 100x more bloody minded. God forbid that by such asinine manoeuvres we return Karl Marx to the rank of essential reading, who at least spat upon the pathos from a viable view of systems.
By encouraging people to challenge each other, the game companies distract them from paying attention to the game content. The players get emotionally invested in their egos rather than the reason they took up the games in the first place (escape from real-world challenges). Sports allow TV networks to attract viewers (also by getting them invested in being fans or stroking their own egos) and forcing them to "challenge" other teams without actually viewing any real content. There is no script or acting necessary to play a sport. It's the game that is always plays with the same rules. There is never any original content. It's all the same content every time. And so is PVP.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
For a company of this size and for this company to have sent soo many people packing, HP now stands for 'Head Packers' in my book.
One of these companies is going to push just a little too hard and have their labor spontaneously unionize. That should be mildly amusing to watch.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Don't forget that businesses are starting to use B-1 visas, not even H-1Bs, and pay the fine. Mainly because the fine is cheaper than paying what would be the going rate, plus, if one B-1 gets deported, there are tens of thousands of college students who want to stay in the US and don't care if they overstay their visas once they graduate (no penalty for doing that.)
I remember when HP made really, really (!!) great stuff {sigh}
Those days are long gone.
The Woz came from there originally and almost never left because the environment for engineers was just that good but the money grubbing CEOs and B.O.D. killed all that long ago
Today HP shares only 2 letters with it's former glory and that is not nearly enough.
HP needs to just die and go away - soon.
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
It's kind of embarrassing how loudly I lol'd when I read that line.
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
It might have worked in the past, but now the mediocre crapware market for everything is dominated by Chinese companies.
No, not a Democrat, just a troll who knows that there are overly sensitive people on Slashdot. He knows what to say to yank their chains. It obviously worked on you.
Hewlett Packard was a wonderful company built by Bill Hewlett and David Packard. The garage they started the company in became a Silicon Valley heritage site. Bill and Dave died. They were great engineers, and their Stanford University professor suggested that they start a company to build up American technology in the Santa Clara Valley (now known as Silicon Valley). What Bill and Dave did was repeated in 1980 by Steve and Steve (also in a garage), and Sergey and Larry in September of '98. But Bill and Dave died. The company brought in MBA's instead of maintaining an engineer at the helm. Immediately they found hundreds of places to cut. And its like a giant Sequoia tree. You trim just a bit here, then a bit there, then edit for size, then trim and trim, and suddenly you have a Bonsai tree, and that's easily shipped/sold to Asia. They replace it with one of their own. The truth is that American business can't support American companies being in America.
It's so true about the power supplies! My friend got a new computer and gave me his 5-year-old one (cuz I fix them up for relatives), and it's an HP. It has a Core 2 E-something (2ghz low power chip), and the power supply was a really old style 250W Bestec. It makes this grinding thumping sound like old machinery used to, and has no no sata power cables, so they used sata adapters for the hard drive and burner. So there you have it - 5 years ago HP was selling 3-year-old tech with a power supply from the last century. Sure, it saves costs, but consumers eventually figure out you're selling crap. I put in a power supply that didn't sound like cows were being grinded up and a SSD and gave it to my parents, but seriously, when it comes to computers, you are so much better building your own. Even Apple only uses slightly better parts, not the best, and they totally gouge you on the price of those iMacs, my god.
That is one of the key problems tho, short term thinking... While reducing headcount may increase profits in the short term, depending on what those staff do you are likely to decrease the viability of the business in the long term.
Cutting down R&D increases short term profits, but then leaves you behind the curve on the next generation of products.
Cutting down support staff can decrease short term costs, but will drive customers away if the quality of service goes down.
I've dealt with such a company myself recently when renting out an apartment, instead of having their regional offices deal with my queries directly they centralised it all to one office staffed by people who are no longer familiar with me or the local area, and there is now someone different who deals with me every time.
While i'm sure it saved them quite a bit by having all the staff in one place, after putting up with that for a year it's cost them a customer and there are plenty of others who have made the same decision as me.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
"CEO Meg Whitman said in a conference call with analysts. 'I think everyone understands the turnaround we're in.'"
http://www.forbes.com/sites/leoking/2013/12/19/happy-christmas-hp-ceo-meg-whitman-in-150m-salary-jump/
Certainly HP has to pay their executive bonuses and salaries somehow?
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
Honestly all of the grossly overpaid people are in upper management, firing thousands of those will make the biggest impact on the bottom line.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Soon all tech companies will have about 100 employees and 90 of them will be investors and executives.
HP's business grade laptops are fairly decent, but there's a pretty good reason for that - when you're selling a 3 year soup-to-nuts service plan on it as a standard feature, you're going to spend the extra $50 to ensure you're not replacing it in two years.
Consumer units are a different story. Head inside one if you get a chance. Instead of wire channels, you'll literally find scotch tape. Everyone I've ever known with an ENVY line laptop has an overheating problem that will trigger a thermal shutdown because they didn't use enough copper to make an effective heatsink. The one guy I know who can go all day without a thermal trigger doesn't game on it, and has a chill mat with strategically placed props to allow hot air to flow off of it. By contrast, my old Dell XPS M1730 was able to cool two GPUs and a Core 2 Duo processor, under load, with fan levels that were rarely audible. My current Origin EON17 (a discontinued model) is much better built and has a nice service panel where most of the core components can be easily accessed.
Head to Google and check out "dv9000". That was their 17" laptop from 2006-2007ish, and literally every one I've ever come across has had the left hinge fail. In my case, repeatedly. This was again due to poor construction of the heat dissipation systems that weakened the hinge until it cracked, because the left hinge started to become a de facto heatsink itself.
When I direct someone to buy a laptop, It's either Lenovo (Thinkpads aren't what they used to be but they still have pretty solid construction), Asus (performance on a budget), Apple (if they're eyeballing one anyway because they've already made up their mind) or Origin (performance without a budget). On rare occasion a Probook will catch my eye at Microcenter and I'm thinking that it may be worth rolling the dice, but would I recommend consumer grade HP? No...and I wouldn't recommend CG Dell, Acer, or Toshiba, either.
Is Bill and Dave spinning in their graves.
"Good news for HP: Profits are up by 18% over the previous year!"
How the hell is that good news?! Everyone in the tech industry wants them dead. They've been making the highest defect percentage laptops for over a decade. Their desktops are 2nd worst next to emachines. Their tech support is rated worst in the entire industry. Their printers have the highest defect rate and highest TCO out of any brand. Their company is a disease! Who the fuck wrote that?
...and, when the last of the workers was fired and all production stopped, the CEO relaxed, knowing that finally, FINALLY, they had brought costs under control. They were now in a position of not owing anyone anything. A brand new day for the company :)
only with this wayyou can sometime surfiavel, http://www.keniaurlaub24.jimdo...
What a load of short-sighted, juvenile comment writers we have today!
Have you even checked what HP offer? Sure, they have a product range but they have a MASSIVE services arm. Maybe products are no longer HP's thing, but it doesn't mean it's a dead company!
So the article uses the fact that a company made a profit against them, when it made the profit by firing people - but it's an article against firing people? Isn't it also a tacit acknowledgement that firing people helps the bottom line?
I have been using HP color laser printers for quite awhile now, and they work great in my situation. It's sad that technical support people are losing their jobs I had a technician personally work with me on figuring out why the E-print function was not working on WiFi we tried various things, and it came down to that ATT Uverse access point is a horrible WiFi unit. I ended up just hard wiring the printer that seems to solve any problems you may have with WiFi. This will make me reconsider if I get an HP printer next time is their support will be as robust as it was before these layoffs.
If you read "The Second Machine Age," the authors (economists) make a good case that this kind of behavior of HP's has been increasing steadily over time since the 80s. They place the largest amount of the blame on improving technology and automation, where more work can be done by fewer people. They admit there is some amount of greed and corruption but that their analysis pegs it accounting for less than 10% of work-force-reduction/money-consolidation behavior. The rest is just natural market forces which pressure monetary efficiency on everyone. (Example: I didn't hire 10 people for my startup when 2 of us got the job done. It saved me money that I didn't have.)
During their research for the book, they interviewed tens of CEOs at large companies who first lamented that firing significant amounts of people is actually quite hard due to the regulatory environment of almost any developed nation. These CEOs went on to admit that in 2008-2010, they were finally able to show less profits in order to fire people that they'd been itching to get rid of for many years before that, and it gave them a chance to flex their technology muscle (paraphrased, don't remember the exact wording) and not lose an ounce of productivity while lopping off a huge chunk of their workers. The ability to pare one's workforce by such a huge margin without the company skipping a beat is considered a very important (and apparently rare) ability in the upper echelons of business governance. This, the CEOs said, is why the rockstar CEOs take home such big compensation: as a company, you can't afford for them to screw up like a normal employee can. Firing 16k people sounds trivial, but they strongly contend that it isn't.
Based on my personal experience of (very briefly) working with a former CTO of AT&T, this info is spot on. The guy was a scumbag and wasn't too good with tech (though he sure was good at putting his name on stuff made by others), but he was *amazingly* good at judging talent and figuring out the precise minimum number of people needed for a job. Startups rolled by bigwigs still leverage his expertise in this area, much to the chagrin of the actual working engineer, like myself, who end up getting leaned on VERY heavily (or else you're fired) as a result. Fortunately, my talents were also exceedingly rare, so when he told the startup to fire me when I asked for more money, they found they couldn't because there was no replacement within their critical 6 month timeframe.
That was also the big takeaway from the book: Those whose skills are topnotch and are in demand with the present (and upcoming) shifts in high-tech shall win big. Everyone else will scrape by with less and less. Much fewer people are needed to make the next big company, after all.
AccountKiller
...I don't need HP for anything. I'm not interested to talking to shitstains from india.
It seems to me that if HP wants to save money they should be looking at the high & mid level management employees instead of the people that actually make the company money.
Just shut-up, Meg.
I remember when Hewlett-Packard had very high employee loyalty and retention, when it was famous for treating its employees very well, better than most public companies. I am not surprised by what has happened and I can blame HP's senior management for this and the ilk in most boards and executive boards of companies whose backgrounds are finance and who listen to Wall Street analysts. This is why I would love to see Business Schools and Economics Departments discredited intellectually and academically beginning at Stanford and Harvard, for spreading lies and half truths that people use to conceal selfishness and shortsightedness. This is one of the reasons I went out of my way to vote against Whitman when she ran for Governor in California, not only was she a pro-business Republican but having sat on boards of many companies, the only perspective she has on decision-making is to look at financial reports. What the OP said is true to form and is as much the reason American business does not serve the needs of the citizens of this country and why it looks to offshore labor. I would like to see leaders like Whitman discredited, for not leading.
HP's CEO, upper management and the Board of Directors wish to thank the 16,000 and growing dead HP employees for their contributions in the face of rising heroin and per-hour male prostitute prices at HP offices world wide.
HP's CEO asks every HP employee to think about death and suicide to save HP billions, the paltry sum that you siphon that becomes a tidal wave in the collective workforce.
Meg ask all to "Give Your All To HP and Kill Yourself; save us the trouble please."
Happy Days Are Here Again at HP.
Ha ha