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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?
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.
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.
No, one less letter to a newspaper is not going to change their publishing ability.
There are plenty of stupid letters they can still post, since there are no shortage of inane comments people have about topics they don't understand. As you have proven just now...
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?
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".
Open VMS. Best Oxymoron. Evar.
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
Actually this really is non-news. For as long as I can remember, . . at least back to the early 90s . . . HP has regularly announced big layoffs. Every few years they announce that they are getting rid of 10,000-15,000 people, and yet, the total number of people working for HP doesn't go down. The truth is, while all these alleged layoffs are going on, HP continues to hire people.
It used to be that layoffs were bad. it meant that your business wasn't doing well. But now, everyone does The Dance of the Big Business. Stock price is down? Announce big layoffs. Wall Street loves that and your stock will go up. And then you just quietly hire more.
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.
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.
read somewhere that to change an organization internally takes 20 years. Everyone must retire, quit or die. so the fastests way tochange things is to lay people off, sell non-performing divisions etc.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
And yet the CEO or any other C-level isn't taking a paycut to help out.
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.
in the last few decades, there has been mass mind-reprogramming that seems to convince people that 'profit above all else, to the exclusion of all else' is what american companies are supposed to be about.
but go back to our grandfather's days and you would find social responsibility (which was hard fought for, during the union days). companies DID care and they DID shoulder the burden during hard times, because they saw value in the INVESTMENT in their work force! it was common for people to work at the same company for 20, 30 even 40 years!
find anyone like that today. I dare you. if you find someone working 20 yrs at the same place, its extremely rare.
this is now how it used to be. and don't accept that this was always how it was and how its meant to be. that's brainwashing by the new capitalists who are no better than white collar criminals, these days.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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
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 don't think you understand how healthy capitalism is supposed to work. Employees of HP are not only providing goods are services but area also potential customers of HP products and services. When you cut and cut and cut, you end up with nobody being able to afford the products your company offers. The lost jobs also have a ripple effect in the local economy. Why don't you stop being a hypocrite. You want to keep your job right? Why should you get to keep yours?
At some point, cutting jobs have a negative effect on your bottom line over the long run.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
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.
in the last few decades, there has been mass mind-reprogramming that seems to convince people that 'profit above all else, to the exclusion of all else' is what american companies are supposed to be about.
but go back to our grandfather's days and you would find social responsibility (which was hard fought for, during the union days). companies DID care and they DID shoulder the burden during hard times, because they saw value in the INVESTMENT in their work force! it was common for people to work at the same company for 20, 30 even 40 years!
find anyone like that today. I dare you. if you find someone working 20 yrs at the same place, its extremely rare.
this is now how it used to be. and don't accept that this was always how it was and how its meant to be. that's brainwashing by the new capitalists who are no better than white collar criminals, these days.
What has changed my friend is court cases of the 1980's defined the role of a company. The question is who owns the company? The shareholders and big banks won. It is not to make profit. It is to raise the shareprice. It must grow grow and grow and if it gets too high go do splits forever with no end in sight! If a CEO can't perform this then hire someone else who can. It is taught in finance 101 today in any college and was asked during my exam even.
So how does this change things?
1. You can't grow by creating great products when your share is saturated or is no longer a cash cow with competition
2. The emphasis on Engineers getting MBA's does not help the goal of the company. Cost accountants getting MBA's and bean counters making critical decisions and overiding IT and engineering make a better value for raising the share price
3. The only way to get a magical p/e ratio is to raise revenue and cut expenses by sitting on cash and going in debt rather than investing on growth
4. When you are out of ideas SELL or CUT DRASTIC CUTS to gain quarterly updates. When that doesn't work by other companies to get other investors raise the share price or sell it so the shareholders can sell out their high costs and give you the golden parachute for looking after shareholder intestests etc.
How many times did I write shareholder? See the problem? It is a math game today of flipping for computer programs that make entities more wealth.
That is the downside. The upside is newer agile competitors can rise up as HP is killing itself and Lenovo and Asus are taking its place. HP needs to hire more financial engineering majors to tinker with the price through accounting tricks and will cash out when it can't sell computers by selling it to Asus as a shadow of itself etc.
It is sad really but unregulated greed and Wall Street is ruining the whole country. Did you know bankers went to jail setting gold and stock prices! True ... today they do it with HFT supercomputers and do not blink. Why is this legal? But until courts role stakeholders not shareholders only you will continue to see shareholder activists like iKahn screwing things up and cashing in and funding Tea Party and anti union laws to make sure he can make even more money.
This corruption needs to stop
http://saveie6.com/
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.
Steve Jobs I respect.
At least he makes something people like and are willing to buy. If you hate the shiny iTurds you are free not to buy them. However, he does not do the same horrible shit HP does.
HP puts 185 watt power supplies and changes the freaking components on the fly to save $.005 based on market conditions on the same model. So you can ahve +32 different combinations of the the HP 8500???! Sucks when you create an image as I never know which site at work has which HP 8500. They all ahve different hardware which is most likely defective.
I can not image Steve Jobs saying SCREW GREAT PEOPLE! I want cheap labor for our iMac or iPhone. After all talent is a cost and because of my brand I can sell and do no need to innovate?! Less people means we can make more money etc.
Apple would have been dead in 1999 if it were not for the iMac and then the explosion or products that came later based on the products
http://saveie6.com/
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.
... and the good performers, innovators, and managers as well. You are left with those who just need a job because they have a questionable resume.
People forget companies do not create great products. PEOPLE DO! I can't make the best widget in the world without the best engineers. ID Software needed John Carmack to make doom back in the 486 days before 3d cards. It was not the brand image that created it. It was the employee.
HP cares more about financially engineering its stock price to rise each quarter and then sell it when it can't maximize than to innovate.
Fiona really did a job on that company. Most of the innovators went to Agilent systems which makes more money than to try to monopolize the pc market which is what Fiona wanted by buying compaq and just focusing on this. Bad bed and the Bill and Hewlett way is gone. As good employers were fired if they did not leave already as senior folks cost money etc.
http://saveie6.com/
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?
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...
Do you remember her campaign? Vote for me - I know how to run a government like a business. It turns out - no she doesn't.
I'm sorry - but if you dish it out you have to take it too.
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.
Steve Jobs I respect.
At least he makes something people like and are willing to buy. If you hate the shiny iTurds you are free not to buy them. However, he does not do the same horrible shit HP does.
HP puts 185 watt power supplies and changes the freaking components on the fly to save $.005 based on market conditions on the same model. So you can ahve +32 different combinations of the the HP 8500???! Sucks when you create an image as I never know which site at work has which HP 8500. They all ahve different hardware which is most likely defective.
I can not image Steve Jobs saying SCREW GREAT PEOPLE! I want cheap labor for our iMac or iPhone. After all talent is a cost and because of my brand I can sell and do no need to innovate?! Less people means we can make more money etc.
Apple would have been dead in 1999 if it were not for the iMac and then the explosion or products that came later based on the products
I guess you don't mean to say that you can't imagine Steve Jobs outsourcing all their manufacturing to China... since that is what they did and continue to do.
Apple dodges billions in tax they rightfully owe the USA. They manufacture everything oversees. They were even using sweatshops until they got called out on it. All of this was done under Steve Jobs. He caused untold damage to US society by following contemporary big business norms to the letter.
Amazing how senior management doesn't really have to deal with true capitalism, only the minions.
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.
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.
I'll save my pre-meditated attempts at injecting clumsy Republican-bashing for stories dealing with vast numbers of closeted gays thank you very much!
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!
The truth is that American business can't support American companies being in America.
Sad, amusing, and true.
And by being a publicly traded company business decisions are driven by Wall Street, even if they make no long term business sense. If you want to destry a company, go publicly traded with it. Look at what happened to Google.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
To really mess things up requires an Ivy league MBA.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
Do you remember her campaign? Vote for me - I know how to run a government like a business. It turns out - no she doesn't.
I'm sorry - but if you dish it out you have to take it too.
I don't want my government run like a business. Governments shouldn't be profit-oriented, they should be customer (citizen) oriented. In theory, that means that each and every citizen gets the same level of service from the government, no matter what the individual cost.
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.
> doesn't really have to deal with true capitalism
Is that like finding a "true faith" or a "true soulmate" or a "true democracy"? It's a goal, and a laudable one, but not a complete reality at any level.
Is Bill and Dave spinning in their graves.
"HP puts 185 watt power supplies and changes the freaking components on the fly to save $.005 based on market conditions on the same model. So you can ahve +32 different combinations of the the HP 8500???! Sucks when you create an image as I never know which site at work has which HP 8500. They all ahve different hardware which is most likely defective."
But your company bought them, presumably in part because they where a good value purchase, which shows that there was a demand for such a range of products.
Your company could have chosen not to buy them and to buy something else instead, which if done in large enough numbers would cause HP to change its offering.
"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?
"but go back to our grandfather's days and you would find social responsibility (which was hard fought for, during the union days). companies DID care and they DID shoulder the burden during hard times, because they saw value in the INVESTMENT in their work force! it was common for people to work at the same company for 20, 30 even 40 years!
find anyone like that today. I dare you. if you find someone working 20 yrs at the same place, its extremely rare."
It works both ways though. Most companies know that a great majority of their workforce will leave for a better job if they have the opportunity to do so. It is rare for people to spend 20 years at the place even when they have the chance.
Employers might not have much long term loyalty but neither do employees - I'm not sure in which direction (if any) the causality works.
only with this wayyou can sometime surfiavel, http://www.keniaurlaub24.jimdo...
Everyone must make in China. Otherwise they would go out of business.
Not to say he is a saint and another pope Francis. But, he makes excellent products and doesn't cut cheap corners. He pays his employees very well too even if he is a dick and values them. Admit the 2007 iPhone was many years ahead with html 5 and pretty graphics with gyroscopes while competitors were debating which plastic molding from central America would be cheaper etc.
FYI HP had iPhone like pdas and phones with these features back in 1999 for its computerized appliances R&D. Fiona turned it down to focus on selling more ink, hiring finance gurus, and trying to monopolize the Desktop market instead.
My point is money == reward for serving society/customers. Right? HP doesn't care about them. Apple under Jobs does and his price premiums are worth it. Especially for non tech people who don't want junk. The iPhone even today is a formable competitor to the Android.
FYI do not own a mac or iPhone. I build computers but I have no issue at all seeing someone get rich by producing something people buy.
http://saveie6.com/
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?
PLEASE! Capitalism is the economic engine that pays for Democracy! If you don't like the company you work for or you want to make more money, start your own company and quit bitching about what someone else has. Could it *possibly* be that your "economic envy" is nothing more than coveting what someone else has?! I tire of continutally hearing socialists, communists and anarchists bitching about the state of things, yet enjoying the highest standard of living in the world! Evne the poor in the U.S. are richer than 98% of the rest of the world!
So instead of complaining about what someone has or doesn't have, why don't you do something novel, like EMULATE them so that you can add to the productivity of the country and at the same time, increase your own take. Business people should be emulated, not demonized!
PLEASE! Capitalism is the economic engine that pays for Democracy!
In the past, maybe. But today it's the economic engine that buys Democracy.
Everyone must make in China. Otherwise they would go out of business.
Actually, with Apple's ridiculous profit margins they'd do just fine. They may only be able to put away $30B a year into the bank instead of $40B a year, but that's pretty damn far from going out of business. I'm not stating an opinion here, just a fact. It's the same debate that has gone on in several other threads on this article... should it be a company's *only* goal to maximize monetary gain, or is there room for social/environmental/economic gain as well?
Oh, and I hate to break it to you, but Steve Jobs died almost 3 years ago. He hasn't made anything or payed anyone for a long time now...
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
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.