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HP To Jettison Up To 30,000 Jobs As Part of Spinoff
An anonymous reader writes: Hewlett-Packard says its upcoming spinoff of its technology divisions focused on software, consulting and data analysis will eliminate up to 30,000 jobs. The cuts announced Tuesday will be within the newly formed Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which is splitting from the Palo Alto, California company's personal computer and printing operation. "The new reductions amount to about 10 percent of the new company's workforce, and will save about $2.7 billion in annual operating costs." The split is scheduled to be completed by the end of next month. "The head of the group, Mike Nefkens, outlined a plan under which it is cutting jobs in what he called 'high-cost countries' and moving them to low-cost countries. He said that by the end of HP Enterprise’s fiscal year 2018, only 40 percent of the group’s work force will be located in high-cost countries."
most execs get a bonus based on stock price. if it ain't happening, the execs MAKE it happen. paid for by 30K pink-slips.
This is the old game. They bring in some skilled foreigners "via H1-B" (from Malaysia, India, Vietnam, etc). They work alongside the American team. The managers tell the engineers to get them up to speed. A year later those folks go back to the home country where it is cheaper. the Americans are expected to work internationally as a team with them.
Next, coincidentally, the CEO announces an option for employees to get a payout for those that would like to leave. A few months later, the CEO announces job cuts typically 10% and focuses on the mid level management and engineering teams that taught the H1-B folks.
This happens all the time. I was glad I took the payout and saw the writing on the wall.
Remember if you are expected to teach foreigners your work and they overlap your team's skill set, within a year or two you will be gone.
OK. We should need 30,000 fewer H1B visas now, right?
I saw the same TOO many times, & did something about it: I got into my OWN business where the product literally can't be "built overseas" & everyone needs it - It literally allowed me to ALMOST completely stop working as a software engineer/programmer analyst/network admin completely (actually, I could totally stop, & I've proven that to myself for the 2008-2013 period as a test of sorts... wasn't easy, scared the hell out of me taking that risk, but I wanted... no NEEDED to know I could pull it off!).
I did, successfully, 2008 to present & so far, Thank the merciful Lord, it's been good!
So far this year, I've done 3 contracts for a Fortune 100/500 for a custom application & servers + workstation migration/upgrade, & have a small one coming up this weekend that's REALLY simple - retail POS update (extra cash for what I consider EASY work in networking? Hey, why not! Gets me outta the house if anything & a couple extra bucks never hurts!). That's a TYPICAL year for me. No joke, as far as working for others that is.
Best advice I could give ANYONE? Don't get into a "want" line of business - get into a NEED line instead (people wanting is VERY SECONDARY to needing).
APK
P.S.=> I learned 2 things a LONG time ago: First is, you're not wealthy if you're working for others (they get wealthy off YOUR time, life, & efforts - paying you peanuts by comparison to what YOUR efforts help make them) & second is, if you're not letting your monies work for you, instead working for your monies? You're NOT well-off, & a wageslave selling the MOST valuable asset you have - your TIME, & LIFE, which there is no online or brick & mortar outlet out there to buy more of it from... apk
GM didn't fail because of anything that the unions did, the workers could have been free and they would still have been in trouble. Why? Because the problem was on the finance end of things, where the executives had put the company in perpetual hock, but then along came the Wall Street meltdown.
Oops. Crash.
Operationally, GM and Chrysler were running a general profit. All the bankruptcy proceedings did was allow them to coerce their various associates into more favorable terms, like jettisoning some brands, dumping some dealers and otherwise clearing house. That's why they were able to quickly transition to other loans once the finance markets decided to play ball again.
IBM has been doing these kinds of layoffs for decades. If you read the article, it looks like they're planning on rehiring some of the same positions. This can be either one of the following:
- Jettisoning "expensive" older, experienced workers that just happen to not be working on today's buzzword set (cloud and mobile in today's case) and replacing them with fresh young "talented" Millenials
- Dumping everyone overboard and just moving the work wholesale to India or similar low cost countries.
This is the MO for IBM nowadays. They're dumping hardware, but they're also trying to turn themselves into some kind of white shoe management consulting firm. To do this, you need to raise profit margins on service contracts, and this is the obvious choice,
I've worked in some very big companies and I've seen my share of dead wood. I've seen managers who no longer have a team but are still somehow on the payroll, I've seen people who literally do nothing all day because their job has been taken over by someone else, and all the other fun/scary examples. But when you're talking about 30,000 employees, that's not all dead wood. If I had to guess, they're killing off the remainder of the EDS guys who know mainframe stuff inside and out. I work in the airline industry and I'm sure those experienced guys look like a juicy target to an MBA or accountant, regardless of how much they know and how awful their Indian, Vietnamese or other replacement is going to be.
The loss of HP, as it was from perhaps 1950 to 2000, wasn't just the loss of a brand or a manufacturer, it was the loss of an art form, a craft, a cherished part of engineering culture.
Their stuff was just so damn good, all of it.
A little detail that isn't often mentioned. In the 1980s or thereabouts, everything HP advertised was real. They never played the vaporware game, they never cheated just a bit on timing the ads. If you saw the ad in a magazine, it was finished, it was real, you could order it, it would arrive in a week or two--and it would work the way it was supposed to and meet all the specs. This, in a day when their competitors would run ads based on models or empty cases up to six months before the product was finished.
Using an incandescent light bulb as a feedback element in their audio oscillators was sheer elegance.
All their instruments were works of art. All of them had front panels that today's user interface designers ought to be studying. All the groupings made sense, almost every control was individually designed to perform its intended function. HP instruments looked good, felt good, were easy to use, and did exactly what they were supposed to do.
The first LaserJet was a revelation, and it worked perfectly, The first DeskJet was in many ways even more amazing--a 300 dpi printer for $600 when laser printers cost $3,000 and every other $600 machine was about 80 dpi if you were lucky.
HP's desk calculators were sweet, and the HP-35 was just a revelation when it came out. Everyone was proud of being able to do a square root, and here's this beautiful thing. Did everything a slide rule could do, everything, to ten-place accuracy when a slide rule would get you at most three. And, again unlike the competition--most particularly unlike TI--the math was impeccable, no glitches, no odd cases--they knew their numerical analysis and they got it right. RPN seemed weird, but at least it was consistent.The competition could never get this right--they would claim that you entered it "algebraically" but you would key in 30, then "sin" instead of sin(30).
The loss of the engineering days of HP was the loss of a whole discipline, a whole body of corporate memory on how to do things right. An irreparable loss of know-how. And it was engineering in the full sense of the word--these weren't self-indulgent overengineered toys, they were priced competitively and sold against competition in a real marketplace--and they were still so good.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
So the investors and executives cared more for the quick buck instead of long-term growth of the company. What a shame...
This is how Wall Street works. Investors no longer hold stock for a long time, merely cashing in dividends. They want the stock price to go up, quick. So they vote for board members who will promote that agenda. Then board members hire a management team that can deliver the agenda. The stock price goes up, the investors sell to other investors. Rince and repeat.
What is amazing is that the investors who have the most influence in this process are institutional investors (such as pension funds) who need to make a profit with their investments to meet their own needs (such as paying out pensions). So in order to make a profit, those large investors drive a short-term agenda that, globally, hurts their customer base. With one hand they give you a 8% return in your 401(k), with the other one they drive your employer (and many others) to the brink of destruction by always forcing executives to think short term.
lucm, indeed.
What do we need?
STEM Jobs!
Where do we need them?
Cheap labor cost countries!
What STEM jobs can Americans do?
Train their foreign replacements!
What can congress do!
More H1-B's, we need cheap STEM labor and we need it now.
What can you do?
Don't be a lowly middle class American, be a CEO of a STEM company and outsource your way to quarterly profits. If that doesn't work, reorganize and break up business units and sell them off. Maybe hookup with a corporate raider like Ichan and rack up a lot of debt, pay large dividends to shareholders then go bankrupt.
When GM spun off their component plants into their own public corporation (Delphi), almost all of their production was in the US. Now, after a bankruptcy that completely fucked the salaried staff (as in degreed engineers) out of their pensions, nearly all of Delphi's manufacturing operations are offshore. This is exactly what the two "new" HP entitites will do - stumble briefly, bankruptcy, throw the pensions off to the government (like Delphi did) and move everything - and I mean EVERYTHING offshore. Good luck with buying gear and getting support from that dysfunctional monster.
There will be a vigorous discussion here on Thursday about what went on during the Republican debates (Wednesday, tomorrow).
Trump is completely against this outsourcing thing. He sees quite clearly the damage it does to our workforce, and how it's turning the country into a 3rd world nation.
Unlike the other candidates, he doesn't have to promise anything to super PACs just to get campaign donations. We're starting to see the fallout from this, as at least one supar-PAC has declared war on Donald Trump.
And for comparison, note that about 6 months before becoming president, [then] Senator Obama voted *for* telecom immunity. After he had promised to vote against it. And the measure didn't need his vote to pass - it already had enough support for that.
As a result several telecoms donated to his campaign and he ultimately won.
Keep this job-loss article in mind as you listen to the candidates on Wednesday. Most of them are career politicians, and we know how they actually voted on some of these issues.
If you want to compete with 30,000 new job hunters because your company outsourced to another country, feel free to vote for a politician.
Of course, your company will offer you 3 months of extra employment if you agree to train your replacement, so it's not all bad!
Increase H1B Visas (Senate) (source)
YEAs: 67 (D = 52, R = 14, I = 2)
NAYs: 32 (D = 0, R = 32, I = 0)
Now that the greedy VC hawks are swirling around even more so. HP is as good as dead.
At least remove Bill and Dave's names from the company at least. The company that exists now has nothing to do with either of them.
Maybe name the company to FW or Fiorina-Whitman
Really, the HP name should have gone to Agilent when they spun them off, and the remnants of the company could have taken the name EDS, which was the part of the company that Carly was really interested in.
That isn't a meg or a carly thing really. This has been in the works for a long time, pretty much since the HP touchpad flop. Basically the purpose behind the split was because the consumer division (printers, desktops, touchpad) would frequently drag the enterprise division (servers, networking gear, storage gear, which generally does pretty well) into the mud along with its routinely shitty performance.
They likewise believe that if they have a more stable stock for the enterprise division, it would be easier to attract investors.
They are rehiring them in "cheaper" countries.
you 20 and 30somethings in software out there: take heed! you have, at best, 5-10 years before all software is outsourced.
your software degree? will be useless and you won't even be able to pay your student loans out.
this country (US) is very quickly going to hell. we all see it, don't we? some are more insulated than others, but its spreading like a disease. the ceo's are robbing us of what made us great; they are stealing all the profits and keeping us around just long enough but not longer than necessary. we are all short timers now.
still think that unions are not needed? lets check back again in 5 yrs and see how the sw industry is doing in the US. my guess is that it will be way worse as time goes on. can anyone show me any signs of it getting better?
since ceo's are patted on the back each time they do a mass-firing of US workers, it will be you, sooner or later. you don't think so, but you just wait. sadly, no one wants to form a union in IT and so we'll all hang separately since we REFUSE to hang together.
really breaks my heart to see us all taken for chumps like this. american ceo's are pond scum but they are powerful land-owning money-keeping pond scum.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Sanders is too old? That's the best you can come up with?
He's not *that* old; McCain was as old. And Sanders seems to be in good health. I'm sure he can handle 4 years before he croaks. I'd rather take my chances with him rather than any of these other clowns (including corrupt Hillary).
Moderate republicans? You guys exist? I thought they chased all you guys out of the party on a rail. :)
Moderate republicans? You guys exist?
I for one do not (anymore). I didn't leave the Republican Party, the Republican Party left me. I am still moderately conservative however with libertarian bent.
Life is not for the lazy.
I wish the mods would come in and somehow make your post a nobler green. Or maybe just like, 3D. Or (Score: 7, Poignantly Sad And Explanatory).