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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."
This is still Carly's fault
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.
...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.
But that's the only thing of value now...
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.
Here's more of the article around the cuts:
Most of the cuts will occur in HP’s long-troubled Enterprise Services unit and may be offset by new hires in that unit. 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.
Many companies have layoffs but they don't disappear. The reason is that the layoffs aren't "reductions in force", they are mass firings of people who are expensive due to seniority or bad negotiations from better times. The company then turns around and hires almost the same number of people, but at a lower rate.
This is frequently done by going to cheaper countries (which is what Nefkins is actually quoted here as saying), which means that this is effectively equivalent to an outsourcing. Either they will really outsource those jobs, or they will hire people in "outsource-worthy" labor markets. That makes this an outsource in all but name and perhaps organizational detail.
So the investors and executives cared more for the quick buck instead of long-term growth of the company. What a shame...
OK. We should need 30,000 fewer H1B visas now, right?
...there is no longer a shortage of STEM resources in the US.
Mission Accomplished!
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
"The purge announced Tuesday will occur within the newly formed Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a bundle of technology divisions focused on software, consulting and data analysis that is splitting off from the company's personal computer and printing operations."
Wha? They are keeping consumer business, spinning off the Enterprise business, and it will be moving to low wage nations?!?! I thought enterprise was the high paying american jobs, and consumer was the cheap, crappy stuff that would get outsourced to China?
They should keep paying 30,000 people they don't need. Shouldn't they?
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!
"Hmm, what happens when you have no customers left in the "high-cost countries" to buy your kit?"
Well, you'll sell them to the high-grow countries, which happen to be those where you outsourced to.
Think of it: where would you want to be selling printers in ten years? A country already full of printers, where you can only sell for those that break and less paper is used at home, or to a country which is growing and basically doesn't have one?
Do you think HP gives a damn if it's selling devices and services to USA or the new generation of growing companies and middle class in India?
And even if it ended up utterly wrong in ten years, do you think the high executives that will get their ginormous bonuses in less than five will give a damn?
You sound like a HP product owner. Or maybe a former employee. Or maybe shareholder?
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)
I'm curious. What do you think a POTUS can do about outsourcing, except be against it?
How do you stop a transnational corporation from moving jobs to other countries in an age of big-dollar corporate lobbying? You think Trump is gonna call for a boycott?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Workers are the consumables.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I don't know. Why don't we start with:
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.
I'm curious. What do you think a POTUS can do about outsourcing, except be against it?
How do you stop a transnational corporation from moving jobs to other countries in an age of big-dollar corporate lobbying? You think Trump is gonna call for a boycott?
The president can stop bad laws from passing.
Additionally, Trump in particular is an expert at negotiations and making deals.
For comparison, note that our current ambassador to Japan is Caroline Kennedy, who is largely a poor choice.
That last link was from the State Department's internal audit of our Japanese ambassador.
We have a long list of trade deals which supercede the constitution and make Americans miserable. We're currently working on the Trans Pacific Partnership, which extends copyright protections, jacks up the cost of medicine, magnifies income inequality, and threatens the climate. (See Wikipedia for more detail.)
A president who has the interests of the *people* as a goal, and who wants the country to become strong again, could veto this treaty and negotiate better terms.
The President...shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur... Constitution of the United States, Art. II, Sec. 2
So HP 'Enterprise Services' is now no longer a part of HP? Well, what else does one expect, when they ain't much different from Wipro these days? But this company will just get eviscerated by the likes of Infosys, HCL, Wipro and even TCS and Tech Mahindra.
Remember that HP (The real HP that made electronic test equipment) was spun off into Agilent which was recently spun off again into Keysight Technoogies.
(2009)
HP -> HP (Computers, Printers etc)
-> Agilent (Life Sciences, Electronic Test)
(2014)
Agilent -> Agilent (Life Sciences etc)
-> Keysight Technologies (Electronic Test)
So when you talk to engineers about HP, we think Agilent and now Keysight as having the original DNA of HP
46137
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.
How do you stop a transnational corporation from moving jobs to other countries in an age of big-dollar corporate lobbying?
Perhaps I'm naive, but I always thought this could be accomplished by political leaders who had the integrity and the balls to actually represent the best interests of the majority of their constituents. If a company's ability to sell its products and services in a country were dependent on the number and quality of jobs it provided in that country, (as tended to be the case before globalization was rammed up our asses with the promise that it would be 'better for everyone'), then we wouldn't be bleeding so many jobs to "low-cost countries". And guess what? There'd still be enough wealth left over to help break the poverty cycle in impoverished countries, if it wasn't all being eaten up by spurious wars, political corruption, and other sundry wealth concentration schemes.
The death knell for a just society was sounded on the day that corporations like HP gained all the rights, (and more) of individual citizens, with little or none of the corresponding responsibility.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
I collect, repair and use classic test gear. I have a good collection of tektronix, hp, keithley, fluke (pretty much all 'just names' at this point; danaher ruined most of them, sigh). the old stuff is amazing, almost magic. the new stuff is overpriced (even by hp standards) and is not designed to last. on the eevblog forum, there was a big thread about an agilent high-end handheld DMM that bricked itself during a fw update and hp's reply was 'sorry, we can't fix it; its not fixable by design'. really??? what the fuck! no backup boot block and no way to jtag fix it? you can't be serious. big stink on eevblog and it taught many of us that we should now avoid hp^H^Hagilent^H^Hkeysight for test/meas gear.
the stuff they make now will never be called 'classic'. its all disposble and even the chinese scopes like rigol and its ilk beat the snot out of the old school brand names, that pretty much invented the tech, 50 or more years ago.
I interviewed at hp in palo alto a few months ago. it took months, they dragged their feet, they could not decide, they could not define what they wanted and after nearly a whole day there, they gave me a thumbs down with no reason given. months of 'we want you!' bullshit from the recruiter only to find that the team does not even know what it wants.
you'd have to be nuts to apply to hp (or amazon, for that matter) these days. perhaps I dodged a bullet by not getting the job at hp.
gotta say, though, the inside of HP looked quite dreary. lame-ass open office, no space for personal stuff, not even cups in the break room (seriously; I had to ask to borrow someone's coffee mug at their desk when I 'dared' ask for some water to keep near me during my interview.)
HP is dead. parts of it don't know it yet, but they are 'dead men walking'.
really a shame. HP was a tier-1 company in their day. when I was starting out, working for DEC or HP or Sun or SGI was the best place to be (all high end unix and unix-like workstation companies and all were great to work for back in the day). now, what do we have? essentially none of those computer companies are around anymore. their culture, which was a valuable part of who they were, has all washed away, as well. the 'hp way' died 15 years ago or more.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Disclaimer: I work for HPE. Anyway, the split isn't quite done yet. We just changed email domains last week, and the internal sites are still in the process of splitting. Funny you mention Wipro, much of our unix and wintel support has long ago been outsourced to them. My facility is in Tulsa, we mostly support various airlines and have the SABRE mainframes in our basement.
"outlined a plan" I work for HPE, and this is the first time I've hear of Mike's latest "plan". It's always a great day to learn once again of huge lay-offs via the internet and not a PEEP from anyone in my management chain. In fact, most people at work don't even know about this. Time to spread the cheer I suppose and start emailing my co-workers and making sure my resume is good to go.
Why H1Bs when you can open an entire branch office in India?
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).
Bill moved the dems hard right so they could win elections after the lost the blue collar guys to social issues and the welfare queen rhetoric. The Republicans had to go further right to maintain a distinct identity..
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If the Touchpad was a flop, what do you call writing off $5 billion after buying Autonomy?
It's too bad they didn't bother updating the hardware on the Touchpad. It would have been current had it been released a year earlier. The 7" Touchpad Go would have been nice too. :(
I'd say it was a pure corruption play. Clearly someone(s) got that $5B. The touchpad was pure tragedy - WebOS sounds like the second coming of BeOS - a great OS with great ideas that just came a bit too late to the party (and didn't have the blessing of the corporate elite).
Also keep in mind Microsoft's Skype acquisition (which in hindsight doesn't seem as bad - if MS would actually merge Skype into Windows or Office...) - the common factor being that since the money being used to purchase the offshore companies wasn't within the US, they could repatriate some of the money without paying taxes.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
The Republican party was founded by religious conservatives who were opposed to the sin of slavery. The only-give-a-damn-about-themselves-and-money wing of the GOP were originally the Whigs who were the party in opposition to the Democrats before the Republican party was created. Like all such people, they were too self-centered to take up an "icky" moral cause. When they made it clear that they had no principles beyond their own wealth and comfort, the American public rejected them and their party collapsed into oblivion. The idea that the modern GOP has been "taken over" by the very religious people who founded it is a joke pushed by the secular Whigs who've been trying to convert the GOP back into the Whig party of 1850 for many decades.
You say "the Republican party left you" ..... impossible if you are a so-called "moderate".
in what specific way? The GOP of today is far more left-wing and liberal than it was during the Reagan years; it's even to the left of where the DEMOCRATS were in the early 80's. Many in the GOP today are for drug legalization, and gay marriage (positions too far to the left for any DEMOCRAT to endorse in 1980). The GOP of George W Bush (from a family of modern Whigs who, like the Romney family worked very hard to prevent Reagan from getting elected) grew entitlements more than many Democrats have done (remember his prescription drug program?) and his dad slashed the nation's defenses more than most Democrats had dreamed of. The GOP of today is far less socially conservative, far less religious, far less defense-hawkish, and far less economically-conservative than it has ever been since its founding.