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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?
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).
Excellent advice. That's how Apple made truckloads of cash: because people NEED iPhones and iPads, and why Safeway got in financial trouble (since people merely "want" food).
lucm, indeed.
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!
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.
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)
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.