HP to Layoff 15,000 Employees 448
William Robinson writes "ZDNet reports that HP is planning to layoff 15000 employees. IT, sales and services will be among the areas particularly hit, although the sweeping cuts will be felt throughout the company, according to a close source to the company." From the article: "HP is expected to announce the layoffs as early as Monday, but employees are not expected to be immediately notified of their status, the source said, noting such a practice is common in corporate America. More high-level discussions on the layoffs will occur late next week and employees may get a greater sense of their specific status sometime thereafter."
Vox populi, vox dei (Score:2, Insightful)
I guess the market has spoken, where's Carly now?
No Management Cuts (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Here they come. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Severance (Score:1, Insightful)
America will have fifty megacorporations. All of them will have one employee, a CEO. Everything else will be outsourced to other countries, and the CEO will bring in 150-200million a year as salary, without benefits.
Then all of a sudden the outsourced pieces of these corps will band together in india, china, korea, taiwan... and form identical megacorporations there, leaving the US completely out of the loop.
The world will say "pwned USA!"
IANACEO (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. So now you have 15,000 less people to lead/manage but you still have the same number of executives and managers. That seems to create a very top heavy structure and those tend to fall over both in the management world and the engineering world.
The more cynical side of me tells me that the execs and managers have more pull so would put up more of a fight if laid off. I'm sure the top level execs know the middle level ones at personal level so found it harder to laid them off. Instead, the little peons on the bottom who they barely know or care about can fend for themselves.
HP Services has roughly 65,000 employees, but analysts are predicting HP will lop off only about 8 percent here because the company is working on edging out IBM Global Services, EDS and Accenture for corporate contracts. "We estimate that HP has roughly 20,000 salespeople, with the majority in (enterprise server group) and Services, and that CEO Hurd is likely to look to streamline the organization, moving away from HP's current 'matrixed' selling organization to focus on more direct accountability," Sacconaghi said.
I really hate the word "accountability" when used in isolation. From my experience, if accountability is the only method being used to solve problems, people start playing politics and the blame game. Bueraucracy goes through the roof and everything has to be documented in case the problem doesn't get solved. You end up spending more time covering your ass than solving the problem. You also end up taking a toll on teamwork.
It seems to me that their current strategy is to lower costs so they can lower their margins to compete. Not a bad plan but there are other avenues. I know at my company, we're more than willing to pay more for better service and reliability. The initial contract cost isn't the only factor. We have to think about the cost of downtime.
Noncritical research and development (R&D) could also be impacted, analysts suggest. HP's R&D spending is nearly $1 billion higher than all of its relevant competitors combined, according to an independent benchmarking analysis done by Sacconaghi's firm. The comparison was designed to mirror the one that Hurd has professed as his method for bringing costs back into line. "We suspect that Hurd might be able to lower HP's annual $3.5 billion in R&D by $250 (million)-$500 million through the elimination of non-core projects, Sacconaghi said. So they're going to gut the thing that made HP great in the first place. I don't know what they consider non-critical R&D but a lot of innovations aren't obviously useful at first. Didn't a division of HP invent the optical mouse? I wonder if that was considered critical at the time.
Again, I'm not a CEO. I'm all for making an organization more efficient but I wonder if they're making the right cuts. It's sad to see the "Grey Lady of the Silicon Valley", the engineers' corporation get hacked to pieces.
Re:In related news... (Score:3, Insightful)
It is for the economy of India.
And if history is any indication, it is for the US as well.
Re:Here they come. (Score:5, Insightful)
A four month CEO is cutting R&D at a TECH company, firing IT workers, and hiring more managers - this is good?? I guess those 120 days on the job does give him the right to slash the pensions on engineers who have been their for 20+ years. After all, those idiots were trying to invent things to make the world better, when they should have been in business school....eck.
And I love this:
And they certainly won't celebrate the 150,000 people who still *do* have jobs created by the likes of HP.
Absolutely, and I'm sure if someone raped your daughter you wouldn't complain - you'd be celebrating that they didnt do it to your wife too!
Apologist.
Re:Don't blame the corporation... (Score:2, Insightful)
Started by Bush Sr, continued by his son (Score:2, Insightful)
This all started with Bush Sr, and his NAFTA, to export jobs to Mexico. I remember the lies, how it would stregnthen the American workforce.
Now the current Bush is exporting jobs to India.
Anyone see a pattern of what the republicans are doing? They got the idea, they no longer need American workers. So they started transfering jobs outside of the USA.
How many more decades do we have before the USA is on par with Mexico in terms of wealth. We will have the likes of Ted Turner owning 2 million acres of land. We will become a nation where 4% of the population lives in gated and gaurded communities, and everyone else will live in an apartment, in places filled with violence, and we will be called sub-human.
Remember, it was not that long ago when families only needed one person to work, to pay the bills, to feed the family. The past 10 years, most families have both parents working. And in the next 10 years, we will see both parents working multiple jobs. But it is okay, I am sure Sony will have the next generation playstation by then.
How can any country justify having CEO's that make $10,000,000+ a year, and having janitors who make $5.75 an hour? It is like what happened with the World Trade Center, when the government was cutting checks to families of survivors. The valuable lives got checks in the millions of dollars, the janitors families got 1/10th of that. It is like Baseball, I remember being a kid when it was a big deal for a player to sign a 1 million dollar deal. Tickets were cheap. Hot dogs were cheap. Heck, the ballpark was a cheap evening, and you would get fed. Now players demand $100 million contracts, and there is advertising in every corner of the ballpark and hot dogs cost $4.50, parking is $15, tickets are over $40. Normal blue collar families no longer go to the ballpark, but that does not matter because teams found they can make more money selling the best seats to corporations. I guess it is a nice benifit for salespeople and executives, to go somewhere they believe is popular, even though they know little about the game or players.
I hope my kids don't have the future I think they will. A small studio, with advertising inside the apartment that can't be turned off. Working 6 days a week, 10 hours a day, and still not having enough to eat good food. And having a police that exists not to protect people, but to keep the poor out of the rich neighborhoods.
Money is evil. It makes people do horrible things.
And to think.. (Score:4, Insightful)
It just goes the show that short-term, bottom-line only thinking really isn't good business sense.
Right on! (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know what happened to HP the past 15 years. When I was a kid, there was only one King of laser printers, and that was HP. Nobody made better laser printers in the world.
3 or 4 years ago, a friend purchased a HP computer, it had windows ME on it. She was in college, and she called me a few times while she was writing papers and got the blue screen of death. There was nothing that could be done to save the paper. Hours of work went down the drain. I know... I told her "save your work more often". But that computer was a horrific peice of crap. I did a clean install with the CD's thinking that might help things, but it took me a while to realize that Windows ME did not work well with that HP computer.
It is too bad HP merged with Compaq, at least Compaq made good computers.
It seems like there is a pattern. Merge two large companies into a super large company, then fire people and give managers bonuses.
And of course they fire a lot of skilled workers (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I would want efficiency-minded former engineers to head an engineering company I was the CEO of. I'd want these former engineers because they'd know what's bullshit and what's not and that'd keep my company's ass farther away from the fire. We're sentient beings, not hive workers. To paraphrase Heinlein, specialization is for insects, there is no reason why someone who spent most of their career as an engineer cannot have a good sense for business and be a good business leader.
Since the buck clearly doesn't stop at the CEO's desk in most situations, I don't see why stockholders waste tens of millions of dollars of their company's money on them. At a company like HP, the CEO is naturally going to be detatched from most of the company's operations and excuse me, but I just don't see why any company would sacrifice anyone who could contribute to R&D of new products when cuts in middle and upper management employment and salaries would yield decent results.
Which is more likely to bring a higher ROI: firing many of the people capable of making new products and keeping many of the middle managers and their upper management ilk, or trimming top down? Maybe if HP put many of those people on some good projects, they'd do a lot of good for the company. It'd be ironic if several groups from the 15,000 who get laid off end up founding companies that make the next iPod, Tivo or something like that.
I'm not saying that many of them shouldn't have been laid off, just that it is incredibly stupid to fire people who can make products if assigned properly, but not cut back severely on upper management's pay and the ranks of the middle managers. When Sun laid off a number of its Solaris and Java developers, but didn't fire McNealey, that loud mouth imbecile, I just shook my head. In order to save money and face, our shiny suit wearing business elite would rather fire people with very hard to find engineering skills that could make or break the success of their products than cull the ranks of their own.
Re:Started by Bush Sr, continued by his son (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm starting to think more and more it might be a really good thing if abortion gets overturned. Then maybe the red state people can start voting their interests rather than their god and we can go back to having reasonable politics in this country. Flying to Canada/Mexico once in a lifetime for an abortion isn't a huge deal.
Re:Here they come. (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you consider perhaps that management fucked up by creating a bloated personnel heavy organization? Big companies grow out of control during good times by hiring tons and tons of people they may not really NEED. When times get tough expendible employees are just as fair game as other belt tightening measures IMO.
Minor factual correction (Score:4, Insightful)
The idea had been talked about long before Bush I was in office, he had some discussions about it. President Clinton signed the NAFTA deal on Dec 8, 1993. And I believe it was ratified by a Senate and House, both with Democratic majorities. (57-43 Dems in the Senate, and 258-176 Dems in the House) You can check which party was in government in recent history at this link [gvsu.edu].
Cheers.
Re:Here they come. (Score:4, Insightful)
Just watch any story about failing companies on Slashdot and you'll see just how many posters argue that a company that isn't profitable right now absolutely should go out of business because it "can't compete" in the "free market." Nevermind whether the company was competitive in the past or could be competitive again in the future with proper (i.e. less greedy and short-sighted) management, or the fact that in that "should go out of business" trope, hundreds or even thousands of lives may be ruined--when the improvement of lives is, ostensibly, the reason for commerce in the first place...
Capitalism is always short-sighted because the capitalists (in the orthodox sense--those people who have capital) will always see their holdings increase, regardless of the longevity of any particular enterprise. That's where this attitude of "bad business should fail" comes from--it's cultural brainwashing from those who control the economies through their wealth. It is their vested interest that unprofitable ventures should fail immediately, so that capital can be transferred to other ventures, in order to minimize losses and maximize profitability on an ongoing basis. If and investment in B will yield a 50% higher/faster return than an investment in A, capital will shift to B to maximize the profits of those who control, even if A was still nominally profitable, and even if thousands of non-capital-holding lives utterly depend on A. Capitalism is fundamentally anti-humanist that way.
Of course they won't know right away (Score:2, Insightful)
If you think about it, having the CEO and VPs make check marks on a list of people they've never even met and announce that without warning would be far, far more evil.
These headlines have been the norm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Here they come. (Score:3, Insightful)
Nonsense. Germany has worker protection and their 3rd quarter is better than our 3rd quarter. Their 2nd quarter is pretty close and their 4th quarter is far far better. Oh and the US hasn't had its major cities destroyed and a good chunk of the male working population killed within the last 100 years; so our economy should be far far healthier than theirs.
If you're going to compare any two periods, look at people's quality of life, not their wage compared to their neighbors'.
That's silly, technological improvements overwhelm differences in distribution of wealth. You need to subtract technology off and to do that you need to look at their wealth relative to the wealth of their society.
Regarding wages stabilizing relative to employees' worth, what you say would only be true without external interference.
Well yes.
And comparing CEOs and shareholders to kings? Precious few kings ever brought the seed capital to create their kingdoms or funded quarterly losses in anticipation of future payback.
And the CEOs and shareholders of HP did do that?
Re:Here they come. (Score:2, Insightful)
And I guess you have the right to comment on the management of an giant international corporation.
You just sound naive when you boil complex policies down to a few sentences on a web board.
Re:Here they come. (Score:3, Insightful)
Only the rules are the same anywhere, because we're all a part of the same "free market" capitalist economy.
So then the idiots say "Well then, don't take a job. Nobody's forcing you to work."
Only then how is one to eat?
People like you are effectively arguing that this is utopia. And it's not an uncommon argument, I hear it all the time and see it on Slashdot as well: the free market is perfect. If you don't like it, tough shit, it's because you must suck and not be able to compete.
So--what's the solution for those who can't compete? Kill them? Let them starve? If you're born IQ 90 and simple, you deserve to be "outcompeted" by everyone else and end up jobless, homeless, and dead (because we don't believe in social welfare in the free market)? How is this different, morally, from the Nazis, eugenics, and the termination of "defective" humans?
It's 2005. We should be past all of this. People should simply fucking CARE ENOUGH TO BE WILLING TO SACRIFICE SOME OF THEIR OWN WEALTH FOR THEIR FELLOW HUMANS.
Especially CEOs making more in one year than anyone needs to live comfortably for an entire LIFETIME, in a nation based on a Judeo-Christian faith that claims to believe in sacrifice and brotherhood, that claims to support individual "freedom." Freedom for who? Only the wealthy? Only the perfect? Everyone who isn't defective? Freedom to do what? Be "out-competed" into unemployment, homelessness, the grave, and then to be blamed for it because you just "couldn't compete?"
Re:Started by Bush Sr, continued by his son (Score:3, Insightful)
On the bright side: It will all get better once the remaining blue collar work force is automated. Goods will plummet in price, making it affordable for everybody to get all the new playstations they wnat (The games will stay expensive though, human creativity needed).
Re:Started by Bush Sr, continued by his son (Score:3, Insightful)
To date, that's how we all started.
Re:Here they come. (Score:1, Insightful)
How many people does the CEO equal??? (Score:2, Insightful)
Having had to call the support line at HP for a faulty bit of hardware recently I have to say they need more phone agents.
Re:Here they come. (Score:2, Insightful)
If a company hires a thousand workers that they don't really need, then lays them off a year later, should they be condemned for laying off a thousand people or commended for giving a thousand people a year's wages?
As for your talk about pensions and being there for twenty years, no-one's entitled to a company pension or even a job. In a capitalist society, no company owes you a living, a job is a two-way agreement that either party can end at any time. I'm sure that if you found a better job you wouldn't keep working at your old company out of a sense of loyalty, you'd move to the better arrangement. That's what HP is doing, moving to a better arrangement of fewer employees and thus fewer costs.
Absolutely, and I'm sure if someone raped your daughter you wouldn't complain - you'd be celebrating that they didnt do it to your wife too!
That's a terrible analogy, as bad as I'd expect on this site. A company is employing 150,000 people, that's a hell of a lot. Yet you're complaining because you want them to employ 165,000. That's terrible. The company I work for employs about 900 people, should I criticise them for not employing 990? But what would they need the other 90 for? That doesn't matter, it's evil not to hire 10% more people than you need!
Re:Those kind of lay offs are bad news (Score:2, Insightful)
And do you really believe that you can get rich fairly? I mean come on. The rich class essentially controls the government to suit their own needs.
Have some understanding for all the have-nots of the world. Isn't that what makes different from animals? That we can have compassion and ignore the free market to make people's lives better. I am not saying that we should all revert to communism, but a stronger social net with and more regulation (e.g. if someone dies due to greed (rushing a medicle product to soon, environmental polution) then shareholders go to prison) would be useful.
Re:And of course they fire a lot of skilled worker (Score:2, Insightful)
The thing that needs to be discussed here is, if HP is or is not an engineering company. They do work with technology, but I would argue that their fields of technology are mature and don't involve as much engineering and innovation than they did before. That's why I categorize them more as marketing and assembly company. If you look at their products: Workstations, Laptops, Servers, Printers, Scanners & Cameras, one can argue that they are all commodized. The technology needed is allmost the same from manufacturer to manufacturer. Only way to add value to these offerings is to use branding and design to create added value in customers mind, the other way is to offer services.
I think that the problem with HP is that they were first engineering company and were on the edge of the technology cycle. As the times went by, they loosed technology battles and had to retreat from many fields. They had create success with imaging products, but what they did forget todo was to invent new things. As the result of innovating hard, and inventing lazy, they became marketing and assembly company. In away one can say that HP and Compaq merger was the last knot that transformed HP from engineering to marketing. The problem with HP now is that thought they have transformed, they have still lot's engineering. Bigger problem is that all places in the market have been taken by others. Dell is the king of assembly companies and they really can't beat them. Same goes with IBM in the entreprise arena. Most of the real engineering is done by other companies ie. Intel, Microsoft, Sun, Novell, Redhat, Oracle etc.. So the big question is what is HP going to do? I hope that their answer isn't just to trim down, that wouldn't in the long run give them reason to be alive.
It's a good question how HP could have avoided all this and what went wrong. A good place to put blame is Carly and other MBA's, but that is insufficient. In my view HP just got too big, they lost their concentration times ago. They should have spinned imaging and customer sides of HP away, or transfered the enterprise and engineering sides to a new company. It's very hard to be a company with many faces, and there isn't so many companies in the end product field that have done this with success.
Maybe all this and other fallen angels of technology industry could have been avoided by better education. As a soon to be graduating economics student (from computer science, don't ask) I have to say that the blame lies in business education. Many people start business studies with idea of doing something cool with customer products (think of likes L'oreal, Coca-cola, Tivo etc..) and they end up in some industrial company with no idea what is going on. The worst thing is that many people that do work industrial area treat these industries as the same as your regular consumer industries. When you have people saying "it's just technology" or "I don't have to know the details" or "just say which one is better" then you know there is much wrong in the picture.
Re:Started by Bush Sr, continued by his son (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you have any evidence of this, like a link to support your claim? Didn't think so.
The 9/11 victims fund had enough money to pay each family 1.6 million dollars, if it was split evenly.
Instead, they used a formula based on how much income a persom was making.
It is possible for the family of a janitor to get $300,000, and a stock brokers family to get 4.35 million dollars.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0104/p11s1-coop.html [csmonitor.com]
What made it all worse, is the government told all the families if they sued or disagreed with the distributation of funds, they would be denied any government victims money. So what is a poor family to do? They can't hire a lawyer and fight. A few of the ultra rich families decided to sue anyways, they must have felt that getting 10 times as much as everyone else was not enough for their "loss".
Re:TGI Friday.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I never bought the theory that it gave the fired person the weekend to calm down. What I see are the opportunities listed above.
Re:Severance (Score:5, Insightful)
It has been shown that european CEOs salrays are often a much smaller multiple of median workers salaries I recall. BusinessWeek, which has tracked executive pay for half a century, figures that CEOs of the country's largest corporations last year (2003) were paid about 300 times the average factory worker. In Europe, in contrast, chief executive pay tops out at 30 times the average worker. Americans might defend this disparity by declaring that U.S. companies are better run, but are these companies more than 10 times better run?
Additionally according to Kevin J. Murphy, E. Morgan Stanley Chair in Business Administration, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California: 'Since 1970, cash compensation for CEOs has gone from 25 times the pay of the average worker to about 90 times the pay of the average worker. Total compensation, including stock options measured at grant value, went from just over 25 times average worker pay in 1970 to a peak of almost 600 times average worker pay in 2000, and has now (2004) dropped down to about 360 times average worker pay.'
I dont know about you but I have to say I am sure that being a CEO is a hard job and requires a variety of skills and risks to be taken, but it is not such a specialized set of skills that warrants 600:1 pay disparity I think. Yes, capitalism exists to reward those who take the greatest risk but if you are a CEO making multi-millions a year regardless of company performance all one needs to do is survive for a few years and then then bail out on your disgustingly obscene Golden Parachute(tm) and be set for life while the company you leave lay in ruins and the common worker gets the shaft.
At least thats how I see it in the light of what that bitch Carly did to Hewlett-Packard (oh, and dont call it HP, then your parodying Carly's attempt to make everyone forget how Walter Hewlett spoke out against the merger between Companq and Hewlett-Packard http://news.com.com/2100-1001-858499.html?legacy=
Re:Here they come. (Score:2, Insightful)
Half the working population could up and lose their jobs, and assuming they haven't found jobs in 6 months, they're as good as forgotten. That's almost how bad it was during the great depression, where it was about one in three without a job.
Of course, they do this so they can put a positive spin on the bullshit that they plan to happen. i.e. the massive re-distrubution of wealth that's set to occour in the world. Instead of some of us doing well, and the the rest just getting by, we'll all be middle class slobs, and the place to put your hands on the money will where the money travels through... i.e. the international banks.
I don't know how they define it in Germany, do you? So, it's like comparing oranges and grapes.
Re:No Management Cuts (Score:3, Insightful)
HP has gotten out of all the markets they were good at, except for printers. Not exactly like that will keep them afloat. There was the elination of much of the scientific computing, PA-RISC, calculators, and all of their instrumentation products.
She had no idea how to do her job and you only have to look at the position she put HP in to see it. People used to consider the company to be made of solid rock. Now they wouldn't buy anything they make.
This is not including the burning hatred so many people have for her politics and personal leanings.
hellbent on self destruction (Score:3, Insightful)
First the utterly pointless merger with Compaq.
Then the abandonment of developing HP-PA in favor of developing Itanium.
Then dissolving the Itanium partnership.
Now, inflicting DRM on all their consumer products. Woo hoo, because it worked so fucking well for Sony that Apple ground them to dust.
If I were an HP shareholder, I'd be demanding executives heads on platters about now...
Re:Started by Bush Sr, continued by his son (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing, as somebody else pointed out these issues existed in the past.
Instead of Enron there was the S&L scandal; tech jobs were being taken by the Japanese instead of the India and China; insider trading was legal until the 60's; AT&T and the rail barons existed long before Microsoft; the military has always recruited in high schools; gas prices and inflation exploded in the 70s; and workers have always been looked at like a commodity
Think about this very carefully. People are scared there will be no future. They are fighting like 10 wild hyinas over a found carcus. We are loosing our humanity when we degrade ourseleves to fight for a basic survival.
Last time I checked cars, vacations and retirement funds were not basic survival.
Re:Started by Bush Sr, continued by his son (Score:4, Insightful)
But are you using natural as a proxy for desirable? A lot of things are natural. Having cavities in your teeth is natural, is that a good reason not to go to the dentist? We have a lot of people who are such devout capitalists that they think anything explained by market forces must be AOK.
Re:Started by Bush Sr, continued by his son (Score:1, Insightful)
Actually, retirment funds are for basic survival, considering that you will be damn near unemployable once your reach retirment age.
Re:In related news... (Score:3, Insightful)
Your statement is wrong.
We now have 6 billion people competing for a few million jobs. No new major jobs-creating industries are going to come up in the US any more; as soon as the potential appears, the jobs will be sent overseas. Prove your assertion; show me one example to the contrary.
I can prove my point, however. We've already lost the tech industry and we are now losing the biotech industry. Recent job growth has been heavily weighted toward the low paying service industry.
Re:Started by Bush Sr, continued by his son (Score:2, Insightful)
***
Also just to correct one of your irrelevant points above, tuition was of course rising faster than inflation in the late '90s and still is doing so today.