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."
The HP way (Score:4, Interesting)
In the short term it should improve profitability. I'm not so sure about the long term, though.
Those kind of lay offs are bad news (Score:4, Interesting)
The "indispensible" ones usually have the attribute of time urgency to get things done... and getting another job is now on their list.
The "useless" ones lounge around.
When the managers get around to announcing exactly who is gonna be affected, they get to choose among the useless ones, as the "indispensable" ones by that time already have jobs... working for their competitors.
HP is the walking dead (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:No Management Cuts (Score:5, Interesting)
That would be Carly, and she's already been affected. Affected to the tune of a $40M payout package, but since getting rid of her caused HP's total market cap to go up several billion dollars, getting rid of her was money well spent.
Re:Severance (Score:5, Interesting)
Direct link to India job listings (Score:4, Interesting)
Just making a search using the term 'Service' at HP India produces 192 new positions.
Job Search HP India [hp.com]
(Scroll down if you don't have a vertical monitor / insane resolution)
Re:The HP way (Score:2, Interesting)
There's too many other companies that I don't buy from specifically because of the fact that their Customer Service Representatives don't fully understand their own product (not talkin' about down-to-the-chip, but at least be able to tell me positives and negatives about using this technology over that one that the competitor has).
I'm about a month from being able to buy myself a new laptop (wanting them specifically, because their stuff is linux-friendly), so I hope they still have someone useful by the time I want one.
Luke
----
"Help your stupid friends not be so stupid. Send 'em to ChristianNerds.com [christiannerds.com]."
Re:Here they come. (Score:2, Interesting)
Regarding wages stabilizing relative to employees' worth, what you say would only be true without external interference.
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.
Re:Here they come. (Score:1, Interesting)
This economy is on fire! (Score:4, Interesting)
IBM announced cutting 10,000 to 13,000 jobs in Europe just last month.
Ford and General Motors can't sell cars and are at risk of defaulting on their debt -- their credit rating has been cut down the minimum by ratings agencies.
So is this the freight train of a bull economy everyone is raving about? I'm an amateur financial enthusiast but I strongly suggest anyone thinks twice before buying any mutual funds in this climate. Stocks are at 4 year highs and future prospects don't look positive at all
Re:Those kind of lay offs are bad news (Score:1, Interesting)
The "indispensible" ones usually have the attribute of time urgency to get things done... and getting another job is now on their list.
The "useless" ones lounge around.
This is a troll post.
So, you know who is useless? You are an idiot.
We need a new law, if a company lays off employees, they can no longer get visas or outsource any jobs. And we should arrest the CEOs as traitors, they are destabalizing the USA. If people don't have jobs, crime goes up. These CEOs are fucking greedy idiots, they are worthless as humans. Their kids should get the shit beat out of them in school. Not that the father would care, he would be too busy counting his money, and trying to hide his mistress from his wife.
People are exactly the same, no matter who or where. The guy who is homeless in India is no different from the CEO of GE, who is no different than a warlord in Afghanastan. It is human nature. It is why countries need to go after the Martha Stewarts and keep greed in check, it is why we need higher taxes for the top 10%, and why we need a 100% estate tax for anything over $1,000,000.
The pie is shrinking, and a very few number of people are stealing and cheating larger portions for themseleves. When they do this, the majority is left with crumbs.
If we are going to outsource jobs to India or Mexico, why not at least pay them the same wage? Why pay them so much less? There is only one reason, so the CEO can get a larger bonus check.
TFA? (Score:4, Interesting)
As for the layoffs... well... I really believe in free, borderless markets. I really really do. But I think we can take a lesson from the EU, and require an adherence to a minimum set of criteria before granting full trade privileges. Giving other markets power without responsibility is a bad thing; without some sort of market synchronization we're just shooting ourselves in the foot.
What if we could say "Okay, India, we'll have completely free trade with you if you become a member of WEFTA (World-Encompassing Free Trade Agreement) and have your economy up to minimum standards within five years."
Maybe a four-tiered system could be made:
This is a bit more complicated than the current EU system, but the idea is the same: Don't let our jobs, our money, our very economy go to those who aren't gonna play by the rules. Small economic variations in WEFTA would exist and would be allowed (it's cheaper to live in a small town in Ithaca, NY than it is in Beverly Hills, CA) for free-trade regions but this $1-an-hour-factory-in-Mexico phenomenon wouldn't exist to pull jobs from the lower rungs of the U.S. (or any full WEFTA member) economy.
If only we could get our Congress to get their charbon and acier together.
Re:Started by Bush Sr, continued by his son (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm from the USA (native balding white guy, mid 30's), and know it pretty well - as I spent 2001-2004 living in a RV traveling the states working internet job via cell phones.
I have spent the last year living in Chile in a decent site city (200,000 people).
You pretty much describe Chile and MUCH of the world "outside the USA" from what I have studied
Have you considered that maybe this is just the natural rebalance of wealth?
Frankly, the USA as it was from WW2 - 2000 could prove to be unsustainable... at least without some form of rebalance. Even if the average person in the USA were knocked down by 50% income... still better off than MANY places in the world.
And JAPAN in the 1980's and 1990's took a lot of the real wealth... cherry picked Hollywood, etc. Turned Tokyo into a city more expensive than NYC as quick as they could.
BTW, here in Chile the latin american tradition of close family is more responsible for the 'small studio' part... they actually share a house with many generations of the same family living under one roof. More family ties, less stress, more simple pleasures. The point is, there are cultural reasons too - not just financial.
Re:Started by Bush Sr, continued by his son (Score:4, Interesting)
Hi, welcome to America. I'll be giving you a brief synopsis of how a free market works.
In a free and open job market, you have people and you have jobs. Many people have the ability to do more than one kind of job. Likewise, most jobs could potentially be filed by one of a relatively large set of people.
Some jobs are able to be done by lots of people, like being a cook in a fast food restaraunt. Some people are willing to take that job because they do not have a skill set that enables them to work a different job, or maybe because they like it. Anyway, the worker and the business agree on compensation for the job that is agreeable to both the business and the worker. If there is someone willing to do the same job for less, then the worker should get paied less. If there is nobody that can do as good of a job for the same price, the worker can ask for more money and may get it.
For a job like a CEO or Baseball player, there is incredible demand to get the absolute best people for those positions. If you are the best baseball player, you can demand a lot of money, because there is demand to have the absolute best player on your baseball team: it would help you win, wins help you sell more tickets and advertisements, and people want their team to win. If your team is a perpetual loser, you won't sell as many tickets. (Unless you are the Cubs, because of Cubs Fans like Me).
Likewise, Good CEOs can demand a premium. Someone who can manage a business effectively has a skillset that is in high demand. If you can make your company that earns 1 Billion / year, and grow that profit by 20%, you are worth a lot of money. Stockholders are willing to pay these high salaries because there is the perception that a good CEO can lead a company to be more profitable.
Of course, this is all based on perception. If killing the R&D saves money now, but you lose out on the next major innovation, you've screwed yourself. But that's how the market works, and your competition (who did the right R&D) will beat you. As they should.
Now you may notice that America isn't exactly a free market. Even when Southwest airlines is making money, the Government gives billions of dollars to airlines who didn't make good business decisions. Unfortunately, the Government has, over the last several decades, gotten more involved with business. This leads to situations where bad businesses are rewarded, in many ways at the expense of better businesses. This makes those better businesses less competitive in the global marketplace. Which means that jobs will flow out of America into places where the work / pay ratio is better.
The good news is that you have the freedom to do things you think will be successful. Is there demand for baseball games for blue-collar folks? Start up your own baseball league, sell tickets for $5, sell beer and hot dogs for $1 each, and pay amateurs a few extra bucks to come out and play in front of some people. Will people come out to your park? Maybe. But maybe people won't really want to come to your baseball stadium and see fourth-rate baseball played. And that's the risk you take in a capitalistic society. If you want the best baseball players to come and play for you, you'll have to pay them what they demand. And if you have to pay them a lot, you'll have to earn lots of money. It's just the way things work.
Of course, there's another way to do things, the socialist way. The government makes sure everyone has a good lifestyle, regardless of what they do. The government also tries its best to make sure the best people don't get too far ahead of the worst people. The government has a hand in almost every part of the economy. Europe does this a lot, and the lowest standard of living in Europe tends to be better than the lowest standard of living here. And w
It's Bangalore or Bust Baby! (Score:3, Interesting)
CEO Hurd Not Going to Build A Success (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't work for, near, or against NCR in any market, I just live here. My perception has been that Hurd took NCR and focused them on ATM machines, their core business. Lots and lots of other unrelated things were shed, including long-term employees and facilities. Most recently, NCR has turned over maintenance of their world-class headquarters to a local office-real estate company (Miller Valentine). Their ATM sales, by the way, are in competition with the infamous Diebold, Inc. And in that market, Diebold is innovating with ways to keep banks coming back to them. NCR just never seemed to get the hang of it.
Now back to HP and the recent high speed printing invention [slashdot.org], and I would have to say we can all expect HP to shed all the unprofitable businesses and focus heavy on the printing. Well, heavier than they already do.
I expect that if HP is in some select-contract, highly-profitable, niche market that they will stay there. NCR has their TeraData database [ncr.com]. HP had, during the merger claimed that Compaq's worldwide sales and services forces would allow them to dominate global industries, but I don't think that really every took foot they way they wanted to. So, unless they drum up something other than calculators and home PCs, those segments are likely to get hit hard. Hurd likely won't wait for the home PC market to do something unique because they've had a couple of dozen years to find a niche and haven't. I'd better say goodbye to the calculator segment too before Cringely goes around saying something stupid like "you saw it here first."
So that leaves the saturated inkjet market. Since the DMCA cannot be used, [slashdot.org] and since we're already paying $3,800US per gallon of ink, [aroundcny.com] increasing profitability will be difficult to do without large customer outbursts. Of course, NCR was so full of waste, those of us in Dayton didn't think they could ever shed all of it and yet they did.
Re:Started by Bush Sr, continued by his son (Score:5, Interesting)
Socialism scares me. The direction of America scares me. Patton said ``America loves a winner. America will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise a coward. Americans play to win. That's why America has never lost a war, for the very thought of losing is hateful to an American.'' I wonder if now this is no longer true; Americans love losers and cannot tolerate a winner. And it's sad, really, because Americans have the opportunity to become winners. We're just choosing to bring everyone down to the loser level, making sure nobody gets ahead, so that nobody will be left behind.
I agree, in the pre-1990 era, America did love a winner. So did I. When a freind of the family succeeded and got a great job, or got accepeted to medical school, or did something really good, everyone was happy. People would celebrate, there would be large meals, everyone felt good.
What has changed?
Those are a few reasons why America no longer loves a winner. The avarage American is not greedy. We want a nice house, a yard for the kids to play in, a car, food in the fridge, money for a vacation, and a retirement fund. The problem is, that lifestyle is not middle class anymore, it is becomming upper class.
Is it any suprise that parents are threatening teachers, that if their kids don't get "A"'s in all their classes, get accepted to the best schools, that parents will sue teachers, or get a gun and kill a teacher. I think in Texas some mom killed another cheerleader so her daughter could get on the team and have less competition. In the papers, at a youth baseball game a father beat up an umpire for calling a third strike on his son, when the father thought it was a ball.
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.
Re:And of course they fire a lot of skilled worker (Score:2, Interesting)
Bad news for 15,000 and a golden chance to blow it (Score:2, Interesting)
What is needed now in PCs/servers AFAIC is someone to drive down the costs of thin-clients, clustering, and modular computing. Given HP's history, this will likely be missed by a full light-year as they retrench in more of the same that got them where they are now.
What exactly is the cost of HP-UX compared to Linux and what are the comparitive support prices compared to say, Red Hat or SuSE? Or BSD for that matter if you want to put it closer to the System V side? What exactly do they have to offer there?
What are they going to give me that I can't get cheaper by leaps and bounds from Dell or for that matter Systemax?
What are they going to offer me for my ongoing needs and is their (*gag*) "vision" going to fit with what I'm doing? Or are they going to follow Redmond's lead not to mention the various hardware standards groups rather than innovating?
I don't see HP (*cough*) "getting it".
My wish list is simple, btw. Given I can get fully packed desktops for under $500, I want a blade server where the backplane and hot swap power supplies with one master board costs no more than a standard whitebox server and each blade is under $500 given that it is stripped of unneeded sound, graphics, and other tchotchkes as well as case and power supply. Why should I be paying over $1000 for a blade when I can get a whitebox with a comparable processor for under $750 and that comes with all sorts of things left out of the blade?
One of the few areas you pay a premium for them to leave something out that you don't need. You're bribing them not to put it in.
I want a *nix to do load-balancing, failover and load-sharing clustering with remote network boot thin client serving much like I could get for free with a few spare days of recompiling various distributions and project sources. I'm willing to pay but if it is going to cost an arm and a leg and get me less support than asking a couple questions on various web forums does, no dice.
Given what I am looking for and knowing what I do of HP, I am not holding my breath. This is just one of many many areas HP could have tried to get into where no one else is bothering. Instead we got the Compaq merger, we got Carly Fiorina and the saga of her removal, anything but a forward looking company doing anything to compete. We got craptastic personal PCs that Dell or even the average local whitebox maker could beat. We got Vectras that weren't offering anything that other business box builders couldn't offer and for less. We got a company living on their printer division's glory days while a host of competitors ate away at them, nibbling like carpenter ants.
We got the HP name and that was it, but we also got the decline in value of the HP name at the same time. So... what was the point? I'm sure that's on the minds of those being laid off as they recount their time at HP. What was the point?
Re:Severance (Score:1, Interesting)
Go read "The Future Doesn't Need You".
Thanks to 100 years of Republicans trying to rebuild the trusts after Teddy Roosevelt broke them, and having shipped virtually all of our production capacity overseas to the point where you couldn't buy an American TV even if you wanted to...
How is this idea infeasible? You don't see Bill Gates' job being outsourced to India.
Re:And of course they fire a lot of skilled worker (Score:3, Interesting)
This isn't always true, but it's true such a large percentage of the time that only a fool would bet against it.
Re:In related news... (Score:3, Interesting)
How do you think US became an economic power? A completely internal enconomy can never make profit because the net of spending and earing will always remain constant. To have capital gains an ecomony will have to profit at the expense of other economies. Over the last 100 yrs. you guys were the better off. And in being better off you created a standard of living which has come back to haunt you. Your world turns upside down if you can't get hold of the latest gizmos and spend billions on celluloid stupidity. While the other guys you, who you are so incensed about, can live on pennies to your dollar and if they can produce similar if even slightly inferior output companies will jump for it.
BTW all the SEs screaming about Software jobs being outsourced, how many of you drive american cars or use US made TV? Software like anything else is a product, just like Japanese cars and gizmos flood the market so does software from the third world coutries. If you consider a job to be your undeniable previlage no matter the cost you should go and start putting back the berlin wall.
Is employee work still propety of employer? (Score:1, Interesting)
For example, an Indian worker creats the embedded C++ code for an HP printer, is that embedded C++ code property of HP or can the employee give it away?
Re:TGI Friday.. I reported this Friday (Score:2, Interesting)
I reported this FRIDAY, 15 July at 1207 (and I am sure the paper was printed before 6AM Friday, which means ), and even put it in my journal, and even bought the Friday paper to have a hard copy. I think it would have made better excitement than to wait for SUNDAY just to see ZDNet's blurb. I guess ZDN *could* have had a writeup on it first, but I
"googled" keywords and Google turned up junk from 2 years prior, but not a single word for Friday. I guess nobody reads the papers fast enough to stir things up so Google caches things before the ZDN's word gets priority over Google.
TFA header/byline as timestamped on ZDN is:
"HP to slash approximately 15,000 jobs
By Dawn Kawamoto, and Michael Singer, CNET News.com Published on ZDNet News: July 16, 2005, 8:00 PM PT"
Saturday NIGHT, no less...
I suppose it *is* possible someone at
To get a submission posted before the regulars, is it necessary to add more redundant verbiage and speculation than the FA itself? Or wait for ZDN and on-site papers to display the content?
Karma Purged/forsaken....
Re:Here they come. (Score:4, Interesting)
One theory goes that corporations are simply the complications of this "inhumanity" where wealth naturally collects and distribution is thwarted in the name of the great distributive system itself: capitalism.
Consider, corporations are proxies which have the power of ownership - private property. Corporations have an advantage of efficiency when we consider large resources and complex tasks. This makes them akin to machines. As a body, any task is broken into smaller tasks and responsibility is spread into a chain. The weakest link defines the chain and thus the entire responsibility of this great machine can easily fail. As humans - remember our axiom - we place a huge amount of resources in corporations and therefore a large amount of our ability to fulfill our responsibility in these machines.
I think of Assimov's 3 laws of robotics - so well interwined and seemingly effective. By breaking one law, the illusion fails and all the laws are broken. But we would love to believe the illusion can be held up, so we repeat the laws to ourselves. We even have the machines repeat the laws. Ultimately, the machines, our proxy workers designed for efficiency, fail to assume our responsibility.
With a corporation, the general effect is that responsbility is far more difficult to handle than with a more direct ownership model. If you think about it, it's a ridiculous notion to believe that a corporation will have responsibility. Groups have jobs, incentive structures, and rules, but the central responsibility - which we assumed at the beginning - is not delegated evenly. It is not delegated at all, for the most part. How can you regulate humanity to humans? It certainly can't be "cost-effective".
We are thus back to punishing individuals, only this time we have made the task more complicated. Now corporations get in our way of responsibility, because they allow people to amass great wealth and power, all while hiding behind a corporate curtain. What's more, they allow us all to participate as consumers, share-holders, etc.
If the machine breaks the laws, are it's part's responsible? No, we attach responsibility to people. But people will always blame the machine - those who stand to gain from the machine's product will always place responsibility on the machine. Ironically, since we all own pieces of this great machine, these individuals are essentially blaming all of us. While citing the virtues of private property, a CEO may very well place the blame of some action on the organization as a whole - "inefficiences" or "the markets" or "competition". In effect, the CEO - a the model of centralized wealth in a capitalist system - is distributing the blame (responsibility-wise) while keeping the money. Thus the machine - and the hive of poorly coordinated machines that make an economy - really is a proxy, but for who's interests?
Honestly, if we actually take up the responsibility as outlined, I am not sure the answer to that question. Do we get a good trade for owning stock in a corporation? All I know is I'm not quiting my job just yet
Re:Here they come. (Score:3, Interesting)
Wealth is only meaningful as the means to an end (comfortable survival, whose end in turn is the ability to carry on a meaningful social existence and interaction, as we are social beings). The moment we turn wealth into an end in and of itself and decide to use the ability to create wealth as our criteria in a darwinistic selection mechanism, we risk creating a world populated with such ruthless, single-minded, or backward characters that it's not worth living in or surviving for in the first place.
It's the critical theorists' view, essentially: before one adopts methods and positions that are unassailably rational, one should consider carefully the ends that the given type of rationality so successfully produces and whether they are as desirable for society at large and for the individual as a complete, multifaceted being as they are for a single "successful" individual when considered only in the single context of said rationality.
Re:Started by Bush Sr, continued by his son (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with this calculus is that there are no winners. EVERY HUMAN will ultimately end in total impoverishment (i.e. death).
There is no win or lose. There is only "suffer more" or "suffer less"--and the curve is logarithmic with respect to increases in wealth. Past a certain level of capitalization in an individual life, the inverse relationship between dollar quantities and suffering quantities is increasingly shallow, the opposite of what lies at the other end of the curve.
Or in simple terms, having $11 million instead of $10 million in a personal bank account makes only an infantesimally small difference in the suffering that such an account holder will endure before his/her unavoiadable death. The extra $1 million really doesn't bring the multi-millionaire much. HOWEVER, that same $1 million could relieve a vast quantity of suffering if divided among numerous people who have $0.00 in their personal bank accounts.
Seeing that all will lose--we are all in this mortality/existential hollowness game together--it is clearly an incredible waste of resources to dedicade so many billions worldwide to making unmeasurably tiny additional improvements to the lives of the already ultra-wealthy when those same billions could make truly massive, world-shattering improvements to the lives of the ultra-poor.
No, we shouldn't remove wealth from anyone to the point that they themselves are thrust into poverty. However, we should remove wealth to the extent that such redistribution is nominally unnoticable to the wealthy in relation to any day-to-day concern, when the gains at the other end of the spectrum that result from such redistribution are huge.
Re:It's Bangalore or Bust Baby! (Score:3, Interesting)
Since you can only increase your wage with a new job, and inflation is going nuts... well... it's tunover central.
Re:Severance (Score:2, Interesting)
That being said however, I completely understand your argument with regards to what is the percieved value of that which the workers ultimately create verse what they actually are paid.
However I think one factor that is perhaps changing the face of small business opportunities is the recent rash of patent stupidity over the past few years. All it takes to clobber your small biz startup is some Amazon or worse a pure IP-lawsuit generating company to wipe away any semblance of profit as well as progress what with the time now having to be spent to have your legal work taken cared of not to mention extremely high legal fees necessitated by your representation.
All things being equal however, not everyone in America is capable of starting a new business per se. Either they don't have necessary capital to get started or they might not be able to come up with a sufficently good enough idea and business plan to get traction. The major issue as I see it is this:
Everyone in America CAN NOT become a "knowledge worker" or their own boss by means of starting their own business. The fact of the matter is that you have a bell curve distribution of intelligence anywhere in the world. The reason this is a problem is because depending on a persons intelligence determines what types of education and learning will end in positive results. Positive results meaning that person can function normally in society and contribtue to it positvely in some way. If we allow our education system to not properly account for this reality (which currently the Leave Every Child Behind is accelerating for us, thank you Bush and the DOE) then we as a country are going to be saddled with a greater societal burden for these people who we have left unprepared and unable to properly integrate into society and economy. Those of us who are able to contribute to the economy and society in a positive way will see our burden of support increase unless we do something to ensure a maximal number of people in our society are functional contributors to the economy and society at large.
Yet I rarely ever see anyone on Slashdot here recognize this fundamental truth. Instead people are quick to say "You don't have to take that job" or "Just go into business for yourself" or "Go back to school and learn the *new* hot thing". The problem is, as manufacturing jobs got replaced by technology jobs what is replacing the technology jobs are jobs that to me at least seem less and less tied to specific locality and only end up increasing the number of people I compete for positions, worldwide as well as forcing median salries to come to a median level for certain positions that are great money in other countires not as highly developed as the US or the UK for example.
I don't know, I just get a feeling that a true free market economy is only going to bring everyone down to the same level, the issue is that the new median level is an unsustainable living wage in many well developed countries. I could be wrong about some of this, but this is how it feels to me in my gut at least.
And yes, I know what a plumber makes in a year. It's my Plan C. Can't outsource clogged plumbing repairs, thats for sure.