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The HP Way 2.0
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat May 19, 2007 02:52 PM
from the getting-ahead-in-business dept.
from the getting-ahead-in-business dept.
theodp writes "How do you replace your Chief Pretexting Officer? HP CEO Mark Hurd announced that Joel Hyatt, an individual of 'exceptional judgment and outstanding character,' has joined HP's Board of Directors, filling one of the seats vacated during last year's boardroom scandal. Hyatt, who drew the ire of a judge over the illegal, Philadelphia-like treatment of an attorney at Hyatt's namesake law firm who was diagnosed with AIDS, was also appointed to HP's HR and Compensation Committee. Presumably, the HP womenfolk won't hold it against Hyatt that he reportedly once advocated keeping alma mater Dartmouth female-free. Hyatt acknowledged making mistakes that he's learned from, but said he was not eager to share them."
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Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
HP deserves whatever they get. Talk about a fall from grace. HP was, at one time, one of the most important and successful and innovative technology companies in the world. Now what do they do? Sell cheap PCs and expensive ink.
Re:Stupid (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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Q. Doesn't Enron have a board of directors whose members are responsible for overseeing the corporation?
A. Yes. They are paid $300,000 a year.
Q. So how could they have allowed this flagrant deception to go on?
A. They are paid $300,000 a year.
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Sure, but second to a ThinkPad (which I can't afford), HP laptops are my preferred brand. So they're doing something right it would seem.
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Career tips (Score:3, Funny)
That interests me for my career. How do I get in the Board of Directors at *another* billion dollar company?
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Be sure to pick a company that has already gone under so no one will answer the phone in case anyone calls them to verify your past employment.
Does theodp only write flamebait? (Score:1, Funny)
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No Problem with Dartmouth Bit (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really interested enough to read the rest of the article, but just wanted to say I don't see the problem with advocating same-sex schooling. My wife went to a women's college and I attended an all-boys high school, are there are definite advantages to it. In the high school case especially, I noticed that having the girls gone resulted in a hugely improved social atmosphere compared to middle school, with everybody pretty much getting along. At the public high school in the same town, however, kids were still vicious little bastards to each other.
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Why the double standard -- all-female schools are ok while all-male schools aren't? And some studies have shown that children of both genders do better in single-sex schools.
-b.
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Re:No Problem with Dartmouth Bit (Score:4, Interesting)
If you think that single-sex education is immoral, then ban it entirely. We seem to have a double standard where all-female education is somehow OK while all-male education is not (at least socially) acceptable.
-b.
Parent
Re:No Problem with Dartmouth Bit (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Replace "males" with "people" and you may be on to something. No one race/gender/creed/etc hs a monopoly on stupidity.
-b.
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Also, the argument for allowing women-only schools and not men only sc
This guy may be a sleazeball... (Score:5, Insightful)
...but if all the dirt the summary writer can find on him is a firing 20 years ago and something he wrote while he was at Dartmouth (30 years ago??), I'm inclined to think he must be a saint.
(disclaimer: I used to work at HP, a looong time ago)
Re:This guy may be a sleazeball... (Score:4, Informative)
Summarizing TFA:
- the fired person, Clarence Cain, was the head of the Philadelphia office, until he contracted AIDS. He was a gay African-American, so he was in the danger population for the disease. Mr Hyatt pointed out that he actually hired a gay in the first place, so I don't understand why it's discriminatory to fire him.
I do understand it's callous and insensitive to fire someone who has a terminal illness without trying to offer help or a compromise. I don't know what's the standard procedure in those cases, but it's clear that Mr Cain was unfit to continue working (not because of AIDS per se, but because of the physical condition he was in from all the associated diseases - the article describes him during the trial:
TFA also mentions Mr Hyatt and Mr Cain didn't get along too well before his illness:
Something that surprises me, but I guess it shouldn't considering the nature of US healthcare, was the sharp decline in his living conditions following his illness. Either he had nothing saved up or he spent everything on healthcare, but I wouldn't blame that on Mr Hyatt as the article does (I do think they should have offered help, but it's not his responsibility).
The callous bit is this Mr. Cain was offered an entry-level position at half the pay or a $12,000 severance package (Is severance not regulated as it is in my home country, where it is a percentage of earnings up to the point?).
I'm not happy at all with HP lately (I work with a local HP partner) but this guy doesn't came across as particularly worse than usual. It does turn on some warning lights (this kind of person has the makings of a sociopath).
Parent
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I agree.
I had a year one (second year of schooling) teacher who had AIDS (this was back in 1990 before effective antiretrovirals) and he was just a mess, he was too sick to even turn up most of the time and when he was there it was clear that he wasn't in the emotional state to be a good teacher, he was short tempered and angry and would shout at students very often for minor things. He also increasingly had us sing songs and play games all day for weeks at a time presumably he wasn't well enough for prop
One question (Score:5, Funny)
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I just bought your company.
You're fired.
Sincerely,
Joel Hyatt
So is Slashdot going to critique (Score:3, Interesting)
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Fiorina was pretty much the tipping point. Hurd's infamous "I didn't explicitely approve illegal actions, so I'm not liable or responsible" pretty much tells you what kind of scumbags he's likely to hire. It makes me feel sympathetic for the old-guard BOD's.
It also gives you an idea what passes for leadership in this country.
Dartmouth Co-education (Score:3, Insightful)
Dartmouth has been co-ed for about 35 years now. Lots of Dartmouth students ca. 1970 griped about co-education. They were in the minority even then; vocal, but a minority. In the intervening years, particularly as their own daughters reached college age, most of those have come to realize that it wasn't the end of the world - it made the College a better place.
Re:Dartmouth Co-education (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not arguing that it made Dartmouth a better place or not. But, I still don't think it should be held against him, especially since all-female schools are pretty common, so why can't there be all-male schools? Should we lambast a female CEO that went to Smith, Holyoke, or Bryn Mawr if she expressed the opinion that her alma-mater would be better off not going co-ed? I'm not against co-education, but private universities should have a choice as to whom to admit.
-b.
Parent
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Regardless, if women have the choice, so should men. I'm not talking about taking away women's right to single-sex education -- I'm saying that in order to have "equality", both genders should have that right.
Besides, the premise is that men and women are intellectually equal. Are you saying that women can't compete on a level playing field now?
-b.
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Surely, Hyatt is not one of the conservatives you talk about. After all, being a well connected democrat helps to make a lot of money. Having money -or- being well-connected does not mean that person is conservative. His father in-law was/is none other than Howard Metzenbaum [wikipedia.org] (D-Ohio).
I know you qualified your statement with 'largely
HP is a mess (Score:4, Interesting)
This is one of those situations where a lot of higher-ups need to get the axe but of course they're not going to fire themselves. Same goes for Yahoo! with their over-AJAX-ified website overhaul.
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Hilarity ensues when said printers have a public IP address and no password.
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Yep, the more expensive ones. Still, if they can embed a web app in a $20 router, no reason why they can't put one in a $250-300 middle-range office printer for scanning. Especially if the printer ALREADY has a web page for configuration. As far as security -- make the thing disabled by default until a password is set.
-b.
Re:HP is a mess (Score:5, Funny)
You don't understand. That 435 MB is to prevent reverse engineering. It would take 895 man years to reverse engineer a driver this size. The 30 minutes to reboot and install is to make you think twice about changing brands of printers ever again. We need you to help protect our profits.
Thank you for your support.
The mgmt.
Parent
Re:HP is a mess (Score:4, Funny)
I used to work on a large software project at HP. It was written in Java.
I remember one meeting where there was a debate about if we should obfuscate the code or not to make it harder to decompile and reverse-engineer. We reasoned that since we can't even figure our own code out half the time when it came time to fix defects, there was little risk in leaving it "un-obfuscated". If our competitors got ahold of it, we'd just laugh and say "good luck, suckers"!
Parent
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I don't have to do research, I just installed HP drivers for an all-in-one a few hours ago and there was NO such option. There were two radio buttons. One said "full" or something like that and was 750MB of disk space required. The other option was 450MB. I saw no way to NOT install the imaging crud.
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Doing that with some types of USB devices under Windows has been known to wedge things badly enough that you'll never get it working without a wipe-and-reinstall. There's a reason why many gadgets have a "make sure you install the driver first" sticker on them. In my own experience, I had a flash reader screw up a Win2K install a few years ago because I dared to plug in the rea
Board directors HAVE TO BE sleazeballs (Score:3, Insightful)
If you aren't a sleazeball then you simply don't make it to the Board, because entire legions of sleazeballs get there long before you can through sleazing their way up the ladder or through the business grapevine.
And it's not even a level playing field with the sleazeballs on the inside track, because not only do they have the souped up engines but they also have rear-mounted machine guns to make sure you lose. (Yeah, I love mixing my metaphors.) In other words, you're actively put down by them.
And that's why pretty much all upwardly mobile managers end up being sleazeballs too. It's built into the system.
The same applies in politics, which is why the President is always the greatest sleazeball of them all, regardless of which party is in power.
I don't like business at HP (Score:2, Informative)
When the HP/Compaq merger was approved, her days became numbered. They didn't even give her a pink slip directly, they transferred her over to an office in the Southwest -
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Afterwards they couldn't afford living in the United States - her husband had already retired - and they had to move back to Australia. She knew it was going to happen, too, it was just one big waiting game.
Just out of curiosity, is it that much cheaper to live in Australia or was she just able to find a better job in her home country? I would think if your resume said "big executive" and "in charge of a business unit spanning multiple countries," one could make a living wage in whatever developed country one wished. I would be wrong though.
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I think it depends on where in the States you want to live. I get conflicting reports from people who move there, and from Americans I know living in Australia. But if you want to rebuild your career it is much easier to do that in an environment which you understand well, and where you have a support network.
Living overseas cuts you off from family who might help you out with
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I do not think she was able to find too many jobs after that, though. I think it had to do with he
2.0 (Score:2)
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There was a film called Philadelphia about a successful attorney who was fired from his law firm when he was dying of AIDS in the 80s.
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The real HP way went to Agilent.
I wish. Where's my shiny new Agilent RPN calculator?