HP To Cut 30,000 Jobs 291
Axolotl_Rose writes with news that Hewlett-Packard is preparing to cut around 30,000 jobs, close to 10% of its total workforce. CEO Meg Whitman reportedly wants to use that money instead for new products and for bolstering the sales force. From the NY Times:
"China, which is one of H.P.’s highest growth areas, will probably be spared, as will its research and development efforts. Ms. Whitman, who became H.P.’s chief executive last September, 'is trying to build a new company,' one senior executive said of the job cuts. 'You can count this as a part of that.' The final plan is expected to be announced on Wednesday, when H.P. announces earnings for its second fiscal quarter. Considered a slow-moving giant in the tech industry, H.P. had revenue of $127 billion in fiscal 2011, but net earnings of just $7.1 billion. While it has a leading position in the sales of low-margin personal computers, H.P. has been late or unsuccessful in many recent tech trends like providing cloud computing services for big companies and smartphones and tablet computers."
An article at Forbes suggests HP should instead 'retool' those jobs by recruiting makers and hackers, TED conference speakers, and others who have experience building and inventing things.
Bolstering the sales force (Score:4, Insightful)
Because when you offshor^H^H cut a bunch of jobs, you need more salespeople to sit by the phones to answer calls about products you offshor^H^H have sold-off in order to mak^H^H save money.
Oh yeah, that'll help. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure cutting out 10% of the workforce, shoving even more extra work on everyone else, will just be a huge moral boost.
Re:Oh yeah, that'll help. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh yeah, that'll help. (Score:5, Insightful)
You forgot the adverb.
You get 1 person doing 3 people's work badly.
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BMO
The 21st century formula for a successful company (Score:5, Insightful)
The modern CEO doesn't grow his company in the long-term. He doesn't build good products and increase sales, putting profits back into R&D, new products, and new hires. He doesn't pay shareholders modest dividends and tell them about his long-term strategy for slowly growing and maintaining a profitable company. That shit is old school!
The 21st century CEO boosts short term profits by cutting jobs and forcing existing workers to pick up the slack. He shows the shareholders that the next quarter's profits are great and they call him a visionary. He hides debt with a shell game, cuts workers to hide sales declines, and outsources everything he can to some sweatshop that produces crap product to lower prices. The 21st century CEO looks AMAZING on paper.
And in the long-term...well, who gives a shit about the long-term? By then the 21 century CEO has long since bailed out with his golden parachute. Let Uncle Sam bail them out.
Re:wait... what??? (Score:5, Insightful)
They are cutting jobs but concentrating efforts on sales. Yeah.. What I hear is please by from us but don't expect cutting edge, anything innovative, or decent support after the sale.
That pretty much puts the final nails in the coffin for what once was an inovative tech company.
Re:Should be... (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't forget that the 30k re-hires will reset the benefits clocks -- healthier younger people who will work with less actual taken vacation.
Re:The 21st century formula for a successful compa (Score:5, Insightful)
Well - in Whitman's defense, HP needs to retool itself. If their claim to fame is personal computers, they will be an also-ran within 5 years. They need to retool with services, get in on the cloud-storage/processing game, and start putting out products and services that people are interested in. Otherwise, they can sit in a corner with Gateway and talk about the olden days.
That, unfortunately, takes drastic measures. Apotheker had the right idea, but just executed it in the worst possible way. Now the question is whether Whitman has the right idea, AND can execute on it. Cutting 10k workers sounds harsh, but it's a nasty requirement for effecting a turn-around.
Re:wait... what??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Its more like they are cutting jobs to show a profit. Its says we are clueless and know no other way of turning a profit. So we will toss out our knowledge base people and hope the cheaper ones in China will work out. Kodak tried this except the engineering went to Japan and Xerox is still trying it. Good luck American worker.
Re:The 21st century formula for a successful compa (Score:2, Insightful)
Life is always a two way steak.
AH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Good one!
On a side note, the rest of your post is now invalid.
Re:The 21st century formula for a successful compa (Score:5, Insightful)
There is nothing quite as beautiful as seeing the plane in free-fall and on fire behind you, as you float to your new private island on a parachute stitched from gold thread and destroyed lives.
Re:wait... what??? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's good news in this.
HP has been making trash equipment for a long time. Their printers are garbage, the software for them is worse. Their business laptops ship with non-functional radio chipsets and I've been told they just won't be fixed. I've gotten servers shipped to me with unsigned drivers that just don't work, and their foreign tech support is the consistently the worst I've ever had to deal with (and over phone lines that barely work). Not to labor the subject, but I actually had someone in India call me a thief when I called to ask them to replace a missing part on a laptop that came back from depot service. Worse yet, I've seen zero indication that they intend to do anything, about any of this, for years.
Any company that pumps out crap product and treats its customers like garbage for the sake of short term cost cutting, trying to squeeze out another .03 bump in their stock price, deserves to die the kind of death HP is going to suffer.
For my part, I say, "fuck em".
Time will tell if this is a good thing for HP. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure that with the EDS acquisition, as well as all the other companies HP went out and bought, there are tons of people hiding out waiting to see which group of employees survives the merger. With the PC and printer divisions merging, that looks to me like a lot of sales guys, account managers and customer liaison people are going to be looking for work as well. HP has 300,000 people or something like that. It's kind of like IBM -- once a company gets too big, people can build themselves a very safe spot without doing too much work simply because it's too hard to keep track of everything.
I've had some limited experience with EDS, and from what I saw, there's LOTS of room to cut there. Outsourcing contracts can only support so many project managers, support staff and liaisons-to-liaisons without affecting the number of actual workers who do work.
The problem is that mass-firings like this, especially ones led by management consultants, tend to gut product engineering and design teams, and leave the overhead in place. Even though Whitman may be sparing HP Labs, which was cut to the bone under Fiorina and Hurd, that doesn't account for the everyday hardware engineers who have to design HP's next products. If HP wants to stay successful long-term, they need to ignore the typical McKinsey speak and keep the people who can build stuff that HP can sell.
I'm working in one of the very few dinosaur-era fields that actually needs to buy good-quality PCs and servers for customer projects. Think stick-in-the-mud customers, low or no network bandwidth and old applications. HP and Lenovo are basically the only choices if you want a decent, well-made business grade PC with a warranty and stable configuration. All the hardware manufacturers need to lay off the cloud kool-aid and realize that there will be a balance between local, private and hosted for quite a while. Not every business is ready for the cloud, the cloud doesn't make sense for some businesses, and even the cloudy people need decent machines to run VMWare, Hyper-V, Xen, etc. on. In HP's case, I'm sure the McKinsey people read the Gartner people's Magic Quadrant stuff, concluded that every business will be in the cloud by 2017, and recommended that HP get out of the traditional PC and services business, and become strictly a cloud provider. Problem is, when the social media/Web 2.0/cloud bubble pops, things are going to swing back to a sane mix of hosted and local, and HP might not have anything good to offer anymore.
Re:wait... what??? (Score:5, Insightful)
+1
I totally agree, I stopped using HP 5 years ago after suffering with crappy products and zero support.
If you are R&D company it should take you no effort to develop on successful platforms like Palm, instead they just killed it.
Re:Bad CEO replaced by bad CEO replaced by bad CEO (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like a board issue. They're not picking the right people for the job (I would've said person, but this has happened twice within as many decades).
Management Logic: (Score:5, Insightful)
If you get one person doing the work of three, that's management success and you should get a big bonus.
If that person does 3 jobs badly, that's his personal failure and should be noted in his next performance review!
Re:The 21st century formula for a successful compa (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:wait... what??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, we need to cut these jobs, so I can show a profit this quarter [or maybe next quarter], then I can get a nice big bonus.
Lather, rinse, repeat...
Re:Should be... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:wait... what??? (Score:4, Insightful)
to contrast, HP once was the pinnacle of high end test equipment. these days, its called 'agilent' but the old 20+ yr equipment still pulls in good money on ebay for used test gear.
I go out of my way to buy (and use) older 'made in usa' HP, tektronix and fluke gear. the chassis were thick metal, the user manuals had *schematics* and parts/vendor lists (oh the shock and horror!) and the units ran for decades without needing repair.
compare to today: you'll pay the same high price but HP^Hagilent is made overseas, is not built to the same standard and is probably not even designed in the US anymore, let alone made here. its throw-away and its becoming rarer to find true service manuals anymore.
my old HP voltmeters, function generators and such are still some of the best stuff in the world. I would be hard-pressed to seek out any NEW hp gear, though. for my money, I'd just assume buy a chinese rigol scope.
the passing of an era is sad; and HP was a source of pride for many decades (nearly half a century, in fact).
RIP HP. at least you did leave behind some really great gear that continues to work well.