HP to cut 25-30k jobs

I think the trick is to find a different (yet related) role with a company that is expanding rather than contracting their business.

Datacenter tech springs to my mind -- a fair number of tech companies have midwest sites (mostly Chicago, sometimes Minneapolis or Nebraska or elsewhere) that don't have local techs. Issues are often handled by the east coast team flying out, which is less than ideal. Someone with that many years of hardware experience is pretty hard to find for those types of roles.

And let's suppose for a second that HP is somehow right. How did they just notice that 10% of their employees are doing something totally worthless? On top of the 55,000 employees that they laid off in 2012? I don't understand how this isn't an admission of total management incompetence.

There's also the classic MBA mistake of seeing employees as expenses rather than assets. HP has been investing in these people for years. What a waste to just fire them all. And this is surely damaging another valuable asset, organizational morale. That they couldn't figure out a single valuable thing to do with those assets is just sad.

One thing I realized working for a huge company and comparing that with my time at their much smaller competitor was that organizations in huge companies become hyperspecialized. This is great during the good times, because everyone is able to squeeze out that last 5% of performance (or whatever other metric they're optimizing for), and this combined effort allows them to keep their lead over the competitor.

But it's terrible during bad times because of the overstaffing. And firing people just makes things worse because the company loses important parts of its organizational memory. Because of the hyperspecialization, no single person/organization knows how to do all the things that need to be done to get the product out the door. And if you fire 10% of your workforce, you're going to forget 10% of the stuff you needed to know to build your products. In fact, you probably lose much more than 10% because people who are actually good see the writing on the wall and leave, taking a disproportional amount of the organizational knowhow with them.

I feel like these companies get caught in a death spiral. They can't do things the old way because they don't know how to any more, and they can't do it the way their competitors are doing it either because they never knew how to do that! So they just flounder along for many years slowly becoming less and less relevant. They solution is to luck into a completely different business model that somehow ends up working a la IBM in the 90s. But how realistic is that?

I haven't seen a decent HP product in a long, long time. Their printers are simply average, and nothing like they used to be.