Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

HP to cut 25-30k jobs

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 319 posts

Re: HP to cut 25-30k jobs

#81

Post by yummyfajitas »

wpietri wrote: post #33
iofj wrote: post #4

HP's new business model for the last 2 years : * cut costs (mostly by disabling essential business functions) * buy back stock using proceeds The result: https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&... The person in Charge : Meg Whitman. In 2008, she was cited by The New York Times as among the women most likely to become the first female President of the United States. Because what "worked" for HP, w…

Doing the math on this, they apparently believe that each one of those people is costing the company $108k per year, net. Given that HP's revenue per employee is ~$350k, I find those numbers simply unbelievable. 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?…

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?

The keyword to search for in the economic literature is "labor hoarding". In short, companies tend to (by default) keep employees until well after they are no longer useful. Then some sort of a shock causes the company to shed the deadwood all at once.

This is management incompetence, but it's exceedingly common. If you ever see a company (e.g. Netflix) which sheds employees regularly, that's a very good sign.

Re: HP to cut 25-30k jobs

#82

Post by MC7447a »

emp_zealoth wrote: post #63
joshmn wrote: post #8

My father is a field-service engineer for HP in Midwest (based out of Minneapolis, but he has calls all over from Fargo, ND to Mpls, MN to Madison, WI). He is _the_ go-to for their biggest, most senior, most mission-critical clients. He put together UMN's Alpha setup, is the only guy that USPS will call for help, MNSCU, Best Buy, UHG... basically, anyone with an HP setup (server or printer) that's a Fortune 1000 (and…

Wow. Rant incoming. Im just aghast how shitty your country is. I can understand living in fear of mortgages and the like, jak with at will nonsense and the like ( gags ) But your employer having a gun to your beloved's head - that what it basically is - is just rotten. I genuinely wish that any libertarians here (in Poland) move to USA or, Friedmans beloved, Chile. I hope they get to experience shit like that. I gues…

You don't have to pay your mortgage if you get laid off in Poland?

Re: HP to cut 25-30k jobs

#83

Post by sjclemmy »

I know a guy who works for HP. He has been wanting to take redundancy for a while but has been turned down. The way he tells it, a lot of the guys he works with leave high priority tickets without looking them up, leave early, start late, surf the web all day, and generally don't work as you might expect. The manager in this situation doesn't seem to do anything about it, and this has been going on for years. I'm not surprised HP are in the predicament they are in, as they've totally mismanaged their business and assets over the past few years - and that business with Autonomy? Wow. Hopefully my friend will be getting his redundancy with this announcement.

Re: HP to cut 25-30k jobs

#84

Post by m12k »

joshmn wrote: post #30
jfoutz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your dad needs to think about the next best 5 guys, and how to pick them up for cheap when the layoffs happen. At his age striking out on his own will seem absolutely terrifying. Work on him for a few months. He must have built up some serious contacts over the years. His pitch is straightforward. HP can't actually support their products anymore, they don't have the staff. He knows the hardware inside and out. Sell s…

This sounds like a great idea, but I don't know if he's such an entrepreneur or risk-taker. Some people are, some people aren't. It's a natural thing. I'm not sure of the papers he's signed (non-competes...), or the contracts that HP has with their customers (there must be some), but... he could definitely "get the band together" and pull off such a feat. Again, I think this goes back to the contracts he had. He's on…

My dad was working as a consultant (environmental consultant, basically handling the creation of reports needed for a company's legal compliance with emissions standards, etc.) for an industrial trade org. They had a rule not to compete with member companies, so when a consultancy joined the org, they shut down his division, even though the new member only offered services that were tangentially related. He ended up working for himself (one man shop) for the last 13 years of his career before retiring, doing exactly the same thing he'd always done. He's not a sales person by any means, and striking out on his own definitely seemed outside his comfort zone at first. But he was able to base his business on the relationships with customers that he'd already established, and since he's got such a specialized skill set and works so diligently, his customers kept coming back and recommended him to others. So I just wanted to give an example that this sort of thing is possible (assuming there's no non-compete clause to undermine the whole thing - in my dad's case he did it with the blessing of his former employer - sometimes they'd even send him leads when they had to turn away a customer)

Re: HP to cut 25-30k jobs

#85

Post by MC7447a »

cft wrote: post #2

No problem, the new "technology" in the Silicon Valley is AirBnB and Facebook. Let China do the hard stuff.

Yeah, because running Facebook isn't hard at all. Maybe you should clue them in how they don't actually need all these positions at all https://www.facebook.com/careers/teams/infrastructure

Re: HP to cut 25-30k jobs

#86

Post by SandB0x »

bduerst wrote: post #29
ekianjo wrote: post #7

> The tech company has struggled over the last decade to keep up with changing demands as customers move away from desktop computers. Maybe, but laptop or desktop, HP has been always synonymous with crappy quality and design - among the worst I have ever seen. I just can't wait for them to stop making PCs so that we can get at least half-decent laptops from other manufacturers.

They're the cost leader, along with Dell. The modern equivalent is Samsung with a lot of its cheaper hardware. Sure, Samsung has it's high end flagships, but so does HP (elitebooks). Just because they've filled one shitty niche doesn't mean they're all bad.

By making the shitty products, you diminish the perceived quality of everything you make. On the other hand, having high standards even for your budget range (e.g. Motorola phones currently) shows that all your products can be trusted and that your badge or brand actually means something.

Re: HP to cut 25-30k jobs

#87

Post by paganel »

HP has become terrible. My girlfriend does some IT procurement from time to time at her job, and that also involves having to buy stuff from HP (nothing big, just the usual).

She told me that HP's procurement interface for external entities (or whatever its official name is) is absolutely terrible. It blocks randomly, it's very slow, it takes a lot to fill in all the info, and when you finally give up and call some human from HP you're being told to go back using the interface. It's like they just don't want to take their clients' money.

Re: HP to cut 25-30k jobs

#88

Post by pferde »

jsudhams wrote: post #20

Most of US big companies are like that if they have more than 200000 people you seriously can cut 30000 jobs any time.

I only wish they cut from the pool of useless middle managers (god knows there's an overabundance of them in HPE, and their number seems to increase every day), and not from among people who do actual productive work.

Re: HP to cut 25-30k jobs

#89

Post by wyclif »

emp_zealoth wrote: post #63
joshmn wrote: post #8

My father is a field-service engineer for HP in Midwest (based out of Minneapolis, but he has calls all over from Fargo, ND to Mpls, MN to Madison, WI). He is _the_ go-to for their biggest, most senior, most mission-critical clients. He put together UMN's Alpha setup, is the only guy that USPS will call for help, MNSCU, Best Buy, UHG... basically, anyone with an HP setup (server or printer) that's a Fortune 1000 (and…

Wow. Rant incoming. Im just aghast how shitty your country is. I can understand living in fear of mortgages and the like, jak with at will nonsense and the like ( gags ) But your employer having a gun to your beloved's head - that what it basically is - is just rotten. I genuinely wish that any libertarians here (in Poland) move to USA or, Friedmans beloved, Chile. I hope they get to experience shit like that. I gues…

Chile is a far stronger economy than Poland will probably ever be.

Re: HP to cut 25-30k jobs

#90

Post by robin_reala »

brudgers wrote: post #28
ekianjo wrote: post #7

> The tech company has struggled over the last decade to keep up with changing demands as customers move away from desktop computers. Maybe, but laptop or desktop, HP has been always synonymous with crappy quality and design - among the worst I have ever seen. I just can't wait for them to stop making PCs so that we can get at least half-decent laptops from other manufacturers.

I have an HP11C calculator I bought in 1989 I still use. It cost almost $100 back then. The first HP printer I bought was a DeskJet 550c. Made a beautiful whooshing and humming noises. Kept it for more than 10 years. When they discovered a tendency for premature wear on the pickup rollers, HP sent me a maintenance kit: one day it just showed up with instructions. I had a zd7000 laptop in the early oughts. It was pret…

I remember that maintenance kit. Big solid metal thing that fitted into the paper feed and a ROM cartridge to go with it. Must have cost them serious money to design, build and ship that.
Post reply on HN