back to article Hewlett Packard Enterprise hiring temps to cover for redundancies - sources

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is hiring temps to cover gaps caused by the exit of hundreds of techies it recently axed, some of whom provided services to clients including the Department for Work and Pensions. This is according to multiple insiders, who told us the picture might have been worse had HPE not halted some of the job …

  1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    If a "redundant" post is back-filled doesn't it change the "redundancy" to wrongful dismissal with the possibility of suing for better compensation?

    1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      Sort-a

      All the company needs to do is hire for a different position (with same job spec). Then you need to prove that the two job specs and positions are equivalent and that is a very tall order and requires a massive amount of resources. Most people who have been made redundant do not have access to such "justice for the rich".

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: Sort-a

        Most people who have been made redundant do not have access to such "justice for the rich".'

        Trade Unions do.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      If another permie, then probably (although you wouldn't necessarily get any more dough). But contractors aren't people, so the position is still technically redundant; effectively outsourced. Also, I bet they're paid for out of another budget, so the management can still bask in the warm glow of a spreadsheet showing how much they've saved on headcount.

      (IANAL, etc...)

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        "But contractors aren't people"

        No, contractors are businesses (retired contractor speaks) and will have factored in this. They won't have had redundancy payments. In fact it will be contractors who pick up the slack.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Idiot-stick second and third level "managers" making decisions that they don't fully understand the ramifications of. Where's the news in that?

      There was a time when the higher up the management chain one went the more knew about the business because they'd grow through it or up with it. Of course, that may have been during the time when the taxation system rewarded building infrastructure and keeping jobs in country.

    4. Julz

      Not if you've signed a waiver to your legal rights in order to get more than the legal minimum redundancy terms...

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge

        They're your statutory rights, you can't waiver them. They can throw money at you and make you sign something in the hope you don't use them, which is something different.

        1. Ben Tasker

          They're your statutory rights, you can't waiver them. They can throw money at you and make you sign something in the hope you don't use them, which is something different

          True, however, they can have you sign an agreement which states that in return for the "advanced redundancy package" you won't exercise those rights.

          If you then choose to do so, you lose out on the "advanced" element and fall back to being eligible for a statutory redundancy (1 week per year), in the hopes of perhaps getting a better payment, which will almost certainly be calculated using statutory values.

          So, no, you can't waive your statutory rights, but by actually exercising them you effectively throw money away.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Contractual obligation

            Of course, if your contract stipulates your redundancy terms and they are as good as that being offered, you can refuse to sign the waiver and still receive the same redundancy package ....

    5. Malignant_Narcissism

      Depends on where the position is located. In the U.S. many states like California are "at will", meaning an employer can terminate an employee at any time for any reason.

  2. SecretSonOfHG

    Well deserved

    Managing by moving numbers around in an Excel spreadsheet has its dangers, one of them that this little thing called "customer satisfaction" is quite hard to value, so it tends to be ignored.

    So let's see the collateral damage: they'll need a cell labelled "cost of hiring temps to do the work permanents were doing" and another labelled "cost incurred by those temps making mistakes due to their lack of familiarity with customers"

    Will bonuses get smaller as consequence of this? I doubt it.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Well deserved

      this little thing called "customer satisfaction" is quite hard to value, so it tends to be ignored.

      Doesn't really apply in ITO and BPO. Once a company has TUPE'd out its in house capability, it is very difficult to recreate it. The vendors like HPE know this, and the only real risk is that the customer might not renew their contract and take the business to a competitor. Trouble is all the ITO and BPO providers are using the same model so you'll get the same poor service, padded invoice, and one way SLA.

      So why worry about customer satisfaction? At the moment the customer decided to outsource the function, they threw away the luxury of having any control over either service quality or cost.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Well deserved

        Most customer satisfaction increases I've seen result from hiring more temps to run the customer satisfaction questionnaire phones.

    2. This post has been deleted by its author

    3. a_yank_lurker

      Re: Well deserved

      The average PHB is very clueless.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    including a voluntary redundancy programme for those who actually want to leave

    I've been watching first-hand as people here have had VRs rejected, and then watching as their own colleagues and team members are being CR'd. You couldn't make it up.

    1. Snivelling Wretch

      Perhaps they figure that if you've applied for VR, then you're bound to leave anyway and they won't have to pay you off...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Perhaps they figure that if you've applied for VR

        Alterantively you've applied for VR. Therefore you think you can get another job easily, or are maybe even being headhunted. Therefore you are presumably good at your job and you go to the back of the queue in terms of being fired.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Perhaps they figure that if you've applied for VR

          I hope not - I've just signed my exit agreement :)

  4. Andy A

    Typical manglement obfuscation-speak

    "the company undertook standard consultations with minimal impact on our clients."

    Translation: "We had a meeting to discuss how to keep our bonuses as high as possible, and we decided that if we told any of our customers whey would crucify us."

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    SharePoint

    Up here in Newcastle it's more or less pick your own salary for SharePoint at HPe

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: SharePoint

      I'm being approached on LinkedIn by "Talent Acquisition Specialists" for roles in Erskine almost weekly at the moment. They assume as I worked there before and have SC Clearance I'd want to go back, but aren't aware of the phrase "Once bitten, Twice shy."

      The managers are an absolute joke. I saw one trying to give a contractor an appraisal, and utterly unable to comprehend why both the contractor and HR were sending up distress flares.

      1. Jeffrey Nonken

        Re: SharePoint

        "...but aren't aware of the phrase 'Once bitten, Twice shy.'"

        They are, they just keep hoping you aren't.

      2. Mark 85

        Re: SharePoint

        Well.... take the "twice shy" and ask for 200% increase in pay. If they go for it, you know they're desperate. If they don't, then maybe the recruiters will leave you alone for this job.

        Sidenote: The recruiters are paid by the company and only if the company hires you and the payment is based on your salary. You can use that knowledge to your benefit.

    2. dorj8

      Re: SharePoint

      That is part of the issue . The promised "savings" are often outweighed by having to pay premiums to get people to move to the primary sites.....

  6. Sir Barry

    New Hire Needed

    It looks like HPE management need an Arse & Elbow Officer to sort them out.

    1. kmac499

      Re: New Hire Needed

      And in other shock revelations.

      Ursines prefer defecating in a silva rich environment

      Bishop of Rome, rumoured to believe in reincarnated rabble rouser.

      Leaving the eternal question

      How come it's never managers,finance or HR that's outsourced or made redundant?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: New Hire Needed

        How come it's never managers,finance or HR that's outsourced or made redundant?

        Actually, whole groups are being made redundant, so imagine the surprise of those managers who get the same treatment because they don't have anyone to report to them and they can't actually be a productive individual contributor.

        HR was outsourced long ago, with the vast majority of functions moved to "self-service portals".

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        There's one individual who should have gotten canned

        The arsehole in marketing who came up with "bestshore".

        1. Mpeler
          Mushroom

          Re: There's one individual who should have gotten canned

          "Bestshore" - Flagellant have been using that term for years. They can let people go, due to their poor planning, mismanagement, and planning to the next quarter without having any labs anymore, and then pat themselves on the back for a job-(not)well done by saying Bestshore rather than offshore, or the truth, which is "the lowest price at which we can get it"shore, quality be damned.

          Nit-Whitman has no clue about technology, and apparently about appropriate staffing, goodwill and obligations to customers. This little "bump in the road" may well come back to bite her and her over-their-heads crew.

          I think they all should be locked in a room to read "In Search of Excellence" and then produce both a thesis on why and how Bill and Dave (and the others in the book) did their wonders; and a "development plan" on how they can and indeed must change their conduct to be similarly successful, honest, and good for society and the economy.

          Methinks they'd be locked up for a long, long, time.....

          1. Mark 85

            Re: There's one individual who should have gotten canned

            Nice idea. But it assumes that they can read and comprehend something other than a profit and loss sheet. OTOH, them never coming out of that room works very well also.

            1. Mpeler
              Pint

              Re: There's one individual who should have gotten canned

              @Mark85

              Yeah, that's kind of what I meant. I doubt anyone of them have read "In Search of Excellence", if they even can read, nor probably do they even know what Excellence is... sad.

              Only problem is, the next level down isn't much (if at all) better...

          2. Captain DaFt

            Re: There's one individual who should have gotten canned

            -I think they all should be locked in a room to read "In Search of Excellence"-

            You know they'd just end up chewing on the book covers. They're mentally incapable of assimilating the contents otherwise, since it isn't written in marketspeak.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    senior staff were waking up to the reality

    you'd think a corporation would have heard about such concepts as "planning". Evidently, it's all news in the corporate world, and in focusing on their long-term nirvana, and marching boldly towards it, they've just realized there's a bridge to cross... but oh, what a surprise, not a bridge but... smoldering rubble?! And what's that logo on that grinning guy from the demolition crew Surely not HP?!

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Bet-shoring a better term?

    They made a gamble, it looks it didn't pay as they hoped... looks everybody there was exactly aware of the planned redundancies and had planned carefully for a smooth transition... just, nobody of this very skilled managers and executive will be shown the door.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Speaking as an ex-DWP client HPE permie....

    Ah hah! Hah, hah, hahhhhh!

    "HPE Enterprise Services sources said senior staff were waking up to the reality of what employing fewer heads in IT Outsourcing and Application Business Services meant for contract delivery."

    Senior staff were told what the eventual result of the never ending cull would be. Senior staff knew better and still chose to do the stupid thing. Wilful idiocy.

    "The first of the redundancies was on 30 April and the last will be done and dusted by 31 October."

    No they won't be done and dusted. How many previous rounds of redundancies were The Last Round? The wilful stupidity of letting so many knowledgeable staff go in so short a time (again) will result in either lost contracts, non-renewals or massive penalties for non/late delivery (again). They'll have a 'bad quarter' (again). And HP will respond in the only way they've ever demonstrated they know. They'll announce yet more rounds of massive redundancies (again).

    Sympathies to the affected - the writing has been on the wall for the longest time. Unless you stand to lose serious change foregoing VR/CR (ie old DWP image terms), get out now. The HPE ship is terminally holed below the line and is going down fast.

    1. Amersfoort

      Agree with you completely. There are currently two rounds of VR running simultaneously and they are about to kick off a third. The next round of CR will be end of July, another at the end of October. In October, the end HPE's financial year, I fully expect them to slash the VR and CR terms to the statutory minimum. The senior line manager I know has already got knowledge of yet another round in January 2017. Before anyone in Newcastle or Erskin get too comfortable they need to take on board the fact that HPE is unlikely to consider that it requires the two centers in the UK after the end of 2017 as HP India FINALLY manages to stop employing staff that were farmers a month before !

      HP executives and the HP Board have shown themselves utterly hopeless in their understanding of the outsourcing industry, thinking instead that MBAs and share price linked pay can paper over knowing jack-shit. Out of 12 board members, including the CEO/executive chairman, only one has experience in a business that is core to HPE and they are doing nothing to solve the problem, in fact they appear to be part of it ! To make a service company the board has to be passionate experts in IT Outsourcing and the HPE board does not have it, so it will ultimately fail. Without critical IT service skills, opportunities will continue to be missed and critical problems, like HPE's inability to deliver solutions, will remain.

  10. BongBong

    Morale = 0

    Having taken part in this round of redundancies, or should we just say moving jobs north, I can say it has been another cluster from HP. Most of the resource being shed is utilised fully and has the experience and background to support the client, hence cutting this time to the depth management has will cause an impact on the client.

    After 2 years plus of slowly bleeding the Enterprise arm it was a real pleasure to be given redundancy, HP is not a company which has a plan and a defined projection forward to gain back market share. This is from the top and as Meg has met her 5 year plan aligned with the American elections she will be away at the end of the year. Hopefully someone with vision will then take control of the company.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Morale = 0

      Sound just like CSC over the last few years. (Or I suspect most major IT companies).

      Bean counters go: "We are spending too much on wages, we need to shed a few people.". So they decide on a headcount reduction. (yuc). Come up with some figure of how many people to get rid of to balance the books, and don't take any account of the fact that most of those people are fully utilised, so off they go.

      So many of the experienced people, who had the client contacts etc. End up out of the door, and those left have to pick up the pieces, on top of their pre-existing roles.

      A while later, the company realise they can't deliver the service, or more precisely the clients start to notice, or that we are having to turn down work as we don't have the people any more (!) and so they then go on a recruitment drive to get the numbers back up. But as they are also in the middle of a re-structuring, they define new teams and roles, to fulfil those same earlier roles. Ergo they are new roles, not the existing ones coming back, despite doing the same real life job (legally correct, but morally very reprehensible).

      Plus of course all the new people are graduates, so on half the pay, or less, than the people they are replacing and just like John Snow, they ".. know nothing!".

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Morale = 0

      Whitman will hang around until they can flog ES off. Rumour has it that under SEC rules they have to wait 2 years from separation so that is 01/11/2017 at the earliest. Cynics might say it's already being carved up, jobs slashed and set up to match what the (probably already lined up) buyer wants.

      Whitman gets $51m if she goes or gets sacked. $91m in the event of HPE being taken over. She's here till Nov 2017, no doubt about it.

      I expect to go in July. It'll be a relief

  11. adam payne

    So HPE lay people off to save money but have to get temps in to cover the massive holes they have.

    Hiring temps is usually more expensive and of course they would need training as well which takes time / resources and of course more money.

    Somehow I think that this plan needed a little bit more thought.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The revolving door that is HP(E)

    They continually make people redundant whilst simultaneously hiring new staff.

    No one sticks it out for longer than two years. In fact, after two weeks it becomes abundantly clear your job isn't even in IT, it's more secretarial. Like the Wizard of Oz, once you get to the Emerald City and look behind the curtain, you find the wizard is just an old fraud.

    They have to fly people in from Heathrow every Monday morning, put them up in a hotel in Glasgow for four nights, give them a hire car, and fly them home every Friday night just to keep the lights on in their Regional Delivery Center™ in Erskine.

    1. Mpeler
      Mushroom

      Re: The revolving door that is HP(E)

      A certain company that "innovated the HP Way" had a division named EMG, which soon became known as

      "Everyone Must Go".

      Looks like HP(Eeeeeeck) is following that line of action. It won't work for them, either.

      Seems like the money-grubbing locusts, be it financial investment companies, patent trolls, aggressive investors, or just moribund boards no longer care about "corporate knowledge", mentoring, or loyalty.

      Their shortsightedness will be coming back to visit, soon.

      Sad thing is, the loyal employees, with the valuable corporate knowledge who are willing and capable mentors will be long gone. Humpty dumPty, indeed.

      1. tekHedd

        Re: The revolving door that is HP(E)

        I hear they're doing weekly layoffs, so the number of layoffs at once won't be large enough to make good news headlines.

        Weekly layoffs? That's gotta be GREAT for morale.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The revolving door that is HP(E)

      I'd heard about this. Must be an awful lot of columns on an awful lot of other spreadsheets that the costs are spread across to make this shenanigans look cheaper than actually employing the previous knowledgable staff in their original locations (Sheffield/Lytham etc). Or is it all chargeable to the client who must be wondering why costs are skyrocketing at the same time as the service is falling off of a cliff?

      Presumably the London-centric staff are collecting their contractor fees/salaries whilst HP pays through the nose for air travel, car hire and hotel accommodation on top? Hope they milk HP for every last penny they can.

  13. Unep Eurobats
    Paris Hilton

    In some weird alternative accountants' universe

    this all makes perfect sense.

  14. Ashton Black

    Phew...

    This has come up on my radar a good number of times, I'm happy sticking with my current contract. (A six month-er that has turned into rather longer.)

  15. Eric Kimminau TREG

    HPE Executives have their head up their backside

    I was a very well paid contractor in a part of HP that became HPE. I was axed in Sept. 2015 with 0 days notice. Effective immediately. The project I was working on was supposed to have been completed by December 2015. It has been repeatedly delayed, has still not been completed and HPE is now at risk of losing a MAJOR payment from a global oil company because they are going to miss a contractual delivery date. If you are still working at HPE, you need to read the writing on the wall. They are shipping EVERYTHING offshore unless there is a contractual requirement to use local resources. If your job isn't specifically defined as requiring local resources, it won't be. You have been warned.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: HPE Executives have their head up their backside

      "I was a very well paid contractor in a part of HP that became HPE. I was axed in Sept. 2015 with 0 days notice. Effective immediately."

      Sad to hear that, but I'm afraid that's the whole point of being a contractor, same as when I was a freelance Graphic Designer in a previous life. I got a freelance gig at Littlewoods, the next day they closed Index (remember that?) and I was given an hour to pack my things and leave the building.

      The reward for big money (contracting) is offset by the risk of being told to leave, immediately.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: HPE Executives have their head up their backside

      "They are shipping EVERYTHING offshore unless there is a contractual requirement to use local resources"

      What boggles my mind about this approach is how they possibly think they can compete with Wipro and Cognizant and co in this market. HPE are never, ever going to win in a price war.

  16. Howard Hanek
    Childcatcher

    The Corporate Pointy Head Sharpner Requires Maintenance

    Antonyms for (adjective) Strategic

    Main entry: strategic

    Definition: highly important to or an integral part of a strategy or plan of action especially in war

    Usage: a strategic chess move; strategic withdrawal; strategic bombing missions

    Antonyms: unimportant

    Definition: not important

    Usage: a relatively unimportant feature of the system; the question seems unimportant

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The graduates are also continuously hired while these redundancies are going on. Now they've hit the point where they can no longer keep these graduates either, so they're using their probation periods to release them or putting them all on false Improvement Plans. So who is actually going to run the place?

  18. GrumpenKraut
    Thumb Down

    "...journey to transform..."

    Management shit speak, exhibit one.

  19. BillDarblay
    Mushroom

    If any article, and it's comments,

    can sum up how completely bleak and shite a career in corporate IT is - it is this one.

    1. Miss Lincolnshire

      Re: If any article, and it's comments,

      It's amazing how an industry that didn't even exist a generation ago has been devalued, comoditised and sent to be "delivered" by exploiting the lack of employment riggts of those in the developing world so quickly.

      Time was my parents encouraged me to get a graduate career. I shall be encouraging my daughter to be a hairdresser or undertaker and see her job stay in the UK.

      1. Zoopy

        Re: If any article, and it's comments,

        Do you really want her working the graveyard shift in a dead-end job?

      2. Mpeler
        Unhappy

        Re: If any article, and it's comments,

        Somehow the carrer choice "undertaker" made me thnk of deep-level systems design, development, and support...

  20. John 104

    Cocks.

    Fire the managers responsible for the losses the business is suffering. I'm talking global strategy level management. Obviously bad decisions were made over and over. Yet somehow these idiots get to keep their jobs?

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    HPE is Greedy and Immoral

    The problem has been that the management are not business orientated and are being compensated via corporate objectives. Many of the clients will experience outages in the future, and it will be cock up theory. The ex staff will be blamed or the poor bugger who has taken over.

    Good luck you need

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: HPE is Greedy and Immoral

      There was a comment on Forbes.com or similar last year on IBM, suggesting that the CxO pod is/was an entity solely and exclusively concerned with managing IBMs stock price up and down; whichever was most advantageous to the big institutional investors and themselves at any given time. The viewpoint made a great deal of sense when used as a lens through which you could examine IBMs otherwise baffling, short term, client & employee hostile decisions and practices.

      HPE has shown itself guilty of exactly the same practices, with Meg following Mark & Carly's failure (except for the stock price advantage to institutional investors and themselves).

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    HPE Employee here

    I have worked for HPE as a permanent full time employee for 3 years next month and I can honestly say hand on heart that this company is one of the worst I have ever had the misfortune of being employed by.

    I've seen first hand the way "best shore" works only last week when we had a major outage for a big UK customer. We raised the alert, gathered all the information needed and then raised a P1 ticket...

    3 hours later, a Bulgarian Critical Incident Manager contacts me and asked if I could investigate and resolve. 3 hours, and they ask the people who raised the alert (and nothing to do with us, another "tower" messing with a switch) to investigate.

    I'm looking for another job as I type, I can't wait to get away from the pathetic Meg Whitman and her short sighted long term plan.

  23. ecofeco Silver badge

    Blast from the past

    When HP bought Compaq, they fired everyone and made them reapply for their jobs.

    Some of the white collar employees got their jobs backs and did well. Some didn't. Some of the factory employees got their jobs back and took huge pay cuts. Many did not get rehired at all except for...

    To cover the factory labor loss, they then hired temp employees only and this became (and still is as far as I know) the policy with no chance of ever being hired on to HP, proper.

    This is pretty much SOP for almost any technical positions at the big corporations these days and has been for years.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Blast from the past

      Not true, at least not universally. I was at Compaq in 2003 when HP took over; there were a large number of redundancies and they weren't done particularly fairly but I don't recall anyone having to reapply for their jobs.

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    No shit Sherlock

    Has anyone worked in a place where redundancies have not involved a bit of "oh hell we didn't know what you did, can you just hang on a while?"

    1. Naselus

      Re: No shit Sherlock

      To which the correct answer is, of course 'no, I'm afraid I can't. I've become a contractor on quadruple my old hourly rate. Though I guess you could outsource my old role to my new ltd company'.

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Was relieved of duties at the end of April

    So sad to see I company I worked at for a decade and a half going to hell in a handbasket.

    As for me - I worked on the DWP account. When myself and the rest of my team was made redundant there was supposed to have been a people in place in another location to replace us.

    Even on our last day there was no-one employed to do our job. The hundred or so years of DWP account experience flushed away with no transfer of skills at all.

    I feel sorry for those who are left in a way. Also for the DWP given how their and other accounts are now being run.

    They are indeed employing contractors on at least 3 times our salary to try and cover the work.

    I think the thing that is going to bother me most, second only to knowing how my tax money is being wasted, is that I now have 15yrs at Hewlett Packard on my CV. Once that would have been a good thing. Now I am not so sure......

    1. Miss Lincolnshire
      Thumb Up

      Re: Was relieved of duties at the end of April

      "I think the thing that is going to bother me most, second only to knowing how my tax money is being wasted, is that I now have 15yrs at Hewlett Packard on my CV. Once that would have been a good thing. Now I am not so sure......"

      Couple it with a "Lessons Learned" and you'll be able to charge double for Consultancy

  26. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    DWP in Lytham and I signed my VR papers today. Only waited this long so I'd get an extra years service in the payout.

    The DWP account dies on July 29th. With the masses of redundancies made in April, they cut the head off it, with the people going in July, the body finally realises it's dead.

    Speaking to people I know in Erskine, the management now have very brown trousers about losing the account. Kind of feel sorry for the bods taking over the grunt work, they haven't been trained (you can't train experience) and they'll get the flak when it all goes pear shaped. They're all either contractors who couldn't care less or kids straight out of school.

    The replacements for the teams that got finished in April aren't up to the job and it's showing. All it's going to take is one major outage and the whole thing is going to collapse.

  27. Anonymous Coward
    Holmes

    was ever thus

    HP's woes are simple to understand, it is always easier to run-down any organisation than to build it up, striping out assets and costly workers and with the right accounts you can even prove a profit.. for a while.

    Its a pernicous problem, even Gov Depts are doing the same - but as they dont have to provide a profit it's a lot worse. - all those datbases GCHQ etc are building will soon be offshore (and the comedy begins)

  28. randomHandle
    FAIL

    FTFY

    "the company undertook minimal consultations with standard impact on our clients."

  29. Speltier

    Bestshoring

    Isn't the acronym for bestshoring BS?

  30. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The meltdown has begun...

    I've seen first-hand the damage the "work-force reduction" process has dealt to the organisation. The problem is that there is no coherent strategy to these cuts - heads are rolling, even if they are business critical and there is no alternative team or group to take over their function. The cuts aren't limited to outside of the RDCs - I'm aware of at least two colleagues based there who have been CR'd.

    The problem is that the entire organisation is hamstrung by laborious, bureaucratic processes. These processes are never reviewed, changed or improved - they are gospel and you must adhere to them, even if they impede your work and take up hours of your week to do so. Witless and co aren't dealing with the overhead imposed by these processes - they are simply cutting heads and insisting to all that this makes their organisation more "agile" and "quicker to respond". It doesn't, as less staff have to spend more time dealing with paperwork.

    To me, the cuts imposed so far demonstrate that the senior management of HPE fail to understand their own organisation, who does what and why, and how they make a different to the business. By the time they get a real-world demonstration of why they shouldn't have got rid of team X or group Y, it will be too late as by then the management will probably be on the receiving end of a major failure.

    The problem is (as someone else has already pointed out), these short-termist management types will be long gone by then and won't get any of the blame. It's always the techies that get singled out, whether it be the poor hapless sod who has picked up the documentation in a desperate attempt to fix something he's never looked at before, or the contractor who is charging by the minute for his expertise.

    The sole permeating, repeating feeling I've had over the last six years is that the company doesn't value it's staff - at all. They treat their staff as a liability to be reduced, rather than an asset to be relied on (none of the automated literature I received on my departure thanked me for my efforts and hard work).

    HPE's management understand the cost of everything and the value of nothing. They charge best of breed rates for a best of value service. They are bereft of ideas to improve the business other than reducing headcount, and to me that is evidence enough of their incompetence. I hope their customers wise up to this soon.

    Anon for obvious reasons.

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