HP polishes the redundancy cannon, prepares to fire 16% of workforce HP Inc's incoming CEO kicked off his reign of terror at the hard-pressed organisation by doing what so many old-world tech company bosses do these days: chopping thousands of jobs and buying back shares. The plan is to lay off up to 16 per cent of the 55,000-strong workforce, shedding between 7,000 to 9,000 jobs via redundancy …
I thought that slide was already complete around the time it split up, and now they are slowly sliding into bankruptcy. Since they are so heavily dependent on printing and PCs, two shrinking industries with ever thinner margins, I expect they'll complete this slide by the end of the next decade.
'create shareholder value'- corporate speak for "board bonus time". Steal employees livelihoods for financial gain come bonus time. While some staff cutbacks would be necessary, let's not lose sight of why they are necessary - changing market conditions, antiquated services and corporate mismanagement over many years.
With less employees to do the job. Sure, that's going to work.
As of now, I am just waiting for the CEO who will whittle down employee count to 10,000 and spout the same bullshit.
Being CEO in a large corporation is apparently easy : all you have to do is have no soul and cull the staff numbers. Your bonus is ensured, and in the worse case, you have your golden parachute made from the tears of all those people you fired.
Do corporate executives genuinely not realize that generic buzzword-bingo (e.g. this example of "advancing our leadership, disrupting industries and aggressively transforming the way we work") actively turns off most of those that read it?
What sort of lobotomy takes place for somebody to think that this is anything *but* the exact opposite of useful (much less inspiring) writing? Heck, you could argue that passing around tequila shots and hiring Run D-M-C is *less* inappropriate than that anodyne garbage in a press release where you announce axing a fifth of the workforce.
No, they don't. The blather they spout isn't for employees and the rest of us. It's for the board and investors. Share holder value is everything to them. Products, sales, and a work environment the encourages those things seem to be disappearing.
"Honey, I see an opportunity to increase family shareholder value by advancing my leadership, disrupting the neighborhood and aggressively transforming the way I work. This means controlling costs and getting increased buy-in from the guys at the golf club. So I'm kicking one of the kids out of the house and rightsizing my marital commitments by replacing you with a 22 year old with enhanced assets. But don't worry! I've had you reclassified from wife to exempt workforce, and HR will be along to notify you of your severance package. Meanwhile here's a cardboard box for your belongings, take your time over filling it, you've got till lunchtime."
...and so begins the demise of HP then. Same old CEO sh*t - kick out the people who make the difference, keep the shareholders happy and cream the bonuses. All the while, spewing forth the expected lingo/jargon to try and keep the wolves at bay while they 'restructure'. Unfortunately, that word 'restructure' means lay-offs just due bolster the bottom line. HP will go the same way as IBM, who now have about 2 staff left. HP can digitally transform and disappear up their own ethernet cable for all I care.
I was made redundant by an American blue chip electronics corp a week after our R&D division made it's first ever profit, causing me to cancel my mortgage insurance. It seemed awful at the time but try getting sympathy from 21 year olds today who can only dream of owning a house or having a full time job.
An IBM employee pal said, "Well, you've worked there five years, at least you'll have five months redundancy money" - I got five weeks pay off.
Again, I don't expect sympathy from these HP former employees, quite the reverse. I got another job within the five weeks so was able to keep my cottage. I still recall my first day in a Job Centre though, I sat on the seat thinking someone would eventually call me, and sat there all day unnoticed. And that was the good old days under Thatcher.
She was working In Spango Valley, Greenock. It was an interesting miles long conveyor belt of a plant, so long they used to have to mini-bus the workers to the canteen.
That was life in 'Silicon Glen' in the early nineties, jumping job to job as companies closed up and relocated to the far east, or to the RoI, as government subsidies dried up here.
My personal opinion: HP has been a zombie company since the Fiorina days, whose focus has not been on creating relevant technology for its customers, but finding novel methods to expoit them.
I'm prepared for many thumbs down: However, If you are talented and hardworking, and you come to realize your firm's raison d'etre is build legal and technogical hurdles so people can't replace their printer ink with any ink other than your own, then it is time to reflect on whether that is the purpose you wish to devote your life's work.
"We are taking bold and decisive actions as we embark on our next chapter," he said. "We see significant opportunities to create shareholder value and we will accomplish this by advancing our leadership, disrupting industries and aggressively transforming the way we work."
No. You're not. You're recycling the same old rhetoric shit that got HP into the mess its in now. The only 'shareholder value' you'll see will be short term, the 'advancing our leadership' is just the top brass advancing their own agenda (aka lining pockets while they can), and the only industries HP will disrupt is that of their customers (whom I am sure don't *want* to be disrupted). The only vaguely true bit is about transforming the way HP work - ie make it a shittier place to work with a shittier outcome for their customers...
Its sad. I know a lot of really good people in HP.
The world of IT is experiencing yet another massive wave of change,( cloud services, consumerisation etc) and the likes of HP, Oracle,IBM etc are swimming against it and drowning, rather than surfing that wave. This much the same as what happened to the likes of DEC back in the day. I'd expect the likes of HP and HPE to go under eventually ...or remain as a very small niche player at best.
I've been told that the increasing life expectancy will force the governments to increase the retirement age, that I'll probably have to retire when I'll be close to 70 years of age, that it will be the same for everyone else, but ... when the powerful corporation wants to get rid of some workers and the European law don't allow to make people redundant so easily the government dutifully funds with public money their early retirement programs.
HP board supporting the purchasing of companies like Autonomy for multiples of their value and then later writing off the losses. Now the people (different or same) in the same positions as those who lost the money pay themselves bonuses and fire the workers that earn the company far more than they are paid. Stop burning money on bad decisions and you would be able to keep your workers. There was a court case regarding who knew what, a possible lack of due diligence or did Autonomy cook the books. Those CEO's etc. are paid the big bucks to know what they are doing and don't trust everything you are told.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
