I worked at HP in the early 2000s and it was such a miserable experience I can't even describe it. I honestly felt like my spirit was being snuffed out every time I walked through the door. I didn't even make it a month.
This is a good thing for the survival of the company. I worked at HP and let me tell you, from what I saw, HP was the most bloated company I have ever seen. The horrible work ethic by the full time employees wasn't the exception but more the rule. I saw jsut about every employee take half day lunch breaks, and they'd hire contractors to do their work. I found it so disgusting that I exited the company. The full time employees I saw did NOTHING all day. They were basically all 25 year career employees that sat around doing NO actual work and they could get away with it because their manager and their managers manager was doing the same thing. HP is a horribly run company. Just about everyone there at least in the division I worked at was dead weight just showing up to collect a huge paycheck.
Hi, I am an ex HP and surely can confirm HP has lost its battle in winning the hearts and minds of its employees. 2008 recession, Mark Hurd took $52 million and later after 2 months declared 25% loss and eventually leading to firing spree, which in US also lead to one HP employee commiting suicide.. I bet this is not what Bill and Dave envisioned for HP. Employees hates the phony speech he gives to build up employee morale but reality is everyone hates him.
No one knows why Mark is fired. Bad business deals or sexual harrassmenT. And given the mammoth size of HP, no one will know.
Brand HP is somewhat a mirage, suferficial and very calous from inside.
It's 21'st centuary, its all about packaging, no one cares whats inside anymore..
Every employee is saying one thing right now 'I dont care if Mark stays or goes'...
Wow this is a pretty huge cut. However, I won't lie/sugar coat it -- I think of HP as one of the most stereotypically bad big companies (where you can go in get a job, and almost never get fired, despite not doing very much work), so this is probably a great move for them. I can't imagine it really takes 300,000 people to do what HP does.
I'm sure there are departments that do cutting edge hardware/software work at HP, and I just haven't seen them yet
I work for a big company that uses HP software. It's horrible. If HP is anything like the company I work, HP is full of people getting free money for showing up and doing nothing.
My thing is, if you know you are getting free money you have to expect it to end at some point. Have a contingency plan.
When I joined HP in 2001 out of college, the first thing my boss had me do was read the book "The HP Way." It was by Dave Packard and outlined their history and philosophy for doing business. My boss was an HP lifer and loved the HP culture and made all his direct reports read the book. Sadly, reading the book just made me realize what a different company I had joined since Carly's changes were soon felt through the organization. Even more so when HP merged with Compaq and instilled their Texan-style top-down management approach and booted out the more distributed and democratic approaches towards innovation and decision making. I finally left in 2006 when the Compaq IT management started forcing all IT employees to move to Houston or Palo Alto (I had just moved to Chicago).
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 some of the smaller guys too) — he's their man.
He's feeling the heat.
He's made it through the absorption of Compaq, and when Compaq absorbed Digital. He's won a ton of awards with each company he's been at, frequently getting high marks for his professionalism, timeliness, availability, willingness to mentor the new guys, stuff like that. He also brought in more than $4MM in revenue for HP in one fiscal year, even though sales wasn't his job (I think it came out to 28 different contracts?) The next highest was $600k. It's been like that for 25 years.
Needless to say, he's pretty damn good at his job.
He's late 50s, but in amazing health. My mother, however, is in her 50s, and is in absolutely terrible health.
They cannot afford to lose healthcare coverage. My mom wouldn't make it, and my father would probably lose his mind. They just refinanced their 220k mortgage and put new siding on their suburban house, added new gutters, got the roof redone, stuff like that.
Please, don't make this about how shitty of an investment that might have been. That's beside the point.
He makes a good living — he filed $98k last year, but that's a _ton_ of overtime.
All he's known is hardware for the last 30 years. He's not a sysadmin and will never be. He's not some low-level nerd. He's the product of an unnotable tech school and he's worked his ass off to keep things afloat. I don't have the best relationship with him at all, but he's a human and I picked up my people skills (if you can call them that) from him.
Who would hire him at this age, with this kind of experience?
It's really sad. When I graduated from college HP was where you really wanted to work. They had all kinds of cool high tech test equipment and parts. And they had a policy of never laying off people - during industry downturns they'd hang on to everybody and tough it out until the economy recovered.
For whatever reason they spun off the high tech bits (as Agilent) and became a PC/printer company. I'll never understand that decision.
Having previously worked at HP for 10+ years I can clearly state that HP is always in the midst of some layoff. After the first Carly purge of 2001 they decided to make it stealthy instead of big bang.
Edit: I decided to share what the Carly purge was like. We all knew that on a certain day we'd have the layoffs. Walk into the office. Conference room doors had windows on them, they were all papered over. Conf rooms had lots of boxes of tissues and bottles of water. You'd sit at your desk and someone would come by and tap you on the shoulder. It was pretty miserable. After that experience I think they decided that they'd announce stuff like this but do it much lower key, not all on the same day and very privately.
I used to work at HP -- it was a very depressing work environment. As the article mentions, Hurd was absolutely despised and his "cost cutting" was very much ridiculous. The employees were left with nothing, salaries/jobs were cut, even seemingly cheap luxuries like tea and water. We moved buildings twice during my tenure there, each time to a smaller workspace.
As an outsider before I joined, I can say its reputation far exceeds reality. Leaving for YC was a no-brainer. On a sidenote it seems the only ones left are the "lifers," all of the younger engineers have moved on. Short the stock.
What's really sad about this is when I graduated from college HP was a highly sought after place to work because they had a lot of "cool" products and prided themselves on never having had a layoff.
Then they spun off the interesting bits as Agilent and decided competing head-to-head with other conglomerates in saturated markets was a good business plan.
When I left HP around 6 years ago there were maybe 3 HP employees left working on calculators, no joke. They were doing their best to keep the dream alive, but they just didn't have a lot of backing or resources.
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