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.
I have been "close" to HP a few years back, and while visiting the California HP hotspots I was only hearing positive things about H, P, and their ones close to them.
I need to get back in there again and leave a couple of coins in that desk :)
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.
As someone who worked in the HP company during the Carly, Mark, Leo and Meg eras, I’ve heard some old timers say much better things about the company.
Even when I started, The HP Way was known and alive at least in some pockets of the company. It was what inspired many to give our best despite the changing environment.
After Carly, things only got worse with Mark Hurd. Cutting costs was the one and only trick he knew.
Now the company remains a tiny piece of its former self, having been split and sold to others in pieces.
Any company that looks up to and wants to emulate The HP Way would be good to be employed in.
Perhaps HP’s biggest sin is how they ditched their super-cool, PA-RISC high quality workstations and servers, how they charged premiums for the hardware and the software, how one couldn’t get HP-UX, its compilers or even the mirroring software unless one was an approved HP “strategic partner”... while a busted-ass, barely good enough, cheap, intel-based PC tin bucket was eating their lunch.
There is no sadder story in American capitalism than the decline of HP from a wonderful equipment engineering company to a racket for selling tiny little tubs of overpriced ink. Think a young Steve Jobs would be excited to get a job there now?
That was years ago. The HP that exists today is certain a place things go to die. I'm not sure what HP does these days but like IBM it keeps tugging along on its brand name without dying.
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.
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