Hewlett Packard Enterprise Is Said to Plan About 5k Job Cuts
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HP spent a billion and a half dollars to buy them in 2010 and then immediately didn't seem to be able to do anything with it. They ignored needed updates while competitors got better every year. They didn't even seem to be able to actually sell the thing - I had a large client who wanted to upgrade to the latest version (more than a million dollars in licensing costs alone), and couldn't get anyone at HPE to return their calls to actually sell him the thing; after six months of trying to give them his already-approved budget, they gave up and bought a competing product.
Now they've sold it off to Micro Focus, who seem to be a company whose business model is milking dying software for support and professional services money.
HPE is an organization that has grown so dysfunctional that it's essentially incapable of operating. Somehow I doubt laying off 5k people is going to help that very much.
All of those products were good for their time, but they never really advanced.
As one small example, LoadRunner is load testing software. When writing load tests you use it in interactive mode, but it would be nice to actually run the tests from a server in the background. You can do this... but any errors will POP A MODAL WINDOW! Serious-fucking-ly!
Also -- you can not only run it on a single "server in the background" but to a whole slew of load generators if you like. You can take those same scripts and reuse them via BPM too. Even long in the tooth, it's still an impressive suite for its breadth of solution. JMeter, Selenium, etc really aren't in the same category as LoadRunner, and yes New Relic and AppDynamics are lovely, but give me Diagnostics any day.
Though with ArcSight, there really is no reason it had to go this way. When HP bought them, they were the undisputed market leader in an extremely lucrative and growing segment that has continued to grow in the years since.
If CA is a like a trucking company that buys old but still serviceable trucks on the cheap, and then runs them into the ground without maintenance, HPE and ArcSight is like buying a Ferrari at top price, leaving it to molder in the woods somewhere for a decade, then selling it for scrap. Just a ridiculous waste by a company that has nothing going for it but momentum.
Tax law used to facilitate this kind of thing, too, because of goodwill writedowns. Might still be true - I don't know.
How many HP employees liked HP's image for real (quality, engineering) ? They should spin off.
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.
Similarly, I started looking to leave my first job out of university when they started offshoring some of the engineer positions to Ukraine. They weren't laying anyone off in the US but it was clear that they were trying to hire more people in Ukraine, which might put downward pressure on the wage raises of the US-based workforce, so I started looking and got out of there within months. The offshoring never did quite work out for them though (turns out that it's hard to offshore consultants).
I think this usually factors into the number of people laid off. Yahoo did a pretty similar layoff in early 2016, after promising 15% cut in workforce. The number of people that left on the day of was much lesser, but an equal number of people left in the aftermath. My old team went down from 30+ to around 5 before hiring other people and building up to a reasonable size again.
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.
I hate this kind of nonsense. You can't just get rid of thousands of people then say "efficiency" and retain full productivity. At a place like HP that's bidding on 8 or 9 figure deals, you absolutely can't function without a sizable bureaucracy.
After watching HPE for a number of years my guess is that in a few months they'll add double or triple this number of layoffs to an offshore team.
Here's the key: when businesses develop dominance in a market, they get fat margins - and they often just 'hire'. It becomes instinctive to think that 'people create value' and so they hire. Moreover - VP's, Directors, Managers are all trying to build their status, and they 'push to hire'.
I worked at a post-startup-stage high-growth company, and my VP was given directive to 'hire 100 people'. Completely not driven by business needs, or project needs, or ROI. 'Just hire'.
There is sometimes good strategic reasoning for 'just staffing' up i.e. scrape all of the talent in an area way from competitors, be a 'real company' to validate the upcoming IPO etc.. but it's really perverse.
Google, FB, MS - all guilty of this. Regular companies just the same.
I'll bet 1/2 of finance today could be replaced by computers - or frankly nothing. 1/2 of Hedge Funds could just put their money in indexes, drop their staff and get the same results.
Large successful companies often spend billions on 'new projects' that are doomed to fail - one could argue that 'failure' is part of the innovative process, yes, but it might be more efficient to invest/partner with startups.
When big, lumbering companies start to wane, well, they can't afford all the graft and have to start letting go.
It's an odd cycle, and it's surprisingly not as directly related to productivity as we might want to imagine.
I once worked with a large internal marketing team of maybe 25 people, they did almost nothing. Nobody was really sure what they were there for. They 'did stuff'. They were smart, nice. But they were very irrelevant - and I took pains not to discount their effort, i.e. not realize that they were 'important but unrecognized' cogs in the wheel. No. They were hired 'for hiring sake' and 'worked' for the sake of 'work'. This is common. A lot of big, entrenched industries are like this.
Maybe so, but, being inefficient, chances that they'll identify the RIGHT 10% to cut are pretty low.
The thing is, they start by cutting front-line employees instead of the root cause of inefficiency: management and bureaucracy. It's best to immediately fire the managers that were hiring for the sake of status.
HP is a dinosaur. They are just a machine that was setup, doing whatever they did before, and won't really be able to change.
Because they are in tech, it's unlikely they will be able to 'turn around' - it's too competitive.
Maybe KMart or Sears maybe under the right management could have turned around. Maybe. A cracker company. An insurer. But not HP. What are they going to do, AI?
And I don't mean 'strategic layoffs' - like MS has done - that's just somewhat ruthless restructuring.
I don't see how IBM or HP truly recover.
One interesting addition may be Cisco, someday. Not yet though.
No, they can't. Organizations don't work that way. People don't show up to work literally doing nothing, they have some kind of workload that will go belly-up if they just don't show up the next day.
Yes, many organizations could be made much more efficient, through restructuring, automation, flatter management structures, etc. But it doesn't happen overnight, and if you try to make it happen overnight, then a lot of the workload just ends up being forgotten about until the customer steps in the door and reminds you in such a way that it becomes critical. Trying to reduce the size of a company needs to be carefully planned and executed over time to do so without affecting operations.
Large sudden layoffs, which is to say large layoffs which need to be executed quickly, mean that the company doesn't care about the hit to operations, which means that there are cash flow problems or worse.
50% of what people do in large organizations is a waste of time. It doesn't matter how hard they work.
"Large sudden layoffs, which is to say large layoffs which need to be executed quickly, mean that the company doesn't care about the hit to operations, which means that there are cash flow problems or worse."
No. Not at all. Corporate raiders since the 1980's have shown this. Hedge Funds see slack, they come in and buy the company, cut the slack and make it profitable. It's not uncommon.
This is not the same thing as literally doing nothing. A waste of time is spending hours changing values around in Excel week after week for a report an executive will spend 30 seconds looking at (if that) instead of automating your job away. Literally doing nothing is taking long lunches, frequent water cooler breaks, and playing around on your phone for so long that your workstation auto-locks from lack of activity.
> Corporate raiders since the 1980's have shown this. Hedge Funds see slack, they come in and buy the company, cut the slack and make it profitable.
No corporate raider cuts slack and achieves profitability overnight. A few weeks, maybe, but overnight? No. Especially not in an era where automation infrastructure can't be built overnight.
We don't actually disagree here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/71kkr0/thank_you_...
http://fortune.com/2017/09/22/hp-hpe-meg-whitman/
She tried to be governor and I think ever since a few people have put her on a short list. At the end of that article, she seems to be portrayed as uninterested in the proposition.
I get the ire, but the world is a dirty place.
HP/E is way too bloated and IMO has very poor management. They have a nice patent portfolio, though.
I think in almost every situation you shouldn't be spending a half-mil on a logo redesign. That's super excessive.
http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/negative-space-logo-de...
How is that an excessive one-time marketing expense for a company with an annual revenue of $50 billion? That's 0.001% of revenue and is just a drop in the overall marketing budget. Engineers are quick to dismiss marketing and sales, but the reality is they are critical to any business. As much as we would like, technically superior products do not just sell themselves. It is especially funny because advertising is the bread and butter of two of the largest tech companies, Facebook and Google. As another poster said, this is creating a brand, not just a logo.
I guarantee you, it was extremely hard to produce. $10k for three initial designs, $150k for dozens of meetings gaining approval from twelve tiers of managers, $50k to consolidate and synthesize hours of feedback from everyone and their nephew, $10k to fly out and present to the CEO, another $200k over again to scrap it all and re-do it from scratch, and then $80k to figure out how to get something that will not be vetoed by the 2,000 people who have involved themselves in the process.
A green rectangle is pretty much the only thing that can survive that meatgrinder.
Also look like companies like BAE, General Dynamics, Medco, and other fortune 100 companies, most of them are just text. How much do you think they paid for those logos? I mean literally anyone with a text editor can make one of these logos, but for branding it IS a 500k decision to make
http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-06-11
The ironic thing is that Lucent later adopted almost the same shape as their real company logo!
http://www.famouslogos.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/lucent...
Who's right?
[1]: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4104846-dell-technologies-d...
HPE also inherited HP's research labs, which Dell never quite had anything similar too, and medical division where they make a lot of very important medical/hospital devices.
ETA: HP at one point was much more similar to GE than Dell, and HPE is all the "fun" stuff that wasn't Dell-like. (The Dell like side is what got spun off into "new" HP.)
Last I tried to read one of those PR articles (probably posted here to HN), it sounded like memristors still exist as active research, even though that was supposed to be the gamechanging basis of The Machine, but they are The Machine branding software projects now and non-memristor product tech that is kind of memristor-esque.
But again, that's merely my mostly hearsay-informed, lay readings of tea leaves.
(It's starting to feel a bit like IBM's Watson where the "brand" The Machine has multiple meanings depending on which team/marketer/sales-person/researcher you are talking to.)
Will MicroFocus retool their software support pipeline? I hope so, because I'm starting to advocate we drop all their software because their first line of support is utterly incompetent. For example, I had to submit a ticket recently about a product we use. On the form, I selected the closest option to the software we had, say Product X, though my exact product wasn't listed. My inquiry was extremely specific and could only possibly be about one thing. Yet the first tech just threw the ticket back at me asking "can you clarify what version of product X you're on?"
It made absolutely no difference what version of PRoduct X I was on, so I wasted a good 48 hours so far. Then I wasted another 48 hours educating this person on what the product I was using even did.
If you need enterprise support at this point with HPE/MicroFocus, you have to escalate your tickets immediately and act pissed off or you certainly will be by their inept first line because they make it rather difficult to actually get someone on the phone that knows their own products.
Edit: To be clear, this happens with everyone I've ever met that has to engage HPE software support. I'm genuinely curious if anyone has any positive experiences because I've yet to encounter one myself or by proxy.
If your issues are with the BSM / APM stack, shoot me an email I'll be glad to help. Also happy to refer you to MicroFocus partners that I trust and would use myself.
We just interviewed a PM from HPE and to our surprise, he makes ~$180k a year. We hired an awesome candidate for $80k.
And no, finding a job in 2 weeks is not realistically obtainable for a senior engineer. Try 6 months to a year. This whole 'developer shortage' BS I keep hearing needs to stop.
And besides, most employers' hiring timelines (from first contact to first day on the job) are longer than 2 weeks.
No BS or bad vibes; Just real peeps writing code and having fun doing it and always looking to add great people to the team because the demand is high and experienced talent is in short supply.
* you shouldn't work for a job you are not going to be happy about (of course you can't be too picky)
* because interview sucks (numerous highly regarded engineers were turned down by big tech companies)
* because some jobs require you to move despite you like the job
Good for HPE PM though.
"Two weeks notice" is a social nicety, good for maintaining good relationships and status. If you don't care about those things, you can quit or fire on the spot.
Note that depending on unions (rare in IT) and mandatory employee representation (Betriebsrat) for big companies, firing people can be harder, especially for long-term employees.
Examples of this would be if you're caught stealing or harassing a coworker - or if your employer is breaking the law by repeatedly not paying you on time or endangering your health etc. You cannot be fired for being late once. Your employer has to document that he has told you "Do not be late again, or else" (and you have to sign off on this).
Work load may not be unreasonable. Usual work load is 40 hour weeks, and overtime is dependent on contractual definitions. Some people are (by union) not able to work more, others are exempt from overtime restrictions (managers), others will receive money or free time as compensation. You can enter contracts that specify a certain amount of overtime work, but unless they are specific enough, those clauses are void. You cannot get less than 24 days / year of holidays, you must not work on Sunday (unless: emergency or working in an exempt job, like healthcare), and employers risk fines/prison if they deny you those rights.
Overtime usually requires an explicit order, and is limited to 48h total work time /week. Anything more (for example: seasonal workers) needs to be compensated with free time in the following 6 months. So an employer can demand a death march for a project, but even that is limited to not more than 10 h/day.
That said, while the law may be on your side, people may work more than the contractually defined amount "because it's necessary / they need me there" or other strange reasons.
(note: there are exceptions for all rules. When your data center is down for some reason, you are not going to tell your boss "sorry, my 8 hours today are up, find someone else to restart those servers. I'll be back tomorrow.")
On your last day, you (should) receive your letter of recommendation (Arbeitszeugnis), which by law needs to be a positive statement of what you have done, enabling you to get another job.
Slacking off in the last 4 weeks _may_ cause your employer to give you slightly less than a glowing review. Some employers take those letters seriously and if your last boss writes "he did the best he could with the tasks that were given to him", that's not going to reflect well on you.
edit: there is a whole "secret" language for those certificates of employment / recommendation letters, where employers may try to sneak in outrageous stuff ("He had an open ear for the concerns of his female coworkers" - grabbing them or being otherwise inappropriate towards them ), but since most companies do not want to haggle in front of a judge about the exact phrasing, it mostly is written in an okay way. Often you will be told: "Write this letter yourself, you know best what you did here, I am going to sign off on it."
Read https://www.thelayoff.com and typically any big companies layoff discussion will mention the severance package being offered.
At the same time, they can fire us (usually being called into HR room and forced to resign) at will. Even if there is any compensation, it will be 3 months basic pay (basic is only a percentage of the full salary).
Thus we get to enjoy the bad things of capitalism without any of the protection it offers.
As it is, I think you do have all the protection capitalism offers.
They're not saying, "you're laid off, effective today, but you have to stay for another two months", they're saying "you're laid off in two months, and your job duties are now to train your replacement". Saying "no" means resigning.
if ($money_to_be_received > $aggravation ) { remain_here(); happy_whistles(); } else { say_bye_bye_suzi(); }
Else if you flip your desk and walk out, you get your PTO and now you have no job.
Excellent resource for HP/HPE staff leaving the company.
On top of this, one of their VPs made a hard sell of the position, which, didn't make me feel particularly comfortable so I politely declined.
This article didn't mention Arkansas, or Software positions at all. I'm curious in any SME's opinion if I've dodged a bullet?
IBM is also building up a cloud provider solution, in addition to Google, Microsoft, and Amazon's solutions. I feel like a lot of shops are pretty entrenched in AWS, and HPE is kinda new and seems to be pivoting a lot. Somethings got to give in that market, no?
These days everyone I know codes on a Mac. Most bulk order desktops I see are Dells.
I ask seriously, with no intention to troll: what is HP good for these days?
Your point of view is too common here, people only look at the consumer products and have no knowledge of operations.
It's really hard to understand this from HN startup / open source / Go/Rust/NodeJS bubble but most of IT is enterprise and it's the reason why companies like HP, Dell, Oracle, SAP are making billions of dollars even though to average HN poster paying for any of their horrible products seems crazy.
Edit: and as somebody mentioned also selling all sort of server / networking stuff
I'd also like to mention massive waste of money in enterprise IT though. I have seen big enterprise companies buy licenses for products from a consultancy company which costs tens of millions per year and it never ends up being used ;)
Rewriting everything in a hipster / HN favorite language is obviously naive but there is a lot of money being wasted now in enterprise IT that could be saved and used more efficiently (like R&D and innovation). Enterprise is area ripe for disruption imho.
A lot of what enterprise software does is manage complexity. Massive amounts of complexity from interdependent systems and 30 legacy customers with byzantine business rules and contractual obligations to use this or that data format on this or that protocol. Processes that involve hand-written paper documents that you aren't at liberty to change but you must somehow account for them.
Startups like to write new, shiny things. They like to "move fast and break things". They like to write a single "beautiful RESTful API" for their users. It's a totally different world.
When you work in the enterprise world, things like rules engines and BPMN and enterprise service buses and Java/Spring with its Factories of Factories start making a lot of sense.
I always bristle a bit when I hear "enterprise" used on HN. It's usually a pejorative, and I get the sense many people think it's just a bunch of overpaid consultants scamming a bunch of hapless dupes out of millions because they just don't know any better. Not accusing you of this of course, but there's an awful lot of condescension about the topic in general.
And then I hear things like "Oh you don't need enterprise software because you can use Gmail for your email now"...
But this is about HPE which is the company that sells Servers, networking equipment and enterprise "Solutions", not the company that sells computers and printers.
[1]https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/1489/is-mac-os-x-un...
1. The UI is horrible and not amenable to sufficient customization. Xfce, bspwm, and i3 are all substantially better from a user experience and getting-things-done standpoint.
2. The availability of tooling for basically everything other than graphics design or video editing is significantly worse than for Linux.
The UI thing is entirely subjective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS
And I doubt that HP/UX was 5,000 people within HP.
https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/05/23/last-itanium-long-la...
They plan to containerize HP/UX and run on x64 Linux, that sounds to me like it's just a plan for a run out to EOL.
A very undignified end to a wonderful OS (BSDs aside!)
The days of paying vendors massive sums of money for an operating system are over.
I'm wondering what their strategy is going forward. Are they still in the cloud business or are they gonna stick to the hardware/server side of things.