So, I guess now is not a good time to call customer service?

basemetal: So, I guess now is not a good time to call customer service?

Was it ever?

HP said its sales for the quarter were $30.7 billion, down 3 percent from a year ago. It had a profit of $1.6 billion, down 31 percent from the same period a year ago, which amounted to 80 cents per share.

Wow, a profit of only $1.6 billion? Man, why don't they just fire all the U.S. employees then!

I imagine most of these cuts will be in the desktop field. I see a fair number of HP laptops and HP is well-known on the server side, but its been quite a while since I've seen more than one or two HP desktops.

dletter: HP said its sales for the quarter were $30.7 billion, down 3 percent from a year ago. It had a profit of $1.6 billion, down 31 percent from the same period a year ago, which amounted to 80 cents per share.

Wow, a profit of only $1.6 billion? Man, why don't they just fire all the U.S. employees then!

Thus the blessing and curse of being a public company, as Facebook is soon to experience. Sure, it's $1.6billion, but it's only $.80/share. That's the number any shareholder cares about.

IF YOU CUT THEIR CORPORATE TAXES THEY'LL REHIRE EVERYONE TROLO

I guess ink prices have reached their peak?

TheBeastOfYuccaFlats: I imagine most of these cuts will be in the desktop field. I see a fair number of HP laptops and HP is well-known on the server side, but its been quite a while since I've seen more than one or two HP desktops.

I was at the University of Washington library the other day and for some reason, EVERY computer they have is a HP workstation computer. I have no idea what idiot signed the contract, and how many hookers the HP rep bought for him, but I was floored that someone thought it was a good use of university funds to buy a top of the line i7-powered workstations to run the card catalog lookup terminal and the print station.

They want to make the workforce more Compaq.

Got laid off from HP in 2009, so really getting a kick....

Seriously: HP needs to figure out what they don't want to suck at, and head in that direction.

Everything I've seen so far suggests they are getting rid of those people because they want to refocus their efforts and resources into areas where they have no presence (tablet, mobile, cloud, etc.).

Another thing, HP employs about 320,000 people. From personal experience, at a corporation of that size there is a lot of dead wood to trim. They were also offering retirement packages to get some of the older entrenched people out of the company. If I had to bet, I would put my money on them hiring a lot more people with skill sets more aligned to the direction they want to go in.

They aren't doing as well as Apple, but they aren't doing all that poorly either.

HP was a good company that made good products when its founders were still living. Now they are Hewlett-Packard-Bell. They manufacture garbage and try to push it on suckers. That is not a viable business model.

BeatrixK: Got laid off from HP in 2009, so really getting a kick....

Seriously: HP needs to figure out what they don't want to suck at, and head in that direction.

2008 for me, after EDS was bought up.

Mad_Radhu: I was at the University of Washington library the other day and for some reason, EVERY computer they have is a HP workstation computer. I have no idea what idiot signed the contract, and how many hookers the HP rep bought for him, but I was floored that someone thought it was a good use of university funds to buy a top of the line i7-powered workstations to run the card catalog lookup terminal and the print station.

I see a couple of possibilities:

1) The catalog company provided a turnkey setup, so the uni didn't really see that as a line-item.

2) University purchasing contracts may be such that those are the standard PC, and any deviation from that would have been a PITA.

TheBeastOfYuccaFlats: I imagine most of these cuts will be in the desktop field. I see a fair number of HP laptops and HP is well-known on the server side, but its been quite a while since I've seen more than one or two HP desktops.

Services.

If there are any former-EDS'ers, they had better start clearing out thier virtual-desks.

M-G: Mad_Radhu: I was at the University of Washington library the other day and for some reason, EVERY computer they have is a HP workstation computer. I have no idea what idiot signed the contract, and how many hookers the HP rep bought for him, but I was floored that someone thought it was a good use of university funds to buy a top of the line i7-powered workstations to run the card catalog lookup terminal and the print station.

I see a couple of possibilities:

1) The catalog company provided a turnkey setup, so the uni didn't really see that as a line-item.

2) University purchasing contracts may be such that those are the standard PC, and any deviation from that would have been a PITA.

HP's corporate side also has sales on certain preconfigured models. Buying i7 powered desktops may have been cheaper than custom configured lesser machines.

TheBeastOfYuccaFlats: dletter: HP said its sales for the quarter were $30.7 billion, down 3 percent from a year ago. It had a profit of $1.6 billion, down 31 percent from the same period a year ago, which amounted to 80 cents per share.

Wow, a profit of only $1.6 billion? Man, why don't they just fire all the U.S. employees then!

Thus the blessing and curse of being a public company, as Facebook is soon to experience. Sure, it's $1.6billion, but it's only $.80/share. That's the number any shareholder cares about.

Can some business guru explain this to me? Why do they care what the profits per share are? Is it because the higher-ups in the company own stock or stock options? Are the biggest shareholders going to can the CEO? Shouldn't they be more concerned with maintaining the business long-term? Why not move these employees to a potentially more productive area? As long as a profit is made (after reinvestment to grow the business), why do they care whether it is $1 or $10 billion dollars? Shouldn't share price reflect long-term business success and not short-term business modifications?

It seems to me that this focus on short-term profits for the purposes of increasing shareholder value is actually a real problem long-term. Perhaps the whole idea of a corporation where the managers have no real stake in the long-term outcome is problematic.

I am genuinely interested in hearing from someone who knows more about this than I do.

gameshowhost: IF YOU CUT THEIR CORPORATE TAXES THEY'LL REHIRE EVERYONE TROLO hire temporary employees to fill these positions at half the pay of the previous group and with no benefits

It's all a con game.

DHMOlogist: Can some business guru explain this to me? Why do they care what the profits per share are?

It's a metric that the shareholders use to judge whether or not other people will want the shares they have, and, thus, drive up the price.

Is it because the higher-ups in the company own stock or stock options?

Partially, yes.

Are the biggest shareholders going to can the CEO?

There is not necessarily a 1-to-1 correlation between the largest shareholders of any given equity and the membership on its Board, but if the performance is lackluster enough, they can agitate for such a thing to happen, sure. They own the company, after all.

Shouldn't they be more concerned with maintaining the business long-term?

One would think. However, a public company has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders to provide profit as it's primary means of existence.

Why not move these employees to a potentially more productive area?

This is a more nuanced question, and probably depends on what positions they're eliminating, so can't answer that one.

As long as a profit is made (after reinvestment to grow the business), why do they care whether it is $1 or $10 billion dollars?

Because in order to beat inflation, you need the stock price to rise by a certain amount. Furthermore, in order to sell the equity at some higher price than inflation, the demand for that stock needs to be higher than the balance point of demand. So, what you end up with is people wanting higher profits in order to make it more likely that other people will want to pay for the stock, on the hypothesis that they, in turn, will be able to sell it again later.

Shouldn't share price reflect long-term business success and not short-term business modifications?

The share price reflects how much the market is willing to pay for a single share, vs how willing the sellers are to sell one individual share. There's many, many, many, many methods by which people attempt to find the "real" value of a share for any company, some of which are rather meta, and that's where investment firms come in to play.

Then again, HFT systems work on a totally different paradigm which has nothing at all to do with valuation.

It seems to me that this focus on short-term profits for the purposes of increasing shareholder value is actually a real problem long-term.

You're not the first to think this, to be sure.

Perhaps the whole idea of a corporation where the managers have no real stake in the long-term outcome is problematic.

As well as this.

The main problem with both of those is that you would need to change the expectations of the shareholders, who, typically, are only in it to get returns that beat other investment vehicles.

DHMOlogist: Why do they care what the profits per share are?

Dividends and earning drive stock price, so when you show earnings and a fatty dividend your shareholders are happy. In this case, .80/share might not be terrible but if your earning were supposed to make it say, $1.05/share, your shareholders will be plenty pissed because now the stock price and the dividend are down.

/And investors aren't usually concerned about growing the business

DHMOlogist: Can some business guru explain this to me? Why do they care what the profits per share are?

For Wall St., profits per share (or more commonly, Earnings Per Share, EPS) are really just an easy shorthand number for comparing one quarter to another or one year to another. They don't mean anything intrinsically, and you can't compare two different companies using EPS as they will have different numbers of shares.

One of the problems with emphasizing EPS, though, is that you sometimes get a CEO who focuses on EPS for its own sake rather than for it represents. For example, one easy way to drive up EPS without doing anything to improve the underlying business is to buy back your own shares (instead of investing the cash in the business). Fewer shares outstanding equals higher EPS. Magic! (See: Mark Hurd).

Is it because the higher-ups in the company own stock or stock options? Are the biggest shareholders going to can the CEO? Shouldn't they be more concerned with maintaining the business long-term?

The last part of this question sort of answers the first. Yes they should be concerned with the long term, and granting stock to executives was supposed to incent/reward that. Unfortunately, many companies structured the packages badly and created the wrong incentives. In other companies, the comp was structured in such a way that the execs made out like bandits regardless of what the stock did or if they personally performed so badly that they got canned.

Why not move these employees to a potentially more productive area? As long as a profit is made (after reinvestment to grow the business), why do they care whether it is $1 or $10 billion dollars? Shouldn't share price reflect long-term business success and not short-term business modifications?

The amount of profit does matter because there is capital -- human and physical -- tied up in creating that profit. Suppose you had $10,000 to invest: You can put it in bonds and earn 2%, you can put in a CD and earn 4% or you can put it in shares of HP. You're only going to do the latter if investing in HP will return you more than the safe 4% you can get from the CD.

So in the short term, new investment will move away from companies that don't return a profit. Now you might (rightly) say that doesn't affect HP because when you buy $10,000 of existing HP stock, that money doesn't go to HP. But it does affect the price that HP can issue new stock at, which in turn affects what it costs HP to issue bonds or otherwise borrow money.

In the medium term, the profit is very important because it has to fund things like reinvestment, R&D, M&A, pay raises (yeah, yeah, I know) and all the other things a company has to do to stay relevant or grow.

And in the long term, the return on the capital tied up in the company will matter because if it's not high enough, somebody else who will acquire those assets in the belief they can generate more revenue from them, either by stripping the assets and selling them to recover their investment (e.g. Bain) or by running the company better and reaping the profits to recover their investment (e.g. Hathaway).

So the number we should really focus on is "return on capital invested" (a discipline that Jack Welch emphasized internally at GE to direct investment decisions).

But unfortunately neither professionals on Wall St. nor amateurs who take their cues from CNBC do so.

It seems to me that this focus on short-term profits for the purposes of increasing shareholder value is actually a real problem long-term. Perhaps the whole idea of a corporation where the managers have no real stake in the long-term outcome is problematic.

Yes. And yes. Unfortunately, the latter is harder than it looks. Stock options haven't worked out successfully (according to a recent study of CEOs of top companies listed on Britain's FTSE, there is zero correlation between performance and compensation). And it's possible for managers to have too much stake, like in the old days where your pension was held by the company and if the company went under, your pension went with it. And in some cases, having too much stake in the company has led unscrupulous execs into illegal/unethical actions in desperate attempts to save a company whose failure would cost them far more than just a job.

I am genuinely interested in hearing from someone who knows more about this than I do.

I'd say that I know barely more, but that won't stop me posting in Fark. With a little luck somebody who knows lots more will be along later today...

Ken VeryBigLiar: if your earning were supposed to make it say, $1.05/share, your shareholders will be plenty pissed because now the stock price and the dividend are down.

It's worth noting that the "supposed to" expectation can come from a whole lot of sources using a whole lot of methods. While the corporations typically give out what they predict will be their earnings per share before their financial reports are actually released, not all do (Google is notorious for not making predictions like that in public, for example).

Wow... Imaging how much more damage Meg Whitman would have done if she was elected in California!

Whitman/Fiorina for president 2016. We'll move all your jobs to India!

GO GOP!

And in a year we'll here that after a temporary spike in earnings, they're back down and they have to lay off even more people.

mtb9000: Another thing, HP employs about 320,000 people. From personal experience, at a corporation of that size there is a lot of dead wood to trim.

27,000 is over 8% of their workforce. That's not dead wood.

AMonkey'sUncle: They want to make the workforce more Compaq.

As someone in Houston allow me to say this

*twitch*

Fiorina can't get cancer enough times to pay for the damage she did to so many people.

mtb9000: Another thing, HP employs about 320,000 people. From personal experience, at a corporation of that size there is a lot of dead wood to trim.

Let's just hope that none of that "dead wood" happens to be in the middle-management layer which will be tasked with selecting those 27,000 workers...

Mad_Radhu: TheBeastOfYuccaFlats: I imagine most of these cuts will be in the desktop field. I see a fair number of HP laptops and HP is well-known on the server side, but its been quite a while since I've seen more than one or two HP desktops.

I was at the University of Washington library the other day and for some reason, EVERY computer they have is a HP workstation computer. I have no idea what idiot signed the contract, and how many hookers the HP rep bought for him, but I was floored that someone thought it was a good use of university funds to buy a top of the line i7-powered workstations to run the card catalog lookup terminal and the print station.

I bet THAT sales rep isn't laid off!

I read fark for the pics: BeatrixK: Got laid off from HP in 2009, so really getting a kick....

Seriously: HP needs to figure out what they don't want to suck at, and head in that direction.

2008 for me, after EDS was bought up.

2005 for me, at this point you have to start wondering if anyone works there at all anymore.

/best thing that ever happened to me

Mike Chewbacca: mtb9000: Another thing, HP employs about 320,000 people. From personal experience, at a corporation of that size there is a lot of dead wood to trim.

27,000 is over 8% of their workforce. That's not dead wood.

While I do agree that at times you go "hire crazy" and there are managers that are not doing a whole lot that the manager above and below them couldn't easily handle. And if you are not a profitable company, you need to make sure you don't have any employees/positions like that. But, as stated, they made $1.6 billion last quarter (not year, just 3 months).

I can't imagine the average person having a grasp that "having a profit of $1.6 billion in 3 months" equals "very necessary to can 33,000 people".

But, this goes back to what is being explained above.... public companies, once they go public, basically become entities who are there only to make the shareholders money, however they can. Obviously, you need to have a sound business model in place to begin, otherwise, nobody will become a shareholder. But, crap, if HP could somehow flip a switch and do something completely different than make computer products with all of their staff and double their profitability... they would do that. (Ignoring the fact that we are talking about HP and there isn't much innovative there we'd miss anyway if they did that).

Now maybe Mitt will take a closer look at Meg Whitman for VP. They can both play up their job creator bona fides.

Great_Milenko: hire temporary employees to fill these positions at half the pay of the previous group and with no benefits


Technically temporary workers cost more, but the good part about them is they don't cost you long term benefits, you can easily get rid of their contract when times are lean, and they don't count as part of your workforce. As a temporary worker when I first got into a field, I made more than people around me as just counting hourly wages, but their benefits packages means they cost the company almost double the wage in total.

dletter: While I do agree that at times you go "hire crazy" and there are managers that are not doing a whole lot that the manager above and below them couldn't easily handle. And if you are not a profitable company, you need to make sure you don't have any employees/positions like that. But, as stated, they made $1.6 billion last quarter (not year, just 3 months).

I can't imagine the average person having a grasp that "having a profit of $1.6 billion in 3 months" equals "very necessary to can 33,000 people".

Agreed. And no company hires 8% too many people. That's not dead wood, those are people in necessary positions. In this day and age, the easiest way to increase profits is to cut costs, and the easiest cost to cut is salary and benefits by laying people off. And it's absolutely ridiculous that a profit that large should result in an 8% workforce cut.

How the mighty have fallen. HP used to make the best printers out there. Now they make CRAP.

YOU SUCK NOW HP !

/ My ancient HP Laserjet4 and Photosmart 1215 are still running strong.

DHMOlogist: TheBeastOfYuccaFlats: dletter: HP said its sales for the quarter were $30.7 billion, down 3 percent from a year ago. It had a profit of $1.6 billion, down 31 percent from the same period a year ago, which amounted to 80 cents per share.

Wow, a profit of only $1.6 billion? Man, why don't they just fire all the U.S. employees then!

Thus the blessing and curse of being a public company, as Facebook is soon to experience. Sure, it's $1.6billion, but it's only $.80/share. That's the number any shareholder cares about.

Can some business guru explain this to me? Why do they care what the profits per share are? Is it because the higher-ups in the company own stock or stock options? Are the biggest shareholders going to can the CEO? Shouldn't they be more concerned with maintaining the business long-term? Why not move these employees to a potentially more productive area? As long as a profit is made (after reinvestment to grow the business), why do they care whether it is $1 or $10 billion dollars? Shouldn't share price reflect long-term business success and not short-term business modifications?

It seems to me that this focus on short-term profits for the purposes of increasing shareholder value is actually a real problem long-term. Perhaps the whole idea of a corporation where the managers have no real stake in the long-term outcome is problematic.

I am genuinely interested in hearing from someone who knows more about this than I do.

Ok.

Meg. Whitman.

That's all you need to know.

So, from reading this is yet another case of a company expecting indefinite upward growth. I remember asking a DM once at an old job I had in retail "What happens when the store plateaus and budgets aren't reachable not because of sales, but because of impossible expectations in growth?" Yeah, he in so many words said they fire the manager and bring someone else in.

Ivo Shandor: mtb9000: Another thing, HP employs about 320,000 people. From personal experience, at a corporation of that size there is a lot of dead wood to trim.

Let's just hope that none of that "dead wood" happens to be in the middle-management layer which will be tasked with selecting those 27,000 workers...

Heh. This happened at JC Penneys. They decided to eliminate about 75% of the lower management (supervisor positions), but let middle management choose who to go. At the store my GF works at, they let go of all of the good supervisors and let the completely worthless ones stay. She was highly amused by this and it's amazing how chaotic things have become. Oh well, another one bites the dust.

Mad_Radhu: TheBeastOfYuccaFlats: I imagine most of these cuts will be in the desktop field. I see a fair number of HP laptops and HP is well-known on the server side, but its been quite a while since I've seen more than one or two HP desktops.

I was at the University of Washington library the other day and for some reason, EVERY computer they have is a HP workstation computer. I have no idea what idiot signed the contract, and how many hookers the HP rep bought for him, but I was floored that someone thought it was a good use of university funds to buy a top of the line i7-powered workstations to run the card catalog lookup terminal and the print station.

You... you have no idea what you're talking about, do you?

Mike Chewbacca: mtb9000: Another thing, HP employs about 320,000 people. From personal experience, at a corporation of that size there is a lot of dead wood to trim.

27,000 is over 8% of their workforce. That's not dead wood.

This.

Talking to my boss today (we've both worked corporate IT for 20+ years)... he had a customer update mtg with HP today and it sounds like a lot of the tech people we've worked with for years are being forced into early retirement. And none of them are dead wood.

To an extent, IBM has already done this, and most of the recent service calls for my DC have been serviced by IBM people from 100 miles away, because IBM is apparently too farking cheap to have a support office in every large market they serve. Farking penny pinchers.

Kar98: Mad_Radhu: TheBeastOfYuccaFlats: I imagine most of these cuts will be in the desktop field. I see a fair number of HP laptops and HP is well-known on the server side, but its been quite a while since I've seen more than one or two HP desktops.

I was at the University of Washington library the other day and for some reason, EVERY computer they have is a HP workstation computer. I have no idea what idiot signed the contract, and how many hookers the HP rep bought for him, but I was floored that someone thought it was a good use of university funds to buy a top of the line i7-powered workstations to run the card catalog lookup terminal and the print station.

You... you have no idea what you're talking about, do you?

How does he not? I mean, I have no idea what the University is paying for the HP workstations, but having worked in several larger corporations, I KNOW that the "workstation" line is going to be more expensive than the "desktop" line, period. There's no reason to be utilizing an HP Workstation as a card catalog.

Now then, whether the issue is IT being lazy and only making one image and thus forcing the school to buy overly powerful PCs for normal deployments (possible, but not likely) or stupidity in the ranks somewhere else (almost guaranteed) is irrelevant. His point, from my perspective, still stands: They were using overkill machines.

TheBeastOfYuccaFlats: dletter: HP said its sales for the quarter were $30.7 billion, down 3 percent from a year ago. It had a profit of $1.6 billion, down 31 percent from the same period a year ago, which amounted to 80 cents per share.

Wow, a profit of only $1.6 billion? Man, why don't they just fire all the U.S. employees then!

Thus the blessing and curse of being a public company, as Facebook is soon to experience. Sure, it's $1.6billion, but it's only $.80/share. That's the number any shareholder cares about.

And that kind of attitude will be the downfall of the U.S. economy. As that speaker who had the fuss last week because TED didn't show his speech spoke about... the "rich" are not the job creators, in the sense that just saying "Lower taxes on the rich" and they'll create jobs. We are a consumer-based society... almost every business is in someway related to somebody "purchasing" their product or service. If there are not enough middle/working class people who can afford to buy all of the products & services out there, the economy goes down. If there is a robust middle/working class, you'll have enough people to purchase things, which makes those businesses that sell them (and make/sell them well) more successful.

If the working/middle class is shrinking (both in numbers and in the average money they have to consume with), then it doesn't matter how rich you make the rich... the economy grinds to a halt. And that more has to do with corporate culture and the pay difference between the "workers" and the "executives/financial" class than even with any government regulations. As the TED guy said, he has 100x as much money as most people, but, that doesn't mean he buys 100x as many cars as a "regular" person... he has 3. So, the rich getting exponentially "richer" from their company stocks and dividends, instead of having modest wealth growth and that extra money going to hire more workers or pay existing workers a bit more, doesn't help the economy overall.

Hotdog453: Kar98: Mad_Radhu: TheBeastOfYuccaFlats: I imagine most of these cuts will be in the desktop field. I see a fair number of HP laptops and HP is well-known on the server side, but its been quite a while since I've seen more than one or two HP desktops.

I was at the University of Washington library the other day and for some reason, EVERY computer they have is a HP workstation computer. I have no idea what idiot signed the contract, and how many hookers the HP rep bought for him, but I was floored that someone thought it was a good use of university funds to buy a top of the line i7-powered workstations to run the card catalog lookup terminal and the print station.

You... you have no idea what you're talking about, do you?

How does he not? I mean, I have no idea what the University is paying for the HP workstations, but having worked in several larger corporations, I KNOW that the "workstation" line is going to be more expensive than the "desktop" line, period. There's no reason to be utilizing an HP Workstation as a card catalog.

Now then, whether the issue is IT being lazy and only making one image and thus forcing the school to buy overly powerful PCs for normal deployments (possible, but not likely) or stupidity in the ranks somewhere else (almost guaranteed) is irrelevant. His point, from my perspective, still stands: They were using overkill machines.

I worked at a large university, and the "problem" (not really a problem) is central purchasing. They likely needed machines that came with at least a three to four year warranty for parts and service and had, at best, two or three models to choose from. Larger universities aren't any different from large corporations - any deviation from standardization costs more to support in the long run than the initial higher cost of purchase.

A $4,000 workstation that does work that can be done by a $1,000 desktop machine is still a money-saver over time if you have to pay an employee to support different machines over the life of the machine. Moreover, the hardware manufacturer isn't going to charge you $4,000 for that workstation if you buy 1,000 of them at a time. You get no such discount buying the cheaper machines because the margin is already erased. Another consideration is "future-proof" of the machines: for public machines you cannot buy something that needs to be switched out every year.

Our lowest level techs made $45K a year. If they had to spend more than 5 hours repairing, re-imaging, or troubleshooting a machine over the entire life of a machine, we lost money on it. You can't get that kind of return by buying the special of the week. That's true for a university, government, or corporation. In the end, you're offloading expensive employee time to the manufacturer, and it's always cheaper to pay more up front for a warranty and better hardware than it is to pay an employee to fix it down the road. ALWAYS.

The downside is that you frequently buy more machine than you need for a specific purpose, but you still save money. Yeah, those machines were overpowered for the library, but they were likely part of a bulk order. Frankly, if you have worked for larger corporations, you should already know this. You can't support endpoints with an infinite number of configurations. You just end up paying more on the support side.

Computers are a commodity. Rental car agencies don't stock one of every car made, they stock multiples of one brand. Your company doesn't buy 30,000 different desk phones - they choose one vendor.

If you came into my office, or the CIO's office when I was working for the university and said your plan for saving money was to buy whatever cheap machine of the week was on sale, I'd fire you. So would the CIO. Your plan would end up costing significantly more money and lessen service response at the same time.

BumpInTheNight: I read fark for the pics: BeatrixK: Got laid off from HP in 2009, so really getting a kick....

Seriously: HP needs to figure out what they don't want to suck at, and head in that direction.

2008 for me, after EDS was bought up.

2005 for me, at this point you have to start wondering if anyone works there at all anymore.

/best thing that ever happened to me

Amen to that!

Oh sure -- it sucked major balls at the time, because, I gotta admit, It was a pretty sweet gig: I was in Services, worked from home, company car, etc. But, I did actually get in the last WFR that forced them to pay for accrued vaca: Since it wasn't a written company policy at the time, they had to pay all WFR's their accrued vaca. A week after that, they put it in writing that you would lose it.

Now, I am with a company that pays way better than what I made there, that actually doesn't treat their employee's like numbers to be crunched, and that puts out a product I don't continually have to make excuses for.

Interestingly enough, I was 'warned' that they'd probably offer me contract once my eligibility was up: and sure enough, a half dozen recruiters came a courtin after my 12 month WFR date: No bennies, and shiatty pay.

This is probably their last ditch effort to get rid of the old timers choking up their high scale pay grades - and, given the ones I still talk to, they are ready to bolt.

Enjoy the Brain Drain, HP: You've earned it!

TheBeastOfYuccaFlats: but its been quite a while since I've seen more than one or two HP desktops.

I got an HP Pavilion Media Center a few years ago and -- aside from replacing the video card -- it's worked great for me.

James F. Campbell: TheBeastOfYuccaFlats: but its been quite a while since I've seen more than one or two HP desktops.

I got an HP Pavilion Media Center a few years ago and -- aside from replacing the video card -- it's worked great for me.

HP ceased to be important to me when they bought Voodoo and hired Greg Vederman to sell it, then folded it within a year.

Now "The Vede" is nowhere to be found, and their gaming line is dead.

James F. Campbell: TheBeastOfYuccaFlats: but its been quite a while since I've seen more than one or two HP desktops.

I got an HP Pavilion Media Center a few years ago and -- aside from replacing the video card -- it's worked great for me.

i'm on an old HP PMC this very minute. was bloated & barely functioning after Mrs.Kritter had in online beaucoup years. reset it to factory, now runs as sweet as day one.

HP was on a collision course with the ground when they bought Compaq, the company I worked for at the time. Buying Compaq just made the resulting crater even bigger.

My involvement with Compaq/HP started in 1994. To tell you the truth, I'm very sad about what it has become.

Mike Chewbacca: dletter: While I do agree that at times you go "hire crazy" and there are managers that are not doing a whole lot that the manager above and below them couldn't easily handle. And if you are not a profitable company, you need to make sure you don't have any employees/positions like that. But, as stated, they made $1.6 billion last quarter (not year, just 3 months).

I can't imagine the average person having a grasp that "having a profit of $1.6 billion in 3 months" equals "very necessary to can 33,000 people".

Agreed. And no company hires 8% too many people. That's not dead wood, those are people in necessary positions. In this day and age, the easiest way to increase profits is to cut costs, and the easiest cost to cut is salary and benefits by laying people off. And it's absolutely ridiculous that a profit that large should result in an 8% workforce cut.

The question you're not asking is "which part of the workforce is largely responsible for that profit?"

Just because a company employing several hundred thousand people is making money doesn't mean that everyone working there is contributing. It's quite possible that part of the company is actually losing money, and has been for a while - someone mentioned the desktop field for instance. But the total profit figure will not tell you that.

If a certain section of your workforce is actually making you money, firing them would actually diminish - not increase - your profits.

dletter: Wow, a profit of only $1.6 billion?

HP had around 325,000 employees

$1,600,000,000 / 325,000 = $4,923.08 profit per employee per quarter.

I don't know if that's low or not (not my area of study), but I thought it was interesting math.

// IMO, HP desktops and laptops have been sucking ass for a long time.