Thread regarding HP (Hewlett-Packard) layoffs

Why HP will fail

HP truly used to be the best company in the world to work for (I remember those years), with extremely high employee retention and loyalty. "The HP Way" was the glue that held the company together and made it so unique and such a fun place to work. It taught employees rules of conduct and created the blueprint for bringing revolutionary products to the market.

Carly Fiorina changed all of that, and the rest of the CEOs have followed in her footsteps. They longer care about innovation which made HP so great, but focus on returning the cash flow to themselves and taking on big debt to repurchase shares (Enrique himself always talks about returning the cashflow to shareholders). HP no longer hires the best and most motivated employees, but mostly hires and retains based on nepotism and cost factors despite some being highly toxic individuals who are the antithesis of the HP Way.

For those of you who don't know, the former Print Vice President (Richard Hackborn) was groomed to be the next CEO. HP owes the entire print business to Hackborn and his stunning leadership. But he just did not want to leave Boise and move to Palo Alto as the next CEO, and did a very hasty job interviewing Carly Fiorina (the first outsider to be given the CEO role at HP). At the time we learned that he spent only two hours talking to Carly at the Boise airport before making his decision.

When Hackborn told the rest of the board that he felt Carly would be the right CEO then everyone else agreed, and disaster followed. Hackborn demonstrated incredible leadership and ingenuity at HP Print, but undid everything he had done by selecting Carly who had never even been a CEO before.

Carly had a very bad track record at Lucent which was not hard to uncover. Lucent would provide loans to their customers to buy their own products, and when the customers went under during the recession so did Lucent with its bad loans. Carly had a big role in that.

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| 1951 views | | 8 replies (last February 10, 2024) | Reply
Post ID: @OP+1qB9FZt0

8 replies (most recent on top)

@oceb

HP has money, a lot of it, in fact. Their spending is extremely backwards. I agree with the comment about them dishing out money for their shareholders and stock buybacks. This is HP's top priority.

When I was still at HP, engineering groups had extremely small budgets. By the end of Q2, your manager would often complain, "Our money is gone for the year because our VP is not advocating for more." So there's no room for being able to go out and research new technologies because engineers needs development tools to purchase. Requesting for said development tools will get declined immediately.

If outside people want to see what the company is up to, look at the job postings. You'll quickly notice the ratio of customer experience nonsense to engineering roles is quite large. What is the strategy behind that? Engineering headcount is shrinking. I mean, this is extremely damning proof that HP is a business and product company, not a technology company. You can't tell me that HP is innovating. Customer experience employees take legacy hardware and try study why people are not satisfied with it. Their studies fall on deaf ears because as soon as they present customer pain points, there is no budget for engineering teams to improve it.

I will applaud Lenovo for at least taking repetitive hardware and creating new experiences. Last year alone they create a laptop with second screen. Another laptop with a miniature tablet. Et cetera, et cetera. This year, they announce a laptop that can switch between Windows and Android operating systems with a click of a button.

What is HP doing? Creating a foldable laptop screen (cool I guess, but late to the party?) that costs more than... AN APPLE MACBOOK PRO... Anytime you have something that costs more than an Apple product is telling the customer, "We believe this is better technology than Apple's products." With that price tag, I'd rather buy that new Apple VR headset because that is an entirely new experience for the technology industry. That headset costs the same AS THAT LAPTOP... Laptops aren't a new experience.

Truthfully, Alex Cho and the C-Suite need to ousted for making HP such a laughing stock. HP needs to gain control of their company. Their shareholders only care about money, they could care less about what products are being made.

Rant over. I don't know how else to explain this company's issues.

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Post ID: @pace+1qB9FZt0

"innovation takes time and $, which HP doesnt have and cannot afford to provide. it's a vicious cycle, till the end comes."

Actually, all the $ that you are talking about is given to shareholders via buybacks and divdends. This is another reason why HP will absolutely fail: insiders looting the company while saddling it with debt.

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Post ID: @oucf+1qB9FZt0

Post from TheLayoff.com

innovation takes time and $, which HP doesnt have and cannot afford to provide. it's a vicious cycle, till the end comes.

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Post ID: @oceb+1qB9FZt0

One thing my colleague told me the other day, "Taiwan doesn't share the same type of creative passion as their US counterparts. They just do what they're told. This is why the tech industry feels so bland." It's rather true. Think about it: why are companies putting out products that are practically the same every year?

I was let go recently from HP. My organization had 70% US workers, 30% Taiwan. When I left, it was 40% US, 60% Taiwan. (Source is from slide decks from all-hands meetings). My former VP's strategy was obvious: save costs, don't take risks, put out the same product, don't ask questions.

HP will fail because they are hiring people who don't really care whether the company is innovative. HP will fail because they have very little control of their products since they heavily rely on third parties to deliver all of the low level details of the products. HP will fail because all of their engineers don't engineer, they tell people their ideas and it gets done.

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Post ID: @opma+1qB9FZt0

I have to agree that Hurd was worse than Carly. Carly made some bad decisions but Hurd had huge layoffs that cut out much needed divisions at the wrong time.

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Post ID: @kjsi+1qB9FZt0

The story that I heard was that HP had decided to buy CPQ before Carly was hired. Carly did tell Intel to shove it and started building AMD servers so that was a good thing.
Honestly, I thought Hurd was far worse than Carly because Hurd destroyed employee morale by cutting deep into the muscle of the company.

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Post ID: @kggr+1qB9FZt0

To be fair, cracks were showing before Carly got there. We were getting into businesses we had to business being it. :)

And along came Carly.

She was just not able to do anything constructive to fix it. She bought CPQ, inflated HP's size and it eventually blew itself apart. But there are names that came before her starting in the mid-80s.

Yes, she ruined everything.

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Post ID: @bzfb+1qB9FZt0

Funny you mentioned that Hackborn couldn't become CEO because he wouldn't move to Palo Alto. This is ironic because current CEO Lores isn't even there himself. He's currently "too busy" in Asia throwing parties.

But I agree. HP sits on the sidelines and waits for its competitors for release something. I worked at HP as well and was laid off a few months ago. If I had nickel for every time my organization was planning new features and the competitor just announced it shortly after, I'd be a millionaire. Market analysis and product management is horrendous. Okay, there is some market analysis but their pool of surveys is limited to like an extremely small market region that cannot represent a fair amount of HP's customers. It's confirmation bias.

My colleague from HP hit the nail on the head: "HP is at the mercy of their suppliers." It's a scathing perspective of being an OEM. Being a hardware company will not cut it anymore. HP products have become super repetitive to the point where it's become a commodity. They need to answer the question of, "How can we incentivize our customers to buy from us every year?"

I also agree with your comment on cashflow. Enrique is only there to please investors. He quite honestly has zero involvement with HP's portfolio. Okay, maybe he mentions,

"We're focusing on bringing AI into our products." But what even does that mean? Nothing. It's literally a buzzword he's using. I don't think I've ever heard Enrique (or any executive really) say, "We need to design our products solve XYZ problems in the industry." Never.

Billions of dollars in cashflow, zero effort for employee retention.

Adios HP

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Post ID: @hcr+1qB9FZt0

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