The Ciber offer was given to a lot of programmers and analysts; people who were under contract by an HP customer to work on, say, an Oracle ecommerce software or to write applications for HP healthcare customers and so on.
The Ciber offer was, so far, only for US workers. In August, people in Europe were also laid off, HP confirmed to us, but those layoffs were part of the restructuring going on since 2012. For instance, in one unit that had US, Canadian, and European team members, all 35 US workers were asked to take jobs at Ciber, while none of the others were.
The employees we've heard from say Ciber's job offer involved big pay cuts. Some people reported cuts of 30%; others said the offer was $20,000 less. For instance, people making $76,000 as programmers with over 10 years of experience were offered in the $40,000 to $50,000 range, one person told us.