HP: AUTONOMY 'misrepresented' its value by $5 BILLION, calls in SEC Hewlett-Packard dropped a bomb this morning in reporting its financial results for its fiscal 2012 year, stating that the British software company Autonomy, which it acquired a little more than a year ago, "outright misrepresented" its own value - leading to a colossal $8.8bn writedown for HP today. In a conference call ahead …
I used to work for Autonomy. I have no sympathy for them.
My little article is at:
http://www.usenetreader.co.uk/msg/14181665.aspx
after Autonomy's lawyers bullied me and anyone who supported me to take my article off line. I eventually lost my net access after Autonomy complained to BT, my ISP; they never issued an explanation or apology but still took money from my account. It took years and a letter to the BT chairman before I got a refund.
The article was originally subtitled "Stress Is More Fun" but seems to have got lost; if you read the article, you'll find out what it has this moniker.
Dude,
that makes me glad I left programming and became a Sysadmin. I had a PM like that once back in the mid-90's - he came by every 2-3 hours to ask "How are we doing? Any progress?", and it was on a project where i was supposed to use a seriously buggy "framework" that we had licensed from a 3rd party developer (who apparently liked illicit drugs). I so wanted to give that PM a colon scan with a rabid cat.
The bit about an IT company have lousy *internal* IT support *definitely* rings bells with me.
Being ready to record *any* conversations with "management" may sound paranoid *until* you discover that the person who writes the *minutes* tells the story.
And it may just be complete bul***it.
In retrospect you appear to be the one that got away.
The story you have written up sounds entirely plausible. There are tons of half-competent "promising startup companies" around which exist for the sole purpose of Raking In Cash As Soon As Possible. I worked for a "security" company who were largely amateurs, but they convinved the German stock market to hand them 200 million Euros, only to implode in 2001. Their core competence was a German-written SSL library and some supporting stuff around this.
Autonomy used a different vehicle (AI, search technologies) to rake in the billions of a different stupid entity (HP). Managers were apparently either incompetent or evil. Sounds very, very realistic to me.
You accepted the pressure from your incapable manager and let it damage your health. That happens all the time to programmers all over the world. That was a mistake of you. You should have quit yourself or at least have taken a very cynical attitude like "they are idiots, I'll ignore their demands and wait until they fire me". I've been fired more than once and I generally take the view that the other party are either idiots or they are looking for a different person. I will NEVER accept that my person or my skills are defective. I know that acquiring my skills is as challenging and time-consuimg as becoming an experienced phyisician or a lawyer.
So I say to myself "fuck you" and move on. I consciously do this to protect myself. I make a mental list of my achievements and a list of their deficiencies. I refuse to indulge in my "weaknesses".
So - never ever take the workplace $hit very seriously. It's an idiot's circus and you only play part of it because of the money. Join a different show if you are unhappy.
Never, ever eat the management excrement of "you have serious problems" (whatever words they use to communicate that). This is the beginning of a serious health problem.
Successful people are almost always cynics. Every one of us has made serious mistakes, and the "elite" are making mistakes on grand scales. They "move" on and forget about the past. So should you. Put the whole crap experience in a dark mental drawer and try to forget it thoroughly.
Beer works to some degree, but as you found out, at some point it is a part of the problem.
So, move to the next job as if nothing has happend (You probably have). Lie about Autonomy. Remove it completely from your resume, if somehow doable. American presidents start wars based on lies, why shouldn't you get a new job based on a little "correction" of what really happened.
doesn't work for me...
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It's the b***ard child of the union of Hewlett Packard with DEC and the infection that was Compaq.
An acquisitive company whose most recent "innovation" being to produce printer cartridges with a 25% failure rate preventing re-fills and frankly s**t build quality.
The real question will be with KPMG. Where the books badly cooked and KPMG too incompetent to spot them or the fraud too carefully carried out IE it was *carefully* set up and quite deliberate.
They sound like a matching pair of a***holes.
@Frank the Developer
I have removed Autonomy from my resume/CV. For all the good it did. I haven't had a job since then, and with me passing my 40th year, the chance of me being hired in any role, not just in IT, is minimal. The people I say "fuck you" are to the people I have approached for help since then. My wife works for a bank and earns slightly above the minimal national wage, and because of this, we aren't eligible for a host of benefits, like working tax credits. We used to get a £3 reduction in our council tax (out of about £130 - an insult), our housing benefit has been cut back, I get no JSA because I left my last job rather than be made redundant. It got so bad that I contacted my local MP, Andrew Lansley and he was full of plattitudes and engineered a two hour long phone conversation with the local job centre (result: "We're sorry but we can't help") and then Lansley turned his back on us when I asked him if he knew of any avenues or opportunities (having applied for hundreds of jobs, and hardly ever got a reply back, I was desperate to try any new venture that might reap dividends.) If it wasn't for my pensioner parents, who help us with the balance of our rent each month (and I feel f**king guilty for them helping us) we'd be living on the street. And no-one in officialdom gives a shit. We are just "statistics."
Anyway, back to the discussion.
I too have had really shite jobs where I was screwed over by management. However when I go for interviews I do NOT say "at company A I left because they screwed me", I talk around things like work/life balance wasn't OK due to other factors in my life at that time, or that I felt there weren't enough progression opportunities etc - slagging down your previous employer is a sure fire way to NOT be selected for a job.
I am well into my 50s rather than your "over 40" yet I still manage to get good contracts; I've even been offered interviews for permanent jobs, despite the fact you seem to think that over 40 = over the hill most employers don't any more. If you have a half decent working record and you aren't getting interviews, either your CV needs re-writing or you've overpriced yourself for the current market. If you are getting plenty of interviews & no jobs after a long time, then consider what you are or aren't saying at interview that is putting people off.
Yeah, it's very difficult to get a job again after such a crisis and after being out of work for several years.
You have to find a way to "conceal" all of that when you get the next interview. I suggest you call the time after Autonomy "working as a freelancer". Of course, you have to somehow fill that with a list of projects you did then. Not easy, but doable.
Why don't you start to contribute to on an open-source project ? That way you "refresh"/"maintain" your coding skills and you get a proper bullet point for your resume. Then claim to have done "consulting" work related to that open-source project in the past. It will take some time, but eventually your will get over this episode.
You apparently have a loving wife and it appears to me you are an experienced developer. Now start to be smart about your career and yes, fiddle a bit with your resume. Weave truth and half-truths in to a shiny fabric to get a job again. And for Spaghetti-monster's sake, forget that crap company.
Other people have defrauded people to the millions and they are now living a nice life on that money. Yeah, I am referring to that German "security" company. The bosses cashed in "performance-based" stock option while the company was deep in the red and shortly before it imploded. So, you need to be economical with the truth to survive in this world.
"Now start to be smart about your career and yes, fiddle a bit with your resume. Weave truth and half-truths in to a shiny fabric to get a job again"
Maybe try putting down your years out of work to "career break for personal reasons" and if asked about it in interview lie, lie & lie! If kids are the right sort of age, say you looked after them while your wife worked, if your parents/grandparents are dead the time off was to look after them etc.
I wouldn't normally advocate lying, but unfortunately it seems everyone does it these days when it comes to CVs & interviews, do you really think anyone else in your position hasn't lied to cover a gap?
From the terms of use of a popular auction site:
You accept <your_new_company> "as-is" and choose to use it at your own risk. Despite the prohibitions below, <your_new_company> may contain inaccurate, inappropriate or possibly offensive material, and we assume no responsibility or liability for such material.
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Despite the previous paragraph, if we are found to be liable, our liability to you or any third party (whether in contract, tort, negligence, strict liability in tort, by statute or otherwise) is limited to fifty US dollars ($50).
It's a start.
Was it for cutting edge computing textbooks which (perhaps) *demanded* in depth developer knowledge to catch errors due to their highly advanced cutting edge subject matter?
Despite my comment to another poster that it was time "they bought a gimp suit, as they seemed to be exactly where they deserved" I'd prefer to see people achieve all they are capable of rather than all they have been *allowed* to.
The idea of an open source project sounds pretty good. It's the equivalent of working in a charity shop for IT staff, except it's actually *useful*, gives recent live experience, positive recommendations from co-developers (*provided* you select the right project) who actually *understand* development, demonstrated you can work to deadlines etc.
You might also like to peruse Dominic Connors articles on the recruitment business. I was once told that anyone can put you down, but only you can *keep* you down. Something to think about.
Doesn't having found then lost (through the fixed term contract ending) another job since Autonomy get you some JSA eligibility again, since you're no longer 'voluntarily' unemployed?
Sounds like a lousy place to work, I hope you find something soon!
As for the overpriced ink emporium, I don't have a lot of sympathy: they seem to be all lawyered up to compensate for their inability to compete any more. Lousy printers that drink ink, plugging Itanic (and shacking NonStop to it when they killed off Alpha to make Intel happy), buying then killing Palm ... all they have going for them lately is some nice budget desktop PCs (got a few at work) - the business line they tried to kill/sell. Do they have a death wish, or just really really lousy management?
Of course, Autonomy WAS worth $5 billion more when HP bought it ... but they of all people should have known, that was before it ran out of ink!
HP used to be a great company but the lack of trust in their employees - shown by never selecting the next leader from the internal pool - is a sound indicator of an unhealthy firm. Let's remember that the current CEO also approved this acquisition therefore falls in the same boat of utmost incompetence that prevails in their Board. The only way they can turn things around is by selecting a tech visionary which I am sure exists in an IT company with 300,000 people in its paycheck. I have no affiliation to HP but some of my friends work there and when they talk about their technology you can see passion and dedication, and that for me is hard to bring from the outside.
IBM does it slightly different - they think they can move any "expensive"/"non-sales" activity to India.
The result is crap quality and even the order management system appears to be defunct half of the time.
Meanwhile Google and Apple shell out serious money for excellent developers in America and Europe. See who is successful.
Well, it's a pretty big step to refer a claim to the authorities. There must be something there because otherwise the impact on the credibility of (an already heavily criticised) HP leadership team will be catastrophic. But, it has to be said that HP have an appalling record of integrating large acquisitions into the company.
Indeed it is the consultants who prepare the 'books' on these deals, and it is also true that the acquired will wish to present as rosy a picture as possible to the acquirer so as to maximise shareholder value - like a householder standing in front of a crack when a potential buyer is having a viewing.
Thing is, the potential house buyer should have the intelligence to ask the seller to stand a little to the left so as to check to see if cracks are evident and if they get the bums rush, they should have the backbone and intelligence to walk away.
What this demonstrates is that someone, somewhere, at HP was either too stupid to be making decisions of such magnitude that they should not have been allowed to or they were so blinkered at the prospect of an acquisition that they were not checking closely enough for cracks.
In both cases, consultants/Autonomess - 1, HP - 0
Given the long succession of HP CEOs (including Ms. Whitman) and board members who have railed against government regulation I think this would be the perfect opportunity for the US government to tell HP to go pound sand on their request for government action here. There IS precendent for this, of course. No one was prosecuted for the financial meltdown of 2008, it was all about "moving on", and "going forward". Same here. If HP's shareholders want to take the obviously seriously overdue step of sweeping out the present board and executives, then that's up to them -- but I'm not sure I want my tax dollars to go towards cleaning up a mess that they all made through their own negligence and refusal to acknowledge reality (as others have pointed out the numbers in this deal never made any sense, a moderately intelligent child could have figured out they were being defrauded -- more proof that most of those complaining now are just a bunch of not-too-bright spoilt children after all).
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