Here we go again...

The internal memo states "At the end of 2009, we reported a workforce of about 304,000. At the end of 2010, we had almost 325,000 employees and at the end 2011, that number had ballooned to nearly 350,000. Over that same period, we saw year-over-year revenue growth of 10 percent in 2010, of 1 percent in 2011… and so far in 2012, revenues have been declining.

We’re struggling under our own weight. And we’ve got to restore a healthy balance in order to return HP to its position as a growing… thriving… innovating… industry leader. That’s what this is all about. And the workforce reduction is only one piece of a comprehensive effort. We see a lot of opportunity to remove complexity, streamline and reduce costs in a number of areas across HP."

So we employed 46000 extra people over two years of global financial downturn and are now wondering why this might have caused a problem...? FFS!!!!!

The masters of corporate gobbledegook

I work for HP - I've now lost count of the number of culls of whatever-they-call-the-group-I'm-in-this-week in the 3.5 years I've been here (at EDS initially).

Every time, phrases such as "benchmarking cost structure" come out of the gobbledegook-generator. Face it, why not just say "we want to cut costs by sacking people, again"...? We all know what you really mean anyway, and it would save time. Corporate-speak impresses no one but the simple-minded...

It would be nice to think that the "bestshore" guys were better/cheaper, then at least we could resign ourselves to the reality, but in practice, we end up hand-holding them and usually substantially reworking entire projects so that they don't go down the pan. This is not-value-for-money, but of course these activities are not seen by the dividend/bonus-grabbing upper management, and are ignored by middle-management, who have no powers except the ability to update a couple of corporate reporting websites with new works of fiction.

The bean-counters don't care about the quality of work or skills/experience, just the bottom-line; this has manifested itself in the latest "700+ engineers are to go, but we're about to hire 1000s of salespeople" announcements.

So - salespeople, get yourselves to the agencies, there's loads of new jobs selling services that (very soon - we're close to it now) will be impossible to deliver.

In the same organisation, on a current project, we have an estimated one-person-year of engineering time (which is realistic, it's a reasonably large/complex project) - at the same time, we have one-person-year of project management time estimated (funnily enough, estimated by the project management office).

One-to-one project management?? If I was looking to cut costs, I know where I would be looking. I wouldn't mind if the particular PMs on this project did anything other than demand status reports against their fictional timescales, which are based on their extremely poor understanding of what the *real* work entails. [NB: This does not apply to all HP project managers I've worked with, some are excellent - they know who they are]

As soon as the market picks up properly...

Maybe...

... they're the first company to cotton on that once the market picks up again, people that have been treated badly will jump ship at the first opportunity?