[Info-vax] HP to axe 30,000 jobs to cut costs

[David Froble]

JF Mezei wrote:
> Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> 
>> Where did you read that the number was decided by Meg and flowing down
>> and not an aggregate of numbers flowing up to Meg?
> 
> Headcount reductions announced just ahead or part of financial
> statements are done from the top down. The CFO tells the CEO that to
> save X million in payroll, they need to cut 25,000 jobs.
> 
> The problem is that often, at that level, they don't really know what
> the impact of those job cuts will be and as was the case with Digital,
> it made things worse.
> 
> Whitman inherits an HP that was wounded by Hurd making too many cuts,
> and now she does the same.
> 
> I have no problem with a CEO that states at a financial report:
> 
> "In the past quarter, we have identified 12,197 jobs that were no longer
> necessary due to streamlining of processes and removing duplication of
> work. "
> 
> I have a problem with making promises to cut a large number of jobs
> because those cuts oten aren't the result of improving processes, they
> are just managers told their budgets are reduced and to select X number
> of employees to be fired.

There are substantial problems with the announcement of large scale job cuts.

It says the company can no longer make money in the business it is in.

Will the job cuts come from the parts of the business which is no longer supporting those 
jobs, or from the parts of the business still making money, thus making the situation even 
worse.

I've seen situations where the question is, are you producing income for the company 
today?  Well, R&D does not produce income for the company today, but without R&D there may 
not be any income in the future.  (Not that wall street and management care about anything 
beyond 3 months)

It seemed that when DEC was trying to downsize, the very people who were not needed were 
the ones making the decisions, and not very many, as in none, saw their own job as not 
required.  What got cut was what should NOT have got cut.

When there are job cuts, all too often it's because the company is failing.  Cutting 
payroll may look good short term, but does nothing to address the reasons the company is 
failing.  I've got to wonder how much payroll could be saved if the top 100 compensated 
people in the company, surely most or all in management, were cut.  We all know how much 
chance there is of that.