HP to cut 25-30k jobs
bbc.com
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He's feeling the heat.
He's made it through the absorption of Compaq, and when Compaq absorbed Digital. He's won a ton of awards with each company he's been at, frequently getting high marks for his professionalism, timeliness, availability, willingness to mentor the new guys, stuff like that. He also brought in more than $4MM in revenue for HP in one fiscal year, even though sales wasn't his job (I think it came out to 28 different contracts?) The next highest was $600k. It's been like that for 25 years.
Needless to say, he's pretty damn good at his job.
He's late 50s, but in amazing health. My mother, however, is in her 50s, and is in absolutely terrible health.
They cannot afford to lose healthcare coverage. My mom wouldn't make it, and my father would probably lose his mind. They just refinanced their 220k mortgage and put new siding on their suburban house, added new gutters, got the roof redone, stuff like that.
Please, don't make this about how shitty of an investment that might have been. That's beside the point.
He makes a good living — he filed $98k last year, but that's a _ton_ of overtime.
All he's known is hardware for the last 30 years. He's not a sysadmin and will never be. He's not some low-level nerd. He's the product of an unnotable tech school and he's worked his ass off to keep things afloat. I don't have the best relationship with him at all, but he's a human and I picked up my people skills (if you can call them that) from him.
Who would hire him at this age, with this kind of experience?
I referred to HN as "my Silicon Valley friends"
In his shoes, I'd also make sure I keep contact information for all his best customers. Because if he gets laid off suddenly, he'll want to go back to them at least to say, "Hey, do any of your vendors need a reliable field service engineer?"
discovering an interest in being linkedin friends with them is not afaik
Can't offshore that, or can you?
And with Obamacare, they don't have to. They should be able to purchase decent coverage on the exchange, right? That's what we did when I quit my job.
I forget all of them, but I think the following states still allow "groups of one" with respect to a business acquiring health insurance:
Connecticut, Delaware, Mississippi, North Carolina
My apologies if I'm wrong on any of these, it's just off the top of my head since the last time I looked into it.
I don't think there's any way around that.
If he can afford to pay the vig, then COBRA makes the most sense for the short term.
Afterwards, ACA guarantees that a plan will be available. Depending on the state, you may be able to even get a quick quote online to get an idea of what the cost would be today.
The ACA is going to be far less expensive than COBRA . If you are on COBRA and the company declares bankruptcy, you lose COBRA and must sign up for the ACA.
Obamacare in MN is through https://www.mnsure.org/ . Your father being fired or laid off qualifies as a special enrollment event.
If your mother is seriously ill, look at gold plans and simply look at the maximum out of pocket. Find a plan with a maximum out of pocket of $2k or even $1k pp. They'll spend it all, and after that, your out of pocket expenses will be limited to copays. They will even be eligible for assistance paying for it if your parents' income falls.
From a brief poke around the above website, for zip 55401 and two adults born 1/1/1960, you should be able to find a plan for under $1k/mo unsubsidized with a $3k/family/year maximum out of pocket. This is almost certainly less than cobra will cost. Be careful of narrow networks though, particularly if your mother is being actively treated by a doctor/hospital.
Good luck to you and yours.
People with big enough health problems that the heavily subsidized Silver market category is insufficient, but who have only a middle class income, do get stung in this system; But before Obamacare they would have been treated much, much worse should their employer fail to provide them with good health insurance. The Silver market plans are supposed to represent the standard level of care, and be subsidized on a sliding scale from 99% right above the Medicaid threshold, down to 0% at ~$100k income or so, IIRC.
MN, thankfully, has chosen to implement Medicaid expansion.
1 - If you have enough income, you will still be eligible for obamacare through the national but not state obamacare organization: healthcare.gov . The coverage gap is between medicaid on the low end if you have a family (no coverage if you're a single adult) and 100% fpl where obamacare kicks in.
2 - if you have too little income, and you should go on Medicaid expansion but unfortunately live in a state run by bigoted morons, you can always lie and claim your income is higher than it is. It turns out nobody will go after you for this. You just have to claim enough income to get yourself out of the medicaid income bracket and into the obamacare income bracket. You'll still end up with health insurance that costs (guessing) on the order of $50 to $100/mo after maximal tax credits.
In most states, that is $11,770 for a single adult. Your circumstances may be complicated, though; ask someone local. There are people who will help you with this.
and oh yeah: pull your head out of your ass and vote for Democrats. And make sure all your friends and family know that they're not just voting against communist muslim death panels, they're actively hurting you as well.
1 - if you have the savings, just pay the bill and you'll get even with Uncle Sam when you do taxes next year
2 - call obamacare and ask for immediate credits. The credits are based on your annual income, so for example if you got laid off in June you'll get one set of credits for that year, since you had an income for half of it, and larger credits the next year, assuming you still need obamacare and don't have a job.
Your father needs to put some serious effort into getting on paper all the skills, both technical and soft "people-type", that he's learned over his career and put himself out there. Minneapolis is a big city and it sounds like he's made quite a few contacts that he could leverage for help getting a new career.
Above all, encourage him not to give up!
Work on him for a few months. He must have built up some serious contacts over the years. His pitch is straightforward. HP can't actually support their products anymore, they don't have the staff. He knows the hardware inside and out. Sell support contracts. Snipe the best after the layoffs.
You don't look for a job when you need one. this rumor is going to terrify customers. Since he has good personal relationships with those fortune 1000, he needs to monetize that. He must have some idea of what HP charges for his time. He can send the new guys, and come in to rescue at the end.
I know this sounds crazy. Think really hard about it though. There isn't anyplace that will hire him at 100k. He needs to set up his own shop. Think of it this way, 0.05 < P(new_biz_fail) < 0.1. What is the chance of him getting a good new job in 6 months? i'd guess less than 10%. With your mom, he needs to bring in serious cash. He's in a position to do that. If he picks good helpers, it won't consume his life, anymore than the current job. He really only needs 1 contract, and can build from there.
It sounds super scary. Hell, it is super scary. If he needs stability for the next 15 years or so, this is a really good way to do it. Really, in his position, as good as he is, it's less scary than going and looking for work.
I'm not sure of the papers he's signed (non-competes...), or the contracts that HP has with their customers (there must be some), but... he could definitely "get the band together" and pull off such a feat. Again, I think this goes back to the contracts he had.
He's one of 4 remaining from the "blue days" (time with Digital); I think they'd be able to pull it off if they did go this route. They're all pretty awesome.
At least get him to take a long look at those contracts. Heck, he might be released from them on severance.
Talk to him about it. No matter what happens, it's going to be a rough time for him. If he feels safer going and looking for work, good for him, there's no judgement. But you make it sound like he really needs to take care of his family. Just keep this option in mind. Time is on your side, for now.
He doesn't have to go on-site to UPS to bring that business over to another firm, and when you build up _30 years_ of trust, that Rolodex and trust is worth 50x the best technical engineers ability (in terms of generating billables). He's in a great position. Senior Partners at McKinsey aren't paid millions because of their ability to put together a nice deck. They're paid that way because they have 20 years of billables and reliable after-work. If he's laid off and not picked up in 2 weeks, tell him to e-mail me.
From personal experience, I want to add some long-term expectations about commanding premium consulting rates -- especially as it relates to vendor-proprietary knowledge.
I used to work for an enterprise software firm and was on their "crisis firefighting team". I'd travel to customer sites at less than 24 hours notice and fix their worst problems. These were the problems that were escalated to the CEO.
When I left the company and struck out on my own as a freelance "subject matter expert", I was able to command $300k a year for a few years. My background and rate was easy to sell: I was trained directly by the people who wrote the software.
The thing is that I always knew I was living on borrowed time because that high income was based on my previous association of being in the "inner circle" of how the software works. I had to diversify my skills away from that software because with each year that passed by, I became more of an "outsider" just like everyone else.
To relate to your dad's situation ... yes he's very good at what he does, but some of that value may also be his inside feed of information from HP. After he's separated from HP, as each new generation of server & printer hardware is released, his "aura" of HP knowledge can become outdated and less relevant value for customers. In other words, he needs to charge whatever premium rate he can, save as much as he can, all with an eye towards diversifying his income. Diversity could mean new tech skills such as learning AWS architecture or buying real estate to get income from rental properties.
I worked at a large company that used HP hardware with large, multi-million dollar contracts and a lot of our business went out to these smaller companies. The level of service that your father can provide is important to large enterprises. If your father doesn't want to start his own company, someone else will. He should start talking to his colleagues and his boss - maybe someone is already thinking of starting something.
These sorts of layoffs can create opportunity for people like your dad. HP can't just lay off that many people without hurting parts of their service line.
i personally bootstrapped my startup with 0 outside funding by doing commercial i.e. "enterprise" software consulting on a platform i had experience in from two jobs ago, with my partner, for 2 years. we each booked about $250k of revenue a year for 2-3 years before the work dried up after several buyouts etc. by then our 'real' business was self sustaining.
it's time-capped, and you'll have to hustle for the work, but you can bill an outrageous sum of money that will pad their retirement and help secure their future in an otherwise shit situation.
It's not hard.
You should do a few things.
1 - Contact an employment attorney and see if they can determine if he signed a non-compete. If it helps, I was involved in two scenarios (in Minnesota) where I signed a non-compete and went to work for a competitor. Both times, the judge threw out the case saying the company couldn't keep me from being gainfully employed if I wasn't going to disrupt their business. It was a hard sell since I was going to a startup and they were a fortune 1000 company.
2 - Tell your Dad to start planning as if he will get laid off. Start putting together a plan for his own business. Contacts, companies, phone numbers, information on their equipment - anything he can get his hands on. In short, start stockpiling information now. The more he has, the sooner he gets off the ground. Also, start talking to people to see how motivated they would be to start something on their own.
4 - Tell him to dust off his resume and start sending it out to recruiters. I know for a fact there's a ton of HP hardware vendors or re-sellers that could use his experience.
In short, start planning for the worst. Hopefully he gets through this, but he should assume the worst and hope for the best. If he does get laid off, he's already ready to hit the ground running instead of wallowing about being a company for so long. Trust me, companies would die to have a guy with his contacts and experience. This is by no means a dead end or career ending by any stretch.
Some examples: GLG (Gerson Lehrman Group) Cognolink AlphaSights
Not to mention that "restrictive covenants" such as a noncompete won't fly in this sort of situation. Then again, my experience is with UK employment law so please don't take this as legal advice.
[0] http://www.isba.org/ibj/2012/01/lawpulse/employmentcovenants...
[1] http://www.cnet.com/news/calif-supreme-court-finds-noncompet...
I would feel pretty comfortable presenting this argument to a judge, even without a lawyer present.
I'm gonna go ahead and ignore any legal advice you give, then. That's completely bonkers.
The argument is pretty clear and rational; unless the judge was in the pocket of the company on the other end of the suit (in which case you're fucked anyway), I think representing one's self would be pretty straightforward in this case.
That aside, your argument may be "pretty clear and rational," but that does not mean it follows the law (which is rarely either of those things). Without a lawyer you have no way of knowing (self-studying law is a great way to royally fuck yourself if you ever try to apply it in a real scenario).
Now, you usually have to be a bigger fish to get a non-compete enforced, or you have to threaten business. Most places that have a contract with HP will still have a contract even after hiring an expert. Fortune 1000 companies have better lawyers that know how to craft jobs to avoid exactly these scenarios.
If the lay him off, it really meams they don't want that kind of business anyway. Companies are driven by business people, not lawyers.
There's 10% unemployment. Is that really a legit solution?
Capitalism is built on the idea of everyone 'working' and 'having a job' and theres lots of people like his dad who really want work, and are loyal and hardworking.
But there's not enough jobs to go around and the amount keeps decreasing due to automation.
So what happens next?
There are ~5.8 million job openings as of the end of July. The highest level maybe in 15 years [1]. The unemployed worker per job opening ratio is also at the lowest in 15 years [2]. The U6 unemployment rate for people that have some college is 5.x%; the unemployment rate for people with a four year degree is 2.x%. There have been eight million full-time jobs added in just four years.
The challenge, as always, is finding the job you want, at the salary you'll accept, matching skills you possess. I'd argue there are plenty of job openings in technology and sales.
Also, I think team leads tell themselves they can mold young developers in their image. Not only are you getting a developer at a discount, you're getting a potential clone. What's not to love?
I think that it's reasonable to assume that the average college grad is < 25, so that statistic doesn't necessarily reflect the experience of the recently graduated.
If you take people with high school or higher education who are > 25, there are 5.5 million unemployed. I'd be curious to know what that number changes to if you lower the age to 22 or so.
I think it was just built on the idea of selling stuff to people and making as many things as you can sellable commodities.
Whether those working are many or few doesn't matter, as long as you get to sell to enough people to make your profit.
In the days of advanced British etc capitalism, the homeless/jobless/disenfranchised living in London etc, were very many.
That you need to pay more people to be able to build a wide market is more of a 20th century addition (Ford and his workers, the New Deal, etc).
Capitalism wouldn't work if everyone who wants a job has one, so I really doubt that. Employees could just demand ever increasing salaries until all profit is gobbled up, and there's nothing the business can do about it because they can't replace them since everyone who wants a job has one.
Capitalism is structured so that everyone without substantial capital holdings needs a job. OTOH, its not built on everyone working and having a job, in fact, the desperation that comes with people not having jobs and people currently working being at risk of not having jobs -- and the effect that has on the wages and conditions those employed are willing to accept -- is important to capitalism (though its one of the effects modern mixed economies have attempted to mitigate in moving away from pure capitalism.)
He has the contacts. Make sure he takes his rolodex when he leaves. Day one after layoffs, call those clients up and say "Hey, they laid me off. Want me on contract?"
Even if he only gets 3 or 4 clients from this, the money they paid HP now goes to him, and it will be a LOT more than his salary. His client contacts are his core IP. Use em.
I also wanted to say people like your Dad are worth their weight in gold. Good hardware tech's are hard to find.
At the same time, I would suggest severely redacting your post. Its one thing to overshare the details of your own life, its another to overshare those of someone else (particularly their income, health, and other factors which might affect hiring).
I think the trick is to find a different (yet related) role with a company that is expanding rather than contracting their business.
Datacenter tech springs to my mind -- a fair number of tech companies have midwest sites (mostly Chicago, sometimes Minneapolis or Nebraska or elsewhere) that don't have local techs. Issues are often handled by the east coast team flying out, which is less than ideal. Someone with that many years of hardware experience is pretty hard to find for those types of roles.
Contract work is not as difficult as it sounds. He already knows the work involved, can do a good job of estimating the hours of work, and getting the number of employees to match that work, and then par for the course is 2x-3x of the salaried rate because a.) the contract can be terminated, no severance, no health care, no bennies, b.) the companies can afford it and are likely already paying that or more for the same contract with HP, c.) he'll need business liability insurance, and slightly more complicated book keeping and tax assistance. It's completely sane for him to ask a company he has a very good relationship "what's in the budget?" if he doesn't already have an idea what this amount ought to be. Don't undercharge. It's reasonable to offer a discount for say 2 or 3 year contracts. If it's hourly, it should be expensive to incentivize contracts.
Anyway, this can also be referred to as "slow retirement" which is a working retirement.
Oh and the home improvement investments seem sane also. They certainly aren't getting done, and will need to be done at a bad time if he does get let go or goes for early retirement.
IMHO Noncompetes should be banned, or there needs to be legislation which requires the employer to pay 100% of the salary of the laid off person for the rest of the term of the noncompete. If they want to prevent the ex-employee from going into business and competing against them, they need to pay the ex-employee for the privilege.
But your employer having a gun to your beloved's head - that what it basically is - is just rotten.
I genuinely wish that any libertarians here (in Poland) move to USA or, Friedmans beloved, Chile. I hope they get to experience shit like that. I guess im a filthy little commie for expexcting to be able to live my life without shit like that /s
While things may be less extreme here than in Europe, you aren't just left to die if you become unemployed. Government-provided insurance that you have to be either poor or old enough to get is actually much better than a lot of the private insurance plans that are the only option for the middle class.
I love both countries though.
Lots of Poles, libertarian or not, do that for the massive quality of life increase.
Crony capitalism still is not capitalism.
Cronyism is central to capitalism, and you can't have one without the other.
Cronyism only exists when competition doesn't work by means of a government. Get some politicians, create regulations, build a monopoly. No matter how uncompetitive it is, you're still a billionaire.
The "free market" in which that is a defensible claim is a counterfactual construct that is sometimes useful as a simplified analytic model, but fundamentally incompatible with the behavior of real human beings and conditions in the real world.
> merciless competition destroys any underperfoming organization.
In real unregulated markets, that may happen initially, and the most successful parties in that situation mercilessly move to lock-in advantages against future competitors by use their economic power they have as a result of that success to monopolize key inputs, preventing competition.
> Cronyism only exists when competition doesn't work by means of a government
Yes, and a particular, common, real-world version of cronyism by which government structures the economic regime to favor the interest of the capital-holding class was identified by its critics in the 19th Century, and given the name "capitalism".
That's it. If there's central planning(no matter to whom) it's socialism. And, regarding 'lock-in advantages', without a government-backed credit expansion, it'd be really difficult for companies to get as much market cap.
No, the dominant system of the developed world in the 19th Century that socialists reacted against and coined the word "capitalism" to describe isn't socialism.
This reminds me of some people who pointed out that communism was never implemented and all the totalitarian regimes were still in the socialism phase. A phase which was obviously never going to be replaced with the communist utopia.
This is just a delay tactic. We all know what we talk about when we say "communism" and it's the same for "capitalism" - we mean the real-world, flawed implementation.
Anyone with a background on classical economics realizes the U.S is much closer to socialism than capitalism. The existence of 'prices' and greed doesn't imply it's capitalism.
Neoliberalism doesn't mean watered down free-market liberalism. The term describes a certain movement in (classical) liberal thought which wanted to seperate itself from former thinkers primarily based on the time they where living in.
While those thinkers have little in common, they genuinely disliked a productive state (as in the production of goods or the delivery of a service), cartels, interventions in the price mechanism etc.
All of that is far away from what the US or European countries are currently doing.
At least in Europe it's also used as a meaningless buzzword to scare people who think that the prefix "neo" means evil.
Anyone should recognize that the dominant system of the modern developed world is a hybrid retaining largely the capitalist structures and property regime, but adopting many strategies with origins in socialism (including advocated in the communism of Marx and Engels) for mitigating some of the effects for which 19th Century socialists criticized the dominant system of the developed world at that time, for which they coined the term "capitalism".
Its probably not particularly productive to argue about whether this synthesis is "closer" to socialism or capitalism.
We have a lot of social programs for the poor, especially in regards to health. No its not Euro-style universal healthcare, but this idea that they'll starve in the streets if they lose their jobs is ridiculous. That's on top of COBRA, which allow you to stay on your employers plan for a bit while you work out a new provider. Or subsidized ACA exchange insurance. We are down to 11% uninsured right now. In the 90s we were getting close to hitting 20%.
There's a lag period before you can apply for and get benefits, but that's what unemployment insurance (which is mandatory) is for and you know... your own savings. You are putting away savings right?
The real problem here is that I find most middle-class people have no idea how welfare works. None. They've never had to apply for these things. They just think they're for "welfare queens" and "drug addicts." They don't realize that these programs are pretty much everywhere in the USA. For example, food stamps are mostly used by white people. So these people have unrealistic ideas of what loss of income means. They think they're going to debtors prison and being forced to die in their basements from lack of healthcare. Europeans like yourself buy into this nonsense because they have an anti-US bone to pick. The reality is that you're both being incredibly disingenuous. Perhaps you should do some basic research before making these shoddy generalizations?
Its also worth mentioning that every HP product we use is fairly terrible. All of our servers, printers, etc. A lot of sysadmins I've talked to are either considering moving to Dell or already have moved. These jobs are going to migrate to Dell or elsewhere I imagine. That's how competition works. Yeah, its ugly, but HP has not been competitive for some time in many areas. You can't expect a lifetime of labor without shake-ups, especially in the volatile tech sector.
I got a taste when I applied for PFL in California when we had a baby. The scale of people the State serves is insane, and navigating the system could be a full-time job in itself.
(PFL is California's supplemental program that pays some fraction of your salary for family leave - in my case new child bonding)
I took 3 weeks leave, and on the last Friday got a phone call from the PFL office: "We have a question about your PFL application, and if you don't return our call today we will deny your claim". I call, and after battling the phone tree got, "Our system is over capacity. Please try again later click". I finally got through at the end of the day via email.
I finally got paid the first day I returned from leave (!). Luckily for me I wasn't depending on the money or else my kids would have been eating rice. What a nightmare. I don't envy anyone who has to use social services.
Not how ratios work. In absolute terms, there are more white people who use food stamps than non-white people because 3/4s of the country's population is white. Per capita, many more non-white people are on food stamps than white people.
The market for private insurance is somewhat better now with Obamacare (depending heavily upon the state you live in) but it still can be very expensive. Especially if you're unemployed.
If you have a family member in poor health, employer-sponsored health coverage can be worth an order of magnitude more than your cash salary. If not more.
Insurance, beyond insuring you, does something perhaps more important: they negotiate massive discounts with all medical practices/hospitals/etc. My insurer negotiated that to something reasonable (approx $35k, though memory fails me); I could even afford that if I needed to. Crucially (and I understand this is fucking stupid; go 'murica), uninsured people pay way more than insured people even including what the insurance pays. Like integer multiples greater than 3 and up to 20 times more.
Or maybe even real multiples. :)
A minor but important correction is they are billed way more, not necessarily pay way more.
For example I dated a girl who just out of high school with no insurance had a really badly broken arm (car accident IIRC) and the hospital "charged" her, in total, $100K+ as an imaginary amount, complained at her for awhile, and then they wrote her off after some token payment (more than they would have gotten in bankruptcy, less than it would have cost her in legal fees to file bankruptcy, but a moderately huge amount of money at part time minimum wage income).
Now whats important is the difference between the imaginary retail price of $100K and what it actually cost to provide services is incredibly valuable from an accounting standpoint. Also from a marketing standpoint her "$100K" of services was donated by a gracious company to the poor, they sure as heck don't publicize the actual cost of providing that service was only $10K even including minor surgery and recuperation. They did a good job, by the time I met her, I had no idea her arm had been so ruined just a year or two ago until she told me and showed me her arm, by no means did they cheap out on her care or recovery just because she was uninsured.
Finally the hope is that if they charged that poor girl a fair $10K then it would be hanging over her head for years until she could pay it off or more likely bankruptcy filing fees costing less than $10K they'd get nothing at all, but if they "charge" $100K then they might jackpot and she could qualify for some govt grant or fundraiser or whatever. If they know she's going to declare bankruptcy no matter what they charge and they're going to get $0 revenue, then game theory shows they should ask for $100M on the off chance by a miracle she wins the lottery, or qualifies from some weird govt grant or school support fund or something.
I think something foreigners often don't understand is we charge poor people $100K for a broken arm but we only charge them like $2K to file bankruptcy, so there are no acute medical problems that cost more than $2K, and for chronic problems they make life hell until either the chronic problem goes away and so do the bankruptcy bills, or the victim dies, but its not really expensive. The business model ruins middle class aspirations (how will I have the vacation home and RV if I file bankruptcy?) but we solved that problem by shipping off all the middle clss jobs to China, not having a middle class means not having to worry about a middle class anymore, there's just really rich people and peasants who own nothing.
1. Bankruptcy can only be filed once every 7 years. What happens if there are medical complications and you are re-hospitalized after you filed for bankruptcy? Answer: You are screwed.
2. It's usually far cheaper and less hassle to purchase an ACA policy to prevent being presented with these large bills in the first place.
First: hospitals are required by law to stabilize you regardless of your ability to pay. Stabilize. They are not required to treat you beyond getting you to the point you won't die on your way out of the ER.
Second: many of the better medical practices, UCSF Ortho for example, will not treat you if you don't have insurance.
Third: bankruptcy is not quite as straightforward as you make it sound, and if you have any assets, you may well lose them. You can have $10 or $20k and still find a $100k surgery very expensive. For example, in CA, you can only protect $3k or $5k, depending, of value in your car during bankruptcy. And there isn't a $3k or $5k car in the US worth a damn.
The procedure itself, plus the related office appointments and tests, was around $50,000 (after insurance discounts). That included separate bills from the surgery center, the hospital (I was admitted overnight), the cardiologist, and the anesthesiologist.
That's for a one-off problem that is now corrected. If it were cancer, or something else that required ongoing treatment, costs rise rapidly.
* To the degree that any medical issue can be minor; my life was never in danger and risk permanent disability was low.
Many providers, including public providers, are exceptionally reluctant to see uninsured patients. If push comes to shove they cannot outright refuse, but they can be highly disinclined.
Insurance isn't just "we cover your bills", but "we negotiate rates with providers". Much healthcare billing is basically funny money. Or more specifically, there are huge fixed costs, but charges are based on specific services billed (HMOs excepted, though internally they likely operate somewhat similarly), so that what in a tremendous number of cases, the healthcare provider cannot tell you, as a private individual, what you'd be billed for treatment. But some hospital procedure or stay can billed entirely differently depending on who paying, with hugely varying rates.
And, since the uninsured has zero effective bargaining leverage (health plans can threaten to drop a provider or apply other leverage), they get the highest rates.
On top of all this, billing is tremendously disaggregated. You might see charges for facility, individual supplies, labs, transport, and individual medical personnel who charge independently. Many (if not most) doctors aren't employees of a hospital, but are independent service providers who charge separately.
It's a mess.
And a distressingly ineffective one. There's been very little real improvement in health outcomes since the 1950s (and for quite some time they got worse). Much of the improvement can be chalked up to improved environmental and lifestyle factors (removing lead from paint and gasoline, asbestos, less smoking and drinking). It's been improved health outcomes for the poor and minorities which account for much of the life expectancy gains as well. Earlier improvements largely came from public health measures: fresh, clean drinking water, sewerage systems, municipal waste removal, and quarantines for infectious disease. Even vaccinations and antibiotics were relatively late and minor interventions by comparison.
Example: I needed a sinoplasty/septoplasty. The procedure was $26k if I was uninsured. My insurance company had negotiated the procedure to $4k. I owed 10% of the procedure cost at $400. This is for a minor outpatient procedure. So, losing insurance means paying 6500% more for healthcare in this case.
The crew supporting it were HP badged guys not making alot of money, but being billed at some wacky rate. Never heard from HP hq until some VP of something flew in to tell me the whole crew was being laid off due to not getting promoted. (Keep in mid they were easily clearing $2M a year in profit)
Long story short, they all left, started a little consultancy and were able to win a bid at half the billing rate that 3x their take home.
And the reason why that's important is it doesn't matter how good of an employee he is, there's no way to stretch the death of HP out 15 years, so he needs a plan for WHEN hp dies, not IF.
The alternative is to fire everyone all at once in maybe 4 years.
This is a question that only the market can answer. While we can speculate all day long, none of us have any idea who would hire him or not. One thing is a certainty: if he never tries to get another job, he will not get any.
Here's something I learned from watching hundreds or perhaps thousands of folks navigate the tech labor market: people skills and networking rock -- much more than technical skills! If your dad has all of these companies who only want to work with him? Wow! The day he gets laid off, if he does, he picks up the phone and starts calling all of his friends. After that it's just a numbers game. For his tech and people skills there are a certain percentage of folks that will positively respond. If that percentage is 10% and he knows 20 or 30 people? Odds are pretty good that he'll have a lead on a new job before the day is over.
The difficult part here is psychological. Very difficult to work for one company for a long period of time and then feel confident talking to others about getting work, even if they like you a lot. Older folks such as myself also start carrying a chip around on their shoulder, looking for ageism everywhere (Yep, it exists, but staying angry or depressed about it is not very motivating)
The psychological part is the hardest. He could be 10 seconds away from getting another job and manage to talk himself out of it instead of trying. It's a very difficult spot to be in.
True story, former employer had a lay off, the company I was at sent me an email with a list of everyone who had been laid off asking me (I was in good standing, and respected) who we should go after. You bet I black listed the jerks, and got the guys I considered to be good developers, and easy to work with.
Sure this was all my opinion and who am I anyway? But the point is: this stuff happens, and all you guys who think it doesn't are kidding yourselves.
The catch-phrase is "fierce opinions, lightly held"
I'll argue the shit out of whether or not brackets stand alone in C++ code, but at the end of the day we all agree on something and move on. We're still friends. You have to both be passionate about what you do -- and willing to see the big picture -- to be a true professional.
Give him a hand if you're in the position to do so.
I know you said you do not have the best relationship, but you recognize he is human. You have compassion. He is family. I want your Dad to succeed. I am sure others in this thread do too.
I was going to mention, that if they are proactive; they might be able to keep their health care expenditures reasonable if they apply to Minnesota's department of health and human services. They will need to spend down assets, but they can usually keep their house, and car. (I know in California, the quality of medical care has gotten much better with the funds from the health care act--much better.)
I just noticed that Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty's (R) recent executive order intended to stop the implementation of federal health care reform in Minnesota? I just don't get his thinking? He's refusing millions in free money?
Again, I hope your father doesn't loose his job. I went to Sonoma State university, and all the business graduates went straight HP to fill out job applications. The company's corporate office was within throwing distance. After I graduated, the number one question was, "When are you going to apply to HP?" I hated anything related to tech back then, but the people who got jobs seemed pretty happy. Back then it was a pretty secure job.
I still cringe whenever I hear Carlie Fiorina brag about her tenure at HP. You don't brag when you pretty much ruin a company?
I had an difficult relationship with my father too.
* cut costs (mostly by disabling essential business functions)
* buy back stock using proceeds
The result:
https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...
The person in Charge : Meg Whitman. In 2008, she was cited by The New York Times as among the women most likely to become the first female President of the United States.
Because what "worked" for HP, we should apply to all of the US.
Also see:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-24/why-hewlett-packard...
And let's suppose for a second that HP is somehow right. How did they just notice that 10% of their employees are doing something totally worthless? On top of the 55,000 employees that they laid off in 2012? I don't understand how this isn't an admission of total management incompetence.
There's also the classic MBA mistake of seeing employees as expenses rather than assets. HP has been investing in these people for years. What a waste to just fire them all. And this is surely damaging another valuable asset, organizational morale. That they couldn't figure out a single valuable thing to do with those assets is just sad.
It's one thing to repurpose people when the trend lines are positive or at least flat, but in HP's case there is a real question mark about what growing sectors they can successfully move into. Certainly they still have the talent to do amazing things, but have the leadership with the deep visibility into the organization's inner workings and talent pool and the outward facing vision to actually pull off a reorg like that seems almost impossible.
But even running with your argument, that the people laid off are slacking, I think it's an enormous failure that they let 30,000 of those people accumulate such that they were wasting $3 billion per year. Especially given their massive layoff a few years back. And if they've built an organization where it's difficult to tell where they're wasting $3 billion per year, I don't see how that's anything but an enormous indictment of the managers.
These people who phone it in still do their jobs, but they aren't hard workers, they are not active in the technical environment so much. They're static workers, working on projects that might be not so necessary any more, but ignored by the business because it's part of a profitable unit. Such as printers and so on.
Even if they could, they have no real incentive to be truthful about it.
Management in big companies cares only about benefits coming with position. Product? Fuck it, as long as they have power and cookies.
Not to mention that more critical people will leave once they sniff layoffs coming.
Everyone in the Venn diagram of willing to jump ship and able to jump ship, has already jumped. All you've got left is people unwilling to jump, unable to jump, or both. Those unwilling will continue to be unwilling for whatever reasons, if the last layoff round didn't snap them out, then this will also fail. Those unable to jump will continue to be unable.
The keyword to search for in the economic literature is "labor hoarding". In short, companies tend to (by default) keep employees until well after they are no longer useful. Then some sort of a shock causes the company to shed the deadwood all at once.
This is management incompetence, but it's exceedingly common. If you ever see a company (e.g. Netflix) which sheds employees regularly, that's a very good sign.
But this is just theory. The empirical grounding for labor hoarding is pretty solid.
Big companies don't really operate by simple supply vs demand laws. They play a much more complex game and many large businesses have long figured that gaming the system is just as profitable as actually shipping product.
In fact companies are constantly starting and changing business activities, and their people should be being moved onto those new activities, sometimes these activities fail, and I would argue that the shock is the result of a set of these transitions failing, resulting in a collapse of the organisms ability to adapt - and layoffs.
This is what seems to be happening at IBM and HP - their management (at all levels) has stopped being able to find new activities for their workforce, and this failure is creating the shocks. My belief is that this is due to a disruption - specifically Hadoop, which has torpedoed the market for differentiated servers and software in enterprise data. "The Machine" was an attempt by HP to ride this out and find an new set of activities (by redefining enterprise computing) maybe the 3D crosspoint announcements from Intel have convinced the HP Enterprise management that the gig is up for this and there is no point in continuing?
Organizational morale at HP has been pretty dire for at least a decade by now with few bright spots of news and a revolving door of leadership. I left HP in very early 2010 after a few years there when I was acquired in, but in hindsight I should have left probably the second I heard of the acquisition and cashed out what I could of my NQSOs / ISOs. I've been calling them the Walmart of tech years ago before these recent stories about Amazon showed up because unlike Amazon, the stories of poor pay, long hours, and consistently below-market compensation are very, very common at HP.
Still solid gains over the last 2 years, but the chart forms a classic "head and shoulders" bearish pattern centered at the beginning of this year. I'd say there's a 50% chance that it will continue to fall.
it worked for radioshack!
HP was the first company to pioneer Silicon Valley culture, ie. The HP Way. It was only after Fiorina's tenure that HP turned into a shadow of its former self. They were one of the first to aggressively lay people off in the US and hire in India, and under her, they lost "The HP Way".
Every CEO since Fiorina has been a complete joke. Now Whitman is coming in to finish the job.
Trying to buy PriceWaterhouseCooper for $14 billion might have been a good move but it was a dumb price. IBM later bought it for $4 billion.
I did go and see her talk at Comdex. She was remarkably clueless about technology.
One thing I realized working for a huge company and comparing that with my time at their much smaller competitor was that organizations in huge companies become hyperspecialized. This is great during the good times, because everyone is able to squeeze out that last 5% of performance (or whatever other metric they're optimizing for), and this combined effort allows them to keep their lead over the competitor.
But it's terrible during bad times because of the overstaffing. And firing people just makes things worse because the company loses important parts of its organizational memory. Because of the hyperspecialization, no single person/organization knows how to do all the things that need to be done to get the product out the door. And if you fire 10% of your workforce, you're going to forget 10% of the stuff you needed to know to build your products. In fact, you probably lose much more than 10% because people who are actually good see the writing on the wall and leave, taking a disproportional amount of the organizational knowhow with them.
I feel like these companies get caught in a death spiral. They can't do things the old way because they don't know how to any more, and they can't do it the way their competitors are doing it either because they never knew how to do that! So they just flounder along for many years slowly becoming less and less relevant. They solution is to luck into a completely different business model that somehow ends up working a la IBM in the 90s. But how realistic is that?
Fire the person(s) responsible for letting things get that bad.
They hesitated to offer me a job, because they said that when HP offers someone a position, they're basically offering them a job for life.
Sure, you can snicker at that comment, since almost no company would (or can, or should) make such a claim nowadays. But people told me that before I got there, in the mid-1980s, there were big problems at the company. Rather than have any layoffs, they reduced everyone's salary by 10%, and told people to only work 9 of every 10 business days. This included everyone, starting with the top managers.
I'm not sure if that was the right thing to do for the company. And I doubt many companies would do that today. And if they're talking about shedding 30k people, then HP is planning some drastic changes.
But it's sad for me to remember the HP that I worked for at the time, in which there was a strong sense of community, and of "we're all in this together" -- and to think of the people who joined when such an ethos existed, and who will be laid off now.
I'm not sure if there's a real alternative, and I'm a capitalist at heart... but it's still sad to see so many people laid off because it's now in style to break companies apart.
But I do have to wonder how the company grew to be so bloated and large. Perhaps it was unfair for HP to hire them to begin with.
I fully recognize that at the end of a day, an unprofitable company doesn't do anyone any good. It's just sad for me to think that the only way to make the company profitable is to lay off such a huge number of employees.
I also know how big-company layoffs often work; they often don't take someone's quality of work into consideration, but rather the project or division in which they worked. Thus, I'm sure some great people will be looking for jobs, through no fault of their own.
She told me that HP's procurement interface for external entities (or whatever its official name is) is absolutely terrible. It blocks randomly, it's very slow, it takes a lot to fill in all the info, and when you finally give up and call some human from HP you're being told to go back using the interface. It's like they just don't want to take their clients' money.
Two weeks to get two hard disks on an enterprise agreement. Bought the damn things off Misco and had them there the next morning.
Decided to buy supermicro from now on.
Plus Broadcom NICs in 2015. Kill me now.
Maybe, but laptop or desktop, HP has been always synonymous with crappy quality and design - among the worst I have ever seen. I just can't wait for them to stop making PCs so that we can get at least half-decent laptops from other manufacturers.
HP was a different company that made good stuff.
That's HP's problem. Great gear, got the job done, didn't have an addictive replacement revenue model like Apple. People ran HP minicomputers for decades because they Just Worked.
Can't sell heirlooms for commodity prices in a commodity market and do good long-term business. ;)
Alas, nowadays I use it for the equivalent of using a Mack truck to drive 300 metres down the road to buy a pack of cigarettes.
Nevertheless it's a fantastic product, which never fails me.
FWIW, I was using Brother products for years but they finally pissed me off enough that I'm on Epson.
Sure, Samsung has it's high end flagships, but so does HP (elitebooks). Just because they've filled one shitty niche doesn't mean they're all bad.
I haven't seen a decent HP product in a long, long time. Their printers are simply average, and nothing like they used to be.
Not to mention the legendary HP laser printers. Those things were built like tanks!
Their business workstations are second to none in terms of internal design (with seemingly minor stuff like automatic shutoff if a short circuit or ground leakage is detected anywhere) and reliability (laptops that can operate 24/7 under 100% load for months at end), at least in my experience...
I'm sure there are departments that do cutting edge hardware/software work at HP, and I just haven't seen them yet
Not to mention that, when it comes to layoffs like this, it's not always performance that gets looked at. It's just as likely that people making a lot of money, deserved or not, will be laid off, and someone who is less talented or hard working, but cheaper to the company, will be kept.
Ever.
Always funny when CEO talk about the future and think about the next quarter.
Seemed like leadership was missing. Fiorina and Whitman never seemed interested in tech. They just liked being the boss of something big. Boss of California, boss of US.
As for HPE moving to these "low cost centers" for their talent, this is actually something I've seen happening where many larger companies are moving to smaller and mid-sized cities farther inland or down south in the U.S., places with adequate amenities to support their infrastructure and a decent workforce, but also within striking distance of large metros. The overhead and salaries in the DC beltway and Silicon Valley, for example, can be as much as 30-50% higher than locations just a couple hours drive away from them. So such a move to lower cost of living areas makes sense from a business perspective if you're running a services company in the IT industry and especially if you're serving cost-conscious government clients which HP has been doing in a big way lately.
[1]: http://www.abebooks.com/Home-Project-Kit-Includes-Disney-Int...
For whatever reason they spun off the high tech bits (as Agilent) and became a PC/printer company. I'll never understand that decision.
But where get the money? Cutting 30k jobs is a start:
My thing is, if you know you are getting free money you have to expect it to end at some point. Have a contingency plan.
If they're hurting enough to layoff tens of thousands people, surely they can sell off the technology to settle some of their debts and live. Just an idea.
Microsoft are not a hardware company by any stretch. There are a few hardware engineers in small areas (Xbox, handsets, Surface), but almost none in server. Apple mostly make consumer facing equipment, again, no enterprise/server heritage.
If not HP, then who has a true system development background?
Well, not sure why you say not Intel. They are one of the few that actually does systems development.
IBM makes the most sense. They've distances themselves from x86, and still maintain a system development mindset, including heavy investment in big data processing. They have the OS development skills.
After IBM, there are a few maybe's:
Google would be a realistic company too, as they have shown system engineering skills, end to end, including a lot of OS development work.
Facebook - continue to do full system engineering in areas they believe are differentiators. I could see them doing something similar for analytics crunching.
Outsiders: Oracle could be viable. There must be a few Sun guys left there that do system development, and they need to show they are still relevant in big data, but they don't spend much in R&D.
Cisco - continue to do full system engineering, but would likely break this by making it too network centric. No real OS development heritage.
Broadcom - continue to expand their areas. This would be a huge step for them in systems integration, but not big at all in terms of silicon and interconnects.
Who happen to keep their jobs no matter what happens to the company.
I take documents with me using my phone. The printer business ain't like it was.
If the printer business was flush, HP could afford to bet on a diversity of services and products. They would be in the business of making money rather than saving it. 25k redundant staff doesn't speak to a track record of sound management decision making of the sort that would inspire confidence in this decision being a great one. Layoffs aren't innovation.