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Comment by elorant | Hacker News Reader

Posts like this remind me how shitty the business model of most Fortune 500 companies is. They lay off people just to increase profits regardless of productivity goals. For most management councils out there everything is about numbers. Perhaps we ought to do something as a community to stop such practices. Like boycott the shit out of companies that adopt them.

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HP is particularly dumb in this area. My personal acquaintance with this was with their strict "up and out" policy that was in effect several years ago. A decade ago I had a secondary responsibility of supporting a legacy DEC terminal environment.

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.

You can restate that as "HP encourages employees to form their own business" :)

Its important to note this is a dying company with no hope at all for the future. The more employees they shed, the faster they shed them, the longer they can minimally keep on operating, or rephrased they're hoping the total sum revenue will be higher if they stretch out the death of the company as long as possible.

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.

Maybe Alcatel can swoop in and buy them up.

they're laying off not to increase revenue but to slash costs. It's a defensive move not an offensive one.

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