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.