There is also the distinct possibility that the 'HP Way' was sacrificed to save the company. Again, I know nothing of the history, but putting out a hit piece like this right before the election is just crude.
I think this is actually the dumbest thing I've ever seen written on Hacker News. If the CEO isn't responsible for corporate culture, then A) Who is? and B) What's the CEO responsible for?
It worked for a friend I know who is a film producer who faked his early resumé as "Producer" and kept getting hired as a such. He would hire good staff & they'd pretty much run the show. He learned producing on the job and quickly replaced the fake resumé jobs with real ones. Thing is, all it took was convincing someone he actually was a Producer. I think many CEOs do the same thing. Walk the walk, talk the talk and hope your employees don't screw up.
There may be a time and a place for discussing the upsides and downsides of any particular CEO's tenure at any given company, but it would probably be much better to discuss it when said CEO is not standing for election in less than a week, so that people's feelings on politics don't cloud their opinions on technology management.
I know nothing about Carly Fiorina's time as CEO of HP, but am disinclined to trust anyone's opinion on the subject this week. Can we talk about Geoffrey Immelt's CEOship of General Electric instead?
Indeed, taking her experience into account, and comparing it to that of Barbara Boxer, is a good idea when you're deciding for whom to vote (unless you're just going to vote on ideology as most people do anyway). But the subject then is still "politics" rather than "tech news".
Incidentally, I do think she has a chance of victory. And I also think she and boxer share the same weakness - lack of answers for the underlying problem. Fiorina and other CEOs didn't outsource thousands of jobs to Asia because regulatory compliance was tedious, they did so because the skill level required for a great many jobs is available at a fraction of the price elsewhere. Even if we cut the price of doing business in the USA by 25% in the morning and made administration, regulation and healthcare cheap and easy for all, low-tech manufacturing and services would still be a lot more expensive in the USA than in China or India, and within a few years we'd be back to where we are now.
We need internal reforms, and there are some valid proposals for what to reform and how from both the left and the right. But the big question, to which neither party has proposed any good answers, is how to productively employ the least skilled members of the workforce so that they can have a reasonable level of economic security. People often talk about reviving US manufacturing; that sounds like a fine idea, but first we must identify what we can make that everyone will prefer to buy. In other words, what comparative advantage do we have in manufacturing over the developing world? If no such advantage exists, how can we redeploy that part of our labor force?
I like the green jobs idea, but wind turbines and solar panels can't make up 5% of the economy for the long term.
Everybody's been saying she was a disaster for half of a decade. And yes, it's relevant to someone who attempts to make "business experience" a reason to vote for them.
But in this particular case, the HP way was 'on the way out' for a while before she ever joined the company, the Agilent spin-off was already in the works before she took over as CEO.
I'm sure that she carries her portion on the blame for what came next though, but spinning off Agilent was definitely not a smart move because it was to a large extent the strongest hold-out of 'the hp way'.