Hewlett-Packard to Cut About 30,000 Jobs (9% of workforce)

This would be roughly 9% of HP's workforce. It's always much more interesting to see layoffs in terms of percentages rather than absolute numbers.

"Walmart to cut 10,000 jobs" = 0.5% of their employees, probably nil effect.

"Instagram to cut 10 jobs" = complete destruction of the company.

For you guys wondering how it is even possible to fire 30k people at once:

In every organization of that size there is cruft. Mind-bogglingly large cruft. Working with those behemots will teach you that you could fire entire departments and no one would notice. There is so many people simply tasked with completely non-customer relevant things like reviewing HR review forms, etc. - they get their pay, produce no tangible value.

Now mind you, every company needs people to keep the whole structure going. HR, IT are never profitable, of course. But at some point during the growth phase of a company these start to metastasize - they are cancer, feeding themselves, leeching of the company that hosts them. And not just money, but also power. Suddenly managers of those areas have a say in company direction. Block innovation because of 'processes'. Have never seen a customer, never produced anything in their life, have no shred of idea of the core business of their company.

And just like cancer treatment, past a certain stage you need to cut deep and wide.

Prahalad and Hamel laid a bit of groundwork for more effective org-cancer treatment with their core competency definition.

You know your cuts were deep enough when a few months in you notice pain. People not being able to service customers effectively. And you'd be surprised just when this really happens at places like HP. 9% is laughable. If you have lots of layers in an organization, every employee laid off has a ripple effect. Need less HR, accounting, IT, etc to service less employees. Even less layers of management as you can combine teams.

Looking at certain country hubs of HP here in Europe I'd wager you could easily cut 50% of the current workforce without any negative impact on customer relations.

Why is there a CEO job if the only solution to problems is doing a layoff? Any fresher can do that for a small percentage of the CEO salary. Shouldn't an efficient company make layoffs part of their process if share price is the only goal and implement bonus reductions to CEO whenever that happens.

Interesting, this morning it was quoted as 25,000 jobs.

I'm actually quite surprised to hear that 10,000 of the cuts will come in the enterprise area, since I was under the impression that it was an area that HP was going to focus on, squaring off against IBM and Oracle.

They really are decimating their workforce. Ouch.

HP has been cutting their workforce for a long time, at least since the Hurd days. Back then I suspect cuts were made based just on the numbers. Some people were expensive and I saw a lot of very capable people get let go. Eventually it became hard to find capable people and now, many years later, I suspect continued cuts wont matter. The good engineers that would have made their next generation of products were disposed of and wont go back. The good engineers of the future aren't being drawn to careers at HP. And the current management is getting theirs, while there is still momentum in the system. HP's time is past.

That's a lot of jobs, even accounting for the fact that companies of that size often announce X number of positions eliminated to make investors happy but a lot of attrition ends up being "internal displacements" and accelerated retirements with chunky severance packages. Nearly 10% of a total workforce is nothing to sneeze at.

Keep in mind that EDS, when HP acquired them, had 139,000 employees.

The cloud has fangs. Just a matter of time for the big IT strategic outsourcers to feel the pinch (looking at you, IBM, CSC, Infosys, TCS, etc).

Why would a company ever cut 30,000 jobs at once, instead of smaller amounts of jobs incrementally? Presumably their desired number of employees did not actually change overnight by 30,000.

How does a 9% job cut actually work? How do you reliably pick 30,000 people who are less valuable than others? Is it just by department? Do middle managers make arbitrary lists? Dice?

I've been through so many rounds of layoffs and it's always hard. I remember we lost about 15% of the workforce one year across the board which was tough. It was indiscriminate, friends you had know for years were gone all of a sudden. Then the next year we lost another 10%. That would've hurt too but by then I was just numb to it, and in some weird way I felt that those who were laid off were the lucky ones.

Good luck to any of you who work at HP.

It's kind of mind boggling that HP has nearly 350,000 employees.

Facebook is soon to be worth twice (maybe three times) what they are, with a mere 3,500 employees, despite HP earning seven times more profit. Something will have to adjust with that math.