HP To Cut Back On Telecommuting 238
Makarand writes "Hewlett-Packard, the company that began
making flexible work arrangements for its employees starting in 1967, is cutting back on telecommuting arrangements
for its IT employees. By August, almost all of HP's IT employees will have to work in one of 25 designated offices during most of the week. Those who don't wish to make this change will be out of work without severance pay. While other companies nationwide are pushing more employees to work from home to cut office costs, HP believes bringing its information-technology employees together in the office will make them swifter and smarter and allow them to be more effective."
Could they... (Score:5, Insightful)
HP moves all nationwide offices to india, any employees who refuse to move are out of a job without servernce pay....
Could they do that, and if they can't, can they move them into offices? I guess its a contract thing, something for me to look out for if i ever telecommute..
Only telecommute from India (Score:5, Interesting)
That's what really pissed me off when I was in the biz. I would ask to work from home and I was ALWAYS told that, "No, we need you here to do your work."
So, I would commute in every fucking day. Then, you guessed it, my job (and others'), were sent over seas to India. Yep, they needed their IT workers there all right!
Re:Could they... (Score:4, Informative)
Not a biggie for me, as I read the contract fully and understood the implications. Also the one move so far has been for the better for me. e.g. not to india
Min
Re:Spouse and children (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Spouse and children (Score:2, Funny)
My own experience, however, has shown me that married workers are more capable, whether it be because of the daily, constant, successful ability to handle stress, emergencies, delegation, risk, and reward, or some other aspect.
So a married working would be more valuable than a single worker anyway
Re:Spouse and children (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Spouse and children (Score:5, Insightful)
While losing a job is tough on anyone, a single person can quit to leave a shitty situation and only be putting themselves at risk. A married person with kids is likely to be more docile because if they quit/get fired, they have to take care of the spouse and rug-rats.
So, of course management likes married people with kids, as it's a shackle they didn't even have to pay for.
Re:Spouse and children (Score:2)
That right there is a good reason for the double standard. (It's fun thinking on both sides of the aisle.)
Also, although it's illegal to ask questions about marriage, family, race, sex, etc. during the interview, it is not illegal to do a background check on prospective employees.
A background check will answer most of those questions, so that the employer doesn't need to ask them during the
Re:Spouse and children (Score:2)
I don't know the demographics of the people you've worked with, of course, but I wonder if it's simply because married people tend to be older (and therefore more experienced) on average.
Re:Spouse and children (Score:5, Interesting)
Japan, S. Korea, and many European countries are imploding [atimes.com] because too few choose to pass along the investment (food, housing, education, time) they received as children. There is a large economic payoff to childless individuals, yet a high cost to society overall if too many take that route. Families are what keep society going, so society has a vested interest in promoting family. No reason to turn it into a religious debate, just look at the demographics.
Re:Spouse and children (Score:2)
Re:Spouse and children (Score:2)
Re:Spouse and children (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like someone needs to go back to school.
Believe it or not, a lower birthrate DOES mean a society disappears in exponential decay. Some mathematician figured that at the current rate, there'll be like 13 Japanese people by 2500 or 3000 or something.
Negative population growth will be a much bigger issue in the next hundred years than overpopulation.
We've too many people on the planet, eating up too many resources, killing too much life, producing killer pollution.
Sigh.
You know our current problem with food is having too much production, right? The famines ever since the Green Revolution have been caused by political issues, not by actual lack of crops.
The countries with reduced population will be winners, and the cancerously growing populations of doomed countries will self-destruct in the usual Malthusian manner
Ah, yes, there it is. I thought you sounded like a Malthusian. Which is great and all, except Malthus has been proven wrong. Repeatedly. He made some fundamental mistakes in his assumptions, and unfortunately for everyone, fools have been repeating these same mistakes for 200 years.
Having a small population is a recipe for disaster in a country.
Countries with reduced populations have never been winners in history in the long run. Even small countries who have done well, like the Netherlands, have eventually been eclipsed by the bigger countries. It is critical to have at least a small amount of population in the world, for a variety of reasons.
The causes of the horsemen are not political in the truest sense; population pressure is always the root cause.
Like most of Malthusian beliefs, this one is demonstrably false. I'd be curious to see how you'd try to relate something like the Vietnam War to population pressures in America and the USSR.
Nothing, no organism, can grow ceaselessly.
This is the core fallacy that is the root of all the problems with Malthusian beliefs.
Humans are not organisms, beyond the scientific definition. We don't fit into the K or R population models that all creatures, from flies to baboons fall into. Humans are unique. Why? It's simple: humans make their own food. And the birth rate drops as humans get more food (or are more successful over all), which is the opposite of what you see in the animal kingdom.
If you are really concerned about overpopulation, which I guess you might be even though you're not very well informed, the best thing you could do is work to build a strong middle class world-wide.
At some point, it poisons the environment with its own effluent and kills off both room to live and the food supply.
More tripe. Unlike animals, humans build things called Sewer Systems. Have been doing it for a while; you might want to look into it some time.
Humans who maintain a steady state population, intelligently, will have resources to live and to educate, while those who do not will inevitably collapse into warfare, disease, ignorance and (usually religious) totalitarianism through sheer desperation.
No... they'll invade the countries with the smaller populations and take them over. Religious Totalitarianism? I'd say radical communist dictatorships are a bigger issue. Consider the famine in Ethiopia. We had enough food to feed the people -- the communism is why over a million people died.
They will be the danger to to the planet, already warming and drying under the strain of a population doubling every two generations.
More than half the world lives in countries that aren't producing enough babies to replace their population. If the very deep and serious problems in Africa ever get solved (and I think
Re:Spouse and children (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Spouse and children (Score:2)
Re:Spouse and children (Score:2)
Is your employer also responsible for expenses related to relocating your spouse and children, if any? Or are such contracts designed exclusively for single people?
No, they were responsible for moving my wife too, and even paid for her immigration costs.
Min
Re:Spouse and children (Score:2)
I cannot really see this if your wife somebody, a professional in her own right.
No damn way in hell if she is at your level or higher in her profession and her profession is different from yours so they cannot hire her.
Yeah... Dream on... Bollocks...
Re:Could they... (Score:2)
I see this in a number of industries, where most of the work a person does in behind the scenes, few people see any physical evidence of work, and the people complain to high heaven if they are asked to come in for a day.
If memory serves me correctly- (Score:5, Informative)
But it's been a little while since I read the article, and I may have it wrong.
Re:If memory serves me correctly- (Score:5, Insightful)
No it's both ways. Telecommuting is good when the job is not emergent and requires a high amount of concentration (architecting, engineering, designing, given you have the tools at home).
However if your job is routine, technical, and requires lots of work, associated with stress, telecommuniting can make you lazy, slack often (having no control) and doing a bad job overall.
I guess a lesson is relearned: a new solution to a problem doesn't necessarily make older solutions invalid or worse.
Re:If memory serves me correctly- (Score:5, Interesting)
The very sort of people HP is calling in from the home.
However if your job is routine, technical, and requires lots of work, associated with stress, telecommuniting can make you lazy, slack often (having no control) and doing a bad job overall.
The very sort of people the new HP manager behind this move is used to dealing with in his previous job at Wal-Mart (no, that's not a joke. RTFA).
KFG
Re:If memory serves me correctly- (Score:4, Interesting)
In the US today, employees and customers are the enemy as far as corporate management and CEOs are concerned.
Yep (Score:5, Insightful)
The more the new executives and managers chase the bottom line, the more HP will suffer (the more brilliant people will leave), and the worse they will fare in the market. I expect someone to acquire HP for the name at some point in the not-to-distant future. No doubt it will seem like a smart move to the new Wal-Mart managers, when looking at the "bottom line".
Re:Yep (Score:2)
Re:Yep (Score:2)
The "Dell" effect (Score:3)
It appears HP decided to copy Dell, who admitted they were a marketing and distribution company and not a "technology" company.
At face value it seems logical to copy your most profitable competitor. However, there is also the issue of niche. There may only be so much r
Which Business School? (Score:3, Funny)
Exactly right. Somebody at HP said, "we're going to compete with Dell on Dell's turf, by Dell's rules, with higher expenses than Dell."
I'd like to know which business school that guy went to.
Re:Yep (Score:4, Informative)
I don't expect anyone to acquire HP. Compaq's acquisition of Digital created an enormous bloat that ultimately sank Compaq. HP's ill-advised decision to acquire Compaq was in the political and financial interests of a handful of executives at both firms, at the enormous expense of employees, stockholders, and customers. More significantly HP inherited the problems of a troubled Compaq in a troubled industry. Since the acquisition, HP's stock as risen as I predicted it would from $11/share to the low 30's. However, most of that rise as been "normal buoancy" of a rising tech market recovering from the 2000-2001 decline and the collective sigh of relief when Fiorina's hand-picked board of directors found balls enough to fire her.
Despite that progress (for which my retirement fund is grateful), HP faces daunting challenges:
1. Their market share in printers was so high that there was nowhere to go but down, as offerings from Epson, Canon, and others brought increasingly credible offerings to market.
2. The printer market itself has been saturated.
3. The PC business is only marginally profitable and unlikely to improve.
4. The large server market is (Unix SuperDome systems) is under pressure from increasingly powerful dual core offerings from Intel and AMS.
5. HP's multibillion dollar gamble on Itanium (remember HP partnered with Intel to co-invent and co-fund Itanium) has largely failed, as AMD forced Intel's had with it's dual mode 32/64-bit Opteron, leaving Itanium to join Betamax in the Hall of Fame for great technologies that the market passed on.
6. HP has huge customer credibility issues across an untenable array of platform and operating system offerings: multiple versions of Unix, Tandem Non-stop, DEC Alpha and it's myriad of also-ran OSes, and MPE, which has survived HP management's best efforts to kill it. It's not that customers don't understand the HP roadmap: it's that HP has earned low credibility.
7. Even if HP returned to its $11 five year low, the market cap is so large that only a stock swap in a highly inflated market would permit HP's acquisition. Even then, who could buy them without getting shot down by FTC or EEC antitrust regulators. IBM's big enough; Dell might be. But either would create untenable monopoly through an acquisition of that size. The only possibility of an acquisition I could forsee is from outside the IT Industry.
8. HP's profits still largely come from ink, toner, and print media -- an annuity revenue stream for HP, but one facing erosion as years of market share losses on print platforms translate into lower growth in ink.
I look for HP to begin selling off assets and lines of business.
On Telecommuting...
The folks HP is reeling back in are application developers, IT support, network management, etc., not the customer facing architects and field force. HP has realized, I suspect, that workspace costing formulas were the problem (for example, a 8x8 cubibcle in Houston "cost" the same as a 8x8 cube in Manhattan -- not exactly market reality). There are substantial costs involved with telecommuting (networking, local equipment that would normally be shared). More importantly, IT operations is a team sport that often requires pulling people into a room and hammering out an answer or an agreement -- much harder to do when employee's are changing diapers while on a con-call.
What's really driving this announcement is that HP is reducing the number of datacenters it operates from and unfathomable 87 to a still barely believable 25. If the telecommuting model were left in place, you'd have support people in one city theorhetically supporting a consolidated data center in another city. That just doesn't make sense.
In the years since Lew Platt left, HP has done some remarkably stupid things. However, this move isn't one of them. It's a necessary move to get both the internal and external cost structure in line with a very competitive IT Services business. The disparity
Re:Yep (Score:2)
Re:If memory serves me correctly- (Score:2)
The very sort of people HP is calling in from the home.
Not at all. While the IT field certainly requires a lot of experience, 80% of it is routine.
Re:If memory serves me correctly- (Score:2)
Re:If memory serves me correctly- (Score:2)
Well, it'll be interesting to see how this all comes out in the end, anyway...
Re:If memory serves me correctly- (Score:2)
I could see that being the case for 2-3 days out of the week, depending on what your job is. But really, if you're working in a team situation (as 99% of people are), there is really no way to effectively work from home 100% of the time. You need to be able to sit down with the rest of you
Re:If memory serves me correctly- (Score:2)
For research jobs, telecommuting doesn't wortk so well.
Re:If memory serves me correctly- (Score:2)
My experience with telecommuting is that it breeds inefficiency and lack of communication. But it looks good to the bean counters who now dominate corporate management. Such folks are always looking for line items to cut, and fuck the long term consequences. And real-estate is a big line item, especially in Silicon Valley. Telecommuters don't need offices, which means smaller corporate campuses. And if you hire people to work from low cost-of-living locat
It makes sense (Score:5, Informative)
When we have tried this with other aspects of our business it has had similar results. Most people simply lack the self discipline to make turn the telecommuter opportunity into a reality (for them).
Re: (Score:2)
Re:It makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
First, as a 'worker' I was allowed to telecommute occasionally. I know that for myself (reasonably well motivated) the temptations at home were too strong for me, and I ended up screwing around about 4 hours a day. Add a wife/kids to the mix, and I would not consider this time to be productive. My co-workers all reported the same thing.
Now as a manager, I run into similar problems with my employees. It took a while for one guy to figure out that Xbox Live lets me know exactly how much screwing around he is doing. (Hmm...he had Oblivion running all day, AND got 5 achievements...) Yet of course he claimed to be working all day. He is no longer eligible for telecommuting.
Now I only support telecommuting with other employees occasionally, and only if there is a very defined project with a definite deliverable at the end. For instance, "You need to have this help file completely finished tomorrow." (Knowing that it is probably a 4 hour job that would be stretched to 8 even if they were at work.)
I'm not trying to be an asshole, but it's just the reality for the people I work with. Given the opportunity, they would sit at home and play games- while making excuses why things didn't get done. They did that when I was part of the team, and they tried to do it when I became the boss.
(Truth be told, when they are AT work, they are very effective, highly productive, and a great team. They are not a bunch of clowns, they just get distracted. But being distracted at work is what lets them see problems from many angles, so it is a good trait if focused on productive issues, instead of deciding which armor to wear.)
Re:It makes sense (Score:4, Interesting)
At the end of the day, I send my boss a list of what I've worked on.
The only downside for me is I have a tendency to work extra hours those days, because there'll be one or two things that I know will be difficult to finish with the "one interruption every 10 minutes" atmosphere that pervades our computing group (most of which are not relevant to my actual job).
Re:It makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
But was he still accomplishing his goals? I assume not, because you don't sound like the kind of person who'd take such a shallow disciplinary action, but it brings up a point:
Too many people assume that--whether at the office or at home--doing nothing but work will always produce the most output for a given period of time. Now, for things like factory assembly lines or monkey coding that don't require thinking, this is more or less true; but for the types of people who most commonly commute--design, R&D and so forth--it doesn't always hold.
In point of fact, when I changed jobs recently I spent my first six months working at the office, then got permission to telecommute. When I looked back over my first year, I'd actually gotten more done at home, despite taking frequent breaks to read a book, play Katamari Damacy, what have you. I suspect it's those relaxation periods that keep my work brain running at full speed, whereas it's awful hard to relax at the office (I don't even have a cubicle, just a desk in a big open room).
One curious thing I've found since starting to telecommute is that work has become almost another hobby for me. Granted I've always found it interesting, but at the office there was always an element of stuffiness, if you will, whereas at home, as long as I make my weekly goals (and I do), it's just one more part of my daily schedule. I guess work really does flow more smoothly when it's fun.
Re:It makes sense (Score:2)
This is the first sign... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, your programmers have been telling you this for YEARS, but it takes a pointy-haired boss to implement it.
Re:This is the first sign... (Score:2)
Re:This is the first sign...Logic has been outsour (Score:2)
Re:This is the first sign...Logic has been outsour (Score:2)
That business with Apple (at least as described in the Slashdot link) is simply insane. I doubt it's generalizable to anything, although your distinction between telecommuting and outsourcing is obviously correct.
Re:This is the first sign... (Score:2)
Romans had the same problem (Score:5, Funny)
Doesn't apply to non-IT (Score:5, Interesting)
Unintended consequences (Score:5, Insightful)
When you lay off your least valuable folks and then start doing stuff like this your most valuable folks start looking. You end up with the people that aren't good enough to get hired elsewhere but probable were gonna be on the next layoff list. Yeah, that's really the kind of people I want supporting my mission-critical gear...
I've seen this too... (Score:2)
What happens is predictable. The deadwood moves, because they can never find a job this good again. A lot of the top talent, who really liked where they lived, and really like
Re:I've seen this too... (Score:2)
Maybe this new guy was brought in to finish what Carly started.
Re:Unintended consequences (Score:3, Insightful)
This reminds me of an old Dilbert cartoon, where the PHB announces that the company will be cutting back on business card printing, and only vital employees will be allowed to order business cards. In the next panel, every employee is thinking "I'd better order business cards to find out if I'm 'vital'.".
I expect this would go the same way... well, actually the employees will jump to the correct
telecommuting (Score:2, Interesting)
But telecommuting for most of the time is stupid and neither good for worker nor firm.
1) My problem is distraction, when I have to finish something I can work from home, that's ok. But if noth
Re:telecommuting (Score:5, Interesting)
Pros:
1) I'm a lot more productive at home. Everybody has been through that - they can just get more done.
2) I'm a developer, so I really don't need to interact much beyond my own team, and through daily phone conferences, personal phone calls, IM, and email, we stay connected.
3) Traffic makes my blood boil, and the idea of losing 4hrs/day sitting in traffic just makes it sound that much worse.
4) I am less productive before noon and more productive late at night. I try to stick to a 9-10 through 5-6 schedule, but if I get an idea late at night, I can crank out some code without having to be in my office.
5) I have my own office at home. It has dedicated computers for work, a desk, and all the "comforts" of work, plus a radio and a decent view. When I'm done for the day, I can shut the door and leave it behind. I have a separate work phone number, and after a certain time, I don't answer it.
6) Fuel savings - $3/g @ 25mpg * 72miles * 5days => $43/week on gas. Not horrible, but that's assuming I'm not sitting in traffic. $43/week ~= $2100/yr. This easily makes up for my extra expenses I bring on myself from working at home.
7) I can visit out-of-town friends and family and work from there as if I'm still in the office. This takes a LOT more discipline, though, and I only do it rarely.
8) My business wardrobe is hardly anything. Most of my days are spent in shorts and a t-shirt.
9) I can listen to whatever damn station I want and turn up the radio as loud as I want (although always just barely on).
Cons:
1) I can "get stuck" at home for days or even a week at a time, with no real reason to leave the house. I have to look for reasons to get out. You can start to miss the normal, everyday interactions with other people. This is probably the biggest disadvantage to me.
2) Motivation is sometimes a factor, but it is in the office sometimes as well. Granted, I have the freedom (as an hourly contractor) to take off half an afternoon and not bill for it, and working at home makes this easier.
3) Working at home does take a lot of motivation and self-discipline. I find that I don't have too much trouble, esp. if I set goals for the day/week/month and stick to them. This should be true in any job situation, though.
I've telecommuted for other companies in the past ~6 years (small startups, side gigs, and worked for a London-based company for 18 months). All the above points all still hold true. Yes, you may miss things like working with the team, the team interaction, etc, but I find that we all do just fine; this is partly to do with the fact that I've always worked on small teams of very competenent people.
To address the points in the above poster:
1) I agree- disipline differs for everyone. Some people can work remotely effectively; others cannot.
2) I agree with being able to talk to people, but using IM and email can work wonders as long as you're verbose. Plus, you have a papertrail for everything.
3) Physically seeing the team is not a prerequisite for team spirit. The guys on my team all feel that we're part of the team and work as a team. And when the product fails or succeeds, we feel it as a team.
4) I have an office at home; I shut the door when I leave. If you have any 40+ hr/week job + commute, it's going to eat up your weekly life anyway. I find I get more personal time when working at home.
Re:telecommuting (Score:3, Insightful)
YOUR problem. Not mine.
When I telecommuted, I got up every morning, got dressed, and put in my 8 hours. That makes all the difference, having the personal discipline to still "go to work", even if that means sitting in my own living room at a laptop. Not to say that I didn't squeeze a little more flexibility out of my time that I would in an office (can't easily take a porn break while at the office), but at least 90% comparable to non-telecommuting, I put in a standard 9-to
For others it's just the opposite (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're the type who needs a work environment to keep focused it would be better not to telecommute, but I bill less when the customer lets me work at home and get more done. It's not that hard to monitor performance in a remote development environment. Either someone is making their milestones or not, closing trouble tickets or not. I can look at their code and tell how long it should have taken vs the actual billing. What I save in clothes, gas and commute time is invaluable. My equipment, my dev environment, my work space at home are all set up for how I work.
A phone list and a speaker phone is all I need for quick consults, fax machine for paperworks, we keep code libraries in common access areas accessible via VPN if I need something. I find interaction at work actually detracts from production more often than helping it. There are times when face to face meetings are unavoidable, like gathering requirements and monitoring user interaction on betas, but other than that I'd say a full 75% of interuptions at the office are at best unproductive and frequently just plain annoying. If I have to forward my office phone, my productivity tanks. If I can check messages a couple times a day that's better.
For people interested in playing politics or needing interaction with other people, an office is necessary. For me the more you leave me alone, the more I'll get done. Sometimes I'll collaborate with other developers...I work with a graphics guy in California regularly. We can work together almost like we're in the same room. We've had three way phone confernces where we've all been hammering away on our part of the app, yapping back and forth on the speaker phone. It was very much like being in an office.
Homeboys (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Homeboys (Score:2)
Re:Homeboys (Score:2)
What connection do you see between commuting time and working time? Commuting comes out of the employee's personal time. I've never once seen any business which factors it in to the time they're expected to spend working. From the employee's side, that seems a bit off ("work is claiming 10 hours of my day but only paying for 10"), but, from the management si
Re:Homeboys (Score:2)
If you start thinking about it the average person needs about eight hours
Re:Homeboys (Score:2)
Okay, I imagine I'm not the only
Look, can I just
Re:Homeboys (Score:2)
Seriously though, yes, cubicles suck. They're a worst of both worlds kinda thing, where they don't quite have the privacy of an office, or the openness of open-plan. If an employer just puts people into small isolated boxes, they're not going to start magically working well together.
What's worked well for our group, is we have 2-ish person offices, close to each other, plus a break-out space. We're never fully isolated, but can always turn to the pe
Re:Homeboys (Score:2)
Because developing serious software is a team effort. "Leave me alone and let me work" too often becomes "I know the right way to do this part of the project — the restof you are idiots, so go fuck yourselves." The result is software where the pieces don't fit, and the overall product bears little resem
Teamwork? (Score:3, Interesting)
In an office, ``you're able to put teams together that can learn very aggressively and rapidly from each other,''
Agreed, IMO lower skilled work environments are much better suited to home working. For example call centre work etc. The only reason I say this is that everyday I go into work and I learn something new from the people around me. Not to say this is "agressive" but if I get stuck on a bit of code, or perhaps a general concept I know that others around me may be able to help, and if they cant then we have discovered something that we as a group are lacking in.
Otherwise these thing go unnoticed, you recieve no critism and do not learn as effectively. Ideally in a team the stronger members of the group can carry the weaker members until they have caught up with the rest.
I cant see how this could be as effective in homeworking, in fact some animosity may occur towards weaker members due to percieved "lazyness" when actually they are just have legitimate trouble with their task.
Re:Teamwork? (Score:3, Interesting)
I know working closely makes sense, but you have to put effort into it. Once you're separated, if you the same effort into it, you'll reap similar rewards. I don't think either is particularly better, but as far as learning from others, etc...
I promise you I could walk into a work enviroment in-office and get far less done and help out far less by simply not putting any effort into it, than I could in a separated enviromen
Re: (Score:2)
It's a control problem (Score:2)
Many bosses like to be able to pop in unannounced to check up on employees and keep them honest. That's not so easy when they telecommute. It's hard to tell how long they "worked".
As the price of gas soars, it's becoming irresponsible to force all this commuting. Even if it's just 1 or 2 days a week, it reduces traffic. pollution and improves employees lives.
Webcam? (Score:2)
I'm not one to usually do so, but I'd trade that bit of liberty for the convenience of telecommuting. I don't mind if people want to watch me work.
Steve
Add to this HP's Real Estate consolidation... (Score:2, Informative)
The building management teams are going nuts trying to fit more people in less capacity. They weren't warned about the telecommuting initiative when planning began for the consolidations.
Many staff are having their cube-space halved, some of the hot-desking areas are not much bigger than 1sq metre. Teams that are being told they have to come back in are
This does not make sense from a mgmt standpoint (Score:5, Insightful)
* 180-degree turns are traumatic, and don't turn out well. This is one such change, and it will be messy and painful. It will alienate a lot of bright folks. From a management standpoint, it's not right. Change is best done gradually, and by co-opting people.
* Making the bright people come into the office in order to straighten out the poor performers, as HP's CIO hints, is yet another silly decision. Yes, I can tell you certain IT personnel should be on-site, but not everyone needs to be there. If HP's IT workforce is peppered with poor employees, this is a recruitment/management issue, not a telecommuting issue. The decision is a non sequitur. If your tire is flat, plugging the exhaust pipe won't solve the problem. Seems to me a much better solution would be to pair up the poor performers with good performers who live in the same area, and have them work together on issues, whether it's at someone's home or my IM/phone. Training would also be another solution.
I wrote about this in more detail here: http://www.comeacross.info/2006/06/04/hp-to-cance
HP was once a company admired by everyone. (Score:5, Insightful)
HP's products are worse than garbage, in my experience. They are scary garbage. I tried to un-install an HP printer driver and the un-install program deleted more than 900 files in the WinNT folder, files belonging to the operating system, not HP.
An HP technical support person told me to solve a problem with an HP printer driver by renaming an HP file so the driver could not be used.
Another HP technical support person told me to solve a problem with an HP network printer driver by not trying to use the network facility.
When installing an HP printer, it has been common that there are error messages. This is during installation. We stopped buying HP products because of that.
It's sad to see HP on a downward spiral. Lou Platt was a terrible manager. Carly Fiorina was FAR worse. I'm guessing the company is rated about 0.1 Enron now.
Watch for this: The top managers of HP will destroy the company, but will still take home tens of millions of dollars in salary and "bonuses", as Carly Fiorina did. Top managers have become enemies of companies and enemies of society.
I don't know if this is true, but it has been said that HP would not be profitable if the company could not sell Inkjet printer ink for $800 per gallon. If that is true, then it is possible that HP is not primarily a computer company, but is primarily an "expoiter of customer ignorance" company.
HP was once a company admired by everyone.
I agree with previous comments that probably HP is planning to fire the employees.
Nicole C. Wong, the author of the article did a surprisingly good job in writing it. Normally business writers are clueless about technology.
--
Edwards: George W. Bush is the "worst president of our lifetime" [go.com].
Re:HP was once a company admired by everyone. (Score:2)
$8,000 per gallon (Score:2)
I would know more about HP if I thought it was safe to buy HP products.
$17 for 24 refills [slashdot.org]
Change for the sake of change... (Score:2)
I don't remember who said, "Change is the only thing that really stays the same", but it's appropriate. There are advantages and disadvantages to working at home, and HP has decided that this week they want to reap the benefits of team-based collaboration. Maybe it's as simple as a new manager wanting to have whatever managers are n levels below him directly indoctrinate these telecommuters to his way of thinking.
I hope they let the employees keep their VPN equipment and computers at home, and give them
IBM ads? (Score:2, Insightful)
Kind of like in those IBM advertisements in magazines where the guy goes crazy and duct tapes the entire office staff together. That'll certainly make everyone collaborate better.
Manager envy? (Score:2)
Manager job security might just depend on there being an office full of people.
Screw Employee Morale (Score:2, Funny)
And the beatings will continue until morale improves.
Re:Screw Employee Morale (Score:2)
Coffeepot Conferences (Score:3, Insightful)
Telecommuters who live far from "Work Centers" (Score:2)
In my experience. I live in Colorado. In my old job with a manager who was an asshat, it mentioned to me that if I wanted to continue to work, I should consider jobs in the Wash
Dumb (Score:2)
If there are issues with the performance of some, that is cause to change the system, not throw everything out and make it worse for the majority. The 'everyone round the watercooler, discussing problems' ide
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Totally hypocritical (Score:3, Interesting)
Now HP is saying telecommuting is bad?
Face it. Corporations want to be slave-drivers, and it's only through democratic lawmaking that we keep them from getting their wish.
Typical manager (Score:2)
This is just a typical least effort solution to a problem. Not suprising that Wall Street views this guy as a brain child as that group is quite content to view the world using simplistic numerical equations. This group is also driving most of corporate world to short term thin
Telecommuting... (Score:3, Interesting)
Firstly, the policy of colocation is not just tied to telecommuters - the idea is to centralise a highly distributed IT workforce. So, eventually, nearly all IT workers will need to relocate to a few central locations. The teleworkers are just first on the list for relocation.
Secondly the problem for many IT firms is not telecommuting per se, it's the fact that we've just sleepwalked into teleworking without a clear business analysis as to whether the business operations can effectively sustain this model of working in each case. Sometimes they can, sometimes they can't. Now, this is a historic failure of management - senior employees get sufficiently pissed off with life in the Bay Area, or Houston, or Atlanta, and feel the need to get a quieter life in Dogshit, Nebraska. Fine and dandy - but it's effective management to say "Sorry, we can't have you in your current job doing that". Neither mean, nor incorrect - just a manager doing his/her job in keeping the department going. But we don't do that - we just say "Yeah, sure. Get an ADSL line, we'll be cool". Sometimes it's true - sometimes it's not. Now - how do you pull that position back into line? In HP, that's Randy Mott's problem. He's got a system that's been allowed to grow wild in many areas and is, to all intents and purposes, out of control.
Randy Mott has an extremely aggressive set of targets in trying to push up the efficiency of HP's IT. Maybe he's going about it the wrong way - if so, he'll pay with his job.
--Ng (not in any way speaking for HP, HP IT, or Randy)
Re:Telecommuting... (Score:4, Insightful)
and use the golden parachute in his contract to get another ferrari, while all the people that have been forced to move and/or put in much worse working conditions will continue to suffer because, of course, their parachutes are made of used kleenex...
It seems that in our industry as soon as you reach the senior management/vp level you are basically given carte blanche to do anything you like for the rest of your life without consequences: tons of money/options to start, huge salaries, tons of money/options when you leave (whether or not you've done anything good) and pretty much a guarantee of another gig exactly like the former as soon as you're done since, after all, you can always say that you "created value for the shareholders by slashing expenses by x%", even if the way you did that was to make your employees work in 2'x2' cubicles standing up to get more mileage of your office space.
Open floor plans. (Score:2)
The founders of HP are rolling over in their graves with what the current management has done to destroy that company.
Silly Geeks (Score:2)
A few notes from inside... (Score:2)
The future is not for people to schlep their butts across suburbia to a centrally air-conditi
Re:A few notes from inside... (Score:2)
Fun times ahead at HP (Score:3, Insightful)
Heh. It's a cheap stealth layoff. Quite a few of the telecommuting workers won't go along with the change, and will find other work. Telecommuting IT employees tend to be more senior (both higher salary, and older). This both gives HP IT a dodge around US laws establishing protected-class workers (over age 40), and allows a fairly cheap staffing reduction:
By August, almost all of HP's IT employees will have to work in one of 25 designated offices during most of the week. With many thousands of HP IT employees scattered across 100 sites around the world -- from Palo Alto to Dornach, Germany -- the new rules require many to move. Those who don't will be out of work without severance pay, according to several employees affected by the changes.
Employees who don't play along are not laid off, but instead either quit or are terminated for cause. This dodges the legal issues (42 USC 2000e and the ADEA, see also http://www.eeoc.gov/ [eeoc.gov]), and avoids severence pay and contract issues.
Randy Mott is known as a real "fix it" guy in IT Management circles. This move will get him well on the way of accomplishing a streamilining of HP IT. (IT workers are probably well aware of what management streamlining means for them...)
Re:mad force.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:mad force.... (Score:5, Informative)
When someone uses the "a few bad apples spoil it for the whole bunch" argument, they don't address the probability that productivity increases as a whole, even with those bad apples. In this particular case, a Wallyworld manager goes to HP and begins treating IT professionals just like they treated the illegal immigrants and sub-minimum wage unskilled workers back at Wallyworld.
Telecommuting isn't for everyone, nor for every job, but taking your lead on this issue from a Wally World manager is like asking a NeoCon for advice on social responsibility in government.
Re:mad force.... (Score:2)
"..or like asking a NeoLibCommy to keep his hands out of your pocket."
Put a little thought into it next time. I know you can do better than that.
Re:Interesting theory. (Score:5, Funny)
Right, and don't forget to put the right cover sheet on your TPS report.
Re:laziness (Score:2)
Re:The water cooler is really important (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How can you measure efficiency? (Score:2, Insightful)
If the answers are yes than you have an efficient telecommuter, if not , you don't. And if the manager can't get this through their cobweb filled head then THEY are not operating efficiently and should be replaced.
This is just another case of beating on the worker because of ineffectual management.
Re:How can you measure efficiency? (Score:2, Insightful)
Some jobs have a direct, measurable effect on the bottom line. Bet they aren't the ones being cut.
Re:How can you measure efficiency? (Score:2, Informative)
And it's for this precise reason that companies in trouble almost always fire all of the engineers and people producing product while ramping up the sales force.
The next step is left as an exercise for the reader.