When HP started in the 30’s their concepts of ideas and how to treat employees was brilliant and nearly unheard of.
It was a fantastic company to be part of....great products and fantastic employee relations.
They had no debt, extremely low turn over, exemplary HR staff that treated employees well.
Each building almost operated as a small company, great loyalty.
I knew people who had other opportunities but couldn’t bring themselves to take other jobs, that’s how much people loved working there.
When Carly was made CEO she killed them.
The day she was fired, the employees celebrated, but her firing happened to late, they were already dead.
Back in the 1990’s, I was wanting to get on with HP in Ft. Collins when I was still living in Indiana but never got in. I lay a lot of blame on Carly Fiorina and also Mark Hurd. IMHO, how long before Mark Hurd destroys Oracle and also bought out Sun Microsystems.
I have a friend working for EDS in California and Mark Hurd did a number on them when they were bought out like pay cuts but they sure didn’t relax the rules like dress codes and inflexible hours.
I had a different friend work for HP during the Carly debacle and the atmosphere was so bad that you had to be careful what you said or you were called to task for daring to criticize or question the executive “leadership”.
I agree with everything you just said.
HP was the “dream” company to work for as a EE. Their quality was top-notch, their ideas were solid, their product catalog was known as “EE porn” in the 70’s and 80’s.
They had computers, but they didn’t see themselves as a “computer company.” They were a tech company that also did computers. The HP-1000 and HP-3000 lines were well regarded in technology and business markets, respectively. Their calculators were second to none, and most engineers of my age bracket would sooner fork over their reproductive organs than their HP calculator. “From my cold, dead fingers” would be a fitting description of the loyalty of engineers to their HP calculators.
Then the company’s board of directors thought they had to get politically correct and recruit a woman. They chose one of the high-profile women at Lucent. A bimbo named Carleton Fiorina, who had no background in technology. She was just a female face in the middle of organization of a stunningly inept spin-out of AT&T called Lucent.
HP wasn’t Lucent. Most of the tech industry was never like Lucent. Lucent had layers upon layers upon layers of management, most of it useless, but no one manager could do anything terribly destructive because they were mostly hemmed into very small fiefdoms that could not take down the entire company.
HP’s board plucked this bimbo with a BA degree in medieval history and MBA’s in... whatever the hell MBA’s do (I’ve never met one that was worth the powder to blow them to hell) and put her in charge of one of America’s best examples of a tech company. HP was started by two electrical engineers (both Bill and Dave were Stanford EE’s from the era of F.E. Terman, who is like a demi-god of EE-dom in the US), run by engineers, grown on the ideas of engineers. HP was first and foremost, an engineering company. Perhaps the only other company I can think of that was as engineer-oriented was DEC in the days of Ken Olsen.
In two short years, she killed everything that was good about HP - before she embarked on the “stupid-on-steroids” idea of merging with Compaq.
I got a call from a friend at HP Labs in Palo Alto the day she was sacked. He told me that engineers were “dancing in the aisles between the cubes! You should see this, man... it’s like something out of Dilbert.”
When this bimbo decided to try running for Senate, I did everything in my power to make sure that people who didn’t know tech knew she was a flaming moron who deserved defeat, even if it meant that a Democrat remained in office. The woman is a menace who should be exiled to an island where we never have to hear from her again.