My first layoffs at HPE. I know they laid off people massively in COVID. How do they typically layoff? What BUs are at risk this time? My manager knows nothing. Do they look at performance? Salary? What else?
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HPE discriminates on race, age and citizenship. So try not to be an older american white male.
@kk - Your performance reviews are a good tool for HR since they're filed away on Workday; they're easily accessible by you, your manager, and HR. Good managers would keep track of your progresses, productivity, and deliverables during your biweekly meetings. Everything that is perceived by your manager can warrant promotions, demotions, raises, bonuses, layoffs, terminations, etc. that is ultimately decided by HR. I forgot where exactly but on the internal HPE intranet for the HR page, there are documents that provide guidance on skill levels and your goal is to either meet or exceed those expectations for those skill levels. HR will look at your salary, skill level, and performance reviews and can make decisions based on those. They're likely doing this right now to make decisions for who to layoff.
It's wise to get feedback from your manager probably once every month or two about how they basically perceive you. I doubt your manager has absolutely nothing noted about you unless you and your team lead purposely withhold information or your manager is absolutely not paying attention to you, which both instances are really bad things.
@kh+1jp0zbkf3 how does HR keep track of things? I do so many things that sometimes only my team lead knows, not even my manager since we meet biweekly
@k9 – It’s incredibly rare for management to get laid off at HPE. I had a director who came from Apollo and then moved on to Storage during COVID. Three vastly different product line organizations in three years. Each of those organizations have had extensive layoffs in the last seven years but somehow that director managed to wiggle his way through various organizations without getting laid off himself.
Individual contributors are more expendable than you think. Management also makes less money than you think. HPE needs management because no one else is trained to do it. During times of financial downfall, it would be very risky to lay off experienced managers and promote an individual contributor to become the next manager when they don’t have management experience.
Engineering is generally safer than sales and supply chain but you’re easily under HR’s radar if you’re not doing a lot.
In hybrid cloud no one knows anything so far, at least is what has been said to us from leadership.
One strange thing is that we received a survey to fill out about your direct people leader, maybe they want to cut middle management before engineering — who knows at this point. The current morale is at its lowest, not that we got that many incentives in general.
For now is a wait, apply for other jobs and see game, not sure if to cry or laugh at this point.
HR temp lead specifically said there would be no early retirement packages offered.
Names are just passed down. Most make zero sense.
@a4 hit the nail on the head.
Retirement opportunities will open up first before they execute layoffs. With recent financial announcements, I expect this round of retirement packages to be not as favorable and many eligible employees will be rather reluctant to take it. Management is going to push very hard.
In terms of layoffs, I expect this round to be very particular and very harsh, especially for organizations that have been slacking. I don’t think there’s any different criteria compared to previous layoffs other than HR looking more carefully at your last year’s performance review. There’s going to be some careful consideration of ROI where the investment is if the employee is either actively generating revenue for the company or has a very strong potential to generate said revenue. If you’re not performing strong in the lab, solving customer needs, optimizing workflow, and/or driving the organization’s strategy, you’re absolutely at risk.
But if you get laid off, don’t panic. It’s often a blessing in disguise. This industry that HPE is part of is headed towards an extremely hostile economy and tariffs are going to accelerate that. The wise thing to do if you wish to remain as an OEM is to suspend outsourcing overseas and chop unusual “operating expenses” (i.e. throwing parties left and right) to help fund that.
Our software quality is terrible already. No need to insert exploitable vulnerabilities as they're already there in high numbers.
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To those who code or design hardware. You need a way to get revenge. Add exploitable vulnerabilities. Post details on dark web if you lose job. Others will take it from there.
I've been there 17 years, have survived at least 4 "major" workforce actions across my BU. They'll offer early retirement to eligible folks, cut from HPE Servers, and also look to "trim" from around the US. The pattern has been to then rehire in Costa Rica.
HPE has "layoffs" every year and almost every quarter somewhere... Just brown nose your boss every day. This is the way...
Do you think the majority of the layoffs will be in the US?
They might pick names out of a hat
Your L2 manager will do the cutting regardless of performance etc... But they're looking to cut dollars so if you're a nonperforming employee or paid a lot (and) don't provide a good amount of return for your pay you will be picked.
I think their best bet is to give some incentives for people to retire early. It just needs to be a little more than the WFR deal to get people motivated. I believe there are a lot of people who may want to leave the rat race at this point.