Let's spend a minute or two and define what being an HPE employee means. Go at it!
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There are lots of fake candidates in HPE El Paso with job title QA and Java dev who donot have actual qualification and work experience.
When you say you're from Colorado people will ask "So you got any weed?"
When you say you work for HPE people will just quietly avoid the issue.
Not sure which is worse.
"A joke" is correct!
25% (or so) of your effort needs to be spent fending off the "jokes", instead of doing your job!
Performance reviews are a joke. "The jokers" make "jokes" ("funny", you know, wink-wink, ha-ha!) about your technical incompetence. The TRUE (worst) technical incompetents are the managers, who are too lazy and ill-informed (about the real technical matters as opposed to political matters) to write you a fair review. So they base your reviews on the "jokes" made by the jokers... Then, after the "jokes" show up in your review, the jokers get to keep their jobs, and you do not! Jokers then laugh all the way to the bank!
A joke!
Bend over and just enjoy it.
It's been a great run. Two and a half decades and still going. Besides all the shuckin and jivin through layoff periods, just kept my nose clean, let my work speak for itself and give God all the credit for blessing me for so many years. It's easy to whine and complain. Yes, there is so much goofy stuff that goes on in corporations and plenty of politics to boot. One things for certain, I do feel truly blessed.
Can you say “sacrificial anode”? Some HPE employees are sacrificial anodes!
It all depends on exactly which specific group at HPE that you work for (including, obviously, your boss… Is he/she a good dude/dudette, or not?) HPE has at-least-vaguely heavenly and (certainly!) at least vaguely hellish work environments… I have seen the latter! But I know of people who work for very decent bosses, in decent groups.
The teeth-and-claws work “ethics” brought about by “rank and yank” performance reviews, and constant layoffs, have taken their toll, though, in many-many groups! The decent and ethical (team-working, non-back-stabbing) workers get picked off one by one… As, surprise, surprise, the management consultants have been telling us, for YEARS! They’ve said that “forced distribution” performance reviews can work for a year or two, to clear out the deadwood… But, do it for anything approaching a decade, or, God forbid, more… And you WILL kill nearly every last vestige of decency and teamwork!
It has gotten to the point that software writers will deliberately write their code to be poorly or arcanely commented, and as dense as at all possible, to make the newbies look stupid… Don’t EVEN expect your co-workers to honestly try to help you; if they help you, you look better, and they look worse, in comparison! So they PRETEND to help you!
Steal credit for your work, bad-mouth you, road-block you, I have seen it all… When it comes times to help interview the “newbie” to replace the too-expensive old guy they just laid off? It behooves you to recommend that they hire the WEAKEST candidate, so that he or she will be the next to be laid off, and you can be spared! Hire and “set up for failure”, the next scapegoat for layoffs! Yes, indeed!
A “sacrificial anode” or “galvanic anode” (Google the phrase) is a piece of dissimilar metal placed on the metallic hull of a ship, or a building, to attract corrosion, to protect the main structure. That is what “newbie” new hires are at HPE… Sacrificial anodes (scapegoats), to protect the jobs of the on-the-job veterans.
A new “favorite technique” that I have seen is, newbie comes in. ANY “fix” or improvement to codes (or designs in general), is advanced by newbie? The job veterans will demand TRIPLE proof, before it is implemented! After all, newbie has no credibility… Newbie is SLOOOW, therefore mentally weak, for one thing. All his/her work must be quadruple-proven, while job veterans get to once-prove or half-prove their work, before it is implemented. … Newbie must triple-prove or more, so he or she will be slow… Since he or she is slow, they have no credibility, so they must triple-prove their work! An unbreakable cycle, a circular-logic-loop, that management is too clueless to see! Repeat till newbie is laid off, and the cycle must repeat… Hire new newbie, trash him or her, get another newbie, repeat…
Ethics? Teamwork? Treating others the way that you want to be treated? THAT will get you laid off, in many-many groups at HPE! Teamwork ethics (if you are lucky) will be barely noticed by your management… But losing in the constant battles of one-upmanship is what will get you laid off. Your co-workers write your review for you, by bad-mouthing you, so that THEY can get the good reviews! Many parts of HPE are soul-destroying cesspools of iniquity.
Honestly, loyalty. HPE employees are great people...mostly dedicated workers and team players. I think it's that loyalty to the people around them that makes it hard to leave independently and to be resistant to the change around them.
In about 5-6 weeks I won't have to think about it anymore. But prior to that, it's been pretty much a downer.
It means being a prairie dog, w/o the positive aspects of prairie dogdom!
With apologies to "Dilbert" creator Scott Adams, who I am riffing off of...
HPE Engineers in Cube-Towns Show an Amazing Resemblance to Prairie Dogs in Prairie-Dog Towns
Pro
It’s a job; HPE pays you money. Whether the wear and tear on your soul, and on the grinding on your faith in your fellow humans, is worth the money, is a question that I can’t answer (must be answered by each of us, on an individual basis) . But let’s look on the plus sides… Another plus side here is that an HPE job can stimulate LOTS of diverse thoughts about LOTS of things, to include ethology (the study of human and animal behavioral mechanisms as biological adaptations) and anthropology and history (the next and higher levels of evolution in humans; AKA, “culture” and “civilization”). Summary follows; I hope that it’s helpful. Sad to say, honest reporting precludes saying that “everything is coming up roses”, to say the very least!
Con
If you have the patience to sit still long enough, watch a prairie-dog town for a while. You may sit still for only minutes, or it might be hours or days… The excitement comes in fits and starts; it is “bursty”. But sooner or later, you’ll see a prairie dog popping his head up out of one of those elevated holes… Perhaps even standing tall, on his hind feet… And making LOUD announcements! If you can understand prairie-dog talk, he is say, “Watch out! Eagles and hawks, wolves and dogs, snakes and humans, oh my!” He is scolding the predators, and warning all p-dogs, beware! He is looking out for his fellow p-dogs… An elementary step towards cooperative and then cultural, civilized behavior. … Similarly, in HPE cube-lands, if you sit there for long enough (no need to sit very still here, actually; the actors here are LOOKING to attract your attention), you will see engineers popping their heads out over the tops of their cubes (maybe even standing on office chairs, hazardous though that may be), and announcing to all in cube-town, “Lo and behold, for all to see! Co-worker XYZ has just come to ME, the All-Knowing Mega-Uber-Wizard, for help, at the mere task of making provisions for dis-ambiguating the slack pointers, for protecting the mulit-snore OSPQW, in the event of a defrabrullator-coherency meltdown!”. If you perform elementary anthropological investigations afterwards, you will find that worker XYZ was merely trying to save hours or days of his/her work, so he/she went to Super-Duper-Wizard (or other specialist at that narrow skill), since (ZQ!MH&W-Wizard or other, fill in the blank) Whatever-Wizard does it all day every day, and XYZ does this particular thing once, only every few years. XYZ made the mistake of thinking that efficiently getting it done QUICKLY, for HPE, by using a primary attainment of human cultural civilization, AKA “job specialization / cooperation / teamwork”, was more important than appearing to know everything, and being smarter than one’s co-worker. So now, XYZ will lick his/her wounds, and learn to study the manuals for hours or days on end, next time this sort of thing happens, rather than approaching (%$@&^@^)-Wizard for some quick help. XYZ will also dream of the day when (%$@&@^)-Wizard comes to him or her, and the tables are turned, and XYZ can get up on that chair, popping out above the cube-tops, to announce that (%$@&@^)-Wizard doesn’t know how to re-calibrate the deflection parameters tables of ionizing radiation-gradients so as to optimize provisions for radiation hormesis. … The advantages of civilization have been negated here, because it is a ruthless war of all against all, under the constant threat of layoffs, with the losers of the ego-wars being the ones selected for layoffs. … But it gets even worse than that: If you think about it, the engineers (who indulge in this kind of behavior) have sunk (at least in this instance) to a level of evolution below that of many animals! At least the prairie dogs, when they pop their heads out to make loud announcements, are looking out for the entire town of p-dogs. The same can NOT be said for the engineers… They are looking out ONLY for themselves. There’s no cooperation here, unlike in prairie-dog-town.
Recommend
Try to promote civilized behavior, and REAL teamwork, rather than sponsoring a ruthless war of all against all. Do you REALLY expect good and sustainable results from the dog-eat-dog environment that you have created? Your “rank and yank” performance reviews, AKA “forced distribution”, “bell curve”, “stacked rankings”, whatever you want to call it (and then deny that you do it), are a prime culprit, especially when combined with clueless management, never-ending layoffs, and un-ethical workers.
Fearful, uncertain
em·bar·rassed
əmˈberəst/
adjective
adjective: embarrassed
synonyms: mortified, red-faced, blushing, abashed, shamed, ashamed, shamefaced, humiliated, chagrined, awkward, self-conscious, uncomfortable, sheepish, discomfited, disconcerted, upset, discomposed, flustered, agitated, distressed, shy, bashful, tongue-tied;
wishing the earth would swallow one up, having or showing financial difficulties.
Being layed off at some point?
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