HP Lays Off Unix/IA-64 gurus 341
A reader writes "On Tuesday HP announced that it is closing a lab in NJ. This was an HP-UX development lab, responsible for porting HP-UX to IA64. The lab employed top engineers, including some who have worked in Unix kernels for over 20 years (originally from Bell Labs, Novell, and other companies). " That report came from a soon-to-be former employee.
HP...(rant) (Score:2, Interesting)
How are they supposed to compete in the upcoming 64-bit arena if they are laying off key development personnel? Leave it up to Compaq? Look what they did with Alpha. I guess I'll be building my own Itanium system in about three years...
Linux moving in front (Score:4, Interesting)
Just wondering.
Weird... (Score:4, Interesting)
Less Diversity..This sucks! (Score:1, Interesting)
Moderators: please browse at 0. I may have made some stupid comments in the past, but I do have something of value to say occasionaly
For the record (Score:2, Interesting)
The law of evolution (Score:4, Interesting)
Let me first tell you that I feel sorry for those guys, just like anyone else, but at the same time I want to point out that this is the natural of evolution/change.
Some may argue that those guys are so-important/good and should not have been let go, or that the project at hand is so-important/good et. al..., and so on.
I think we need to look at this, and everything else, as part of what makes us "advance" forward and look ahead. To me this is nothing but "change-in-action" for which without "change" we will never see beyond our current perspective.
I am very confidence that those HP engineers (and the project) that are being doomed today, will go out and come back with a much superior product now that they are faced with higher challenges due to this "change" that has been forced upon them.
Unix is going... how sad... (Score:1, Interesting)
If linux wants to stay alive, though, and maintain it's buzz, it has to do one thing: Don't fully emulate windows. Reason? OS/2 did it, and so all the developers said, "Why should I port to OS/2? That OS runs windows anyway"
Re:It's All In The Plan (Score:4, Interesting)
In today's environment, it doesn't really matter if she's good. These executives sit in their offices and make decisions for people that they've never met and whose jobs they know nothing about. She says she can do it, HP's board of directors let her try until it gets so bad that they have to oust her, then she'll get her parachute and some other moron will say that they have the magic beans and that they'll make everything better. And for some reason, people always want to believe it.
Killing HP/UX probably isn't a bad move anyway. Killing TRU64 probably isn't a bad move, either. Is anyone still buying and using significant numbers of these things? When I worked for MCI Worldcom 3 years ago, they INSISTED on using Digital UNIX instead of Solaris or Linux... Man, I bet that Manager/Director is real happy now... Actually, I bet he got promoted out of his job before the shit hit the fan.
That's the way it works: Do your worst, and then get out before the shit hits the fan. This is why I'll always be an engineer and I never want to manage, ever again.
I wonder if Intel or AMD would get them ? (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder how long until Intel or AMD get down there and start recruiting
realistically Intel needs help with IA64 because it's compiler is not really up to scratch (witness the compaq/digital guys moveing to intel)
AMD needs to get O/S AND Compiler to work on x86-64 realistically the new win2k kernel to work on it
so I dont think that they will be unemployed for long
its a big gaff on HP part because HP-UX was going to be the successor going from PA-RISC to IA64 meaning that customers had very little to worry about compared to True64 customers
the only real big guys not laying off core people seems to be SUN
(remember that alot of linux people got layed off as well recently )
so remember good engineers are never in need of a job just projects that need good engineers the problem is of course finding the true good engineers
regards
john "curently trying to get a job" jones
Re:Linux moving in front (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Linux moving in front (Score:3, Interesting)
Solaris. Sun may have accepted Linux's role in the world, but don't expect them to be nice about it. I have to believe that Solaris has a higher marketshare than anything IBM put out. I can't see that going away in the future. Solaris 8 (and future versions) have some nice features that are going to start becoming more crucial as technology evolves....
Re:RE : HP layoffs (Score:5, Interesting)
The capricious way that companies seem to be doing this (I shudder to think what else will happen during this merger), is staggering. If I ran a company I wouldn't let experienced engineers loose on the streets and give them a possible reason for a grudge. Someone is going to snap them up and the short term profit of axing them will be a pittance compared to the revenue and goodwill you lose from them in the long run. Think about what DEC/Alpha engineers did for AMD and then think about what these people could do for IBM or SUN or any number of companies.
The analyst in the article said it does not make any sense and he's right. This leads me to believe that their strategy is not as coherent as they claim. What's going to happen when they tell their customers "Not only are we giong to sell you an Intel box for your server, but it's not going to have HP-UX on it." Thus, the original reason for buying an HP (their architecture and software) is now gone. If they think their "brand" is something else, then they will be horribly surprised when their customers say "well as long as we're changing platforms and OSs I think I will check out what Sun and IBM have to offer." No one is strong enough in times like these to crap on valuable employees and customers this way. Doesn't anyone understand that this is the time to keep valuable employees and steal them from others? When the dust settles it will be painfully obvious that they need them.
Re:Unix is going... how sad... (Score:4, Interesting)
This is soooo misguided! Software that is 30 years old is probably the only software in the world that has all of its bugs worked out. If it is still useful then use it, don't worry about how old it is. Having looked at the minimalism of plan 9, I can't say I've ever been tempted to use it. Plan 9 suffers from reinvention syndrome; the creators want to create something that perfectly represents the abstractions they were trying to create in Unix; but it doesn't balance use with ideal in any pragmatic way.
Similar to Plan 9 was the old NT3.51 kernel, a perfect microkernel architecture. Dead slow because nothing but the kernel was running in ring 0, so even video access had to go through a couple of layers of OS context before modifying a register, but beautiful in its construction.
Utility trumps perfection.
Linux doesn't scale to SuperDome-levels. (Score:5, Interesting)
The people saying that HP is dropping everything to concentrate on Linux are nuts. Linux won't scale to 64 processors, it only recently lost the 2-gig filesize limit, HP has no hope of getting these scalability features past Linus, and there are other reasons why many still consider Linux a toy.
These layoffs a terrible move for HP in general. They need to develop two separate OS roadmaps, one assuming that the merger goes through, and one that assumes that it will be blocked.
Each roadmap needs to address all the important OSes (HPUX, Tru64, OpenVMS, MPE/ix, Linux) and the processors (Itanium, PA, Alpha).
Before they fire anybody, they need to share the roadmap with the public. This layoff makes HP appear to be backing away from the Itanium architecture and the HP-UX OS.
A tasteful merger of HP-UX and Tru64 can occur (and heck, TruHP might fix some of the big flaws in both), but it looks like taste is out the window as this hatchet-job proceeds.
Re:Linux moving in front (Score:2, Interesting)
Linux will only be able to replace AIX, Solaris, etc. if IBM's billion dollars goes into implementing those features that make Solaris Solaris and AIX AIX. Then, they have to convince the world that Linux really is better than Solaris or AIX, which will be difficult. IMO, Solaris is pretty damn good (I don't have experience with AIX, however). Also, Linux-based systems will need to amass documentation comparable to that for Solaris, which includes the thousands of pages of up-to-date and complete AnswerBooks.
Poor bastards... / Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
On the upside, this might mean that the new HPaQ corporation is planning to dump some of their traditional UNIX plans in favor of moving to Linux. This would certainly make sense, given that both vendors have close relationships with intel, encourage Linux as the native OS for IA-64, and have had problems being strongarmed by Microsoft in the past.
Interesting view on HP's R&D spending (Score:3, Interesting)
In this editorial [eetimes.com] in a recent EE Times [eetimes.com] issue, Rick Merrit, discussing hardware spending, writes "I doubt [Fiorina] has the taste for the engineering costs. Maybe she really is poised to reverse HP's three-year slide in R&D expenditures as a percentage of sales, but the move to acquire a company [Compaq] that spends even less on engineering speaks otherwise."
Re:RE : HP layoffs (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed. There's a Sun billboard near Boston that I drive by every once in a while that says "Alpha Engineers: we've got a better job for you."
But what about Tru64 and OpenVMS? (Score:5, Interesting)
The fact is, Carly could get a wild hair and decide that Itanium/NT is the way to go, and the HP-UX bloodbath would then commence. The customer base has absolutely no idea how this is going to work out, to say nothing regarding Tru64 or OpenVMS.
I had been led to believe that there were some rather intense political struggles between Ft. Collins and NJ, which your viewpoint seems to back up. These sort of internal struggles are of no real value to your customer base.
However, I have also been led to believe that the NJ team bore most of the responsibility for porting the HP-UX kernel to the Itanic. Losing this team is perhaps Carly's first salvo in slaughtering Ft. Collins. Remeber, Carly already has said that you could "drive a truck through HP's high end." What makes you think that you're so safe? I don't see this woman as a staunch defender of either HP-UX or Tru64.
As a customer, can you actually convince me that I should see this differently?
mormonism in management doesn't help (Score:2, Interesting)
An example: a guy I know, incredibly skilled at his job, has worked at this office for 14 years. He's been passed over for promotion the last three times, and every time to a Mormon with far less experience. The last time a wet-behind-the-ears snot-nosed kid with less than five years of experience got the job even though the kid has no experience in programming at all!
This is all anecdotal but I've heard two-dozen stories along the same lines as the one above, especially in the last five years. How can a company make informed decisions if it promotes, in part, on religious affiliation???
Max