Friday, August 6, 2010

Mark Hurd, HP CEO Resigns

When I still worked there, I was pleased to see Hurd replace Empress Carly.  Unlike Carly, Mark Hurd was at least capable of simulating a caring human being.  (It was beyond Carly's abilities.)  Now I see that Hurd is resigning after a sexual harrassment investigation revealed an "improper" relationship with a contractor.  (Hurd is married.)  It appears from the news story that expense accounts were wrong--which makes me wonder if he was sticking the company with weekend flings.

One thing that I had against Hurd was a policy that he adopted that meant that if you were laid off from HP, you could not be rehired without permission of a member of the executive committee.  The reason was that Hurd found out that some divisions were laying off workers--then rehiring them a few months later, when they discovered, "Gee, no one else but Fred knows how this works!"  His solution, rather than asking if perhaps he was pushing too hard to get costs down--was to adopt this absurd rule.

HP is busily hiring people at the moment for positions that I could easily do, and for considerably better pay than I now get.  But Hurd's stupid, peevish rule means this valley is filled with qualified engineers that can't be hired back.  Instead, HP has to hire people from elsewhere.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.

UPDATE: Government jobs are generally safer than private sector jobs--but at least Idaho taxpayers can take comfort that the state government isn't wasting your money on high salaries.  State government jobs pay substantially less than private sector jobs--and the health insurance benefits, while okay, are generally inferior to most large private sector employers.

5 comments:

  1. IBM had the same rule. I was told it had to do with tax accounting for hiring a contractor someone you laid off and some rather unfavorable tax consequences for doing so.

    I've known employees called back 3 or more times for multiyear contracting gigs at much more than they made while working there because they're the only ones who know how some code works.

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  2. Now that you have a (safe government*) job would you even consider going back to work for HP if this rule changes?

    * I suspect that Idaho is more like Missouri than many other states. Here our new Democratic governor has laid off 2,000 state workers as part of a general proactive budgetary policy.

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  3. Clayton,
    Glad to see you back! There is still a problem with foxfire loading your comment function and also the Boxer video.
    Could it be that Bab's campaign rant blew firefox's bullshit detector?

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  4. What version of Firefox? It's loading for me just fine. I think there's an issue with something on the security tab.

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  5. I have: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8

    Comments loaded OK the first time but now refuses. The Boxer video is nowhere to be seen. Safari loads OK.

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