Hewlett-Packard Reviews in Mississauga, ON (Canada)

Pros

good working conditions, work from home policy

Cons

expected to address business issues outside of 9am-5pm work hours

Advice to Senior Management

overall satisfied with my career at HP

Pros

Great opportunities to shape your career in any direction, in any country. Senior managers are expected to spend at least a year in a different country.
Employees have access to online-university style training modules, which covers up to date courses for hot Technology certifications like Microsoft, Cisco and HP Procurve.
Business culture is typical large enterprise - very professional, encourages high ethics and embraces best-shored work-force with many opportunities to travel for training and knowledge sharing.
Employees are encouraged to self-serve technology needs and are given a high degree of autonomy. if you enjoy problem solving, that's a good exciting thing to add to your days work.
Depending on job role, there are options for Teleworking from home.

Cons

Virtual teams abound in the organization - co-workers will often be in different cities or even countries - and you will have to compete with peers for raises and bonus pools, without having common levels of performance measures. You will be challenged to ignore cultural barriers, and it can be hard to determine whether a project issue lies within a process or is just poor communications within the team.
For a technology company the internal IT systems are painful, with a myriad of portals and passwords, and ramp up time for new hires can be over 6 weeks to get access to software tools and resources.
Teleworkers are often overlooked for promotion into management - head offices are where your careers really grow.

Any large public company is not immune from shareholder influence - when things go bad, the bonuses go and next response is to chop departments that are not profitable. Most employees become immunized by the continual threats of layoffs and reorgs - they come often, are publicly praised by shareholders, and while they are not personal, really mess with team dynamics. I have had 15 different dotted line managers in 4 yrs.

Pros

It is a well recognized company.
Figure out the ins and outs of working in a large company.

Cons

Asked to do three people's jobs.
Constant deflecting of what employee's want to satisfy Wall Street
Hiring of Junior people with little to no experience for higher positions at a lower wage grade
Great profits for company, but no raises for employee's

Advice to Senior Management

HP decided to satisfy Wall Street more since the passing of both owners but funny enough our stock has only fallen. It turns out that original owners had it correct, satisfy the customer first and they will reward you financially. No one believes in that theory anymore.

Pros

A fortune 100 company, great people, lots of internal resources, lots of training resources, work-life balance is appreciated and encouraged.

Cons

Poor compensation structure, unfair policy on raises, capped raises, preference given to external candidates rather than internal promotions, commission tracking tool is extremely poorly maintained and offers no insight into performance or subsequent pay check details.

Advice to Senior Management

Fix your internal tools, make it straight forward for sales employees to understand compensation tracking, improve base pay for sales employees or they will continue to leave (and not to alliance partners but to the competition and then when you lose 10's of thousands you will wonder whether it made more sense to over 10-20K more rather than lose a few 100,000.).

Pros

Good company to work for. Great career growth opportunities. the Company has a good reputation in the market place which is good when you want to move out.

Cons

Salaries are not comparable with the industry. at times you almost feel insignificant, which is probably true at most large companies.

Advice to Senior Management

Offer better compensation if you want to retain your employees. Once the market bounces back, the retention rate will inevitably drop.

Pros

It is a very well known company. Whenever you mention Hewlett packard, peopl recognise it and trust it. It is also very good to have on your resume.

Cons

The cpmpany is very large. you have a multitude of people within your department or team, which makes it difficult when there is a posting for a promotion within the department. Also, communication is an issue, since there are so many people within the company, sometimes sommunication gets lost.

Advice to Senior Management

do not shoose favorites, treat all employees equally. As a manager, your responsibilty is getting to know your employers within your immediate team and understanding and fascilitating their goals and growth.

Pros

HP grants us the ability to work from a home office location. This is the only saving grace to be an employee of HP Canada. Not so long ago, management would fully reimburse their employees - called "Teleworkers" - each month, for their home Internet expense (since you are using it to connect with their global intranet). New policies have cut this reimbursement allowance in half, and there is talk that it will be removed entirely in the coming year.

Cons

Where to start.
This company has done a complete about-face over the past two years. I've watched my salary be cut, as management tells us that they must hold-fast due to the poor economic climate. However, I've also seen many corporate emails that indicate HP is winning more and more multi-million dollar bids/accounts. They also stated recently that they will not be providing profit/loss information to the employees, going forward. To me, this lends to distrust amongst the worker-bees, like myself.

I've watched my health/dental benfits be cut in the past year, while the cost of the actual plans have decreased due to them switching insurance vendors.

My retirement/pension contributions have also been cut, and stock options as well.
I've seen my floater days be reduced to "1" per year.

There is very little communication flowing from mgmt to the employees.

If all of this isn't enough to dissued a potential applicant from working at HP, know that management has a regular habit of cutting employees en-masse every 3 months (each fiscal quarter).

I would not recommend working here to anyone, for any reason. With the exception of having "HP" on their resume. From the outside, it probably "ooks good to a potential employer. But from the inside, it is certainly not a place that has comfortable work environment.

There is a constant tension amongst staff, a blatant mistrust with management, a fear of being fired every 3 months (or having your salary cut even further), and a definite air of intimidation from mgmt to staff.

Does HP have productive, professional staff? Yes, but they are being fired or are quitting for better employment elsewhere.

Does HP have great products? Services? Yes. But it is increasingly more difficult to get excited about them, when you're in such a disrespectful environment.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your employees for a change.

Send all of your managers, senior directors, and VPs back to Mgmt #101 and make them understand that without content employees, who should be compensated for their talent/abilities, and who are the lifeblood of the company, HP would be nothing.

You win nothing by mistreating your staff.

Pros

Flexible work environment, working from home.
State of the art systems and technologies to make for appealing one the job experience.

Cons

Its too bad that senior management has decided the best way to improve share prices is to cut back on EVERYTHING...

Advice to Senior Management

Long term growth of the company will suffer as long as there is this take or leave it approach to people

Pros

Great infrastructure, Amazing engineering talent and amazing products. Some of the Smartest folks I have worked with worked at HP. Many are gone now but a few remain and they are Gems!

Cons

Sadly the company is now run by "average" self serving Director - Managers. Little to no imagination or risk taking ability. The empty suits are running a great company into the ground.

Advice to Senior Management

Hewlett Packard was a Great company, Since the Aquisition of Compaq "HP" is much less than it was, ruled by the short term, short sighted and generally self serving "director level" managers. Bill & Dave are rolling in thier graves

Pros

Great working culture and talented employees

Cons

some what unorganized
too many people working from home

Advice to Senior Management

needs little more degree of atonomy from the us parent