Hewlett-Packard Reviews in Portland, OR Area

Pros

Great people at the individual contributor level.

Cons

Board managing quarter by quarter making poor decisions for long term heath. Do not value employees any longer, see only as an expense.

Advice to Senior Management

Get feedback from all levels before moving forward with major decisions.

Pros

HP has smart,dedicated employees. They are a pleasure to work with. It also offers great flexibility for telecommuting and alternative work hours. These are all things that are very important to me.

Cons

The past few years have included constant restructurings and loss of benefits. It's been years since I really felt secure in my job. As soon as we start to settle into a new organization and jobs, we change everything again. It's very difficult to make any progress on new capabilities for the business. I really respect my immediate management, but see them struggle to do what is right for the business given the mandates that get passed down from the very top two levels in the company.

Advice to Senior Management

Make business decisions for the mid to long term vs maximizing quarterly earnings.

Pros

Major global tech company. HP did a great job of hiring excellent people in the past and many of them are still around -- great people to work with. Opportunities to work in global environment -- many overseas partners. Great learning opportunities.

Cons

The classic HP Way is dead, dead, dead! While we are coasting on the residual value of what was once a great corporate culture, we are now the moral equivalent of Walmart. Do it cheap! Offshore it! Make sure the payback is fast!
Benefits have been severely eroded, pay raises non-existent, and bonuses are unfairly distributed according to secret formulas. IT has been taken over and gutted by a bunch of goobers from Walmart and Dell. They believe their job is to make all users completely miserable and they do it well.

Advice to Senior Management

They don't want my advice. Or yours.

Pros

None that I can think of in the current situation. Sure Mark has brought some fiscal discipline to the company which has provided it with a shot in the arm. Previous CEO's including Carly and senior management were not doing a good job of tracking all the $$$. Now everyone is talking in terms of cost, revenue, profits, ROI etc. This is about 180deg shift from previous management. I have been with this company for 8 long years straight after finishing my Master's and haven't worked with any other company in the US before so I cant say how it is out there in terms of work environment.

Cons

What are some of the downsides of working at Hewlett-Packard? Good question. Not sure where to begin. Everything from payraises to employee benefits, work/life balance everything has been taken away from employees. I am afraid to receive emails from HR since I know every single one of them in the past has taken something away from me. HP has started benchmarking itself against several other companies in terms of employee benefits and perks and has used that to take away everything it can from employees. Employees have been asked to make so many sacrifices at the same time top management has walked away with millions in pay and bonuses. This is downright discriminating. Also there is no prospects in terms of job growth or career development. Previously HP used to have so many instructor led and other training classes available that employees could use to acquire new skills and progress in their job. Now all of it is gone. HP used to pay a portion of fees and tuition for any employee seeking further education, that is gone too. Now we are tracked by a metric called TCOW (total cost of workforce) and if the ##'s are too high you bet some layoffs are coming. Conclusion: bail out as fast as you can.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop your greed and look at employees as human beings who also have families. They are the ones who make this company strong. They are the ones who have made this company a great place to work in the past. Stop tracking them on a spreadsheet as a TCOW metric. Just in 2008 the executive management including Hurd took a combined salary and bonuses of USD 142M. This does not include other expenses like vested stock options and use of company jets. On the other hand the employees were given a 5% pay cut even while in Q109 HP made USD 1.2B (that a billion with a B) in profits.

Pros

Can't think of any, no other jobs right now. you can get your foot in the door to a high tech company.

Cons

Job cuts, pay cuts, out sourcing. Upper managment will say one thing one week, then do something different the next week. Low level managers are running scared of their jobs so there is no focus. Mark is pushing more and more jobs overseas at the expence of US workers. The quality of products has gone from one of the best to just like the rest. Everyone is stuck in CYA mode and is afarid to make any waves because the next lay-off will be the next quarter. People are leaving here as fast as they can.

Advice to Senior Management

Tell the truth, lead by example. If there is a problem, fix it don't whine that people don't listen to you.

Pros

HP employes well qualified people. Work teams are highly motivated. Products are technically excellant, but marketing iw week in new product areas. Infrastructure to support employee productivity generally good.

Cons

Benefits policies targeted to become among the leaders, not a true leader of the best in the industry. Management by short term bean counter profit motives seems to be eroding long term company prospects. As a stock holder, I would like to know the company will continue to be a great company in the long term.

Advice to Senior Management

Will your decisions help keep you and your best employees at HP to be the best company it can be in 5, 10 or 20 years?

Pros

A big company with big company benefits and a casual work atmosphere. HP provides the opportunity to learn and grow in your profession. This makes it a good employer for entry level positions.

Cons

The focus is now on execution: better marketing and lower costs. Quality is only important if it can be shown to have a short term economic benefit to HP. As a result, there is little or no job security in the US. Integrity and value to the customer use to be key elements of the HP way but that has really take a back set to short term profit.

Advice to Senior Management

Customers would pay more for superior products. It isn't just about cost and marketing.

Pros

The people at HP (at the individual contributor level) are some of the most intelligent, creative and capable people you'll find anywhere. The work is challenging and rewarding.

Cons

Upper management is obsessed with making shareholders happy, at the expense of employee morale. They view employees at a liability that must be tolerated, rather than an asset. HP used to be famous for treating employees well, and taking pride in doing MORE than what competitors did. Not any more. The name of the game now is "benchmarking" -- striving to be average (in terms of rewards for employees), and no better than that. Benefits are continuously cut. I dread the e-mails we get from HR every month or two, since they are ALWAYS bad news about the latest benefits cuts. Most employees have not had a raise of any sort for 2 -3 years or more, despite record company profits. (Of course, the one area that hasn't been cut by benchmarking is the CEO's pay -- Mr.Hurd's compensation is reportedly the highest in the tech sector.) Naturally morale is terrible as a result of all of this.

HP was once perpetually near the top of Fortune's "Best Places to Work" list, hitting #10 in the late 90s. Then Carly Fiorina was hired as CEO, and morale took an instant tumble. The last time HP was on the Forbes list was 2001, coming in at number 63. HP hasn't been on the list since then, which is no coincidence. Carly started the decline in morale, and her replacement (Mark Hurd) has done nothing to help improve things. If anything, things have only gotten worse for the employee under Hurd, despite the fact that the company itself is stronger and more profitable.

Sadly, upper management doesn't view employee morale as a concern. It's no wonder that people are leaving, working fewer hours, and just don't care about the company any more. Eventually, this is going to make it difficult for HP to be competitive, but the current crop will be long gone by then, and it will be someone else's mess to clean up.

What a terrible shame. This company used to be a leader, not a follower, and was a fantastic place to work. Now HP is just another big company run by out-of-touch executives that are solely concerned with building up their empire. Unless this changes there is no compelling reason to work for HP. It's merely an average place to work, and falling fast.

Advice to Senior Management

Treat employees the way YOU would want to be treated. Take care of the employees, and they'll take care of you.

Pros

Large, stable, company. Management under Mark Hurd is overall sound.
HP recognizes that products have a lifecycle and try to recycle human resources from dying business lines into new ones.
Shows good commitment to people but also causes problems.

Cons

Large company, easy to get lost in the crowd. Things can move very slowly mired in corporate bureaucracy.
Hiring bar is not where it should be. Focus on closing our open REQs quickly detracts from quality hires and
lowers quality of workforce. Very hardware-oriented.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on quality of workforce. Hardware is low margin - as you seek to expand areas like software don't approach them with a hardware mindset. HP achieves much of it's innovation through acquisition - then stifles it internally. Try to build a culture of innovation - this can be hard to do when you're the size of HP. Run it more like a small company while leveraging your size ... think "global village".

Pros

As HP is a very large company with a diverse set of environments, I can only speak to experience within R&D organizations located at the site in Vancouver, WA. This particular site is native to HP (ie not acquired as part of a merger with Compaq, EDS, etc.).

As an engineer, working for HP at this site has been an excellent experience. Many of the engineering challenges related to things that had never been done before, which keeps things fresh and adds to job satisfaction and enjoyment for any engineer. The site has a spirit of using invention to solve new problems; while "Invent" may not be part of the corporate logo these days, it's still a big part of the local company culture here.

The general employee base at this site is high quality and fun to work with. There is a sense of community that makes it enjoyable. Folks tend to look for opportunities to work together, and there are a number of grass roots efforts to foster team spirit, even in recent times as corporate leadership has not seemed to share in it. Office politics are present as in any organization, however it seems to be at a low level...most people are more interested in succeeding as a team more than they are at turf-guarding or proving themselves correct (even if they aren't), for instance...one of HP's founders once said something along the lines of, "If you never fail, then you probably aren't reaching far enough," and that seems to be a prevalent attitude among both individual contributors and local management.

Summarizing, the "best" reasons to work at HP in Vancouver are job satisfaction, culture, quality of co-workers and attitudes, and the presence of interesting technical challenges.

Cons

The downsides have more to do with dissatisfaction with corporate leadership than anything else. In recent years, upper management has become made up of higher and higher percentages of "outsiders" who have not seen how the HP of yesteryear operated and grew. As a result, the HP culture that built a company by attracting talented people and providing them an environment in which they (and by extension the company) can excel has been eroding of late. Finding every possible dollar of profit and growth has been prioritized over just about everything else, including attracting and retaining a high quality work force.

From this comes the major downside: one of the messages from the top has been that culture, compensation, and benefits need to be just like every other company out there, and that there is not enough attrition-related turnover in the employee ranks.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't chase away your biggest resource (employees and culture) in search for every possible last dollar of profit. Strive to be the best, not the biggest.