Staffers in charge of HPE's UK IT outsourcing face redundo in April Around a quarter of Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s current IT Outsourcing staff are expected to be made redundant at end of next month, according to company insiders. As we exclusively revealed on Friday, 780 ITO workers are among 1,000 heads in the UK Enterprise Services division that were told their jobs are at risk. Sources …
So all those companies who invested in the HP infrastructure here can now wait in a queue to be answered by some operator with a prompt card in a clearly 2nd language with all the attendant repeating of sentences and vocalising of standard words (And still be contract charged at the same rate). Tell me I'm wrong.
My, that would make me so happy to be a HPE customer
Note to self: forget that outsourcing position in the UK advertised on Indeed
HP, nit-Whitman, et. al..
Just go away.
You are a disgrace to the memory and legacy of Bill and Dave, as well as all the brilliant and dedicated people who have worked there over the years.
You deserve to choke on your own electronic vomit.
Sorry for the crude reference, but that is all you manglement lot are anymore.
Just go away.
Stripping out heads from valid roles all over with no means of replacing them from the already stretched Jock and Geordie Nirvana. Present as many appeals as you want they will be ignored. Those left will have to deal with the customer fallout until they turn on them next quarter.
That's the HP Way.
A young man of my acquaintance applied for a job recently, (well a couple years ago now), and jumped through a bunch of hoops for the recruiter.
When he was finally informed the prospective employer was HP, he laughed derisively and told them no (way).
The recruiter sighed and thanked him for his time.
I was contracting for HP a few years back on a government project on a site in the South of England. The project management was hell-bent on shifting the work up to Erskine, but they wouldn't pay me a suitable contract rate to tempt me (or anyone else in the team, permies or contractors). They wanted to employ permanent staff. I trained (and trained well, I might add) my own replacement three times. Nobody would stay in the role, not at the money HP were paying them, or with the crap their line managers dealt them. I listened to a senior manager bawl out an employee on an open conference call for not taking an early enough flight down from Scotland. It was the single most appalling thing I have ever heard a manager do. No wonder no-one stayed.
In my current role, a number of our customers have support contracts with HPE in Australia, and when HPE Engineering raises a ticket with us, the phone numbers are almost always +91 (India) as opposed to +61 (Australia). Makes for a painful experience for both the end customer and for me. I get fed up with HPE Project Managers calling me for an update when the last action in the ticket is quite clearly on the HPE Engineer to provide information or to take an action.
The callback trick (especially off-hours or at lunchtime) is something they're "taught" in order to keep their "stats up". 'orrible does that too. Another favorite of the latter outfit was the "soft close", whereby a call was closed for "lack of customer response".
Well, yeah, if ye call me at 2:00 AM whaddya expect? You support me during MY day, not YOURS. That's what I'M paying for...
(Shades of Microsoft's EULA tome(s) and horsement and spears going through my head).....
Well, guys in UK or US were not good enough to make these company grow against the onslaught of Indian vendors. Were they? If not, then they should shut up. There is no case for keeping the work in these high cost locations where people drink more beer and coffee than work, take more leaves than work. It seems folks in these locations end up blaming everyone else, but never question if there company (which means they) were so great why they are getting screwed? Why isn't an HPE or an IBM growing despite the so called investments or cloud or digital or whatever? And then the same guys preached "division of labor", didn't they? So now when the division is hurting, why complain?
Our English grammar is at least to O level standard though. An educational intervention. I hadn't considered that the race to the bottom was driven by the exemplary lifestyles and cultures prevalent in the far east. I'd rather cynically assumed it was because people were cheap as chips and disposable with few employment rights.
Please accept my apologies. It must be all that beer instead of coffee and leaves(sic) that led me to assume that it was all about short term share return and that we hadn't done a bad job of building these companies considering that when I left school the industry hardly existed at all.
"We will do the needful".
Except they don't.
I'd rather like to have the time back that I wasted doing MY JOB, repairing the damage THEY DID, and then doing THEIR JOB too.
Training issue? Well, yes. Once one group of "engineers" was trained, they'd disappear and a new one would appear.
Sorry. Cheaper is not synonymous with better. Except, perhaps, for PHB's.
Well today we in our department within HPE were told that we are in a pool of 5 for redundancy.
To begin with this confused us as we are a collective team of 12 (with 7 team members in Erskine). But then we realised that our 5 roles could simply be shifted to Erskine, and on pressing our manager for an answer he threw his hands up and said he couldn't mislead us anymore, and yes - our jobs were effectively gone.
So, a customer support team providing dedicated on site support will come the end of April have zero on site presence, meaning all helpdesk calls relating to network patching, printer maintenance and hardware will in future be dealt with by.....wait for it....the customer. Yes, the customer will have to do this themselves.
When I passed this on to the customer today (having been warned under no circumstances to do so) they went berserk, and immediately phoned my manager threatening legal action by way of breach of contract - the contract of which was signed only 6 weeks ago for in excess of £3m
The 5 of us in our team have decided to work to rule from Monday and find other jobs, which we realise we should have done months ago with hindsight.
The whole at risk pool thing is a charade. Theyve been moving people about for months to save a few, usually cronies and yes men.
Work to rule is absolutely the right way to react, you owe the buggers nothing now. Don't let them pressure you into doing anything other than the bare minimum your contract covers. I suspect I'll be following you in a quarter or so and I'm quite looking forward to taking a lunch hour and leaving at 5 for once.
At least a quarter of the Q2 job cuts will come to Lytham. That site and Warrington both have very little time left. With the 'back to the office' dictat it'll leave people nowhere to go in that region anyway.
We may get a few customer facing types left on the DWP work but overall the NW will be pretty devoid of HPE presence very soon. With IBM making the move to statutary payouts Whitman will doubtless not be far behind. 2016 is probably the last opportunity to get out without being complete screwed over.
Well - after EDS was taken over by HP I have been working for one sick company. But 3 years ago I landed on the DWP account and loved it from day 1, I worked from home, delivering project after project - sometimes working 70hrs a week.
But - no training in 7 years, no promotion, no mentoring, no pay rises - just work
But HP have ground me down. First the back to the office crap - we are supposed to be the biggest most forward looking company - but hey ho - lets get back to the 80's/90's.
Then the lets move all jobs up north - so thats me and a few thousand others gone as well.
With that pile of rubbish - and the talks about the redundancy packages being reduced - my mind is made up - request submitted - just hope they accept it.
The trouble is we all take the crap - No one stands up to the way this awful company treats us.
All frightened to show any dissent about how bad it is, while they put out emails saying how much they value us!
I'm with you, I'll be out the door as soon as I can finish my VR application, EDS was a decent company ruined by these bunch of idiots!
The post above was the 3rd one across 2 threads where people have said they have just put VR applications in - but the comms said the window closed on Friday 11th? Or did it get extended? If it was extended you know that means they didn't get as many volunteers as expected.
It's a complete joke of a process with certain accounts exempt and complete lack of information being shared.
As for the back in the office thing is anyone actually doing it?
and lastly the move to RDCs- it was targeted at DWP account this quarter and next one is TPS roles.
Well, we had our 1 to 1 meetings today having been told we would find out who out of our team would be made redundant.
But we were given the news that actualy, we wont find out until April 21st. And then whomever is chosen will have just 1 week and then they are out the door.
It could be one of us, it could be all of us. So we now have 3 more weeks of purgatory waiting to hear our fate.
HPE are treating us and most other employees like dirt and with utter contempt.
The rumour mill has us merging with Microsoft in the next 12 months.
I applied for VR and have only been told my application is 'coming under intense scrutiny' meaning its about to get declined. Its a terrifying prospect remaining here given the lack of leadership and lack of backfill for those who are leaving....I expect contractors will be dragged in as a panic measure.
As a fresh faced graduate I embarked on my career at HP in 2013. Since then I have worked my way to a management position upon completing of my graduate program.
Once taken off the graduate program, it then showed how bad this company was. The HPE way of no training, no value of employees and no pay rises continued, to haunt me. I have become disillusioned, by the mere notion of recognition, pay rises, bonuses.& job security.
After a few months of the graduate scheme I have now been informed I will be made redundant in the Q2 WFM. I have never felt more relieved, I can now go forth and progress my career at a company that will no doubt provide me with 100% more training, with a much higher salary.
But the company seems to be going from bad to worse. HPE have now decided to ruin the life of new fresh faced graduates as they are now within the redundancy pools due to poor hiring protocols. What is a joke in this is that HPE have decided that whilst they have too many graduates that some will be made redundant, they will go off and hire more. That is brilliant logic! Credit to some of these graduates being interviewed as a lot of the, pulled out last minute, resulting a lower hiring pool.
HPE's decision to opt for low cost labour in the form of graduates is not a bad notion, however this only works if good top calibre candidates are attracted to the company. At this moment they are unable to even gain enough applicants willing to attend assessment centres.
Meg Whitman and her team of uneducated management should step down before they ruin the HP brand further, to the point of no return!
This quarter's target is huge. 780. Those of us that buy services and resource internally can all see how hardline it's been this time round. My boss let slip today that she'd been informed that the US boss of ITO was here to oversee the process personally and make sure the target was hit. 1st May will be interesting to say the least. I suspect I'll be in line next time. Meh.
To the Grad who posted above me - I agree with every word. HPE is in its death throes.
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