If you're a late millennial/early zoomer, you probably know IBM had a sort of "golden age" from the 1960s through the 1980s. You also know AT&T was a juggernaut (even if you can't imagine the scale of "Ma Bell").
HP though? Nobody my age knows how great HP was in the '90s unless they're either a retro computing nerd, or an EE who knows the Agilent/Keysight lore.
The timeline makes it all the more surprising. HP's glory days were the 1990s! A decade after AT&T and IBM were clearly declining! Somehow the recency doesn't play in HP's favor.
They torched their reputation so quickly and so thoroughly that I can't think of any comparisons. As far as I know, the only companies who did it faster were fraudsters, the Enrons and FTXes of the world.
HP had engineers at the helm right up until Fiorina. She came in and destroyed a lot of what made it great to work at HP while not really doing a great job of managing the company.
Then Hurd came in and he just gutted the company to the delight of the shareholders. I came in right as Hurd went out as an intern. The place was in shambles when I got there. He'd fired and outsourced everything he could. The IT there was a complete joke. It was actually insane that HP decided to outsource IT operations.
I yearn for the day that I'm in a stable enough career position to write about some of the shitshows I've seen.
My boss was a manager in IT and they were fortunate enough to get a heads up before the shitshow hit. They moved departments right before everyone in IT got laid off.
I had requests to IT that I had put in at the beginning of my internship which were just getting handled by the end of my internship.
Real basic stuff like getting my badge was a nightmare. I had to make a 3 hour drive to another building just to get my badge. The appointment to do that took 3 months, which meant my coworkers had to let me into the office and past security every day.
General office supply and admin was really bad. I was seated in a broken chair for my entire internship. Employees were buying their own office furniture like chairs because there basically was nobody at the helm doing basic recs like that.
The IT firm we contracted out to was obviously one that mostly serviced the likes of banks or chain restaurants. The stuff they technically "owned" they were completely detached from. The only stuff they knew how to do was active directory management stuff. But like I said, they were extremely slow and backed up. Understandable because HP is huge company to contract out to.
Leadership was a total mess. I had like 3 different bosses I technically reported to and it was never super clear to me in the org chart exactly how I was supposed to be positioned in the company.
They're not bad for $300-500 upgradeable Costco/Best Buy laptops, especially since Dell has deteriorated and Chromebooks exited their honeymoon period at escape velocity.