Following the trend in the rest of the HDD industry, HGST has announced plans to reduce workforce by 10% in the U.S. Initially a voluntary early retirement program has been offered to eligible employees, and following that, an involuntary program, aka resource action, i.e. firing people. The announcement was made internally a week ago, and the 10% figure was the word from a 2nd-line manager, but the press release wasn't made available until the 13th, so I couldn't mention it here. Gotta observe proper business conduct and all that.

Note that you won't find such a press release on the Hitachi GST web site.

Of course, the troops are getting more and more cynical. I heard a few reasons why the job cuts "have to" happen, but that doesn't mean I agree with the philosophy of cutting jobs to improve the bottom line. If a job has to be cut, it should be because the employee is incompetent. The job of executive management is to balance business concerns (such as demand, capacity, and inventory) and resources (such as equipment, people, and IP). Blind cutting of people only indicates that the executives didn't do their job right. If the people sucked, don't wait until the net profits are in parenthesis to can them. If the people don't suck, don't be an idiot and lose them. If the executives screwed up, they should acknowledge their mistakes and either step down or take a pay cut—not extra stock options—to prevent their screw-ups from throwing someone's life into disarray. This is an broad indictment of Corporate America, not just the company I work for. (Hitachi GST is a private company in the U.S. and so doesn't have stock options per se. The parent company, however, has its targets to be met.)

You can see that I'm not meant to be a corporate slave. However, if I can't keep a lid on my opinions, my retirement from said class might happen sooner than I'd like....