Mark Hurd, HP CEO Resigns

When I still worked there, I was pleased to see Hurd replace Empress Carly.  Unlike Carly, Mark Hurd was at least capable of simulating a caring human being.  (It was beyond Carly's abilities.)  Now I see that Hurd is resigning after a sexual harrassment investigation revealed an "improper" relationship with a contractor.  (Hurd is married.)  It appears from the news story that expense accounts were wrong--which makes me wonder if he was sticking the company with weekend flings.

One thing that I had against Hurd was a policy that he adopted that meant that if you were laid off from HP, you could not be rehired without permission of a member of the executive committee.  The reason was that Hurd found out that some divisions were laying off workers--then rehiring them a few months later, when they discovered, "Gee, no one else but Fred knows how this works!"  His solution, rather than asking if perhaps he was pushing too hard to get costs down--was to adopt this absurd rule.

HP is busily hiring people at the moment for positions that I could easily do, and for considerably better pay than I now get.  But Hurd's stupid, peevish rule means this valley is filled with qualified engineers that can't be hired back.  Instead, HP has to hire people from elsewhere.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.

UPDATE: Government jobs are generally safer than private sector jobs--but at least Idaho taxpayers can take comfort that the state government isn't wasting your money on high salaries.  State government jobs pay substantially less than private sector jobs--and the health insurance benefits, while okay, are generally inferior to most large private sector employers.