New thread: Bay Area HP alumni check in here....

[dshoaf]

This thread is intended to separate out a parallel thread that got started here: http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/showthread.php?t=375580&page=9

Bay Area HP alumni, please check in here and let's continue on!

I had the best 20 of my career with HP in the Enterprise computer divisions. The first 10 years spent in the field as a CE, then an SE and on to Consulting and into quota-carrying sales. The last 10 years were spent at the enterprise server divisions (HP-UX and HP 9000 systems) then on into the OpenView (now called HP Software, IIRC) divisions as a Product Manager and general marketeer. All of my last 10 years were at the Cupertino/Wolfe road site. Anyone seen what Apple has planned for the campus there?

My wife also worked at HP Labs and the HP-UX labs for her 20+ career, too.

Post here, too!

Cheers,

David

 

[Jon_Logan]

This thread is intended to separate out a parallel thread that got started here: http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/showthread.php?t=375580&page=9

Bay Area HP alumni, please check in here and let's continue on!

I had the best 20 of my career with HP in the Enterprise computer divisions. The first 10 years spent in the field as a CE, then an SE and on to Consulting and into quota-carrying sales. The last 10 years were spent at the enterprise server divisions (HP-UX and HP 9000 systems) then on into the OpenView (now called HP Software, IIRC) divisions as a Product Manager and general marketeer. All of my last 10 years were at the Cupertino/Wolfe road site. Anyone seen what Apple has planned for the campus there?

My wife also worked at HP Labs and the HP-UX labs for her 20+ career, too.

Post here, too!

Cheers,

David

HP labs at Deer Creek? Cool. I worked with a guy (Brian Elliott) that worked at hp labs. Brilliant guy. He was working on picosecond pulse generator stuff. He's into audio and is buds with Sigfreid Linkwitz. Sigfreid also worked at hp labs and was responsible for a spectrum analyzer, or two.

Both these guys (Brian/Sigfreid are into open baffle dipoles. Brian's dipoles were probably the best sounding speakers I've ever heard.

Anyway, like I said in the other thread. I've been working for the hp type of company (hp. Agilent, Avago) since about '97. Building 90 (350 W Trimble SJ) hp and Agilent, building 50 (Agilent 1503 Stevens Creek Santa Clara), and back at building 90 (350 W. Trimble San Jose) with Avago.

The hp days of yore were awesome. Donuts in the morning, a monthly birthday cake party, beer bashs, Big Basin campground, etc, etc. What an incredible, nurturing environment to do your best in.

I've heard that market pressures and Carly (F) obliterated the hp way days.

Too bad, but a nice memory.

 

[dshoaf]

Agree, the HP Way went a-way after Lew Platt split off the Test and Measurment business units into Agilent. Carly came in but was far more the marketing type rather than the operational type. The Compaq merger almost ruined the company, IMHO. Mr. Hurd, following her, went too far to the extreme and got too efficient. In the meantime, there were a couple of board scandals and lack of board-level attention to the daily business. I'll bet Bill and Dave have been spinning in their graves.

Despite all that, I feel so fortunate for the opportunity to have worked at HP. The personal growth for myself as well as the financial growth I experienced there was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

In the days since I took an early-retirement package, I've done consulting for a number of non-high tech companies as well as back here in Silicon Valley. In all these projects, the most valuable thing I've discovered I can bring to my clients are elements of how HP trained its people to build and manage new technologies.

BTW, my wife was up at HP Labs in Palo Alto there up the hill from the corporate offices. Bldg 4, IIRC.

Cheers,

David

 

[rBuckner]

Checking back in as well. My stay with HP was only six months and at (IIRC) 1501 Page Mill Rd. in Palo Alto. I commuted in from Alameda, 45 miles each way. I think gas in 1979 when I was there was around 60 cents a gallon. Yes we had the goodie cart come around in the morning and afternoon too with something different on it each day along with coffee and iced tea in the afternoon. You could get lunch for about 2 bucks in the cafeteria and I remember playing volleyball too at lunch. It was almost like not working!

The thing I remember most ws my supervisor Fred Thiele, he told me his job was to make me sucessful. He always would offer to make a run to the parts room about once a day. But that was HP style and was smart of them.

I wouldn't have left except I was getting married and having to move to where my bride was going to her last year of college.

 

[House de Kris]

Thanks dshoaf for starting this thread. When I saw the HP sub-thread in the other thread, I thought of suggesting someone start an HP thread. I don't normally mention the company that I toil for, but since I just retired from a 20+ year stint at series of companies created by splits and spin-offs, I figure it's OK to talk about them now. I've always been in the ATG (Automatic Test Group) of TMO and enjoyed all my time doing it the HP-Way.

I've spent many years at 5301 Stevens Creek in both 53 Lower and 54 Lower. There's a chance that some of us responding to this thread may have actually bumped into each other there. There was a period where I ate in the cafeteria everyday. There also was a period where I never went to the cafeteria, so it depends.

I really loved how the experiences at work fit right in with my own personal interests, this makes work fun. I had many many years of designing high accuracy instrumentation and developing converter tests (DAC and ADC), amoung other things. Here's a picture of one of my boards after the Agilent split, and one of my best. It is sufficiently low-rez so as to not let out any secrets, I believe. The machine this went into had up to 144 of these boards in it.

 

[Jon_Logan]

Hey HD Kris. Cool board. Was that a measurement pin board out of a 93k? (SoC)? Our group (HSIO/NSD) had a 93k at Agilent. Our entire group was laid off after the bubble burst in 2003. The Agilent/hp ATE's were awesome.

The story I heard about the Agilent/hp spin-off was, Lew felt "weird" or unhappy explaining to shareholders about the semiconductor and Test and Measurement business. It's kind of odd and my co-workers and I wished the hp name stayed with their roots. TMO.

 

[dshoaf]

So you guys were in the labs, then. I started as a field guy out in North Carolina - a CE to start with. Had a company car for those years, a company gas card and a phone long distance charge card. Drove all over the state fixing HP3000s and all the peripherals.

Later became an SE, designing data centers, networks, etc. That was fun and then ended up a consultant billing my hours and, lastly, a sales rep selling HP 9000s and all the peripherals. I was attached, then, to the Data Center, networking and tape/disk drive divisions. You'd be amazed how many of these divisions didn't bother to talk to each other before they shipped products that were _supposed_ to work together! I came for training up at the Wolfe Rd. complex. Have been down to the Santa Clara division building a number of times back when some of it was housing some of the PC divisions before the merger. It still has that sleek 60s look to the lobby and meeting rooms much like some of the Palo Alto lab buildings.

My job was to get the running the way the customer wanted. Tough job when you didn't know which division was responsible for what driver, card, etc. Especially when it is 1AM on a Saturday night and you're out on site trying to diagnose some flaky problem with nothing more than a voltmeter and a scope - and no schematics!

On the food carts, that's not the way it worked in the field. We got doughnuts with our coffee on Fridays - but only if the field office was over quota the month prior. That meant that _all_ the division's sales reps must be over quota! Yep, I suppose we got the company cars, etc. to make up for it.

Hated to see HP split up, too. I sit at my garage ham desk, I have some nice older HP scopes, power supplies, and even an old frequency counter from the HPJapan division. They still work. We used to fight over the HP gear at the engineering school - didn't care for the Tek stuff!

Cheers,

David

 

[House de Kris]

Jon_Logan, that's a Pin Electronics (PE) board from an MTS (Memory Test Systems) tester. There's lots of similarities to the 93k. In fact, Agilent lumped SoC and MTS together when they pushed us out the door to make another spin-off (again, to keep shareholders happy). Depending on how old your 93k was, and what the options were, you may have had a few of my designs in that tester as well. Back when SoC was BSTD, and we were CSTD, we (CSTD) made a whole series of analog option boards for the 93k. I did all the initial designs other than an RF Mux, a Video Digitizer, and the DPS board.

dshoaf, I was never at HP or Agilent Labs. I always did R&D with the intent to make a product to sell, as opposed to just doing a science experiment. OK, inside joke, but I'm sure you get it.

 

[dshoaf]

Oh, yeah, I dealt with too many Labs ideas that just never made it to the product level.

On the ATE stuff, I never had the pleasure of dinking with those but I seem to recall that Northern Telecom had quite a few of the board testing setups at the plants where HP had lots of computer gear down in the data center.

When I was in the field, I could never sort out all those division names much less the 3 and 4 letter acronyms. As far as I was concerned, they were all lumped together as 'the factory', where you called or emailed until someone answered you. Odds were they weren't the right people to deal with a customer issue but at least they answered!

Cheers,

David

 

[ferninando]

So since 2011 these are the only Bay Area HP folks?