HP to cut 25-30k jobs
My father is a field-service engineer for HP in Midwest (based out of Minneapolis, but he has calls all over from Fargo, ND to Mpls, MN to Madison, WI). He is _the_ go-to for their biggest, most senior, most mission-critical clients. He put together UMN's Alpha setup, is the only guy that USPS will call for help, MNSCU, Best Buy, UHG... basically, anyone with an HP setup (server or printer) that's a Fortune 1000 (and some of the smaller guys too) — he's their man.He's feeling the heat.He's made it through the absorption of Compaq, and when Compaq absorbed Digital. He's won a ton of awards with each company he's been at, frequently getting high marks for his professionalism, timeliness, availability, willingness to mentor the new guys, stuff like that. He also brought in more than $4MM in revenue for HP in one fiscal year, even though sales wasn't his job (I think it came out to 28 different contracts?) The next highest was $600k. It's been like that for 25 years.Needless to say, he's pretty damn good at his job.He's late 50s, but in amazing health. My mother, however, is in her 50s, and is in absolutely terrible health.They cannot afford to lose healthcare coverage. My mom wouldn't make it, and my father would probably lose his mind. They just refinanced their 220k mortgage and put new siding on their suburban house, added new gutters, got the roof redone, stuff like that.Please, don't make this about how shitty of an investment that might have been. That's beside the point.He makes a good living — he filed $98k last year, but that's a _ton_ of overtime.All he's known is hardware for the last 30 years. He's not a sysadmin and will never be. He's not some low-level nerd. He's the product of an unnotable tech school and he's worked his ass off to keep things afloat. I don't have the best relationship with him at all, but he's a human and I picked up my people skills (if you can call them that) from him.Who would hire him at this age, with this kind of experience?