Nice eye catching title huh 
I got laid off along with 55000 others from HP worldwide have been expecting this for some time and now it's finally my turn. Most of the folks I know get laid off at around this age of 40+ so do take note.
Ideas that ran thru my head this last few weeks: bitcoin farming, it security, audit/compliance, drive a taxi.
Anybody with 5 minutes to spare got any good ideas?
There is always a need for Unix/Linux Sysadmins. I have lot's of ideas, but what are you good at and what makes you happy doing it? Maybe you can do join talent fun ?
It seems that HP is hiring again, maybe you can go back.... 
If you have good skills people will hire you. Working at HP might
even help, since many companies run HP servers. Stay with it,
you shouldn't need to drive a cab or sling coffee.
I've already gone back to work in HP 3 times previously before already once contract expired I left then later rejoined then resigned and rejoined again.
But in HP once you get laid off it means that position is considered redundant and can no longer be filled by anybody.
Also furthermore this time they have relocated the support overseas to low cost centers.
I think the industry is changing even shrinking with the advent of cloud computing, in time systems are going to get more efficient and cheaper and that will put pressure on operating costs, budgets, salaries they don't need so many sys admins or engineers to run around in-country anymore some places I hear they just have a pool of less than 10 people overseas datacenter can manage several thousand virtual servers on cloud.
Sure I think there are many sys admin jobs around still if I wanted to continue or maybe I should bite the bullet now and break out to try something else.
The only jobs in IT today I see that will be hard to farmed out are:
local desktop support - low pay
it security
audit and compliance
I saw Hp folk being laid here, was sad as I knew most of them...In common? were over 50, and were old HP Team not ex DEC...
HP hasnt finished making mistakes... The first big one was the abandon of PA-RISC...
Because of that, we have no more HP srvers here... I can hardly justify my position anymore, thanks I know a little more so now I do mostly SAS integration on AIX and help when I can on AIX Solaris and Linux...
If you want to stay as sysadmin, the easiest for you would be to integrate an AIX team as AIX (IMHO) is the closest in terms of management/administration to HP-UX, and you could be efficient quite fast as smit is more powerful than sam and a good help when you know what you are doing/looking for but dont know all the commands
I find this statement really odd. The reason why people liked RISC chips is because, at one point, they had faster clock speeds that CISC chips. However, since then CISC chips have become significantly faster, run at a higher clock frequency and can do more with each clock cycle. Hence anything RISC is in the past.
I worked in the VAX/Alpha world 20 years ago. That architecture was dying then, and is now all but dead. There is still a local steel mill that uses Alpha processors. But they only use it because they haven't yet rewritten all their old Cobol and Fortran.
I get the argument that cloud computing means fewer tech jobs. But companies will still want some knowledge in house. But maybe not forever.
Which is why the average North American now carries one or more RISC processors at all times, has several more in their home, and is increasingly using them for all computing.
I certainly get your point. While ARM processors are technically reduced instruction set processors. They don't necessarily match the architecture of the PA-RISC chips.
Do PA-RISC chips have multiple cores and co-processors?
Neither did ARM, a while ago. They say RISC is nothing but young CISC.
Also, you forgot MIPS, increasingly ubiquitous in network routing devices.
If they continued the development I suppose they would have...
About speed, what was the faster CPU mid 90 already, sont you find it curious how after making alpha CPu for DEC suddenly the pentium doupled speed ( and so the rest of INTEL cpus...)...
Are you saying Powerpc is CISC?
20 years ago someone had windows NT intel version running on an Alpha station using FX!32. The server was too slow to use in any practical way. Granted it was running a hardware emulator, but the chip wasn't that special. Perhaps if things were different we would all have Alpha processors in our desktops and DEC would still exist as a company. But we don't and DEC is long dead. All that I was saying is that the RISC server hardware of 20 years ago is dead.
In any layoff typically there are those that want it and those that don't. Those that are young have no family or small family unit to support no loans to service will typically want to volunteer for it. They are young enough to start over.
I feel for those HP guys over 50 that got laid but I believe they are the lucky ones to get out. The ones that remain have to take on the additional workload and now they are changing the system. Once upon a time those benefits was capped at 25 months, 1 month of each year of service, then they changed it to a 12 month cap. Now there's an ugly rumor they are going to change to 1 week for each year of service cap at 12 thats over 75% cut.
And this has come out converting employees to become contractors
HP layoffs are going on now and involve a new job offer ... but no severance - Business Insider
I learned this back in CSC many years ago, if they announce layoffs it means they budgetted for it, I know this sounds crazy but you should volunteer for it be on the first train to get out. Once they deplete the layoff budget and they haven't managed to achieve their business goals thats when it gets ugly they will resort to all sorts of tricks. I remember in CSC they had 2 layoffs in then a painful pay cut followed by another 2 layoffs.
Once a company announces layoffs it means their business outlook has changed negatively there likely to be more than 1 layoff you should think about that.
It is the dronification on the works.
They want people to obey, not to think.
Cloud ? It still needs sysadmin love.
Now you are not connecting physical servers and switches, but virtual ones.
It still requires knowledge how things work and how they should be configured.
Couple of sysadmins for thousands of servers ?
Yea, and N of insert made up drone positions.
As for HP, i'm working with HP gear for last 6 years on mostly all levels.
I cannot speak of the past (a bit too young...32), from what i've heard from 50+ folks HP was a great company when it innovated.
Shit started happening when instead of doing the work, they started buying other companies and playing money games.
HPUX is a great operating system standards compliant, but the hardware that follows today is just bad. Itanic sucks on so many levels (power, performance..)
Nobody can touch x86 - it is cheap, has the fastest CPU and does the job on the operating system you choose (solaris variants, linux varians, bsd etc...)
Who would choose Itanic,SPARC or POWER over Xeon for a new project ?
What advantages do you see in such selection ?
Think twice and ahead 
Since Oracle bought Sun i've jumped with both feets in the Linux bandwagon... i still love the Sparc architecture and Solaris but it's market is dying ... so is HP-UX (in my humble opinion). I've also drank the cloud koolaid with CI, CM, Agile and what not. I believe the pure sysadmin job is transitionning into the devops creature.
I've just switched jobs at 43 and add 40 compagnies contact me within in a month. Yes i'm in Europe but US is a more dynamic market. It should be the same if not easier.
I said with cloud they don't need so many I didn't say they don't need anymore sysadmins.
In HP when I first joined years back my KPI for unix server was originally 20 boxes per engineer then it jumped to 40 and they bumped it up again 80 boxes per engineer.
I spoke to the overseas team taking over the support from local they have 20 guys managing over 3000 physical servers. That's over 150 server per engineer almost double. And that may not even be their real KPI it may be even higher so how do you win against low cost?
This and all other layoffs is all about money costs pressures and who is able to give more bang for their $$$$$, your skillsets may be very good but you cannot win low cost and you could still find yourself getting cut.
The business guy he is in-charge not you and he doesn't know you or what you look like or your family money problems all he sees everyday is a number on a spreadsheet that he wants to cut because he is answerable to the people above him all the way to the ceo and then finally the shareholders who every year want to see more returns performance dividends.
Sorry to hear this sparcguy. Hope you will keep us updated on anything you find. Always like to know how these things turn out.
This is a blessing. HP is a sucking black hole of mismanagement and incompetence.
Some of those laid off will find SA jobs elsewhere, and some will find their way into other fields.
If you can't find work where you're at, consider relocating...
As hard as this might be right now Brother, consider it a blessing in disguise.