Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) chief executive Meg Whitman, who was hired last year to clean up the mess left by her predecessor Leo Apotheker, reportedly is considering slashing as many as 30,000 jobs, or about 9% of the company's staff.

About 15,000 cuts will be in HP's struggling enterprise services division, though other divisions will not be spared, according to Bloomberg News. Unfortunately, more job cuts are likely.

According to Reuters, each HP employee generates about $357,491 in revenue and $16,982 in net income, well below the industry averages of $8.18 million and $164,858. HP employs about 349,600 people.

Shares have slumped more than 14% this year as investors have worried that the pioneering tech company had failed to keep up with the latest trends, such as tablet computers and the shift toward cloud computing, according to Bloomberg. The company's PC sales are dropping.

The leaking of the the layoff announcement may have been timed to coincide with the much-hyped Facebook (FB) initial public offering. Since the media have the attention span of a gnat, the timing could minimize coverage of the layoffs. But that's a short-term strategy. Eventually, investors are going to expect Whitman to deliver results.

Bloomberg quotes an analyst as saying that HP could save about $1.2 billion by cutting 18,000 jobs. The question that then arises is what the company should do with that windfall. Maybe it will increase its dividend or invest in its business, but figuring out where may be tricky, because most of its units are foundering.

The Personal Systems Group's revenue declined 15% last quarter as demand for desktop and notebook computers plunged. Revenue of the imaging and printing business declined by 7% during the same time, while enterprise servers, storage and networking revenue fell 10%.

Software was a bright spot, reporting a 30% gain in sales. However, those figures include the acquisition of Autonomy. Software also is much smaller than the other businesses, so HP would have to make a huge acquisition there for it to make a difference to its bottom line.

Indeed, it took HP years to morph from a tech innovator to a hot mess. Whitman, though, does not have that much time to right HP's faltering ship. One of her biggest challenges remains figuring out what to do with the PC business, which Apotheker wanted to ditch but she decided to keep. Unfortunately, there is only so much cutting to do.

Whitman, eventually, will have to figure out how to grow HP. Until she articulates a coherent plan to do that, investors should avoid the stock.

Jonathan Berr does not own shares of the companies listed here. Follow him on Twitter@jdberr