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Intel lays off hundreds of tech administrators
- mrtweetyhack 8y agoCould be moving to the cloud where system administrators are really no longer needed. I'm seeing more and more companies doing that, they don't even own servers anymore.
- chrisseaton 8y agoWhat does a technical administrator do?
- noir_lord 8y agoPrevent meltdown level bugs in tape outs perhaps?.
- chrisseaton 8y agoThe article implies they're more on the side of IT.
- gwbas1c 8y agoProbably things like being a DBA. Intel has a lot of 1-off databases for internal tools used in manufacturing. The database sees a lot of heavy use, but is tied to one particular step in manufacturing, so there aren't a lot of traditional users. I suspect that they've migrated these databases to versions that don't require as much heavy oversight.
- JetezLeLogin 8y agoThat's exactly what they did. In the past year or so they've migrated everybody from a custom DBA type arrangement to a self-serve DBaaS system. They've also turned over the keys for people to do their admin stuff in a self-serve way in the on-premises-hosted cloud. You can now spin up an onsite VM very easily and do your thing, without letting the precious-precious flow outside of Intel at any time to e.g. AWS, Azure etc. (Though if what you do is below a certain secrecy level, you can do that too.) The downside is that for those applications that have tried to stay on the custom model (cough), IT service quality and quantity has gone straight down the shitter. You can submit help tickets and like never hear back. I guess now I know why - it wasn't so much "Thanks for coming, enjoy your stay" as it was "Run for the lifeboats, we're sinking the ship!"
- gautamdivgi 8y ago> I suspect that they've migrated these databases to versions that don't require as much heavy oversight. I think you're giving the bean counting process too much credit. AFAIK they go by abstract criteria (organization/location/job role/performance/etc.). I doubt they go by (or even know or care) how much actual work is being supported by the person.
- aarongolliver 8y agoI have a friend who is one (I believe) and his job is to admin huge network drives that are used by R&D researchers.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- throwaway10958 8y agoA more well known term would be 'systems administrators'. The layoff is affecting sysadmins and similarly scoped job functions. While I've never heard the term 'tech administrators' at Intel, the term 'system' has a more specific meaning[1](EG. CPU system design), which is likely why the more common title wasn't used. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_engineering
- foobarbazetc 8y agoSysAdm
- Iwillgetby 8y agoFrom what I can tell, tech or technical administrator is a term used by people who are not familiar with IT geek speak. There are some valid uses of the term, but AFAICT it is not part of the geek speak lexicon. See this for example https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q="Technical+Adminstrator"&from=sug https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q="Technical+Adminstrator"&from=... or https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=%22Tech+Adminstrator%22&l= https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=%22Tech+Adminstrator%22&l=
- Spooky23 8y agoUsually limited scope IT functions for a legacy or snowflake system. In a big company, you’ll find a little team in charge of Lexmark printers or something similar. Jobs like that are an endangered species as cloud and even minimally useful automation root.
- godelmachine 8y agoJust to site an example - handles software like ticketing systems or issue trackers, could be Jira or ServiceNow
- thomas 8y agoNever heard of this role. It’s a general name for people that work in tech? An Intel-specific term?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pcurve 8y agoThey probably refer to people that have been maintaining legacy apps, database, or web servers that have been in more or less maintenance mode for a long time until new replacement came long.
- stuff4ben 8y agoIf anyone affected by this happens to be well-versed in Kubernetes/SRE, please shoot me an email!
- joejerryronnie 8y agoTech Administrator sounds like some type of government job
- bluedino 8y agoOffshoring?
- yourapostasy 8y agoIf so, then even the offshore teams are vulnerable to the tsunami change coming with devops, SRE, elastic infrastructure, etc. It drives me a little crazy inside when I go to clients and see their system administrators have never developed automation for routine "small" events and are still after N years (where sometimes N>10!) responding to the same disk full alerts in exactly the same way, with absolutely zero automation of what they learned, cleaning up the same selection of files, and so on. And this is before I try to extol the virtues of devops over lunches, or go tactical and encourage them to try out Terraform, Pulumi, or the like (MEGO is my usual audience reaction). Fortunately my clients don't pay me to transform their IT, so it's no skin off my back. But make no mistake, that change is building a powerful head of steam, and I'm excited to work on automation solutions that embrace these principles, tooling, culture, etc., in my own service offerings for another part of my business. The folks who are resisting this change though, are not going to react well if/when the change starts seeping into their worlds.
- packet_nerd 8y agoMy experience with these kinds of people is they react badly when anything new seeps into their worlds.
- crispyambulance 8y agoI think that many of these seemingly change-resistant folks actually would have loved to embrace new stuff. The problem, in many places, is that they're in departments like operations that value "convergent" work. This means they're stuck with their noses to the grindstone at all times and judged on volume and consistency of work. If they want to change something, they need to go through an onerous process designed to keep mistakes from happening at all costs. There is NO experimenting in such places and the workload is such that it's hard even to get some interstitial time to explore new ideas, of course forget about conferences and 20% time. The way they end-up canned or otherwise scattered to the wind is when someone way higher up in org see's that there's a better way and brings in someone from the outside to implement much needed change. It usually never occurs to these folks (the managers bringing in consultants) that they would not have had to do that in the first place if there was some value placed on innovation.
- cannonedhamster 8y agoIt seems really perverse incentive wise that layoffs always seem to bump stock prices. Companies are going to need to transition at times and have cut backs and pivots but it doesn't seem like it should be a market signal that the company is doing something worth investing in so consistently. Many times what these cuts do, in many companies, is just offload the tech overhead to another department, or lower quality and quantity of work being done by another department. When I was in IT they wouldn't replace workers who had left. This caused IT hold times to go from less than a minute for an answer to over an hour. We estimated that it ended up costing the company over a million dollars in man hours over some non-trivial period because of wasted time on users who were no longer able to perform their duties. They outsourced the call center after I left. I heard it's only gotten worse as the call center frequently hangs up if the call is too hard or is taking too long since they are tracked on call times and numbers. Perverse incentives.
- hinkley 8y agoTech companies don't know how to fire people, and the market seems to know this. It's generally assumed that the first round of layoffs, if small, is to cull underperformers. Further rounds seem to make everybody jumpy.
- mistrial9 8y ago> Tech companies don't know how to fire people, and the market seems to know this. citation on that?
- Rexxar 8y agoHN is not wikipedia but I don't have any citation to prove it.
- yardie 8y agoIntel was one of the first companies reported to use stack ranking. If anything they had a reputation of firing too aggressively or for mundane reasons.
- 8y ago
- 40acres 8y agoTechnical administrator is a strange title, but also seems kind of accurate. I know folks who are in IT at Intel and a majority of those who were let go seem to be 'systems analysts' and management of systems analysts. Where the systems in this case are internal enterprise tools.
- IronWolve 8y agoSome telecoms call app admins, SMEs, Subject Matter Experts. They administrate a service. I'm guessing Tech Administrators are the same thing, they run internal applications, databases, internal tools, non-major platforms, more of a sysadmin+app admin role. If you bounce around different projects internally, you can grow your experience in that company. You can learn networking, databases, operating systems (diff flavors), deployment tools, etc, and further your career. Major companies offer a yearly educational package also. This is how I qualified for tiger teams at a few companies. Teams formed to troubleshoot major problems, check new projects for issues, etc. Collection of experts. Not sure if Intel "Tech administrators" are just production facilities app owners, some of those apps are so old, running dos/95, that upgrading it would be too expensive.
- rhacker 8y agoOregon and many other states are often providing companies with massive tax breaks. These kinds of layoffs, in my book, justify terminating such tax breaks. (actually in my book no companies would get a tax break - but just say'n)
- simonebrunozzi 8y agoIn my book too.
- OrgNet 8y agoas long as they give the same tax break to individuals in that state, I'm fine with it...
- PhantomGremlin 8y agoactually in my book no companies would get a tax break Generally speaking, I agree with that. Tax breaks lead to a race-to-the-bottom. The "winning" location gives away so much that it's often a negative for the municipality. This may well have been the situation with the recent proposed HQ for Amazon in NYC. However, there are exceptions. I don't know the exact details of the "massive tax breaks" you are referring to. But they could be justified in this case. Otherwise the investment would simply go to another state. Here's now it has worked in Oregon with Intel in the past: The tax breaks were because of the extraordinary high cost of a semiconductor fab. It costs literally billions of dollars to build and equip a modern fab. This cost is far out of proportion to what a more mundane industrial development would cost. Assessing a property tax on the full value of that fab would mean the amount of tax is far far far out of proportion to the cost of providing government services to that fab. So lets say, making up some numbers, a municipality has an existing property tax base of $5 billion. Intel builds a new $5 billion fab there. The burden of that fab on resources such as fire and schools is minimal. So, does everyone else in the municipality get their property taxes cut in half just because the expensive new building appears? Or does the municipality now get 2x the previous revenue (which whey will most likely spend recklessly). The same argument as property taxes can be made for income taxes on the business. Let's say a company can build a widget factory for $5 billion. The widgets from that factory can generate a profit of $1 billion per year, at very little cost to the municipality or the state. Should the state collect income tax on that full $1 billion of profit? If you say yes, collect the full amount of property or income tax, then the factory just gets built elsewhere. Maybe even in another country. In that scenario, the USA loses and the state loses. They lose the high paying jobs that the factory brings. They lose all the "trickle down" that the factory brings. They simply lose. Dont forget, all the new local employees buy homes, pay property taxes, pay state income taxes, pay capital gains taxes on all the appreciated Intel stock they sell. In Oregon, unlike at the Federal level, there is no tax reduction for long term capital gains and there is no tax reduction for dividends. The income tax rate hits 9% at $8,401 in income. Oregon gets plenty of money at the 9% state income tax rate that most people easily hit. Oregon takes 9.9% above $125,000 but that's not a big added burden for most people. Semiconductor fabs are so very capital intensive that I think adjustments must be made to the general method of taxing both property and income.
- apo 8y agoThat last line caused me to do a double-take: > Intel shares were trading up 0.9 percent Friday at $53.61. The stock is near its highest point since the dot-com era. Sure enough, it hasn't recovered its pre-crash price (~ $75). That's 20 years in the red if you happened to invest at the top. Many (most?) of the high fliers from back then that are still around did recover (e.g., AMZN, MSFT, AAPL). Even ORCL (but barely).
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoAre the numbers inflation normalized?
- dmoy 8y agoNo, and they also probably don't account for dividends. Edit: after dividends it would be 10.7% higher, but annualized returns of <1%. So still really bad, but not less money than you went in with.
- dmoy 8y agoActually after dividends but after inflation too you're still negative I guess, hah.
- apo 8y agoNo, straight from Yahoo finance. Also doesn't include dividends.
- GoMonad 8y agoTo be fair to Intel, you wouldn't be in the red if you took dividends into account. The adjusted pre-crash price is ~$44 relative to today's $54. Still, a pretty bad return for 20 years.
- caprese 8y agoDollar cost average my guy. You would be golden by now. Any study telling you that lump sum investing beats dollar cost averaging was only able to use a 30 year period of unprecedented and unreplicated global growth DCA + Dividend Reinvesting + Covered Calls + a few years = Cost Basis of basically $0
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tejtm 8y agoAnd here I was thinking they were laying off the administrators because they are an impediment to progress in tech