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How has demand for chips looked over the past few months? Has it been enough to potentially necessitate from a business perspective keeping output high? I can i

How has demand for chips looked over the past few months? Has it been enough to potentially necessitate from a business perspective keeping output high? I can imagine arguments for higher or lower demand that seem perfectly reasonable (low because consumer segment slowdown, high because surge in cloud service use increasing failures/expansion demand or business laptops for WFH) and I'm wondering what the dominant force is.

ksidkrk9 6y ago
Personally demand for chips is not the measure I’d want them to use. Stabilizing employee mindset is the measure they should care about. Hard to ship chips if they feel the company doesn’t care about their demand to stay alive and they all quit. AMD wouldn’t mind a bunch of chip experts being suddenly available. Ogling market economics first and foremost is really not the priority for agency these days. If demand falls such that we’re just generating chips for science and industry, so be it. No one owes tech nerds tech to fetishize.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  They need to sell units, to make money, to continue to employ and pay employees. They may have contracts that require them to ship units or lose large contracts (and thus have to engage in mass layoffs).
- vikramkr 6y ago
  Oh I completely agree that it's a bad measure. I'm not looking for a justification, I'm curious for an explanation of why management might be incentivized to act this way. If theres a business case for it it's fairly easy to rationalize as a manager why you have a moral responsibility to put employees at risk (the economy is running in WFH powered by our CPUs! They need us!). Especially if they're in for a nice bonus if sales spike in higher demand. I'm more curious if there's even a business case to be made which might explain (but not necessarily justify) reckless behavior.
- kube-system 6y ago
  I doubt many people are comfortable quitting their job in the current market. I also doubt AMD would hire any of these people, even in good economic times, since they divested their fabs 11 years ago.

ksidkrk9 6y ago

Personally demand for chips is not the measure I’d want them to use. Stabilizing employee mindset is the measure they should care about. Hard to ship chips if they feel the company doesn’t care about their demand to stay alive and they all quit. AMD wouldn’t mind a bunch of chip experts being suddenly available. Ogling market economics first and foremost is really not the priority for agency these days. If demand falls such that we’re just generating chips for science and industry, so be it. No one owes tech nerds tech to fetishize.

vorpalhex 6y ago
They need to sell units, to make money, to continue to employ and pay employees. They may have contracts that require them to ship units or lose large contracts (and thus have to engage in mass layoffs).
vikramkr 6y ago
Oh I completely agree that it's a bad measure. I'm not looking for a justification, I'm curious for an explanation of why management might be incentivized to act this way. If theres a business case for it it's fairly easy to rationalize as a manager why you have a moral responsibility to put employees at risk (the economy is running in WFH powered by our CPUs! They need us!). Especially if they're in for a nice bonus if sales spike in higher demand. I'm more curious if there's even a business case to be made which might explain (but not necessarily justify) reckless behavior.
kube-system 6y ago
I doubt many people are comfortable quitting their job in the current market. I also doubt AMD would hire any of these people, even in good economic times, since they divested their fabs 11 years ago.