3 ms·

Couldn't existing R&D employees be better utilized instead of being laid off?

s1artibartfast 2y ago
They obviously think the answer is no. There is this interesting phenomenon where people outside an organization view R&D potential as elastic. That is to say, there is always a positive return on investment for the marginal R&D dollar. It is clearly not in the case or every company would have exponential growth simply by reinvesting in R&D. In reality, it is difficult to create growth from R&D at all, let alone the marginal dollar.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >There is this interesting phenomenon where people outside an organization view R&D potential as elastic. That is to say, there is always a positive return on investment for the marginal R&D dollar. I don't think that's the view here; instead, I think the idea is that R&D personnel could be reassigned to work on something more profitable, rather than simply laying them off. Assigning R&D people to work on something unprofitable or a dead-end is the fault of management and their poor vision, not the people assigned to research that stuff.
  - wavemode 2y ago
    That implies that there are job openings in those "more profitable" areas. Indeed, wouldn't every company love to just reallocate all of its employees to the areas that are most profitable. But alas, adding eight more women to the project of birthing a baby does not reduce pregnancy time to one month.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      >That implies that there are job openings in those "more profitable" areas. if they are more profitable, they probably have more space and budget by defauly. Outside of these strange times, it's not like Tech has historically been oversaturated and companies shy away from hiring new talent.
      - wavemode 2y ago
        > if they are more profitable, they probably have more space and budget by defauly Not sure what you're basing this assertion on. I've never been at any tech company where the fact that a project is profitable somehow inherently means that we can just keep adding engineers to it and those additional engineers will magically increase the revenue the project generates. In fact there's almost no industry where such an assumption would be logical. Even if your work has a very straightforward financial model, like manufacturing where you simply make Y dollars for every X parts you produce, that still does not imply you can just keep adding assembly line workers. At a certain point you have to consider whether there are even enough purchase orders to cover the volume of goods you're creating, or if they are just going to become wasted surplus sitting in a warehouse.
    - jodleif 2y ago
      No but you could get 1 baby / month on average
      - wavemode 2y ago
        What you're suggesting is the equivalent of the eight other mothers not working on the same most profitable project, but instead on other projects of their own. So you're agreeing with my point.
        s1artibartfast 2y ago
        And then you have 9 mouths to feed when you really wanted one very healthy baby. The corporate analog would be sustaining dozens of projects, partnerships, and business areas that never really took off and had the results you hoped for.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    Why does every organization always have something profitable they could be working on? In the case of firing, either way, companies are not staffed by omniscient leaders. The are staffed by humans, which don't know where to put R&D today to guarantee profitable inventions tomorrow. Human uncertainty and imperfection underlies all business risk.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      It seems that the visionary management at Intel has been consistently failing at focusing R&D efforts in a productive and profitable way, so why are they still employed there? They should fire the management and hire some new management that can make better decisions. This is nothing new: even when I worked there decades ago, they were always making stupid decisions, such as the whole Itanic idea, the dumb idea of making their P4 processors dependent on expensive RAMBUS memory, refusing to make a serious 64-bit version of x86 until AMD did it first, etc. It seems they still haven't learned (or hired some better executives).
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
        They say the fish rots from the head. This is a common problem with mature companies with clueless owners and nobody competent enough to right the ship. If the money printing machine works to well, everybody forgets how to repair it by the time it breaks down.
- rowanG077 2y ago
  It's more like R&D is the lifeblood of a company like Intel. Intel is basically purely an R&D company, their entire future hinges on R&D. This is not typical of other companies who can usually coast for years or even decades on existing product or may not even require R&D for new products. R&D should really be Intels major spend.
  - Conan_Kudo 2y ago
    But... Intel does coast on plenty of things and seems to remain market leader anyway?
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    They have been putting record funding into R&D for years, but it seems that simply throwing money at the problem isn't helping, so it makes sense that they would try something different. Their press statement essentially R&D is too bloated, dysfunctional, and disorganized in the current state to produce.
    - rowanG077 2y ago
      Throwing money at any problem is ineffective by itself. Still throwing money at a problem is a prerequisite to get stuff solved. It may very well be true that Intel R&D teams are too bloated, dysfunctional and disorganized. But that is not solved with throwing less money at it. If anything doing that and nothing else just leaves with less teams that are too bloated, dysfunctional and disorganized.
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
        Their R&D spend is 4x that of TSMC and 2X that of Nvidia. If they cut 20%, they will still have an obscene budget. If you read the press release the idea is to focus on their core competencies, like making good processors. That means laying off people that can't help with that goal.
        johnnyanmac 2y ago

They obviously think the answer is no. There is this interesting phenomenon where people outside an organization view R&D potential as elastic. That is to say, there is always a positive return on investment for the marginal R&D dollar. It is clearly not in the case or every company would have exponential growth simply by reinvesting in R&D. In reality, it is difficult to create growth from R&D at all, let alone the marginal dollar.

shiroiushi 2y ago
>There is this interesting phenomenon where people outside an organization view R&D potential as elastic. That is to say, there is always a positive return on investment for the marginal R&D dollar. I don't think that's the view here; instead, I think the idea is that R&D personnel could be reassigned to work on something more profitable, rather than simply laying them off. Assigning R&D people to work on something unprofitable or a dead-end is the fault of management and their poor vision, not the people assigned to research that stuff.
- wavemode 2y ago
  That implies that there are job openings in those "more profitable" areas. Indeed, wouldn't every company love to just reallocate all of its employees to the areas that are most profitable. But alas, adding eight more women to the project of birthing a baby does not reduce pregnancy time to one month.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    >That implies that there are job openings in those "more profitable" areas. if they are more profitable, they probably have more space and budget by defauly. Outside of these strange times, it's not like Tech has historically been oversaturated and companies shy away from hiring new talent.
    - wavemode 2y ago
      > if they are more profitable, they probably have more space and budget by defauly Not sure what you're basing this assertion on. I've never been at any tech company where the fact that a project is profitable somehow inherently means that we can just keep adding engineers to it and those additional engineers will magically increase the revenue the project generates. In fact there's almost no industry where such an assumption would be logical. Even if your work has a very straightforward financial model, like manufacturing where you simply make Y dollars for every X parts you produce, that still does not imply you can just keep adding assembly line workers. At a certain point you have to consider whether there are even enough purchase orders to cover the volume of goods you're creating, or if they are just going to become wasted surplus sitting in a warehouse.
  - jodleif 2y ago
    No but you could get 1 baby / month on average
    - wavemode 2y ago
      What you're suggesting is the equivalent of the eight other mothers not working on the same most profitable project, but instead on other projects of their own. So you're agreeing with my point.
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
        And then you have 9 mouths to feed when you really wanted one very healthy baby. The corporate analog would be sustaining dozens of projects, partnerships, and business areas that never really took off and had the results you hoped for.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  Why does every organization always have something profitable they could be working on? In the case of firing, either way, companies are not staffed by omniscient leaders. The are staffed by humans, which don't know where to put R&D today to guarantee profitable inventions tomorrow. Human uncertainty and imperfection underlies all business risk.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    It seems that the visionary management at Intel has been consistently failing at focusing R&D efforts in a productive and profitable way, so why are they still employed there? They should fire the management and hire some new management that can make better decisions. This is nothing new: even when I worked there decades ago, they were always making stupid decisions, such as the whole Itanic idea, the dumb idea of making their P4 processors dependent on expensive RAMBUS memory, refusing to make a serious 64-bit version of x86 until AMD did it first, etc. It seems they still haven't learned (or hired some better executives).
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      They say the fish rots from the head. This is a common problem with mature companies with clueless owners and nobody competent enough to right the ship. If the money printing machine works to well, everybody forgets how to repair it by the time it breaks down.
rowanG077 2y ago
It's more like R&D is the lifeblood of a company like Intel. Intel is basically purely an R&D company, their entire future hinges on R&D. This is not typical of other companies who can usually coast for years or even decades on existing product or may not even require R&D for new products. R&D should really be Intels major spend.
- Conan_Kudo 2y ago
  But... Intel does coast on plenty of things and seems to remain market leader anyway?
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  They have been putting record funding into R&D for years, but it seems that simply throwing money at the problem isn't helping, so it makes sense that they would try something different. Their press statement essentially R&D is too bloated, dysfunctional, and disorganized in the current state to produce.
  - rowanG077 2y ago
    Throwing money at any problem is ineffective by itself. Still throwing money at a problem is a prerequisite to get stuff solved. It may very well be true that Intel R&D teams are too bloated, dysfunctional and disorganized. But that is not solved with throwing less money at it. If anything doing that and nothing else just leaves with less teams that are too bloated, dysfunctional and disorganized.
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      Their R&D spend is 4x that of TSMC and 2X that of Nvidia. If they cut 20%, they will still have an obscene budget. If you read the press release the idea is to focus on their core competencies, like making good processors. That means laying off people that can't help with that goal.
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago