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Is it just me (non-US) that is grossed out by this dehumanizing talk which is somehow en vogue? Your "waste" is the salary of tens of thousands of smart engin

Is it just me (non-US) that is grossed out by this dehumanizing talk which is somehow en vogue? Your "waste" is the salary of tens of thousands of smart engineers that put significant chunks of their lifetime into the company to enable their family (probably) a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. They made Intel no. 1 with outrageous profit margins that fueled many-billion stock buybacks. The company is troubled because their executives are legendary for their bad decisions. They missed out or gave up too early on almost all major opportunities: - Mobile computing - GPGPU (twice! Rumours are their GPU team was cut after the crypto craze) - Chiplets for economic manycore CPUs - AI (remember Optane? The nonsensical AVX-512 strategy?) - ARM - Efficiency (higher IPC + lower clocks) Seriously, how about fixing their awful strategic decision making instead of blaming employees? Do you think a company with out-of-touch leadership will somehow start winning with fewer employees?

BeetleB 2y ago
> Your "waste" is the salary of tens of thousands of smart engineers that put significant chunks of their lifetime into the company to enable their family (probably) a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Likely, many/most of those engineers didn't play much of a role in Intel's success. Trust me, I know many current and former employees there. While they certainly have good SW people, they also have absolute trash (e.g. cannot write a function to compute a factorial, cannot handle branches in version control, cannot do anything on the command line - including a basic understanding of directories and how to navigate them). As I said, when a company is very profitable, it's easy to hire subpar engineers. And they did. When I say Intel is fat, I'm not exaggerating. They have a lot of poorly capable engineers who are not contributing much. That's one category. Then another category is hiring a lot of capable engineers for a zillion side projects - none of which are profitable. Ideally you'd move them to existing products that will be profitable, but there's no need for them - those products are already well staffed. What do you want Intel to do? Keep paying them for useless work (which is what they've been doing all along)? You're not wrong about the stock buybacks and the bad executives. But you're not proposing a solution either. They've raised compensation. They've stopped buybacks. They've cut and then eliminated the dividend. The reality is the company is bleeding money, and competitors are squeezing them. If they don't lay them off, they face extinction. Even the 15,000 number is low. Expect more layoffs in future years. Unless they can come up with another cash cow that their competitors cannot, they are not a viable company at this size. The only reason they were so wasteful in the past was their lead in Moore's Law. Now that Moore's Law is mostly dead, other companies have caught up (and temporarily surpassed them). Unless a revolutionary breakthrough occurs in semiconductor fabrication, which only Intel can capitalize on, the good (wasteful) days are gone forever. AMD had to go through this a long time ago. > - Mobile computing > ... > - Efficiency (higher IPC + lower clocks) I think you're not realizing the reality of the situation. With the exception of GPUs and the AI craze, for everything else you list: Even if they had become number 1 in those categories they would still be poorly profitable and fat. Just look at the competitors in those spaces - none are as inefficient or overstaffed as Intel. Even Nvidia, with their insane profits, remains relatively lean. All the things you mention aren't why Intel is suffering so much. It's due to the fundamental economics of running a fab, along with the stalling of Moore's Law. (And BTW, the sales and marketing team got cut 35% - and I bet if they reveal the numbers, you'll find that the cuts from the fab will be less than the 15% target. So it's not just engineers).
ac29 2y ago
> Your "waste" is the salary of tens of thousands of smart engineers that put significant chunks of their lifetime into the company to enable their family (probably) a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. The only layoffs Intel mentioned specifically are in sales and marketing. Does this change how you feel? edit: As a reference, last quarter Intel spent ~$4.4B on R&D and ~$1.6B on SGA (sales, general, and administrative).
- 0x000xca0xfe 2y ago
  No, it doesn't. I did not comment because of Intel specifically but because many comments I have read about similar mass layoffs tend to dehumanize ordinary workers for being "useless bloat" while completely ignoring that the root cause of the problems is moronic decisions by higher-ups. Mass layoffs that unexpectedly upend the lives of thousands of people are basically guaranteed to cause a couple deaths by suicide, ruined families or homelessness so at least have some basic human decency when talking about those that are affected most.

BeetleB 2y ago

> Your "waste" is the salary of tens of thousands of smart engineers that put significant chunks of their lifetime into the company to enable their family (probably) a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Likely, many/most of those engineers didn't play much of a role in Intel's success. Trust me, I know many current and former employees there. While they certainly have good SW people, they also have absolute trash (e.g. cannot write a function to compute a factorial, cannot handle branches in version control, cannot do anything on the command line - including a basic understanding of directories and how to navigate them). As I said, when a company is very profitable, it's easy to hire subpar engineers. And they did. When I say Intel is fat, I'm not exaggerating. They have a lot of poorly capable engineers who are not contributing much. That's one category. Then another category is hiring a lot of capable engineers for a zillion side projects - none of which are profitable. Ideally you'd move them to existing products that will be profitable, but there's no need for them - those products are already well staffed. What do you want Intel to do? Keep paying them for useless work (which is what they've been doing all along)? You're not wrong about the stock buybacks and the bad executives. But you're not proposing a solution either. They've raised compensation. They've stopped buybacks. They've cut and then eliminated the dividend. The reality is the company is bleeding money, and competitors are squeezing them. If they don't lay them off, they face extinction. Even the 15,000 number is low. Expect more layoffs in future years. Unless they can come up with another cash cow that their competitors cannot, they are not a viable company at this size. The only reason they were so wasteful in the past was their lead in Moore's Law. Now that Moore's Law is mostly dead, other companies have caught up (and temporarily surpassed them). Unless a revolutionary breakthrough occurs in semiconductor fabrication, which only Intel can capitalize on, the good (wasteful) days are gone forever. AMD had to go through this a long time ago. > - Mobile computing > ... > - Efficiency (higher IPC + lower clocks) I think you're not realizing the reality of the situation. With the exception of GPUs and the AI craze, for everything else you list: Even if they had become number 1 in those categories they would still be poorly profitable and fat. Just look at the competitors in those spaces - none are as inefficient or overstaffed as Intel. Even Nvidia, with their insane profits, remains relatively lean. All the things you mention aren't why Intel is suffering so much. It's due to the fundamental economics of running a fab, along with the stalling of Moore's Law. (And BTW, the sales and marketing team got cut 35% - and I bet if they reveal the numbers, you'll find that the cuts from the fab will be less than the 15% target. So it's not just engineers).

ac29 2y ago

> Your "waste" is the salary of tens of thousands of smart engineers that put significant chunks of their lifetime into the company to enable their family (probably) a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. The only layoffs Intel mentioned specifically are in sales and marketing. Does this change how you feel? edit: As a reference, last quarter Intel spent ~$4.4B on R&D and ~$1.6B on SGA (sales, general, and administrative).

0x000xca0xfe 2y ago
No, it doesn't. I did not comment because of Intel specifically but because many comments I have read about similar mass layoffs tend to dehumanize ordinary workers for being "useless bloat" while completely ignoring that the root cause of the problems is moronic decisions by higher-ups. Mass layoffs that unexpectedly upend the lives of thousands of people are basically guaranteed to cause a couple deaths by suicide, ruined families or homelessness so at least have some basic human decency when talking about those that are affected most.