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I agree that the board's lack of technical expertise is an issue, but I think the root issue is - and hear me out, because this sounds ridiculous - the vibes.

I agree that the board's lack of technical expertise is an issue, but I think the root issue is - and hear me out, because this sounds ridiculous - the vibes. At the end of the day, a company is a machine to turn employee labor into revenue. Intel has clearly been a sinking ship for years now. What kind of people work at a failing company? What kind of people serve on its board? Is this portrait of the board not a portrait of any other failing business?

lordnacho 2y ago
> the vibes I went to lunch the other day with a friend. We had both worked at Intel during our early careers, and we still know people who are there over 20 years later. Of course the topic arose of our old workplace. We had a great time there it should be said. But neither of us stayed on, and it was vibes. Even at that time, as a young guy in university, I thought something was wrong. I couldn't tell what, since I was a young guy who barely knew anything about the business. But I knew that I felt uncomfortable about potentially spending decades at a place where everyone was so relaxed. There was no urgency. People would come in, find a colleague to have coffee with, and that was their day. I checked with the other interns as well, it was really chill. I was working on my thesis, and my team was working on rolling out what would later be called WiFi. Amazingly, part of the strategy was to slow down certain standards, because we were behind in some of the fabs. That didn't seem like what you would do as a cutting-edge technology company. People at the all-hands would ask things like "should we keep AMD around just for show? So that we aren't a monopoly?". Well, that problem has been solved now. I got offered a permanent role but never even considered it.
- le-mark 2y ago
  A phenomena so common it has a name: https://medium.com/geekculture/the-dead-sea-effect-d71df13724f8 https://medium.com/geekculture/the-dead-sea-effect-d71df1372...
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    It’s so easy to fix with competent leadership. Kind of sad to see the state of American “leaders”
- MiscCompFacts 2y ago
  I recently left a big company exactly for this reason. And the sibling post is probably right, the Dead Sea affect probably plays a huge role. I didn’t see very many people that were ambitious and it was way too “relaxed”.
brookst 2y ago
As someone who worked at Intel for 5ish years a while ago, I partly agree. There was a fatalism to the culture; a sense that any initiative had to be simultaneously super low risk and guaranteed to generate $1B in revenue within a couple of years. It had to be 100% predictable and planned month by month years in advance, and also exactly what customers would want on day one. The people who “succeeded” were those who could sell that story to the finance org (who essentially made all the product decisions), and who could move onward and upward before the fairy tale collapsed. The disconnect between the aspirational culture (risk taking, tech-forward, customer-focused) and the real culture (risk averse, finance-forward, planning-focused) was extreme. The whole place was like a filter designed to retain only those who had no interest or capability to fix the systemic issues.
- sbarre 2y ago
  This describes almost every large enterprise I've ever done work for or worked at.
  - Retric 2y ago
    In most giant companies it is a reasonable strategy. The critical difference is most large companies don’t need to innovate. United doesn’t design aircraft, airports, etc they compete with other huge companies in an extremely capital intensive industry and execution is what matters. FedEx, Walmart, Bank of America, etc all need to keep up with their competitors but there’s no need to make risky bets when slow and steady brings in billions of revenue and nothing external is going to drive them out of business quickly. Intel essentially forgot just how ruthless their industry was and got crushed.
    - cma 2y ago
      I think all major airlines have pretty much gotten to the point of bankruptcy without bailouts
      - Retric 2y ago
nimish 2y ago
Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Intel's innovate or die culture died years ago Inertia has taken its time but the company itself is catching up
AnotherGoodName 2y ago
The pay is ridiculously low. Lower than tsmc in Taiwan on a ppp basis (not that far off in raw $ terms). Much lower than tiny hardware startups in the USA. Monumentally lower than AMD or nvidia, especially with stock grants factored in. No pay rises for over 20years now. Layoffs on a routine basis. They asked everyone to take a pay cut last year. All of this in an extremely competitive labour market. It’s pretty obvious to anyone that a job at intel is temporary. You take the job and do the bare minimum (because hey you’re paid bare minimum) and keep looking. There isn’t going to be a single employee outside the board at intel who isn’t browsing for a new job given the wage disparity. Everyone knows this. If you have a brilliant improvement for process keep it to yourself and take it to the next job. A low level position at a startup pays more than a senior role at intel at this point. It’s a laughing stock and the most recent statement at the last earnings was more layoffs and wage freezes to give more shareholder value. They already have 0 serious talent and nobody gives a fuck there, reasonably so. “You’re going to lay me off from by far the lowest paying company in tech if I don’t give 100%?” “Ok!”. It’s such a joke of a company and has been for 20 years now and the investors have made it clear they want another 20 years of this.
- AnotherGoodName 2y ago
  Do you want $77k/yr for a job with degree requirements at intel in an extremely high cost of living area or would you rather get well over $200k/yr at a competitor for the exact same job description. Lol. This was one random example out of pretty much any role at intel just to give awareness of how dire 20 years of wage freezes from short term investors becomes over time. https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Intel-Corporation/job-titles/Integrity-Engineer https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Intel-Corporation/job-titles/Inte... https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/NVIDIA-Signal-Integrity-Engineer-Salaries-E7633_D_KO7,32.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/NVIDIA-Signal-Integrity-Eng...
  - Spivak 2y ago
    Wow $77k holy shit that's uhh not doing so well with inflation.
    - 2y ago
nradov 2y ago
People seeking permanent US residency via an H-1B visa want to work at a failing company. And I don't blame them; from their perspective it's a totally rational choice as long as the company doesn't fire them before they get a green card.
ashoeafoot 2y ago
Its on the CEO if he cant convince with a plan to turn the ship around and sell that story.
mrtksn 2y ago
Interesting take, but wouldn't also have the chance to attract the exactly right people too? Renegades, outcasts who dreamed too big for Nvidia or never got the opportunity at TSMC maybe? There are many comeback stories, Apple being a particularly great one.
- freeqaz 2y ago
  There are also a lot of geopolitical interests in helping Intel succeed. As much as investors might balk at Intel today, the amount of money that Western governments can toss at the problem is effectively infinite. (Looking at Defense contractors as an example; horrendously inefficient, but tax revenue is effectively perpetually guaranteed to keep flowing.) It's silly to frame it this way, but even though the US and allies pay gobs for planes like the F-35, it's also what continues to allow the stream of taxable money to continue. I view Intel in a similar light. Even if they stay inefficient, there will still be money for a long time because the West needs a way to be self-sufficient. The cost of not having a backup is too high (tens of trillions of dollars when I last looked into it). It's a weird market that doesn't obey a lot of the conventional rules of capitalism. Yes, it would be better if Intel were able to compete without government subsidies, and maybe they will. But even if they don't it's very unlikely they'll totally crater because of how central this "power" is, and TSMC will never cede full control of their latest tech until the UN recognizes Taiwan as a distinct entity from China (imo).
  - bcrl 2y ago
    However, subsidies always come with requirements for companies to fulfill. While it may sound great that Intel is getting billions of dollars in money to build and operate new fabs in the US, those fabs come with massive operating expenses. Unless Intel finds a whole lot of new product to run through those fabs, and soon, the subsidies could end up putting Intel in an even worse financial hole than it is already. Intel needs to change its internal culture to get back on a path towards success. I don't know if any CEO is capable of fighting and winning that battle within the span of a few years, and time is running out. Part of what impresses me about TSMC are some of the anecdotes that have trickled out about how they approach process R&D. TSMC runs experiments 24/7 with each team building on the results of the previous shift. This allows it to iterate much faster than many competitors. It is that kind of dedication and drive that Intel needs to push its leading edge manufacturing capabilities back into world class status, but that isn't the kind of change that can be achieved purely by throwing money at the problem.
vasco 2y ago
Intel won't go down after receiving the billions it did for foundries. The USA doesn't burn money. IBM 2.0
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  The billions are just a drop in the Intel bucket.
- chithanh 2y ago
  Intel won't go down, US lawmakers are determined to prevent that from happening. Any government rescue will however cause Intel shareholders to lose their money. Which is presumably why investors aren't too happy about the current situation. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/intel-might-be-too-big-to-fail-washington-policymakers-are-already-discussing-potential-solutions-if-the-chipmaker-cannot-recover https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/intel-might-be-to...

lordnacho 2y ago

> the vibes I went to lunch the other day with a friend. We had both worked at Intel during our early careers, and we still know people who are there over 20 years later. Of course the topic arose of our old workplace. We had a great time there it should be said. But neither of us stayed on, and it was vibes. Even at that time, as a young guy in university, I thought something was wrong. I couldn't tell what, since I was a young guy who barely knew anything about the business. But I knew that I felt uncomfortable about potentially spending decades at a place where everyone was so relaxed. There was no urgency. People would come in, find a colleague to have coffee with, and that was their day. I checked with the other interns as well, it was really chill. I was working on my thesis, and my team was working on rolling out what would later be called WiFi. Amazingly, part of the strategy was to slow down certain standards, because we were behind in some of the fabs. That didn't seem like what you would do as a cutting-edge technology company. People at the all-hands would ask things like "should we keep AMD around just for show? So that we aren't a monopoly?". Well, that problem has been solved now. I got offered a permanent role but never even considered it.

le-mark 2y ago
A phenomena so common it has a name: https://medium.com/geekculture/the-dead-sea-effect-d71df13724f8 https://medium.com/geekculture/the-dead-sea-effect-d71df1372...
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  It’s so easy to fix with competent leadership. Kind of sad to see the state of American “leaders”
MiscCompFacts 2y ago
I recently left a big company exactly for this reason. And the sibling post is probably right, the Dead Sea affect probably plays a huge role. I didn’t see very many people that were ambitious and it was way too “relaxed”.

brookst 2y ago

As someone who worked at Intel for 5ish years a while ago, I partly agree. There was a fatalism to the culture; a sense that any initiative had to be simultaneously super low risk and guaranteed to generate $1B in revenue within a couple of years. It had to be 100% predictable and planned month by month years in advance, and also exactly what customers would want on day one. The people who “succeeded” were those who could sell that story to the finance org (who essentially made all the product decisions), and who could move onward and upward before the fairy tale collapsed. The disconnect between the aspirational culture (risk taking, tech-forward, customer-focused) and the real culture (risk averse, finance-forward, planning-focused) was extreme. The whole place was like a filter designed to retain only those who had no interest or capability to fix the systemic issues.

sbarre 2y ago
This describes almost every large enterprise I've ever done work for or worked at.
- Retric 2y ago
  In most giant companies it is a reasonable strategy. The critical difference is most large companies don’t need to innovate. United doesn’t design aircraft, airports, etc they compete with other huge companies in an extremely capital intensive industry and execution is what matters. FedEx, Walmart, Bank of America, etc all need to keep up with their competitors but there’s no need to make risky bets when slow and steady brings in billions of revenue and nothing external is going to drive them out of business quickly. Intel essentially forgot just how ruthless their industry was and got crushed.
  - cma 2y ago
    I think all major airlines have pretty much gotten to the point of bankruptcy without bailouts
    - Retric 2y ago

nimish 2y ago

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Intel's innovate or die culture died years ago Inertia has taken its time but the company itself is catching up

AnotherGoodName 2y ago

The pay is ridiculously low. Lower than tsmc in Taiwan on a ppp basis (not that far off in raw $ terms). Much lower than tiny hardware startups in the USA. Monumentally lower than AMD or nvidia, especially with stock grants factored in. No pay rises for over 20years now. Layoffs on a routine basis. They asked everyone to take a pay cut last year. All of this in an extremely competitive labour market. It’s pretty obvious to anyone that a job at intel is temporary. You take the job and do the bare minimum (because hey you’re paid bare minimum) and keep looking. There isn’t going to be a single employee outside the board at intel who isn’t browsing for a new job given the wage disparity. Everyone knows this. If you have a brilliant improvement for process keep it to yourself and take it to the next job. A low level position at a startup pays more than a senior role at intel at this point. It’s a laughing stock and the most recent statement at the last earnings was more layoffs and wage freezes to give more shareholder value. They already have 0 serious talent and nobody gives a fuck there, reasonably so. “You’re going to lay me off from by far the lowest paying company in tech if I don’t give 100%?” “Ok!”. It’s such a joke of a company and has been for 20 years now and the investors have made it clear they want another 20 years of this.

AnotherGoodName 2y ago
Do you want $77k/yr for a job with degree requirements at intel in an extremely high cost of living area or would you rather get well over $200k/yr at a competitor for the exact same job description. Lol. This was one random example out of pretty much any role at intel just to give awareness of how dire 20 years of wage freezes from short term investors becomes over time. https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Intel-Corporation/job-titles/Integrity-Engineer https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Intel-Corporation/job-titles/Inte... https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/NVIDIA-Signal-Integrity-Engineer-Salaries-E7633_D_KO7,32.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/NVIDIA-Signal-Integrity-Eng...
- Spivak 2y ago
  Wow $77k holy shit that's uhh not doing so well with inflation.
  - 2y ago

nradov 2y ago

People seeking permanent US residency via an H-1B visa want to work at a failing company. And I don't blame them; from their perspective it's a totally rational choice as long as the company doesn't fire them before they get a green card.

ashoeafoot 2y ago

Its on the CEO if he cant convince with a plan to turn the ship around and sell that story.

mrtksn 2y ago

Interesting take, but wouldn't also have the chance to attract the exactly right people too? Renegades, outcasts who dreamed too big for Nvidia or never got the opportunity at TSMC maybe? There are many comeback stories, Apple being a particularly great one.

freeqaz 2y ago
There are also a lot of geopolitical interests in helping Intel succeed. As much as investors might balk at Intel today, the amount of money that Western governments can toss at the problem is effectively infinite. (Looking at Defense contractors as an example; horrendously inefficient, but tax revenue is effectively perpetually guaranteed to keep flowing.) It's silly to frame it this way, but even though the US and allies pay gobs for planes like the F-35, it's also what continues to allow the stream of taxable money to continue. I view Intel in a similar light. Even if they stay inefficient, there will still be money for a long time because the West needs a way to be self-sufficient. The cost of not having a backup is too high (tens of trillions of dollars when I last looked into it). It's a weird market that doesn't obey a lot of the conventional rules of capitalism. Yes, it would be better if Intel were able to compete without government subsidies, and maybe they will. But even if they don't it's very unlikely they'll totally crater because of how central this "power" is, and TSMC will never cede full control of their latest tech until the UN recognizes Taiwan as a distinct entity from China (imo).
- bcrl 2y ago
  However, subsidies always come with requirements for companies to fulfill. While it may sound great that Intel is getting billions of dollars in money to build and operate new fabs in the US, those fabs come with massive operating expenses. Unless Intel finds a whole lot of new product to run through those fabs, and soon, the subsidies could end up putting Intel in an even worse financial hole than it is already. Intel needs to change its internal culture to get back on a path towards success. I don't know if any CEO is capable of fighting and winning that battle within the span of a few years, and time is running out. Part of what impresses me about TSMC are some of the anecdotes that have trickled out about how they approach process R&D. TSMC runs experiments 24/7 with each team building on the results of the previous shift. This allows it to iterate much faster than many competitors. It is that kind of dedication and drive that Intel needs to push its leading edge manufacturing capabilities back into world class status, but that isn't the kind of change that can be achieved purely by throwing money at the problem.

vasco 2y ago

Intel won't go down after receiving the billions it did for foundries. The USA doesn't burn money. IBM 2.0

actionfromafar 2y ago
The billions are just a drop in the Intel bucket.
chithanh 2y ago
Intel won't go down, US lawmakers are determined to prevent that from happening. Any government rescue will however cause Intel shareholders to lose their money. Which is presumably why investors aren't too happy about the current situation. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/intel-might-be-too-big-to-fail-washington-policymakers-are-already-discussing-potential-solutions-if-the-chipmaker-cannot-recover https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/intel-might-be-to...