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I heard from a friend who works for Intel that he doesn't know why he was hired in the first place; his PhD was in a completely different domain, the objectives
by MinimalAction 1y ago
I heard from a friend who works for Intel that he doesn't know why he was hired in the first place; his PhD was in a completely different domain, the objectives of the project were remote to his skills, and he told me this is what his entire team was made of. Seems like a lot of bloat present in this company, and it makes sense they feel the way forward is layoffs.
- dylan604 1y agowhy would someone with a PhD apply for the position if that was the case? Were they hired and then re-tasked once employed?
- MinimalAction 1y agoBecause Intel pays well (mid six figures + bonus) and PhD doesn't pay a minimum wage in most places. They were expressly hired without an overarching goal.
- dylan604 1y agoSo in other words, that PhD was well worth the effort.
- dkdcio 1y agoin college I got a job offer from Intel without interviewing. I had applied, the hiring manager reached it and said they’d setup a loop, it never happened. then some weeks later I got an offer. super weird also I was sorta laid off by the current Intel CEO from my last startup!
- skadamou 1y agoI know someone with a PhD in biochemistry who was hired at Intel from a cancer research lab... I'm sure he sold his chemistry background well but I always thought that was an odd hire. Maybe there are just so few qualified PhDs that they'll happily take folks from adjacent fields?
- whatever1 1y agoMost of the senior leadership of Amazon in the early days were a bunch of randos from a formal credential standpoint. A car mechanic leading aws engineering, a musician running logistics, a chemical engineer optimizing the network etc . Hedge funds also hire physicists and mechanical engineers
- dapperdrake 1y agoThat sounds surprisingly non-random. Graph theory originated in Chemistry. Not Computer Science. Musicians know harmonics and indirectly lots of cyclical travel stuff. And waves. The good car mechanics I know are scary smart.
- SJC_Hacker 1y agoYou may as well say graph theory had its origins in Ancient Rome when they built the road network. Most trace it back to Euler when he considered the problem of Seven Bridges of Konigsberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_K%C3%B6nigsberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_K%C3%B6nigsbe...
- donavanm 1y agoYour phrasing _drastically_ undersells the actual relevant background and experience there: James hamilton the “mechanic” … with EE & CS degrees and time at ibm and ms. Dave Clark the “musician” (undergrad) … and an MBA focused on logistics. Jeff wilke the “chemist” … who worked on process optimization at honeywell and supply chains at aderesen. So sure, might as well say DeSantis is an SDE Intern figuring out software deployments, Vosshall is an amateur aircraft EE, or marc brooker is some foreign radar engineer. Signed, some newpaper dude who was an AWS PE doing edge networking and operations.
- jandrewrogers 1y agoChemical engineers are so good at distributed systems that it is almost a trope at this point. It is their specialty. Their entire discipline is optimizing aggregate throughput in decentralized systems with minimal coordination. It maps 1:1 with the computer science but chemical engineering as a discipline has more robust design heuristics that don’t really have common equivalents in software even though they are equally applicable. Chemical engineering is extremely allergic to any brittleness in architecture, that’s a massive liability, whereas software tends to just accept it because “what’s the worst that could happen”.
- fuck_AI 1y agoBy your description it sounds like layoffs should be at the management level for incompetence, not for employees.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y agoI would argue that should be done at a lot of companies.
- immibis 1y agoWhat purpose would it serve? Remember, the purpose of a company is not to make good products.
- Nifty3929 1y agoWhat would you do with all of the employees who are currently working in jobs or on projects or with skills not relevant to the company?
- kstrauser 1y agoUnless you're a sociopath, you let natural attrition run its course. If their skills weren't relevant when you hired them, then it's your fault. If you changed course after you hired them so that they stopped being relevant, then it's your fault. The only just thing to do is find a way to make their work meaningful until they move on.
- Nifty3929 1y agoWhat a sad waste of talent in that case. A waste that could be mitigated by them finding a more productive way to help society than sticking to a pointless job.
- naysunjr 1y agoAgree. We lean hard into sunk cost fallacy when it comes to job training. “If your name is Farmer you’re a farmer.” mentality but self selected euphemism. “I trained as a software engineer and that’s what I am for 50 years! Dag gubmint trynna terk my herb!” Service economy role play is the root of brain dead job life we’re all suffering through.
- moopmoopmoop 1y agoBack in 2012-2014 intel hired a bunch of “futurists” which were liberal arts majors from the northeastern US. Needless to say they spewed a bunch of nonsense and were fired years later, but I knew a few and they were puzzled they were hired to begin with.
- thijson 1y agoI remember there being a bunch of Anthropologists that were hired before that, under Genevieve Bell. It wasn't clear to me why they were hired. It felt to me like the people at the top were clueless, and so were hoping these hires would help give them an idea which direction to steer the ship.
- UncleOxidant 1y ago> I remember there being a bunch of Anthropologists that were hired before that, under Genevieve Bell. It wasn't clear to me why they were hired. Yes, I remember contracting at Intel in 2006 and the Anthropologists were at one end of the building we were in. Their area was a lot different than the engineering areas. Lots of art, sitting around in circles, etc. I remember asking about what was up over there "Those are the anthropologists".
- db48x 1y agoXerox hired an anthropologist once, Julian E. Orr, and it resulted in a really good book called “Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job”. Of course, mostly he found was how out of touch the executives at Xerox were with what their employees were actually doing in practice. The executives thought of the technicians who repaired copiers almost as monkeys who were just supposed to follow a script prepared by the engineers. Meanwhile the technicians thought of themselves as engineers who needed to understand the machines in order to be successful, so they frequently spent hours reverse engineering the machines and the documentation to work out the underlying principles on which the machines worked. The most successful technicians had both soft skills for dealing with customers and selling upgrades and supplies as well as engineering skills for diagnosing broken hardware and actually getting it fixed correctly. It seems that none of the sales, engineering, or executives at Xerox liked hearing about any of it.
- paxys 1y agoIntel has 108,000 employees. In comparison: Nvidia 36,000 AMD 28,000 Qualcomm 49,000 Texas Instruments 34,000 Broadcom 37,000 It is obvious that Intel is ridiculously overstaffed.
- adrr 1y agoIntel runs their own fabs. NVidia, AMD, Qualcomm outsource chip manufacturing.
- SJC_Hacker 1y agoTheir fabs have been falling well behind TSMC for nearly a decade, and in fact their higher end stuff is mostly produced by TSMC
- thechao 1y agoTSMC has 83000 employees. If Intel does everything TSMC & NV do, then they should have something like 83000+36000~120000 employees?
- paxys 1y agoThe scale isn't really comparable. TSMC manufactures 5x more wafers than Intel, and the disparity is getting exponentially worse every year (see the chart at https://thecuberesearch.com/247-special-breaking-analysis-the-root-cause-of-intels-troubles-a-critical-analysis/ https://thecuberesearch.com/247-special-breaking-analysis-th...). In fact 30% of Intel's own production is outsourced to TSMC.
- jordanb 1y agoI knew a guy who got a job with Intel's wearable division. Everything was chaotic, everyone was toxic, and Intel one day lost interest and fired the whole division. The sad thing is they acquired the basis smartwatch and destroyed it, leaving only Garmin as developers of dedicated activity trackers. I considered getting a basis but was obviously glad I didn't.
- cjbgkagh 1y agoI hear it’s division dependent, but just about every time someone complained about things being toxic at Microsoft they would be told at least it is not Intel.
- josephg 1y agoI've been thinking of buying pixelmator pro recently for photo editing. It seems like a lovely photo editing application. And they have a lifetime license. But Apple bought the company recently. I worry that whatever made the product great will go away post acquisition. Whether or not Apple keeps working on it at the same level of quality is anyone's guess. Or maybe they'll integrate the best features into their free Photos app and ditch the rest. Or something else entirely. I can't think of any examples where acquisitions make a product better. But dozens where the product was killed immediately, or suffered a long slow death.
- malnourish 1y agoYouTube? Twitch? I don't use either but people sure flock to them. There are many acquisitions that lead to better products.
- saintfire 1y agoI would argue neither is better for it, as a user. They're more lucrative for creators/streamers and have further reach but the platform experience is noticeably worse.
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- sashank_1509 1y agoSecond hand knowledge, I have a cousin in Intel Oregon. Intel mass hires PhDs in Physics/ Chemistry or Biology etc, reasoning that a PhD is enough to learn whatever is needed for a process engineer. Assume 30-40 people hired every cohort and there is 12 or so cohorts a year. Another curious thing I noticed, was Intel had online multi correct tests for its engineers that they had to pass weekly, presumably to keep track whether they are actually learning on the job or not. The multi correct tests though just seem like rote memorization and easy to cheat. Overall my 5000 ft view, was the culture was very different from FAANG or a Bay Area Tech company. If the Bay Area approach is high ownership and high accountability, Intel was much more process driven and low ownership. They even tracked hours worked for engineers in Oregon.
- disgruntledphd2 1y agoYeah, my old (and best) boss at a FAANG had been at Intel. She left because they basically wouldn't promote her as she didn't have a PhD.
- s1artibartfast 1y agoI had a similar realization in biotech. I saw a lot of engineering masters grads hired to break down cardboard boxes and document chamber temperature logs. The idea was they could read and write, and perhaps fit into yet undetermined roles later. I think it speaks to common challenges when hiring mangers are disconnected from the work, degrees and resumes are worthless, and turnover is difficult. In many companies team leads dont have a role in the hiring or firing of the employees working for them.
- dheera 1y agoI applied to Intel once a long time ago when I was just getting out of school, but when they replied asking for my resume in "Word format" I stopped pursuing it. I didn't use Word to create my resume and if they can't deal with a PDF that was their problem.
- elric 1y agoThat's not at all an unusual request though. Plenty of recruiters want Word. Probably so they can make changes behind your back or some such nonsense. Or, less cynically, so they can more easily copy/paste stuff into their HRM tool.
- dheera 1y agoI've never had a competent company ask me for that. The only ones who did were "old fart" companies. New companies, especially ones with good tech, have always taken my PDF. > Probably so they can make changes behind your back Nope, I don't consent to that. > Or, less cynically, so they can more easily copy/paste stuff into their HRM tool Their HRM tool should support PDFs if they are competent. They should also be able to read my resume with their own eyes. If not I consider the company not a good fit for me.
- azalemeth 1y agoI often look at the pdf metadata when reading CVs. It tells a story all of its own. And latex automatically signals virtue to me...