Intel Has Cut 35,500 Jobs in Less Than Two Years (tomshardware.com) 22
An anonymous reader shares a report: The first announcement that Lip-Bu Tan made a day after becoming the permanent chief executive of Intel was about massive layoffs to right-size the company in accordance with market realities. Now, the extent of those layoffs is becoming clearer, indicating Intel let go of as many as 20,500 employees in about three months. If we add 15,000 positions eliminated by the previous management, that means Intel reduced its headcount by 35,500 people in less than two years.
It was bloated anyway (Score:5, Informative)
When I worked there 15 years ago they had around 85,000 employees, and there was a lot of bullshit teams, tech marketers, and desktop gaming promoters that literally did nothing. A team of only around 30 people or so in the VSD (volume server division) helped usher in the first x86 Mac Pro...so much bloat in so many places that didn't make money.
At a recent count they are up to 125,000. Now they've fired 35,500. They really don't have that many more products than they had back then (they were working on failed compute and GPU back then too), so it sounds like they could trim some more and still be bloated.
Regardless, in NYSE terms, this means their stock should jump by 5-10%, right?
So those people do a few things (Score:3, Interesting)
with the current state of government in the world there is virtually no chance of antitrust law being enforced so nobody cares to keep engineers around for that anymore.
But until his cut way way way deeper than that. This isn't bloat they are firing people they need long term in order to get a quick stock boost
you
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First you hire a bunch of engineers because you don't want them working for potential competitors. It's one of the easiest ways to form a monopoly without running a foul of antitrust law.
No one in the real world does this. It's a waste of money and wouldn't work even if it weren't a waste of money. Intel couldn't even absorb a majority of graduating students in the field in a given year, much less all of the more experienced and far more expensive labor. Shareholders would fire anyone stupid enough to even try doing this.
The only way something like this could feasibly work is in a completely new field that has few workers and is rapidly expanding. It still wouldn't work though because th
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That's a one dimensional view. In fact if you stick with that one dimensional view it's worth noting that AMD doesn't have any spectacular increase in count of products either but somehow has 3x the number of employees over that same period.
Every engineer thinks the other departments are bullshit. I wonder if you would have still worked there if it weren't for those "bullshit" teams promoting the product you were making, because quite frankly 15 years ago Intel was at the top of their game so clearly doing
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Example is the "I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills."
As a sort of engineer it's great when you do have that person.
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No I didn't. I'm following the OP's logic. Intel is no different, that's despite their product listing being higher, cadence being different, having acquired Altera, Habana labs, Mobileye, just to name the ones in the billions.
I didn't write the rules, I just made a comment following the absurdity. By the way Xilinx doesn't remote account for the increase. They weren't a company with twice the employee count of AMD, so even with your rules the point stands.
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He said "helped issue in" so it's quite plausibly correct. Lots of groups probably helped.
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Not really lots of groups, just VSD - the first x86 Mac Pro took just a few months to develop and was a relatively light-lift for Intel. It was a dual processor workstation motherboard that was slightly repurposed, using a slightly modified off-the-shelf EFI bios with the legacy side removed (EFI aka tiano was really new at the time), and a few ATI graphics adapters. The laptops didn't come until later and leveraged our initial work.
Apple - Apple never changes. Their focus on secrecy was paramount.
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I believe you are only looking at your part of the job. Somebody speced it, somebody negotiated the contracts, somebody designed the look, or at least approved the design. Somebody advertised it. There are probably others I haven't thought of.
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I am not looking only at my part of the job - again, I *actually* worked there on the team that did this. Let me reiterate - the first generation macintosh to use an x86 chip was a Mac Pro workstation with 2 processors, designed and built entirely inside VSD by ~30 people. The look and feel, specs, and design all came from Apple. The actual server board used was more or less "off the shelf" with some slight modifications for multi gfx support and EFI only bios - it wasn't until the 3rd gen of x86 designs th
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To put it in perspective, 35,000 employees laid off is about equal to the number of people at AMD. So Intel laid off an AMD.
Of course, Intel has employees that have no equivalent at AMD since they have fabs to maintain and do research with.
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To put it in perspective, 35,000 employees laid off is about equal to the number of people at AMD. So Intel laid off an AMD.
That explains why they're flailing. They should have laid off a Cyrix instead.
Intel's fall will become a case study.... (Score:4, Informative)
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Their dominance was in the PC. Intel, like M$, grew on the back of the PC and while that was the biggest source of income for any semiconductors there wasn't any challenger. Problem is, another source of income, smartphones, grew to be bigger than the PC, and Intel didn't dominate that.
Intriguingly, if AMD had stuck with in-house manufacturing itself then it wouldn't be in a position to challenge Intel right now so Intel would be much better off still using its older fabs.
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Nepotism can be a dangerous thing when an ill-prepared younger generation sweeps into power and think they can do no wrong.
Intel always does layoffs wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
It will always reinforce failure because it's a bureaucratic dinosaur led by greedy assholes who don't actually understand anything about how to create the products they sell or the actual customers who must use them, and it treats both with utter disdain because these people are wealth supremacists.
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For a second there, I thought you were talking about *my* current company!
Let us nor forget (Score:2)