Intel is laying off over 15,000 employees and will stop ‘non-essential work’

You’re probably right, the generation 13&14 will be riddled with lawsuits.

I'm rather OOTL with intel. Mind giving me a short summary? What'd they do this time?

MBA brain rot

Gotta keep that angle at 45° forever and ever.

Two words, bean counters.

I wish them brain drain for being such greedy. Let their best people leave to better pastures.

Part of the lackluster CPU problem is that Intel was pissing away their money on other adventures. CPUs were "in the bag", so they kept spending money on other stuff to try to "create new markets". Any casual observer knew their fundamental problem was simple: they got screwed on fabrication tech. Then they got screwed again as a lot of heavy lifting went to the 'GPU' half of the world and they were the only ones with zero high performance GPU product/credibility. But they instead went very different directions with their investments...

For example they did a lot to try to make Optane DIMMs happen, up to and including funding a bunch of evangelism to tell people they'll need to rewrite their software to use entirely new methods of accessing data to make Optane DIMMs actually do any better than NAND+RAM. They had a problem where if it were treated like a disk, it was a little faster, but not really, and if it were used like RAM it was WAY slower, so they had this vision of a whole new third set of data access APIs... The instant they realized they needed the entire software industry to fundamentally change data access from how they've been doing it for decades for a product to work should have been the signal to kill it off, but they persisted.

See also adventures in weird PCIe interconnects no one asked for (notably they liked to show a single NVME drive being moved between servers, which costed way more than just giving each server another NVME and moving data over a traditional fabric). Embedding FPGA into CPUs when they didn't have the thermal budget to do so and no advantages over a discrete FPGA. Just a whole bunch of random ass hardware and software projects with no connection to business results, regardless of how good or bad they were. Intel is bad for "build it, and they will come".

Right to the pockets of the least useful in the company - the executives.

They only made 50 billion dollars of profit last year. Won't anybody think of the shareholders

Idk about other subsidies but they're probably not getting any CHIPS Act funds with this sort of behavior.

Of course not. The Chiefs earn every penny by making the difficult decisions to keep stock prices up. /s

That's what happens when companies are too fucking big, and intel was essentially a monopoly for a while.

I have interned at AT&T while at University, laying off a 1000 people would be less than 1 % for them.

... the 12 percent that actually does something too...

So what I’m getting here is that the CEO and or the board decided to invest in something that is losing a ton of money

Intel has an enormous technical debt that they're finally struggling to pay back after they hit a brick wall with their 7nm Titanium chipset.

It isn't that this is wasteful spending so much as it is big upfront costs for future productive development.

That said, the fact that this work has to be government subsidized in order to be done raises the question of why this business is private at all.

I think it's even more absurd than that. The CEO/board decided to make a long-term investment which wasn't going to pay off for several years. To what should be the surprise of no one, that meant short term losses.

Framing an investment in a massive amount of new infrastructure as a loss because it didn't immediately start operating in the black is beyond unreasonable, but that's the demand when all that matters is quarterly gains and year-over-year growth.

That's definitely a huge issue but they're going to have a hell of a time on the overcooked processors on the market right now. They've sold a hell of a lot of defective product over the past couple of years. Consumers and third parties are going to come after them for refunds. Consumer confidence is way down. They're going to have a hell of a time trying to sell 15th gen to people. Everyone I know who knows what in the hell is going on is going to AMD.

That's exactly what happened, and that's how layoffs always work.

The losses of the horrible decisions of the board/owners/management/etc are paid for by the blood of the workers. It's so wonderful and very fair.

I do a moderate amount of work with Intel, and I'd say the problem is not that the people are "shit", it's that their bureaucracy is so messed up. You have the people that actually engaged with their customers (support and sales), who marketing largely ignores, and marketing makes up stuff that isn't in sync with the field guys, but that's hardly a problem because the development executives then go off on their own "cool" ideas, without any buy in or anything from support, sales, or marketing. This has real impact, but then you have some middle managers spooling up side projects with like a dozen dedicated people each, adding another indirection of effort totally disconnected from any business capability.

So end result is you have an admittedly qualified team toiling away on a project that there's just no way a potential customer will even hear about, working on problems that someone "imagined" that a customer never had, or is trivially solved in the industry already, but they don't have the experience to know that. Even when the work is good and people might want it, it's still doomed to obscurity because there's such a disconnect between the engineers and any actual communication with potential customers.

Yes, I agree, and I think it's a reflection of society's values over the past 50 years.

We are living in a world with more of a "make money and fuck all else" mindset. Children of wealthy elites are living very privileged childhoods, and as a result, have less empathy and more contempt for real people. We are now seeing the effects of living in a society where the needle of social values is pointed 100% on the side of capitalism and 0% on the side of moral values. And how that has affected our perspectives of a society at large: a general lack of caring, a lack of empathy, a lack of conscientiousness from the top, tossing normal, real people aside like rubbish in a bin.

We're seeing what happens when you let a generation of incredibly entitled children grow up to take the reins of society. We all know how it ends....

(And for what it's worth, I think a long, extended Great Depression-style event is much more likely than a violent conflict, especially given how docile citizens of the west have proven themselves to be over the past several decades.)

Stagnation, baby.

That’s not surprising if you know how software products nowadays are planned and built in bigger companies.

It’s harder to do it with 50 people than with 5.

Ah yes, the ol' "promoted to the level of their incompetence". SOP. Or SNAFU, take your pick.

over 1000 VPs

I used to work for Comcast and it was astonishing how many vice presidents there were. It might be the most meaningless corporate title ever. Even if they had real work to do they never had time to do it - VPs there turned over faster than beignets at Cafe du Monde.

All the idiot Americans cheering about scapegoating single mothers as welfare queens since the 80s, never an utterance by anyone with power of all the DO NOTHING private investors that drop their chips from their last trip to the exploitation casino and demand all the profit for no labor whatsoever.

"Fuck you, I'm an owner, pay me."

Prior to the Jack Welch Ronald Reagan betrayal, the model was correcly "customers first, employees second, investors third."

Everything falls apart when you give every spare penny to the people who A) dont DO anything to make the money they demand and B) demand the companies they own sabotage their missions and futures to goose net profit for the current quarter so they can profit and walk away having severely damaged those company's ability to do what they existed for, only to demand it of other companies.

maybe the root-cause is less the publicly-traded part but rather the total lack of any consequences?

but yes i totally agree, any company publicly traded will get a payed-for-CEO after a while and latest at that point is where no problems are resolved any more, but instead are IMHO always created on purpose.

The US and Europe has become acutely aware that too much semi-conductor manufacturing has been outsourced to China and other Asian nations and they're trying to build some back domestically. So that's the geopolitical reason for it.

$20 billion investment that will generate 3,000 jobs

Lol that's $6,666,667 per job. I could create a job with that much money: counting all my fucking money.

These corps are slimy Fucks. It probably did create 3k jobs. Low paying, temporary jobs. These layoffs are probably other jobs

The U.S. should sue the shit out of them.

The string is that they use it for the creation of a domestic chip plant, not salaries for existing employees.

Oh my god...

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1ehjuzj/i_bought_700k_worth_of_intel_stock_today/

Dude, what the heck is wrong with people. Wealth is wasted on the stupid.

Layoffs will make the stock go up. It's bizarre.

Layoffs usually cause the stock prices to increase because it shows the company is being "lean" and "cutting the fat".

I had a friend in the '90s who took a $40K inheritance and "invested" it all on $75 Fossil watches, the kind with Popeye and other cartoon characters on them. At least she was able to show them off at parties and get all the guests to go home.

He's gonna make a ton of money then, because investors love layoffs.

I just sat through a "town hall" at a former GSK now Haleon site and a site director assured people that volume was coming back through nothing but the power of marketing alone. Apparently 8 dollar tubes of toothpaste are non sellers in a tight market. Who knew.

I really hope they plan on fixing the problems with those generations. 🤞

Intel is a failing company and has been for years, it has nothing to do with the tech industry. They failed to invest in chip fabrication, and their designs are soundly beaten by AMD and Nvidia. Look at AMD and Nvidia, they're making record profits and hiring.

Also, the tech industry is a huge place, there are plenty of opportunities outside of the hardware niche that Intel operates in. I will admit though that the current interest rates and risk of recession does make it harder for junior programmers.

Apply to non-tech companies. There ate many companies who aren't in the tech sector that relies on in-house tech.

You like tech? You like wiring up and programming state-of-the-art commercial automation, access control, and cctv systems? You like to move around as well and work with your hands and tools, all on the same job? Become an electronic security technician. Been doing it for 20 years, it's great, and always hiring, almost never firing, unless you get caught smoking meth or something.

Nothing wrong with a more blue-collar style job.

As the OP said, get a job outside of tech.

The biggest research hospitals employ electronic engineers, software engineers, chemical engineers, physicists, statisticians, network engineers, sysdamins, etc.

Insurance companies? Auto industry? Power companies, pharmaceuticals, local governments etc. The best part about being a STEM is that you have a place everywhere. You just gotta be willing to bend your expectations until you find something that fits you.

Get 5 remote work jobs and keep the ones that don't suck.

What kind of tech are you trying to get into?

Chips Act, Take 1: Hey Intel here's 8 Billion dollars to make us more chips in the US. Intel: I gotta let 15,000 of you go, there's just not enough money......

I thought they would be more tacit about it. This is too obvious and too soon after taking taxpayers’ money. But they probably don’t care anyways. Who is going to stop them or hold them accountable?

I don't think it backfired...I truly don't believe the Chips act is a jobs act. It is to address manufacturing gaps in semiconductors within the US. The US government wants semiconductor manufacturers to update foundries and gave them money to do so. The jobs that have been added within the industry have been icing on the cake but not the original intent imho.

It got us a TSMC fab, soon ish maybe lol

The CHIPS plants just started being built a few months ago. This is bad for the employees and short-term investors, but long-term Intel will be fine and the plants will be a net positive to the country.

Is this really a backfire? My read is that they're actually focusing on their core business (plus cutting down marketing). It sounds like the right move, but maybe I'm too optimistic?

Executives will be "essential", QA, sys admins, etc will be non essential.

These layoffs will only be for a quarter or two. Just enough for the c-levels to unlock their full bonuses.

Only if you have conviction. Buying tech in the face of recession fears is one thing, but buying tech that supplies hardware to tech is another. It'll probably sound like a whip cracking if the AI frenzy ever collapses hard

Done.

They won't. That's their springboard into that multi trillion dollar AI market everyone keeps talking about

Read article

Arm is worth 5.3bn USD and employs just over 8000 people. Intel is worth just over 100bn USD and employs 124,000 people.

Nvidia is worth 42bn USD and employs 30,000 people.

That makes Intel over twice as valuable as Nvidia with over four times as many employees.

Nvidia wants IP. They do not want to buy foundries. It's too volatile and dependent on government subsidies while also being well outside their core competencies. If their products don't sell as a fabless company, they don't see growth and lose on the manufacturing cost and stop placing orders. If their products don't sell and their chip fabs run idle, they lose a shitton of money on not just the above but also the cost of maintaining the fabs. Not only is there no guarantee that Nvidia would be able to run the foundries better, it's actually quite likely they'd run them worse.

Why that specifically?

Let's hope they ditch.

Have you seen the performance and efficiency of these arm chip? The performance and battery life of Apple's chips compared to the Intel chips before then? Intel should be absolutely embarrassed.