Intel Has Cut 35,500 Jobs in Less Than Two Years (tomshardware.com)
- Reference: 0179864036
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/10/24/185247/intel-has-cut-35500-jobs-in-less-than-two-years
- Source link: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-has-cut-35-500-jobs-in-less-than-two-years-more-than-20-000-let-go-in-in-recent-months-as-lip-bu-tan-continues-drastic-recovery-journey
> 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 [1]by 35,500 people in less than two years .
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-has-cut-35-500-jobs-in-less-than-two-years-more-than-20-000-let-go-in-in-recent-months-as-lip-bu-tan-continues-drastic-recovery-journey
Intel's fall will become a case study.... (Score:4, Informative)
This will certainly be discussed and looked at for decades from now in the future. The missteps that have occurred and the technology advances and shifts the spelled the downfall of the once complete dominant technology company in the world that led the drive and datacenters of the internet's initial rise and expansion, only to collapse on itself due to resting on its technological lead and loss of the key internal personnel that drove their dominance in chip manufacturing and the ramifications those items had in the years to follow with the rest of the chip manufacturing world catching and surpassing Intel's once overwhelmingly dominant lead.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Intel always does layoffs wrong (Score:2)
Once upon a time in the ~2002 timeframe, they used an "algorithm" to choose who to layoff. Unfortunately, they did a Nuclear Safety Group "oopsie" by laying off the head designer of their next flagship product.
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
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:4, Interesting)
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.
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 need for example those gaming guys because they work extensively with video game developers to help them optimize code for your CPUs.
The same goes for gpus which Intel is getting into.
That's exactly how Nvidia dominated the market. It goes for server side to not just for video games.
You basically give programmers millions and millions of dollars worth of free consulting and technical expertise and they make heavily optimized software for your platform and so you can outcompete your rivals on performance and stability.
This isn't even a long-term thing, pulling back on that kind of support like Intel is doing is going to hit them almost immediately.
But line must go up.
Re: (Score:2)
> 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
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
He said "helped issue in" so it's quite plausibly correct. Lots of groups probably helped.