Live data from Hacker News

Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

bloomberg.com

31–40 of 484 posts

Re: Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

#31
post #19

I worked at Intel and it kicked off my career. I believe putting a Cfo in charge of a company will lead to this. I wonder if apple will ever end up in the same situation

Pat Gelsinger was a CEO of VMware prior to Intel, COO at EMC prior to that, and CTO at Intel before that. He was never a CFO.

I think they are talking about the previous captain that pointed them at the iceberg.

Re: Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

#32
I think this is the first major layoff announcement at a big, established tech firm I've heard this year that is anywhere near this size. I mean, there have been loads of "couple hundred" employee layoffs, and certainly a lot of hiring slowdown/freezes, but again, haven't seen anything else near this big, and the layoffs previously seem to have been concentrated in unprofitable VC-funded companies. I know Tesla laid off a couple thousand people this summer, that's the closest thing that comes to mind.

Intel certainly has its own unique challenges, but even, for example, AMD had been doing pretty great up until this year, and they also just announced a big shortfall for their 3rd quarter results. Just wondering if this is really the tip of the iceberg for a true, broad retrenchment in tech, after the past 9 months of "Is a recession coming? Is a recession coming?"

Re: Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

#33
Reports elsewhere ( https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/10/repor... ) suggest that the layoffs might be a bit concentrated in the Sales & Marketing departments.

Is it just me, or do some other folks also smell "corporate bloat, which better management would not have allowed to happen"?

Re: Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

#35

Quoted post unavailable.

How many people have they hired in the last few years?

If Linkedin data is trustworthy, headcount growth has been 9% last year, 16% last two years. https://imgur.com/a/tTjb2ZM

Re: Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

#36

I’ve been through two layoffs at tech companies - one of 14,000 and one of 15,000. One touched a lot of teams including my own. The second was mostly smoke and mirrors - they took multiple factories and supply chain employees and sold them or outsourced them to a company that picked up the payroll for those employees. Only a handful of roles were truly culled. The announcement of the layoffs was theatre for Wall Stre…

Sorry, care to explain why did you mention Wall Street in your post? What does it signify?

Re: Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

#37

Hopefully for them that includes executives and managers, they are the ones responsible of the death of that company, not the engineers Congrats to Apple and AMD for having done better Microsoft ignoring AMD in their latest Surface lineup is a hint for the people looking for answers

>Microsoft ignoring AMD in their latest Surface lineup is a hint for the people looking for answers

For those of us who are bad at subtext, could you elaborate further? What are the questions that this is the answer to?

Re: Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

#38

Hopefully for them that includes executives and managers, they are the ones responsible of the death of that company, not the engineers Congrats to Apple and AMD for having done better Microsoft ignoring AMD in their latest Surface lineup is a hint for the people looking for answers

That’s always the problem. An R&D group I worked for laid off developers but no managers, which lead to more layoffs because overhead went up, which mean rates went up, which meant more consultants came in instead.

Really at least a fifth of your layoff should be managers. If you lay off about six reports, that’s one less manager you need. So 1/7. If you lay off six managers, that’s one skip level you don’t need. 1 + 6 + 36 = 43. Go to three levels and that’s 1 + 6 + 36 + 216 = 259, or 43 / 259 or about 1/6.

But if you want to keep production capacity, you should move to slightly more reports per manager, not maintain steady state. Just to keep the math simple, if you had 216 developers reporting to an organization of 43 managers, if you went to 7 reports per manager you need 31 line managers, not 36, which is a 2% RIF without losing a single producer. Or if you do both you get about 1/5th of laid off people as managers if you lay off less than half your developers.

Edit: fractions and ratios are not interchangeable, bad math.

Re: Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

#39

Reports elsewhere ( https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/10/repor... ) suggest that the layoffs might be a bit concentrated in the Sales & Marketing departments. Is it just me, or do some other folks also smell "corporate bloat, which better management would not have allowed to happen"?

Might make sense: If you're selling mostly to mobile OEMs and data centers you need a completely different sales/marketing strategy that's more focused on whale hunting than building "brand awareness" to a broad consumer market.

Re: Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

#40

Isn't this just a culmination of nearly a decade of unforced errors and mismanaged strategy? I'm a complete outsider but I see a couple of fundamental huge misses by Intel over the past 10 or so years: 1) Completely missed the boat on mobile. Their ARM-competitive chips (Atom, etc.)... weren't. Missed on every measure from power to performance. Let Qualcomm and Samsung eat their lunch. 2) Missed too many ticks and re…

> It's absolutely incredible to watch these formerly phenomenally innovative companies falter at that very core competency of staying cutting edge but we see it happen over and over again.

To be frank, I think that's a great thing. I don't want companies to stay giant in perpetuity, I think it's great that they are essentially "recycled" when new, better companies come along and eat their lunch.

If anything I think it's quite bad that over the past 25ish years that a lot of big companies have really learned the lessons of "disruption" and have responded by just buying up the smaller but up-and-coming competition before they can overtake (looking at you Adobe and Figma).

Post reply on HN