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Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

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

#121

Post by BobbyJo »

srinivgp wrote: post #54
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

IF a company goes bad, it's great that new companies eat their lunch. It's bad for a company to go bad. It's bad for a company to lock out competition.

> It's bad for a company to go bad.

Hard disagree, so I wonder what your basis for this bullet is.

Agree on the other two though.

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

#122

Post by mechanical_bear »

mattfrommars wrote: post #36
QuarterRoy wrote: post #10

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?

They laid people off only on paper, essentially moving those people to outsource roles. This made their ongoing expenses look better to investors, when presented in a dishonest manner.

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

#123

Post by jrockway »

pantulis wrote: post #78
jrockway wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it's great that they are essentially "recycled" when new, better companies come along and eat their lunch. Don't you have on the order of tens of thousands of dollars invested in Intel through retirement savings, though? When S&P 500 companies fail, your retirement savings become worthless. (Apple is really the one you want to watch out for, though!)

Not a US citizen, but aren't the retirement funds managed by someone who should be held responsible for not diversifying?

Retirement funds do pretty OK here. Early in your career you'll mostly hold something like an S&P 500 index fund or a total stock market fund, as you get closer to retirement they shift the allocation towards safer investments.

I don't love this; the total stock market is a lot of tech companies, and I already have plenty of exposure to tech by working in the field. It's a good heuristic for most people, though. (And no, I don't do anything about this underlying fear of tech sector exposure. I just buy the Target Date 20XX funds like everyone else.)

My only point is that the grandparent comment generally expects companies to die when they get into the S&P 500. If that's true, we're all screwed. If one S&P 500 is just stealing business from some other S&P 500 company, though, it's probably a net gain. But if it's some privately owned startup, then it's not as concrete a win, and let's be honest, startups are driving a lot of the innovation in tech.

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

#124

Post by magicloop »

chongli wrote: post #67
disillusioned wrote: post #30

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…

Completely missed the boat on mobile I think their main error was short-termism. They were addicted to high margin (workstation/server) devices. They had no interest in the low margins of mobile devices. They could not imagine how low-power devices would take over the world.

Actually that is the "Innovator's Dilemma" in action. Managers will always prefer to safeguard and enhance the high margin aspects of the business and discourage/under-invest in low margin disruptor aspects of the business due to cannibalization of profits and thus missing profit guidance for the quarter (thus losing compensation personally). They knew the tide was changing but organisation dynamics prevents a course correction.

Only a few companies can buck the Innovator's Dilemma, usually only founder led enterprises with significant control.

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

#125

Post by nemothekid »

jrockway wrote: post #58
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

> I think it's great that they are essentially "recycled" when new, better companies come along and eat their lunch. Don't you have on the order of tens of thousands of dollars invested in Intel through retirement savings, though? When S&P 500 companies fail, your retirement savings become worthless. (Apple is really the one you want to watch out for, though!)

>Don't you have on the order of tens of thousands of dollars invested in Intel through retirement savings, though?

Why is my fund in Intel but not in Apple? The whole point of choosing the index is so that you are diversified. You would only lose if Intel lost out to a foreign company, otherwise the demise of Intel is made palatable by the rise of Apple and AMD.

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

#126

Post by causi »

disillusioned wrote: post #30

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…

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.

I'm gonna add the caveat that the failure didn't happen out of the gate. Xscale was leagues ahead of anything else two decades ago. Atom stumbled at the start but Cherry Trail had a better price to performance ratio than anything that followed it. Intel's failure was nothing but pure avarice.

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

#127

Post by piggybox »

chongli wrote: post #67
disillusioned wrote: post #30

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…

Completely missed the boat on mobile I think their main error was short-termism. They were addicted to high margin (workstation/server) devices. They had no interest in the low margins of mobile devices. They could not imagine how low-power devices would take over the world.

It's reported Steve Jobs did ask Intel to provide CPU for the first gen of iPhone, but the offer price was too low so Intel would lose money. If you were the CEO of Intel, how would you explain it to the board that "we should make this deal with Apple even with loss, because I think iPhone will be the next big thing"?

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

#128

Post by coryfklein »

gspencley wrote: post #46
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #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…

I don't know a lot of the details, but everything I've heard over the last couple of years indicated that AMD was absolutely crushing Intel. A recent laptop I purchased, as well as the last desktop I put together (~2 years ago) each have Ryzen chips. I forget the details but in addition to performance issues, didn't Intel CPUs also have some major security vulnerabilities? And was it that they were related to instruc…

> everything I've heard over the last couple of years indicated that AMD was absolutely crushing Intel.

AMD market cap: $93B

Intel market cap: $104B

And now you will no longer be able to say that everything you've heard indicates that AMD is "absolutely crushing Intel".

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

#129

Post by CameronNemo »

cantaloupe wrote: post #107
chrisseaton wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know anyone who is buying or recommending Intel CPUs at the moment. Aren’t the major cloud providers still mainly running on and buying Intel?

AWS developed two generations of an in-house ARM chip (Graviton), which I think is cheaper for an equivalent power to an x86 instance. Cloudflare has also begun switching to ARM, for 57% more performance per watt: https://blog.cloudflare.com/designing-edge-servers-with-arm-...

IIRC GCP is using AMD EPYC.

Not sure about Azure.

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

#130

Post by xwolfi »

beebmam wrote: post #101
jason-phillips wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that's a great thing. I don't want companies to stay giant in perpetuity... Except that semiconductors are a national security issue at the moment.

100%. It's worth considering that some of these people laid off may consider working for authoritarian governments if they were well compensated (or are ideologically aligned), and that's a huge national security risk too. Hope they aren't dumb enough to lay off engineers with important knowledge. Please tell me that US representatives have already met with Intel on this.

I work in an authoritarian country (Hong Kong) and it s not what you think. You cant transplant a well paid foreigner expecting a breakthrough: his entire team will spend their time enforcing the red tape to teach him to adapt and by the time the money dries out they ll either have an obedient clone of the rest or a frustrated quitter.

Plus, dictatorships arent against the US per se, they re against the US convincing the populace they too could act like americans, and are extremely dependent on that Schrodinger state where you re both the factory for the US and a public political opponent. Symbiotic parasite pretending to be the host's alternative.

Plus the US might change heads at the top, but it s hardly a safe ally to have. Ukraine nearly went to complete disaster thanks to Trump and having morons elected there is a security risk for many too...

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