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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

#181

Post by collegeburner »

xwolfi wrote: post #130
beebmam wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

we have temporarily made peace with dictatorships before. the bigger concern is china wants the #1 spot in world power and we will oppose any nation that tries to beconme more powerful than us.

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

#182

Post by maerF0x0 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #7
samson8989 wrote: post #4

The cause is the international economic downturn/ high inflation, combined with a collapse in cloud computing orders. Around 30%-40% of PC sales were going to cloud compute. This is slowing.

I wonder how much profit Intel really makes on the data center. The tech press never questions it, but Intel does a lot of gaslighting and notoriously has many sock puppets in the industry press. We are told all the time that the data center is subsidizing the consumer but I wonder if the truth is the other way around... Certainly Intel wouldn't have gotten within 100 miles of the data center if it hadn't been for th…

I imagine tomshardware has to "play nice" so they get free demo units to do benchmarks, articles, overclocks etc with.

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

#183

Post by skippyboxedhero »

dozgon wrote: post #163
skippyboxedhero wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a strong welfare state, it should make it easier to fire. This is the case in Denmark, some countries offer incentives to lay staff off temporarily but, generally, it isn't the case (which is why you have unbelievable levels of unemployment in Europe).

I might also have used the wrong terminology here. (English isn't my native language.) However, I know for sure that in Germany, it isn't that easy to hire and fire people on a whim. In the US this seems to be the case. Just in case, let me also clarify this: I don't care, if you think the American system is better than the German one. I simply made the statement that even if not all EU countries have rulings like Ge…

Yes, Germany has such a rule, Kurzarbeit basically does this through a state subsidy.

And one particular aspect of Germany is that capacity is controlled on the way up. The reason why the US has these huge swings is because capacity isn't controlled. It isn't possible to have the upside without the downside. Germany's political economy is totally different because the US has a far higher level of competition and innovation, this isn't possible with Germany's labour market.

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

#184

Post by colinmhayes »

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…

AMD chips had the same branch prediction side channel vulnerabilities that intel did. At this point their offerings are pretty similar with intel being a bit cheaper but using more electricity.

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

#187

Post by skippyboxedhero »

dozgon wrote: post #146
skippyboxedhero wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a strong welfare state, it should make it easier to fire. This is the case in Denmark, some countries offer incentives to lay staff off temporarily but, generally, it isn't the case (which is why you have unbelievable levels of unemployment in Europe).

My mistake was to assume such rules in other EU countries. In Germany, there is a thing called "Kündigungsschutz"[1]. I am not sure about Ireland, but I assumed there are similar rulings. So at least in Germany, it is not that easy, but possible. 1) http://www.rechtslexikon.net/d/kuendigungsschutz/kuendigungs...

Germany has strong works councils because it has very strong companies that, essentially, are given a licence to print money by the state. Ireland is an example of a country with a totally different political economy (more similar to the UK) with high levels of competition/innovation.

Either way, the point is that if you have high levels of protection that should mean that it is easier to fire someone...because they have something to fall back on. That is why the UK and the US have universal welfare states. Germany does not have a universal welfare state, and the only way that is possible is by having high employment security/strong labour laws and huge companies that are profitable due to low competition. This, obviously, comes with downsides (this is why Germany has struggled with high unemployment in the past, and has things like Kurzabeit to subsidise companies even further against firing staff).

An exception to this is Denmark which has almost total union participation and very weak labour laws, they achieve this through a much more expensive system of social insurance. They have, for Europe, relatively high levels of innovation so this all offsets (you get high security and relatively high levels of innovation).

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

#188

Post by colinmhayes »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #70
SevenNation wrote: post #63

Can't read the article, but for context Intel's share price never recovered from the "dot com" bubble of 2000: https://www.tradingview.com/chart/?symbol=INTC It's one of a few large companies with that distinction. Shares now offer a (relatively) regal 5.3% dividend yield and a price/earnings ratio just above 5. Of course, as profits dwindle, both metrics will be recalibrated downward. This seems relevant because dur…

> Intel's share price never recovered from the "dot com" bubble of 2000 As you observe, this is true only if one ignores dividends, which are a material component of total returns for a mature company like Intel. > during the late 1990s Intel was allegedly the company whose shares one bought and never sold This has never been true for any public company. And it’s driven by investor style more than company fundamental…

> This has never been true for any public company.

Not really true. Most billionaires utilize the "buy, borrow, die" strategy of borrowing against their holdings instead of selling to get around taxes. As long as the equity increases in price more than inflation you come out ahead, plus save the 20% on taxes. Then when they die their capital gains are reset so no taxes ever paid.

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

#189

Post by stuff4ben »

mort96 wrote: post #50
keepquestioning wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Intel Inside" worked..

I wonder if it did? Who bought a laptop because it had an Intel CPU? I know I always bought Intel laptops because Intel laptops were the only things available, not because I have some high view of Intel as a brand. I imagine the vast majority of laptop buyers wouldn't even know what an Intel is.

I always bought Intel CPU laptops. Could never figure out the AMD naming scheme (and still can't but that goes for Intel now too). Also back then it seemed the AMD laptops were of poorer quality than the Intel ones.

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

#190

Post by dang »

bell-cot wrote: post #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"?

(This comment was originally posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33180313, but we merged the thread hither since that article was a misleadingly titled ripoff.)
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