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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

#201

Post by Der_Einzige »

theropost wrote: post #168

This is going to become the norm for a while - many of these massive tech companies have a lot of dead weight, and these current conditions allow for the shedding of such weight. It will be painful, and not great for many - but at the end of the day we should emerge a more agile, stable, and innovative society. At least that is the hope. The age of exuberance is gone, time to put our heads together, and work hard aga…

Too bad mass layoffs don't target folks based on performance at Intel. They just lay off entire buildings.

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

#202

Post by Der_Einzige »

typon wrote: post #41
djmips wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Brian Krzanich was cancelled/fired for sleeping with a coworker, so the then-CFO Bob Swan was made CEO after Intel tried to hire "externally" for a year or so. After MBA'fying Intel for a couple of years, he left to a16z, a perfect place for people like him. Pat Gelsinger then joined, probably too late, to try to steer the ship back in the right direction. Intel as an organization is finished. (I worked at Intel for…

Btw, they carefully never said the gender of the person who BK was porking. I'm convinced it was a man!

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

#203

Post by dangus »

koheripbal wrote: post #193
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"?

Seems normal that the number of employees in Sales would follow the rate of product sales.

Yes, sales are at the front of the pipeline. If there aren’t prospects and customers to talk to, salespeople sit idle.

If you’re at a company and you look at your engineer to sales ratio you might think to yourself “gee, we have so many sales people!”

That’s because there’s not much multiplying factor to sales roles. There isn’t a lot of potential to automate like engineers can do. A salesperson only has so many hours in the day and they’re fitting maximum one or two customers into a one hour slot of their time.

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

#204

Post by smolder »

tehnub wrote: post #120
gspencley wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't have any data, but from word of mouth and variously seeing posts and videos online, 12th gen Intel CPUs seem pretty popular for gaming builds. They're winning in benchmarks against 50 series AMD (as they should, being newer), but are also cheaper. I'll be curious to see how 13th gen Intel vs. 70 series AMD plays out. There are always complicating factors, such as motherboards for 70 series AMD being quite pri…

Of the last gen stuff, the 5800x3D is arguably among the best bang for buck, including for use in gaming builds. The applications where Intel's 12900K/12700K hold a significant advantage against the other chip with its 96MB of L3 cache typically aren't applications desperately in need of cpu power. IME it's poorly-optimized or hard-to-optimize software with bad cache coherency that most demands speed, and it's in those cases that the X3D delivers.

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

#205

Post by srinivgp »

BobbyJo wrote: post #121
srinivgp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Things going bad is bad. Dying is bad. Etc etc.

Sometimes on net things are good because of other effects like "ah, promising new competitor gets a chance to shine!" but if you could have _both_, you absolutely _would_. A company going bad is a _cost paid_ for new blood, not an _added benefit_.

It's not good that you have 100 fewer hours when you spend 100 hours creating something awesome. It's bad that you have 100 fewer hours. If you could create the same awesome thing and still have those 100 hours to do something else, that'd be fantastic.

All other things being equal, I would far rather Intel be awesome than not. If it turns out the world is such that all other things can't be equal, it might be worth having Intel not be awesome in favor of other benefits, but I'm never going to be _happy_ about Intel not being awesome.

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

#206

Post by jsdwarf »

dangus wrote: post #203
koheripbal wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems normal that the number of employees in Sales would follow the rate of product sales.

Yes, sales are at the front of the pipeline. If there aren’t prospects and customers to talk to, salespeople sit idle. If you’re at a company and you look at your engineer to sales ratio you might think to yourself “gee, we have so many sales people!” That’s because there’s not much multiplying factor to sales roles. There isn’t a lot of potential to automate like engineers can do. A salesperson only has so many hour…

There is indeed a lot you can do to avoid overcrowded sales departments, e.g. define minimum order volumes your prospects need to hit to let your salespeople interact with them (and refer them to an external reseller otherwise). Invest in online sales tools like product configurators to let you customer do the sales job etc.

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

#207

Post by PartiallyTyped »

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…

Anecdata; a friend at Dresden has been interviewing people from Xilinx all week.

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

#208

Post by BobbyJo »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #153
BobbyJo wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not the op, but: 1. Tautological: from company's perspective, it's bad for the company (itself) to go bad. 2. More broadly, it's reasonably self-evident that it's bad for employees, and bad for shareholders of a company, for that company to go bad 3. Where we can have discussions, and probably for a long and fun if not necessarily fruitful time, is whether it's "good" or "bad" from market's, or consumer's perspective…

> Where we can have discussions, and probably for a long and fun if not necessarily fruitful time, is whether it's "good" or "bad" from market's, or consumer's perspective for companies to go bad. I personally think not.

Generally where my head was at. The other two points were better scoped. I personally think it's good that companies go bad, as it moves control over productive assets from one group to another. This is good for society for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is enabling new ideas to be tried. Can a long lived company try new ideas? sure, but the degree to which they avoid risks (if they live a long time they necessarily avoid undo risk) puts on upper bound on how ambitious they are with new things.

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

#209

Post by PartiallyTyped »

colinmhayes wrote: post #184
gspencley wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With the new releases, it seems that 5800x3D takes the crown for single threaded tasks and video games even in intel's 13xxx benchmarks. The 7950x is closely trailed by the 5800x3D.

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

#210

Post by hedgehog »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #154
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…

> 2) Missed too many ticks and replaced them with tocks. Fell far behind because of ridiculous tilt-at-windmill folly around Itanium and other architectural decisions that absolutely didn't pay off. Ended up taking way too long to get further down on process size. I applied to Intel's architecture group in 2015, and when I asked one interviewer "does Intel have a strategy if TSMC catches up on process tech?" I was le…

The fab business is very sensitive to scale, with enough money and discipline you can mostly make your own luck. TSMC does way more volume than Intel and they have a very aggressive customer (Apple) that can help work out early quirks and guarantee orders on new nodes before they're economical for anyone else. I don't know what a turn around might look like but it's a tough problem.
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