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Intel Cuts Employee Pay to Maintain Quarterly Dividend

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Re: Intel Cuts Employee Pay to Maintain Quarterly Dividend

#251

Post by etempleton »

baq wrote: post #220
cmdrriker wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel lost this battle years ago when leadership decided to badge engineer the shit out of their product portfolio and do stock buy-backs. In a capital intensive enterprise, Jack Welch school of management will only give the company maybe 10 years before those opportunity costs blow signifgant holes in your boat. Look at TSMC, they take government money, invested that in people and material. They’ve got a work plan i…

Of all the things you picked the least relevant one. Intel without GPUs is dead. Gone. Zero. A foundry at best, with a decade to be top tier again. Intel without RISC is… fine? The instruction set doesn’t matter, the underlying hardware doesn’t execute it anyway, it runs microcode.

I agree, I think GPU is a smart move for Intel. They have a lot going for them that they should be able to carve out a nice niche in the GPU market.

Re: Intel Cuts Employee Pay to Maintain Quarterly Dividend

#252

Post by artisanspam »

anonreeeeplor wrote: post #55

You don’t want a Silicon job because your talent is illiquid. They can take a giant dump directly in your mouth while making steady eye contact and you can’t leave because there is nowhere to go. In software and in startups if you have relevant skills and modern, up to date experience you can switch easily. Don’t work in industries that are declining and have no future and require advanced technical training that is…

The vast majority of engineers at Intel are not what you described. Most are CS/EE bachelors or masters that could go to dozens of other companies shipping hardware.

Re: Intel Cuts Employee Pay to Maintain Quarterly Dividend

#253

Post by BeetleB »

graton wrote: post #145
manv1 wrote: post #90

If Intel cuts its dividend the stock will crater. Since executive compensation is stock-based, tied to the stock performance, or both, there's an obvious incentive to keep the dividend going. The dividend has become more political than normal. In finance theory, a dividend is supposed to be a paid-out return. If you're cutting salaries to pay the dividend that means that you don't have enough surplus...by definition.…

In 2021 Pat Gelsinger made $179 million dollars[1]. But his salary was $1.1 million. So him taking a 25% cut in his salary is pretty much nothing. [1] https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/intel-ceo-pa...

This common assertion is false. See my earlier comment here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34584450

Re: Intel Cuts Employee Pay to Maintain Quarterly Dividend

#254

Post by nurspouse »

artisanspam wrote: post #252
anonreeeeplor wrote: post #55

You don’t want a Silicon job because your talent is illiquid. They can take a giant dump directly in your mouth while making steady eye contact and you can’t leave because there is nowhere to go. In software and in startups if you have relevant skills and modern, up to date experience you can switch easily. Don’t work in industries that are declining and have no future and require advanced technical training that is…

The vast majority of engineers at Intel are not what you described. Most are CS/EE bachelors or masters that could go to dozens of other companies shipping hardware.

Former Intel employee here. This may be true for their design folks, but the largest portion of the company is related to the fab, and there aren't many jobs for those folks. Moreover, the alternatives (TSMC, Samsung, etc) suck as much as Intel.

Re: Intel Cuts Employee Pay to Maintain Quarterly Dividend

#255

Post by khyryk »

osigurdson wrote: post #112

I'm not an Intel shareholder (outside of ETFs maybe) but I would be far more interested in their stock if they cut their dividend entirely and invested 100% of earnings back into the business. Hire the best talent, become the kind of place where the best talent wants to be. Stop being a stodgy, old, risk averse has-been. I would really like to see Intel make a comeback but this dividend preservation move suggests the…

Xe-HPC wasn't a risk-averse design, nor was Arc, nor was Alder Lake, nor was Sapphire Rapids. The only problem is that Xe-HPC is nowhere to be found, Arc was delivered 2 years late and buggy, and Sapphire Rapids was at least 1 year late; only Alder Lake delivered on time and without major problems. Thus, the problems came from poor execution.

Look at Intel's projected node schedule, it's very aggressive. Show me the risk aversion there. The problem is that it's difficult to achieve that schedule without problems, and taking into account Intel's history, the market doesn't believe they can do it.

Re: Intel Cuts Employee Pay to Maintain Quarterly Dividend

#256

Post by deelowe »

nurspouse wrote: post #254
artisanspam wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of engineers at Intel are not what you described. Most are CS/EE bachelors or masters that could go to dozens of other companies shipping hardware.

Former Intel employee here. This may be true for their design folks, but the largest portion of the company is related to the fab, and there aren't many jobs for those folks. Moreover, the alternatives (TSMC, Samsung, etc) suck as much as Intel.

I'm seeing plenty of intel folks move easily into other areas. I don't think this is true. We hired a test automation engineer who worked on the fab side at my last employer. They transitioned pretty well until a PCBA and server integration testing role.

Re: Intel Cuts Employee Pay to Maintain Quarterly Dividend

#257

Post by int_19h »

robocat wrote: post #232
int_19h wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a textbook example of how owners of capital can extract economic rent from wage workers they hire to utilize that capital to produce something valuable. The whole point of any for-profit business that is not worker-owned is to "do investors a favor" with the money obtained by paying workers less than market value of the goods they produce.

> paying workers less than market value of the goods they produce Have you ever owned a business? If employees got paid the value they produce, why would any business bother to exist? If you want to get paid the value you produce: start a co-op; join a co-op; start contracting; or become a founder. Stop whinging, and do something about it. So many employees choose to work for a business - it is a transaction where th…

Note that I didn't make any moral judgment on the matter, or any specific suggestions on how to fix it. I merely pointed out what the arrangement is explicitly - yet all the replies are, essentially, saying "this is fine" (or, at least, "this is the best that we can do"). Fair enough, but let's at least be explicit about what's on the table, and let's not pretend that the resulting distribution of produced wealth is not a consequence of a pre-existing and self-perpetrating economic power imbalance.

Co-op employees seem to be doing better off on average, so I would argue that "usually better off for it" is not really true. Better off than trying to run their own business - yeah, probably true for most; regardless of who gets the profits, businesses still need professional managers to run them effectively.

Re: Intel Cuts Employee Pay to Maintain Quarterly Dividend

#258

Post by nurspouse »

midoridensha wrote: post #116
chrgy wrote: post #57

The worse culture, I have ever seen in any company. Amazed how they are still in business. The corporate greed, the culture of nepotism, killing innovation has been dominant.

I think you're being hyperbolic, or you haven't worked in many companies. Intel isn't a great place to work (despite their corporate value claiming it is), but by most accounts, Amazon is much worse unless you really like a place with cutthroat corporate politics. And "corporate greed"? Doesn't that describe every American corporation? All the big tech companies are laying off right now (except maybe Apple). And nepo…

> Intel isn't a great place to work (despite their corporate value claiming it is), but by most accounts, Amazon is much worse unless you really like a place with cutthroat corporate politics.

I used to work at Intel. Some data points:

When the news about how bad Amazon's culture was (e.g. people crying at desk), my thoughts were "This sounds like Intel."

When you talk to Amazon employees, most say "Every team is different. We don't see such behavior in my team, and I don't work long hours (i.e. more than 40)." And the same can be said at Intel. If you're close to the fab, the behavior is crap. Software tends to be pretty chill. And you'll see everything in between. I recall once going in on Saturday and talking to a guy - he said he'd worked every weekend for the last 6 weeks and expects to continue doing so for a month or two more.

Everyone I know who has left Intel to join Amazon is happier at Amazon. Everyone. The most common refrains:

1. Good work/life balance at Amazon (although some had it good at Intel too).

2. Far fewer morons at Amazon. When you're in the non-core parts of Intel (e.g. software), the people around you are fairly poor in terms of talent (e.g. complaining about having to use Git, saying we're using it only because Microsoft owns Git (!), refusing to use branches in Git and insisting on just creating command line arguments for every experiment you want to try).

Intel, though, does have better PTO.

Re: Intel Cuts Employee Pay to Maintain Quarterly Dividend

#259

Post by fatbird »

bluedino wrote: post #53
AlbertCory wrote: post #40

Back in the day at 3Com, Bill Krause used to announce that everyone had to take two days of vacation in the coming quarter. The reason was that he had "promised" Wall Street that we would hit a certain earnings number, and with accounting practices, your accrued PTO is "paid back" when you actually take it. (The rationale is, they'd have to hire someone to do your job when you're gone, although of course that's nonse…

I worked at a place during Covid where you were forced to use your pto as it was accrued. Financially the money goes into either payroll or PTO, and this way they saved whatever percent. It was either this or lay off ~10% of the employees If you worked there for years and had lots of hours banked it was fine, but as a newer employee it was very annoying.

Honeywell furloughed virtually its entire staff for two weeks in Q2 of 2020. Literally, no work and no pay, just all about reducing labour expenses by 2/13ths for the quarter.

Re: Intel Cuts Employee Pay to Maintain Quarterly Dividend

#260

Post by nurspouse »

deelowe wrote: post #256
nurspouse wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former Intel employee here. This may be true for their design folks, but the largest portion of the company is related to the fab, and there aren't many jobs for those folks. Moreover, the alternatives (TSMC, Samsung, etc) suck as much as Intel.

I'm seeing plenty of intel folks move easily into other areas. I don't think this is true. We hired a test automation engineer who worked on the fab side at my last employer. They transitioned pretty well until a PCBA and server integration testing role.

If he was a test automation engineer, he likely had transferable skills. Many/most of the fab folks have almost no programming skills, and are PhDs in things like chemistry[1], etc.

Now some of them do take the initiative and learn SW skills, or data analysis properly, and switch due to that. But the majority of them feel stuck. They have a heavy workload and do not feel they have time to learn new skills.

[1] For a long time, and perhaps even now, the fabs only hired either technicians or PhDs. An exemption would be needed to hire someone with "just" an MS. Of course, almost none of these jobs actually need PhD level skills.

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