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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

#281

Post by fooker »

osnium123 wrote: post #280
fooker wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile ~50% of the EE PhD graduates, and ~10% of the CS PhD graduates from my university are joining Intel on a regular basis. Intel has a steady funnel of smart international PhD grads who are usually fine with the comparatively lower pay.

Are the EE PhDs at your university better than the top undergrads? I ask this because a PhD is no guarantee of quality.

They’d be significantly better than top undergrads immediately after graduating.

Top undergrads after a few years guided by competent people and managing to keep motivated will be way better than the average PhD graduate.

Re: Intel Cuts Employee Pay to Maintain Quarterly Dividend

#282

Post by int_19h »

robocat wrote: post #262
int_19h wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I answered why I think your original statement is nonsensical, yet this new reply goes off on other tangents. Plus you appear somewhat hypocritical to me: you are complaining about the fruits of capitalism, but yet you chose to move from the USSR to the USA and work at Microsoft!! You also appear to write a lot on politics, which is definitely something Hacker News discourages on the site (and here I am engaging with…

I moved from Russia to the US; capitalism is certainly better in the latter than the former. Besides that, there's also the question of social and political freedoms, which is largely orthogonal to economic systems; you can and we do have brutal capitalist dictatorships, and there are democratic socialist polities (e.g. Rojava). I'm also no fan of USSR and authoritarian socialism in general, but the choices aren't limited to that vs capitalism.

In any case, to reiterate, the point is that for it to be a compromise, we should all be aware of the nature of that compromise - that is, who is giving up what exactly, and for whose sake. It is only a true compromise if people knowingly choose to preserve it, because they feel that it's the best deal that they can get.

Re: Intel Cuts Employee Pay to Maintain Quarterly Dividend

#283

Post by BeetleB »

doetoe wrote: post #279
BeetleB wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree a 25% cut for him is nothing. I was pointing out the falsehood of him making $179M. He made about $10M in 2021 and will likely not see most of the remaining amount as he will not hit the share price in time.

I misunderstood the part of the RSU's: I thought you meant that by the time they vest they will be worth considerably less than $179M, because the stock price has gone down. However if I understood you correctly now, these will be worth 0 if the stock price doesn't hit a certain value in time

Yes - he simply won't get those stocks.

Read the 2022 Proxy statement starting from around P 66 for all the gory details. I think my estimate of $10M was probably high.

Re: Intel Cuts Employee Pay to Maintain Quarterly Dividend

#284

Post by fooker »

stevenhuang wrote: post #247
fooker wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> also don't fully understand the dividend investor mindset Suppose you have ~5 million invested for retirement. The dividend you could get from this is ~100k-150k per year. That is a very livable salary if you want to retire early (45? 50?) and focus on your family and hobbies. Does this make sense yet? It's essentially a conservative way to lead your live if you are not necessarily married to your profession.

Dividends are forced liquidation events. If you want dividends simply sell a portion of your holdings every quarter. When one focuses solely on dividend yield and not total return, which includes capital appreciation, it's a sign they don't really what's going on. Where do you think the dividends are coming from? Straight from the company's market cap. By preferring companies that consistently pay high dividend yield…

>Straight from the company's market cap.

That's not how it works for a publicly traded company in a free market. Historically announcing a dividend has usually caused more people to be interested in buying, which increases your market cap correspondingly.

Re: Intel Cuts Employee Pay to Maintain Quarterly Dividend

#285

Post by AYBABTME »

kube-system wrote: post #202
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not really. the US cares a lot more about Taiwan if they are making the chips for the US. a sizable part of Taiwan's national defense strategy is to have a benevolent monopoly on cutting edge chip production so their allies think it's worth it to fight a war with China if necessary.

Yes, that is the current state. I was entertaining a future scenario above. TSMC is currently building more capacity outside of Taiwan, and the US is making investments that will likely continue this.

But they're not doing investments that will entirely replace Taiwan's relevance. The bulk of their top tier technology will remain in Taiwan, and I would be very surprised to see that change. Moving some production to the US to alleviate worst-case scenarios for Washington, yes, but moving enough that Taiwan's defense becomes irrelevant? I really don't think so.

I mean, if you were TSMC's CEO/Board, knowing full well that your country of birth is highly dependent on your presence for its defense posture, would you do allow this to change?

Re: Intel Cuts Employee Pay to Maintain Quarterly Dividend

#287

Post by midoridensha »

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.

Moreover, those alternatives are generally located in Asia, not the US, so that's probably not a likely job change for most. Maybe they could move to one of the new Samsung/TSMC fabs being built in the US though.

Re: Intel Cuts Employee Pay to Maintain Quarterly Dividend

#289

Post by 93po »

jonas21 wrote: post #149
93po wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel had record revenue in 2021 and $20 billion in profit. There is literally zero reason for cutting pay or jobs except for corporate greed.

It's not 2021 any more. Intel revenue dropped significantly in 2022, meanwhile they were hiring as though the revenue growth would continue. It's a similar story to many other tech companies. But at least at Intel, leadership is taking responsibility by cutting their own pay more than their employees' pay.

My mind hasn't moved on to it being 2023 now, hah

They still made 8 billion in profit in 2022. There's ~130k employees, let's be generous and say average income for all of those is $120k a year. This is generous because there's a massive amount of factory workers that get paid nowhere near this. That's $15 billion a year in salaries. Cutting that by 10% is $1.5 billion. Intel still would have had several billions in profit.

As I said - no reason except greed. The business is not in jeopardy.

> leadership is taking responsibility by cutting their own pay

This is a really empty gesture. Leadership has leverage to get that pay bumped up again very quickly, and I guarantee they will. They may even get bonuses to offset it in the future.

Non-leadership employees have extremely little to no leverage to get their pay back up. And in terms of financial stress, a leader making $300k a year taking a 15% cut isn't going to feel much different. Someone making $60k a year on the fab floor is going to have to make lifestyle changes with a pay cut.

Re: Intel Cuts Employee Pay to Maintain Quarterly Dividend

#290

Post by flangola7 »

RantyDave wrote: post #158
flangola7 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Intel an underdog next to AMD? I don't know many business machines running AMD.

Intel are screwed. Many of its biggest customers have started just making their own chips instead. The bleeding edge of compute appears to be falling to Nvidia (who now make both the chips and the network that connects them). Their latest GPU project is going the way of their other GPU projects. They don't even have the biggest/baddest fab capability thing going on any more. I have no idea what's going on in there, b…

Other than Apple who else is making their own chips?
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