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Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

bloomberg.com

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

#171

Post by structural »

throw8383833jj wrote: post #88

TLDR. there's something I don't understand: car companies and everyone else can't seem to get enough Chips and yet Intel is laying off employees?

If everyone's not designing new products due to lack of availability of cutting-edge stuff, selling more lower-end products than usual anyways (because buyers are more cost-conscious).... then the organization may need to lay off people who are focused on high-end products so that they can spend the money elsewhere.

The people you need to grow fab and manufacturing capacity are different than the people you need to design cutting-edge new products. And the sales team you need to offer fab services to other companies is different than selling CPUs to consumers.

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

#172

Post by dredmorbius »

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"?

FWIW, Ars are citing the same Bloomberg piece the submitted blogspam is, so I'd not take that as an independent validation or clarification on the magnitude of the sackings.

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

#173

Post by giantrobot »

irrational wrote: post #27
pengaru wrote: post #17

I love how the PC market slowdown is being headlined as causal when Intel has clearly done this to themselves. Maybe if Apple's products were still "Intel Inside" Intel wouldn't be in this position.

I asked an Intel chip designer more than 10 years ago why they were not prioritizing mobile chips. He didn't have a good answer. It has been obvious for so long that everything was moving to phones, tablets, etc. The fact that Intel has no foot at all in that door is astonishing to me.

It's almost funny that Intel did have a foot in that market in the 2000s. They sold off XScale right before the original iPhone was released. A lot of PDAs used XScale CPUs.

I think Intel just bought into their own Wintel uber alles bullshit and couldn't even conceptualize devices with TDPs under a watt. No one could possibly do anything worthwhile without Wintel so shed everything that's not Wintel!

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

#174

Post by hinkley »

hinkley wrote: post #38
Kukumber wrote: post #22

Hopefully for them that includes executives and managers, they are the ones responsible of the death of that company, not the engineers Congrats to Apple and AMD for having done better Microsoft ignoring AMD in their latest Surface lineup is a hint for the people looking for answers

That’s always the problem. An R&D group I worked for laid off developers but no managers, which lead to more layoffs because overhead went up, which mean rates went up, which meant more consultants came in instead. Really at least a fifth of your layoff should be managers. If you lay off about six reports, that’s one less manager you need. So 1/7. If you lay off six managers, that’s one skip level you don’t need. 1 +…

Just to check my math, let’s look at an org that has a multiple of 6²x7²=1764 staff.

We had 294 line managers, 49 managers, and 8+ program managers. 351 managers, 2115 employees total. I need to lay off at least 15% or 318 people.

We go from 294 line managers to 252, plus reductions up the chain to 36 + 5 = 293. 58 down, 260 to go. I lay off 5 managers, 35 line managers, and 245 staff, that’s 58 + 285 = 343 people total, so I can argue for keeping a couple extra line managers and all their reports. Call it 327 layoffs, 96 of them managers, 28.4%.

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

#175

Post by MichaelBurge »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #40
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…

> 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…

There's no guarantee semiconductor fabs will be recycled. If TSMC shuts down due to political turmoil, Intel decides to halt all R&D and milk their new monopoly, then hardware progress could simply stall with no new competitor rising.

An investor would need to front many billions of dollars for an uncertain payoff over a decade or two, and Intel could at any moment become competent again. And if no investor is willing to take that risk, there would be no new competitor.

Adobe and Figma are software companies, so don't require capital investment. So if one shuts down, it's relatively easy to make a new UI modeling tool(or for an existing one to take over their customers).

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

#176

Post by nightski »

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.

Apple gets incredibly high margins on their products probably leaving more play room.

Is there any evidence that mobile chip makers who do not also create/own the device and are in a race to the bottom on price actually get decent returns?

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

#177

Post by kgwgk »

vineyardmike wrote: post #136
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!)

Over time, those funds are re-weighted. Unless you bought inte directly, the rewighting should handle it. Unless it fails quickly and spectacularly

S&P 500 trackers are not re-weighted.

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

#178

Post by briandear »

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…

Oracle is/was laying off thousands as of August.

Within the past 12 months:

Peloton laid off over 4000. Snap 1280 (which is 20% of the company,) Shopify 1000 (10%.) Groupon laid off 15%. Salesforce, 1000. Microsoft 1800. Carvana (while not "big established" it's still a lot of people) laid off 2500. Tencent laying off 5500. Alibaba: 9500, ByteDance: 1000, Zillow 2300.

This definitely isn't really the first major layoff announcement.

Outside of big tech: Credit Suisse laying off 5000, Ford 8000, Telefonica 2700. Societe General 3700

A bunch more, but these are the one measured in thousands or otherwise a significant percentage of a company's workforce.

(By the way, not arguing with you, my point is that this isn't surprising, the writing has been on the wall for the past year, so an Intel layoff isn't a bellwether for things getting bad -- it's a lagging indicator of things already being bad.

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

#179

Post by ethbr0 »

alexnewman wrote: post #9

I worked at Intel and it kicked off my career. I believe putting a Cfo in charge of a company will lead to this. I wonder if apple will ever end up in the same situation

> putting a Cfo in charge of a company will lead to this

The why is more interesting to me and seems pretty self-evident: a CFO's job is to keep bad things from happening.

That's not the sole person you want running a company, because that's just dying more slowly, with good numbers.

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