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Pre-Retirement Interview With Intel CEO Barrett
kevcol writes "The San Francisco Chronicle has an excellent interview with Intel's CEO Craig Barrett who retires next year. In it, he is asked about topics ranging from labor distribution (oh I'm sorry- outsourcing), the Chinese market, the perils and promise of expanding operations in the Middle East, the state of K-12 schools in the U.S. and declining numbers of home-grown engineers, and more. Notably absent are any questions of AMD. Notice how he likes to pick on sensationalist press by prepending some comments with 'you in the media...'. Anyway, good interview."
"We're graduating a decreasing number of engineers each year" -- Get your ass whomped for 4 years in a engineering program, while all your friends slide by as buisness majors. When you all graduate, they get jobs as managers and you stand in the unemployment line because Intel outsourced all those jobs to India or filled them with H-1B workers. Wow, with those prospects, who *wouldn't* want to go into engineering. (PS - I say this as a PhD student in engineering)
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
"We have very high standards for our performance at Intel, for a variety of reasons. The memo was in reference to our performance and (said) that we could improve our performance and we should improve our performance." How many times can you say performance?
This guy's smugness is a more than a little ridiculous . . . Unlike Newton, who said that he stood of the shoulders of giants . . . this guys thinks he is a giant.
It sounds so incredibly smug. I would say that building something with a lot of transistors is like building something with a lot of bricks (how many bricks/stones in the Great Wall of China?). . . If you count bricks, or rivets, or grams of steel, there are lots of complicated things out there that humans have built . . . Many of these things take a lot more labor and a lot larger organization than Intel . . . Saturn 5's, Great Pyramids, etc. Some things are even intangible . . . the supply chain and resourcing used to move the military might of the US to Europe during WWII for example. At one time there were over one million US troops based in the UK alone . . . and that doesn't consider their supplies and equipment. Not to say Intel doesn't do complex and amazing things, they do . . . but let's keep it in perspective.
And finally for that matter, if I build a multi-processor system am I making a more complicated device than he is? I'm using move transitors than he is . . .
You gotta retire undefeated. Mark my words, folks, no sooner than Steve Ballmer says he's "retiring" you can say that "Microsoft is dying".
Intel is in a LOT of trouble right now I've heard. Their chips have historically been overpriced, and this just doesn't work anymore because AMD is undercutting them. They've fucked up the 64-bit transition, too. Their only undefeated front right now is mobile processors - they kick all sorts of butt there. But other than that, "it's time for CEOs to retire".
For the uninformed, I note that Intel grades its employees on a bell curve each quarter. Any employee who falls in the bottom 25% for two consecutive quarters "qualifies" to be fired. During an economic recession, the employee is automatically fired. When there is a labor shortage, the employee is given a stern warning.
My information comes from a managing director at Intel.
I haven't done any research, but I'd be willing to bet that the itanium was the most expensive processor ever researched, and possibly the most complex. I'd have liked to have asked if he feels it is a sucess, or if it will be, and how AMD's quick response to public demand in the 64bit market affects ( effects? ) the itanium.
I can well imagine the response, but this guy is a joker: I am a god, you all need to put in 80 hour weeks, because that's what I do. No I don't care if you have families to take care of, ect... ( relative worked for intel ).
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Yeah because we all know MBA's are such great managers. Oh and engineers are smarter and harder working than a bunch of guys with MBA's. I mean how hard is it to take economics courses and pansy math courses like statistics for MBA's?
Don't forget - they have to know how to operate spreadsheets, and boy, let me tell you, it takes leet skillz to do that.
I bet you're one of those people who believe that, since you're an engineer, you could easily do an MBA's job.
If George W. Bush can get an MBA, that doesn't say very much about the academic rigor required to earn the degree.
If George W. Bush can get an MBA, that doesn't say very much about the academic rigor required to earn the degree.
Yes, at that was at Yale, no less.
My information comes from a managing director at Intel.
Your information comes from a whiny wimp who can't take the pressure needed to succeed.
If those folks don't like their jobs, they can move--this is America after all, where they have the opportunity to succeed, not be coddled in poverty like some socialist workers' paradise.
Wow! That site you link to has some crackpot stuff up! I bet they blame 9-11 on Bush, too.
Actually no, it was at Harvard. But I'm sure you knew that already.
I don't doubt that there are various things that need to be brought to light about Intel's employment policies, but WHY if that site has such a VALID MESSAGE to promote and has ALL THE NECESSARY FACTS to back up their case do they need to resort to sensationalism and sub-high-school-newspaper journalism to get their point across? The whole site reads like a propaganda newletter, with links supposedly linking to relevant documentation just pointing at more sensationalist commentary, and their random emphasis and italicising of words reminds me of MAD magazine.
That site is going to hurt their cause more than help it.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
That site would be easier to take seriously if not for the hysterical and unprofessional ranting tone of its writing. Engineers should not write like yellow journalists.
That site makes Matt Drudge's style look restrained.
Because almost every media outlet in the USA takes money from Intel, at least indirectly. Who do you think funds most of the cost of all those computer ads that have "Intel Inside" and/or that anoying sound in them? That's right, Intel.
No, but all the MBAs I've encountered seem convinced that, if they just had the time away from their oh-so-important duties, they could jump right into the lab and show the engineers how to make things hum. On the other hand, I don't know many engineers that feel particularly comfortable operating outside their own areas of expertise, and generally eschew business matters on principle as, well ... uninteresting.
... I'd be inclined to believe that the average engineer is a damn sight brighter than your average MBA. Certainly a lot more useful.
The sad truth is, my friend, that the continued viability of what is left of the American technical and manufacturing sector is far more at risk from the ongoing loss of all kinds of engineering, scientific and technical talent, that it is from a lack of administration. One might easily argue that the poor job prospects of engineers in today's marketplace are directly due to MBAs who've shown little compassion towards their fellow Americans, and no understanding whatsoever of the long-term consequences of their actions. So, yeah
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
He actually started the scheduling for his pre-retirement interview 12 years ago.
What's the criticism?
Should Intel fire their best employees rather than their worst? Should they keep people who can easily be replaced by better people? Should they keep paying people when they don't have work for them to do?
The following quote just tells me how hard CEOs must work:
A: We have very high standards for our performance at Intel, for a variety of reasons. The memo was in reference to our performance and (said) that we could improve our performance and we should improve our performance.
while working for Scorpio:
Homer(to some geeks):"Are you guys working?"
Geeks:"Yes sir."
Homer:"Can you work harder?"
Oy, and he wonders why Americans don't want to become engineers anymore.....
Monstar L
it hardly goes in deep to any of the subjects.
when you read it, what's left is that the guy is a big fan of tests(exams) to put people in a nice order(from best to worst) and that he would have chosen forestry if it had been available in stanford.
*** Balance your personal life with your professional life, but do both at 200 miles an hour.
Q: What do you play hard at?
A: I play hard at outdoor activities. My wife and I own a ranch in Montana, which we get to as often as we can. When I was a little kid, I always wanted to be a forest ranger, but I went to Stanford and they don't have a school in forestry, so I became an engineer. But I've always had this passion to be a forest ranger, so now I have a ranch in Montana, and I'm my own forest ranger.
****
there's a golden nugget of insight right there, when you're growing a forest DO IT AT 200 MPH! damn is he gonna be disappointed after planting those trees and watching them grow at abit less than 200mph for a long time..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I'm sorry, what's your point? Your post doesn't even seem to follow on from mine ...
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
At my University, the Business department refers the Engineering department as "Pre-Business". If you look at the students in business a lot of them started out as engineering students and then got burned out and switched to business because it was easier (and the fact that the department tried to schedual classes so there were no Friday classes didn't hurt much either).
I think the whole business department is creating a really bad feedback loop. You have a lot of (poor) students graduating in business who get jobs and are usually in administrative positions. Since they usually aren't very bright/hard working (in my experience) they either make things worse or more inefficient, putting more red tape and levels of burracracy, thus creating a need for yet more business majors. That is why business departments are usually some of the largest on campus and why businesses, especially large ones, are so huge and convoluted. Until business because as hard as engineering, the loop will continue. That's my opinion at least.
Space for rent, inquire within
Ah, but you see, you don't need enginners or MBAs
if you can just slap around anyone who disagrees
with you. Or drop a big bomb on them.
So that's $35 billion for agriculture, $5 billion
for R&D and $350 billion for "the hammer".
1. They call Intel "dastardly". I tend to not
trust adults who talk like dungeon masters.
2. Any company with tens of thousands of employees
will have a "string of suicides" going at any
given time. Suicide is common.
I'm probably not the only Intel employee that won't be missing Craig. Hopefully Paul Otelleni can make less bad choices over the next decade.
I was about to post exactly the same thing. Oh, and another tip: if you actually want to convince people of anything, you need to actually say what the fucking point of the website is in a clear, easy to find place. I hunted around the website for a while and now know its former name, the location of the plant, the fact that it includes practically anybody (churches etc), but still have little idea of what they hope to achieve. For instance, they state "Our group members have been targeted, wrongfully terminated or have been forced out through Intel's ill employment practices.". Now, presumably the wrongful termination has been addressed by the courts, so where's the problem? Or, on the flipside, it hasn't been found to be true by the courts, so it's just libel.
And the complexity is passed to the compiler and application developer, so I wonder what they did so it is "complex".
I encountered this jaw-dropper from the interview:
"How much does the United States invest annually in basic R&D in physical sciences? About $5 billion."
Huh? Anyone know any different? Or is this A-1 confirmable fact? I call shenanigans, so I will go look...
google found me this reference back to 2002, where the figure is stated to be 100 billion.
Is this dude talking out his nether regions, using his "exalted" CEO royal intellectual poohbah position going up against a lowly journalist, just to buffalo him? Or d'ya think he believes his 5 billion figure?
Maybe it's a good idea he's being forced to retire..... Or maybe something terrible happened between 2002 and now, just don't know, but 5 billion just seemed incredibly low ball. I mean, that seems the buidget for maybe just one firm, like IBM perhaps. Or is this apples/oranges? What is considered "hard" science research?
And his views on outsourcing and what it means job wise for US middle class folks... popuh leeze, here's a guy talking about his multiple homes, his 12,000 acre + sized "ranch", his private corporate airline, etc, and he's qualified to *relate* to joe worker, even if joe worker is an engineer?
Sounds like these millionaire politicians who "feel your pain" when they are talking it up at some diner for the TV cameras. Just "regular guys", aw shucks and stuff...
Joe sixpack white collar with a calculator and a PC loses his job to some guy who has to come up with 35$ (whatever, low ball for example) a month rent. Uh huh, he's supposed to "compete" wage wise with that inside the US. uh huh. Yep, that's gonna be just *spiffy* for the economy.
We got rid of buggywhip jobs when most folks switched from carriages and horses. What we are getting rid of now are *not* buggywhip jobs. That's the big difference between what happened with the industrial revolution and this scam they push called "globalization". I certainly didn't see Mr. Barret outsourcing HIS job for 1/2 price or less so his corporation could save money and make profits for the investors. And funny, I don't see any news reports of any other CEOs doing that either. Why is that? Oh ya, THEY like THEIR jobs, don't they?
Big famous rich dudes talking up globalization is an example of "do as we say, not as we do".
Hypocrites
Re: outsourcing
He says:
>There are four things you can do in the United
>States to be competitive, and none of them is
>easy. The education system is first and foremost.
>You need to fix
Uh.. The Indians and Chinese are sending their best and brightest university students here all the time to be in our "inferior" school system.
Yet, we are still deep to our eyeballs in unemployed software engineers from coast to coast of the USA, including many who are top class, work(ed) hard, and graduated with top grades from very good universities.
There are lots of problems with the effectiveness of doing software engineering in the USA today, but the education system isn't one of them.
(the real issue is cost differences with the third world, something which isn't likely to sort itself out at all within the career lifespans of any of today's newgrads..)
The company where I work now outsources almost all software work to Asia, India..etc, thousands of jobs that US new grads would have gotten before..
and those projects are succeeding.. which means that those jobs are never coming back.. (and we aren't hiring newgrad software people anymore either..)
Software engineering has absolutely no future in the USA, better to find something else to study in school or do when you graduate..)
Yes it sucks... welcome to the new world order..yeaay globalization..
Craig you were never more than a "More of the same thing too" guy. You were never more than a "Whatever you say Mr. Bill, you da Man!" guy. You were never more than the mouthpiece for your institutional investors.
Face it Craig. You were always bush league. You're not qualified to carry Andy's Volt Ohm Meter.
Worse than reading the tripe within this article is having to work within it.
I wish I could live long enough to see the reverberations when a CEO is outsourced. Craig or Carly (Fiorina) would be damn good start.
One of my first months there came with a warning from a lady - "Don't let them do to you what they've done to so many others." and "There was a guy I knew who committed suicide last week." I didn't believe her.
After a number of years there, it was obvious that Intel does it's best to isolate each and every person in a grueling deathmatch against everyone else, all in the name of productivity - all while spouting "teamwork" principles.
They'll reward high achieving individuals, but it's extremely hard for anybody who wants a life outside of work - and there have been a large number of ruined families because of it.
Good riddance.
i heartily agree.
at my uni, we engineers generally consider sacrificing your soul and 20 IQ points as entrance requirements to the school of management.
filter: +3. Hey, look! all the trolls went away!
Just as the young men were sacrificed on the altar of patriotism in every bogus, cooked-up war in history, courtesy of munitions manufacturers in early wars, now they are sacrificed on the altar of labor market manipulations, courtesy of multinational corporations....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
The world's economy in the last 10 years has opened up, and you've had a seminal event, of half the world's population joining the world's free economic system almost overnight, in the 1990s.
I disagree with this assessment. I think that it is more correct to say that, in the past 10 years, U.S. businessmen discovered that there already was a whole bunch of other worthwhile countries and economies outside their own.
I don't intend this in a mean way at all -- what I'm suggesting is that many Americans tend to be rather U.S.A.-centric; that is, viewing themselves (in business as with many other facets of life) as the center of the universe. There has been an awakening, of sorts, to the U.S.'s perception of other countries and economies over the past 5-10 years, and I think that's very promising.
I would even dare to say that outsourcing isn't a bad thing at all -- it strengthens competition, and further opens up a global basis for trade and exchange of people. That there is some backlash among Americans to the whole concept of outsourcing, I find somewhat funny -- Canada, for example, has been dealing for years with what has been referred to as a "brain drain" (a loss of highly-skilled workers to better-paying U.S. companies). The solution? You accept it, try to become more competitive, offer different incentives, suck it up, and get on with trying to excel in life.
It will be interesting to follow which countries can adapt early to the fact that China, Japan, and India will become even greater economic powerhouses over the next decade or two. (I feel that this will be due, in part, to rising inflation and debt in the U.S., which will put pressures on the U.S. economy and dollar. Rough times will be ahead for American -- and by extension, Canadian -- investors, I feel.)
Unfortunately, you picked a wrong example for someone being non-smug. That comment by Newton is apparantly a paraphrasing of Didacus Stella who said that "Pigmies placed on the shoulders of giants see more than the giants themselves". Newton wrote his version as part of an argument with Robert Hooke, who had criticized some of Newtons ideas. It is generally considered to be the case that Newton was making fun of Hookes height, since Hooke was quite short. Newton, it seems, was a very smug and concieted individual. For example, he was known to have congratulated himself for his "victory" over Leibniz in being considered the originator of Calculus.
America is doomed with more and more useless 'engineering is an art' and neo-socialists comming from the slashdot-reader-template factory. Soon this minority will become the majority, then who will you blame for you're faults?
Or will your cinicism turn on yourselfs? Will you burn down your own institutions?
the article's basically a typical CEO interview. A lot of "I'm the pioneer; I'm God" type of arrogance that you often see in any typical EE Times interviews. Basically he's just using "outsourcing", which sounds negative, into "[is just our way of expansion because we're starting to have higher demand of our products overseas, and we need our man power there to do production and support]". It's just another way of him to say that his company's products are doing well and because [they're "customer oriented"] (damn I hate these stupid business-type buzzwords) they need to have the man-power there to provide the support of their (uhh.. again) "solutions".
Well I see he's a pretty good speaker... in turning something negative and make it seem positive, but in the end it's the company that benifits, not us, the north-american engineers.
For the record, I'm working my ass off in my Masters EE program (takes longer to finish in Canadian schools than US,) and I really hope I'll be able to find some decent employment when I finish within this academic year... Unless I can find full-time employment in my field, I wouldn't want to do a PhD. fulltime.
my blog
Ken Hamidi is a crank. He got fired years ago by Intel, and has been on a tirade against them ever since. I've heard that even his attorney has told him that he needs serious help. There are many things wrong with Intel, but Hamidi doesn't really hit them on the head.
For the uninformed
ironic
I note that Intel grades its employees on a bell curve
true
each quarter
false
Any employee who falls in the bottom 25% for two consecutive quarters "qualifies" to be fired
false
During an economic recession, the employee is automatically fired. When there is a labor shortage, the employee is given a stern warning.
false
My information comes from a managing director at Intel
no such title