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Pre-Retirement Interview With Intel CEO Barrett

Posted by timothy on from the getting-his-licks-in dept.

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."

4 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Dishonest by Raul654 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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
    1. Re:Dishonest by Epistax · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is a little bit off topic from what you said but it relates to Intel engineers vs managers. I had a 6-month internship at Intel and I plan on going back next summer. One thing I noticed was how unbusiness-like the managers were. It seems most of the people just decided to go up form being an engineer. Most engineers don't want to adopt a life of PowerPoint and endless (truly endless) meetings even if it does mean a raise. Those who do (and obviously also show promise) gradually move up the chain. Others stay as engineers. It's not like Intel doesn't pay the engineers well either-- if you work hard, you get rewarded big time.

      I don't know the atmosphere of their upper level management. The most I got to see was a talk with Fister (now CEO of Cadence). He was a senior VP at Intel, and is an electrical engineer (masters). Any business education he's had (I'm sure he's had some) wasn't mentioned in his bio. This suggests it might just be company classes. I think how someone becomes a higher ranking member of a company is completely different company to company, and from what I see I like how Intel does it.

    2. Re:Dishonest by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Intel is bringing in foreign workers because they're cheap and replacable, and why should a little thing like legality stop them?

      While that may be so, in reality it doesn't make that much difference. If H1-B loopholes were closed, a company with the global reach of Intel could easily move the work to one of it's offshore operations where it would only have to pay prevailing wages there.

      What is the solution? Near term I don't know of one. The only real hope is that the US economy has a good track history when it comes to adjusting to problems.

  2. Smugness . . . by StateOfTheUnion · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The other contributing feature is: We build the most complicated things that human beings have ever built. First of all, you can't see what you're building, and you're building a lot of them. You're building transistors you can't see, and the biggest transistor budget we have is a product that comes out next year called Montecito, from the Itanium processor family. It has 1.75 billion transistors in it.

    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 . . .