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."

Comments

Dishonest

[Raul654]

"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)

Re:Dishonest

[Epistax]

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.

Re:Dishonest

[the eric conspiracy]

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.

Intel's Performance

[Jazzer_Techie]

"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?

Smugness . . .

[StateOfTheUnion]

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 . . .

That's right, Craig,

[melted]

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".

F.A.C.E. Intel

[reporter]

Too bad, the interviewer did not ask him about the suicides of employees at Intel. The F.A.C.E. Intel web site gives the relevant information about the grueling conditions of employment at a sweatshop.

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 would have liked to have seen some Itanium q's

[grasshoppa]

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 ).

excellent?

[gl4ss]

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..

Where did he get this nugget?

[zogger]

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:I CALL BULLSHIT

[DeepHurtn!]

Uh.. The Indians and Chinese are sending their best and brightest university students here all the time to be in our "inferior" school system.

That's not entirely true, at least in India's case -- the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are amongst the most well-respected technical universities in the world.