Slashdot Mirror
Intel To Lay Off 1000 Managers
sprash writes to mention a Forbes article about an Intel cost-cutting measure. In response to stiff competition from AMD, the company is laying off 1000 managerial positions. From the article: "In April, Intel reported a 38 percent drop in first-quarter profit as demand slackened for PCs and microprocessors from AMD continued to steal market share. That same month, Chief Executive Paul Otellini vowed to spend the next 90 days identifying underperforming business groups and cost inefficiencies in an effort to save the company $1 billion a year. He said he planned to make changes as his analysis progressed, rather than waiting until the end of his review."
In my experience it's middle-managers who go first, then after consolidating groups and departments, headcount follows. If this is 1% of Intel's workforce then there's likely 5% or more to follow, which would be 5,000 or more when the next boot hits the Linoleum.
It's inevitable when a business loses a significant amount of market share and only the most ignorant Intel employee wouldn't see this coming. I wish them luck. This is probably more a move to maintain profitability and stock value (got to convince those anaylists on Wall Street you're minding your P's and Q's) than "streamlining for growth", which is exactly what you hear when they are doing major houseclearing no matter whether the house is merely smoldering or engulfed in flames.
The pity is those most responsible rarely are held to account for keeping a business trundling along only to be blindsided something some from the inside saw coming, but weren't taken very seriously (Yamhill). Intel may pare their losses, but they'll never enjoy 90% market dominance again.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I Am Not An Intel Manager. But I do work there. I can say that there are way too many managers and that this action is required :-)
I can not count the number of managers that have two or three people reporting to them. There are^H^H^Hwere managers who have never worked in the field they manage. I say that before becoming a manager you should have years of experience doing the things that the people you manage do.
Paul Ottelini rocks!
Please put the link to your stupid site in your .sig so we don't have to read it fifty times a day.
So, sales are weak and costs need to be cut. This Friday, though, Intel is going to announce their new 'Conroe' desktop chip when the NDAs expire. We've already seen from the hype and benchmarks of the pre-shipping chips that Conroe is going to be a very good chip that will put Intel back in the driver's seat so why do the 1,000 have to go only two days before Conroe appears? Couldn't Intel just hang on for a few more weeks until the Conroe sales take off? Maybe then they wouldn't even need to dump the 1,000 managers.
No ... that could very well also be a "politically correct" way of saying, "I'm well aware that some of our management are worthless sponges, sucking up a paycheck while adding zero value to the company. I plan on kicking these people out as soon as I can, while looking at the rest of the bunch to see who else needs to stay, and who needs to go."
My manager was just laid off (I'm a blue badge).
It's not that he is incompetent, just redundant. I have meetings with his boss at least monthly, and so do the other engineers and managers on my team.
If someone is necessary, they will not fire them. This guy was smart, but useless in his position. He would be equally useless elsewhere, because his technical skills were replaced with corporate management BS - and he's only a 2nd-level manager.
Intel will be weird for the next 3-6 months.
And Intel tends to do layoffs in waves. So, instead of just laying off everybody they're going to all at once, they'll get rid of loads of contractors first, then middle-management, then two or three passes through regular employees. So, whenever they have a layoff, everyone there knows to expect another soon.
When I worked for Intel, I updated my resume after the first couple of rounds, just to be ready. Since I had gone through all the trouble of updating it, I went ahead and posted it to a couple of job sites. Recruiters found it, and found me a much better job. So I left. It was probably about 50/50 whether I would have kept my job there if I hadn't.
And, yeah, this wasn't a surprise. I've got a few friends who still work for Intel, and they've mentioned hearing rumours of an upcoming VSP for a couple of months now.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
I've always felt that especially in fields like engineering and computer support or application development, you can get by with very minimal management if you make it a point to try to hire people who are comfortable/capable working with little direction.
I tend to agree with you, but I've definitely seen it fail. I work in government (NASA), and with a pretty crappy budget situation in the 90's, the ratio of engineers/management in an org I used to work for slowly creeped up. The engineers were producing stuff and knew their jobs, so losing them in the short term hurt, but it was easy to consolidate their management.
That is, until a year or two went by. Lower management had so many employees they'd barely know what they were doing. Those engineers were very smart people and kept busy doing brilliant work, but often it was on things that, in the big picture, wasn't something we should have been expending labor on.
Other departments sapped our labor, by asking individuals (instead of their management) if they could "give us some help with this". A few hours here, a few days there, pretty soon we can't map our budget to what we are actually producing but yet everyone seems overworked because of the "extras" that should have been tasked through a request of their management.
Worse yet, it caused a lot of things that need to get done for long term health of an organization to fall by the wayside, like training, career development, and succession planning. Bob the engineer may prefer to work on his new gadget, and could care less that if he were hit by a bus the following morning there's nobody around to support that critical piece of software. He never trained a backup.
Or the hot new engineer that is a workaholic. Sometimes people actually need to be told to go home/take a vacation, lest they burn themselves out in a couple of years (often causing them to quit or transforming them into a bitter employee).
Anyways, it's pretty easy to find management needless because of the bad ones, but good management will always leverage their employees into producing more and being happy while they do it.
Worst...sig...ever!
I think there are way too many engineers or manager that dont make the cut. I know a lot of graduates in CS who have made to the positions/internships at Intel just because there spouse/brother works there. With there struggling education averages and no specific skills or merits, I was suprised they still made it. Seems like internal contacts are more important at Intel than educational merits, experience or skills. I will not be suprised to see more inefficient people being layed-off as cost-cutting measure.
That's a great theory. It usually works the other way: a company opens up to compete against the monopolist, the monopolist buys them out, and the principals turn right around and start another competing company. Happened to Rockefeller's Standard Oil many times. One guy sold three refineries in a row to him.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
This is how Intel got to this point to begin with. If I remember correctly, there was a big purge of experienced designers after the P3 came out, when it came time for the P4 (Prescott) they didn't have enough folks who could work from a clean sheet of paper. They got by on superior fab until the P4M showed up from a non-decimated division. On the other hand AMD went on a hiring binge for good processor designers and has had the upper hand ever since.
I know *exactly* what you mean... No word for Intel or against AMD goes unpunished in
In my experience, AMD is much worse than Intel, because their marketing is so dishonest. They had a marketing campaign for several years based on the meme that "clock speed doesn't matter" and labelled their products in an entirely misleading way. I have a notebook (HP/Compaq NX9005) with an AMD "2200+" CPU, so named to give an impression that it's faster than a Pentium 2.2 GHz. Well, this CPU runs at 1.7 GHz and doesn't have SSE2 instructions, for number crunching it's less than *half* as fast as a Pentium 2.2 GHz. I don't care how fast does integer operations, since anything over 100 MHz or so will be enough for that, but for tasks like encoding videos that CPU really sucks. If AMD had any respect for the consumers they would call it an "Athlon 1100--".
I used to be brand-neutral about CPUs before, but having an AMD "2200+" notebook and an Intel 2.4 GHz at the same time made me a rabid Intel fanboy.
Perhaps they were getting $100,000 in salary and making $900,000 worth of bad decisions a year. That would certainly be a good reason to throw them overboard.
Douglas P. Price
So if layoffs end up scaring off all the great employees, how should a company get rid of its worst employees? I only ask this as idle speculation.
By and large, I don't think it's possible to really purge an organization of the worst people (apart from the tautology that there always are "worst people" no matter how good everyone is). I strongly suspect that there's a deeper dynamic going on that makes them as neccesarily present as the inevitable few stars.
No matter what kind of performance review or ability measure you apply, most of the "worst people" (assuming actual substandard performers, not grading on a curve) will pass anyway. Remember, these people came through the hiring process intact; a review and examination rather more thourough than any summary performance report while at work. And after they've been at work for some time, they have contacts, friends, nowledge of the internal process and so on that makes it even more difficult to find and target them (to the exclusion of the people you want to keep).
And this of course leads into the essential deficiency of performance reviews: do they actually measure what you're after? The actual individual output of lines of code or whatever really isn't what the company is all about after all. If you focus too myopically you risk microoptimizing your employees to the detriment of the organization as a whole.
For example, some of the bad performers that pass anyway do so because they're likeable, have a wide net of contacts, keep up with the office gossip, maybe party animals always ready to suggest a department out on the town. Those people are in reality doing a hugely important job (without being aware of it). They are providing a lot of the social grease necessary to have the department work reasonably wel despite plenty of strong-willed, socially clumsy (but excellent) workers. Get rid of them, and you'll see a productivity decrease among the other staff instead; and probably one that more than offsets what you gained. Not until another amiable screwup is transferred to the office will productivity go up again.
Performance reviews really should probably be at a departmental, not an individual, level, and largely ignore individuals. And with a team performing at a substandard level (and after you've ascertained it's not because of the nature of the projects they're involved in), you should probably focus on finding the group dynamic reasons for it and look for ways to improve it, either by transfer in (or out) people, or in extreme cases to split the group and integrate the members in other groups instead. Note that the head of the group or depratment too is a member and does not have sole responsibility (though of course more individual responsibility than the other members).
And the real disastrous employees, well, don't worry about them; you don't need reviews to find them, and rarely an excuse to get rid of them. Just wait until the police, fire department or the CDC has identified the idiot who caused the whole mess and get rid of them.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.