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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!
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.
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
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.