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Intel to Lay Off Thousands
symbolset writes to say that "Intel is expecting to lay off 10% of their workforce in a move to become more competitive against rival AMD. From the article: 'The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker, having suffered several financially disappointing quarters, launched an internal analysis in April to find ways to increase its efficiency. [CEO Paul] Otellini is scheduled to announce the results of the analysis, including the layoff, on Tuesday after the stock market closes, sources familiar with the plans said. Intel has about 100,000 employees worldwide, so the cut could be as high as 10 percent of the company's staff.' Coverage also at The Register, internetnews.com, and more as it develops at Google News. Reuters has the number at up to 16,000."
I think Intel has more class than some other companies.
But this is still a huge number of people to get rid off. Don't they do these sort of checks all the time, on a department basis. This sound more like a simple reaction to we can't do anything better, so we will fire people. A bad solution to a problem if you ask me.
That lame dancing by the clowns in the aluminised bunny suits will not be missed. Hooray for competition, this clearly signals the end of the monopoly. Hopefully this trend will continue to the desktop OS (or more properly, Program Loading Environment with a bunch of device drivers) market.
I think Intel is going to make a comeback and crush AMD. Here is why I think that: Imagine a world where Apple is pushing more boxes then Dell and all of them have an Intel Chip inside. They are only hurting right now because of the tiff they had with MS over their new 64 bit design. Developers did not like it since it had a totally different instruction set. With all the trouble with their new chips MS decided to put their full force behind AMD, and Intel suffered. It is too bad that such a large number of people are going to be out of work now :(
I am sure the top echelon of Intel will take massive pay cuts also...yea right...they will get multimillion bonuses for firing so many people.
Windows Admin Tools
Middle management is a great waste of skin. Plus they often take a fairly large salary while not generating revenue or a product.
1. Get with direct link interconnects, FSB is teh stupid :-)
2. Stop making a new core every other Tuesday, m'kay?
3. 4MB of cache is nice, but it has to be hella expensive right? [*]
4. Merge with Nvidia, totally mess up the PC scene, it'll be fun
[*] Don't look at the retail cost for the true margins they make [if any] on the cores. Selling at a loss or near loss is not a new tactic.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Quit Your Job Day, Sept 18th.
The goal of Quit Your Job Day is to reverse the advantage perpetuated by an elitist class who profit from your actions without making any personal investment in you as an individual. If you don't know who profits from your hard work, I assure you that they care very little about you. You are just a line on a spreadsheet and if cutting your salary would make the column balance, you're fired.
http://www.quityourjobday.com/
...Intel's re-hired the Blue Man Group to perform at the goodbye party.
That's sooo Osama bin Laden.
They have been laying or selling off in their telecom chip business since June.
hope that all their employees check their email today!
Tuesday evening, Intel lays off 10,000 employees. Wednesday 7:00am, AMD gains 10,000 new employees. And to the guy that said Intel will beat down AMD. Ya right. AMD has been gaining a lot of ground for years. They have acheived so much with so little. I have only bought AMD for the past seven years not because its AMD, but for price vs performance. I had to build three machines for a local business this week and I ended up going with AMD because of price. The performance is there, there is no doubt about it. But Intel cost more overall. Why pay more for the same performance. AMD isn't going anywhere and neither is Intel. Its called competition and its what drives the two companies forward instead of idleing and not making new products.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
Back in my day, we remained competitive by building a superior product at an affordable price, up-hill both ways!
/get off my lawn
"People should be allowed to keep midgets as pets."
- Gov. Jesse Ventura
Argh! For my lab, we just bought a dozen opteron-based computers. I feel guilty.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
This probably is not the simplistic knee jerk reaction that you describe. I'm sure that any of us could identify a lot of redundancy or simple non-performance in any organization of 100,000 people. If you were running an organization with redundancy and dead wood and you were faced with competition from AMD then what would you do?
What do they think those 10% of people (i.e. lots) are gonna do? Smile, take it in the rump, and bid them good day? A bunch of them are gonna end up working for AMD, and I'm sure they'll be happy to have people with experience at Intel. Non-compete clauses don't last forever.
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
Bastards. This is just a maneuver so they can say "But we're firing people right now, not hiring!" when I ask them why on Earth they didn't contact me for an interview in spite of my qualifications, experience and genius.
"We're laying people off to be more competitive!"
By this logic, wouldn't firing *everyone* make you the most productive?
Seriously, though...it's all a show for The Street anyways. They fire a bunch of people to keep the stockholders happy, then when things looks rosy again they quietly hire up again. When was the last time you saw "[Insert big company here] hires 10,000 over last 2 quarters" plastered all over the news?
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
We're just a cog in the machine and our contributions are not worth that much - as an individual. The elitists make their money because they know how to take all of us low-value cogs and turn us into a high value machine. That's why they are where they are. And I hope to join them.
What you suggeested is a nice fantacy, but I'll take my porn anyday!
Read this book for a better explanation ;-)
Say %10 of 100.000 ..
I predict 10.000 less chips sold by INTEL ..
that which does not kill me makes me stranger
I have a neighbor who works at the Intel office here in the Silicon Valley and she's known for quite a while that these were in the works. IIRC, she was talking about this back in April or May.
One thing that I've always thought about company layoff planning is that there's a difficult choice to be made over when to notify employees that a layoff is in the works. Too little notice and people feel like they're being dumped without warning, too much and you have a long period of tension and a lot of people slacking off because they know that they're headed for the unemployment line.
When I worked for a division of a major company that was planning layoffs, we all knew in June that the offices in California were going to be closed by the end of the year, and offical notice came in October. The company did something that I considered a stand-up thing: they told us who was going (in October) and gave us official permission for the rest of the year to look for work using company resources. It was cool for them to give us that much notice (though because of the slow market at the time, it was hard to find work even with such a long lead time). However, a lot of employees (including ones who really were supposed to be doing something else) spent the time building houses of cards out of their company business cards, driving remote-controlled cars around the cubes, and generally goofing off.
Again, it was a cool thing for the company to do (and I am aware that there are financial incentives for getting your employees hired off before closing an office--but I don't think those offset the cost of paying them salary for three months) but I can see that there are employers who couldn't afford to do that.
Here's hoping all the folks getting pink slips at Intel can find something else to do as quickly as they'd like.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
I don't see why laying off people would make them more competitive against AMD. Sure, their HR department will have less work afterwards, but they're not the ones who will make Intel more competitive.
This is just to make the actions go up and make the investors richer, but it won't make them more competitive to AMD, and more attractive to customers.
My compassion will to the laid off employees, and my money will go to AMD when I'll buy a new chip.
But keep in mind that back in your day, globalization wasn't as significant as it is now. Your domestic manufacturers didn't have to compete with foreign firms in places like China, India, Taiwan, and Thailand.
Today, your manufacturers have no choice but to reduce the quality of their products in order to stay price-competitive with those foreign manufacturers. Or they can get those foreign manufacturers to produce the product for them, often resulting in a severe quality drop anyway. So in order to keep the price affordable, there is going to likely be a drop in quality. The days of producing quality, reliable, affordable consumer goods are over. All we will get today is shitty, breakable, low-quality, affordable consumer products.
OWNED!
1 in 10? Why, they'll be decimated!
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
They probably didn't up and say "Hey engineers, nice job on the Conroe core. We don't need you any more, good luck in the future!"
Intel has a hand in a lot of IC markets, not just CPU's. There has to be some needless redundancy in managing these (ie, a manager for widget A line and a separate manager for widget B line -- are they both necessary?). While these are good strategies when you set out, these lines may integrate well with the core management structure. That means job cuts, but the talented folks are often kept. Let's face it, with 100k employees, there's going to be some below average performers.
Older Americans will be the hardest hit by the layoffs.
1> Americans they are more expensive
2> they are older
but some also have more knowledge than thoses that are younger or in other countries
Seriously, where are the good paying jobs going to come from in the next 50-100 years in the US? Assuming not everyone will come up with a brilliant idea to make them rich. Globalization isn't necessarily a bad thing but I would like to see the results of an economic simulation where an entire coutry, like say the US, wraps itself in isolationist economic and trade policies, and see what happens.
Back in '00 or '01 Intel bought the DEC Alpha group that was a step in the right direction. But from reading the INQ it seems that most of their projects were canceled and by now most of the top Alpha architects have quit.
So let me get this right: the plan was to wait until after the stock market closed Tuesday, then announce, so people don't run around dumping stock like headless chickens?
And The Reg, Reuters and Slashdot have got it now?
I love it when a plan comes toge... oh. Ah. Well, errrmmm.... if you work for Intel, have a GREAT weekend, and if you own shares, well, you've only got some 20+ hours trading to go before the announcement, so take your time...
Like middle management I just made a decision that impacts others. I, like middle management, must be safe because my job is to get the orders of my boss and pass them onto people who justify my position.
Just junk food for thought...
Sounds like the Bob's came in and did a sweep.
when come back bring pie
So I wonder how many of those staff are going to be engineers and then how many of them will then make their way to rival companies. Sure they're not going to fire they're really good workers but there must have been a reason that they hired them in the first place. And the staff laid off I'm guessing won't be too happy about it so wouldn't really mind that much about passing on any insider knowledge that they might have.
This maybe purely hearsay but i've heard that some of the ppl being laid off were given an option of relocating to an offshore intel group (india/malaysia/israel) where the remuneration in US$ is much less - this way they get to keep the people in, and cut back on the budget as well. the wonders(curse?) of globalization!
My sig has been answered.
before posting these emotional tirades? If you read the article before posting, you will see that a lot of the people being laid off are from marketing. Intel's sales fell significantly, so at the very least marketing didn't do their job and thus are really redundant. So it makes perfect sense to get rid of them, and it wasn't just done to make some fat cats on The Street.
Monstar L
the answer is, healthcare, biology, nanotech, security and disaster recovery, alternative energy and energy storage, mass transit, ubiquitous networking and communication, hedge funds, supply chain and distribution logistics, and probably not a few other fields I missed.
No need for a simulation. This isolationist approach was in fact tried in the late 1920s in the US. The economic outcome is commonly known as "The Great Depression". If this is not convincing, try the following thought experiment: what can be purchased in the US that does not have significant non-US content (hint: even agricultural products grown in the US depend on non-US imports, e.g., oil for fuel and fertilizer).
Countries taking this approach today either voluntarily or involuntarily (e.g., North Korea, Myanmar) are not on most people's lists of great places to live. Of course, opinions may differ.
Here tis: http://malfy.org/
I think Intel has more class than some other companies.
Despite your optimism, I was spot on with my prediction.
Many other companies in the past, including one I worked for, begin by slashing managers. Then they consolidate operations under a new management structure and then the big cut happens as the attempt to eliminate "redundant" operations and employees. This is a tricky thing to do because sometimes they cut out keystone employees which are their real foundation and founder a bit. Expect another round in about a year, after Intel senior management have reviewed how things are going.
The disruption will mean Intel will struggle with overcoming internal reshuffling, which is to AMD's advantage.
On a more cynical note, It's worth remembering that a shrinking company is more profitable, in the short term. Ever notice how stock initially goes up when these moves are made?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Strikes me now that Intel finally has a decent product in the marketplace again, they're cutting back on R&D since they're 'in the game' once again.
They are shaving off MARKETING STAFF. Bwahahah! Yes indeed, leave your victim complexes at the door.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Meanwhile, Intel is telling Congress there is a "skills shortage" so they need more H-1B visas.
The new bill they want Congress to pass includes an automatic escalator clause that will increase the H-1B visa limit 20% per year there-after (year's limit is hit) without your representative having to cast a vote on this politically sensitive issue.
If Intel needs more H-1B visas then why are they laying off up to 16,000 employees? How can Intel be experiencing a "skills shortage" when they intend to layoff up to 10% of their workforce?
Why would AMD want to employ the WORST of their competitor's cast offs, who's best could not top them in product design?
The writer of a LOT of truly superb Linux Weekly News articles on how the kernel works is Valerie Henson. Valerie works at Intel. This means that there's a 10% chance a corporation doing heavy, front-line R&D in Linux will have a chance to hire a brilliant mind. (Unfortunately, the place I work is two states away, so there's no hope here.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I have been to this job fair out of curiosity a month ago, and intel was one of the biggest recruiters there, looking the most professional, with trained HR personnel making quick stand-up interviews.....
Intel, as far as I know is not laying anyone off here, in fact they are hiring as crazy.
but also consider this : with an IT degree as an engineer you make $1500-2000 as a starter at a big firm (most leikely below that), while a CS representative's salary is around $800-1200 or less at most places...
This is monthly, before you wonder and yes, you make an OK living on that.
Now the article probably should have said: Intel joins the other us companies, who want to hire well-educated foreigners, 4 for the price of 1.
Maybe not that off-topic: I think CR and Panama is getting popular because of the physical distance to the US. I mean try to fly to India to manage your company, or give training, a few time a month.
just my observaion.....
OHH btw: I just heard, that many ar criticising Intel, because they are responsible for water levels being 20% lower than usual, and it seems that the government does not care. But that is just people talknig, I am not claiming any of these to be true......
They are firing 16,000 "skill-short" employees.
In every company I've seen, the top 10% employees seem to contribute 80% of the useful work; and the bottom 10% seem to contribute negative value - and the only business reason to keep them around is for the moral of the top-10% guys.
If Intel axed the right ones, this could be a great thing for them.
Especially if those guys go get jobs at AMD.
OTOH, if they axed the wrong ones (top 10%, and friends of the top 10%) this could be the end of Intel.
Especially if those guys go get jobs at AMD.
I know more than one person who was laid off from Intel. Worst one: A friend was on business in Hong Kong, with one other employee. They were fired *while* in Hong Kong. The company actually tried to not pay their return travel (!)
This turns out to be legal (!)
I know some former Intel employees who were set to work on a project, and unknown to them, the project managers *also* put another team on the same project, and when they were determined to be making better progress, the whole other team was canned.
There's a whole culture at that company of aggressive, cutthroat competition among the business units. Basically, the theme is "screw your neighbor."
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
What Intel is at heart, and will be for some time, is the world's best high-volume manufacturer of semiconductors, something that requires a far, far lower load of white-collar workers than being a broad-ranging technology company. Intel will continue to be a great producer of an important product, but only in the sense that (e.g.) US Steel was once a great producer of an important product. Intel is on the path to irrelevance as a technology force. This is why its P/E is 17x and not, for example, Google's 55x or even Microsoft's 21x. Look for it to trend upward in the short-term, but in the longer term settle toward US Steel's 8x.
Also note that recent management changes have elevated Sean Maloney into an heir-apparent position. This signals the fin de siecle, completing the transition from an engineer/scientist leader (Andy Grove) through a manufacturing guru (Barrett), to a bean-counter (Otellini), ending with a salesman (Maloney). How the mighty have fallen.
Link to your prediction, instead of just the story: Only the First Shoe to Drop.
That Slashdot story linked to a Forbes story about Intel laying off 1000 managerial positions. That was an admission that Intel has been badly managed in the past. Otherwise, how could they have 1,000 managers they don't need?
They don't need to fire thousands. They need to fire Intel CEO Paul Otellini. He has made Intel more adversarial toward its employees, and therefore less efficient. Intel employees spend a good part of their time and energy defending themselves rather than working.
Intel CEO Paul Otellini is AMD's most productive single employee, by far.
I'm sure its only a matter of time before the US taxpayers are told they need to send more money to Israel because these overseas operations in a semi-war zone are so vital to the USA. The only thing 'vital' going on in these Israeli operations would be inserting various 'back doors' that would be illegal, or at least able to be questioned in court, in the USA or other industialized, semi-transperant nation.
That was an admission that Intel has been badly managed in the past. Otherwise, how could they have 1,000 managers they don't need?
This is a typical Restructure. They slash middle-management first, then headcount.
Otellini will likely be ousted if the strategy backfires. They only way he will go is if he leaves voluntarily or the board sack him. The board will certainly be watching this drastic move.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This used to happen all the time back in the good old days. Now that industry is beginning to equilibrate after the bust, the cycles are shortening and it's back to the good old days of semiannual semiconductor boom-bust cycles.
Intel used to have every manager rank their employees in order, "on a curve" so to speak. This was done [quarterly, annually?] and was IMHO a fair way to force managers to evaluate their people objectively, which every manager ought to do anyway. I suppose one side beneft is that there was always a list at hand when it was time to sack N% of the workforce.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Alternative Energy/storage is about to make a MAJOR boom soon enough. Give it 10 years when we get indium-gallium-arsenide solar panels easy enough to make cheaply. As for storage, I'm of the opinion supercapacitors may be the way to go, with batteries as a stable backup source. Now as to what type of batteries, that remains to be seen.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The heartless cruelty of the bottom line No loyalty to families No honor for spent time No gold watch goodbyes All to save a dime Send them away empty and close the factories down No suits need to worry No American dreams rise Your jobs moved to Asia So that you can sell fries
You would much rather have the money back than have the company 'invest' it in something that is never going to pay off.
Sometimes companies need to know when they've pulled in more revenue than they can properly reinvest and just give it back to you.
paintball
Disclaimer: I am an actual engineer.
Middle-management is essential to getting my job done. I don't want to have to negotiate with the tool vendors on price or licenses. I don't want to have to evaluate how well people are performing. I don't want to have to find, interview, and hire new employees. I don't want to do the department budget, set the schedule, fight to get materials on time from vendors, etc, etc. And, most importantly, I don't want to have to explain what I'm doing to upper management.
Now, some managers are definitely useless, but so are some engineers. That's not a job-level problem, that's a people problem.
paintball
So are they going to pull a radio shack?
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
But at 65nm, the 4MB of cache on a Core 2 Duo is the same size as the 2MB of cache that was on a 90nm AMD X2 chip before they cut them (except the FX) down. Did you jump down AMD's throat then?
There's plenty of tradeoffs to be made here. I think it's ridiculous you think you know better than Intel how to best use transistors effectively. You have no knowledge of Intel's process, design rules or techniques.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Intel marketing is an example of Intel's unbelievably, extremely, amazingly bad management. The major problem is not to get rid of the time wasters in Intel marketing, the major problem is to get rid of the top management that let Intel marketing become the joke that it is.
Intel's board is obviously incompetent, and obviously not paying attention. The board let the stupidity happen.
Intel marketing is so disgusting that it is difficult to find words that are negative enough. Here is an example that paraphrases an actual Intel marketing email: "Jump through hoops and get an Intel BunnyPeople(TM) doll." Yes, hmmm, hmmm, ahem, Intel did lots of high-level research and analysis and determined that the people who make decisions about processors and motherboards also collect dolls! So, giving away dolls is an effective marketing tool! NOT!
Don't worry about the fact that the Intel web site is a mess, Intel markets processors with deliberate product confusion (What's an Intel 531 processor?), and Intel marketing people are the most dedicated work avoiders I've ever known.
Someone should step forward and say this about the Intel board of directors and CEO, and it might as well be me: Craig R. Barrett, Paul S. Otellini, Ambassador Charlene Barshefsky, E. John P. Brown, D. James Guzy, Reed E. Hundt, James D. Plummer, David S. Pottruck, Jane E. Shaw, John L. Thornton, David B. Yoffie, you are incompetent! You let Intel marketing become the waste of time and resources that it is!
Here a few of the qualifications of the board of directors, according to the Intel web site:
CEO Paul S. Otellini: Has an MBA. Can someone with no technical training run a high-technology company? No need to understand what you "manage", right?
Ambassador Charlene Barshefsky: On the board of directors of Estee Lauder, a company that manufactures makeup and therefore encourages women to live in a fantasy world. Maybe she has influenced Intel marketing to live in its fantasy world. "She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations", it says, and we all know the quality of the U.S. government's foreign relations.
Dr. Jane E. Shaw: Experienced in running pharmaceutical companies. Would such a person notice if a high-tech company's marketing is a joke? No.
David B. Yoffie: Professor of business administration. Would such a person notice if a high-tech company's marketing is a joke? Uhhh, what's a processor?
E. John P. Browne: Helps run BP, formerly British Petroleum. The company is apparently part of the reason for the Iraq war. The idea, apparently, was to invade the country with the second-highest proven reserves of oil in the world, and restrict the production so that the price of oil would go up. This also benefited Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, whose friends and family and business associates are heavily invested in oil and weapons. See the free Google video, Robert Newman's History of Oil. The U.S. taxpayer pays and pays and pays.
Reed E. Hundt: A lawyer.
David S. Pottruck: Knows the stock market. "In July of 2004, Mr. Pottruck resigned after a 20-year career having served as President, Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of the Charles Schwab Corporation." Does that prepare him to understand the needs of a very, very high-tech company?
Boards of directors usually do not have enough education, time, or interest in the companies they "direct" to do a good job. The entire board of director system is out of control. But Intel's board of directors is especially inappropriate.
From the Wikipedia entry:
"A rumor or rumour (see spelling differences) is a piece of purportedly true information that circulates without substantiating evidence. The information content/payload of rumors can range from simple gossip to advanced propaganda techniques."
Why bother discussing such a baseless rumour now? Wait until after Tuesday people...
The mass layoff law says that companies must give 60 days notice if there are more than 50 people laid off at a time at one site. This is so workers and communities could try to adapt.
:-(
This doesnt stop my company from having frequent layoffs of 40 or so
I read somewhere the auto repair companies were bemoaing a shortage of auto repair techs. This is something you cant offshore. Cars are becoming so computerized that techs need a high school diplpoma and more often some community college work.
"As a technology company, we've been losing our technical edge in the last two years. Whatever shall we do?"
"I know--let's fire people until we're profitable again!!!"
Look at who they're firing--the marketers. From the article, "Intel studies comparing its own staffing levels to competitors' concluded that the ratio of marketing personnel to salespeople was too large, the sources said."
I'm not saying that eliminating marketing people isn't the right thing to do, but what an assinine metric--the ratio of marketing to sales. At a certain size, do all companies forget that creating better products is often a good way of making sales?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=31 660
OK, this is getting old, but lets put out a few more details than are floating. Sales and marketing are getting gutted, a bitch slap to Eric Kim, should he be employed wednesday. Indian operations are getting hit, as are Intel Capital, Oregon (bits) and a few other sites.
The numbers that are floating are 15K (including cuts already done), 30K and 35K. The latter two seem to be layoffs plus people gone from divisional sales and closing, so all the numbers could be correct.
If you work for Intel, take heart in the word that is reaching me that they are really getting the right people, not those who do a good job. This isn't mass cuts for the sake of mass cuts, but it is a lot more targeted than you might suspect.
-Charlie
marketers live in this metric free world where they claim they are the lifeblood of the company an dall sales are due to their "branding."
time to bury that lie.
intel is swimming with marketers AND THER PRODUCT BECAME LESS COMPETITIVE.
could these marketing drones market their way out of this mess?
heck no!
the company rolled b/c the real power behind the "brand" wasn't competing.
think about that when the sociopath, errr, marketer, gives you his pitch about why he's so important... but can't be measured.
Throwing away one of your main assets, i.e. people, just doesn't seem to work.
Less people = less ideas and less work = less productivity and innovation = less competitive.
Intel has been on a bad path since abandoning faster CPUs. 4 GHz will always be faster than 2 CPUs at 2 GHz except for 100% paralizable problems (which are rare, and programming to take advantage of that is a real pain for the programmer and/or compiler writer - C is weak in this area).
I still like them better than AMD, because of compatibility and thermal issues (shutting down is better than burning up).
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
When Israel bombed power plants in the Gaza strip a few weeks ago to turn the lights out, the US taxpayers had to pay for the damage.
Why? Because the government had underwritten insurance for the generators that were bombed because it helped American companies make the sale.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Expect more like 4000-5000. (That's still a lot of people, and it will still be painful)
It seems standard practice is to leak a big number to get everyone emotionally prepared, and then only do half. They may also count in the number the employees who left with the division they sold.
To speak more directly to your comment, in many cases when companies are growing well (as Intel was), a lot of people end up staying that aren't that great.
--
You gotta think outside the box, or perhaps the cubicle...
it's all about the trades.
Carpentry, construction, unionized jobs for the states and federal governments, electricians, plumbers, roofers (roofers make BIG bucks), masonry, electronics repair, fixing musicial instruments, HVAC (another ridiculously lucrative field), structured wiring technicians, warehouse workers, shipping companies, trucking, etc etc etc...
pretty much all those jobs are involved with actually building stuff and putting stuff together, or doing the kind of work that most people simply do not know how to do, but which are absolutely vital to the core of a modern human society. many of them have techological aspects, but most of them aren't going to be behind a desk. And, they're not going away. No development in computers is going to make us not want heating and cooling in our houses and workplaces. Nothing to do with alternative energy is going to make us not want running water. And you can't outsource the guy who fixes your sink to India.
And with todays internet shopping culture, the people in warehouses and shipping companies must be doing record business.
America seems to have forgotten that the trades are absolutely vital and respectable jobs... it's sad, and it can lead to a decline in the fundamentals of a society.
so yeah, next time you're like "oh no, such and such computer development is going to put everyone out on the street with no job prospects ever again", just remember that there's a lot more to the job market than monster.com and help desk jobs!
ìì!
I have had a major problem recently with Intel. I can hardly believe it. I purchased two SC1420 Xeon servers from Dell to run Windows XP Professional 64-bit and Windows Server 2003 R2 64-bit. I am a software engineer and I know that different revs of the CPU chips have different features. I of course wanted to know exactly which CPU chips were in my machines. I think its only right that I should be able to find this out. I started with the Intel CPUID program which told me the Family, Stepping, and Revision numbers for the CPUs. That's where the trouble started. The CPUFinder web page at the Intel site has no reference for the stepping and revision repored by the CPUID utility. I emailed Intel technical support ten times with the CPUID numbers asking for clarification. Intel finally called me back and told me I should remove the CPU fan assembly and remove the thermal transfer material and read the sSpec number off the CPU chip. I didn't want to void my Dell service agreement, so I started asking Dell to tell me the sSpec number of the CPU chips that they ship in the SC1420 server systems. My sales person dumped me back to the Special Support Services desk who never returned any of my calls. I called Intel back, and they stated that it is up to the vendor whether they want to disclose what chip they are using in a system. I am royally pissed off at Intel and Dell and don't plan on buying either of their products any time soon. The whole situation in so unprofessional I can't stand it. The moral of this story is that Intel has so many versions of the Xeon chip that they cannot keep them straight, even on their technical support web site. I have always had the highest respect for Intel in the past and have used their chips since the 8085. But not any more. If they are going to lay of a major percentage of their employees, it can't happen soon enough to suit me. To bad they aren't going to start from the top down.
No doubt after laying of 10% of their workforce, Intel will continue to lament the lack of "qualified" CS and CEE candidates that have 10 years of experience in technologies that are 3 years old.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
I see this as the executives seeing the size of the pie they intend to steal on getting smaller. Best to get rid of product development who are impeding their stuffing their golden parachutes. What do they care about the future of the company. They will have retired to their gated communities by then.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
I have learned enough in economics to understand that layoffs are needed in relation to downturns in the area of business a company participates in. These days, however, it's seems to be used for other completely unrelated reasons.
I survived 2 layoffs at a company and voluntarily left on the 3rd (the severance I received was sufficient to keep my family supported until I found another position). They seemed to think that was the best solution to the problem.
Two things I noticed as a result of the layoff sequences:
1.) It never really addresses the problem. (In my opinion of course)
2.) They rehired back to the same quantity of people before the layoff on each occasion. They appear to be doing so again.
Top Level Management always refers to layoffs as a "hard" decision. While I am sure that some of the folks at the top of the corporate food chain, go through tremendous emotional stress, and for them it is, it isn't as hard decision unless it affects you as well. Layoffs are all about saving the corporation moeny, so if management had to take a salary cut in relation to the ratio of people that report to them that are being laid off, that would then be a much "harder" decision. It would also, require fewer people (sometimes substantially fewer) to be cut in order to meet the same monetary goals. Chances are, if you concern is your stock, it would look better to the stock market as well. (Anyone who comes home and brings information about salary cuts, is typically not going have a good day. My wife is awesome and very understanding and supported me when I left without having another job ready, but your own results will, most likely, vary).
If you get a bonus, stock options and praise for laying off people, it really doesn't seem to be all that hard. To quote You've Got Mail, "It's not personal, it's just business"=it's all about the money, not the people.
It's personal to every individual being given the pink slip. It should be personal to management as well. If you can't deal with that type of emotional stress, management might not be the place for you. That's why, at most companies, management salaries are higher and the VP+ salaries are 6-7+ figures. IT'S WHAT YOUR BEINGING PAID FOR. I don't begrudge those who have worked their way up, but when anyone as an employee is punished for doing exactly what you were told and even excelling there appears to be something wrong.
When management continues to receive bonuses during a quarter that the rest of the company doesn't due to poor performance, it's a bit upside-down. Management are the ones making the decisions about the direction of the company and directly affecting the financial outcome of the company. If anything the bonus delivery should be in reverse. If there's enough money to for bonuses for anyone, it should be given to those who succeeded in the goals they set for the year, and progrss from the bottom to the top of the food chain. For the people at the bottom, any bonus is substantial. This would also do wonders for the companies values you concept. (Kinda the opposite of the pink email concept)
Side note: For all I know this is actually happening at corporations, I'm just not aware of it. To those companies, this doesn't relate to you. This is simply something that wandered in when I was thinking one time.
Obviously all of the above is an opinion and may never have a bearing on reality.
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The above thoughts are capable of walking on their own, they appear the same way that code escapes. They did come from me, but not anyone I know. They are not affiliated to have come from any known corporation, abc entity, xyz state or lmnop country, Additional legalese, plausible deniability, etc. as needed ad infinitum. Ever read the manual for Haventree Software's Easy Flow package?
I do apologize if you take offense. In that case, in your opinion, fortunately this is not reality. :-)