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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.
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.
They have been laying or selling off in their telecom chip business since June.
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?
"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.
No, anti-trust only kicks in if monopoly power is abused.
Anti-trust will not kick in simply because someone owns a large chunk of
the market.
*sigh* back to work...
>> The days of producing quality, reliable, affordable consumer goods are over.
Yeah. My pre-globalization, 1958 Edsel has far superior quality, reliability, and affordability compared to my post-globalization 2006 Honda Civic.
Special bonus question: Will step 5 ever execute?
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
If needed and done right, it's the way capitalism is supposed to work. If it's just a wall-street ploy and actually hurts other areas of their bottom line, well, poo on them.
why would people dump stock because of a layoff announcment? typically, this is seen as a way to spend less, which increases earnings per share. eps is what drives stock prices, not headcount. (fyi: intel is up ~0.9 - 1.0% on the day)
Wave upon wave of demented avengers March cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream
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.
Sure they're not going to fire they're really good workers
Actually, that may not be a good assumption. Often in engineering industries the more experienced workers are the first to be laid off. A company can hire two or three bright-eyed bushy tailed college grads for the price of one engineer with 20 years experience.
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You've got the algorithm wrong. This one is none standard.
The bonus question should be: When does this unsustainable model collapse?
Just how long can the rich get richer and still sell stuff the poor who are getting poorer?
"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
Major Major
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.
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