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."

Comments

Intel will beat down AMD

[IntelliAdmin]

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

Re:Intel will beat down AMD

[raehl]

Well, maybe all those qualified engineers will go on to find jobs that are more productive, and build better things for society.

Unfortunately, successful companies have a bad habit of hiring people to do new projects 'because they can'. The money is there to hire more people, so, they hire more people. The more successful the company is, the less scrutiny is applied to how likely the new proect is t result in actual new revenue for the company.

After enough of this, the company finds itself burdened with a lot of labor working on things that are not really relevant o the company's main business, which negatively impacts the company's performance, and ultimately forces a layoff.

It would be better, of course, if sucessful companies could avoid the temptation in the first place and give that money to shareholders.

Re:Intel will beat down AMD

[Ubergrendle]

What are you smoking -- I'd like some!

First off, Apple has between 5-6% of the total PC base in the world right now. They have a loooong way to come even close to matching ONE of IBM (Lenovo), HP, or Dell. Intel made a nice marketing coup with lining up Apple, but its no panacea of profit.

Two, yes Intel goofed on the 64 instruction set. But WinXp runs on Athlon and Pentiums, and there's very little real 64 bit computing taking place on corporate desktops even today. Intel needed to make cheaper, faster, more efficient processors -- something they've finally done with the dual-core. Both server and desktop segements will do benefit from the latest designs.

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. When you're behind, you have to spend money to catch up. Allowing AMD to beat them for so long on price and performance had to be galling to a company the size of Intel -- someone was asleep at the switch.

I love competition, I think Intel is in for some good times now, but I doubt they'll ever be as dominant as they were in the early 90s ever again. AMD has their work cut out for them, but getting where they are today was MUCH harder than what they're facing now.

Do it back to them.

[neo]

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/

Re:Do it back to them.

[Overzeetop]

That's why there are Unions. And, as typcially happens, the Union becomes exactly what the employee hated about management - a political, bottom line driven organization used to forcefully extract concessions from the opposite side. They're just working for you instead of the other side now.

It all comes back to monkeyspace. Big corporations exceed it, and need a kick in the pants (or regulations) to return balance. That's one reason why many small businesses are not regulated, and why many don't need it (oh sure, some do...some really do) - the 50 employee limit is within a standard human monkeyspace.

Re:Hopefully not by email

[Anonymous Coward]

i worked there in 2002 as an intern and they did a 4000-person layoff. I remember people were getting 4 months severance pay or something like that. Sounded like a good deal to me.

Re:Friendly tip from a competitor

[tomstdenis]

Yeah that's why it would be fun. I think we need more vendor-lockin nowadays. If we can't beat them join em.

And yeah, it is nice that Intel is more pro-OSS... /me looks to employer, how about we support OSS? /me takes that back, wants to keep job.

Tom

Re:Friendly tip from a competitor

[tomstdenis]

No, they "should" use that. Doesn't mean they will.

Chances are they'll do one of two things

1. Roll out their own CPU interconnect with a bridge to HTX
2. Roll out their own HT but call it ZippyDataTransit or say Lightning Data Transport [hehehe chuckle, *] and claim it's 1.97x faster than AMDs

Tom

[*] Bonus points for anyone who can tell me why the latter name suggestion is funny.

This is old news to people at Intel

[blueZ3]

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.

More competitive?

[jb_nizet]

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.

killed off the alpha group

[wiz_kid_99]

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.

Well that worked well didn't it?

[MancDiceman]

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...

Re:Well that worked well didn't it?

[uarch]

This rumor has been out there for over a month. There was even a reference to it on ./ when they posted they story about Intel laying off 1000 managers. Everyone expects further cuts but until they actually tell the employees what's happening these posts are just rehashing the same old rumors.

I was a little surprised it made it onto ./ today but then I remembered this was ./ - land of the double posts.

Re:Brilliant...

[Coward the Anonymous]

I doubt they will be laying off much if any of their chip design talent. This is probably managerial and administrative staff throughout the company (general IT, accounting, call centers, etc...) People who can't really provide a comptetive advantage to another chip maker and most like don't even have non-compete agreements.

Re:This is hardly news.

[Doctor Memory]

When I lived in Portland (just after the turn of the century), Intel was one of the few stable tech companies out there. Toshiba, Hitachi and IBM all closed their fabs in the area, and most of the "silicon forest" was left to wither. I was unemployed for the first time in my life, and it lasted for six months before I picked up a short-term gig at Nike. If you heard the phrase "I work at Intel", you knew that within ten seconds someone would say "Is your group hiring?" or "Here's my resume!"

I'm just surprised that Intel could weather that storm and then shed so many workers now. I guess the competition's more fierce than many people realize.

offshoring

[escay]

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!

Re:Hopefully not by email

[Jahz]

They've had competition of a serious nature for several years now at least. That (by itself) doesn't seem to justify the layoffs.

Of course not, but who said that was the only reason? Intel may have had competition from AMD for a while, but Intel are just now starting to take that seriously. Intel hung on to the P4 - against a constant AMD barrage - for a really long time. But in the past year AMD has beaten Intel to the affordable 64-bit chips, affordable dual-core chips, affordable enterprise-class server chips (opteron), and affordable preformance chips (overclockers, gamers).

I will admit that the last 4 computers I have built for myself wore a sticker that read "AMD Inside." Most recently, in Feb of this year, I constructed a PC that ran a dual core AMD Opteron processor (165). On the first boot I cranked the core speed from 1.8ghz to 2.5ghz and its been running smoothly ever since. Thats a great chip, and it only cost $2xx USD, whereas the equivalent P4 at the time was near 850-1000 USD.

I will also say that I am extremely pleased with Intel lately. The archetecture of the "Core" line of processors is really cool. They are fast, dual-core, and low power. To me, this symbolizes the first REAL response to AMD by Intel.

I have spoken to people who worked as engineers at Intel. Some of the projects were really cool, but most never made it out of the labratory. Intel is an R&D firm... they do great research. I hope the layoffs don't really affect that part of the company.

Re:Hopefully not by email

[timeOday]

I could understand suddenly firing 10% of the workforce if there were some unforeseen dramatic event that hurt business overnight, such as airlines after 911. But Intel has been in a very gradual decline for a number of years. If they had acted sooner but more gradually, they might have been able to downsize through natural attrition (retirements and people who quit), rather than a sudden painful cut.

Re:Hopefully not by email

[GreyPoopon]

this guy, against all historical data, claims that intel is losing money.

That depends on your definition of losing. If they fail to capitalize on an opportunity for profits, that could be considered "losing". For my part, I feel that any company that goes through layoffs as a response to eroding market share is plotting a course towards either bankruptcy or being bought by a competitor.

Intel marketing: Major disgusting joke.

[Futurepower(R)]

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.