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

Don't start with the little guys.

[Anonymous Coward]

Middle management is a great waste of skin. Plus they often take a fairly large salary while not generating revenue or a product.

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.

Is this how companies compete now?

[Trollificus]

Back in my day, we remained competitive by building a superior product at an affordable price, up-hill both ways!

/get off my lawn

Not knee jerk

[cryfreedomlove]

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?

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.