AMD To Lay Off 10% of Global Workforce

Luyseyal writes "Advanced Micro Devices Inc. slashed its global employment by 1,400 jobs Thursday as the company seeks to boost profits and re-balance its work force to pursue new product areas. This amounts to over 11% of its global workforce, including Mark Langsdorf, who often posts AMD patches to the Linux Kernel Mailing List."

Comments

Re:If they need something to do,

[Fluffeh]

I am sure that there are many companies out there who would be more than happy to hire these folks to gain some insight into what plans are for the next few years from AMD. While cost cutting and laying off some people is never nice, certain industries that are so competitive will always be looking to hire (even bad employees) to gain access to their knowledge.

Heck, I work in a multinational retailer (read: tough times in terms of profits and trends) and we hired a guy who works for a competitor chain in Europe without so much as an interview - even knowing it is just for a few months while his girlfiend is on study vacation out here. Sometimes the more competitive the industry, the safer the employees.

Bonus time.

[RyanFenton]

Expect to see EXTREMELY large executive bonuses come December.

It is a system that makes sense in one way - shareholders simply want maximized return on money, and shareholders in amalgam play the role of idiots without an interest in future of the company willing to pay money for a stake and a vote.

So, in return for promise of transforming the company in an idiotic direction that sounds good from the perspective of shareholder marketing, the shareholders then provide bonuses to the management.

Thus solving the problem once and for all. ONCE AND FOR ALL.

Ryan Fenton

Re:Bonus time.

[0123456]

The ridiculous point is - nobody with any sense invests long-term any more.

You can't invest long-term when government economic policy is swerving from side to side like a twelve year old who's emptied his Dad's liquor cabinet and then borrowed the Porsche.

Re:Bonus time.

[inviolet]

And, "the market" applauds when the prime minister of Greece announces that no, the Greek people won't have a say in their future after all. All you have to do is turn on the news tonight, any channel from Fox to NPR to hear the economic elite talk about how pleased they are that the people won't have a say in their future.

Not all statements are correct. Not all opinions are wise or even meaningful. Asking for economic advice from Greek citizens, more than 50% of whom are collecting a check for parasitic employment in a comically bloated public sector of a dead economy, is unlikely to yield anything useful.

In fact, left to their own devices, most citizens (not merely Greeks) will make short-sighted short-term-pain-minimizing decisions that will eventually wreck their culture's pattern. Democracy exists as a check on tyranny, NOT as a source of omniscience.

Re:Bonus time.

[Dunbal]

Yeah, he needs to learn that trading on "news" is possibly even worse than trading completely at random. Besides if you look at the past 13 years of the stock market, you are just as likely to make money in the next 5 years or so by buying stock as you are by selling it. The market has been jogging in place since 1998.

Re:Bonus time.

[PopeRatzo]

Not all statements are correct. Not all opinions are wise or even meaningful. Asking for economic advice from Greek citizens, more than 50% of whom are collecting a check for parasitic employment in a comically bloated public sector of a dead economy, is unlikely to yield anything useful.

OK, I noticed that yesterday and today there were two national polls taken that show if the elections were held today, the Democrats would take back the House of Representatives and Obama would be re-elected. Do you believe that the elections should be cancelled because you don't believe that decision is wise or meaningful?

Greece is called the birthplace of democracy. Isn't it a little bit ironic that today in Greece it is announced that no, the people should not have a voice in their future because they have a stake in the outcome of the vote?

Every one of us has a stake in the output of elections. We benefit or are hurt to varying degrees. We vote based upon our own interests.

Should we just toss the constitution and go back to having only white male landowners vote because their vote is more "correct" and "meaningful"? Or will we have a system where people have some say in the way they are governed?

In fact, left to their own devices, most citizens (not merely Greeks) will make short-sighted short-term-pain-minimizing decisions that will eventually wreck their culture's pattern.

Since all corporations make "short-sighted short-term-pain-minimizing decisions that will eventually wreck their culture's pattern" then you must agree that they should not be allowed to participate in elections at any level, including financially. Especially since corporations are not citizens.

Re:Bonus time.

[Radical Moderate]

Show me a company that actually knows which 10% constitutes dead wood, and....

Re:Bonus time.

[Runaway1956]

I've not noticed much swerving in economic policy. The government has steadily been working to wreck the United States economy.

For fifty years or more, we've had no immigration policy worth mentioning.
NAFTA
China "free trade"
CAFTA
outsourcing
exporting jobs
"work visas" freely passed around like candy at halloween, and the conditions unenforced
rewarding illegal aliens with free college tuition
rewarding illegal aliens with free legal counsel
rewarding illegal aliens with free health care
tax cuts for companies that export jobs

Have I missed anything important? If I have, I've included enough to show that our government is NOT swerving back and forth. They are on a steady course to destroying the middle class.

Re:Bonus time.

[TheEyes]

What kills me is the idea that somehow executive compensation is necessarily going to trickle down into either increased share value or dividends.

What kills me is the idea that people somehow believe that "executive compensation" is more than 0.001% of the problem. This brand of thinking is known colloquially as "stomping piss ants while tigers are coming over the wall."

Executive compensation is a symptom of a larger problem: corporate governance in the US is really screwed up. These days shareholders are largely incapable of enforcing a long-term perspective on executive officers; the rules these days are written by boards more interested in hiring a CEO for a few quarters to juice profits, siphon as much money as they can, and let the CEO take a multi-billion dollar golden parachute to the next sucker play. This quarter-to-quarter thinking isn't fostered by pensioners investing in index funds for 20-30 years for retirement, but by the giant money-printers of Wall Street. The whole system needs to be fixed, and executive compensation is a small, but important piece of the puzzle.

Trying to start a class war in America has never worked, isn't working now, and will never work. Journalists and pundits who push this "executive compensation" horse pucky are just playing into the hands of the politicians.

Trying to normalize income distribution is the exact opposite of encouraging class warfare. Real class warfare is what happened in the 19th century when French peasants started breaking out the guillotines, because the aristocracy thought they could get away with stealing everyone's money and forcing them into permanent wage slavery. You want to see a real "class war" then you let things keep going the way they have been going. Every country, even the overweight, lazy USA, is three missed meals away from revolution. That's a lesson the cash-steeped Republicans don't think they need to know anymore, with their Fox News propaganda machines and well-funded astroturf campaigns, but it won't go away just because they keep denying it's there.

Re:Bonus time.

[dbIII]

I'm not in the USA, but I really would like to point out that those people are already in your country. There's nothing that can be done to move them out of the country (and your economy would collapse furthur if there was anyway) so reality has to be faced and they have to get some sort of place in society. You can't close the floodgates any more than George III could when he wanted to stop the colonies expanding beyond the Appalachians. It may suck but it comes down to trying to get the best of some bad choices. The USA is far too addicted to low priced low skilled labour anyway, and while that continues there will be very little done to stop the trend at any level. Even senators have disposable servants at less than the minimum wage who can't complain or they might get deported. Making them illegal immigrants instead of just immigrants like a century ago actually makes things worse. The bottom is getting pegged lower and lower and as you say there has been a lot of deliberate destruction of the middle class as part of a race towards what looks more and more like a parody of Feudalism.

Sacking developers

[Tomato42]

Sacking one of the people responsible for good Linux performance on servers is not just stupid... it's cutting the branch which you're sitting on.