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Intel Confirms Major Layoff: 12,000 Worldwide, 11 Percent of Workforce (ieee.org)
Tekla Perry writes: It's all about the cloud and the Internet of Things, says Intel explaining the planned layoffs, which will affect some 12,000 employees. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich promises in an email today to employees, that the "transition" will be handled with the "utmost dignity and respect." According to IEEE Spectrum, "Intel Corp. today announced that it would cut some 12,000 jobs -- that's 11 percent of its total workforce -- by mid-2017, with the majority of those affected getting the bad news within the next two months. In a press release, the company said the 'restructuring initiative' would 'accelerate its evolution from a PC company to one that powers the cloud and the billions of smart, connected computing devices,' and that the company would be increasing its investments in 'data center, IoT memory, and connectivity businesses.'"
It's odd that as Intel and AMD have shed workers -- they put the "Silicon" in Valley after all -- absolutely useless companies like LinkedIn are sprawling all over Sunnyvale. I understand why a company needs a large workforce to make microprocessors with nanometer thick wires, but I have no idea why you need thousands of people to run a website.
Maybe investors are just dumb....?
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ARM Holdings plc
I know we want to blame somebody. Anybody. Who is responsible?
Third order responsibility goes to the sales people, that apparently can't land enough contracts to keep all their fabs running 24/7.
Second order responsibility goes to the director of sales, who either hasnt replaced the bad eggs or hasn't provided enough staff to land contracts fast enough.
First order responsibility goes to the executives, who havent replaced the director that has failed to maintain contractual demand for the companies existing capacity.
There. That wasn't so hard. Its only hard when you complicate it unnecessarily with pretensive irrelevant hand waving bullshit.
"His name was James Damore."
How much you want to bet that when they hire for cloud and IoT stuff, they hire
overseas workers or H1B people.
Not only PC's but Servers as well.
I have a set of 5 year old IBM servers that run dual Xeon 2.9ghz processors with 4 cores each and there is ZERO reason to replace them. In fact I just picked up a pair of identical barely used units for parts for under $190 each off of ebay and replaced the SAS drives with cheap SATA SSD drives on the backup unit for testing to dramatically increase disk access speeds. (Yes my SAS raid controller happily manages SATA SSD drives)
I could spend another $10K to replace the two or simply spend $2000 and keep them going for another 5 years just fine. the 10,000Base T network interface is faster than we will need, and the SAN works just fine.
Intel has not made a processor worth upgrading to for over 5 years and the current gen stuff is less than 20% better than the older so there is no reason at all to even toy with upgrading. My new lenovo laptop is actually SLOWER than the old one it replaced, the 6th gen intel i7 processors are complete crap.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Intel has to restructure. It's too bad that they couldn't move some of those employees over to the growing parts of the business. Intel's business is kind of a niche one. Where will those laid off employees go? AMD? Motorola? And that's assuming that they need people.
And when Yahoo! starts their fire sale, there will be re-orgs there as well as layoffs and it will flood the market with even more tech people.
There are some bad times coming to Silicon Valley.
Not to sound like a cruel heartless asshole and sorry for the SV folks reading this but I have to ask the following? Do kids fresh out of school need to be pulling 70k a year??! Does someone with a bachelors degree only in computer science and has 5 years experience need to be paid $120,000 a year??!
NO!
What will happen is a price correction to more of $45k a year for college grads coding and 85k a year for senior programmers like it should be compared to other fields. IT is overvalued as financie majors start at onl $15/hr fresh out of college.
What we have is a bubble. I may get an angry response and be modded down by someone who feels they should actually make 6 figures but you can kiss the ass of those who have masters degrees and 5 years experience in other fields and make just 65k a year. Seriously.
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it's because companies like LinkedIn need very few employees relative to the amount of paying users. That's what scale really means. It means the investors can make a shitload of money without all those pesky employees ruining it for them. Investors have been living high off the massive productivity gains they've squeezed out of the work force, but they're kinda hitting the limits of that until automation kicks in. They're a little nervous about full blown automation because if they're not careful they'll end up with socialism when people notice there aren't any jobs anymore. So they're moving at a snails pace and using companies like LinkedIn to realize the profits they demand.
Once companies like that dry up be afraid. These folks run the economy and have a boundless desire for wealth. I'm not sure what they're going to do but if you're a member of the working class instead of the ruling one it's not going to be pretty...
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not after we repealed Glass-Steagall and let the investment bankers get buddy buddy with the Mortgage bankers. See, we used to keep the risky wallstreet stuff separate from the stable Mortgage, car and Student Loan stuff. We don't do that anymore. So a Stock market crash doesn't just devalue the paper money of the 1%ers, it wrecks the whole economy. That's sorta why we separated them in the first place...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Just an observation from the peanut gallery.
In my view, PC sales are in decline because prices have been going up, not staying the same or getting cheaper.
Years ago, I bought a new PC with an i7 920 in it, along with a monitor, and they threw in a netbook for free. Factoring out the other items, I paid less than $600 for the PC - a price/performance ratio that I could not touch when it came time to upgrade. (I tried every avenue to actually upgrade my old machine, but every time it added up to more than buying a new PC). The new PC is only about 30% faster than the old - a far cry from my usual 100% increase.
I have kept my eye on the market as people have been talking about the decline of the PC, and the situation has not changed. We are not, and cannot get our money's worth out of new PCs, so we are not buying them. Ergo, fewer PCs are being sold. Increase the value proposition, and watch PC sales skyrocket - we still need our gaming fix, and we will still buy fast PCs - if we can get a deal.
Oh, and one more thing... Microsoft hasn't helped with their Windows offerings - the braindead stupid interface changes in 8 and up, and now being strongarmed into upgrading to the data-stealing Windows 10. You can't sell me a PC with that OS on it. So yeah, PCs are in decline. Give us a decent deal, and get Microsoft to stick to the better side of it's nature, and maybe that will change.
Not to sound like a cruel heartless asshole and sorry for the SV folks reading this but I have to ask the following? Do kids fresh out of school need to be pulling 70k a year??! Does someone with a bachelors degree only in computer science and has 5 years experience need to be paid $120,000 a year??!
Do the CEOs need to be pulling in 9 figures a year??!
NO!
Define need. If someone is contributing enough to profit then yes it's worth paying them $120,000 per year. And, while there's money to be made, there will be competition for good people which will push prices upm even if evil people try to illegally suppress wages.
I may get an angry response and be modded down by someone who feels they should actually make 6 figures but you can kiss the ass of those who have masters degrees and 5 years experience in other fields and make just 65k a year.
Some types of skill are worth more than others. Stop worrying about what others have that you do not and instead concentrate on what YOU have that makes YOU happy. Unless you are richer than your peers (and given the bitterness, it appears not), then there is nothing to be found in the former bath but misery. If you embrace the latter, you will be happier.
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and it's not entirely impossible we could do something about it. Trump, believe it or not, is the working class trying to do something. You're laughing, but he at least supports Tariffs and other pro-worker policies.
I'm laughing because Trump only supports Trump, and you think he gives a shit about anyone else. History shows that such an idea is fucking stupid.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"