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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.'"
Four reasons
1)Scale. Scale is hard. Its not a solved problem. It takes a lot of people to make things run at scale.
2)You only see the tip of the iceberg. The algorithms for advertising, selecting what stories get shown, etc are 10x the size of code you see on the website.
3)Non-engineering. Want to monetize that website? You need salesmen, marketers, and the support staff to provide software, HR services, etc for all of them.
4)Speed. While you can't speed up small projects by adding more people, you can work on two projects at once by adding more. That's what they're trying to do. A team of one could write everything, given a few centuries. If you want it all delivered in a year, that takes people.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
It's because the prospect of exponential revenue growth, no matter how illusory or profitless, holds much more sway with investors than an established behemoth that prints money but whose best growth days are behind it.
ARM Holdings plc
Don't worry! These layoffs will be replaced with plenty of new jobs for H1B folks!
So I guess it will all work out for the best . . . in the end . . .
. . . maybe . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I can't believe this is an earnest comparison to one of the world's biggest chip makers. Please tell me you're trolling.
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.
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/