Intel dropped the ball, and it was the biggest bullet I ever dodged. Even 20 years ago, I felt there was something wrong about the internal culture there, so I turned down the post-internship job offer.
There's a bunch of teams there with three-letter acronyms whose origins have been totally forgotten. Like, nobody knows what LTQ or ASR stands for, or what purpose they have. When you're an intern, you tend to think that the higher-ups know what they're doing, but if you ask for an explanation, you will soon conclude that they don't know either.
People were not working hard enough. At the time Intel's dominance was supreme. They should have been picking up on niche ideas like GPUs and mobile chips, it would have been cheap and adjacent to what they had. Instead, all I heard at the meetings was laughing at the little guys who are now all bigger than Intel. Even my friend in the VC division couldn't get the bosses to see what was happening. People would spend their whole day just having coffee with random colleagues, and making a couple of slides. It's nice to relax sometimes, but when I was there it was way too much of that. There was just way too much fat in the business.
I still have friends there who stayed on. They tell me not to come, and are now wondering how to do the first job search of their professional lives. A couple have moved very recently.
It's very odd that the guy who was famous for saying what upper management should do (set culture) ended up building a culture that has completely failed.
>>It's very odd that the guy who was famous for saying what upper management should do (set culture) ended up building a culture that has completely failed
Is it? Everywhere I worked upper management is taking big about the culture but their taking points are rarely applied to the company.
Like when Facebook says something like "we value your privacy"
Facebook does value your privacy, because it's a commodity they can sell for a high price.
Sort of like that Twilight Zone episode. The aliens come and convince us they are here to serve man. "Here, if you don't believe us look at our book called 'To Serve Man.'"
Finally one of the humans translates it and discovers it's a cookbook.
They are the poster child for "we have a monopoly so we don't have to innovate or even maintain competence". Mind you, how much worse must things be at AMD that they're not winning the x64 war? Eventually the "PC" market is going to get run over by ARM like everything else. Especially now there's a Windows on ARM with proper backwards compatibility.
(although something is very odd with drivers on Windows-ARM, if anyone knows the full story on how to get .inf based 'drivers' working it would be genuinely helpful)
Windows on ARM is still largely ignored, everyone on the consumer level is more than happy with current Intel/AMD offerings.
Every single attempt to sell Windows ARM systems has been more or less a flop, including the recent CoPilot+ PCs.
Windows developer community also largely ignores Windows on ARM, unless there is an actual business value to support yet another ISA during development, CI/CD pipelines, and QA.
Only Apple gets to play the vertical integration game, our way or go away attitude, and they are the survivors of home computer vertical integration only because they got lucky when banks where already knocking on the door.
Same. I started down the semiconductor path about 15 years ago (physics student, loved my EE classes, loved nanofab class, wanted more) and got warned away by an astonishing number of independent postdocs, interns, and seemingly successful industry contacts who all agreed on one point: the pay was such utter dogshit that one should consider it a passion career like art or music. Some of them saw consulting for the Chinese as their "big ticket light at the end of the tunnel" -- but that got shut down soon enough. I changed directions before getting first hand experience but the R&D job listings tended to support this view. "They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" seemed to be in the advanced stages at that point.
At least in R&D, from the angle I saw it. Clearly, being stingy wasn't a universal problem: heavy buybacks, ludicrous M&A (in foresight and hindsight), and that $180k average salary in the article sounds completely divorced from the snapshot impression that I got. I don't know what gives, was R&D "salary optimized" to a degree that other parts of the business weren't? Did the numbers change at some point but the culture was already rotten and cynical? Or did I see noise and mistake it for signal? Dunno.
In another world I'd love to have been part of the fight to make 10nm work (or whatever needed doing) rather than working on something that doesn't fully use my skills or in my private opinion contribute as much to humanity, but my employer pays me and respects my time and doesn't steer their business into every iceberg in the ocean, and in the end those things are more important.
The problem with R&D as a career (in a "large organised company/institute" context at least, where you don't own and control the results) is the limitless supply of impoverished students and postdocs willing to work for exposure.
Right, but cheaping out on the foundation of your building has consequences -- which have come home to roost orders of magnitude in excess of the money saved.
In R&D management, this is an extremely well-known problem with an extremely well-known solution: use the oversupply to be selective rather than cheap. The fact that they chose to be cheap rather than selective is managerial incompetence of the highest order. They had one job, and they blew it. "Selective" doesn't even mean that the rating system has to be perfect or even good, it just has to equilibrate supply and demand without shredding morale. Even a lottery would suffice for this purpose.
> Many of those who lost their jobs worked in technical fields in an industry that pays an average wage of $180,000 a year. Those were great jobs and helped buoy the whole state, but most won’t find similar work locally.
This is the big risk we all took when we moved away from the Bay Area to work remotely. You arbitrage the COL difference and come out ahead big time, but it might be very hard to make the same salary locally if you can't find a remote job.
IBM left my once prosperous hometown as a kid. Others followed suit. Since then it's been in a sad state economically, just some rust belt town. Corporations abandoning communities is hardly anything new. Capital acts with 0 empathy, or rather, the people who direct it do.
I've heard on this forum of a tactic Intel employed where they broke off some people into a subsidiary, dissolved the subsidiary, and then offered to rehire them with the caveat: Oops, the pension you were promised is now gone. Then Intel's foundry business started failing. Oops!!
> “I don’t feel good today,” Gelsinger said told employees Thursday. “I’ve agonized over today for the last three, four weeks. Many nights waking up at 2 a.m. because I know that what we do, and how we’re affecting you and your families, it matters.”
Sounds pretty empathetic to me. I’m guessing he also has empathy for Wall St and his shareholders. Ultimately Intel has no choice but to either grow or downsize and the former hasn’t materialized. They’re losing market share and revenue and if they keep that up they will be empathizing with their creditors and the bank.
Krzanich and Swan were catastrophically bad. Both of them are among the worst bigcorp CEOs ever, with asleep-at-the-wheel Krzanich in the running for the worst of all time. Intel's board tried to right the ship with Gelsinger, but it was too little and too late, especially given slow development cycles in the semiconductor industry.
I'd argue it's not a choice of "let's open a campus in flyover country," but a reflection of how the industry has changed.
The "older" companies were manufacturers. Even places like Mountain View and San Jose were the working-class towns with HP factories and semiconductor plants. The concentration of engineering talent (HP/Intel/Apple/Atari) is what created the affluence, especially after manufacturing itself was outsourced globally.
The newer Web 2.0 companies don't make physical things; they make software. Their most critical infrastructure isn't a factory but a dense network of developers. They go to the Bay Area, Seattle, etc., because that's where the network is. For the parts of their business that don't require that network, like customer service, they locate in less expensive regions, just as PayPal did with Nebraska. They were even the second largest employer in Nebraska iirc.
There's a significant overlap between well educated technical minds who you want to do information work and people who want to live in a vibrant city. This isn't new and it shouldn't be shocking.
But Silicon Valley isn't made up of vibrant cities. Most of it is small towns and suburbs between SF and SJ.
I remember the first time I was sent to the Bay Area for training. I was excited to see this City of Mountain View I'd heard so much about; to explore its city nightlife and enjoy the view of the mountain. My boss had to let me down gently :) "Mountain View in Europe would be called a village", he said.
That’s kind of the big failure of post-WWII 20th century American urban planning. People, especially young ones, want to live in the fun cities they saw on TV where you can live in fun neighborhoods and walk to cool restaurants on the way to a show, so they move to places like SF, LA, NY, etc. but unless you bought in the 90s anyone without family wealth has the abrupt disappointment that they’re actually in some suburb 45 minutes away and spending a couple hours a day driving and trying not to think about how much they’re paying for even that.
I don’t know how quickly we’ll find the political will to break that since everyone who owns property in a city has a financial incentive to keep prices artificially high. Removing density restrictions helps by making redevelopment financially advantageous for individuals but the degree of uncertainty we have now is going to slow that down, too.
Econ 101: people aren’t paying $3,000 a month because everyone in business has failed to think about opening an office in the suburbs. Walkable neighborhoods are expensive because they’re so desirable that Americans pay a premium to live there. The answer should be removing the barriers preventing builders from supplying that demand.
Metropolises are not soulless, as a rule. They are dynamic and exciting, with an influx of ambitious young people every year trying their best to start something.
You don't need a big home space when any cafe can become your living room, any restaurant your kitchen, dining room and wait staff, and any park your professionally tended garden.
Your choice of entertainment, especially live entertainment, is mainly limited by your willingness to keep up with what's going on, and not by the sparse calendar of touring acts.
Metropolises are fantastic places to live, especially when you are comfortable spending money to expand your space on demand.
“[W]hen you are comfortable spending money” is the kicker, though. Unfortunately, the Bay Area is oppressively expensive, and the same can be said about places like New York City. High housing prices puts a major strain on the ability to enjoy restaurants and paid entertainment. Also, because the restaurant owners and workers need to pay high rents, the food prices are very high. It’s hard to enjoy $3000 studio apartments, $12 burritos that used to only cost $8 before the pandemic, and other high costs when you’re not rich. I make a low six-figure salary as a professor in the Bay Area and I’ve had to cut back on eating out in the past year since the prices have gotten obscenely expensive.
It doesn’t have to be this way, though. Tokyo is a vibrant metropolis that is also relatively affordable by global standards. The key to this is sensible housing policy that doesn’t inflate the cost of living to oppressive levels.
What keeps me in the Bay Area besides being tenure-track are proximity to family, the acceptance of multiculturalism, and (as an academic) California’s support for academia in a national political climate that has become hostile to academia. But financially I wish the price of rent, food, and other necessities weren’t so oppressive.
> Metropolises are fantastic places to live, especially when you are comfortable spending money to expand your space on demand.
That's a very optimistic perspective, which I somewhat envy. It makes sense in a way, assuming your rent is negligible, but when you're paying out the ass for an apartment, having the privilege of being able to pay short-term rent in the form of coffees and brezels for a shared proper living room doesn't sound great...
Half an acre that you have to care about, mind you. And work is not the only place people go to in a city. Add all those other amenities other commenters already spoke about, and your half-acre would have to be in the middle of at least a mid-size town.
Obviously that would be nice, but not even HNers are rich enough to build rural villas in city centres.
> Half an acre that you have to care about, mind you.
I have an acre and maintaining it's quite a nice alternative to computers and screen based entertainment. It's just another form of exercise basically.
Half an acre in the middle of nowhere, where you need to drive everywhere or a pod in walkable distance to everything you need, all services and entertainment?
I don't think you get what living in a busy city is. The "pod" is where you sleep, the city is your home. You don't need half an acre to sleep.
Maybe it is not the lifestyle for you, but I don't find it "insane" to want to have plenty of stuff available at walking distance. And you can't have that without high population density and yeah "pods".
It reminds me of an ad campaign for a travel agency a while ago, I can't remember the details. But one of them depicted a large city labeled "hell" and next to it, some place in the middle of nowhere labeled "heaven". Under it, the same pictures with the labels swapped.
They are working on a different planning time horizon. The older established companies would have a 10-20 year plan which is enough time for diffusion and growth of talent. Startups (unless really well-financed) think more in terms of the next 1-2 years, not enough time for the local community to grow around the company.
Hillsboro is pretty much a company town (well, there are some datacenters now, but those don't need a lot of employees). Actually the whole of Washington County is heavily dependent on Intel. There's also Nike, but it's also heading for significantly lower headcount than it's had in a while. So it's kind of a double-whammy here (Triple if you count federal government funding cuts hitting places like OHSU (Oregon Health Sciences University)).
I was contracting out at Intel Jones Farm campus in Hillsboro in 2004 and I'd walk around the (then) new neighborhood there by the campus and I distinctly recall thinking "What if something were to happen to Intel in, say 25 or 30 years? What would happen to these neighborhoods?" It was just kind of a thought experiment at the time, but now it seems like we're going to find out.
Not unlike what happened to Finland when Nokia went down. That took a long time to recover from, and some would say we're still trying to overcome, though it's hard to say what could have been post-Coved with the current state of the world economy.
There are hundreds of new homes being built in/near Hillsboro -- probably planned a few years ago when Intel "promised" it was expanding its Oregon facilities. Can't see them selling now. The local economy's going to take a major hit.
Saw the same thing happen 20 years ago with DEC in Colorado Springs. Lots of people assumed it would last forever until it didn't.
They were getting paid "California salaries in Colorado" (well, really Massachusetts salaries but popular sayings don't have to be completely accurate) and lots of people had virtual mansions on senior tech salaries (plus probably stock options?).
Then DEC imploded and there were almost no other options for hundreds of storage engineers. Knew a lot of people who had their houses foreclosed because so many were flooding the market at the same time.
I heard from a friend who works for Intel that he doesn't know why he was hired in the first place; his PhD was in a completely different domain, the objectives of the project were remote to his skills, and he told me this is what his entire team was made of. Seems like a lot of bloat present in this company, and it makes sense they feel the way forward is layoffs.
Second hand knowledge, I have a cousin in Intel Oregon. Intel mass hires PhDs in Physics/ Chemistry or Biology etc, reasoning that a PhD is enough to learn whatever is needed for a process engineer. Assume 30-40 people hired every cohort and there is 12 or so cohorts a year. Another curious thing I noticed, was Intel had online multi correct tests for its engineers that they had to pass weekly, presumably to keep track whether they are actually learning on the job or not. The multi correct tests though just seem like rote memorization and easy to cheat.
Overall my 5000 ft view, was the culture was very different from FAANG or a Bay Area Tech company. If the Bay Area approach is high ownership and high accountability, Intel was much more process driven and low ownership. They even tracked hours worked for engineers in Oregon.
I knew a guy who got a job with Intel's wearable division. Everything was chaotic, everyone was toxic, and Intel one day lost interest and fired the whole division.
The sad thing is they acquired the basis smartwatch and destroyed it, leaving only Garmin as developers of dedicated activity trackers. I considered getting a basis but was obviously glad I didn't.
I hear it’s division dependent, but just about every time someone complained about things being toxic at Microsoft they would be told at least it is not Intel.
I've been thinking of buying pixelmator pro recently for photo editing. It seems like a lovely photo editing application. And they have a lifetime license.
But Apple bought the company recently. I worry that whatever made the product great will go away post acquisition. Whether or not Apple keeps working on it at the same level of quality is anyone's guess. Or maybe they'll integrate the best features into their free Photos app and ditch the rest. Or something else entirely.
I can't think of any examples where acquisitions make a product better. But dozens where the product was killed immediately, or suffered a long slow death.
Apple is different from Microsoft or Google in that they don’t have a monopoly to subsidize mistakes. They bought things like Logic and Final Cut because they realize that not having high-quality Mac software means that Adobe gets to choose whether professionals in those fields keep buying Macs. I would expect Pixelmator will continue to be developed to compete with Photoshop.
Maybe some of these will work for you; Minecraft, PayPal, GitHub, Instagram, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Android, Waze.
With Apple it's harder for me to know. How do former Dark Sky users feel about the Weather app? I think it has all the features? How about Shazam, which I never used before it became an iOS feature? TestFlight retained its identity. Beats by Dre headsets did too, though Beats Music I think became Apple Music in a way.
Some of these are hard comparisons specifically because what you are describing is really the initial exit. Acquisitions are often not funded by valuation as much as an actual plan to make money.
Something like Minecraft for an example - the existing established customer base with perpetual license was not justification for buying it. The value Microsoft saw was around things like DLC content and cosmetics, and subscription revenue through server hosting.
From what I have observed - one could say that everything Apple acquires is an accu-hire first, for a product they want to ship and trying to find a delivery-focused team to help them with that.
If the company already built a product similar to that and had it hit the market - thats great! It means that they are getting a team which has delivered successfully and maybe even have a significant head start toward Apple's MVP. That likely means also that the team will have a fair bit of autonomy too (and often retain their brands).
DarkSky's product in that light wasn't their app. It was their work on localized weather models and their weather API.
Apple's Weather App doesn't look like DarkSky, but AFAICT you could rebuild the DarkSky app on the WeatherKit REST API (including features like historical weather, and supporting alternative platforms like Android).
With the possible exception of Android (which tbh I have never used) and possibly Minecraft, it's hard to make an argument that any of those acquisitions improved the products. At best they're kept in stasis.
Github has gotten a lot more unstable (GH Actions outages every couple weeks or so), but it definitely has not been in stasis: the pace of change has been a whole lot higher since the acquisition (and I'd say generally for the better)
You would be arguing wrongly YouTube today is the largest trove of knowledge accessible by the largest number of people in the world. It also has a lot of false information but overall it is one of the greatest cause of change in the world.
Would YouTube be the behemoth it is without the plethora of content (some of it, high quality)? And if it being more lucrative for creators is what got that content, I would argue the platform as a whole is better. You could have the most whizz bang video platform, but without good content, what good is that?
With the money came the greed, the over-polished mass market content, and the ecosystem of creators is now mostly driven by engagement.
Not to mention all the topics that have been soft-banned because one algorithm flags those videos as not monetizable, and the next algorithm decides that only showing or recommending videos that can show ads results in the most add revenue
I don't think YouTube is clearly better or worse than it was before acquisition, and maybe an independent YouTube would have walked the same path. It is simply a very different platform that was ship-of-theseusd
YouTube was acquired in 2006.
I do think since then things like video quality and length have improved, although you can argue the ads everwhere are bad UX.
I have Pixelmator Pro & Photomator. They haven't meaningfully changed since Apple's acquisition, and they don't rely on any subscription or online features that could be ruined after the fact. If a future update fucks things over, you don't have to update. Everything runs locally.
I know someone with a PhD in biochemistry who was hired at Intel from a cancer research lab... I'm sure he sold his chemistry background well but I always thought that was an odd hire. Maybe there are just so few qualified PhDs that they'll happily take folks from adjacent fields?
Most of the senior leadership of Amazon in the early days were a bunch of randos from a formal credential standpoint. A car mechanic leading aws engineering, a musician running logistics, a chemical engineer optimizing the network etc .
Hedge funds also hire physicists and mechanical engineers
Your phrasing _drastically_ undersells the actual relevant background and experience there:
James hamilton the “mechanic” … with EE & CS degrees and time at ibm and ms.
Dave Clark the “musician” (undergrad) … and an MBA focused on logistics.
Jeff wilke the “chemist” … who worked on process optimization at honeywell and supply chains at aderesen.
So sure, might as well say DeSantis is an SDE Intern figuring out software deployments, Vosshall is an amateur aircraft EE, or marc brooker is some foreign radar engineer.
Signed, some newpaper dude who was an AWS PE doing edge networking and operations.
Chemical engineers are so good at distributed systems that it is almost a trope at this point. It is their specialty. Their entire discipline is optimizing aggregate throughput in decentralized systems with minimal coordination.
It maps 1:1 with the computer science but chemical engineering as a discipline has more robust design heuristics that don’t really have common equivalents in software even though they are equally applicable. Chemical engineering is extremely allergic to any brittleness in architecture, that’s a massive liability, whereas software tends to just accept it because “what’s the worst that could happen”.
From the tone of your post, I assume that you are a ChemE who works with CompSci folks. If what you say is true, why haven't ChemEs moved into the space and taken over? Software dev pays much better than ChemE.
in college I got a job offer from Intel without interviewing. I had applied, the hiring manager reached it and said they’d setup a loop, it never happened. then some weeks later I got an offer. super weird
also I was sorta laid off by the current Intel CEO from my last startup!
Look for mutually beneficial ways forward - reassignment to relevant projects, retraining where necessary, generous layoff package for those for whom neither hits. Realistically the vast majority of PhD employees are going to be highly motivated and want to work on something useful just as much as you want them to.
Unless you're a sociopath, you let natural attrition run its course. If their skills weren't relevant when you hired them, then it's your fault. If you changed course after you hired them so that they stopped being relevant, then it's your fault. The only just thing to do is find a way to make their work meaningful until they move on.
No, you give them a fat severance and eat the losses. Maybe 6 months + 1 month per year of tenure, something like that. You're break even by the end of the fiscal year, you just gave someone a lifechanging amount of money, and they don't have the crushing morale problems of "the work I do is pointless" and get to collect unemployment in addition to severance.
If you are honest and generous with people, they aren't mad that you made a mistake and let them go. It's companies that try to give 2 weeks + 1 week per year of severance that are making a mistake, not the entire concept of layoffs.
(Without delving into the systemic reasons that layoffs are inevitable of course. If the system was different, they wouldn't have to happen, but we live in this system at the moment.)
> If you changed course after you hired them so that they stopped being relevant, then it's your fault.
Nobody can predict market conditions or technological advances.
If you don’t change course (mission, people) the company will likely fail and then everyone is out of a job, shareholders, pensioners, and 401k holding laypeople look money.
I do think that leadership is not held accountable enough for their mistakes and failures.
The situation of Intel is much more the result of bad management than the output of their current workers. For all purposes, they're effectively doing what they're were supposed to do when hired. So the logical conclusion is that Intel workers are the ones who should have the power to fire the entire management and put someone in place to fix the issue, not the other way around.
What a sad waste of talent in that case. A waste that could be mitigated by them finding a more productive way to help society than sticking to a pointless job.
Agree. We lean hard into sunk cost fallacy when it comes to job training.
“If your name is Farmer you’re a farmer.” mentality but self selected euphemism. “I trained as a software engineer and that’s what I am for 50 years! Dag gubmint trynna terk my herb!”
Service economy role play is the root of brain dead job life we’re all suffering through.
Managers are also employees. Nobody's arguing they should be spared and I'm not sure that you can argue top management at Intel hasn't been let go over the years.
Also laying off incompetent managers alone won't solve the problem of having hired the wrong people
The scale isn't really comparable. TSMC manufactures 5x more wafers than Intel, and the disparity is getting exponentially worse every year (see the chart at https://thecuberesearch.com/247-special-breaking-analysis-th...). In fact 30% of Intel's own production is outsourced to TSMC.
> If Intel does everything TSMC & NV do, then they should have something like 83000+36000~120000 employees?
TSMC is a fab, not a chip designer. And NV makes GPUs and small scale SoCs like the ones in the Nintendo Switch and automotive (IIRC the Tegra SoC that powered the Switch 1 literally was an automotive chip that they repurposed).
That's quite the difference from what Intel makes: CPUs that power a lot of the world's compute capacity for laptops, PCs and servers, wireless chips (Bluetooh+WiFi), their own GPU line...
Because Intel pays well (mid six figures + bonus) and PhD doesn't pay a minimum wage in most places. They were expressly hired without an overarching goal.
I applied to Intel once a long time ago when I was just getting out of school, but when they replied asking for my resume in "Word format" I stopped pursuing it.
I didn't use Word to create my resume and if they can't deal with a PDF that was their problem.
That's not at all an unusual request though. Plenty of recruiters want Word. Probably so they can make changes behind your back or some such nonsense. Or, less cynically, so they can more easily copy/paste stuff into their HRM tool.
I've never had a competent company ask me for that. The only ones who did were "old fart" companies. New companies, especially ones with good tech, have always taken my PDF.
> Probably so they can make changes behind your back
Nope, I don't consent to that.
> Or, less cynically, so they can more easily copy/paste stuff into their HRM tool
Their HRM tool should support PDFs if they are competent. They should also be able to read my resume with their own eyes. If not I consider the company not a good fit for me.
Back in 2012-2014 intel hired a bunch of “futurists” which were liberal arts majors from the northeastern US. Needless to say they spewed a bunch of nonsense and were fired years later, but I knew a few and they were puzzled they were hired to begin with.
Xerox hired an anthropologist once, Julian E. Orr, and it resulted in a really good book called “Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job”.
Of course, mostly he found was how out of touch the executives at Xerox were with what their employees were actually doing in practice. The executives thought of the technicians who repaired copiers almost as monkeys who were just supposed to follow a script prepared by the engineers. Meanwhile the technicians thought of themselves as engineers who needed to understand the machines in order to be successful, so they frequently spent hours reverse engineering the machines and the documentation to work out the underlying principles on which the machines worked. The most successful technicians had both soft skills for dealing with customers and selling upgrades and supplies as well as engineering skills for diagnosing broken hardware and actually getting it fixed correctly. It seems that none of the sales, engineering, or executives at Xerox liked hearing about any of it.
> I remember there being a bunch of Anthropologists that were hired before that, under Genevieve Bell. It wasn't clear to me why they were hired.
Yes, I remember contracting at Intel in 2006 and the Anthropologists were at one end of the building we were in. Their area was a lot different than the engineering areas. Lots of art, sitting around in circles, etc. I remember asking about what was up over there "Those are the anthropologists".
Having a bunch of people who might at some point generate a few valuable ideas doesn't sound like a bad strategy. Intel is (was?) huge, their market penetration is enormous. I think Bell Labs did something similar back in the way -- maybe not with the liberal arts, but they certainly left a lot of room for serendipity.
It's hard for me to be specific about this but I've worked for 2 cloud FAANGs and whatever the management culture was like at Intel, whenever I work with ex-Intel management... their behavior and perspective just really rubbed me wrong. None went to work because they liked what they did. What was worse is you could feel it. They had a smell; not Tech, no imagination.
When I think of people that went into Tech 20+ years ago, this choice of work was a vocation. Not saying they were all pleasant, but they were all largely invested.
At some point Tech became a safe, lucrative profession, for people who say things like 'life is more than work. Nobody is required to like what they do.', like the managers from Intel.
> Those of the Elven-race that lived still in Middle-earth waned and faded, and Men usurped the sunlight. Then the Quendi wandered in the lonely places of the great lands and the isles, and took to the moonlight and the starlight, and to the woods and caves, becoming as shadows and memories, save those who ever and anon set sail into the West and vanished from Middle-earth.
Andy Grove left in 1998, even though he was on the board of directors until 2004 (with diminished role).
After he left the CEO role Intel just lost his way.
As far as I understand, Grove was at the helm when Intel started the Itanium project. Granted, he didn't see it to "completion", but poor choices were made even in his time.
He even stated the following in "Only the Paranoid Survive":
One, don’t differentiate without a difference. Don’t introduce improvements whose only purpose is to give you an advantage over your competitor without giving your customer a substantial advantage. The personal computer industry is characterized by well-chronicled failures when manufacturers, ostensibly motivated by a desire to make “a better PC,” departed from the mainstream standard. But goodness in a PC was inseparable from compatibility, so “a better PC” that was different turned out to be a technological oxymoron.
Just because Itanium last as a bet, doesn't mean it was wrong to try it. They gambled that compilers would keep up - they didn't. Today it might work! Compiler technology is very much improved. (Dotnet/Java payloads? Dynamic recompiling...) It's a software problem and as such inherently easy to underestimate the complexity of it. Itanium also had its roots in a time when Big Iron was more relevant than it is today.
CHIPS act nuked Intel. The promise of unlimited US govt support to make a US TSMC encouraged Gelsinger to all in on domestic fab production, only to rugged first by Biden DEI stipulations, then by Trump 2.0 coercing Taipei to give up TSMC and start production in Arizona. All this while export controls cut Intel out from its second largest market (China), depriving it of much need revenue. Workers in Oregon losing jobs is downstream of all this
Workers in Oregon losing jobs is downstream of Intel not being able to produce the best chips, which earned the highest margins that Intel was used to earning. This has been in the works since the mid 2000s, and they still don’t have a competitive low power, high performance chip.
Also, Oregon is a terrible state to invest in as a business, especially one that is looking to pay high salaries.
>Instead, Intel has embarked on an unprecedented and sustained campaign to shrink its business in response to a series of technical and financial crises.
it's not unprecedented, when companies' businesses contract, shrinking is exactly the right thing to do, not to mention that it's forced on them anyway.
It's not unprecedented, but I question if it is the right move while the industry is experiencing unprecedented growth.
"The Global Data Center Chip Market size is expected to be worth around USD 57.9 Billion by 2033, from USD 14.3 Billion in 2023, growing at a CAGR of 15.0% during the forecast period from 2024 to 2033."
Thinking about the Rule of 72, that CAGR is astonishing. Where will the power come from to run these data centers? Are we going to see an explosion of solar and wind farms with the express purpose of powering data centers? I say solar and wind because they are easier to get approved and built compared to nuclear or gas/coal.
For a few decades, they paid their shareholders instead of paying competitive salaries to their employees. All the best people went to Apple/Microsoft/Nvidia/Amazon/Meta/Alphabet/Qualcomm/TSMC (adjusted for their CoL and options in Taiwan).
Intel was in the business of selling the most cutting edge, technologically advanced products in the world, but they didn’t want to pay enough for the best people.
What I don't get is that there are at least a couple of very large, very valuable US companies that need to have their CPUs/GPUs fabbed (Apple and NVidia) and are currently dependent on fabs in Taiwan, a geopolitically risky place to be that dependent on. Both are sitting on huge reserves of ca$h. Why not either outright buy or buy a large stake in Intel to recapitalize it and allow it to finish the new SOTA fabs it was building? The CHIPS act was intended to help the likes of Intel and Micron, but the current admin has apparently blocked any further funding. If the current admin was serious about US semiconductor manufacturing it would try to arrange some kind of shotgun wedding where Apple & Nvidia (and others) take a stake in Intel to keep it afloat. Perhaps some kind of a consortium where the investing companies get priority in getting their parts fabbed? There's really no other US alternative for advanced semiconductor fabrication unless you're going to start from scratch and that doesn't seem like a viable idea.
Yes, I understand the argument that Intel management screwed up for too long and this is the market at work, but that ignores the geopolitical risks of what we're going to end up with. Forming some kind of consortium to keep Intel fabs running (and new ones built) could also include completely changing the management of the company.
To me, Apple and NVidia have already voted "no" to major Intel investment. This is evident from how large is their order book with TSMC and Samsung. I think the newest TSMC fab in Arizona is one step back from the best in Taiwan, and I think they will build another fab in Arizona soon (if not already started).
Because it was incentive based. Intel has to hit milestones to get funding. Everything Intel does takes years.
Intel is also likely going to lose hundreds of millions in incentives from Oregon for failure to meet hiring objectives, but they have a while to do that.
Is it because the employees themselves are so incompetent that no one wants to take this burden on. Besides, TSMC is expanding in Arizona and Samsung is expanding in Texas.
> Is it because the employees themselves are so incompetent that no one wants to take this burden on.
I don't buy this. I think the primary problem was mismanagement especially in the 2008 to 2020 timeframe. Too many bean counter CEOs during that period who did not understand the need to constantly invest in SOTA fabs.
> Too many bean counter CEOs during that period who did not understand the need to constantly invest in SOTA fabs.
I am not here to defend Intel, but I don't think this is the correct interpretation of events. Basically, Intel failed in their fab process R&D to keep up with TSMC and Samsung, and that is not lack of effort or money. Since their fab process R&D was going so poorly, Intel slowed down their fab construction rate. This makes good business sense to me. The truth appears to be that Intel fab process got beat fair and square by TSMC and Samsung.
Intel absolutely flubbed some nodes and bad employee execution was a part of it.
But management has consistently tried to tell customers what they want/need. Intel has a history of developing products with no customer base or pulling out of markets too early. Neither of those are the responsibility of low level employees. That's higher management.
One of the big concerns about the GPU division is "Will Intel keep going long enough for this to matter or will they pull out the second there's an issue?"
As I understand, the best fab tech is TSMC (Taiwan) and Samsung (Korea). Do you really expect China can surpass both in only two years? It seems unlikely, as they don't have access to high-end fab equipment from ASML.
> Intel would sometimes cut jobs during fallow periods but it backfilled them almost immediately.
Smells like corporate bulimia.
When I worked/lived in the Bay Area there was a sense that corporations, and residents of the Bay Area, were moving to Oregon because it was cheaper … but still close enough to Silicon Valley. (Apropos of nothing really.)
> If companies have extra cash on hand, don't we want them to invest it and hire?
No. Hiring should be a long-term strategic investment, not something you do whenever you have extra cash lying around. If you needed the extra people you should have been trying to hire them already, and if you don't then you shouldn't hire them now.
If I'm a shareowner, if the company doesn't have any intelligent ideas on how to spend my money, they should send it back to me as a dividend, or buy me out (share buyback).
Please don't waste my money trying to build some immortal empire as a shrine to the CEO's ambition.
There’s an enormous amount of money being made by chipmakers, and Intel is rapidly losing access to it. That doesn’t mean hiring stupidly is good, but spending money to regain its momentum and save the company from bankruptcy is an obvious priority. Stock buybacks aren’t, unless the plan is to extract revenue and shut the place down.
No. Generally speaking, I want corporations to return capital in excess of operating needs to shareholders unless they have actual high-expected-return, ready-to-be-executed plans for what to do with their money.
When corporations just invest because they have money, there is a gigantic agency problem, and executives have a tendency to burn shareholder value on vanity projects and fancier headquarters.
Stock buybacks are exactly what I want wealthy companies to be doing with money they don't have a high expected ROI for.
On the other hand, the Shanghai stock index has been basically flat for years, despite Chinese companies rapidly growing and dominating industry after industry. Our companies have been very good at returning value to shareholders, while Chinese companies have been re-investing. There’s a very real possibility that we may come to deeply regret it.
I would not read too much into the lackluster performance of Chinese stock markets. Something is weird about a place with a fast growing economy, but the stock market performance is so poor.
Because China is starting from a position of weakness and catching up, it is by definition easier for them to find high ROI projects to spend money on. Just wait 10–20 years when China is thoroughly technically ahead of us, and Chinese companies will be more like American ones.
China is massively investing in the entire energy generation sector, renewables, advanced nuclear, batteries, EVs, full self driving. This is the future we were supposed to be investing in, but we’re losing it. Maybe we got some share buybacks instead.
The share buybacks enable and encourage investors to move their money to invest in other things for the future. That's usually a better idea than e.g. Intel, who know nothing about other wind farms, building their own.
My concern is that America will become a sprawling no man’s land as the economy contracts to 20 percent of its present size. Rapid collapse is unpredictable and seems like a bad idea for a country with such a huge military presence.
Not entirely disagreeing, but Intel feels more like a poster child of buybacks that (in hindsight and in comparison with their peer group) would have been much better spent reinvested into the company https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-intel-fi...:
* during the same time period they fell behind TSMC and SEC in semiconductor fab , missed the boat on mobile (couldn't really capture the market for either smartphone or tablet CPUs), and are missing the boat w/AI training https://www.hpcwire.com/2025/07/14/intel-officially-throws-i...
Intel did not do a good job with its (sizable) investments for the last decade. There's little reason (at least for me, a casual observer of their failure to deliver good chips) to think they would have done a better job by just throwing (more) money at the problems they were trying to solve.
The existence of markets Intel didn't dominate does not, to me, imply that it would have been a good use of resources to throw (more) money at the markets they didn't dominate. Not every company is good at every business, even if they dominate some seemingly related market.
This is completely opposite of how budgets work inside companies. If a department has a specific budget, then it is generally considered very bad to return part of it ever. Instead, they just find new things to do with it. Now, of course, sometimes, the new things are vanity projects, but I find that 80% of times those are actually very good investments.
There is a good reason for it: Many pension funds and large money managers have a hard rule that they will not invest at full into a company without a dividend. I'm not saying that you have to agree with that strategy, but it is incredibly common for US pension managers. Also, some stocks pay one cent as their div, just to qualify.
No stock buybacks, pay dividends, that's why the instrument exists. Stock buybacks are an aberration of hyperfinancialisation, just pay the shareholders proportionally to what they own.
Dividends don't currently get the same tax advantages in the US, so until tax policy gets revised, it's better for the shareholders in question if there's a buyback.
There's also the matter that dividends are meant to be long-term and recurring. So it's not great for one-time windfalls.
If you asked CFOs why they choose stock buyback over dividends, it is simple: tax efficiency. When you pay divs, holders are required to pay tax immediately. Buybacks act like reinvestment and are not taxed until the holder sells their shares.
Companies should buy back their stock if their stock is undervalued.
This anti stock buyback meme is silly. It’s like people who are anti shorting stock. Companies list on the stock exchange in order to sell their own stock to raise capital. If they have excess capital, absolutely they should be able to buy back their stock. And buy other companies stock if they see it as undervalued also.
It's not silly, it's a terrible incentive for companies flush with cash and paying bonuses to their executives in stocks, it becomes very easy to manipulate the stock price with stock buybacks for a larger bonus while letting the company flailing with underinvestment (or simply missed investments).
A great case to see the absurdity of it is Intel, doing stock buybacks for almost a decade to push its stock price up while flailing around and losing its edge, if it was paying high dividends while flailing around then major shareholders would be asking why the fuck would they be paying dividends while the business is losing competitiveness but by doing stock buybacks it kept investors "happy" so they could jump ship and let the company fail on its own.
Stock buybacks have perverse incentives, everyone responsible for keeping the company in check gets a fat paycheck from buybacks: executives, major investors, etc., all financed by sucking the coffers dry. The buybacks at Intel just made the company as a whole lose money, they bought back stocks when they were high and it only dipped since then (10y window).
Buybacks are in effect and by definition a kind of fraud even if people make excuses for it or do not want to see it that way. It's the equivalent of a vested interest driving up an auction price or, you know, buying a bunch of your own product and then using the "sales" figures to convince others to invest or buy your product at a higher rate/price due to artificial scarcity.
The fact that c-suites authorize buybacks largely to boost the stock price in order to trigger their own performance bonuses tied to the stock price only highlights that point.
If you did something even remotely similar, you would be prosecuted for fraud, because it's fraud.
1) Wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain.
2) A person or thing intended to deceive others, typically by unjustifiably claiming or being credited with accomplishments or qualities.
The problem though is that the incentive structure is so that none of the involved parties has any disincentive, let alone an adversarial incentive to end the practice, let alone has standing to do anything legally, short of sabotaging their own stock value.
It's a totally perverse and corrupted incentive structure, similar to why both Trump or Biden, or Democrats or Republicans have the real will or interests in ... non of the involved parties have any interest in revealing the rot and corruption, and all parties involved have every incentive to keep it all under wraps, suppressed, covered, up and distracted from.
In some ways, a civil activist organization could in fact buy a single stock of one of the most egregious stock buyback stock price inflation causing corporations and sue them for fraud and deception, but it would have to come with a claim at manipulation of the market due to fraudulent manipulation of the price discovery process similar to a light version of cornering the market through restriction of supply, i.e., cartel behavior.
They can only buy back stocks from people who want to sell them. The people who sell them do so because they believe it's a good deal. The process puts cash in the hands of those sellers, who can then go on to invest in something else, keeping the market more liquid rather than the first company sitting on cash reserves. The price of an individual stock is pretty much meaningless, you must multiply by the total number of stocks outstanding to determine the market cap. So it is not the buying back of stock that represents any fraud.
If there is any fraud, it would be having performance bonuses tied to individual stock price, rather than market cap. But blaming the buyback itself, is short-sighted.
Do you realize how extensively companies have to document their buybacks? Who is deceived?
There is zero fraud implied or even suggested by stock buybacks. They are heavily-publicized-in-advance returns of capital to shareholders. That's it. The sales are often offset by the creation of new stock via RSUs, and in that case just reduce the dilution intrinsic to RSUs.
Shareholders want executives to be incentive-aligned to reduce agency problems. Stock based compensation furthers that goal. If a manager doesn't think they have a better use of spare capital than returning it to shareholders, returning the capital is exactly what shareholders want. There's nothing nefarious here.
It's the disposable side of the practice that I disagree with. Hiring should feel like a marriage or a commitment for any business. Just my opinion though.
I think we've become too complacent/accepting of corporations just laying off employees with what amounts to a shrug.
I'm kinda with you that in most situations corporations would probably be better off hiring slower and then riding out downturns on cash.
But big picture I disagree. We kind of need creative destruction in an economy - we need to be able to lay off people in horse buggey industries so that they can be hired to make Model T's. We're better off focusing on our social safety network and having a job market that encourages some amount of transit between careers.
> Hiring should feel like a marriage or a commitment for any business.
Treating the employer/employee relationship like some life-long commitment sounds like pure hell. It is a transaction. I don't want it to be anything more than that.
I wish it weren't such a big deal in ones life they keep their current employer (from the perspective of things like health insurance plans, retirement plans, PTO balances, basic income). If it weren't so god damned painful to change jobs or have some gaps longer than a month or two then maybe we'd have a chance to just treat jobs as jobs we move between instead of a sacred vow for life lest we be thrown into chaos when broken.
The average marriage lasts about 20 years. Companies should be able to fire people, but they shouldn't be overhiring in good years and then tossing people out in the next rough patch.
I don't know what a fired certificate is unless you're making a funny about you needing to do that with a divorce certificate? I also don't know what that is either. There's a divorce decree issued by the court, is that what you mean? Have you actually had a date ask to see legal documents about your divorce or any of the other situations? I just have no experience with any of that so it seems very strange, and feels like your just belaboring the point.
Been there done that got the decree and everything. You’re right, I don’t understand your musings as not once has anyone ever asked to see proof of my divorce. Some forms that ask about marital status might have a divorced option, but not all. It does not affect my credit. It does not affect job interviews. I really just have no way to relate to what you’re saying as it has never happened to me, nor have I ever heard anyone else complain about needing to provide this certificate. You are literally the first person. That’s such an outlier that I have to question its legitimacy.
For buy and hold investors, stock buybacks do nothing, whereas dividends create real taxable income. Either you take the income, minus taxes, and spend it, or you reinvest it into the stock, again minus taxes.
If you reinvest it into the stock, you've had to pay taxes on the dividend amount, so you've lost vs a buyback.
If you want to spend money and your stocks don't issue dividends, you just have to sell some of your shares. Selling $X of shares will almost always generate less taxable income than receiving $X of dividends as some of it will be a return of capital; so again, if you take $X out of the holdings, you've lost with a dividend vs a buyback and you sold $X.
There is also a bit of strategic, defensive hiring that happens, i.e., hiring people so your competition cannot hire them, let alone at a lower salary if you were not hiring. It's a little talked about issue, because it is mostly expressed as a type of C-suite FOMO tied to their performance and stock option incentives, i.e., "we need to hire because X is hiring and we can't look like we are not growing/hiring because that will drive the stock price down and risks my stock options, even if we are doing massive buybacks to glaze the stock price".
It is another significant flaw in the "capitalist", i.e., publicly traded corporate system that incentivizes all the various financial shenanigans to generate false stock performance to enrich the c-suite.
> there was a sense that corporations, and residents of the Bay Area, were moving to Oregon because it was cheaper … but still close enough to Silicon Valley.
It's a different state and a 9-10 hour drive away; in what sense is it close?
At least in the past, Intel owned a dozen 35-50 pax regional jets (https://www.planespotters.net/airline/Intel-Air-Shuttle-Airc...) and had regular scheduled flights back and forth between their Santa Clara, Phoenix, and Portland offices. (They now seem to be down to two- rise of Zoom?)
Note that these were NOT executive jets for C-suite, these were for all employees who had meetings at other locations (at least according to people I've met since I moved to AZ a few years ago to be near my in-laws).
I remember the airplane tail had the number 386, or 486. It was difficult to get a seat, but it was based on first come first serve, so you just had to be diligent on the booking web site.
Coming out of San Jose, the plane would enter this corkscrew to gain altitude. I guess to avoid SFO airspace.
I would often see high level executives on the same plane.
A lot of people "on the coast" were happy to relocate a bit further north where they still had beaches, mountains to romp around — only more affordable.
Definitely not close as in "commute close".
Maybe more like "close to feeling the same as the Bay Area"?
(You can believe Portlanders hated Californians that moved up there. Or so I've been told.)
Another thing that would've sweetened the deal -- given certain priorities -- is how close nature is: Oregon's restrictive limits on urban area boundaries means that in 45 minutes you're out in nature, and in 1 1/2 hour you're skiing on Mt Hood.
Also, no sales tax!
PS – as someone who spent hundreds of hours on Glider PRO as a kid, thank you!
> (You can believe Portlanders hated Californians that moved up there. Or so I've been told.)
They still do, only it's not really Portlanders anymore, it's all the smaller cities that hate them. Why? A couple reasons: they came in and pay over asking price for housing, driving up prices across the board so those working for local non-conglomerates have a hard time affording housing. And then they vote contrary to how the locals do (locals, I might add, who didn't have any problem with how things were run before, even if their "betters" felt they were "backwards").
Basically, they end up burying the local culture and replacing it with California.
It is actually cheaper to rent in Portland and fly commercial daily to SJC than it is to live in the bay area. I did this commute regularly since my family is settled in Portland. End to end it is only slightly slower than Caltrain (sfo->SJC) as well... Actually one of my more pleasant commutes. I live close to the airport and with TSA precheck I would show up 15 minutes before boarding, be in air for 90 minutes and then to the office. If I leave at 7 then I'm perfectly on time for 9AM and then fly home at around 7:30 to be back in bed around 10. Even have time for dinner and drinks after work.
Pure financials can more than explain this, if you have a family and want space for them. Let's do some napkin math, from a quick Google search it's 150$ round trip, so 3000$ a month assuming 20 work days (maybe even less with frequent-flyer status, cashbacks and rewards).
For a 4 bedroom house, Zillow gives me around 7-8k a month in rent for SF and around 4k for SJ, so you'll at least break even and have a better quality of life for your family even if you won't see them much during the week.
Anyway: The fact that a simple adequate house for a family runs at 4k in the US is ... maddening. 1500 sqft is around 140 m², a comparable house in Berlin (one of Germany's hottest markets!) runs ~2500€. How one is supposed to live in the US when not on a typical techbro salary, I have no idea how y'all even manage that.
You don't have to answer this question, but: do you live off the I-205? I'm always astounded (well, annoyed) at how, living in the inner east side, getting to Multnomah Falls via I-84 would sometimes be quicker than getting to PDX fir the 205.
In Oregon, the layoffs were 3x-4x more than in AZ. What's kicked both regions in the teeth is that the layoffs were 4x-5x more than what Intel had stated.
OregonLive has been reporting for weeks that 500+ Oregon Intel jobs were going to be cut -- they cut 2500 jobs. This is also round 3 (?) of Intel's layoffs in the last 12 months. It's massive and devastating.
This is yet another example of something that's happening all acrossed tech: (Over?)Correcting for a systemic problem; due to either/both misidentifying the problem, or reaching for the wrong solution that promises to solve the issue regardless.
The Asserted problem: Labor force/expense is too high, or at least, higher than is now thought necessary.
The (IMO) core problem: Measuring professional success/skill primarily by the size of the team a person manages.
The asserted solution: AI replacing Labor to reduce inflated labor costs/pools.
While there is some inherent benefit there to reducing team sizes back down into allegedly functionally sized units, there is a lack of accountability and understanding as to why that's beneficial, as it at seems to be done either due to the lofty promise of AI (which I'm critical of), or a more brutalist/myopic approach of merely trying to make the big labor-cost number smaller to increase margin/reduce expenses. To be clear, while I'm a critic of AI, I fully acknowledge it can absolutely be helpful in many instances. The problem is that people are learning the wrong lessons from this, as they've improperly identified the issue, and why the force reduction is allegedly/appears to be working.
Obviously, YMMV on a case-by-case/team/company basis, but Intel is known for being guilty of "Bigger = Better" when it comes to team size, and their new CEO acknowledged this somewhat with their "Bureaucracy kills innovation" speech [0].
That said, what may be good for the company (even if done for the right reasons) can still hurt the communities it built/depend on it.
As a PDX native that went to Oregon State and saw a lot of people go towards Intel, I don't feel the Oregon Intel crowd has strong aptitude for starting something up. They're at Intel in the first place because it was a secure job in their hometown they could coast at. I'm sure there are many of them that can do it, but I don't feel Portland has strong startup energy.
Disagree. Hillsboro has plenty of businesses from ex-intel employees.
Just off the top of my head I can think of a dozen or so.
They're just not in tech for the most part. I can think of 2 breweries, a standardization company, two machine shops. And those are just within a mile or so of my house.
I think a lot of folks work at Intel in order to get out of tech. That's basically what I'm doing, lol. Work enough to save and get out of tech.
Tech is also expensive to start up in. So it makes sense that a lot of the intel-driven businesses would be non-tech.
Yes, these folks came out of Intel Labs. But that's also a fabless startup. When you start talking about fabs you're talking about needing real money (in the multi billions of dollars). That kind of funding could only come from the likes of Apple and Nvidia.
It's a very laid-back place - more of a "you're missing out on life if you're not enjoying nature every weekend" type of place. Lots of new parents in the mid-to-late 30s (I think the highest proportion of any major city, actually.)
I think what hampers Oregon is that there isn't much non-Intel investment in R&D in the Portland region as well, compared to the Bay Area – there used to be a graduate institute funded by Tek et al., but that never got sustained. [1] The local academic medical research center is well-regarded and otherwise wouldn't have trouble attracting talent if it wasn't for the salaries.
I was a student at OGI back when it was still a thing. Then a lot of the DARPA grant money dried up because of the Iraq war (they wanted research that could be applied to weapons in the short term, not basic research into operating systems and programming languages).
They merged with OHSU, but it turned out OHSU was about as broke as they were, so most of the CS faculty migrated en-masse to PSU and took all their grad students (myself included) along with them. (It turns out grants generally go to the principle investigator, not the school. So if your advisor moves schools, their funding goes with them.)
Yeah, this is going to be the ultimate deciding factor. When local companies don't pay enough to live and Bay Area companies are paying upto 10X+ the compensation (for AI roles) people are going to make the move.
It helps there to be a strong community of founders, employees willing to take a risk to work at startup for less money, investors, capital, and general energy in the air. PNW tech scene is relatively low-key and apathetic to startups. Anyone with that type of ambition should have already migrated
There was a strong contingent of forward looking tech people and entrepreneurs a few years ago (pre COVID). They have left due to the large restrictions during COVID and the flight of capital and the general decline of Portland due to the riots and the lockdown measures.
Here's one thing OP might be talking about – the "skyscraper district" of PDX practically emptied out during COVID, precisely because Portland has highly segregated big-B-business and residential districts. The rise of WFH meant that the whole district nearly emptied out overnight – especially anchor tenants like law firms and tech that were most amenable to WFH. Without any residential population in the area, boom: no place for a downtown flagship office.
Since I don't want to stealth-edit my post, another one was the rise of "nuisance homelessness" – the same shelter-in-place order prevented the City from sweeping people into warehouse shelters (but lower-capacity motel shelters were set up); and a combo drug-decriminalization-and-treatment-funding bill gave us the decriminalization but never actually funded the treatment in time, and so there was a lot of open-air drug use. That didn't help the return to "downtown" either.
Fabs aren't cheap, so you can't just start-up mentality you're way into this. This isn't a bunch of dudes living in the same house banging code on laptops. Serious investment would be needed. Even with bags of cash available, these are not available for 2-day delivery. There's a bit of lead time involved
It sounds like a lot of the jobs are in manufacturing (fabs) or closely related. Once upon a time, innovative startups could be in that space (that's how "Silicon Valley" got the silicon part of its name). But, for several decades now, it requires billions of dollars to start up a semiconductor fab, and VC's don't seem to be all that into funding manufacturing.
I'm not saying it _should_ or _must_ be that way, just that it is.
Lucky for those people, California exists! Noncompetes can’t be enforced here, and amazingly, this applies even if the employee entered into the agreement before they came to California:
In general you should ignore non competes but you should not divulge previous employers proprietary knowledge. No state will enforce a non compete if it means the person would be unemployed. The judge will laugh you out of the courtroom.
Only if there are paradigm shifts on the horizon. Chip making is high barrier to entry, capital intensive. No small collective is going to be able to start something up.
Yeah. The big problem with chip making is the effort to start up is absolutely monumental. China is putting all their money into it and still playing catch up. Japan is trying to get into the game and they're mostly aiming to make slightly older chips and bringing in companies that already have expertise.
Those are two of the biggest economies in the world pumping loads of money and people into that engine to try to get it started and still just starting to make some progress. That's not to say there aren't great ideas out there that we're missing which could make it all easier and cheaper, but a small team is definitely going to have one hell of a time making stuff on a nanometer scale without billions and billions of dollars behind them. Software startups are easy, but hardware is hard. Massive hardware and microscopic hardware are harder.
I am rooting for this to be the case, and frankly it should be, but typically the massive startup boom comes from companies IPOing (PayPal mafia, Google mafia, etc.). So much talent has been locked up at Intel, I'm hoping this is a liberation of sorts.
Intel dropped the ball, and it was the biggest bullet I ever dodged. Even 20 years ago, I felt there was something wrong about the internal culture there, so I turned down the post-internship job offer.
There's a bunch of teams there with three-letter acronyms whose origins have been totally forgotten. Like, nobody knows what LTQ or ASR stands for, or what purpose they have. When you're an intern, you tend to think that the higher-ups know what they're doing, but if you ask for an explanation, you will soon conclude that they don't know either.
People were not working hard enough. At the time Intel's dominance was supreme. They should have been picking up on niche ideas like GPUs and mobile chips, it would have been cheap and adjacent to what they had. Instead, all I heard at the meetings was laughing at the little guys who are now all bigger than Intel. Even my friend in the VC division couldn't get the bosses to see what was happening. People would spend their whole day just having coffee with random colleagues, and making a couple of slides. It's nice to relax sometimes, but when I was there it was way too much of that. There was just way too much fat in the business.
I still have friends there who stayed on. They tell me not to come, and are now wondering how to do the first job search of their professional lives. A couple have moved very recently.
It's very odd that the guy who was famous for saying what upper management should do (set culture) ended up building a culture that has completely failed.
>>It's very odd that the guy who was famous for saying what upper management should do (set culture) ended up building a culture that has completely failed
Is it? Everywhere I worked upper management is taking big about the culture but their taking points are rarely applied to the company.
Like when Facebook says something like "we value your privacy"
Facebook does value your privacy, because it's a commodity they can sell for a high price.
Sort of like that Twilight Zone episode. The aliens come and convince us they are here to serve man. "Here, if you don't believe us look at our book called 'To Serve Man.'"
Finally one of the humans translates it and discovers it's a cookbook.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Z...
> At the time Intel's dominance was supreme
They are the poster child for "we have a monopoly so we don't have to innovate or even maintain competence". Mind you, how much worse must things be at AMD that they're not winning the x64 war? Eventually the "PC" market is going to get run over by ARM like everything else. Especially now there's a Windows on ARM with proper backwards compatibility.
(although something is very odd with drivers on Windows-ARM, if anyone knows the full story on how to get .inf based 'drivers' working it would be genuinely helpful)
This is a very Apple viewcentric point of view.
Windows on ARM is still largely ignored, everyone on the consumer level is more than happy with current Intel/AMD offerings.
Every single attempt to sell Windows ARM systems has been more or less a flop, including the recent CoPilot+ PCs.
Windows developer community also largely ignores Windows on ARM, unless there is an actual business value to support yet another ISA during development, CI/CD pipelines, and QA.
Only Apple gets to play the vertical integration game, our way or go away attitude, and they are the survivors of home computer vertical integration only because they got lucky when banks where already knocking on the door.
I did say "eventually", because I'm at the very start of "yet another ISA during development, CI/CD pipelines, and QA" work.
Which means that there is some business value on selling the software on Windows on ARM devices to budget such efforts.
> they're not winning the x64 war?
That's probably the strongest mis-statement I've heard this week. At least, it seems AMD have been the x86-64 leaders for several years now.
Why are you thinking AMD aren't winning?
By precisely what metric are AMD the leading x86-64 vendor? Intel still outsells them.
It sure seems like AMD is winning the x64 war?
https://www.alltechnerd.com/amd-captures-17-more-cpu-market-...
Maybe a semantic argument, but I'd say they are "on their way to winning", but once they have a higher market share than Intel, "they are winning".
> Despite Intel still holding the lead with 56.3% of systems validated through CPU-Z, AMD is closing in, now claiming 43.7% of the market.
I think Intel's been losing for a while now. I would rather have RISC-V over ARM, though.
Same. I started down the semiconductor path about 15 years ago (physics student, loved my EE classes, loved nanofab class, wanted more) and got warned away by an astonishing number of independent postdocs, interns, and seemingly successful industry contacts who all agreed on one point: the pay was such utter dogshit that one should consider it a passion career like art or music. Some of them saw consulting for the Chinese as their "big ticket light at the end of the tunnel" -- but that got shut down soon enough. I changed directions before getting first hand experience but the R&D job listings tended to support this view. "They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" seemed to be in the advanced stages at that point.
At least in R&D, from the angle I saw it. Clearly, being stingy wasn't a universal problem: heavy buybacks, ludicrous M&A (in foresight and hindsight), and that $180k average salary in the article sounds completely divorced from the snapshot impression that I got. I don't know what gives, was R&D "salary optimized" to a degree that other parts of the business weren't? Did the numbers change at some point but the culture was already rotten and cynical? Or did I see noise and mistake it for signal? Dunno.
In another world I'd love to have been part of the fight to make 10nm work (or whatever needed doing) rather than working on something that doesn't fully use my skills or in my private opinion contribute as much to humanity, but my employer pays me and respects my time and doesn't steer their business into every iceberg in the ocean, and in the end those things are more important.
The problem with R&D as a career (in a "large organised company/institute" context at least, where you don't own and control the results) is the limitless supply of impoverished students and postdocs willing to work for exposure.
Right, but cheaping out on the foundation of your building has consequences -- which have come home to roost orders of magnitude in excess of the money saved.
In R&D management, this is an extremely well-known problem with an extremely well-known solution: use the oversupply to be selective rather than cheap. The fact that they chose to be cheap rather than selective is managerial incompetence of the highest order. They had one job, and they blew it. "Selective" doesn't even mean that the rating system has to be perfect or even good, it just has to equilibrate supply and demand without shredding morale. Even a lottery would suffice for this purpose.
> Many of those who lost their jobs worked in technical fields in an industry that pays an average wage of $180,000 a year. Those were great jobs and helped buoy the whole state, but most won’t find similar work locally.
This is the big risk we all took when we moved away from the Bay Area to work remotely. You arbitrage the COL difference and come out ahead big time, but it might be very hard to make the same salary locally if you can't find a remote job.
Best to make some hay while the sun is shining.
IBM left my once prosperous hometown as a kid. Others followed suit. Since then it's been in a sad state economically, just some rust belt town. Corporations abandoning communities is hardly anything new. Capital acts with 0 empathy, or rather, the people who direct it do.
I've heard on this forum of a tactic Intel employed where they broke off some people into a subsidiary, dissolved the subsidiary, and then offered to rehire them with the caveat: Oops, the pension you were promised is now gone. Then Intel's foundry business started failing. Oops!!
> “I don’t feel good today,” Gelsinger said told employees Thursday. “I’ve agonized over today for the last three, four weeks. Many nights waking up at 2 a.m. because I know that what we do, and how we’re affecting you and your families, it matters.”
Sounds pretty empathetic to me. I’m guessing he also has empathy for Wall St and his shareholders. Ultimately Intel has no choice but to either grow or downsize and the former hasn’t materialized. They’re losing market share and revenue and if they keep that up they will be empathizing with their creditors and the bank.
I am pretty sure he will get a nice stock compenstation for the mental anguish he suffered for this decision.
Snark aside, did Intel management take any cuts, even symbolic ones to show they are in it together?
Yes, that’s exactly what they did under Gelsinger: https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2023/02/intel-slas...
Honestly, I don't think Gelsinger is a bad guy. He was handed a mess made by others before him, which in my mind absolves him of some of the blame.
Krzanich and Swan were catastrophically bad. Both of them are among the worst bigcorp CEOs ever, with asleep-at-the-wheel Krzanich in the running for the worst of all time. Intel's board tried to right the ship with Gelsinger, but it was too little and too late, especially given slow development cycles in the semiconductor industry.
It feels like these older companies had more of "let's open a campus in flyover country" or at least medium sized cities
The newer "web 2.0" companies (and I mean, even Google and Amazon) opened shop in more affluent places
I'd argue it's not a choice of "let's open a campus in flyover country," but a reflection of how the industry has changed.
The "older" companies were manufacturers. Even places like Mountain View and San Jose were the working-class towns with HP factories and semiconductor plants. The concentration of engineering talent (HP/Intel/Apple/Atari) is what created the affluence, especially after manufacturing itself was outsourced globally.
The newer Web 2.0 companies don't make physical things; they make software. Their most critical infrastructure isn't a factory but a dense network of developers. They go to the Bay Area, Seattle, etc., because that's where the network is. For the parts of their business that don't require that network, like customer service, they locate in less expensive regions, just as PayPal did with Nebraska. They were even the second largest employer in Nebraska iirc.
Amazon's customer service HQ is in West Virginia IIRC.
There's a significant overlap between well educated technical minds who you want to do information work and people who want to live in a vibrant city. This isn't new and it shouldn't be shocking.
But Silicon Valley isn't made up of vibrant cities. Most of it is small towns and suburbs between SF and SJ.
I remember the first time I was sent to the Bay Area for training. I was excited to see this City of Mountain View I'd heard so much about; to explore its city nightlife and enjoy the view of the mountain. My boss had to let me down gently :) "Mountain View in Europe would be called a village", he said.
That’s kind of the big failure of post-WWII 20th century American urban planning. People, especially young ones, want to live in the fun cities they saw on TV where you can live in fun neighborhoods and walk to cool restaurants on the way to a show, so they move to places like SF, LA, NY, etc. but unless you bought in the 90s anyone without family wealth has the abrupt disappointment that they’re actually in some suburb 45 minutes away and spending a couple hours a day driving and trying not to think about how much they’re paying for even that.
I don’t know how quickly we’ll find the political will to break that since everyone who owns property in a city has a financial incentive to keep prices artificially high. Removing density restrictions helps by making redevelopment financially advantageous for individuals but the degree of uncertainty we have now is going to slow that down, too.
Yup. The Bay Area just seems like endless suburbia with a small city hidden inside. Nice weather though, to be fair.
They're more like denser regions inside El Camino Real tbh
Completely wrong.
The people who unironically want to live in the middle of a soulless metropolis where $3000 a month gets you a tiny studio are retarded, frankly.
Workers live in the city because they have to, not because they want to.
Econ 101: people aren’t paying $3,000 a month because everyone in business has failed to think about opening an office in the suburbs. Walkable neighborhoods are expensive because they’re so desirable that Americans pay a premium to live there. The answer should be removing the barriers preventing builders from supplying that demand.
Metropolises are not soulless, as a rule. They are dynamic and exciting, with an influx of ambitious young people every year trying their best to start something.
You don't need a big home space when any cafe can become your living room, any restaurant your kitchen, dining room and wait staff, and any park your professionally tended garden.
Your choice of entertainment, especially live entertainment, is mainly limited by your willingness to keep up with what's going on, and not by the sparse calendar of touring acts.
Metropolises are fantastic places to live, especially when you are comfortable spending money to expand your space on demand.
“[W]hen you are comfortable spending money” is the kicker, though. Unfortunately, the Bay Area is oppressively expensive, and the same can be said about places like New York City. High housing prices puts a major strain on the ability to enjoy restaurants and paid entertainment. Also, because the restaurant owners and workers need to pay high rents, the food prices are very high. It’s hard to enjoy $3000 studio apartments, $12 burritos that used to only cost $8 before the pandemic, and other high costs when you’re not rich. I make a low six-figure salary as a professor in the Bay Area and I’ve had to cut back on eating out in the past year since the prices have gotten obscenely expensive.
It doesn’t have to be this way, though. Tokyo is a vibrant metropolis that is also relatively affordable by global standards. The key to this is sensible housing policy that doesn’t inflate the cost of living to oppressive levels.
What keeps me in the Bay Area besides being tenure-track are proximity to family, the acceptance of multiculturalism, and (as an academic) California’s support for academia in a national political climate that has become hostile to academia. But financially I wish the price of rent, food, and other necessities weren’t so oppressive.
> Metropolises are fantastic places to live, especially when you are comfortable spending money to expand your space on demand.
That's a very optimistic perspective, which I somewhat envy. It makes sense in a way, assuming your rent is negligible, but when you're paying out the ass for an apartment, having the privilege of being able to pay short-term rent in the form of coffees and brezels for a shared proper living room doesn't sound great...
Lets say pay was the same and magically commute was the same too. You would choose a literal pod over half an acre only 75 miles away?
Insane. Enjoy your pod. And all the crime too.
Half an acre that you have to care about, mind you. And work is not the only place people go to in a city. Add all those other amenities other commenters already spoke about, and your half-acre would have to be in the middle of at least a mid-size town.
Obviously that would be nice, but not even HNers are rich enough to build rural villas in city centres.
> Half an acre that you have to care about, mind you.
I have an acre and maintaining it's quite a nice alternative to computers and screen based entertainment. It's just another form of exercise basically.
But they are not the same.
Half an acre in the middle of nowhere, where you need to drive everywhere or a pod in walkable distance to everything you need, all services and entertainment?
The answer depends on your lifestyle.
I don't think you get what living in a busy city is. The "pod" is where you sleep, the city is your home. You don't need half an acre to sleep.
Maybe it is not the lifestyle for you, but I don't find it "insane" to want to have plenty of stuff available at walking distance. And you can't have that without high population density and yeah "pods".
Not judging but that sounds worse than hell, at least the heating is free there.
It reminds me of an ad campaign for a travel agency a while ago, I can't remember the details. But one of them depicted a large city labeled "hell" and next to it, some place in the middle of nowhere labeled "heaven". Under it, the same pictures with the labels swapped.
Being able to walk to the store "sounds worse than hell"?
Not everybody is autistic, you know
I gladly pay a lot of money to be in the center of things
On HN it's a pretty safe assumption.
You know you can drive there too right? On the other hand, you dont get to live in an actual house. Its sort of like an insect hive.
You can. It usually means you don’t unless you don’t have to.
Living in the city is optimizing for time, not space.
Optimizing for entertainment. You can optimize for time by just not going to the city, too.
They are working on a different planning time horizon. The older established companies would have a 10-20 year plan which is enough time for diffusion and growth of talent. Startups (unless really well-financed) think more in terms of the next 1-2 years, not enough time for the local community to grow around the company.
That sounds like the kind of tactic IBM would do too.
Hillsboro is pretty much a company town (well, there are some datacenters now, but those don't need a lot of employees). Actually the whole of Washington County is heavily dependent on Intel. There's also Nike, but it's also heading for significantly lower headcount than it's had in a while. So it's kind of a double-whammy here (Triple if you count federal government funding cuts hitting places like OHSU (Oregon Health Sciences University)).
I was contracting out at Intel Jones Farm campus in Hillsboro in 2004 and I'd walk around the (then) new neighborhood there by the campus and I distinctly recall thinking "What if something were to happen to Intel in, say 25 or 30 years? What would happen to these neighborhoods?" It was just kind of a thought experiment at the time, but now it seems like we're going to find out.
Not unlike what happened to Finland when Nokia went down. That took a long time to recover from, and some would say we're still trying to overcome, though it's hard to say what could have been post-Coved with the current state of the world economy.
I used to commute from Tigard to JF5 as a contractor and I too wondered what would happen to everything I drove past.
There are hundreds of new homes being built in/near Hillsboro -- probably planned a few years ago when Intel "promised" it was expanding its Oregon facilities. Can't see them selling now. The local economy's going to take a major hit.
I live in Hillsboro. Home sales are fine. There are whole subdivisions selling out before they are finished.
The $180k figure is also inflated. Most folks being laid off don't make over $100k.
I don't think they're talking about actual home sales prices up to this point, but rather the situation going forward, over a longer period of time.
Price per sq ft in Oregon (except Bend) have been flat or down for a few years already (more than other markets).
Saw the same thing happen 20 years ago with DEC in Colorado Springs. Lots of people assumed it would last forever until it didn't.
They were getting paid "California salaries in Colorado" (well, really Massachusetts salaries but popular sayings don't have to be completely accurate) and lots of people had virtual mansions on senior tech salaries (plus probably stock options?).
Then DEC imploded and there were almost no other options for hundreds of storage engineers. Knew a lot of people who had their houses foreclosed because so many were flooding the market at the same time.
> This is the big risk we all took when we moved away from the Bay Area to work remotely.
I suspect most of those folks did not "come from" the bay area in the first place.
I heard from a friend who works for Intel that he doesn't know why he was hired in the first place; his PhD was in a completely different domain, the objectives of the project were remote to his skills, and he told me this is what his entire team was made of. Seems like a lot of bloat present in this company, and it makes sense they feel the way forward is layoffs.
Second hand knowledge, I have a cousin in Intel Oregon. Intel mass hires PhDs in Physics/ Chemistry or Biology etc, reasoning that a PhD is enough to learn whatever is needed for a process engineer. Assume 30-40 people hired every cohort and there is 12 or so cohorts a year. Another curious thing I noticed, was Intel had online multi correct tests for its engineers that they had to pass weekly, presumably to keep track whether they are actually learning on the job or not. The multi correct tests though just seem like rote memorization and easy to cheat.
Overall my 5000 ft view, was the culture was very different from FAANG or a Bay Area Tech company. If the Bay Area approach is high ownership and high accountability, Intel was much more process driven and low ownership. They even tracked hours worked for engineers in Oregon.
Yeah, my old (and best) boss at a FAANG had been at Intel. She left because they basically wouldn't promote her as she didn't have a PhD.
I knew a guy who got a job with Intel's wearable division. Everything was chaotic, everyone was toxic, and Intel one day lost interest and fired the whole division.
The sad thing is they acquired the basis smartwatch and destroyed it, leaving only Garmin as developers of dedicated activity trackers. I considered getting a basis but was obviously glad I didn't.
I hear it’s division dependent, but just about every time someone complained about things being toxic at Microsoft they would be told at least it is not Intel.
I had the basis. It was fantastic. I still miss it.
I've been thinking of buying pixelmator pro recently for photo editing. It seems like a lovely photo editing application. And they have a lifetime license.
But Apple bought the company recently. I worry that whatever made the product great will go away post acquisition. Whether or not Apple keeps working on it at the same level of quality is anyone's guess. Or maybe they'll integrate the best features into their free Photos app and ditch the rest. Or something else entirely.
I can't think of any examples where acquisitions make a product better. But dozens where the product was killed immediately, or suffered a long slow death.
Apple is different from Microsoft or Google in that they don’t have a monopoly to subsidize mistakes. They bought things like Logic and Final Cut because they realize that not having high-quality Mac software means that Adobe gets to choose whether professionals in those fields keep buying Macs. I would expect Pixelmator will continue to be developed to compete with Photoshop.
Maybe some of these will work for you; Minecraft, PayPal, GitHub, Instagram, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Android, Waze.
With Apple it's harder for me to know. How do former Dark Sky users feel about the Weather app? I think it has all the features? How about Shazam, which I never used before it became an iOS feature? TestFlight retained its identity. Beats by Dre headsets did too, though Beats Music I think became Apple Music in a way.
Some of these are hard comparisons specifically because what you are describing is really the initial exit. Acquisitions are often not funded by valuation as much as an actual plan to make money.
Something like Minecraft for an example - the existing established customer base with perpetual license was not justification for buying it. The value Microsoft saw was around things like DLC content and cosmetics, and subscription revenue through server hosting.
From what I have observed - one could say that everything Apple acquires is an accu-hire first, for a product they want to ship and trying to find a delivery-focused team to help them with that.
If the company already built a product similar to that and had it hit the market - thats great! It means that they are getting a team which has delivered successfully and maybe even have a significant head start toward Apple's MVP. That likely means also that the team will have a fair bit of autonomy too (and often retain their brands).
DarkSky's product in that light wasn't their app. It was their work on localized weather models and their weather API.
Apple's Weather App doesn't look like DarkSky, but AFAICT you could rebuild the DarkSky app on the WeatherKit REST API (including features like historical weather, and supporting alternative platforms like Android).
With the possible exception of Android (which tbh I have never used) and possibly Minecraft, it's hard to make an argument that any of those acquisitions improved the products. At best they're kept in stasis.
Github has gotten a lot more unstable (GH Actions outages every couple weeks or so), but it definitely has not been in stasis: the pace of change has been a whole lot higher since the acquisition (and I'd say generally for the better)
It is also hard to argue that they were killed off immediately or slowly died.
YouTube? Twitch? I don't use either but people sure flock to them.
There are many acquisitions that lead to better products.
I would argue neither is better for it, as a user.
They're more lucrative for creators/streamers and have further reach but the platform experience is noticeably worse.
You would be arguing wrongly YouTube today is the largest trove of knowledge accessible by the largest number of people in the world. It also has a lot of false information but overall it is one of the greatest cause of change in the world.
Youtube was about to get destroyed by an avalanche of lawsuits by the TV/movie industry. Without Google's army of lawyers, they would not have lasted.
True. Android might be another example.
But there's also hundreds of examples of the opposite happening: Successful products being bought by a big company and then killed post acquisition.
We probably won't know which camp Pixelmator will fall into for a few years yet.
Would YouTube be the behemoth it is without the plethora of content (some of it, high quality)? And if it being more lucrative for creators is what got that content, I would argue the platform as a whole is better. You could have the most whizz bang video platform, but without good content, what good is that?
With the money came the greed, the over-polished mass market content, and the ecosystem of creators is now mostly driven by engagement.
Not to mention all the topics that have been soft-banned because one algorithm flags those videos as not monetizable, and the next algorithm decides that only showing or recommending videos that can show ads results in the most add revenue
I don't think YouTube is clearly better or worse than it was before acquisition, and maybe an independent YouTube would have walked the same path. It is simply a very different platform that was ship-of-theseusd
YouTube was acquired in 2006. I do think since then things like video quality and length have improved, although you can argue the ads everwhere are bad UX.
Youtube is an absolutely miserable product compared to where it's been in the past, are you joking?
I have Pixelmator Pro & Photomator. They haven't meaningfully changed since Apple's acquisition, and they don't rely on any subscription or online features that could be ruined after the fact. If a future update fucks things over, you don't have to update. Everything runs locally.
Are they still being worked on? Have either product received updates since the acquisition?
I'm tossing up between pixelmator and affinity photo.
Pixelmator was updated at the end of June.
The main changes were integration of Apple's AI stuff and improved VoiceOver support. Nothing earth-shattering but it's still active.
I know someone with a PhD in biochemistry who was hired at Intel from a cancer research lab... I'm sure he sold his chemistry background well but I always thought that was an odd hire. Maybe there are just so few qualified PhDs that they'll happily take folks from adjacent fields?
Most of the senior leadership of Amazon in the early days were a bunch of randos from a formal credential standpoint. A car mechanic leading aws engineering, a musician running logistics, a chemical engineer optimizing the network etc .
Hedge funds also hire physicists and mechanical engineers
Your phrasing _drastically_ undersells the actual relevant background and experience there:
James hamilton the “mechanic” … with EE & CS degrees and time at ibm and ms. Dave Clark the “musician” (undergrad) … and an MBA focused on logistics. Jeff wilke the “chemist” … who worked on process optimization at honeywell and supply chains at aderesen.
So sure, might as well say DeSantis is an SDE Intern figuring out software deployments, Vosshall is an amateur aircraft EE, or marc brooker is some foreign radar engineer.
Signed, some newpaper dude who was an AWS PE doing edge networking and operations.
Chemical engineers are so good at distributed systems that it is almost a trope at this point. It is their specialty. Their entire discipline is optimizing aggregate throughput in decentralized systems with minimal coordination.
It maps 1:1 with the computer science but chemical engineering as a discipline has more robust design heuristics that don’t really have common equivalents in software even though they are equally applicable. Chemical engineering is extremely allergic to any brittleness in architecture, that’s a massive liability, whereas software tends to just accept it because “what’s the worst that could happen”.
From the tone of your post, I assume that you are a ChemE who works with CompSci folks. If what you say is true, why haven't ChemEs moved into the space and taken over? Software dev pays much better than ChemE.
Because they want to do ChemE rather than CompSci more than they care about their pay?
That sounds surprisingly non-random.
Graph theory originated in Chemistry. Not Computer Science.
Musicians know harmonics and indirectly lots of cyclical travel stuff. And waves.
The good car mechanics I know are scary smart.
Any good laboratory chemist can be trained to work in semiconductor research. The tools and jargon are largely similar.
in college I got a job offer from Intel without interviewing. I had applied, the hiring manager reached it and said they’d setup a loop, it never happened. then some weeks later I got an offer. super weird
also I was sorta laid off by the current Intel CEO from my last startup!
By your description it sounds like layoffs should be at the management level for incompetence, not for employees.
What would you do with all of the employees who are currently working in jobs or on projects or with skills not relevant to the company?
Look for mutually beneficial ways forward - reassignment to relevant projects, retraining where necessary, generous layoff package for those for whom neither hits. Realistically the vast majority of PhD employees are going to be highly motivated and want to work on something useful just as much as you want them to.
Let them make cool stuff the company can sell, increasing revenue and reversing the decline.
How to draw an owl: draw the owl.
Unless you're a sociopath, you let natural attrition run its course. If their skills weren't relevant when you hired them, then it's your fault. If you changed course after you hired them so that they stopped being relevant, then it's your fault. The only just thing to do is find a way to make their work meaningful until they move on.
No, you give them a fat severance and eat the losses. Maybe 6 months + 1 month per year of tenure, something like that. You're break even by the end of the fiscal year, you just gave someone a lifechanging amount of money, and they don't have the crushing morale problems of "the work I do is pointless" and get to collect unemployment in addition to severance.
If you are honest and generous with people, they aren't mad that you made a mistake and let them go. It's companies that try to give 2 weeks + 1 week per year of severance that are making a mistake, not the entire concept of layoffs.
(Without delving into the systemic reasons that layoffs are inevitable of course. If the system was different, they wouldn't have to happen, but we live in this system at the moment.)
A year or two of salary is generally not life-changing.
It doesn't have to be lifechanging to be meaningful. I'd happily take 6 months of severance over working ineffectually on a doomed product.
> If you changed course after you hired them so that they stopped being relevant, then it's your fault.
Nobody can predict market conditions or technological advances.
If you don’t change course (mission, people) the company will likely fail and then everyone is out of a job, shareholders, pensioners, and 401k holding laypeople look money.
I do think that leadership is not held accountable enough for their mistakes and failures.
The situation of Intel is much more the result of bad management than the output of their current workers. For all purposes, they're effectively doing what they're were supposed to do when hired. So the logical conclusion is that Intel workers are the ones who should have the power to fire the entire management and put someone in place to fix the issue, not the other way around.
What a sad waste of talent in that case. A waste that could be mitigated by them finding a more productive way to help society than sticking to a pointless job.
Agree. We lean hard into sunk cost fallacy when it comes to job training.
“If your name is Farmer you’re a farmer.” mentality but self selected euphemism. “I trained as a software engineer and that’s what I am for 50 years! Dag gubmint trynna terk my herb!”
Service economy role play is the root of brain dead job life we’re all suffering through.
I would argue that should be done at a lot of companies.
What purpose would it serve? Remember, the purpose of a company is not to make good products.
Managers are also employees. Nobody's arguing they should be spared and I'm not sure that you can argue top management at Intel hasn't been let go over the years.
Also laying off incompetent managers alone won't solve the problem of having hired the wrong people
I think management has historically argued as such.
Who said they have the "wrong" people? They are doing exactly what they were hired to do.
wrong for the needs of the company. this isn't an assessment of their worth as an individual or as a professional
Intel has 108,000 employees.
In comparison:
Nvidia 36,000
AMD 28,000
Qualcomm 49,000
Texas Instruments 34,000
Broadcom 37,000
It is obvious that Intel is ridiculously overstaffed.
TSMC has 83000 employees. If Intel does everything TSMC & NV do, then they should have something like 83000+36000~120000 employees?
The scale isn't really comparable. TSMC manufactures 5x more wafers than Intel, and the disparity is getting exponentially worse every year (see the chart at https://thecuberesearch.com/247-special-breaking-analysis-th...). In fact 30% of Intel's own production is outsourced to TSMC.
There's other reasons to think it, but 5x wafers on 8x staff seems within the realm of comparable.
My reading of the numbers it should be 0.8x staff. I think you’re off by an order of magnitude.
The scale also isn’t linear.
Sure but that's different than your original point.
The world isn’t the panning for the 2027 takeover.
Of what?
2027 is the date the CCP has announced for when it'll be militarily ready to invade Taiwan. Whether they actually do so or not is an open question.
Taiwan.
> If Intel does everything TSMC & NV do, then they should have something like 83000+36000~120000 employees?
TSMC is a fab, not a chip designer. And NV makes GPUs and small scale SoCs like the ones in the Nintendo Switch and automotive (IIRC the Tegra SoC that powered the Switch 1 literally was an automotive chip that they repurposed).
That's quite the difference from what Intel makes: CPUs that power a lot of the world's compute capacity for laptops, PCs and servers, wireless chips (Bluetooh+WiFi), their own GPU line...
Intel runs their own fabs. NVidia, AMD, Qualcomm outsource chip manufacturing.
Intel has about as many salary employees (blue badge) as contract employees (green badge). Only the blue badges are included in the counts.
I know it's apples to oranges but ASML has 44,000 employees, for reference.
With this brilliant logic, you should switch to being a McKinsey consultant and start driving companies into the ground.
None of those companies have chip manufacturing.
The only true comparison is TSMC but in only does chip manufacturing and not chip design/development.
So Nvidia + TSMC would probably be a fair comparison.
TI does
why would someone with a PhD apply for the position if that was the case? Were they hired and then re-tasked once employed?
Because Intel pays well (mid six figures + bonus) and PhD doesn't pay a minimum wage in most places. They were expressly hired without an overarching goal.
So in other words, that PhD was well worth the effort.
I applied to Intel once a long time ago when I was just getting out of school, but when they replied asking for my resume in "Word format" I stopped pursuing it.
I didn't use Word to create my resume and if they can't deal with a PDF that was their problem.
I often look at the pdf metadata when reading CVs. It tells a story all of its own. And latex automatically signals virtue to me...
That's not at all an unusual request though. Plenty of recruiters want Word. Probably so they can make changes behind your back or some such nonsense. Or, less cynically, so they can more easily copy/paste stuff into their HRM tool.
I've never had a competent company ask me for that. The only ones who did were "old fart" companies. New companies, especially ones with good tech, have always taken my PDF.
> Probably so they can make changes behind your back
Nope, I don't consent to that.
> Or, less cynically, so they can more easily copy/paste stuff into their HRM tool
Their HRM tool should support PDFs if they are competent. They should also be able to read my resume with their own eyes. If not I consider the company not a good fit for me.
Back in 2012-2014 intel hired a bunch of “futurists” which were liberal arts majors from the northeastern US. Needless to say they spewed a bunch of nonsense and were fired years later, but I knew a few and they were puzzled they were hired to begin with.
I remember there being a bunch of Anthropologists that were hired before that, under Genevieve Bell. It wasn't clear to me why they were hired.
It felt to me like the people at the top were clueless, and so were hoping these hires would help give them an idea which direction to steer the ship.
Xerox hired an anthropologist once, Julian E. Orr, and it resulted in a really good book called “Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job”.
Of course, mostly he found was how out of touch the executives at Xerox were with what their employees were actually doing in practice. The executives thought of the technicians who repaired copiers almost as monkeys who were just supposed to follow a script prepared by the engineers. Meanwhile the technicians thought of themselves as engineers who needed to understand the machines in order to be successful, so they frequently spent hours reverse engineering the machines and the documentation to work out the underlying principles on which the machines worked. The most successful technicians had both soft skills for dealing with customers and selling upgrades and supplies as well as engineering skills for diagnosing broken hardware and actually getting it fixed correctly. It seems that none of the sales, engineering, or executives at Xerox liked hearing about any of it.
> I remember there being a bunch of Anthropologists that were hired before that, under Genevieve Bell. It wasn't clear to me why they were hired.
Yes, I remember contracting at Intel in 2006 and the Anthropologists were at one end of the building we were in. Their area was a lot different than the engineering areas. Lots of art, sitting around in circles, etc. I remember asking about what was up over there "Those are the anthropologists".
Bell went on to become Vice-Chancellor at the Australian National University. She has become a very controversial figure there.
https://www.nteu.au/News_Articles/Media_Releases/Staff_lose_...
Having a bunch of people who might at some point generate a few valuable ideas doesn't sound like a bad strategy. Intel is (was?) huge, their market penetration is enormous. I think Bell Labs did something similar back in the way -- maybe not with the liberal arts, but they certainly left a lot of room for serendipity.
They make for good DEI hires.
It's hard for me to be specific about this but I've worked for 2 cloud FAANGs and whatever the management culture was like at Intel, whenever I work with ex-Intel management... their behavior and perspective just really rubbed me wrong. None went to work because they liked what they did. What was worse is you could feel it. They had a smell; not Tech, no imagination.
Maybe thats survivor bias?
Those who liked it stayed on Intel cuz it is the only company which literally operates at all levels of tech stack
From sand to jsons
They would probably say the same about you. Nobody is required to like what they do. life is more than work.
Weak answer.
When I think of people that went into Tech 20+ years ago, this choice of work was a vocation. Not saying they were all pleasant, but they were all largely invested.
At some point Tech became a safe, lucrative profession, for people who say things like 'life is more than work. Nobody is required to like what they do.', like the managers from Intel.
> Those of the Elven-race that lived still in Middle-earth waned and faded, and Men usurped the sunlight. Then the Quendi wandered in the lonely places of the great lands and the isles, and took to the moonlight and the starlight, and to the woods and caves, becoming as shadows and memories, save those who ever and anon set sail into the West and vanished from Middle-earth.
(J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion)
If only there was a way to sail west
Andy Grove left in 1998, even though he was on the board of directors until 2004 (with diminished role). After he left the CEO role Intel just lost his way.
As far as I understand, Grove was at the helm when Intel started the Itanium project. Granted, he didn't see it to "completion", but poor choices were made even in his time.
He even stated the following in "Only the Paranoid Survive": One, don’t differentiate without a difference. Don’t introduce improvements whose only purpose is to give you an advantage over your competitor without giving your customer a substantial advantage. The personal computer industry is characterized by well-chronicled failures when manufacturers, ostensibly motivated by a desire to make “a better PC,” departed from the mainstream standard. But goodness in a PC was inseparable from compatibility, so “a better PC” that was different turned out to be a technological oxymoron.
One might think Itanium goes against that.
Just because Itanium last as a bet, doesn't mean it was wrong to try it. They gambled that compilers would keep up - they didn't. Today it might work! Compiler technology is very much improved. (Dotnet/Java payloads? Dynamic recompiling...) It's a software problem and as such inherently easy to underestimate the complexity of it. Itanium also had its roots in a time when Big Iron was more relevant than it is today.
https://archive.ph/9OeKK
https://web.archive.org/web/20250716200622/https://www.orego...
CHIPS act nuked Intel. The promise of unlimited US govt support to make a US TSMC encouraged Gelsinger to all in on domestic fab production, only to rugged first by Biden DEI stipulations, then by Trump 2.0 coercing Taipei to give up TSMC and start production in Arizona. All this while export controls cut Intel out from its second largest market (China), depriving it of much need revenue. Workers in Oregon losing jobs is downstream of all this
Workers in Oregon losing jobs is downstream of Intel not being able to produce the best chips, which earned the highest margins that Intel was used to earning. This has been in the works since the mid 2000s, and they still don’t have a competitive low power, high performance chip.
Also, Oregon is a terrible state to invest in as a business, especially one that is looking to pay high salaries.
>Instead, Intel has embarked on an unprecedented and sustained campaign to shrink its business in response to a series of technical and financial crises.
it's not unprecedented, when companies' businesses contract, shrinking is exactly the right thing to do, not to mention that it's forced on them anyway.
It's not unprecedented, but I question if it is the right move while the industry is experiencing unprecedented growth.
"The Global Data Center Chip Market size is expected to be worth around USD 57.9 Billion by 2033, from USD 14.3 Billion in 2023, growing at a CAGR of 15.0% during the forecast period from 2024 to 2033."
https://market.us/report/data-center-chip-market/
Thinking about the Rule of 72, that CAGR is astonishing. Where will the power come from to run these data centers? Are we going to see an explosion of solar and wind farms with the express purpose of powering data centers? I say solar and wind because they are easier to get approved and built compared to nuclear or gas/coal.
Unfortunately what seems to be happening is more gas and screw the permits. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17072025/elon-musk-xai-da...
What went wrong with Intel?
For a few decades, they paid their shareholders instead of paying competitive salaries to their employees. All the best people went to Apple/Microsoft/Nvidia/Amazon/Meta/Alphabet/Qualcomm/TSMC (adjusted for their CoL and options in Taiwan).
Intel was in the business of selling the most cutting edge, technologically advanced products in the world, but they didn’t want to pay enough for the best people.
With the premier US semiconductor fab dying, China will take the reigns in 2027 according to intelligence agencies.
What I don't get is that there are at least a couple of very large, very valuable US companies that need to have their CPUs/GPUs fabbed (Apple and NVidia) and are currently dependent on fabs in Taiwan, a geopolitically risky place to be that dependent on. Both are sitting on huge reserves of ca$h. Why not either outright buy or buy a large stake in Intel to recapitalize it and allow it to finish the new SOTA fabs it was building? The CHIPS act was intended to help the likes of Intel and Micron, but the current admin has apparently blocked any further funding. If the current admin was serious about US semiconductor manufacturing it would try to arrange some kind of shotgun wedding where Apple & Nvidia (and others) take a stake in Intel to keep it afloat. Perhaps some kind of a consortium where the investing companies get priority in getting their parts fabbed? There's really no other US alternative for advanced semiconductor fabrication unless you're going to start from scratch and that doesn't seem like a viable idea.
Yes, I understand the argument that Intel management screwed up for too long and this is the market at work, but that ignores the geopolitical risks of what we're going to end up with. Forming some kind of consortium to keep Intel fabs running (and new ones built) could also include completely changing the management of the company.
I suspect buying Intel could lead to them being the Boeing to Intel's McDonnell-Douglas.
To me, Apple and NVidia have already voted "no" to major Intel investment. This is evident from how large is their order book with TSMC and Samsung. I think the newest TSMC fab in Arizona is one step back from the best in Taiwan, and I think they will build another fab in Arizona soon (if not already started).
> The CHIPS act was intended to help the likes of Intel and Micron, but the current admin has apparently blocked any further funding
Chips act was a whole lot of hot air. It passed in 22 and intel did not receive any money from it until end of 24.
Because it was incentive based. Intel has to hit milestones to get funding. Everything Intel does takes years.
Intel is also likely going to lose hundreds of millions in incentives from Oregon for failure to meet hiring objectives, but they have a while to do that.
Is it because the employees themselves are so incompetent that no one wants to take this burden on. Besides, TSMC is expanding in Arizona and Samsung is expanding in Texas.
It’s business and policy. This business is winner take all due to economy’s of scale.
Ergo policy should have been that X percent of chips be made on US shores. Wups
> Is it because the employees themselves are so incompetent that no one wants to take this burden on.
I don't buy this. I think the primary problem was mismanagement especially in the 2008 to 2020 timeframe. Too many bean counter CEOs during that period who did not understand the need to constantly invest in SOTA fabs.
Eh yes and no.
Intel absolutely flubbed some nodes and bad employee execution was a part of it.
But management has consistently tried to tell customers what they want/need. Intel has a history of developing products with no customer base or pulling out of markets too early. Neither of those are the responsibility of low level employees. That's higher management.
One of the big concerns about the GPU division is "Will Intel keep going long enough for this to matter or will they pull out the second there's an issue?"
> If the current admin was serious about US semiconductor manufacturing
They are not.
> Intel would sometimes cut jobs during fallow periods but it backfilled them almost immediately.
Smells like corporate bulimia.
When I worked/lived in the Bay Area there was a sense that corporations, and residents of the Bay Area, were moving to Oregon because it was cheaper … but still close enough to Silicon Valley. (Apropos of nothing really.)
> Smells like corporate bulimia.'
If companies have extra cash on hand, don't we want them to invest it and hire? The alternatives are stock buybacks or just sitting on the cash.
Obviously every bet is not going to pan out, but hiring even on the margin is probably good.
> If companies have extra cash on hand, don't we want them to invest it and hire?
No. Hiring should be a long-term strategic investment, not something you do whenever you have extra cash lying around. If you needed the extra people you should have been trying to hire them already, and if you don't then you shouldn't hire them now.
Depends who "we" is.
If I'm a shareowner, if the company doesn't have any intelligent ideas on how to spend my money, they should send it back to me as a dividend, or buy me out (share buyback).
Please don't waste my money trying to build some immortal empire as a shrine to the CEO's ambition.
There’s an enormous amount of money being made by chipmakers, and Intel is rapidly losing access to it. That doesn’t mean hiring stupidly is good, but spending money to regain its momentum and save the company from bankruptcy is an obvious priority. Stock buybacks aren’t, unless the plan is to extract revenue and shut the place down.
TSMC as a manufacturer and Apple/Qualcomm/Nvidia as designers make an enormous amount of money.
Everyone else, like AMD/Global Foundries/Samsung/Intel don’t seem to be making an enormous amount of money.
The margins are all in the best chips. Less than best is commoditized.
No. Generally speaking, I want corporations to return capital in excess of operating needs to shareholders unless they have actual high-expected-return, ready-to-be-executed plans for what to do with their money.
When corporations just invest because they have money, there is a gigantic agency problem, and executives have a tendency to burn shareholder value on vanity projects and fancier headquarters.
Stock buybacks are exactly what I want wealthy companies to be doing with money they don't have a high expected ROI for.
On the other hand, the Shanghai stock index has been basically flat for years, despite Chinese companies rapidly growing and dominating industry after industry. Our companies have been very good at returning value to shareholders, while Chinese companies have been re-investing. There’s a very real possibility that we may come to deeply regret it.
I would not read too much into the lackluster performance of Chinese stock markets. Something is weird about a place with a fast growing economy, but the stock market performance is so poor.
Because China is starting from a position of weakness and catching up, it is by definition easier for them to find high ROI projects to spend money on. Just wait 10–20 years when China is thoroughly technically ahead of us, and Chinese companies will be more like American ones.
China is massively investing in the entire energy generation sector, renewables, advanced nuclear, batteries, EVs, full self driving. This is the future we were supposed to be investing in, but we’re losing it. Maybe we got some share buybacks instead.
The share buybacks enable and encourage investors to move their money to invest in other things for the future. That's usually a better idea than e.g. Intel, who know nothing about other wind farms, building their own.
My concern is that America will become a sprawling no man’s land as the economy contracts to 20 percent of its present size. Rapid collapse is unpredictable and seems like a bad idea for a country with such a huge military presence.
Not entirely disagreeing, but Intel feels more like a poster child of buybacks that (in hindsight and in comparison with their peer group) would have been much better spent reinvested into the company https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-intel-fi...:
* they've done about $152B in stock buybacks since 1990 https://www.intc.com/stock-info/dividends-and-buybacks. I think... ~$108B in the last decade.
* during the same time period they fell behind TSMC and SEC in semiconductor fab , missed the boat on mobile (couldn't really capture the market for either smartphone or tablet CPUs), and are missing the boat w/AI training https://www.hpcwire.com/2025/07/14/intel-officially-throws-i...
Discussion of Intel's buyback behavior as excessive and wasteful was also picked up on during all the discussion of CHIPs subsidies last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39849727 see also https://ips-dc.org/report-maximizing-the-benefits-of-the-chi...
Intel did not do a good job with its (sizable) investments for the last decade. There's little reason (at least for me, a casual observer of their failure to deliver good chips) to think they would have done a better job by just throwing (more) money at the problems they were trying to solve.
The existence of markets Intel didn't dominate does not, to me, imply that it would have been a good use of resources to throw (more) money at the markets they didn't dominate. Not every company is good at every business, even if they dominate some seemingly related market.
Intel is the corporate version of Germany.
This is completely opposite of how budgets work inside companies. If a department has a specific budget, then it is generally considered very bad to return part of it ever. Instead, they just find new things to do with it. Now, of course, sometimes, the new things are vanity projects, but I find that 80% of times those are actually very good investments.
Or even dividends, once they've set up a solid rainy-day fund. Anyone remember dividends?
Roughly 80% of SP500 companies pay dividends
There is a good reason for it: Many pension funds and large money managers have a hard rule that they will not invest at full into a company without a dividend. I'm not saying that you have to agree with that strategy, but it is incredibly common for US pension managers. Also, some stocks pay one cent as their div, just to qualify.
No stock buybacks, pay dividends, that's why the instrument exists. Stock buybacks are an aberration of hyperfinancialisation, just pay the shareholders proportionally to what they own.
Dividends don't currently get the same tax advantages in the US, so until tax policy gets revised, it's better for the shareholders in question if there's a buyback.
There's also the matter that dividends are meant to be long-term and recurring. So it's not great for one-time windfalls.
If you asked CFOs why they choose stock buyback over dividends, it is simple: tax efficiency. When you pay divs, holders are required to pay tax immediately. Buybacks act like reinvestment and are not taxed until the holder sells their shares.
Companies should buy back their stock if their stock is undervalued.
This anti stock buyback meme is silly. It’s like people who are anti shorting stock. Companies list on the stock exchange in order to sell their own stock to raise capital. If they have excess capital, absolutely they should be able to buy back their stock. And buy other companies stock if they see it as undervalued also.
It's not silly, it's a terrible incentive for companies flush with cash and paying bonuses to their executives in stocks, it becomes very easy to manipulate the stock price with stock buybacks for a larger bonus while letting the company flailing with underinvestment (or simply missed investments).
A great case to see the absurdity of it is Intel, doing stock buybacks for almost a decade to push its stock price up while flailing around and losing its edge, if it was paying high dividends while flailing around then major shareholders would be asking why the fuck would they be paying dividends while the business is losing competitiveness but by doing stock buybacks it kept investors "happy" so they could jump ship and let the company fail on its own.
Stock buybacks have perverse incentives, everyone responsible for keeping the company in check gets a fat paycheck from buybacks: executives, major investors, etc., all financed by sucking the coffers dry. The buybacks at Intel just made the company as a whole lose money, they bought back stocks when they were high and it only dipped since then (10y window).
The only reason there's a difference is because of the psychological and incentive-based effects of 'number go up'.
Buybacks are in effect and by definition a kind of fraud even if people make excuses for it or do not want to see it that way. It's the equivalent of a vested interest driving up an auction price or, you know, buying a bunch of your own product and then using the "sales" figures to convince others to invest or buy your product at a higher rate/price due to artificial scarcity.
The fact that c-suites authorize buybacks largely to boost the stock price in order to trigger their own performance bonuses tied to the stock price only highlights that point.
If you did something even remotely similar, you would be prosecuted for fraud, because it's fraud.
1) Wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain.
2) A person or thing intended to deceive others, typically by unjustifiably claiming or being credited with accomplishments or qualities.
The problem though is that the incentive structure is so that none of the involved parties has any disincentive, let alone an adversarial incentive to end the practice, let alone has standing to do anything legally, short of sabotaging their own stock value.
It's a totally perverse and corrupted incentive structure, similar to why both Trump or Biden, or Democrats or Republicans have the real will or interests in ... non of the involved parties have any interest in revealing the rot and corruption, and all parties involved have every incentive to keep it all under wraps, suppressed, covered, up and distracted from.
In some ways, a civil activist organization could in fact buy a single stock of one of the most egregious stock buyback stock price inflation causing corporations and sue them for fraud and deception, but it would have to come with a claim at manipulation of the market due to fraudulent manipulation of the price discovery process similar to a light version of cornering the market through restriction of supply, i.e., cartel behavior.
They can only buy back stocks from people who want to sell them. The people who sell them do so because they believe it's a good deal. The process puts cash in the hands of those sellers, who can then go on to invest in something else, keeping the market more liquid rather than the first company sitting on cash reserves. The price of an individual stock is pretty much meaningless, you must multiply by the total number of stocks outstanding to determine the market cap. So it is not the buying back of stock that represents any fraud.
If there is any fraud, it would be having performance bonuses tied to individual stock price, rather than market cap. But blaming the buyback itself, is short-sighted.
The first paragraph I agree with but not this part:
This is pretty common for the board to setup stock price targets for the CEO, then pay large bonuses (cash or shares) for beating the targets.Do you realize how extensively companies have to document their buybacks? Who is deceived?
There is zero fraud implied or even suggested by stock buybacks. They are heavily-publicized-in-advance returns of capital to shareholders. That's it. The sales are often offset by the creation of new stock via RSUs, and in that case just reduce the dilution intrinsic to RSUs.
Shareholders want executives to be incentive-aligned to reduce agency problems. Stock based compensation furthers that goal. If a manager doesn't think they have a better use of spare capital than returning it to shareholders, returning the capital is exactly what shareholders want. There's nothing nefarious here.
It's the disposable side of the practice that I disagree with. Hiring should feel like a marriage or a commitment for any business. Just my opinion though.
I think we've become too complacent/accepting of corporations just laying off employees with what amounts to a shrug.
I'm kinda with you that in most situations corporations would probably be better off hiring slower and then riding out downturns on cash.
But big picture I disagree. We kind of need creative destruction in an economy - we need to be able to lay off people in horse buggey industries so that they can be hired to make Model T's. We're better off focusing on our social safety network and having a job market that encourages some amount of transit between careers.
I agree with the social safety net. It feels as much of a long-shot though as corporations acting more responsibly. :-/
> Hiring should feel like a marriage or a commitment for any business.
Treating the employer/employee relationship like some life-long commitment sounds like pure hell. It is a transaction. I don't want it to be anything more than that.
I wish it weren't such a big deal in ones life they keep their current employer (from the perspective of things like health insurance plans, retirement plans, PTO balances, basic income). If it weren't so god damned painful to change jobs or have some gaps longer than a month or two then maybe we'd have a chance to just treat jobs as jobs we move between instead of a sacred vow for life lest we be thrown into chaos when broken.
> Hiring should feel like a marriage
it does though doesn't it? divorce is so common that marriage no longer feels like it has any permanence like you imply it does
I guess I meant hiring should feel like I feel about marriage.
Married 27 years — still on the first wife. :-)
Good for you, terrible analogy though
The average marriage lasts about 20 years. Companies should be able to fire people, but they shouldn't be overhiring in good years and then tossing people out in the next rough patch.
Divorce may be common, but a divorce without trauma is still a rarer thing.
getting fired is without trauma?
Are you still producing your fired certificate, 17 years down the line, for every background check, rental application, and date?
I don't know what a fired certificate is unless you're making a funny about you needing to do that with a divorce certificate? I also don't know what that is either. There's a divorce decree issued by the court, is that what you mean? Have you actually had a date ask to see legal documents about your divorce or any of the other situations? I just have no experience with any of that so it seems very strange, and feels like your just belaboring the point.
Yes, divorces are processed through the courts. Yes, it comes with a certificate. Yes, it affects your legal life forever more.
As that's all pretty basic... Maybe you... Don't understand divorce well enough to say whether or not it fits an analogy.
Been there done that got the decree and everything. You’re right, I don’t understand your musings as not once has anyone ever asked to see proof of my divorce. Some forms that ask about marital status might have a divorced option, but not all. It does not affect my credit. It does not affect job interviews. I really just have no way to relate to what you’re saying as it has never happened to me, nor have I ever heard anyone else complain about needing to provide this certificate. You are literally the first person. That’s such an outlier that I have to question its legitimacy.
You have omitted shareholder dividends.
Stock buybacks are shareholder dividends with better tax consequences and less expectations.
For buy-and-hold investors stock buybacks do nothing at all whereas dividends create real income.
For buy and hold investors, stock buybacks do nothing, whereas dividends create real taxable income. Either you take the income, minus taxes, and spend it, or you reinvest it into the stock, again minus taxes.
If you reinvest it into the stock, you've had to pay taxes on the dividend amount, so you've lost vs a buyback.
If you want to spend money and your stocks don't issue dividends, you just have to sell some of your shares. Selling $X of shares will almost always generate less taxable income than receiving $X of dividends as some of it will be a return of capital; so again, if you take $X out of the holdings, you've lost with a dividend vs a buyback and you sold $X.
Dividends create real income and decrease stock value.
Any time you want that to happen for you, simply press the sell button for some percentage.
Why would you want the company to decide the timing and the percentage for you?
Because dividends are (at least in theory) perpetual.
Can buy-and-hold investors use margin?
Of course, but margin is expensive for retail people.
There is also a bit of strategic, defensive hiring that happens, i.e., hiring people so your competition cannot hire them, let alone at a lower salary if you were not hiring. It's a little talked about issue, because it is mostly expressed as a type of C-suite FOMO tied to their performance and stock option incentives, i.e., "we need to hire because X is hiring and we can't look like we are not growing/hiring because that will drive the stock price down and risks my stock options, even if we are doing massive buybacks to glaze the stock price".
It is another significant flaw in the "capitalist", i.e., publicly traded corporate system that incentivizes all the various financial shenanigans to generate false stock performance to enrich the c-suite.
> there was a sense that corporations, and residents of the Bay Area, were moving to Oregon because it was cheaper … but still close enough to Silicon Valley.
It's a different state and a 9-10 hour drive away; in what sense is it close?
At least in the past, Intel owned a dozen 35-50 pax regional jets (https://www.planespotters.net/airline/Intel-Air-Shuttle-Airc...) and had regular scheduled flights back and forth between their Santa Clara, Phoenix, and Portland offices. (They now seem to be down to two- rise of Zoom?)
Note that these were NOT executive jets for C-suite, these were for all employees who had meetings at other locations (at least according to people I've met since I moved to AZ a few years ago to be near my in-laws).
^^ Can corroborate. Intel had a fleet of airplanes for employee use commuting between sites. You did not have to be an exec or VP to fly.
I remember the airplane tail had the number 386, or 486. It was difficult to get a seat, but it was based on first come first serve, so you just had to be diligent on the booking web site.
Coming out of San Jose, the plane would enter this corkscrew to gain altitude. I guess to avoid SFO airspace.
I would often see high level executives on the same plane.
Same for Nike, I think to LA and back – although it might have been cut as well.
Nike still has 3(maybe 4) jets in the Hillsboro hangar. I run by there regularly. Saw one taking off yesterday.
A lot of people "on the coast" were happy to relocate a bit further north where they still had beaches, mountains to romp around — only more affordable.
Definitely not close as in "commute close".
Maybe more like "close to feeling the same as the Bay Area"?
(You can believe Portlanders hated Californians that moved up there. Or so I've been told.)
Another thing that would've sweetened the deal -- given certain priorities -- is how close nature is: Oregon's restrictive limits on urban area boundaries means that in 45 minutes you're out in nature, and in 1 1/2 hour you're skiing on Mt Hood.
Also, no sales tax!
PS – as someone who spent hundreds of hours on Glider PRO as a kid, thank you!
> (You can believe Portlanders hated Californians that moved up there. Or so I've been told.)
They still do, only it's not really Portlanders anymore, it's all the smaller cities that hate them. Why? A couple reasons: they came in and pay over asking price for housing, driving up prices across the board so those working for local non-conglomerates have a hard time affording housing. And then they vote contrary to how the locals do (locals, I might add, who didn't have any problem with how things were run before, even if their "betters" felt they were "backwards").
Basically, they end up burying the local culture and replacing it with California.
Culturally, also that is physically close in the west.
It is actually cheaper to rent in Portland and fly commercial daily to SJC than it is to live in the bay area. I did this commute regularly since my family is settled in Portland. End to end it is only slightly slower than Caltrain (sfo->SJC) as well... Actually one of my more pleasant commutes. I live close to the airport and with TSA precheck I would show up 15 minutes before boarding, be in air for 90 minutes and then to the office. If I leave at 7 then I'm perfectly on time for 9AM and then fly home at around 7:30 to be back in bed around 10. Even have time for dinner and drinks after work.
How much did you pay per flight? Your carbon footprint must put Taylor Swift to shame...
Yeah that's absolutely insane. I can't imagine the mental gymnastics needed to do that.
Pure financials can more than explain this, if you have a family and want space for them. Let's do some napkin math, from a quick Google search it's 150$ round trip, so 3000$ a month assuming 20 work days (maybe even less with frequent-flyer status, cashbacks and rewards).
For a 4 bedroom house, Zillow gives me around 7-8k a month in rent for SF and around 4k for SJ, so you'll at least break even and have a better quality of life for your family even if you won't see them much during the week.
Anyway: The fact that a simple adequate house for a family runs at 4k in the US is ... maddening. 1500 sqft is around 140 m², a comparable house in Berlin (one of Germany's hottest markets!) runs ~2500€. How one is supposed to live in the US when not on a typical techbro salary, I have no idea how y'all even manage that.
> If I leave at 7 then I'm perfectly on time for 9AM
I don't doubt you but most people would not find a 2-hour one-way commute pleasant.
Everyday? No. But a few days a month? Absolutely. It works really well.
I thought 9-5 + 1hr commuting was bad enough. What you just said is crazy.
Different strokes for different folks.
You don't have to answer this question, but: do you live off the I-205? I'm always astounded (well, annoyed) at how, living in the inner east side, getting to Multnomah Falls via I-84 would sometimes be quicker than getting to PDX fir the 205.
Did the employer know you didn't live there?
I wonder what this means for the future of High NA.
It’s a local piece, but are the layoffs even disproportionate with other sites?
In Oregon, the layoffs were 3x-4x more than in AZ. What's kicked both regions in the teeth is that the layoffs were 4x-5x more than what Intel had stated. OregonLive has been reporting for weeks that 500+ Oregon Intel jobs were going to be cut -- they cut 2500 jobs. This is also round 3 (?) of Intel's layoffs in the last 12 months. It's massive and devastating.
This sounds like sell the whole company type of cuts.
What else could be the trajectory of Intel, when the CEO has admitted defeat in the current investment environment?
> Intel CEO says it's "too late" for them to catch up with AI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44532572
Well, yeah. It's the Elop and Nokia situation all over again. Remember the "burning platform" memo?
Intel actually made a decent video card that sells above MSRP: Battlemage. They can easily advance it into more powerful GPUs.
Gelsinger understood that. The current MBA empty suit doesn't.
Last stage of grief is acceptance. I think the only way left is up.
Gelsinger was apparently Intel's last hope to avoid being sold off in pieces.
Lip Bu Tan is here for some spring cleaning.
Can you still call it a spring cleaning when you take out support walls in the process?
You misspelled: "Dismantle the company to sell it piecemeal"
This is yet another example of something that's happening all acrossed tech: (Over?)Correcting for a systemic problem; due to either/both misidentifying the problem, or reaching for the wrong solution that promises to solve the issue regardless.
The Asserted problem: Labor force/expense is too high, or at least, higher than is now thought necessary.
The (IMO) core problem: Measuring professional success/skill primarily by the size of the team a person manages.
The asserted solution: AI replacing Labor to reduce inflated labor costs/pools.
While there is some inherent benefit there to reducing team sizes back down into allegedly functionally sized units, there is a lack of accountability and understanding as to why that's beneficial, as it at seems to be done either due to the lofty promise of AI (which I'm critical of), or a more brutalist/myopic approach of merely trying to make the big labor-cost number smaller to increase margin/reduce expenses. To be clear, while I'm a critic of AI, I fully acknowledge it can absolutely be helpful in many instances. The problem is that people are learning the wrong lessons from this, as they've improperly identified the issue, and why the force reduction is allegedly/appears to be working.
Obviously, YMMV on a case-by-case/team/company basis, but Intel is known for being guilty of "Bigger = Better" when it comes to team size, and their new CEO acknowledged this somewhat with their "Bureaucracy kills innovation" speech [0].
That said, what may be good for the company (even if done for the right reasons) can still hurt the communities it built/depend on it.
0: https://www.inc.com/kit-eaton/in-just-3-words-intels-new-ceo...
Intel will be taught in business schools as a textbook example of hubris and pride.
Hypothetically a glut of unemployed but highly skilled semiconductor people hanging around might kick off a wave of startup innovation.
As a PDX native that went to Oregon State and saw a lot of people go towards Intel, I don't feel the Oregon Intel crowd has strong aptitude for starting something up. They're at Intel in the first place because it was a secure job in their hometown they could coast at. I'm sure there are many of them that can do it, but I don't feel Portland has strong startup energy.
Disagree. Hillsboro has plenty of businesses from ex-intel employees.
Just off the top of my head I can think of a dozen or so.
They're just not in tech for the most part. I can think of 2 breweries, a standardization company, two machine shops. And those are just within a mile or so of my house.
I think a lot of folks work at Intel in order to get out of tech. That's basically what I'm doing, lol. Work enough to save and get out of tech.
Tech is also expensive to start up in. So it makes sense that a lot of the intel-driven businesses would be non-tech.
it's happening?
"Ex-Intel executives raise $21.5 million for RISC-V chip startup":
https://www.aheadcomputing.com/
I believe the founding team is all in Oregon - and mostly all ex-Intel.
Yes, these folks came out of Intel Labs. But that's also a fabless startup. When you start talking about fabs you're talking about needing real money (in the multi billions of dollars). That kind of funding could only come from the likes of Apple and Nvidia.
This is basically correct. The culture in PDX is totally different.
How does it compare to Silicon Valley?
It's a very laid-back place - more of a "you're missing out on life if you're not enjoying nature every weekend" type of place. Lots of new parents in the mid-to-late 30s (I think the highest proportion of any major city, actually.)
I think what hampers Oregon is that there isn't much non-Intel investment in R&D in the Portland region as well, compared to the Bay Area – there used to be a graduate institute funded by Tek et al., but that never got sustained. [1] The local academic medical research center is well-regarded and otherwise wouldn't have trouble attracting talent if it wasn't for the salaries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Graduate_Institute
I was a student at OGI back when it was still a thing. Then a lot of the DARPA grant money dried up because of the Iraq war (they wanted research that could be applied to weapons in the short term, not basic research into operating systems and programming languages).
They merged with OHSU, but it turned out OHSU was about as broke as they were, so most of the CS faculty migrated en-masse to PSU and took all their grad students (myself included) along with them. (It turns out grants generally go to the principle investigator, not the school. So if your advisor moves schools, their funding goes with them.)
> salaries
Yeah, this is going to be the ultimate deciding factor. When local companies don't pay enough to live and Bay Area companies are paying upto 10X+ the compensation (for AI roles) people are going to make the move.
Some are starting:
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2025/06/top-resear...
You only need a sprinkling of people with the entrepreneurial spark to kick it off, right?
It helps there to be a strong community of founders, employees willing to take a risk to work at startup for less money, investors, capital, and general energy in the air. PNW tech scene is relatively low-key and apathetic to startups. Anyone with that type of ambition should have already migrated
There was a strong contingent of forward looking tech people and entrepreneurs a few years ago (pre COVID). They have left due to the large restrictions during COVID and the flight of capital and the general decline of Portland due to the riots and the lockdown measures.
Were there more restrictions in Oregon than California during COVID? Or are you talking about something else?
Here's one thing OP might be talking about – the "skyscraper district" of PDX practically emptied out during COVID, precisely because Portland has highly segregated big-B-business and residential districts. The rise of WFH meant that the whole district nearly emptied out overnight – especially anchor tenants like law firms and tech that were most amenable to WFH. Without any residential population in the area, boom: no place for a downtown flagship office.
Since I don't want to stealth-edit my post, another one was the rise of "nuisance homelessness" – the same shelter-in-place order prevented the City from sweeping people into warehouse shelters (but lower-capacity motel shelters were set up); and a combo drug-decriminalization-and-treatment-funding bill gave us the decriminalization but never actually funded the treatment in time, and so there was a lot of open-air drug use. That didn't help the return to "downtown" either.
All of the west coast went insane, really. It was like the entire region had a competition for how crazy and nonsensical they could make the rules.
As a result, basically every west coast city absolutely destroyed itself and will take at least a decade or more to recover… it they every really do.
This is extreme hyperbole if you have been to most West Coast cities recently. Rents have shot up to new heights for a reason.
Portland specifically is lagging a bit, but they are on the upwards trajectory (with a few big things to fix still).
You also need funding. That tends to be harder to come by in Oregon vs Silicon Valley.
It doesn't, unless there is cheap capital floating around
Fabs aren't cheap, so you can't just start-up mentality you're way into this. This isn't a bunch of dudes living in the same house banging code on laptops. Serious investment would be needed. Even with bags of cash available, these are not available for 2-day delivery. There's a bit of lead time involved
It sounds like a lot of the jobs are in manufacturing (fabs) or closely related. Once upon a time, innovative startups could be in that space (that's how "Silicon Valley" got the silicon part of its name). But, for several decades now, it requires billions of dollars to start up a semiconductor fab, and VC's don't seem to be all that into funding manufacturing.
I'm not saying it _should_ or _must_ be that way, just that it is.
That or they’ll have to move to Shenzhen to find work
This is the reality. The US is cooked.
Surely Intel made them sign non-competes and will vigorously enforce Intel's troves of patents and trade-secrets.
Lucky for those people, California exists! Noncompetes can’t be enforced here, and amazingly, this applies even if the employee entered into the agreement before they came to California:
https://www.littler.com/news-analysis/asap/california-reache...
> amazingly, this applies even if the employee entered into the agreement before they came to California
Has this been tested? Why would an Oregon court care about what a California law says it can and cannot do?
In general you should ignore non competes but you should not divulge previous employers proprietary knowledge. No state will enforce a non compete if it means the person would be unemployed. The judge will laugh you out of the courtroom.
Only if there are paradigm shifts on the horizon. Chip making is high barrier to entry, capital intensive. No small collective is going to be able to start something up.
Yeah. The big problem with chip making is the effort to start up is absolutely monumental. China is putting all their money into it and still playing catch up. Japan is trying to get into the game and they're mostly aiming to make slightly older chips and bringing in companies that already have expertise.
Those are two of the biggest economies in the world pumping loads of money and people into that engine to try to get it started and still just starting to make some progress. That's not to say there aren't great ideas out there that we're missing which could make it all easier and cheaper, but a small team is definitely going to have one hell of a time making stuff on a nanometer scale without billions and billions of dollars behind them. Software startups are easy, but hardware is hard. Massive hardware and microscopic hardware are harder.
I wonder how many are on H1Bs? Intel has tons of engineers from India.
I am rooting for this to be the case, and frankly it should be, but typically the massive startup boom comes from companies IPOing (PayPal mafia, Google mafia, etc.). So much talent has been locked up at Intel, I'm hoping this is a liberation of sorts.
I remember where I wanted an intel pentium 4 back in the day so bad!