Executives will be “essential”, QA, sys admins, etc will be non essential.

Right to the pockets of the least useful in the company - the executives.

They only made 50 billion dollars of profit last year. Won’t anybody think of the shareholders

I do a moderate amount of work with Intel, and I’d say the problem is not that the people are “shit”, it’s that their bureaucracy is so messed up. You have the people that actually engaged with their customers (support and sales), who marketing largely ignores, and marketing makes up stuff that isn’t in sync with the field guys, but that’s hardly a problem because the development executives then go off on their own “cool” ideas, without any buy in or anything from support, sales, or marketing. This has real impact, but then you have some middle managers spooling up side projects with like a dozen dedicated people each, adding another indirection of effort totally disconnected from any business capability.

So end result is you have an admittedly qualified team toiling away on a project that there’s just no way a potential customer will even hear about, working on problems that someone “imagined” that a customer never had, or is trivially solved in the industry already, but they don’t have the experience to know that. Even when the work is good and people might want it, it’s still doomed to obscurity because there’s such a disconnect between the engineers and any actual communication with potential customers.

Stagnation, baby.

Yes, I agree, and I think it’s a reflection of society’s values over the past 50 years.

We are living in a world with more of a “make money and fuck all else” mindset. Children of wealthy elites are living very privileged childhoods, and as a result, have less empathy and more contempt for real people. We are now seeing the effects of living in a society where the needle of social values is pointed 100% on the side of capitalism and 0% on the side of moral values. And how that has affected our perspectives of a society at large: a general lack of caring, a lack of empathy, a lack of conscientiousness from the top, tossing normal, real people aside like rubbish in a bin.

We’re seeing what happens when you let a generation of incredibly entitled children grow up to take the reins of society. We all know how it ends…

(And for what it’s worth, I think a long, extended Great Depression-style event is much more likely than a violent conflict, especially given how docile citizens of the west have proven themselves to be over the past several decades.)

Of course not. The Chiefs earn every penny by making the difficult decisions to keep stock prices up. /s

Would be awesome if DARPA bought them…

“Here is more evidence that our system is fundamentally broken and doesn’t serve the people who make it run anymore”

You: “How can I profit from this?”

You sound like a CEO in the making.

Man I really should’ve bought some Intel instead of Nvidia.

They won’t. That’s their springboard into that multi trillion dollar AI market everyone keeps talking about

MBA brain rot

I wish them brain drain for being such greedy. Let their best people leave to better pastures.

Two words, bean counters.

Part of the lackluster CPU problem is that Intel was pissing away their money on other adventures. CPUs were “in the bag”, so they kept spending money on other stuff to try to “create new markets”. Any casual observer knew their fundamental problem was simple: they got screwed on fabrication tech. Then they got screwed again as a lot of heavy lifting went to the ‘GPU’ half of the world and they were the only ones with zero high performance GPU product/credibility. But they instead went very different directions with their investments…

For example they did a lot to try to make Optane DIMMs happen, up to and including funding a bunch of evangelism to tell people they’ll need to rewrite their software to use entirely new methods of accessing data to make Optane DIMMs actually do any better than NAND+RAM. They had a problem where if it were treated like a disk, it was a little faster, but not really, and if it were used like RAM it was WAY slower, so they had this vision of a whole new third set of data access APIs… The instant they realized they needed the entire software industry to fundamentally change data access from how they’ve been doing it for decades for a product to work should have been the signal to kill it off, but they persisted.

See also adventures in weird PCIe interconnects no one asked for (notably they liked to show a single NVME drive being moved between servers, which costed way more than just giving each server another NVME and moving data over a traditional fabric). Embedding FPGA into CPUs when they didn’t have the thermal budget to do so and no advantages over a discrete FPGA. Just a whole bunch of random ass hardware and software projects with no connection to business results, regardless of how good or bad they were. Intel is bad for “build it, and they will come”.

Gotta keep that angle at 45° forever and ever.

That’s what happens when companies are too fucking big, and intel was essentially a monopoly for a while.

I have interned at AT&T while at University, laying off a 1000 people would be less than 1 % for them.

… the 12 percent that actually does something too…

Ah yes, the ol’ “promoted to the level of their incompetence”. SOP. Or SNAFU, take your pick.

over 1000 VPs

I used to work for Comcast and it was astonishing how many vice presidents there were. It might be the most meaningless corporate title ever. Even if they had real work to do they never had time to do it - VPs there turned over faster than beignets at Cafe du Monde.

The CHIPS plants just started being built a few months ago. This is bad for the employees and short-term investors, but long-term Intel will be fine and the plants will be a net positive to the country.

Is this really a backfire? My read is that they’re actually focusing on their core business (plus cutting down marketing). It sounds like the right move, but maybe I’m too optimistic?

I don’t think it backfired…I truly don’t believe the Chips act is a jobs act. It is to address manufacturing gaps in semiconductors within the US. The US government wants semiconductor manufacturers to update foundries and gave them money to do so. The jobs that have been added within the industry have been icing on the cake but not the original intent imho.

I thought they would be more tacit about it. This is too obvious and too soon after taking taxpayers’ money. But they probably don’t care anyways. Who is going to stop them or hold them accountable?

Chips Act, Take 1: Hey Intel here’s 8 Billion dollars to make us more chips in the US. Intel: I gotta let 15,000 of you go, there’s just not enough money…

It got us a TSMC fab, soon ish maybe lol