this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
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So they got all that money from Uncle Sam's CHIPS Act only to lay off 10,000 employees and make themselves "lean". Govt funded unemployment.

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[–] [email protected] 269 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Prepping for all those spicy class action lawsuits coming their way.

[–] [email protected] 95 points 3 months ago

You’re probably right, the generation 13&14 will be riddled with lawsuits.

[–] [email protected] 61 points 3 months ago (14 children)

I'm rather OOTL with intel. Mind giving me a short summary? What'd they do this time?

[–] [email protected] 163 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Not sure a short summary will cut it.

They had no competition for a long period and ended up with an accountant CEO that caused their R&D to stagnate massively. They had a ton of struggling and failing to deliver all in most areas, and they wombled about releasing CPU generations with ~4% performance uplifts, probably saving a few bucks in the process.

AMD turned back up again with Ryzen and Epyc models that were pretty good and and an impressive pace of improvement ( like ~14% generational uplifts ) that caused them such a fright that they figured out they had to ditch the accountant.

Pat Gelsinger was asked to step up as CEO and fix that mess. They axed some obvious defective folks in their structure and rushed about to release 12th generation products with decent gains by cranking the power levels of the CPUs to absurd levels, this was risky and it kind of looks like they are being bit with it now.

Server CPU sales are way down because they are just plain uncompetitive. They have missed out on the chunk of money they could have got from the AI bubble because they never had a good GPU architecture they could leverage over to use. They have been shutting down unprofitable and troublesome divisions like the Optane storage and NUC divisions to try and save money, but they are in a bad way.

The class actions mentioned elsewhere in the thread are probably coming because the rush to make incremental improvements to 13th generation and 14th generation CPU's resulted in issues with power levels and other problems that seem to be causing those CPU's to crash and sometimes fail altogether.

[–] [email protected] 79 points 3 months ago (4 children)

What is it with accountants being chosen as CEO? Like if you were a competent accountant, you should be CFO, and the CEO is someone who knows what the fuck the company sells and how it profits, which I can guarantee you has never been a competent accountant.

[–] [email protected] 83 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

It's because the big investors only give a fuck about number go up. Accountants show number go up. All current large investors also seem to have a complete inability to look more than 1-2 quarters in advance, at most. So if number go down, instead must force change to make number go up, but again only 1-2 quarters to make it happen. If number stay down, abandon and go elsewhere.

Institutional investors, the ones with billions in assets controlled, and the real power in this world, don't give a shit if the company is actually successful, or about sustainability, or anything other than continuous profits at any expense. And that's how they perceive the accountants.

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 3 months ago

It’s a little like the sociopath hospital boards, having more billing staff than doctors and nurses. Making a massive mistake for quick profit and leaving it for the next guy to cleanup lawsuits. A little like robocall centers, okay with fleecing the poor as long as they only have to pay roughly 20% in damages, close shop and create a new call center all over again and rinse and repeat.

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[–] [email protected] 80 points 3 months ago (1 children)

A bug or whatever in their 13'th and 14'th gen CPU's makes them slowly but permanently degrade and cause crashes. Intel have not been handling the issue as you would hope since the discovery. Denying, downplaying, refusing a recall, refusing extended warranties, the lot. Now the lawsuits are cooking.

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[–] [email protected] 196 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Two generations of bad cpu's and their solution is get rid of the workers so they can keep their bonuses.

[–] [email protected] 84 points 3 months ago

MBA brain rot

[–] [email protected] 45 points 3 months ago

Gotta keep that angle at 45° forever and ever.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Two words, bean counters.

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[–] [email protected] 135 points 3 months ago (3 children)

You know they pocket those subsidies when this happens.

[–] [email protected] 95 points 3 months ago (11 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 125 points 3 months ago (1 children)

stop 'non-essential' work

So those jobs they're cutting start with everyone with "Chief" in their title, right?

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[–] [email protected] 111 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (5 children)

What’s crazy to me is that they are laying off more employees than the total number of full time employees I’ve worked at for most companies.

They are laying off 12% of their work force.

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[–] [email protected] 109 points 3 months ago (8 children)

While Intel has absolutely been losing money on its chipmaking Foundry business as it invests in new factories and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, to the tune of $7 billion in operating losses in 2023 and another $2.8 billion this quarter, the company’s products themselves aren’t unprofitable.

So what I'm getting here is that the CEO and or the board decided to invest in something that is losing a ton of money and so now 15% or more of the people who have been working diligently to actually make the company money are going to pay for it by losing their job.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 3 months ago (4 children)

So what I’m getting here is that the CEO and or the board decided to invest in something that is losing a ton of money

Intel has an enormous technical debt that they're finally struggling to pay back after they hit a brick wall with their 7nm Titanium chipset.

It isn't that this is wasteful spending so much as it is big upfront costs for future productive development.

That said, the fact that this work has to be government subsidized in order to be done raises the question of why this business is private at all.

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[–] [email protected] 104 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Several tech companies have really stopped giving a shit lately. Intuit laid off a ton of people and referred to them as "not meeting expectations", and Intel's laid-off folks are now all apparently working on non-essential stuff.

Imagine losing your job and being told second-hand after you'd been shown the door that you were shit.

Fuck these companies.

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[–] [email protected] 87 points 3 months ago (1 children)

they fired the guy that single handedly managed meshcommander https://github.com/Ylianst/MeshCommander

it was a tool to remotely control intel vpro machines, intel's own tool is not as good as what the old ex-employee did in his free time

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[–] [email protected] 80 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I wonder how many of the over 1000 VPs will get canned. You read that right. I worked there at the beginning of my career. I know a lot of people who are now VPs. Only one of them was actually any good. One guy couldn't even manage his own staff meetings when he was a first line manager. Nice guy, not dumb or anything, but not brilliant, and a terrible organizer.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Ah yes, the ol' "promoted to the level of their incompetence". SOP. Or SNAFU, take your pick.

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[–] [email protected] 77 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Publicly traded companies are a curse on humanity.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

All the idiot Americans cheering about scapegoating single mothers as welfare queens since the 80s, never an utterance by anyone with power of all the DO NOTHING private investors that drop their chips from their last trip to the exploitation casino and demand all the profit for no labor whatsoever.

"Fuck you, I'm an owner, pay me."

Prior to the Jack Welch Ronald Reagan betrayal, the model was correcly "customers first, employees second, investors third."

Everything falls apart when you give every spare penny to the people who A) dont DO anything to make the money they demand and B) demand the companies they own sabotage their missions and futures to goose net profit for the current quarter so they can profit and walk away having severely damaged those company's ability to do what they existed for, only to demand it of other companies.

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 3 months ago (6 children)

In January 2022, Intel announced an initial $20 billion investment that will generate 3,000 jobs,

Not sure why Biden didn't put any terms and conditions on giving away all this money 💰?

[–] [email protected] 54 points 3 months ago (3 children)

The US and Europe has become acutely aware that too much semi-conductor manufacturing has been outsourced to China and other Asian nations and they're trying to build some back domestically. So that's the geopolitical reason for it.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 3 months ago (1 children)

$20 billion investment that will generate 3,000 jobs

Lol that's $6,666,667 per job. I could create a job with that much money: counting all my fucking money.

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 3 months ago

It's a good thing we gave them BILLIONS of Taxpayer Dollars! Otherwise they would have Laid Off Employees! Anyways we don't have enough money in the Budget to Feed Starving American Children!

[–] [email protected] 55 points 3 months ago (18 children)

There’s a dude in wallstreetbets who dumped a $700k inheritance into Intel stocks. lol

[–] [email protected] 30 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Dude, what the heck is wrong with people. Wealth is wasted on the stupid.

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 3 months ago (1 children)

So they're only keeping marketing?

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 3 months ago (11 children)

Probably just keeping the staff needed to replace all the 13th and 14th gen CPUs.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 3 months ago (10 children)

As a 30-year-old trying to break out into a tech career, this is incredibly disheartening.
Really difficult to not give up all hope with headlines like these. How to believe in potentials for opportunities with these barrages of bad news? Where is the hope--Any silver linings at all?

[–] [email protected] 46 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Intel is a failing company and has been for years, it has nothing to do with the tech industry. They failed to invest in chip fabrication, and their designs are soundly beaten by AMD and Nvidia. Look at AMD and Nvidia, they're making record profits and hiring.

Also, the tech industry is a huge place, there are plenty of opportunities outside of the hardware niche that Intel operates in. I will admit though that the current interest rates and risk of recession does make it harder for junior programmers.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 3 months ago (5 children)

They are doubling down on that mistake it would seem. Article says most of their losses last month were from their foundry division. I realize I'm just a random person on the ground, but shit like this really has me shaking my head. For a company like Intel foundry is absolutely essential to their business. If they can't build the chips, build them better, faster, smaller, they can't compete. It's like if Airbus said they are firing everybody in their airplane division to focus on important things. What the hell, the airplane is the important thing. Same thing with Intel.

Seems like a great time to buy stock in AMD.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 3 months ago

Apply to non-tech companies. There ate many companies who aren't in the tech sector that relies on in-house tech.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Didn't expect CHIPS to backfire this fast lol.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 3 months ago

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......

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 3 months ago

I guess Intel needed that QA team, after all.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Non essential work, oh dear Product and Project managers, where are you gonna stand in the way of good products next?

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 3 months ago

The money needs to return to the government. Some wealthy fucks are lining their pockets.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 3 months ago

What the actual fuck

[–] [email protected] 31 points 3 months ago

There's no corporate death penalty, but there is corporate death from alcoholism, coke overdose and syphilis.

I mean, you do a TRAFU and instead of firing those logically responsible for it you fire your actual troops.

This basically means they failed to find scapegoats inside the company who wouldn't be management themselves.

Wow.

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