Intel's retreat is unlike anything it's done before in Oregon

https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2025/07/intels-retreat-is-unlike-anything-its-done-before-in-oregon.html

by cbzbc • 1 year ago

269 444 1 year ago

JKCalhoun5• 1 year ago

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.)

legitster3• 1 year ago

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.

JKCalhoun5• 1 year ago

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.

chasil• 1 year ago

You have omitted shareholder dividends.

mercutio24• 1 year ago

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.

hopelite4• 1 year ago

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.

tjwebbnorfolk3• 1 year ago

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.

lmm2• 1 year ago

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.

yjftsjthsd-h• 1 year ago

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?

mandevil• 1 year ago

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).

JKCalhoun5• 1 year ago

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.)

anon29114• 1 year ago

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.

tracerbulletx• 1 year ago

Culturally, also that is physically close in the west.

pstuart• 1 year ago

If one is pushed out of the Bay Area but wants to stay on the Left Coast and have the next best approximation of the Bay Area, then the Portland metro is a natural default. At least in my case...

thunderbong• 1 year ago

https://archive.ph/9OeKK

neonate• 1 year ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20250716200622/https://www.orego...

jeffbee3• 1 year ago

Hypothetically a glut of unemployed but highly skilled semiconductor people hanging around might kick off a wave of startup innovation.

RetiredRichard• 1 year ago

It doesn't, unless there is cheap capital floating around

dylan6048• 1 year ago

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

hmmokidk• 1 year ago

That or they’ll have to move to Shenzhen to find work

20after4• 1 year ago

This is the reality. The US is cooked.

em3rgent0rdr• 1 year ago

Surely Intel made them sign non-competes and will vigorously enforce Intel's troves of patents and trade-secrets.

ashdksnndck• 1 year ago

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...

anon29114• 1 year ago

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.

ngokevin3• 1 year ago

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.

jeffbee3• 1 year ago

You only need a sprinkling of people with the entrepreneurial spark to kick it off, right?

anon29114• 1 year ago

This is basically correct. The culture in PDX is totally different.

insane_dreamer9• 1 year ago

Some are starting:

https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2025/06/top-resear...

pquerna• 1 year ago

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.

chneu6• 1 year ago

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.

orangechairs3• 1 year ago

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.

rossdavidh• 1 year ago

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.

dyauspitr• 1 year ago

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.

forgotoldacc• 1 year ago

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.

insane_dreamer9• 1 year ago

I wonder how many are on H1Bs? Intel has tons of engineers from India.

georgeburdell• 1 year ago

It’s a local piece, but are the layoffs even disproportionate with other sites?

orangechairs3• 1 year ago

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.

saelthavron• 1 year ago

This sounds like sell the whole company type of cuts.

MinimalAction2• 1 year ago

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.

dylan6048• 1 year ago

why would someone with a PhD apply for the position if that was the case? Were they hired and then re-tasked once employed?

MinimalAction2• 1 year ago

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.

dkdcio• 1 year ago

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!

skadamou• 1 year ago

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?

whatever12• 1 year ago

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

fooker• 1 year ago

Any good laboratory chemist can be trained to work in semiconductor research. The tools and jargon are largely similar.

fuck_AI• 1 year ago

By your description it sounds like layoffs should be at the management level for incompetence, not for employees.

vjvjvjvjghv3• 1 year ago

I would argue that should be done at a lot of companies.

Nifty39292• 1 year ago

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?

airstrike3• 1 year ago

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

moopmoopmoop• 1 year ago

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.

thijson2• 1 year ago

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.

elric3• 1 year ago

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.

paxys2• 1 year ago

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.

adrr• 1 year ago

Intel runs their own fabs. NVidia, AMD, Qualcomm outsource chip manufacturing.

thechao• 1 year ago

TSMC has 83000 employees. If Intel does everything TSMC & NV do, then they should have something like 83000+36000~120000 employees?

insane_dreamer9• 1 year ago

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.

drjasonharrison• 1 year ago

Intel has about as many salary employees (blue badge) as contract employees (green badge). Only the blue badges are included in the counts.

blinding-streak• 1 year ago

I know it's apples to oranges but ASML has 44,000 employees, for reference.

izacus• 1 year ago

With this brilliant logic, you should switch to being a McKinsey consultant and start driving companies into the ground.

jordanb• 1 year ago

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.

cjbgkagh3• 1 year ago

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.

josephg4• 1 year ago

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.

MostlyStable• 1 year ago

I had the basis. It was fantastic. I still miss it.

sashank_1509• 1 year ago

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.

disgruntledphd24• 1 year ago

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.

s1artibartfast4• 1 year ago

I had a similar realization in biotech. I saw a lot of engineering masters grads hired to break down cardboard boxes and document chamber temperature logs. The idea was they could read and write, and perhaps fit into yet undetermined roles later.

I think it speaks to common challenges when hiring mangers are disconnected from the work, degrees and resumes are worthless, and turnover is difficult.

In many companies team leads dont have a role in the hiring or firing of the employees working for them.

dheera3• 1 year ago

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.

elric3• 1 year ago

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.

azalemeth• 1 year ago

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...

takklz• 1 year ago

I remember where I wanted an intel pentium 4 back in the day so bad!

mensetmanusman3• 1 year ago

With the premier US semiconductor fab dying, China will take the reigns in 2027 according to intelligence agencies.

UncleOxidant7• 1 year ago

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.

lmz• 1 year ago

I suspect buying Intel could lead to them being the Boeing to Intel's McDonnell-Douglas.

osnium123• 1 year ago

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.

rapsey2• 1 year ago

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.

mrheosuper• 1 year ago

If the current admin was serious about US semiconductor manufacturing

They are not.

throwaway203711• 1 year ago

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).

throwaway203711• 1 year ago

    > China will take the reigns in 2027

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.

Henchman21• 1 year ago

IMO you’re misreading: as I understand it China is poised to take Taiwan in 2027. It’s my understanding they aren’t being shy about announcing it. It ceases to be about tech and becomes more about who controls the state.

Edited to add: this was not the point being made, I am aware. Just my thoughts on the matter.

declan_roberts• 1 year ago

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.

UncleOxidant7• 1 year ago

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.

insane_dreamer9• 1 year ago

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.

wvh• 1 year ago

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.

selimthegrim3• 1 year ago

I used to commute from Tigard to JF5 as a contractor and I too wondered what would happen to everything I drove past.

jermberj• 1 year ago

Hillsboro is pretty much a company town

No, it's not. Not even close.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

lelandbatey• 1 year ago

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.

zumu• 1 year ago

Yea, Intel has been in Hillsboro since the 70's. People moved from all over the world to work for Intel in office in Oregon. This has nothing to do with remote.

smolder2• 1 year ago

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!!

raverbashing2• 1 year ago

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

jahewson• 1 year ago

“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.

justinclift3• 1 year ago

That sounds like the kind of tactic IBM would do too.

y-curious• 1 year ago

Are you from the 607? I left there for the Bay Area and never looked back, nice to see someone else from there :)

aunty_helen• 1 year ago

As a business you get to pick and choose your battles. There’s only so much empathy you can have and stay afloat. What most people forget is at the point they’re doing layoffs, that time has probably passed.

freddie_mercury• 1 year ago

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.

insane_dreamer9• 1 year ago

Intel has had its main R&D in Oregon for 40+ years. They didn’t get a bunch of people from the Bay during the pandemic.

vachina3• 1 year ago

Lip Bu Tan is here for some spring cleaning.

cyberax2• 1 year ago

You misspelled: "Dismantle the company to sell it piecemeal"

vachina3• 1 year ago

[flagged]

yvdriess• 1 year ago

Can you still call it a spring cleaning when you take out support walls in the process?

Wohlf2• 1 year ago

Spring cleaning was 2022-2023, at this point they're one step from ripping the copper out of the walls.

DebtDeflation2• 1 year ago

I was super disappointed by the recent "18A will be an internal only node, 14A will be for external customers" announcement. Immediately reminded me of "we're skipping 20A because 18A is better than expected". If Panther Lake on 18A gets delayed again beyond Q1 2026, it's pretty much over for Intel as we know it and the foundry will get spun off in late 2026.

fsckboy• 1 year ago

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.

jsemrau• 1 year ago

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/

throwaway203711• 1 year ago

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.

burner4200422• 1 year ago

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.

dmead3• 1 year ago

They would probably say the same about you. Nobody is required to like what they do. life is more than work.

burner4200422• 1 year ago

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.

high_na_euv• 1 year ago

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

sooperserieous• 1 year ago

As one might expect there are exceptions to this, I apparently happened to be in one of those orgs for 5 years. It was very outward-focused so not as tightly tied to the internal way of life, and was greedily dismembered by the empire-builders when that particular VP suddenly 'retired'. Occasionally we'd get an internal transfer that didn't quite gel with us. Every time I hear about that 'real' internal culture I am thankful I missed out on the bulk of it...

hunglee2• 1 year ago

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

lotsofpulp8• 1 year ago

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.

boogieknite• 1 year ago

right on your second point. i expect talent whos cut would rather work in a state without income tax

FMecha• 1 year ago

CHIPS Act also has people thinking it is some sort of Intel "bailout" act as well (compareable to 2008 GM bailout to them).

buyucu• 1 year ago

Intel will be taught in business schools as a textbook example of hubris and pride.

shmeeed• 1 year ago

I wonder what this means for the future of High NA.

0manrho• 1 year ago

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...

lordnacho• 1 year ago

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.

smallmancontrov3• 1 year ago

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.

HPsquared2• 1 year ago

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.

sgerenser2• 1 year ago

Interesting, is this specifically on the fab side? I work at Arm and the engineers working on design and validation are paid quite well. Not quite as well as NVidia but most non-juniors are well above the $180k mark quoted above for Intel.

pjc503• 1 year ago

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)

smallmancontrov3• 1 year ago

It sure seems like AMD is winning the x64 war?

https://www.alltechnerd.com/amd-captures-17-more-cpu-market-...

pjmlp7• 1 year ago

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.

justinclift3• 1 year ago

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?

johnisgood• 1 year ago

I think Intel's been losing for a while now. I would rather have RISC-V over ARM, though.

GeekyBear2• 1 year ago

Especially now there's a Windows on ARM with proper backwards compatibility.

I wouldn't say that Microsoft's Prism x86 to ARM translation layer has been anywhere near as successful as Rosetta was at running the majority of legacy software on day one.

Prism is improving, but the Windows on ARM reviews are still bringing up x86 software that didn't work at all.

ponector• 1 year ago

>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"

dreamcompiler• 1 year ago

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...

michaelcampbell3• 1 year ago

Everywhere I worked upper management is taking[sic] big about the culture but their taking[sic] points are rarely applied to the company.

Or worse, where I am their talking points about the culture they want ONLY applies to the company and not themselves. (In-office requirements, how the office is laid out, etc.)

gwbas1c• 1 year ago

I spent ~2 years at Intel 20 years ago. My experience was kind of similar, although I didn't see the "People would spend their whole day just having coffee with random colleagues" aspect.

I left because I was working on a machine learning project that was a "solution in search of a problem;" and I spent too much time working alone. I was very early in my career and felt like I just wasn't learning enough from my peers.

Overall, I felt like Intel was a positive experience. I do think their biggest problem was that they had to many lifers and didn't have enough "healthy turnover." Almost everyone there started at the beginning of their career, and thus everyone who was mid-late career didn't understand what the rest of the industry was doing.

ksec• 1 year ago

You only need to look at total employees of AMD + TSMC, either AMD and TSMC are extremely efficiency or Intel is bloated.

Monopoly and Bureaucracy. That is basically what government is. It is kind of sad reading Intel was like that even in 2005.

no_wizard• 1 year ago

I firmly believe intel went from decline (which you can reverse) to terminal (which in a business sense, can be reversed, but it usually isn't) as soon as AMD was able to successfully erode some of their server business, and ARM is now doing the same.

The mountain of money for intel has always been with server chips, as its their high margin chipsets. While they make alot of money on consumer laptops and desktops, its no where near the amount of money they traditionally have made on their server oriented chipsets.

I don't think Intel is likely to come out of this state without something extremely radical happening, and every time they try to do something that could be radical it never has enough time to gestate to work, it always ends up abandoned.

tootie• 1 year ago

Can't vouch for this site but it has a breakdown of cpu market share by device type and the graph for servers is shocking

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/market_share.html

Aurornis• 1 year ago

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.

I knew a lot of people who got jobs like this after college. I was so very jealous at the time. I was working in a company that was nice, but also wasn’t afraid to tell people when they weren’t meeting expectations. Some of my friends were at companies where they weren’t expected to “ramp up” for the first year. One person I know read “The Four Hour Work Week” and talked his company into letting him work remote, then started traveling the world. He would brag that his entire job was “telling the engineers what to do” and it took him an hour a day because he did it all through email in one sitting.

Years pass, economies evolved, and now it’s harder to get a job. Companies start looking for dead weight and discover people doing jobs that barely contribute, if at all.

A tech company near me looked at their VPN logs (required to interact with their internal services and do any dev work) and discovered a lot of engineers who were only connecting a couple times per month.

By then it’s hard to turn it around. It’s not easy to take people who have become so comfortable not working that the entire idea of urgency is a foreign concept. Ask for some task that should only take an hour or two and they’ll say they’ll have it by early next week. Any request turns into a series of meetings, which have to be scheduled with all participants, which means they can’t start discussing it until Bob is back from vacation next week, so they might have an idea of what’s required by end of month.

At some point you can’t turn it around without making big changes to the people involved. There’s too much accumulated inertia and habit. You have to reorg at minimum and bring in new management, while also making it clear to everyone that their performance is now actually being noticed. It’s hard.

With Intel, I’ve also heard from some ex-employees who left because pay was lagging. Companies with low expectations can feel like they’re getting away with low pay because many people will keep an easy job despite the low pay. It masks the problem, for a while.

nineplay• 1 year ago

One of my background voices is constantly saying "How will you describe your current project in a job interview?". Maybe I add a little spin, maybe I highlight certain aspects, but I always have an idea of how I'd introduce it and how I would answer detailed 'star' style questions about my contributions and results.

I think some people with 'cushy' jobs don't take on this same mentality, perhaps overestimating the security of their current job. “telling the engineers what to do” is not a good starting point and the answers to follow-up questions had better be pretty detailed and convincing.

itake• 1 year ago

I have a few people in my network like this too. They would tease me for working too many hours and having a high savings rate while they traveled around the world and spent their bonuses and vests. They struggled to find a job paying $140k/yr while I'm earning almost 4x that.

Neywiny• 1 year ago

Agreed. I had a uni roommate who played video games during his internship because he had nothing to do. Struggled to find a job and I think changed careers.

Also interviewed someone my year but we were both a year out of school, same major, roughly same job title, at our first post-undergrad jobs. I was thrown into the deep end and learning a lot. He was buying software licenses. I commend him on sticking it out for a bit but also realizing it was a bad fit.

7bit• 1 year ago

Years pass, economies evolved, and now it’s harder to get a job. Companies start looking for dead weight and discover people doing jobs that barely contribute, if at all.

It sounds like you blame their own lack of effort for losing their jobs. Like, if they would have worked harder, it wouldn't be them on the line.

But the reality is, they did not let the corporations take advantage of them. They turned table and had a good Work-Life-Balance and got paid for it. Yes, maybe it cost them their job. But at the same time, they had one for years, and for many people it would have meant that they had been ready for a change anyway.

Eventually, happiness is a personal measure and what fulfills you is your own desire and the way the people worked, that you talk about, may not be your preference. But it does not sound like they made a poor choice.

I worked my ass off for 20 years. I'm an expert in the field that I work in, but when I had been skipped for raises in three years I said fuck it and put my personal life in front of everything else. I wake up when I want, start my work when I want, work way less than I should. I still don't get no raise, but all my peers and my manager continue to tell me what a great job I do. Now I'm slacking hard, but why should I feel bad, when hard work is not valued? That my boss and peers are happy are a positive thing, but I would not concern myself much, if they were less.

michaelcampbell3• 1 year ago

Like, nobody knows what LTQ or ASR stands for,

Arithmetic Shift Right? (I kid, of course, but seeing a team name that _might_ correspond to an assembly instruction, in an post about Intel amused me.)

reactordev• 1 year ago

I can attest to this. 16 or so years ago I walked into one of their offices to talk Intel GPU’s and shaders with folks. They knew enough to build hardware but their software stack was 10% of what a GeForce 4 MX could do.

I didn’t end up taking the job.

I never really knew what happened to that division.

sellmesoap2• 1 year ago

I remember early on in the clone wars hearing that Intel was strong arming motherboard manufacturers with delayed chipset availably if you also happened to make compatible kit for competitors. Now at the time I was funding my computer purchases with a paper route so it was always going to be AMD (cost/performance) but the scuttlebutt made buying AMD seem like the rebel/moral move.

freefaler2• 1 year ago

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.

0xffany• 1 year ago

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.

actionfromafar• 1 year ago

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.

lenkite2• 1 year ago

Itanium was an excellent idea that needed some continued persistence. It is was a bit too early for its time.

justaddwater• 1 year ago

There is a fantastic oral history with Robert P. Colwell – Chief Architect for Intel's IA32- where he goes into this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38459128

" 0:26:21 BC: But that was lost after Andy left. That was lost, that part of the culture went away.

0:26:27 PE: Who succeeded him?

0:26:28 BC: Craig Barrett.

0:26:29 PE: Right. Were you still there when that happened, when did Grove leave?

0:26:34 BC: Grove stopped being the president in January 1998.

0:26:40 PE: Yes.

0:26:41 BC: And that's when Craig Barrett took over. 0:26:43 PE: And what changed at point?

0:26:46 BC: Well Craig's not Andy, I mean he had a different way of thinking and doing things, Craig, I don't want it to sound cynical but I always sound cynical when I talk about him because I had such a bumpy relationship with him. I don't think he felt like he needed anything I could tell him, and it wasn't just me, I wasn't taking this personally. I never once got the same feeling I got with Andy that my inputs were being seriously and politely considered, and then a decision would be made that included my inputs. 0:27:21 PE: Yes.

0:27:22 BC: That never happened. Instead, for example five Intel fellows including me went to visit Craig Barrett in June of 98 with the same Itanium story, that Itanium was not going to be able to deliver what was being promised. The positioning of Itanium relative to the x86 line is wrong, because x86 is going to better than you think and Itanium is going to be worse and they're going to meet in the middle. We're being forced to put a gap in the product lines between Itanium and x86 to try to boost the prospects for Itanium. There's a gap there now that AMD is going to drive a truck through, they're going to, what do you think they're going to hit, they're going to go right after that hole" which in fact they did. It didn't take any deep insight to see all of these things, but Craig essentially got really mad at us, kicked us out of his office and said (and this is a direct quote) "I don't pay you to bring me bad news, I pay you to go make my plans work out".

0:28:22 PE: Gee. 0:28:25 BC: So. 0:28:25 PE: Yeah he's polar opposite. 0:28:26 BC: So and he, and at that point he stood up and walked out and to back of his head. I said, "Well that's just great Craig. You ignored the message and shot the messengers. I'll never be back no matter how strong of a message I've got that you need to hear, I'll never bring it to you now.” 0:28:38 PE: Yeah.

0:28:40 BC: It's not rewardable behavior. It was sad, a culture change in the company that was not a good one and there was no way I could fix it. If it had been Andy doing something that I thought was dumb, I'd go and see him and say "Andy what you're doing is dumb", and maybe I'd convince, maybe I wouldn't. But as soon as you close that door, it is a dictatorship. You can't vote the guy out of office anymore, you can't reach him. There's no communication channel."

freefaler2• 1 year ago

Thanks for digging this out!

I keep wondering why Andy didn't see that before nominating him?

gone35• 1 year ago

What went wrong with Intel?

lotsofpulp8• 1 year ago

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.

m3kw9• 1 year ago

Intel should go big into quantum computing

someonehere• 1 year ago

Part of me feels Intel was too high on the horse for years and the little ideas that were innovative were ignored. I knew Intel would be in this condition when Apple decided to move off of Intel. Apple’s switch was the canary in the coal mine. Intel wasn’t innovating and giving Apple what they wanted. So Apple, much like the little guys, found a way to innovate without them.

bcatanzaro• 1 year ago

I've often wondered if Intel would still be a dominant force in computing if it had kept engineering in Silicon Valley. I worked at Intel both in Hillsboro and in Santa Clara and I feel that Intel's decision to put so much engineering in Oregon was done to insulate them from the pressures of Silicon Valley. They didn't have to pay very well, and they had a very insular culture - because they could afford it. They didn't have to work very hard to keep engineers at Intel because their engineers were basically trapped in beautiful Oregon and generally wouldn't consider moving back to expensive California.

Housing costs in the Bay Area are soul-crushing, but they do motivate people to work on the highest value projects because complacency just doesn't usually work if you're trying to buy a house. And so I wonder, if Intel had kept their workforce mostly in California, could they have stayed a dominant force in computing?

evereverever• 1 year ago

Screw Intel. When they moved all of their contract work to InfoSys in India I lost hope in them. Dev shops and design agencies in Portland and Seattle were cut out of it.

They missed on buying Nvidia and in the last 5 years they have netted 30b but also spent 30b on stock buybacks. So they could still have 30b, but they chose to manipulate their stock instead.

All of those workers will move. There aren't any jobs in the Portland area. Downtown is vacant and still expensive and the startup scene has dwindled.

cloverich2• 1 year ago

All of those workers will move. There aren't any jobs in the Portland area. Downtown is vacant and still expensive and the startup scene has dwindled.

I am curious about this, moving out of Portland -> Seattle myself. For software I see it, but for hardware, it feels like there's a kind of inertia / concentration that still benefits staying and fixing. It seems like shedding a large chunk of their workforce is on the path to righting the ship. It also feels like chips are too important an asset to discard. I'm skeptical they'll merely bleed out, even if the current phase is quite chaotic. Also frankly Portland area doesn't have enough high tech careers to replace them (and the income tax that goes with it), I feel the state would likely incentivize them staying / growing almost whatever it takes.

This is all a hot take with little insight, other than being a tech person currently living in the Portland area.

xhkkffbf2• 1 year ago

Is -> Seattle a good idea? I've heard the high extra taxes are driving companies out of Seattle.

Pearledlang• 1 year ago

I heard a similar story from a friend deeply in Nokia in early 2000's.

Everyone non-technical was hired. Everyone with a strong ability was seen as difficult, and kicked out.

SilverBirch• 1 year ago

Many years ago now I remember chatting with my senior manager at Intel - he had been getting showered with resources because his team were "the future". At one point he was literally offered a deal of "You can have 10 more people, but they've got to be in Oregon". Essentially they had tonnes of people in Oregon and they didn't really have anything to do and so they were trying to sprinkle them around in to other teams instead of laying them off. Very weird organisation.

Intel's retreat is unlike anything it's done before in Oregon

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