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

110•cbzbc•10h ago

Comments

JKCalhoun•9h 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.)

legitster•8h 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.

JKCalhoun•8h 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.

dylan604•8h ago

> 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

JKCalhoun•7h ago

I guess I meant hiring should feel like I feel about marriage.

Married 27 years — still on the first wife. :-)

cjbgkagh•4h ago

Good for you, terrible analogy though

shakna•7h ago

Divorce may be common, but a divorce without trauma is still a rarer thing.

dylan604•6h ago

getting fired is without trauma?

shakna•6h ago

Are you still producing your fired certificate, 17 years down the line, for every background check, rental application, and date?

dylan604•4h ago

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.

legitster•7h ago

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.

JKCalhoun•7h ago

I agree with the social safety net. It feels as much of a long-shot though as corporations acting more responsibly. :-/

tjwebbnorfolk•4h ago

> 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.

zamadatix•3h ago

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.

chasil•8h ago

You have omitted shareholder dividends.

toast0•7h ago

Stock buybacks are shareholder dividends with better tax consequences and less expectations.

kccqzy•3h ago

For buy-and-hold investors stock buybacks do nothing at all whereas dividends create real income.

toast0•2h ago

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.

mercutio2•8h 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.

piva00•7h ago

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.

rcxdude•7h ago

The only reason there's a difference is because of the psychological and incentive-based effects of 'number go up'.

legitster•7h ago

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.

hopelite•7h ago

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.

mercutio2•5h ago

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.

ta8645•5h ago

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.

erentz•5h ago

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.

screature2•7h ago

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...

mercutio2•5h ago

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.

BobaFloutist•4h ago

Or even dividends, once they've set up a solid rainy-day fund. Anyone remember dividends?

ac29•4h ago

Roughly 80% of SP500 companies pay dividends

matthewdgreen•3h ago

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.

kccqzy•3h ago

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.

matthewdgreen•1h ago

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.

hopelite•7h 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.

tjwebbnorfolk•4h 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.

matthewdgreen•4h ago

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.

lmm•3h 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•8h 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•8h 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).

orangechairs•7h ago

^^ 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.

thijson•6h ago

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.

nxobject•2h ago

Same for Nike, I think to LA and back – although it might have been cut as well.

JKCalhoun•7h 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.)

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS•5h ago

> (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.

nxobject•2h ago

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!

anon291•4h 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.

superconduct123•3h ago

Did the employer know you didn't live there?

kccqzy•3h ago

> 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.

alostpuppy•1h ago

Everyday? No. But a few days a month? Absolutely. It works really well.

nxobject•1h ago

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.

_carbyau_•1h ago

I thought 9-5 + 1hr commuting was bad enough. What you just said is crazy.

Different strokes for different folks.

tracerbulletx•2h ago

Culturally, also that is physically close in the west.

thunderbong•9h ago

https://archive.ph/9OeKK

neonate•6h ago

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

jeffbee•8h ago

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

RetiredRichard•8h ago

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

dylan604•8h 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•8h ago

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

20after4•4h ago

This is the reality. The US is cooked.

em3rgent0rdr•8h ago

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

ashdksnndck•8h 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...

JumpCrisscross•5h ago

> 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?

anon291•4h 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.

ngokevin•7h 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.

jeffbee•7h ago

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

ngokevin•7h ago

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

anon291•4h ago

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.

amanaplanacanal•1h ago

Were there more restrictions in Oregon than California during COVID? Or are you talking about something else?

nxobject•37m ago

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/

nxobject•28m ago

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.

cruffle_duffle•36m ago

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.

UncleOxidant•2h ago

You also need funding. That tends to be harder to come by in Oregon vs Silicon Valley.

anon291•4h ago

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

brcmthrowaway•3h ago

How does it compare to Silicon Valley?

nxobject•1h ago

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

insane_dreamer•3h ago

Some are starting:

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

pquerna•3h 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.

UncleOxidant•2h ago

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.

orangechairs•7h 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•5h 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•4h 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•7m 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.

georgeburdell•8h ago

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

orangechairs•7h 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•5h ago

This sounds like sell the whole company type of cuts.

consumer451•5h ago

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

vachina•2h ago

Last stage of grief is acceptance. I think the only way left is up.

cyberax•1h ago

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.

UncleOxidant•2h ago

Gelsinger was apparently Intel's last hope to avoid being sold off in pieces.

MinimalAction•8h 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.

dylan604•8h 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?

MinimalAction•8h 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.

dylan604•8h ago

So in other words, that PhD was well worth the effort.

dkdcio•7h 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•7h 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?

whatever1•3h 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

dapperdrake•2h ago

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.

donavanm•33m ago

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.

fooker•1h ago

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

fuck_AI•7h ago

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

vjvjvjvjghv•5h ago

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

immibis•5h ago

What purpose would it serve? Remember, the purpose of a company is not to make good products.

Nifty3929•5h 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?

kstrauser•4h ago

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.

Nifty3929•4h ago

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.

naysunjr•4h ago

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.

runjake•4h ago

> 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.

coliveira•1h ago

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.

jaggederest•4h ago

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.)

saagarjha•3h ago

A year or two of salary is generally not life-changing.

josephg•2h ago

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.

lmm•3h ago

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.

ungreased0675•1h ago

Let them make cool stuff the company can sell, increasing revenue and reversing the decline.

airstrike•3h 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

saagarjha•3h ago

I think management has historically argued as such.

coliveira•1h ago

Who said they have the "wrong" people? They are doing exactly what they were hired to do.

moopmoopmoop•7h 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.

thijson•6h 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.

UncleOxidant•2h 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.

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".

db48x•1h ago

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.

bigfatkitten•21m ago

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_...

paxys•4h 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•4h ago

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

thechao•4h ago

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

paxys•4h ago

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.

nateglims•3h ago

There's other reasons to think it, but 5x wafers on 8x staff seems within the realm of comparable.

cjbgkagh•2h ago

My reading of the numbers it should be 0.8x staff. I think you’re off by an order of magnitude.

RC_ITR•3h ago

Sure but that's different than your original point.

mensetmanusman•3h ago

The world isn’t the panning for the 2027 takeover.

saagarjha•3h ago

Of what?

Grosvenor•2h ago

Taiwan.

dapperdrake•2h ago

The scale also isn’t linear.

insane_dreamer•3h 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.

denimnerd42•3h ago

TI does

drjasonharrison•3h 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•27m ago

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

jordanb•4h 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.

cjbgkagh•2h 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.

josephg•2h 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.

malnourish•2h ago

YouTube? Twitch? I don't use either but people sure flock to them.

There are many acquisitions that lead to better products.

saintfire•1h ago

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.

achenet•1h ago

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.

zeppelin101•51m ago

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.

LoganDark•1h ago

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.

josephg•7m ago

Are they still being worked on? Have either product received updates since the acquisition?

I'm tossing up between pixelmator and affinity photo.

MostlyStable•2h ago

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

sashank_1509•1h 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.

takklz•4h ago

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

mensetmanusman•3h ago

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

UncleOxidant•3h 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•2h ago

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

osnium123•2h 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.

UncleOxidant•2h ago

> 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.

mensetmanusman•1h ago

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

rapsey•2h 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.

declan_roberts•3h 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.

UncleOxidant•2h 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.

lelandbatey•1h 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.

vachina•2h ago

Lip Bu Tan is here for some spring cleaning.

cyberax•1h ago

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

fsckboy•1h 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•52m 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/

burner420042•48m 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.

“Reading Rainbow” was created to combat summer reading slumps

Ex-Waymo engineers launch Bedrock Robotics to automate construction

Original Xbox Hacks: The A20 CPU Gate

I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022)

I was wrong about robots.txt

AI therapy bots fuel delusions and give dangerous advice, Stanford study finds

Altermagnets: The first new type of magnet in nearly a century

Show HN: A 'Choose Your Own Adventure' written in Emacs Org Mode

The 1960s schools experiment that created a whole new alphabet

Inside the box: Everything I did with an Arduino starter kit

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

Pgactive: Postgres active-active replication extension

Blue Pencil no. 18–Some history about Arial

Show HN: Improving search ranking with chess Elo scores

Mistakes Microsoft made in the Xbox security system (2005)

Gaslight-driven development

How and where will agents ship software?

Artisanal handcrafted Git repositories

Where the Horses Swim: On Barbados' Pebbles Beach, Racehorses Train in the Ocean

I'm switching to Python and actually liking it

Shipping WebGPU on Windows in Firefox 141

Signs of autism could be encoded in the way you walk

A Rust shaped hole

Roman dodecahedron: 12-sided object has baffled archaeologists for centuries

Remembrance of Scents Past

Show HN: Cobble – A hard daily word game

Chain of thought monitorability: A new and fragile opportunity for AI safety

Show HN: 0xDEAD//TYPE – A fast-paced typing shooter with retro vibes

Scanned piano rolls database

Weave (YC W25) is hiring an AI engineer

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

Comments

“Reading Rainbow” was created to combat summer reading slumps

Ex-Waymo engineers launch Bedrock Robotics to automate construction

Original Xbox Hacks: The A20 CPU Gate

I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022)

I was wrong about robots.txt

AI therapy bots fuel delusions and give dangerous advice, Stanford study finds

Altermagnets: The first new type of magnet in nearly a century

Show HN: A 'Choose Your Own Adventure' written in Emacs Org Mode

The 1960s schools experiment that created a whole new alphabet

Inside the box: Everything I did with an Arduino starter kit

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

Pgactive: Postgres active-active replication extension

Blue Pencil no. 18–Some history about Arial

Show HN: Improving search ranking with chess Elo scores

Mistakes Microsoft made in the Xbox security system (2005)

Gaslight-driven development

How and where will agents ship software?

Artisanal handcrafted Git repositories

Where the Horses Swim: On Barbados' Pebbles Beach, Racehorses Train in the Ocean

I'm switching to Python and actually liking it

Shipping WebGPU on Windows in Firefox 141

Signs of autism could be encoded in the way you walk

A Rust shaped hole

Roman dodecahedron: 12-sided object has baffled archaeologists for centuries

Remembrance of Scents Past

Show HN: Cobble – A hard daily word game

Chain of thought monitorability: A new and fragile opportunity for AI safety

Show HN: 0xDEAD//TYPE – A fast-paced typing shooter with retro vibes

Scanned piano rolls database

Weave (YC W25) is hiring an AI engineer