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.
> 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.
> 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.
>> But it does not sound like they made a poor choice.
I think the thing that's not obvious to young people is that choices that seem good at any given time may turn out to be poor choices further down the line. The guy who traveled the world while working one hour a day telling engineers what to do over email probably had a great young adulthood. It sounds like he paid for it later, though, by getting laid off and having difficulty finding another job.
This doesn't mean that those who worked their asses off didn't get screwed over, but on average they probably did better professionally - and by proxy, financially.
The seductive failure of doing that is what you choose to invest your saved time in, similar to financial debt.
It’s one thing if someone is iron willed enough to make productive use of their new free time.
It’s different if they use it to play video games and sleep.
Most people, if left to their own devices, will do the latter.
We can say what we want about a hard, challenging job, but it forces us to work and learn. Thus, at the end of it, we have the benefit of that working and learning.
The better question is not “How little work can I get away with doing?” but rather “What will I have at the end of this work?”
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.
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.
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.
>>It's very odd that the guy who was famous for saying what upper management should do (set culture) ended up building a culture that has completely failed
Is it? Everywhere I worked upper management is taking big about the culture but their taking points are rarely applied to the company.
Like when Facebook says something like "we value your privacy"
Facebook does value your privacy, because it's a commodity they can sell for a high price.
Sort of like that Twilight Zone episode. The aliens come and convince us they are here to serve man. "Here, if you don't believe us look at our book called 'To Serve Man.'"
Finally one of the humans translates it and discovers it's a cookbook.
Humm time to put my life story and my product and lifestyle preferences in an easy to read format behind a small paywall, there's gold in them there hills!
> 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.)
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.
They are the poster child for "we have a monopoly so we don't have to innovate or even maintain competence". Mind you, how much worse must things be at AMD that they're not winning the x64 war? Eventually the "PC" market is going to get run over by ARM like everything else. Especially now there's a Windows on ARM with proper backwards compatibility.
(although something is very odd with drivers on Windows-ARM, if anyone knows the full story on how to get .inf based 'drivers' working it would be genuinely helpful)
Windows on ARM is still largely ignored, everyone on the consumer level is more than happy with current Intel/AMD offerings.
Every single attempt to sell Windows ARM systems has been more or less a flop, including the recent CoPilot+ PCs.
Windows developer community also largely ignores Windows on ARM, unless there is an actual business value to support yet another ISA during development, CI/CD pipelines, and QA.
Only Apple gets to play the vertical integration game, our way or go away attitude, and they are the survivors of home computer vertical integration only because they got lucky when banks where already knocking on the door.
Which also isn't great for Apple. I mean they're lagging Microsoft now. We've all felt this coming, right? The M series was great but it's hard to think of more innovation after Jobs. I mean... things got smaller/thinner? That's so exciting... now can we fix the very basic apps I use every day that have almost trivially fixable bugs?
In a way, Pantheon feels weirdly accurate. People not actually knowing what to do. Just riding on momentum and looking for the easiest problem to solve (thinner & extract more money from those making your product better) because the concern is next quarter, not next year, not the next 5 years. What's the point of having "fuck your money" if you never say "fuck you"?
Those of us that were around for when Apple was at the edge of bankruptcy can relate to a similar approach, where some products were great like the Newton, but the wind of the early days wasn't as strong.
They have plenty of money to burn, but unless they make their systems more affordable to the common man that doesn't live with tier 1 country salaries, they will eventually become the iPhone/iPad company.
There is no longer Apple hardware for servers, the way MacPro has been dealt with, it is clear that the professional desktop workstation is also not a market that they care about any longer, if the only PCI slots on studio are for audio cards.
So it doesn't matter how great the M chips are, if they don't have products on their portfolio that people care about buying, instead of having Windows/Linux/BSD systems for servers, and mostly Windows on consumer hardware (70% worldwide market share).
Can you present data from sales numbers and developers showing this? Need to see the numbers of ARM vs x86 for sales and how many applications are currently one/both.
> everyone on the consumer level is more than happy with current Intel/AMD offerings
They shouldn't be. Apple's chips changed the game so much that it was a no-brainer for me to choose them when I bought a new laptop - PCs just couldn't compete with that compute and battery life. Anyone with a decent enough budget is not even considering Windows.
I don't think any power user will be happy with Intel/AMD any more.
> Anyone with a decent enough budget is not even considering Windows.
Uhm, no. This is so totally dependent on your use case. I use my home box MOSTLY for gaming; it's just better on Windows. I also want a box I can upgrade. I never need to carry it with me.
Apple isn't even in the consideration space for me for that.
For work I don't have a choice, but the M[1-4] machines are _good enough_ for that; the battery life is nice, but I'm not mobile that often. I don't use its screen, mouse, or keyboard, so don't care there. The OS is close enough to familiar unixen that I like it fine, but WSL2 on Windows or native linux would be MORE THAN FINE, and closer to my deployment environment so would be better at way less cost, but our IT dept. doesn't want to support it so I get what I get.
I do hope intel comes back, while I prefer AMD currently (due to no avx512 on intel consumer cpus and me not being interested in having things scheduled on efficiency cores in my desktop pc), if there's no competition anymore who knows what AMD might become...
I'm a gamer, and for Intel to make a comeback for me, they need something that competes with AMD's X3D chips, which absolutely dominate all the gaming benchmarks.
The Core Ultra CPUs are an absolute joke for gaming, often being beaten even by the 14th gen CPUs. The Core Ultras had a major performance regression in L3 cache speed which destroyed gaming performance.
Games love large cache sizes. The Ryzen 9700X has the same number of cores, but a slower clock than a 9800X3D, yet the 9800X3D comes out on top purely because it has 96 MB of L3 cache compared to 32 MB. If Intel would have put out an i9-14900K with 96 MB of L3 cache, it'd probably come out on top.
> 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.
I was pretty pleased to see a news article on the x86/x86-64 emulator for RISC-V, felix86, recently, where they've had success running Steam and playing relatively complicated 3D games using a PCIe graphics card.
Dealing with MCUs for projects, RISC-V Espressif chips and boards are no-brainers now; I buy big bags of ESP32 boards from Seeed. I get some free ARM boards at work, which are neat - I always love playing with MCUs - but they're relatively power-hungry and expensive without a lot to show for it. I'm either using a ~$6 ESP32 board or a ~$1 ATTiny in a DIP package for home/fun projects. ESP32s are starting to show up in consumer electronics I find, too, along with the relatively pared-down ESP8266s which I'm not as fond of, though I can still flash them easily over USB-TTL at least, so whatever.
In the SBC space, ARM is competing with x86. RISC-V exists but only really for enthusiasts. RISC-V may start making inroads here soon. I picked up some Radxa Rock 2F boards (using ARM-based Rockchips) for ~$12 shipped a few months ago, they run Debian, and these have been fantastic for projects (though now ~impossible to source the cheap 1GB variant of). It's difficult to imagine it being worth getting involved in this nightmarishly competitive space, though obviously some still do. Most seem to try finding some obscure niche to justify a high markup.
In many workloads, it's more the GPU that matters. I need an MMU, a PCIe slot, and driver support. Most of us don't really need these outlandishly complex and CPU-centric $100+ ATX motherboards, or even CPU/RAM sockets/slots; just solder it on. -Like, how often do people even upgrade the CPU on a motherboard anymore? I'm more liable to throw the whole thing out because it doesn't have any 10PB/s 240GW USB9 quantum ports, so cut materials, decrease surface area, lower cost, and make it disposable.
Same. I started down the semiconductor path about 15 years ago (physics student, loved my EE classes, loved nanofab class, wanted more) and got warned away by an astonishing number of independent postdocs, interns, and seemingly successful industry contacts who all agreed on one point: the pay was such utter dogshit that one should consider it a passion career like art or music. Some of them saw consulting for the Chinese as their "big ticket light at the end of the tunnel" -- but that got shut down soon enough. I changed directions before getting first hand experience but the R&D job listings tended to support this view. "They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" seemed to be in the advanced stages at that point.
At least in R&D, from the angle I saw it. Clearly, being stingy wasn't a universal problem: heavy buybacks, ludicrous M&A (in foresight and hindsight), and that $180k average salary in the article sounds completely divorced from the snapshot impression that I got. I don't know what gives, was R&D "salary optimized" to a degree that other parts of the business weren't? Did the numbers change at some point but the culture was already rotten and cynical? Or did I see noise and mistake it for signal? Dunno.
In another world I'd love to have been part of the fight to make 10nm work (or whatever needed doing) rather than working on something that doesn't fully use my skills or in my private opinion contribute as much to humanity, but my employer pays me and respects my time and doesn't steer their business into every iceberg in the ocean, and in the end those things are more important.
The problem with R&D as a career (in a "large organised company/institute" context at least, where you don't own and control the results) is the limitless supply of impoverished students and postdocs willing to work for exposure.
Right, but cheaping out on the foundation of your building has consequences -- which have come home to roost orders of magnitude in excess of the money saved.
In R&D management, this is an extremely well-known problem with an extremely well-known solution: use the oversupply to be selective rather than cheap. The fact that they chose to be cheap rather than selective is managerial incompetence of the highest order. They had one job, and they blew it. "Selective" doesn't even mean that the rating system has to be perfect or even good, it just has to equilibrate supply and demand without shredding morale. Even a lottery would suffice for this purpose.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
> Many of those who lost their jobs worked in technical fields in an industry that pays an average wage of $180,000 a year. Those were great jobs and helped buoy the whole state, but most won’t find similar work locally.
This is the big risk we all took when we moved away from the Bay Area to work remotely. You arbitrage the COL difference and come out ahead big time, but it might be very hard to make the same salary locally if you can't find a remote job.
IBM left my once prosperous hometown as a kid. Others followed suit. Since then it's been in a sad state economically, just some rust belt town. Corporations abandoning communities is hardly anything new. Capital acts with 0 empathy, or rather, the people who direct it do.
I've heard on this forum of a tactic Intel employed where they broke off some people into a subsidiary, dissolved the subsidiary, and then offered to rehire them with the caveat: Oops, the pension you were promised is now gone. Then Intel's foundry business started failing. Oops!!
> “I don’t feel good today,” Gelsinger said told employees Thursday. “I’ve agonized over today for the last three, four weeks. Many nights waking up at 2 a.m. because I know that what we do, and how we’re affecting you and your families, it matters.”
Sounds pretty empathetic to me. I’m guessing he also has empathy for Wall St and his shareholders. Ultimately Intel has no choice but to either grow or downsize and the former hasn’t materialized. They’re losing market share and revenue and if they keep that up they will be empathizing with their creditors and the bank.
If there is one thing I have learned it's that most people who make it to the top in business or politics are great actors and storytellers who can express empathy in a very convincing way when needed. They may even believe it at the moment. But if it benefits them, they will still make brutal decisions without any regard towards the lives of people who are affected by the decisions.
Krzanich and Swan were catastrophically bad. Both of them are among the worst bigcorp CEOs ever, with asleep-at-the-wheel Krzanich in the running for the worst of all time. Intel's board tried to right the ship with Gelsinger, but it was too little and too late, especially given slow development cycles in the semiconductor industry.
It's arguably a challenge to supplant Jack Welch as "worst of all time" after he not only ran GE into the ground, but also started the whole "celebrity CEO" fad and spewed a bunch of toxic crap that poisoned scads of other companies. Rank-and-yank being first among those.
I'd argue it's not a choice of "let's open a campus in flyover country," but a reflection of how the industry has changed.
The "older" companies were manufacturers. Even places like Mountain View and San Jose were the working-class towns with HP factories and semiconductor plants. The concentration of engineering talent (HP/Intel/Apple/Atari) is what created the affluence, especially after manufacturing itself was outsourced globally.
The newer Web 2.0 companies don't make physical things; they make software. Their most critical infrastructure isn't a factory but a dense network of developers. They go to the Bay Area, Seattle, etc., because that's where the network is. For the parts of their business that don't require that network, like customer service, they locate in less expensive regions, just as PayPal did with Nebraska. They were even the second largest employer in Nebraska iirc.
If only one company offers jobs in your profession or skill set, that company has a labor monopsony. Back when companies provided lifetime job security and pensions, moving to a remote corporate campus might have been a reasonable tradeoff to consider -- your reduced negotiating leverage would depress your wages but that might have been offset by the lower cost of living (e.g. housing).
But modern skilled workers know how risky it is to put down roots in a place where they only have a couple employment options. So companies struggle to attract talent to remote areas and end up needing to hire in places that already have an established pool of skilled labor, which is typically in the cities and more affluent areas of the state or country.
In this case, the lack of employment options means many of the engineers laid off by Intel will end up needing to uproot their families' lives and move to a new city or state to find a new employer who can to pay for their skills.
There's a significant overlap between well educated technical minds who you want to do information work and people who want to live in a vibrant city. This isn't new and it shouldn't be shocking.
But Silicon Valley isn't made up of vibrant cities. Most of it is small towns and suburbs between SF and SJ.
I remember the first time I was sent to the Bay Area for training. I was excited to see this City of Mountain View I'd heard so much about; to explore its city nightlife and enjoy the view of the mountain. My boss had to let me down gently :) "Mountain View in Europe would be called a village", he said.
That’s kind of the big failure of post-WWII 20th century American urban planning. People, especially young ones, want to live in the fun cities they saw on TV where you can live in fun neighborhoods and walk to cool restaurants on the way to a show, so they move to places like SF, LA, NY, etc. but unless you bought in the 90s anyone without family wealth has the abrupt disappointment that they’re actually in some suburb 45 minutes away and spending a couple hours a day driving and trying not to think about how much they’re paying for even that.
I don’t know how quickly we’ll find the political will to break that since everyone who owns property in a city has a financial incentive to keep prices artificially high. Removing density restrictions helps by making redevelopment financially advantageous for individuals but the degree of uncertainty we have now is going to slow that down, too.
If you want to live in a house, then yes, you will have to commute potentially far distances. But if you're willing to live in an apartment then you can still live in the core of the cities mentioned. This just makes sense, if everyone got to live in a house then it'd hardly have the density required to be considered a city anymore. And actually the existence of 45min away suburbs from the heart of the city is exactly the problem with post-WWII development, if anything you should pay a much heavier premium or live even further.
> Removing density restrictions helps by making redevelopment financially advantageous for individuals
The big problem with changes like this (which I support, btw) is that the changes get immediately reflected in land prices, which means that you basically can only put the maximum number of units on the land, which tends to increase prices.
If you build enough, this doesn't happen but I don't think any western urban area is anywhere close to that point.
Along the 101/El Camino more like a series of small towns that blend into each other. Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Mountain View at least have walkable streets with restaraubts, shops, etc, clustered around a “Main Street”, and residential areas laid out on a grid that mostly blend in to this area not sealed off in some way. Yes it is mostly single family homes and smaller apartments, with almost no high rises.
But when I think of “suburbia” I think of a series of housing developments, strip malls p, golf courses just off all major highways/roads. Cul de sacs as opposed to grid pattern. Generally hostile to pedestrians getting fro residential to commercial and business areas. On,y part of the Valley is like this, mostly the richer areas more towards 280, such as Los Altos, Portola Valley, Cupertino.
> But when I think of “suburbia” I think of a series of housing developments, strip malls p, golf courses just off all major highways/roads. Cul de sacs as opposed to grid pattern. Generally hostile to pedestrians getting fro residential to commercial and business areas. On,y part of the Valley is like this, mostly the richer areas more towards 280, such as Los Altos, Portola Valley, Cupertino.
I guess this is reflective of US/Europe suburbia. From my (Irish) perspective, the valley is clearly suburbia given the density. I'll never forget taking the caltrain from Palo Alto to SF and seeing basically low-density housing with sporadic strips of shops. That would be clearly suburban to me (but obviously other people's opinions will differ).
Sure, the South Bay is hell, but that's why plenty of startups are in SF proper.
Plenty of large corporations have headquarters in suburbs (where the rich execs want mansions) but in a close enough commute to a major city where more of the employees want to live.
Metropolises are not soulless, as a rule. They are dynamic and exciting, with an influx of ambitious young people every year trying their best to start something.
You don't need a big home space when any cafe can become your living room, any restaurant your kitchen, dining room and wait staff, and any park your professionally tended garden.
Your choice of entertainment, especially live entertainment, is mainly limited by your willingness to keep up with what's going on, and not by the sparse calendar of touring acts.
Metropolises are fantastic places to live, especially when you are comfortable spending money to expand your space on demand.
“[W]hen you are comfortable spending money” is the kicker, though. Unfortunately, the Bay Area is oppressively expensive, and the same can be said about places like New York City. High housing prices puts a major strain on the ability to enjoy restaurants and paid entertainment. Also, because the restaurant owners and workers need to pay high rents, the food prices are very high. It’s hard to enjoy $3000 studio apartments, $12 burritos that used to only cost $8 before the pandemic, and other high costs when you’re not rich. I make a low six-figure salary as a professor in the Bay Area and I’ve had to cut back on eating out in the past year since the prices have gotten obscenely expensive.
It doesn’t have to be this way, though. Tokyo is a vibrant metropolis that is also relatively affordable by global standards. The key to this is sensible housing policy that doesn’t inflate the cost of living to oppressive levels.
What keeps me in the Bay Area besides being tenure-track are proximity to family, the acceptance of multiculturalism, and (as an academic) California’s support for academia in a national political climate that has become hostile to academia. But financially I wish the price of rent, food, and other necessities weren’t so oppressive.
> Metropolises are fantastic places to live, especially when you are comfortable spending money to expand your space on demand.
That's a very optimistic perspective, which I somewhat envy. It makes sense in a way, assuming your rent is negligible, but when you're paying out the ass for an apartment, having the privilege of being able to pay short-term rent in the form of coffees and brezels for a shared proper living room doesn't sound great...
I don't think you get what living in a busy city is. The "pod" is where you sleep, the city is your home. You don't need half an acre to sleep.
Maybe it is not the lifestyle for you, but I don't find it "insane" to want to have plenty of stuff available at walking distance. And you can't have that without high population density and yeah "pods".
You are certainly correct that it's a matter of lifestyle preference.
> You don't need half an acre to sleep.
Where do I put my vegetable garden and fruit trees?
How can I relax on my back porch listening to the birds and creek?
How do I get away from all the hustle and bustle of dense city living?
> plenty of stuff available at walking distance. And you can't have that without high population density and yeah "pods".
Exhaust, brake dust, sirens, litter, concrete jungle, noisy neighbors with thin walls, massive crowds/traffic... there are tradeoffs to living in a dense city.
I think the Pareto optimal living conditions in the US today are the suburbs bordering the rural outskirts. Especially now with WFH prevalence.
> Where do I put my vegetable garden and fruit trees?
Some cities provide shared gardens, but it is a niche thing.
> How can I relax on my back porch listening to the birds and creek?
Most cities have parks.
> How do I get away from all the hustle and bustle of dense city living?
You go to the countryside.
But sure, if you like these things, maybe living in a city is not the best. The thing is that there are solutions. In the same way that if you live in the countryside, you can still go to cultural and sport events, fancy restaurants and bars, but it will take a trip, and you also have to consider that driving and drinking is not great. If you love these things, maybe you should live in a city instead.
I am not a fan of suburbs as there is essentially nothing you can do without driving. For me, it would be my last choice, as it tends to be expensive compared to the countryside, and not as calm. An intermediate choice that can make sense, but not a Pareto optimal.
It reminds me of an ad campaign for a travel agency a while ago, I can't remember the details. But one of them depicted a large city labeled "hell" and next to it, some place in the middle of nowhere labeled "heaven". Under it, the same pictures with the labels swapped.
Half an acre in the middle of nowhere, where you need to drive everywhere or a pod in walkable distance to everything you need, all services and entertainment?
Are you really not understanding that there are people who have different preferences than you do?
I grew up in a rural area, with a decent-sized house and garden, surrounded by nature. It had its pros and cons. I’ve now spent a couple of decades living in large cities, and I love it. I personally don’t need all that private space, I enjoy having many people from all over the world around me and the endless options for culture, food and entertainment. When I get older still, my priorities may change again, or maybe they won’t.
I don’t think you’re insane for making other choices than I have, but you seem to lack both imagination and empathy if you can’t wrap your head around why not everyone feels the way you do.
I do have empathy, thats why I can honestly say you are wrong.
HN is largely comprised of people who are disproportionate beneficiaries of modern society, so its not a surprise that people here develop a pathological ideology that goes as far as valuing the trappings of modern society. It is like in Huxley, the purpose of soma and orgy porgies are to keep people from noticing how fucked up their world is. It is fucked up to live inside pods stacked and crammed up to the clouds - so what is the soma?
All the "vibrant" amenities available in the city. But why would you want to work on a laptop in a cafe when you can work on a quad monitor in underwear looking out over your own literal fiefdom? The amenities are substitutes not the real thing. You shouldn't be fooled.
I think suburbia is this uncanny valley between the convenience of true urban living and the peace and simplicity of true rural living. You still have to subject yourself to traffic and driving everywhere, can’t grow enough food to sustain yourself, have to spray your lawn with carcinogens to satisfy the HOA, etc etc etc.
I will say that Canadian suburbia (at least Vancouver area) is subtly different from US suburbia in a way that makes it vastly more livable. My parents house is right next to a river trail with mostly ungroomed foliage, still somewhat walkable for groceries and restaurants, and has passable public transit.
Half an acre that you have to care about, mind you. And work is not the only place people go to in a city. Add all those other amenities other commenters already spoke about, and your half-acre would have to be in the middle of at least a mid-size town.
Obviously that would be nice, but not even HNers are rich enough to build rural villas in city centres.
> Half an acre that you have to care about, mind you.
I have an acre and maintaining it's quite a nice alternative to computers and screen based entertainment. It's just another form of exercise basically.
The fact that different people have different preferences is why its great that we have options for where to live. People like you can have space in the countryside and people who prefer to spend their time at cafes/restaurants/other city activities can live in apartments. Why is the pissing match necessary?
You simply do not know what you are talking about. I live in an urban city. I have a yard, fruit trees, a vegetable garden, and birds singing. Don't have a creek running behind my house, but there is one a half mile away, plus there is the whole SF Bay, and Redwood parks accessible on bus routes _within_ the city.
Mate why do you assume I haven't experienced it myself? I've done city living, I moved out thanks to wfh.
Yes there are people who live in houses in or near the city. Most people live in pods. We're talking about the "influx of young ambitious people" remember?
At the very least, even if you can afford it, to own a home in the city for most people means putting off FIRE which I think is poor decision making.
Econ 101: people aren’t paying $3,000 a month because everyone in business has failed to think about opening an office in the suburbs. Walkable neighborhoods are expensive because they’re so desirable that Americans pay a premium to live there. The answer should be removing the barriers preventing builders from supplying that demand.
I don't think this is actually quite the case when you look historically. What seems to be the case is that cities have a sort of S-shaped demand curve, where a fraction of people are willing pay a huge premium to be near their job and their entertainment, and many others need housing to be dirt cheap to live in the metaphorical pod. In other words, it's not that the demand curve is just higher than the suburbs: the demand curve is more sloped. Cities then constrain their housing supply so that landlords end up only serving high-premium customers, ensuring that the surplus here goes to landlords and not to renters.
People often talk about supply and demand until this subject comes up. “How can you stand to live somewhere so expensive?” “Because it’s so nice that many people want to live here.” “Impossible!”
The high COL is proof that people enjoy it and are voting with their wallets. It’s not as though everyone here is ignorant of the existence of Oklahoma. I’ve lived there-ish. I pay extra not to have to anymore.
So the open market voted and decided that the area can support a high COL, but we'll choose every explanation other than that people want to live here.
Now, why are the jobs there? Is it because everyone wants to pay tons more for housing, or is it because people with higher incomes are willing to pay for better living conditions and everyone else is pulled along? Tech didn’t used to be anywhere near this concentrated but over the decades people moved out of declining cities and that produced the current hyper-concentration. That cycle is brutal - you have cities like Rochester which have a lot of comparatively cheap real estate but until the senior management want to live there, they won’t have enough businesses for any skilled workers not to think they’d be screwed if their current employment changes because there aren’t many alternatives.
Doesn’t that suggest that there is so much demand that successive waves of people have settled for the closest in they can afford? I remember people talking about being priced into a hefty commute during the dotcom bubble and only the top tech workers saw income growth keeping pace with real estate prices since then.
They are working on a different planning time horizon. The older established companies would have a 10-20 year plan which is enough time for diffusion and growth of talent. Startups (unless really well-financed) think more in terms of the next 1-2 years, not enough time for the local community to grow around the company.
This is what I never understood about Americans. In my country people want to live in civilization- you can't just move your company to redneck land out in the boonies! These are highly educated liberals for crying out they want a hipster Uyghur restaurant not a McDrive.
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.
Hillsboro is pretty much a company town (well, there are some datacenters now, but those don't need a lot of employees). Actually the whole of Washington County is heavily dependent on Intel. There's also Nike, but it's also heading for significantly lower headcount than it's had in a while. So it's kind of a double-whammy here (Triple if you count federal government funding cuts hitting places like OHSU (Oregon Health Sciences University)).
I was contracting out at Intel Jones Farm campus in Hillsboro in 2004 and I'd walk around the (then) new neighborhood there by the campus and I distinctly recall thinking "What if something were to happen to Intel in, say 25 or 30 years? What would happen to these neighborhoods?" It was just kind of a thought experiment at the time, but now it seems like we're going to find out.
Not unlike what happened to Finland when Nokia went down. That took a long time to recover from, and some would say we're still trying to overcome, though it's hard to say what could have been post-Coved with the current state of the world economy.
There are hundreds of new homes being built in/near Hillsboro -- probably planned a few years ago when Intel "promised" it was expanding its Oregon facilities. Can't see them selling now. The local economy's going to take a major hit.
Maybe, but Oregon as a whole is far behind on housing, and prices are inflated in the area especially relative to the available jobs. I think more likely it just drives home prices downward. There's plenty of holdouts (myself included) that would happily move sooner if prices came down.
I think it’s interest rates that are keeping that from happening , not housing prices, which have been flat for the past 2-3 years. Since these are new homes not sure how much it will drive prices down as developers expect a certain profit. But you may be right!
Hillsboro real estate has slowed down and prices have come down a bit but the whole metro is short on housing, and Hillsboro is on the light rail lines.
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.
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.
I heard from a friend who works for Intel that he doesn't know why he was hired in the first place; his PhD was in a completely different domain, the objectives of the project were remote to his skills, and he told me this is what his entire team was made of. Seems like a lot of bloat present in this company, and it makes sense they feel the way forward is layoffs.
Second hand knowledge, I have a cousin in Intel Oregon. Intel mass hires PhDs in Physics/ Chemistry or Biology etc, reasoning that a PhD is enough to learn whatever is needed for a process engineer. Assume 30-40 people hired every cohort and there is 12 or so cohorts a year. Another curious thing I noticed, was Intel had online multi correct tests for its engineers that they had to pass weekly, presumably to keep track whether they are actually learning on the job or not. The multi correct tests though just seem like rote memorization and easy to cheat.
Overall my 5000 ft view, was the culture was very different from FAANG or a Bay Area Tech company. If the Bay Area approach is high ownership and high accountability, Intel was much more process driven and low ownership. They even tracked hours worked for engineers in Oregon.
I 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.
I knew a guy who got a job with Intel's wearable division. Everything was chaotic, everyone was toxic, and Intel one day lost interest and fired the whole division.
The sad thing is they acquired the basis smartwatch and destroyed it, leaving only Garmin as developers of dedicated activity trackers. I considered getting a basis but was obviously glad I didn't.
I hear it’s division dependent, but just about every time someone complained about things being toxic at Microsoft they would be told at least it is not Intel.
I've been thinking of buying pixelmator pro recently for photo editing. It seems like a lovely photo editing application. And they have a lifetime license.
But Apple bought the company recently. I worry that whatever made the product great will go away post acquisition. Whether or not Apple keeps working on it at the same level of quality is anyone's guess. Or maybe they'll integrate the best features into their free Photos app and ditch the rest. Or something else entirely.
I can't think of any examples where acquisitions make a product better. But dozens where the product was killed immediately, or suffered a long slow death.
Maybe some of these will work for you; Minecraft, PayPal, GitHub, Instagram, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Android, Waze.
With Apple it's harder for me to know. How do former Dark Sky users feel about the Weather app? I think it has all the features? How about Shazam, which I never used before it became an iOS feature? TestFlight retained its identity. Beats by Dre headsets did too, though Beats Music I think became Apple Music in a way.
Some of these are hard comparisons specifically because what you are describing is really the initial exit. Acquisitions are often not funded by valuation as much as an actual plan to make money.
Something like Minecraft for an example - the existing established customer base with perpetual license was not justification for buying it. The value Microsoft saw was around things like DLC content and cosmetics, and subscription revenue through server hosting.
From what I have observed - one could say that everything Apple acquires is an accu-hire first, for a product they want to ship and trying to find a delivery-focused team to help them with that.
If the company already built a product similar to that and had it hit the market - thats great! It means that they are getting a team which has delivered successfully and maybe even have a significant head start toward Apple's MVP. That likely means also that the team will have a fair bit of autonomy too (and often retain their brands).
DarkSky's product in that light wasn't their app. It was their work on localized weather models and their weather API.
Apple's Weather App doesn't look like DarkSky, but AFAICT you could rebuild the DarkSky app on the WeatherKit REST API (including features like historical weather, and supporting alternative platforms like Android).
With the possible exception of Android (which tbh I have never used) and possibly Minecraft, it's hard to make an argument that any of those acquisitions improved the products. At best they're kept in stasis.
Facebook replaced Instagram with a completely different app, which they then made quite useful to a lot of people. (Sure, I might object to all the strings attached, but there are dimensions along which Instagram was improved – in the same way you can improve a house by bulldozing it and building a dozen single-room flats in its place.)
Github has gotten a lot more unstable (GH Actions outages every couple weeks or so), but it definitely has not been in stasis: the pace of change has been a whole lot higher since the acquisition (and I'd say generally for the better)
You'll find many (including myself) who find Microsoft's purchase of Minecraft to be a huge loss for the game. I'll admit that the acquisition wasn't the calamity people were fearing, but overall it's still been a net negative or stagnation at best.
For starters they split the community among bedrock & java. And while a minecraft copy leveraging a C++ was a good idea, it seems they've mostly made the split to justify adding heavy monetization for skins and world maps to bedrock. (Maybe they feared backlash if they did that to the OG Java version?) This monetization seems to have killed people's appetite for hobby-project mods and maps.
Likewise, it's clear that the intended demographic of their marketing has become much younger. From the mob votes, the type of things that go in updates, it seems that what's added is far less deep. That updates are now more of a social media "Llamas in minecraft, look how goofy they are!" stunt.
I recently started a 1.7.10 modded world, and was surprised to see just how much stuff was already there.
The only newer vanilla things that I found I missed were bees and slime blocks.
Maybe it's nostalgia, but this version feels nicer, like it's cohesive, and respects me as a player more.
Apple is different from Microsoft or Google in that they don’t have a monopoly to subsidize mistakes. They bought things like Logic and Final Cut because they realize that not having high-quality Mac software means that Adobe gets to choose whether professionals in those fields keep buying Macs. I would expect Pixelmator will continue to be developed to compete with Photoshop.
You would be arguing wrongly YouTube today is the largest trove of knowledge accessible by the largest number of people in the world. It also has a lot of false information but overall it is one of the greatest cause of change in the world.
Would YouTube be the behemoth it is without the plethora of content (some of it, high quality)? And if it being more lucrative for creators is what got that content, I would argue the platform as a whole is better. You could have the most whizz bang video platform, but without good content, what good is that?
With the money came the greed, the over-polished mass market content, and the ecosystem of creators is now mostly driven by engagement.
Not to mention all the topics that have been soft-banned because one algorithm flags those videos as not monetizable, and the next algorithm decides that only showing or recommending videos that can show ads results in the most add revenue
I don't think YouTube is clearly better or worse than it was before acquisition, and maybe an independent YouTube would have walked the same path. It is simply a very different platform that was ship-of-theseusd
Follow some channels like Practical Engineering or Veritasium ... both good quality, information dense. Yes, decent production values, but that's not a bad thing at all in my book.
YouTube was acquired in 2006.
I do think since then things like video quality and length have improved, although you can argue the ads everwhere are bad UX.
I have Pixelmator Pro & Photomator. They haven't meaningfully changed since Apple's acquisition, and they don't rely on any subscription or online features that could be ruined after the fact. If a future update fucks things over, you don't have to update. Everything runs locally.
I know someone with a PhD in biochemistry who was hired at Intel from a cancer research lab... I'm sure he sold his chemistry background well but I always thought that was an odd hire. Maybe there are just so few qualified PhDs that they'll happily take folks from adjacent fields?
Most of the senior leadership of Amazon in the early days were a bunch of randos from a formal credential standpoint. A car mechanic leading aws engineering, a musician running logistics, a chemical engineer optimizing the network etc .
Hedge funds also hire physicists and mechanical engineers
Your phrasing _drastically_ undersells the actual relevant background and experience there:
James hamilton the “mechanic” … with EE & CS degrees and time at ibm and ms.
Dave Clark the “musician” (undergrad) … and an MBA focused on logistics.
Jeff wilke the “chemist” … who worked on process optimization at honeywell and supply chains at aderesen.
So sure, might as well say DeSantis is an SDE Intern figuring out software deployments, Vosshall is an amateur aircraft EE, or marc brooker is some foreign radar engineer.
Signed, some newpaper dude who was an AWS PE doing edge networking and operations.
Chemical engineers are so good at distributed systems that it is almost a trope at this point. It is their specialty. Their entire discipline is optimizing aggregate throughput in decentralized systems with minimal coordination.
It maps 1:1 with the computer science but chemical engineering as a discipline has more robust design heuristics that don’t really have common equivalents in software even though they are equally applicable. Chemical engineering is extremely allergic to any brittleness in architecture, that’s a massive liability, whereas software tends to just accept it because “what’s the worst that could happen”.
From the tone of your post, I assume that you are a ChemE who works with CompSci folks. If what you say is true, why haven't ChemEs moved into the space and taken over? Software dev pays much better than ChemE.
Almost all of the chemical engineers I know do work in software, mostly for the money. The skillset translates to computer science relatively seamlessly. Chemical engineering is essentially computer science where you swapped atoms for bits, but far more difficult because there are only distributed systems and the background error rate is always noticeably non-zero.
I studied chemical engineering after I was already working in software, so I did it backward.
Because if you need a systems designer / architect you will look for traditional credentials in the field. It’s the same reason that computer scientists cannot break into pharma despite the fact that they would really fit with the data infrastructure & processing challenges they face.
Ultimately it is all about how strict the hiring pipeline is to the credentials vs potential.
in college I got a job offer from Intel without interviewing. I had applied, the hiring manager reached it and said they’d setup a loop, it never happened. then some weeks later I got an offer. super weird
also I was sorta laid off by the current Intel CEO from my last startup!
Look for mutually beneficial ways forward - reassignment to relevant projects, retraining where necessary, generous layoff package for those for whom neither hits. Realistically the vast majority of PhD employees are going to be highly motivated and want to work on something useful just as much as you want them to.
Unless you're a sociopath, you let natural attrition run its course. If their skills weren't relevant when you hired them, then it's your fault. If you changed course after you hired them so that they stopped being relevant, then it's your fault. The only just thing to do is find a way to make their work meaningful until they move on.
No, you give them a fat severance and eat the losses. Maybe 6 months + 1 month per year of tenure, something like that. You're break even by the end of the fiscal year, you just gave someone a lifechanging amount of money, and they don't have the crushing morale problems of "the work I do is pointless" and get to collect unemployment in addition to severance.
If you are honest and generous with people, they aren't mad that you made a mistake and let them go. It's companies that try to give 2 weeks + 1 week per year of severance that are making a mistake, not the entire concept of layoffs.
(Without delving into the systemic reasons that layoffs are inevitable of course. If the system was different, they wouldn't have to happen, but we live in this system at the moment.)
Imagine you're a middle tier functionary making $70k a year. Are you telling me $90k in cash after tax plus unemployment for ~6 months isn't lifechanging? That's a downpayment on a house, or your student loans paid off, or $4000 a year in permanent income for the rest of your life.
> If you changed course after you hired them so that they stopped being relevant, then it's your fault.
Nobody can predict market conditions or technological advances.
If you don’t change course (mission, people) the company will likely fail and then everyone is out of a job, shareholders, pensioners, and 401k holding laypeople look money.
I do think that leadership is not held accountable enough for their mistakes and failures.
The situation of Intel is much more the result of bad management than the output of their current workers. For all purposes, they're effectively doing what they're were supposed to do when hired. So the logical conclusion is that Intel workers are the ones who should have the power to fire the entire management and put someone in place to fix the issue, not the other way around.
The output of workers is always a leadership problem, imho.
I disagree that the workers are the ones who should have the power to fire management unless they are shareholders. I think this should (and it does) fall upon the board and the shareholders. If the workers are shareholders, all the better.
Regardless, it's clear the current system needs work.
What a sad waste of talent in that case. A waste that could be mitigated by them finding a more productive way to help society than sticking to a pointless job.
Agree. We lean hard into sunk cost fallacy when it comes to job training.
“If your name is Farmer you’re a farmer.” mentality but self selected euphemism. “I trained as a software engineer and that’s what I am for 50 years! Dag gubmint trynna terk my herb!”
Service economy role play is the root of brain dead job life we’re all suffering through.
Managers are also employees. Nobody's arguing they should be spared and I'm not sure that you can argue top management at Intel hasn't been let go over the years.
Also laying off incompetent managers alone won't solve the problem of having hired the wrong people
Do they have any clear direction for the future of the company? As it seems they don't, the idea that these workers are the wrong people is completely unfounded.
> 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.
But this is just his point of view. Intel was hiring people and training them to do the job they wanted. And if they continued employment this means they were doing what was expected.
The scale isn't really comparable. TSMC manufactures 5x more wafers than Intel, and the disparity is getting exponentially worse every year (see the chart at https://thecuberesearch.com/247-special-breaking-analysis-th...). In fact 30% of Intel's own production is outsourced to TSMC.
> If Intel does everything TSMC & NV do, then they should have something like 83000+36000~120000 employees?
TSMC is a fab, not a chip designer. And NV makes GPUs and small scale SoCs like the ones in the Nintendo Switch and automotive (IIRC the Tegra SoC that powered the Switch 1 literally was an automotive chip that they repurposed).
That's quite the difference from what Intel makes: CPUs that power a lot of the world's compute capacity for laptops, PCs and servers, wireless chips (Bluetooh+WiFi), their own GPU line...
> IIRC the Tegra SoC that powered the Switch 1 literally was an automotive chip that they repurposed
Tegra was designed for mobile devices like smartphones. The automotive part came later and isn’t particularly relevant. Intel also makes low power SoCs for mobile devices, e.g. Atom.
> Intel also makes low power SoCs for mobile devices, e.g. Atom.
Last time I heard that name was well over a decade ago for crappy "netbook" devices. Just looked it up, last Atom CPU was released in 2013 per Wikipedia [1]. They might still make them for embedded computing purposes with very long life cycles, but no idea at which volume.
For the GP of this comment, TI mixes running their own fabs with some fabless product lines. A lot of the companies that make analog ICs still own their fabs and TI is one of them.
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.
Back in 2012-2014 intel hired a bunch of “futurists” which were liberal arts majors from the northeastern US. Needless to say they spewed a bunch of nonsense and were fired years later, but I knew a few and they were puzzled they were hired to begin with.
Xerox hired an anthropologist once, Julian E. Orr, and it resulted in a really good book called “Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job”.
Of course, mostly he found was how out of touch the executives at Xerox were with what their employees were actually doing in practice. The executives thought of the technicians who repaired copiers almost as monkeys who were just supposed to follow a script prepared by the engineers. Meanwhile the technicians thought of themselves as engineers who needed to understand the machines in order to be successful, so they frequently spent hours reverse engineering the machines and the documentation to work out the underlying principles on which the machines worked. The most successful technicians had both soft skills for dealing with customers and selling upgrades and supplies as well as engineering skills for diagnosing broken hardware and actually getting it fixed correctly. It seems that none of the sales, engineering, or executives at Xerox liked hearing about any of it.
> I remember there being a bunch of Anthropologists that were hired before that, under Genevieve Bell. It wasn't clear to me why they were hired.
Yes, I remember contracting at Intel in 2006 and the Anthropologists were at one end of the building we were in. Their area was a lot different than the engineering areas. Lots of art, sitting around in circles, etc. I remember asking about what was up over there "Those are the anthropologists".
Having a bunch of people who might at some point generate a few valuable ideas doesn't sound like a bad strategy. Intel is (was?) huge, their market penetration is enormous. I think Bell Labs did something similar back in the way -- maybe not with the liberal arts, but they certainly left a lot of room for serendipity.
What possible ideas could someone with no expertise in advanced math/physics/chemistry/or other relevant hard science have for the products and services Intel sells?
Why not throw a janitor, cook, and bus driver in the mix too then?
Almost every field require baseline knowledge of certain facts to make one's ideas useful. And we're talking about the most technologically advanced process in the world using cutting edge physics and materials science. The baseline here is basically as high as you can get.
I applied to Intel once a long time ago when I was just getting out of school, but when they replied asking for my resume in "Word format" I stopped pursuing it.
I didn't use Word to create my resume and if they can't deal with a PDF that was their problem.
That's not at all an unusual request though. Plenty of recruiters want Word. Probably so they can make changes behind your back or some such nonsense. Or, less cynically, so they can more easily copy/paste stuff into their HRM tool.
I've never had a competent company ask me for that. The only ones who did were "old fart" companies. New companies, especially ones with good tech, have always taken my PDF.
> Probably so they can make changes behind your back
Nope, I don't consent to that.
> Or, less cynically, so they can more easily copy/paste stuff into their HRM tool
Their HRM tool should support PDFs if they are competent. They should also be able to read my resume with their own eyes. If not I consider the company not a good fit for me.
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.
> 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.
Speaking as a Seattle-based F500 employee, they're being driven out of Seattle proper but often setting up shop on the Eastside or just outside city limits. It's the Seattle City Council driving a lot of the change, not the state legislature (other than the capital gains tax).
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.
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...
When I think of people that went into Tech 20+ years ago, this choice of work was a vocation. Not saying they were all pleasant, but they were all largely invested.
At some point Tech became a safe, lucrative profession, for people who say things like 'life is more than work. Nobody is required to like what they do.', like the managers from Intel.
> Those of the Elven-race that lived still in Middle-earth waned and faded, and Men usurped the sunlight. Then the Quendi wandered in the lonely places of the great lands and the isles, and took to the moonlight and the starlight, and to the woods and caves, becoming as shadows and memories, save those who ever and anon set sail into the West and vanished from Middle-earth.
it's a fine answer and it's the correct answer. Obsessive behavior is not easily identifiable when everyone around you is leading an unbalanced life. I'm sure in certain circles you could find people who agree both of us.
The difference is the the psychologists and the philosophers agree with me over the long term. Being work obsessed at age 40+ when you have other aspects of life worth exploring is simply mental illness.
Did you ever even consider that such people have other things to do?
It seems like you are addressing a completely different point, and creating a false dichotomy.
It makes sense that people dont want to work with others that try to do as shitty of a job as possible without being fired, fucking over whomever and whatever happens to be collateral damage.
Being an obsessive company man is not the only alternative, and certainly not what they were suggesting. Im not sure why you thought it was being advocated for.
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.
>Instead, Intel has embarked on an unprecedented and sustained campaign to shrink its business in response to a series of technical and financial crises.
it's not unprecedented, when companies' businesses contract, shrinking is exactly the right thing to do, not to mention that it's forced on them anyway.
It's not unprecedented, but I question if it is the right move while the industry is experiencing unprecedented growth.
"The Global Data Center Chip Market size is expected to be worth around USD 57.9 Billion by 2033, from USD 14.3 Billion in 2023, growing at a CAGR of 15.0% during the forecast period from 2024 to 2033."
Thinking about the Rule of 72, that CAGR is astonishing. Where will the power come from to run these data centers? Are we going to see an explosion of solar and wind farms with the express purpose of powering data centers? I say solar and wind because they are easier to get approved and built compared to nuclear or gas/coal.
Andy Grove left in 1998, even though he was on the board of directors until 2004 (with diminished role).
After he left the CEO role Intel just lost his way.
As far as I understand, Grove was at the helm when Intel started the Itanium project. Granted, he didn't see it to "completion", but poor choices were made even in his time.
He even stated the following in "Only the Paranoid Survive":
One, don’t differentiate without a difference. Don’t introduce improvements whose only purpose is to give you an advantage over your competitor without giving your customer a substantial advantage. The personal computer industry is characterized by well-chronicled failures when manufacturers, ostensibly motivated by a desire to make “a better PC,” departed from the mainstream standard. But goodness in a PC was inseparable from compatibility, so “a better PC” that was different turned out to be a technological oxymoron.
Just because Itanium last as a bet, doesn't mean it was wrong to try it. They gambled that compilers would keep up - they didn't. Today it might work! Compiler technology is very much improved. (Dotnet/Java payloads? Dynamic recompiling...) It's a software problem and as such inherently easy to underestimate the complexity of it. Itanium also had its roots in a time when Big Iron was more relevant than it is today.
It really wasn't. Itanium was a gamble that hard-coding static parallelism into the ISA would beat dynamic OoO. And just like architectural delay slots, it inevitably failed - using a few more transistors isn't that expensive since the alternative is "waste your time doing nothing at all".
"Compilers just need to keep up" was Intel's marketing apologia, not reality.
Compilers simply could not keep up - that was reality, not just marketing. Ideally, Intel should have coded the compilers too and removed the rough edges. But they were a bit too slow and AMD ate Itanium's target market.
You have to admit though that the EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) model was quite innovative. The philosophy influenced the LLVM project and some of the principles are used in GPU's and AI accelerator chips, even if hardware-based dynamic scheduling won the game.
"
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."
What I don't get is that there are at least a couple of very large, very valuable US companies that need to have their CPUs/GPUs fabbed (Apple and NVidia) and are currently dependent on fabs in Taiwan, a geopolitically risky place to be that dependent on. Both are sitting on huge reserves of ca$h. Why not either outright buy or buy a large stake in Intel to recapitalize it and allow it to finish the new SOTA fabs it was building? The CHIPS act was intended to help the likes of Intel and Micron, but the current admin has apparently blocked any further funding. If the current admin was serious about US semiconductor manufacturing it would try to arrange some kind of shotgun wedding where Apple & Nvidia (and others) take a stake in Intel to keep it afloat. Perhaps some kind of a consortium where the investing companies get priority in getting their parts fabbed? There's really no other US alternative for advanced semiconductor fabrication unless you're going to start from scratch and that doesn't seem like a viable idea.
Yes, I understand the argument that Intel management screwed up for too long and this is the market at work, but that ignores the geopolitical risks of what we're going to end up with. Forming some kind of consortium to keep Intel fabs running (and new ones built) could also include completely changing the management of the company.
To me, Apple and NVidia have already voted "no" to major Intel investment. This is evident from how large is their order book with TSMC and Samsung. I think the newest TSMC fab in Arizona is one step back from the best in Taiwan, and I think they will build another fab in Arizona soon (if not already started).
Is it because the employees themselves are so incompetent that no one wants to take this burden on. Besides, TSMC is expanding in Arizona and Samsung is expanding in Texas.
> Is it because the employees themselves are so incompetent that no one wants to take this burden on.
I don't buy this. I think the primary problem was mismanagement especially in the 2008 to 2020 timeframe. Too many bean counter CEOs during that period who did not understand the need to constantly invest in SOTA fabs.
> Too many bean counter CEOs during that period who did not understand the need to constantly invest in SOTA fabs.
I am not here to defend Intel, but I don't think this is the correct interpretation of events. Basically, Intel failed in their fab process R&D to keep up with TSMC and Samsung, and that is not lack of effort or money. Since their fab process R&D was going so poorly, Intel slowed down their fab construction rate. This makes good business sense to me. The truth appears to be that Intel fab process got beat fair and square by TSMC and Samsung.
Intel absolutely flubbed some nodes and bad employee execution was a part of it.
But management has consistently tried to tell customers what they want/need. Intel has a history of developing products with no customer base or pulling out of markets too early. Neither of those are the responsibility of low level employees. That's higher management.
One of the big concerns about the GPU division is "Will Intel keep going long enough for this to matter or will they pull out the second there's an issue?"
Because it was incentive based. Intel has to hit milestones to get funding. Everything Intel does takes years.
Intel is also likely going to lose hundreds of millions in incentives from Oregon for failure to meet hiring objectives, but they have a while to do that.
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.
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.
> Intel would sometimes cut jobs during fallow periods but it backfilled them almost immediately.
Smells like corporate bulimia.
When I worked/lived in the Bay Area there was a sense that corporations, and residents of the Bay Area, were moving to Oregon because it was cheaper … but still close enough to Silicon Valley. (Apropos of nothing really.)
> If companies have extra cash on hand, don't we want them to invest it and hire?
No. Hiring should be a long-term strategic investment, not something you do whenever you have extra cash lying around. If you needed the extra people you should have been trying to hire them already, and if you don't then you shouldn't hire them now.
If I'm a shareowner, if the company doesn't have any intelligent ideas on how to spend my money, they should send it back to me as a dividend, or buy me out (share buyback).
Please don't waste my money trying to build some immortal empire as a shrine to the CEO's ambition.
There’s an enormous amount of money being made by chipmakers, and Intel is rapidly losing access to it. That doesn’t mean hiring stupidly is good, but spending money to regain its momentum and save the company from bankruptcy is an obvious priority. Stock buybacks aren’t, unless the plan is to extract revenue and shut the place down.
No. Generally speaking, I want corporations to return capital in excess of operating needs to shareholders unless they have actual high-expected-return, ready-to-be-executed plans for what to do with their money.
When corporations just invest because they have money, there is a gigantic agency problem, and executives have a tendency to burn shareholder value on vanity projects and fancier headquarters.
Stock buybacks are exactly what I want wealthy companies to be doing with money they don't have a high expected ROI for.
Not entirely disagreeing, but Intel feels more like a poster child of buybacks that (in hindsight and in comparison with their peer group) would have been much better spent reinvested into the company https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-intel-fi...:
* during the same time period they fell behind TSMC and SEC in semiconductor fab , missed the boat on mobile (couldn't really capture the market for either smartphone or tablet CPUs), and are missing the boat w/AI training https://www.hpcwire.com/2025/07/14/intel-officially-throws-i...
Intel did not do a good job with its (sizable) investments for the last decade. There's little reason (at least for me, a casual observer of their failure to deliver good chips) to think they would have done a better job by just throwing (more) money at the problems they were trying to solve.
The existence of markets Intel didn't dominate does not, to me, imply that it would have been a good use of resources to throw (more) money at the markets they didn't dominate. Not every company is good at every business, even if they dominate some seemingly related market.
No stock buybacks, pay dividends, that's why the instrument exists. Stock buybacks are an aberration of hyperfinancialisation, just pay the shareholders proportionally to what they own.
Dividends don't currently get the same tax advantages in the US, so until tax policy gets revised, it's better for the shareholders in question if there's a buyback.
There's also the matter that dividends are meant to be long-term and recurring. So it's not great for one-time windfalls.
Companies should buy back their stock if their stock is undervalued.
This anti stock buyback meme is silly. It’s like people who are anti shorting stock. Companies list on the stock exchange in order to sell their own stock to raise capital. If they have excess capital, absolutely they should be able to buy back their stock. And buy other companies stock if they see it as undervalued also.
It's not silly, it's a terrible incentive for companies flush with cash and paying bonuses to their executives in stocks, it becomes very easy to manipulate the stock price with stock buybacks for a larger bonus while letting the company flailing with underinvestment (or simply missed investments).
A great case to see the absurdity of it is Intel, doing stock buybacks for almost a decade to push its stock price up while flailing around and losing its edge, if it was paying high dividends while flailing around then major shareholders would be asking why the fuck would they be paying dividends while the business is losing competitiveness but by doing stock buybacks it kept investors "happy" so they could jump ship and let the company fail on its own.
Stock buybacks have perverse incentives, everyone responsible for keeping the company in check gets a fat paycheck from buybacks: executives, major investors, etc., all financed by sucking the coffers dry. The buybacks at Intel just made the company as a whole lose money, they bought back stocks when they were high and it only dipped since then (10y window).
The shareholders got what they wanted with Intel. If it was the wrong decision for Intel doesn’t mean it’s the wrong decision for everyone and should be banned.
The idea that the stock market can only be used to flow shares in one direction has no merit. If you want to regulate executive compensation do that with direct clear regulation on executive compensation, not via some indirect rule change on the stock market.
Stock buybacks are the indirect rule, it wasn't even allowed for most of the existence of stock markets, it's the odd one out which created perverse incentives.
It's not about regulating executive compensation, it's to close a gap that was opened and only led to poorer decision making at the executive/board level, there's no advantage to the company. It's a stupid instrument with no reason to exist except to return money to shareholders in a way they can avoid taxation events.
If you asked CFOs why they choose stock buyback over dividends, it is simple: tax efficiency. When you pay divs, holders are required to pay tax immediately. Buybacks act like reinvestment and are not taxed until the holder sells their shares.
Buybacks are in effect and by definition a kind of fraud even if people make excuses for it or do not want to see it that way. It's the equivalent of a vested interest driving up an auction price or, you know, buying a bunch of your own product and then using the "sales" figures to convince others to invest or buy your product at a higher rate/price due to artificial scarcity.
The fact that c-suites authorize buybacks largely to boost the stock price in order to trigger their own performance bonuses tied to the stock price only highlights that point.
If you did something even remotely similar, you would be prosecuted for fraud, because it's fraud.
1) Wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain.
2) A person or thing intended to deceive others, typically by unjustifiably claiming or being credited with accomplishments or qualities.
The problem though is that the incentive structure is so that none of the involved parties has any disincentive, let alone an adversarial incentive to end the practice, let alone has standing to do anything legally, short of sabotaging their own stock value.
It's a totally perverse and corrupted incentive structure, similar to why both Trump or Biden, or Democrats or Republicans have the real will or interests in ... non of the involved parties have any interest in revealing the rot and corruption, and all parties involved have every incentive to keep it all under wraps, suppressed, covered, up and distracted from.
In some ways, a civil activist organization could in fact buy a single stock of one of the most egregious stock buyback stock price inflation causing corporations and sue them for fraud and deception, but it would have to come with a claim at manipulation of the market due to fraudulent manipulation of the price discovery process similar to a light version of cornering the market through restriction of supply, i.e., cartel behavior.
They can only buy back stocks from people who want to sell them. The people who sell them do so because they believe it's a good deal. The process puts cash in the hands of those sellers, who can then go on to invest in something else, keeping the market more liquid rather than the first company sitting on cash reserves. The price of an individual stock is pretty much meaningless, you must multiply by the total number of stocks outstanding to determine the market cap. So it is not the buying back of stock that represents any fraud.
If there is any fraud, it would be having performance bonuses tied to individual stock price, rather than market cap. But blaming the buyback itself, is short-sighted.
You are making a basic mistake. Assuming that the originating company or its interested parties are regular market participants.
They are in effect more like the guys who stand around a cup and ball scam to make it look like there’s action and winners and keys you think you could do better.
A buyback is a removal of the security from the market, not participation in the market.
It’s like people buying their own books to drive up sales in order to get in lists to promote more book sales, which is when they then supply the market with the books their bought once the price has been artificially elevated and has become sticky.
You may not like hearing that and it’s clearly not the mainstream street preferred narrative, but that’s what it is.
I don't find anything you said very convincing. You are simply characterizing a transaction as nefarious, and perhaps conspiratorial. Of course, there are incentives and perhaps even misincentives around such sales, but that doesn't mean they are inherently bad.
There are mechanisms that are commonly employed to REDUCE the price of the stock, (ie. a stock split), and nobody bats an eye about that. Buying back stocks is a reasonable way to employ cash reserves, and protects the firm from exposure to foreign exchange rate, and inflation risks.
I will agree with you that the way executive bonuses are structured can be a perverse incentive that borders on fraud. But blaming the buyback of stocks itself, isn't grounded in any inherent economic misdeed.
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.
You assume that simply because information exists that people will not only understand it, do so correctly, and act on it rationally and not emotionally.
Again, it’s like the Epstein narrative; the right and good thing is to release the information, but the whole system, both sides and most in between have a vested interest of one kind or another to keep it under wraps. We know there as organized human trafficking, sexual slavery, abuse, rape, and various types of racial master race level eugenics associated with out of control “intelligence” agencies, including for foreign governments against the American government …. It everyone is just covering it up because everyone is implicated or is mentally compromised and the “peasants” unlikely have the organized power to change that.
That is also all documented, in fact it was documented for how many years? 10? 15? 20?
Ever hear of a guy called Madoff? He sure made off with money of sophisticated and smart people for several decades.
Don’t lie to yourself about the confidence in the system.
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.
Because China is starting from a position of weakness and catching up, it is by definition easier for them to find high ROI projects to spend money on. Just wait 10–20 years when China is thoroughly technically ahead of us, and Chinese companies will be more like American ones.
China is massively investing in the entire energy generation sector, renewables, advanced nuclear, batteries, EVs, full self driving. This is the future we were supposed to be investing in, but we’re losing it. Maybe we got some share buybacks instead.
The share buybacks enable and encourage investors to move their money to invest in other things for the future. That's usually a better idea than e.g. Intel, who know nothing about other wind farms, building their own.
My concern is that America will become a sprawling no man’s land as the economy contracts to 20 percent of its present size. Rapid collapse is unpredictable and seems like a bad idea for a country with such a huge military presence.
I would not read too much into the lackluster performance of Chinese stock markets. Something is weird about a place with a fast growing economy, but the stock market performance is so poor.
This is completely opposite of how budgets work inside companies. If a department has a specific budget, then it is generally considered very bad to return part of it ever. Instead, they just find new things to do with it. Now, of course, sometimes, the new things are vanity projects, but I find that 80% of times those are actually very good investments.
Investors in a corporation don't want individual teams to spend money "just because it was budgeted, even if we didn't have a good thing to spend it on".
I, as a manager of a team at a corporation, of course have a partially adversarial relationship with investor goals; I want my team to be happy, in part because happier teams often are more productive, but in large part also because it's just nice to spend my work life working side by side with people who are enjoying their perks.
If my entertainment budget directly (or even partially) reduced my team's bonus pool, that would be crappy for team cohesion, but it would probably make me think more carefully about taking everyone out to lunch.
There is a good reason for it: Many pension funds and large money managers have a hard rule that they will not invest at full into a company without a dividend. I'm not saying that you have to agree with that strategy, but it is incredibly common for US pension managers. Also, some stocks pay one cent as their div, just to qualify.
It's the disposable side of the practice that I disagree with. Hiring should feel like a marriage or a commitment for any business. Just my opinion though.
I think we've become too complacent/accepting of corporations just laying off employees with what amounts to a shrug.
I'm kinda with you that in most situations corporations would probably be better off hiring slower and then riding out downturns on cash.
But big picture I disagree. We kind of need creative destruction in an economy - we need to be able to lay off people in horse buggey industries so that they can be hired to make Model T's. We're better off focusing on our social safety network and having a job market that encourages some amount of transit between careers.
> Hiring should feel like a marriage or a commitment for any business.
Treating the employer/employee relationship like some life-long commitment sounds like pure hell. It is a transaction. I don't want it to be anything more than that.
I wish it weren't such a big deal in ones life they keep their current employer (from the perspective of things like health insurance plans, retirement plans, PTO balances, basic income). If it weren't so god damned painful to change jobs or have some gaps longer than a month or two then maybe we'd have a chance to just treat jobs as jobs we move between instead of a sacred vow for life lest we be thrown into chaos when broken.
The average marriage lasts about 20 years. Companies should be able to fire people, but they shouldn't be overhiring in good years and then tossing people out in the next rough patch.
I don't know what a fired certificate is unless you're making a funny about you needing to do that with a divorce certificate? I also don't know what that is either. There's a divorce decree issued by the court, is that what you mean? Have you actually had a date ask to see legal documents about your divorce or any of the other situations? I just have no experience with any of that so it seems very strange, and feels like your just belaboring the point.
Been there done that got the decree and everything. You’re right, I don’t understand your musings as not once has anyone ever asked to see proof of my divorce. Some forms that ask about marital status might have a divorced option, but not all. It does not affect my credit. It does not affect job interviews. I really just have no way to relate to what you’re saying as it has never happened to me, nor have I ever heard anyone else complain about needing to provide this certificate. You are literally the first person. That’s such an outlier that I have to question its legitimacy.
I've had plenty of background checks. Not once have I ever been asked to provide divorce documentation. I've had security checks as well. Have I been asked if I'm divorced? Sure. Never have I needed to show someone the details of the divorce itself. It's not my employer's business who got what in the divorce.
So let's just flip this. Why have you been asked, and what were they asking to see? Proof you are divorced? Did you claim something that you were awarded by the judge and had to show proof of it? If someone is asking for that kind of information, did you not ask why they needed and get an answer? It would be much easier if you just explained your experience as it is the outlier here
You're the outlier - and the explanation is simple. Where you are, divorce and family court filings are part of the public record. A request isn't necessary, because the background checking org already can see the full documentation. They care to, because who you are in debt to, can influence you in future. And it takes about 3sec to confirm this, rather than sitting there saying "no, you".
Your employer enjoys your data without your say so [0].
EU, UK [1], Au [2], NZ... They have to ask. So they do.
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.
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.
This is disregarding the definition of buy-and-hold investors. As the name implies, they don't sell stock. Whether or not buy-and-hold is irrational or not is a completely different topic.
Selling a couple percent of stock every year or two will work for at least a century before you have to adjust the plan. Something else will come up first.
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...
> there was a sense that corporations, and residents of the Bay Area, were moving to Oregon because it was cheaper … but still close enough to Silicon Valley.
It's a different state and a 9-10 hour drive away; in what sense is it close?
At least in the past, Intel owned a dozen 35-50 pax regional jets (https://www.planespotters.net/airline/Intel-Air-Shuttle-Airc...) and had regular scheduled flights back and forth between their Santa Clara, Phoenix, and Portland offices. (They now seem to be down to two- rise of Zoom?)
Note that these were NOT executive jets for C-suite, these were for all employees who had meetings at other locations (at least according to people I've met since I moved to AZ a few years ago to be near my in-laws).
I remember the airplane tail had the number 386, or 486. It was difficult to get a seat, but it was based on first come first serve, so you just had to be diligent on the booking web site.
Coming out of San Jose, the plane would enter this corkscrew to gain altitude. I guess to avoid SFO airspace.
I would often see high level executives on the same plane.
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.
There's a lot of downtime in that commute. Sitting in an airport. Talking to people. Flying is fun if you're into it.
Anyway, a 2 hour commute is normal in the bay area . I used to do the south bay to San Francisco Caltrain daily... Flying is better. Free drinks for one thing
Why? I own a house in Portland. Company closed the Portland office. My family is settled there. It doesn't make sense to move your whole life just for a few days a month in the office . I didn't do it daily. However I did price it out and it is cheaper.
Pure financials can more than explain this, if you have a family and want space for them. Let's do some napkin math, from a quick Google search it's 150$ round trip, so 3000$ a month assuming 20 work days (maybe even less with frequent-flyer status, cashbacks and rewards).
For a 4 bedroom house, Zillow gives me around 7-8k a month in rent for SF and around 4k for SJ, so you'll at least break even and have a better quality of life for your family even if you won't see them much during the week.
Anyway: The fact that a simple adequate house for a family runs at 4k in the US is ... maddening. 1500 sqft is around 140 m², a comparable house in Berlin (one of Germany's hottest markets!) runs ~2500€. How one is supposed to live in the US when not on a typical techbro salary, I have no idea how y'all even manage that.
You don't have to answer this question, but: do you live off the I-205? I'm always astounded (well, annoyed) at how, living in the inner east side, getting to Multnomah Falls via I-84 would sometimes be quicker than getting to PDX fir the 205.
I live in inner NE. I'm two miles from downtown via the broadway bridge, and four miles from the airport via surface streets (about a 10 minute drive. If someone texts me while picking up bags at baggage claim, I will be at the airport before they are out). If I lived farther out, then commuting to the airport would be a problem. However, central Portland is very livable compared to most cities.
Yes. This was part of the deal; that I show up in the office every once in a while. They paid for my flights too, so it was actually cheaper than renting in the bay area, and certainly more convenient (my wife and kids are well settled in Portland). The flights were so cheap ($90 - $110 round trip with south west)
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.)
> (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.
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!
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.
This is yet another example of something that's happening all acrossed tech: (Over?)Correcting for a systemic problem; due to either/both misidentifying the problem, or reaching for the wrong solution that promises to solve the issue regardless.
The Asserted problem: Labor force/expense is too high, or at least, higher than is now thought necessary.
The (IMO) core problem: Measuring professional success/skill primarily by the size of the team a person manages.
The asserted solution: AI replacing Labor to reduce inflated labor costs/pools.
While there is some inherent benefit there to reducing team sizes back down into allegedly functionally sized units, there is a lack of accountability and understanding as to why that's beneficial, as it at seems to be done either due to the lofty promise of AI (which I'm critical of), or a more brutalist/myopic approach of merely trying to make the big labor-cost number smaller to increase margin/reduce expenses. To be clear, while I'm a critic of AI, I fully acknowledge it can absolutely be helpful in many instances. The problem is that people are learning the wrong lessons from this, as they've improperly identified the issue, and why the force reduction is allegedly/appears to be working.
Obviously, YMMV on a case-by-case/team/company basis, but Intel is known for being guilty of "Bigger = Better" when it comes to team size, and their new CEO acknowledged this somewhat with their "Bureaucracy kills innovation" speech [0].
That said, what may be good for the company (even if done for the right reasons) can still hurt the communities it built/depend on it.
As a PDX native that went to Oregon State and saw a lot of people go towards Intel, I don't feel the Oregon Intel crowd has strong aptitude for starting something up. They're at Intel in the first place because it was a secure job in their hometown they could coast at. I'm sure there are many of them that can do it, but I don't feel Portland has strong startup energy.
Disagree. Hillsboro has plenty of businesses from ex-intel employees.
Just off the top of my head I can think of a dozen or so.
They're just not in tech for the most part. I can think of 2 breweries, a standardization company, two machine shops. And those are just within a mile or so of my house.
I think a lot of folks work at Intel in order to get out of tech. That's basically what I'm doing, lol. Work enough to save and get out of tech.
Tech is also expensive to start up in. So it makes sense that a lot of the intel-driven businesses would be non-tech.
Ah, I meant tech startups. Starting a brewery and machine shop is exactly what I expect from the PDX crowd. I think you echo what I said, people working in PDX tech are there for the salary and coast so they can focus on their own lives outside of work, which is perfectly fine. But not conducive to a tech startup environment
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.
They did not come (directly) out of Intel Labs. They left because they were working on a moonshot project that lost corporate support. Just like Ampere computing, just a few years later.
It's a very laid-back place - more of a "you're missing out on life if you're not enjoying nature every weekend" type of place. Lots of new parents in the mid-to-late 30s (I think the highest proportion of any major city, actually.)
I think what hampers Oregon is that there isn't much non-Intel investment in R&D in the Portland region as well, compared to the Bay Area – there used to be a graduate institute funded by Tek et al., but that never got sustained. [1] The local academic medical research center is well-regarded and otherwise wouldn't have trouble attracting talent if it wasn't for the salaries.
I was a student at OGI back when it was still a thing. Then a lot of the DARPA grant money dried up because of the Iraq war (they wanted research that could be applied to weapons in the short term, not basic research into operating systems and programming languages).
They merged with OHSU, but it turned out OHSU was about as broke as they were, so most of the CS faculty migrated en-masse to PSU and took all their grad students (myself included) along with them. (It turns out grants generally go to the principle investigator, not the school. So if your advisor moves schools, their funding goes with them.)
Yeah, this is going to be the ultimate deciding factor. When local companies don't pay enough to live and Bay Area companies are paying upto 10X+ the compensation (for AI roles) people are going to make the move.
It helps there to be a strong community of founders, employees willing to take a risk to work at startup for less money, investors, capital, and general energy in the air. PNW tech scene is relatively low-key and apathetic to startups. Anyone with that type of ambition should have already migrated
There was a strong contingent of forward looking tech people and entrepreneurs a few years ago (pre COVID). They have left due to the large restrictions during COVID and the flight of capital and the general decline of Portland due to the riots and the lockdown measures.
Oregon and California were roughly on par. However, the once bustling downtown where you'd normally find people socializing after work, or hanging out, or doing tech-oriented meetups (I.e., the sorts of things that lead to business creation), was beset by 'fiery but peaceful' riots for almost an entire year. Now, the entire industry of after-work social hours, meetups, etc is dead. It is beginning to be revived but on the east side and suburbs, which is more residential and 'suburban' (although east side portland, is definitely more urban than most places). Suburban is okay, but you really need downtowns to create the sort of bustle that leads to that bay area zeitgeist.
One of the underappreciated things about the bay area is that, while it is very suburban, there are several respectably sized downtown cores -- Mountain View, Palo Alto, Redwood City, and of course the Big Kahuna - San Francisco -- all connected by relatively speedy (and from what I understand, much speedier now) rail.
Here's one thing OP might be talking about – the "skyscraper district" of PDX practically emptied out during COVID, precisely because Portland has highly segregated big-B-business and residential districts. The rise of WFH meant that the whole district nearly emptied out overnight – especially anchor tenants like law firms and tech that were most amenable to WFH. Without any residential population in the area, boom: no place for a downtown flagship office.
Since I don't want to stealth-edit my post, another one was the rise of "nuisance homelessness" – the same shelter-in-place order prevented the City from sweeping people into warehouse shelters (but lower-capacity motel shelters were set up); and a combo drug-decriminalization-and-treatment-funding bill gave us the decriminalization but never actually funded the treatment in time, and so there was a lot of open-air drug use. That didn't help the return to "downtown" either.
Yes my company (small startup) closed its Portland office during COVID. It was opened for people who didn't want to be in the bay area. Pre COVID it was en vogue for bay area startups to have a PDX office. Then COVID happened and downtown became a ghost town.
I knew the end was in sight when it became company policy that no employee stay past 6PM without HR approval due to the danger.
Do you think east of the Willamette will be where any tech scene rebuilding might end up? I wonder which neighborhood might have the right mix of housing, office space, and recreation (ie food.)
I go to Portland regularly just so I can enjoy a city that's much nicer than San Francisco. And Seattle recently hit another record population, it is significantly larger than it was before COVID and will soon pass SF.
I suspect the person denigrating the West Coast cities is doing so from their basement in East Prolapse, Kentucky, as a way to rationalize their life choices.
The financial numbers paint a grimmer picture of Portland than they do of the other west coast cities.
The city, the county, and the state all spend increasing proportions on debt service, and the rewards for earning a lot of money are much less than the neighboring state.
The total fertility rate is also one of the lowest in the country. And Portland lacks a flagship university to bring in young talent.
It might be a nice place to visit during the summer months, but I don’t foresee many high paying jobs or highly profitable businesses being made there.
If OSHU could expand to a serious biotech research uni that could maybe fill the gap and kickstart something. That’s where I would start. But I don’t know if it could eve happen. Portland definitely hurt by not having OSU or OU - compared with Seattle/UW, Austin/UT, Madison/UW etc.
It's a decent school, but beset by the same 'Portland problems' that ruin it for the people who would be starting businesses. For example, during the last riot in Portland, the PSU library was taken over and rendered unusable for several quarters. If you were using this public space to do research or to work with friends to start a business... good luck... It's just gone in a day, and the university does nothing, and even encouraged the rioters.
I agree that Portland does need public space to co-work and to be close to research. Unfortunately that would take investment… and that’s not forthcoming, not even public $.
That being said, as someone who took a few graduate stats courses at PSU, I don’t think the library would have been the right place anyway - it always couched itself as a commuter access school that relied heavily on transfers from community college, and the library reflected that. It’s definitely not a well-resourced research institution, and with the retrenchment of federal funding for research and financial aid I’m not sure what it’ll focus on.
Portland has some major advantages over SF, but as someone who also goes there regularly (~5 weeks/year), I still prefer living in SF at the moment. Not considering the amount of tech jobs there (which is a major factor for me), the city in general just isnt quite there yet. There are also some very major fiscal problems that have to be sorted before I'd consider moving.
Great place though, definitely might end up there one day
I'm not denigrating Portland... I live here. I live two miles from downtown. People need to stop being sensitive
I am a critical person and Portland is currently deserving of much criticism in order to fulfill its potential. No one got anywhere by patting themselves on the back reassuring themselves they had already made it.
+1 to this. As someone who still believes that everything that made Oregon attractive is still there, and won’t be taken from Oregon soon - nature, laid-back culture, quality of life - we can’t deny that Oregon is deindustrializing more broadly. Reasonable people can disagree on the essence and details of the issues - I say this as someone who came here because of the youth culture, and still doesn’t have a family! Even we might agree on many things (as Portlanders usually do.)
But we all agree the state is seriously going to have to think hard about how to attract new business to both I-5 corridor and rural areas - whether it’s through investing in OSU upstream, or attracting more downstream manufacturing jobs.
De-industrialization is the right word. We are buoyed almost entirely by intel. Without Intel, the state is essentially cottage / mom-n-pop industries.
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
Only if there are paradigm shifts on the horizon. Chip making is high barrier to entry, capital intensive. No small collective is going to be able to start something up.
Yeah. The big problem with chip making is the effort to start up is absolutely monumental. China is putting all their money into it and still playing catch up. Japan is trying to get into the game and they're mostly aiming to make slightly older chips and bringing in companies that already have expertise.
Those are two of the biggest economies in the world pumping loads of money and people into that engine to try to get it started and still just starting to make some progress. That's not to say there aren't great ideas out there that we're missing which could make it all easier and cheaper, but a small team is definitely going to have one hell of a time making stuff on a nanometer scale without billions and billions of dollars behind them. Software startups are easy, but hardware is hard. Massive hardware and microscopic hardware are harder.
It sounds like a lot of the jobs are in manufacturing (fabs) or closely related. Once upon a time, innovative startups could be in that space (that's how "Silicon Valley" got the silicon part of its name). But, for several decades now, it requires billions of dollars to start up a semiconductor fab, and VC's don't seem to be all that into funding manufacturing.
I'm not saying it _should_ or _must_ be that way, just that it is.
Lucky for those people, California exists! Noncompetes can’t be enforced here, and amazingly, this applies even if the employee entered into the agreement before they came to California:
> What makes Oregon think it can enforce its law across state lines ?
It’s absolutely possible to be a fugitive in one state from another. It’s also typically quite expensive and stressful.
If I were on the other side of this fight, I’d use the opponent’s absence from Oregon courts to get civil judgements in my favour and then use the federal credit system to collect.
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.
I am rooting for this to be the case, and frankly it should be, but typically the massive startup boom comes from companies IPOing (PayPal mafia, Google mafia, etc.). So much talent has been locked up at Intel, I'm hoping this is a liberation of sorts.
I 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.
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?
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.
CHIPS act nuked Intel. The promise of unlimited US govt support to make a US TSMC encouraged Gelsinger to all in on domestic fab production, only to rugged first by Biden DEI stipulations, then by Trump 2.0 coercing Taipei to give up TSMC and start production in Arizona. All this while export controls cut Intel out from its second largest market (China), depriving it of much need revenue. Workers in Oregon losing jobs is downstream of all this
Workers in Oregon losing jobs is downstream of Intel not being able to produce the best chips, which earned the highest margins that Intel was used to earning. This has been in the works since the mid 2000s, and they still don’t have a competitive low power, high performance chip.
Also, Oregon is a terrible state to invest in as a business, especially one that is looking to pay high salaries.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
>> But it does not sound like they made a poor choice.
I think the thing that's not obvious to young people is that choices that seem good at any given time may turn out to be poor choices further down the line. The guy who traveled the world while working one hour a day telling engineers what to do over email probably had a great young adulthood. It sounds like he paid for it later, though, by getting laid off and having difficulty finding another job.
This doesn't mean that those who worked their asses off didn't get screwed over, but on average they probably did better professionally - and by proxy, financially.
The seductive failure of doing that is what you choose to invest your saved time in, similar to financial debt.
It’s one thing if someone is iron willed enough to make productive use of their new free time.
It’s different if they use it to play video games and sleep.
Most people, if left to their own devices, will do the latter.
We can say what we want about a hard, challenging job, but it forces us to work and learn. Thus, at the end of it, we have the benefit of that working and learning.
The better question is not “How little work can I get away with doing?” but rather “What will I have at the end of this work?”
im not sure when i can play video games and sleep..
Why not find a job where hard work is valued, or start your own company?
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.
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.
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.
Can't take it with you. (money)
>>It's very odd that the guy who was famous for saying what upper management should do (set culture) ended up building a culture that has completely failed
Is it? Everywhere I worked upper management is taking big about the culture but their taking points are rarely applied to the company.
Like when Facebook says something like "we value your privacy"
Facebook does value your privacy, because it's a commodity they can sell for a high price.
Sort of like that Twilight Zone episode. The aliens come and convince us they are here to serve man. "Here, if you don't believe us look at our book called 'To Serve Man.'"
Finally one of the humans translates it and discovers it's a cookbook.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Z...
FB invades your privacy so that they sell access to you. Your privacy is important to them, so that they can continue to be the intermediary.
Humm time to put my life story and my product and lifestyle preferences in an easy to read format behind a small paywall, there's gold in them there hills!
And they have internal modeling to exactly value each persons privacy in $
> 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.)
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.
> At the time Intel's dominance was supreme
They are the poster child for "we have a monopoly so we don't have to innovate or even maintain competence". Mind you, how much worse must things be at AMD that they're not winning the x64 war? Eventually the "PC" market is going to get run over by ARM like everything else. Especially now there's a Windows on ARM with proper backwards compatibility.
(although something is very odd with drivers on Windows-ARM, if anyone knows the full story on how to get .inf based 'drivers' working it would be genuinely helpful)
This is a very Apple viewcentric point of view.
Windows on ARM is still largely ignored, everyone on the consumer level is more than happy with current Intel/AMD offerings.
Every single attempt to sell Windows ARM systems has been more or less a flop, including the recent CoPilot+ PCs.
Windows developer community also largely ignores Windows on ARM, unless there is an actual business value to support yet another ISA during development, CI/CD pipelines, and QA.
Only Apple gets to play the vertical integration game, our way or go away attitude, and they are the survivors of home computer vertical integration only because they got lucky when banks where already knocking on the door.
In a way, Pantheon feels weirdly accurate. People not actually knowing what to do. Just riding on momentum and looking for the easiest problem to solve (thinner & extract more money from those making your product better) because the concern is next quarter, not next year, not the next 5 years. What's the point of having "fuck your money" if you never say "fuck you"?
Those of us that were around for when Apple was at the edge of bankruptcy can relate to a similar approach, where some products were great like the Newton, but the wind of the early days wasn't as strong.
They have plenty of money to burn, but unless they make their systems more affordable to the common man that doesn't live with tier 1 country salaries, they will eventually become the iPhone/iPad company.
There is no longer Apple hardware for servers, the way MacPro has been dealt with, it is clear that the professional desktop workstation is also not a market that they care about any longer, if the only PCI slots on studio are for audio cards.
So it doesn't matter how great the M chips are, if they don't have products on their portfolio that people care about buying, instead of having Windows/Linux/BSD systems for servers, and mostly Windows on consumer hardware (70% worldwide market share).
I did say "eventually", because I'm at the very start of "yet another ISA during development, CI/CD pipelines, and QA" work.
Which means that there is some business value on selling the software on Windows on ARM devices to budget such efforts.
Can you present data from sales numbers and developers showing this? Need to see the numbers of ARM vs x86 for sales and how many applications are currently one/both.
Walk into any random shopping mall computer shop and observe how many people care about buying Windows ARM, or are asking about them.
Those are my numbers.
If you prefer something more official,
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2816617/microsofts-copilot-g...
> Walk into any random shopping mall computer shop and observe how many people care about buying Windows ARM, or are asking about them.
Those still exist?
Yes, all over the place in Europe.
Media Market, Carrefour, Publico, Worten, Cool Blue, FNAC,...
> everyone on the consumer level is more than happy with current Intel/AMD offerings
They shouldn't be. Apple's chips changed the game so much that it was a no-brainer for me to choose them when I bought a new laptop - PCs just couldn't compete with that compute and battery life. Anyone with a decent enough budget is not even considering Windows.
I don't think any power user will be happy with Intel/AMD any more.
Gaming desktop rigs prove otherwise.
As for laptops maybe when there is something able to compete with Razor laptops for e-sports, using ARM.
Snapdragon chips ain't it.
> Anyone with a decent enough budget is not even considering Windows.
Uhm, no. This is so totally dependent on your use case. I use my home box MOSTLY for gaming; it's just better on Windows. I also want a box I can upgrade. I never need to carry it with me.
Apple isn't even in the consideration space for me for that.
For work I don't have a choice, but the M[1-4] machines are _good enough_ for that; the battery life is nice, but I'm not mobile that often. I don't use its screen, mouse, or keyboard, so don't care there. The OS is close enough to familiar unixen that I like it fine, but WSL2 on Windows or native linux would be MORE THAN FINE, and closer to my deployment environment so would be better at way less cost, but our IT dept. doesn't want to support it so I get what I get.
> I use my home box MOSTLY for gaming; it's just better on Windows.
Don't you mean on x86?
Windows on ARM is no more suitable for running legacy x86 games at full performance than any one else's OS on an ARM chip.
I think that was implied, proving the point that many don't even think about Windows ARM.
It sure seems like AMD is winning the x64 war?
https://www.alltechnerd.com/amd-captures-17-more-cpu-market-...
Maybe a semantic argument, but I'd say they are "on their way to winning", but once they have a higher market share than Intel, "they are winning".
> Despite Intel still holding the lead with 56.3% of systems validated through CPU-Z, AMD is closing in, now claiming 43.7% of the market.
I do hope intel comes back, while I prefer AMD currently (due to no avx512 on intel consumer cpus and me not being interested in having things scheduled on efficiency cores in my desktop pc), if there's no competition anymore who knows what AMD might become...
I'm a gamer, and for Intel to make a comeback for me, they need something that competes with AMD's X3D chips, which absolutely dominate all the gaming benchmarks.
The Core Ultra CPUs are an absolute joke for gaming, often being beaten even by the 14th gen CPUs. The Core Ultras had a major performance regression in L3 cache speed which destroyed gaming performance.
Games love large cache sizes. The Ryzen 9700X has the same number of cores, but a slower clock than a 9800X3D, yet the 9800X3D comes out on top purely because it has 96 MB of L3 cache compared to 32 MB. If Intel would have put out an i9-14900K with 96 MB of L3 cache, it'd probably come out on top.
> they're not winning the x64 war?
That's probably the strongest mis-statement I've heard this week. At least, it seems AMD have been the x86-64 leaders for several years now.
Why are you thinking AMD aren't winning?
By what metric? AMD is making headway fast but intel still controls 76% of the server market.[1]
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amd-records-...
By precisely what metric are AMD the leading x86-64 vendor? Intel still outsells them.
EPYC?
I don't think I even know anyone (including in businesses) who buy Intel for anything any more, and it's been that way for a few years.
That's why you want to look at data rather than people you know https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-9005-turin-turns-trans...
I think Epyc will get there within a few years, it has great momentum and Intel's response has been pretty weak.
Stock price delta over the past five years is a good metric since the market is efficient and traders themselves use all available information.
Heh!
Poe's Law in action. I can't tell if this is serious or satire.
EDIT: Though I'm leaning towards satire.
Imagine being this naive in 2025. The market isn't rational.
> 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.
I think Intel's been losing for a while now. I would rather have RISC-V over ARM, though.
I was pretty pleased to see a news article on the x86/x86-64 emulator for RISC-V, felix86, recently, where they've had success running Steam and playing relatively complicated 3D games using a PCIe graphics card.
Dealing with MCUs for projects, RISC-V Espressif chips and boards are no-brainers now; I buy big bags of ESP32 boards from Seeed. I get some free ARM boards at work, which are neat - I always love playing with MCUs - but they're relatively power-hungry and expensive without a lot to show for it. I'm either using a ~$6 ESP32 board or a ~$1 ATTiny in a DIP package for home/fun projects. ESP32s are starting to show up in consumer electronics I find, too, along with the relatively pared-down ESP8266s which I'm not as fond of, though I can still flash them easily over USB-TTL at least, so whatever.
In the SBC space, ARM is competing with x86. RISC-V exists but only really for enthusiasts. RISC-V may start making inroads here soon. I picked up some Radxa Rock 2F boards (using ARM-based Rockchips) for ~$12 shipped a few months ago, they run Debian, and these have been fantastic for projects (though now ~impossible to source the cheap 1GB variant of). It's difficult to imagine it being worth getting involved in this nightmarishly competitive space, though obviously some still do. Most seem to try finding some obscure niche to justify a high markup.
In many workloads, it's more the GPU that matters. I need an MMU, a PCIe slot, and driver support. Most of us don't really need these outlandishly complex and CPU-centric $100+ ATX motherboards, or even CPU/RAM sockets/slots; just solder it on. -Like, how often do people even upgrade the CPU on a motherboard anymore? I'm more liable to throw the whole thing out because it doesn't have any 10PB/s 240GW USB9 quantum ports, so cut materials, decrease surface area, lower cost, and make it disposable.
Same. I started down the semiconductor path about 15 years ago (physics student, loved my EE classes, loved nanofab class, wanted more) and got warned away by an astonishing number of independent postdocs, interns, and seemingly successful industry contacts who all agreed on one point: the pay was such utter dogshit that one should consider it a passion career like art or music. Some of them saw consulting for the Chinese as their "big ticket light at the end of the tunnel" -- but that got shut down soon enough. I changed directions before getting first hand experience but the R&D job listings tended to support this view. "They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" seemed to be in the advanced stages at that point.
At least in R&D, from the angle I saw it. Clearly, being stingy wasn't a universal problem: heavy buybacks, ludicrous M&A (in foresight and hindsight), and that $180k average salary in the article sounds completely divorced from the snapshot impression that I got. I don't know what gives, was R&D "salary optimized" to a degree that other parts of the business weren't? Did the numbers change at some point but the culture was already rotten and cynical? Or did I see noise and mistake it for signal? Dunno.
In another world I'd love to have been part of the fight to make 10nm work (or whatever needed doing) rather than working on something that doesn't fully use my skills or in my private opinion contribute as much to humanity, but my employer pays me and respects my time and doesn't steer their business into every iceberg in the ocean, and in the end those things are more important.
The problem with R&D as a career (in a "large organised company/institute" context at least, where you don't own and control the results) is the limitless supply of impoverished students and postdocs willing to work for exposure.
Right, but cheaping out on the foundation of your building has consequences -- which have come home to roost orders of magnitude in excess of the money saved.
In R&D management, this is an extremely well-known problem with an extremely well-known solution: use the oversupply to be selective rather than cheap. The fact that they chose to be cheap rather than selective is managerial incompetence of the highest order. They had one job, and they blew it. "Selective" doesn't even mean that the rating system has to be perfect or even good, it just has to equilibrate supply and demand without shredding morale. Even a lottery would suffice for this purpose.
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.
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.
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
Is this mainly because of the delays with the newest Xeon?
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
> Many of those who lost their jobs worked in technical fields in an industry that pays an average wage of $180,000 a year. Those were great jobs and helped buoy the whole state, but most won’t find similar work locally.
This is the big risk we all took when we moved away from the Bay Area to work remotely. You arbitrage the COL difference and come out ahead big time, but it might be very hard to make the same salary locally if you can't find a remote job.
Best to make some hay while the sun is shining.
IBM left my once prosperous hometown as a kid. Others followed suit. Since then it's been in a sad state economically, just some rust belt town. Corporations abandoning communities is hardly anything new. Capital acts with 0 empathy, or rather, the people who direct it do.
I've heard on this forum of a tactic Intel employed where they broke off some people into a subsidiary, dissolved the subsidiary, and then offered to rehire them with the caveat: Oops, the pension you were promised is now gone. Then Intel's foundry business started failing. Oops!!
> “I don’t feel good today,” Gelsinger said told employees Thursday. “I’ve agonized over today for the last three, four weeks. Many nights waking up at 2 a.m. because I know that what we do, and how we’re affecting you and your families, it matters.”
Sounds pretty empathetic to me. I’m guessing he also has empathy for Wall St and his shareholders. Ultimately Intel has no choice but to either grow or downsize and the former hasn’t materialized. They’re losing market share and revenue and if they keep that up they will be empathizing with their creditors and the bank.
If there is one thing I have learned it's that most people who make it to the top in business or politics are great actors and storytellers who can express empathy in a very convincing way when needed. They may even believe it at the moment. But if it benefits them, they will still make brutal decisions without any regard towards the lives of people who are affected by the decisions.
I am pretty sure he will get a nice stock compenstation for the mental anguish he suffered for this decision.
Snark aside, did Intel management take any cuts, even symbolic ones to show they are in it together?
Yes, that’s exactly what they did under Gelsinger: https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2023/02/intel-slas...
I have the feeling he will be fine financially.
Honestly, I don't think Gelsinger is a bad guy. He was handed a mess made by others before him, which in my mind absolves him of some of the blame.
Krzanich and Swan were catastrophically bad. Both of them are among the worst bigcorp CEOs ever, with asleep-at-the-wheel Krzanich in the running for the worst of all time. Intel's board tried to right the ship with Gelsinger, but it was too little and too late, especially given slow development cycles in the semiconductor industry.
The one constant through Intel's almost two decade long downfall across multiple CEOs has been the BOARD. At what point do they get assigned blame?
It's arguably a challenge to supplant Jack Welch as "worst of all time" after he not only ran GE into the ground, but also started the whole "celebrity CEO" fad and spewed a bunch of toxic crap that poisoned scads of other companies. Rank-and-yank being first among those.
The individual people involved are frequently very empathetic, the key is that they ultimately are not afforded a choice.
If a business is losing money, then laying off some percentage will certainly hurt them. But it could save the jobs of the others.
The leadership has empathy for both sets and it's emotionally mind numbing.
It feels like these older companies had more of "let's open a campus in flyover country" or at least medium sized cities
The newer "web 2.0" companies (and I mean, even Google and Amazon) opened shop in more affluent places
I'd argue it's not a choice of "let's open a campus in flyover country," but a reflection of how the industry has changed.
The "older" companies were manufacturers. Even places like Mountain View and San Jose were the working-class towns with HP factories and semiconductor plants. The concentration of engineering talent (HP/Intel/Apple/Atari) is what created the affluence, especially after manufacturing itself was outsourced globally.
The newer Web 2.0 companies don't make physical things; they make software. Their most critical infrastructure isn't a factory but a dense network of developers. They go to the Bay Area, Seattle, etc., because that's where the network is. For the parts of their business that don't require that network, like customer service, they locate in less expensive regions, just as PayPal did with Nebraska. They were even the second largest employer in Nebraska iirc.
Amazon's customer service HQ is in West Virginia IIRC.
If only one company offers jobs in your profession or skill set, that company has a labor monopsony. Back when companies provided lifetime job security and pensions, moving to a remote corporate campus might have been a reasonable tradeoff to consider -- your reduced negotiating leverage would depress your wages but that might have been offset by the lower cost of living (e.g. housing).
But modern skilled workers know how risky it is to put down roots in a place where they only have a couple employment options. So companies struggle to attract talent to remote areas and end up needing to hire in places that already have an established pool of skilled labor, which is typically in the cities and more affluent areas of the state or country.
In this case, the lack of employment options means many of the engineers laid off by Intel will end up needing to uproot their families' lives and move to a new city or state to find a new employer who can to pay for their skills.
There's a significant overlap between well educated technical minds who you want to do information work and people who want to live in a vibrant city. This isn't new and it shouldn't be shocking.
But Silicon Valley isn't made up of vibrant cities. Most of it is small towns and suburbs between SF and SJ.
I remember the first time I was sent to the Bay Area for training. I was excited to see this City of Mountain View I'd heard so much about; to explore its city nightlife and enjoy the view of the mountain. My boss had to let me down gently :) "Mountain View in Europe would be called a village", he said.
That’s kind of the big failure of post-WWII 20th century American urban planning. People, especially young ones, want to live in the fun cities they saw on TV where you can live in fun neighborhoods and walk to cool restaurants on the way to a show, so they move to places like SF, LA, NY, etc. but unless you bought in the 90s anyone without family wealth has the abrupt disappointment that they’re actually in some suburb 45 minutes away and spending a couple hours a day driving and trying not to think about how much they’re paying for even that.
I don’t know how quickly we’ll find the political will to break that since everyone who owns property in a city has a financial incentive to keep prices artificially high. Removing density restrictions helps by making redevelopment financially advantageous for individuals but the degree of uncertainty we have now is going to slow that down, too.
If you want to live in a house, then yes, you will have to commute potentially far distances. But if you're willing to live in an apartment then you can still live in the core of the cities mentioned. This just makes sense, if everyone got to live in a house then it'd hardly have the density required to be considered a city anymore. And actually the existence of 45min away suburbs from the heart of the city is exactly the problem with post-WWII development, if anything you should pay a much heavier premium or live even further.
> Removing density restrictions helps by making redevelopment financially advantageous for individuals
The big problem with changes like this (which I support, btw) is that the changes get immediately reflected in land prices, which means that you basically can only put the maximum number of units on the land, which tends to increase prices.
If you build enough, this doesn't happen but I don't think any western urban area is anywhere close to that point.
Yup. The Bay Area just seems like endless suburbia with a small city hidden inside. Nice weather though, to be fair.
Along the 101/El Camino more like a series of small towns that blend into each other. Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Mountain View at least have walkable streets with restaraubts, shops, etc, clustered around a “Main Street”, and residential areas laid out on a grid that mostly blend in to this area not sealed off in some way. Yes it is mostly single family homes and smaller apartments, with almost no high rises.
But when I think of “suburbia” I think of a series of housing developments, strip malls p, golf courses just off all major highways/roads. Cul de sacs as opposed to grid pattern. Generally hostile to pedestrians getting fro residential to commercial and business areas. On,y part of the Valley is like this, mostly the richer areas more towards 280, such as Los Altos, Portola Valley, Cupertino.
> But when I think of “suburbia” I think of a series of housing developments, strip malls p, golf courses just off all major highways/roads. Cul de sacs as opposed to grid pattern. Generally hostile to pedestrians getting fro residential to commercial and business areas. On,y part of the Valley is like this, mostly the richer areas more towards 280, such as Los Altos, Portola Valley, Cupertino.
I guess this is reflective of US/Europe suburbia. From my (Irish) perspective, the valley is clearly suburbia given the density. I'll never forget taking the caltrain from Palo Alto to SF and seeing basically low-density housing with sporadic strips of shops. That would be clearly suburban to me (but obviously other people's opinions will differ).
They're more like denser regions inside El Camino Real tbh
Sure, the South Bay is hell, but that's why plenty of startups are in SF proper.
Plenty of large corporations have headquarters in suburbs (where the rich execs want mansions) but in a close enough commute to a major city where more of the employees want to live.
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Metropolises are not soulless, as a rule. They are dynamic and exciting, with an influx of ambitious young people every year trying their best to start something.
You don't need a big home space when any cafe can become your living room, any restaurant your kitchen, dining room and wait staff, and any park your professionally tended garden.
Your choice of entertainment, especially live entertainment, is mainly limited by your willingness to keep up with what's going on, and not by the sparse calendar of touring acts.
Metropolises are fantastic places to live, especially when you are comfortable spending money to expand your space on demand.
“[W]hen you are comfortable spending money” is the kicker, though. Unfortunately, the Bay Area is oppressively expensive, and the same can be said about places like New York City. High housing prices puts a major strain on the ability to enjoy restaurants and paid entertainment. Also, because the restaurant owners and workers need to pay high rents, the food prices are very high. It’s hard to enjoy $3000 studio apartments, $12 burritos that used to only cost $8 before the pandemic, and other high costs when you’re not rich. I make a low six-figure salary as a professor in the Bay Area and I’ve had to cut back on eating out in the past year since the prices have gotten obscenely expensive.
It doesn’t have to be this way, though. Tokyo is a vibrant metropolis that is also relatively affordable by global standards. The key to this is sensible housing policy that doesn’t inflate the cost of living to oppressive levels.
What keeps me in the Bay Area besides being tenure-track are proximity to family, the acceptance of multiculturalism, and (as an academic) California’s support for academia in a national political climate that has become hostile to academia. But financially I wish the price of rent, food, and other necessities weren’t so oppressive.
> Metropolises are fantastic places to live, especially when you are comfortable spending money to expand your space on demand.
That's a very optimistic perspective, which I somewhat envy. It makes sense in a way, assuming your rent is negligible, but when you're paying out the ass for an apartment, having the privilege of being able to pay short-term rent in the form of coffees and brezels for a shared proper living room doesn't sound great...
Lets say pay was the same and magically commute was the same too. You would choose a literal pod over half an acre only 75 miles away?
Insane. Enjoy your pod. And all the crime too.
I don't think you get what living in a busy city is. The "pod" is where you sleep, the city is your home. You don't need half an acre to sleep.
Maybe it is not the lifestyle for you, but I don't find it "insane" to want to have plenty of stuff available at walking distance. And you can't have that without high population density and yeah "pods".
You are certainly correct that it's a matter of lifestyle preference.
> You don't need half an acre to sleep.
Where do I put my vegetable garden and fruit trees?
How can I relax on my back porch listening to the birds and creek?
How do I get away from all the hustle and bustle of dense city living?
> plenty of stuff available at walking distance. And you can't have that without high population density and yeah "pods".
Exhaust, brake dust, sirens, litter, concrete jungle, noisy neighbors with thin walls, massive crowds/traffic... there are tradeoffs to living in a dense city.
I think the Pareto optimal living conditions in the US today are the suburbs bordering the rural outskirts. Especially now with WFH prevalence.
> Where do I put my vegetable garden and fruit trees?
Some cities provide shared gardens, but it is a niche thing.
> How can I relax on my back porch listening to the birds and creek?
Most cities have parks.
> How do I get away from all the hustle and bustle of dense city living?
You go to the countryside.
But sure, if you like these things, maybe living in a city is not the best. The thing is that there are solutions. In the same way that if you live in the countryside, you can still go to cultural and sport events, fancy restaurants and bars, but it will take a trip, and you also have to consider that driving and drinking is not great. If you love these things, maybe you should live in a city instead.
I am not a fan of suburbs as there is essentially nothing you can do without driving. For me, it would be my last choice, as it tends to be expensive compared to the countryside, and not as calm. An intermediate choice that can make sense, but not a Pareto optimal.
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Not judging but that sounds worse than hell, at least the heating is free there.
It reminds me of an ad campaign for a travel agency a while ago, I can't remember the details. But one of them depicted a large city labeled "hell" and next to it, some place in the middle of nowhere labeled "heaven". Under it, the same pictures with the labels swapped.
Being able to walk to the store "sounds worse than hell"?
You think you can only walk to the store if you live in the middle of a city...?
But they are not the same.
Half an acre in the middle of nowhere, where you need to drive everywhere or a pod in walkable distance to everything you need, all services and entertainment?
The answer depends on your lifestyle.
Are you really not understanding that there are people who have different preferences than you do?
I grew up in a rural area, with a decent-sized house and garden, surrounded by nature. It had its pros and cons. I’ve now spent a couple of decades living in large cities, and I love it. I personally don’t need all that private space, I enjoy having many people from all over the world around me and the endless options for culture, food and entertainment. When I get older still, my priorities may change again, or maybe they won’t.
I don’t think you’re insane for making other choices than I have, but you seem to lack both imagination and empathy if you can’t wrap your head around why not everyone feels the way you do.
I do have empathy, thats why I can honestly say you are wrong.
HN is largely comprised of people who are disproportionate beneficiaries of modern society, so its not a surprise that people here develop a pathological ideology that goes as far as valuing the trappings of modern society. It is like in Huxley, the purpose of soma and orgy porgies are to keep people from noticing how fucked up their world is. It is fucked up to live inside pods stacked and crammed up to the clouds - so what is the soma?
All the "vibrant" amenities available in the city. But why would you want to work on a laptop in a cafe when you can work on a quad monitor in underwear looking out over your own literal fiefdom? The amenities are substitutes not the real thing. You shouldn't be fooled.
I think suburbia is this uncanny valley between the convenience of true urban living and the peace and simplicity of true rural living. You still have to subject yourself to traffic and driving everywhere, can’t grow enough food to sustain yourself, have to spray your lawn with carcinogens to satisfy the HOA, etc etc etc.
I will say that Canadian suburbia (at least Vancouver area) is subtly different from US suburbia in a way that makes it vastly more livable. My parents house is right next to a river trail with mostly ungroomed foliage, still somewhat walkable for groceries and restaurants, and has passable public transit.
Half an acre that you have to care about, mind you. And work is not the only place people go to in a city. Add all those other amenities other commenters already spoke about, and your half-acre would have to be in the middle of at least a mid-size town.
Obviously that would be nice, but not even HNers are rich enough to build rural villas in city centres.
> Half an acre that you have to care about, mind you.
I have an acre and maintaining it's quite a nice alternative to computers and screen based entertainment. It's just another form of exercise basically.
The fact that different people have different preferences is why its great that we have options for where to live. People like you can have space in the countryside and people who prefer to spend their time at cafes/restaurants/other city activities can live in apartments. Why is the pissing match necessary?
Who's pissing? I'm making the same point as you.
Not everybody is autistic, you know
I gladly pay a lot of money to be in the center of things
On HN it's a pretty safe assumption.
You know you can drive there too right? On the other hand, you dont get to live in an actual house. Its sort of like an insect hive.
You can. It usually means you don’t unless you don’t have to.
Living in the city is optimizing for time, not space.
Optimizing for entertainment. You can optimize for time by just not going to the city, too.
You simply do not know what you are talking about. I live in an urban city. I have a yard, fruit trees, a vegetable garden, and birds singing. Don't have a creek running behind my house, but there is one a half mile away, plus there is the whole SF Bay, and Redwood parks accessible on bus routes _within_ the city.
Mate why do you assume I haven't experienced it myself? I've done city living, I moved out thanks to wfh.
Yes there are people who live in houses in or near the city. Most people live in pods. We're talking about the "influx of young ambitious people" remember?
At the very least, even if you can afford it, to own a home in the city for most people means putting off FIRE which I think is poor decision making.
Econ 101: people aren’t paying $3,000 a month because everyone in business has failed to think about opening an office in the suburbs. Walkable neighborhoods are expensive because they’re so desirable that Americans pay a premium to live there. The answer should be removing the barriers preventing builders from supplying that demand.
I don't think this is actually quite the case when you look historically. What seems to be the case is that cities have a sort of S-shaped demand curve, where a fraction of people are willing pay a huge premium to be near their job and their entertainment, and many others need housing to be dirt cheap to live in the metaphorical pod. In other words, it's not that the demand curve is just higher than the suburbs: the demand curve is more sloped. Cities then constrain their housing supply so that landlords end up only serving high-premium customers, ensuring that the surplus here goes to landlords and not to renters.
People often talk about supply and demand until this subject comes up. “How can you stand to live somewhere so expensive?” “Because it’s so nice that many people want to live here.” “Impossible!”
The high COL is proof that people enjoy it and are voting with their wallets. It’s not as though everyone here is ignorant of the existence of Oklahoma. I’ve lived there-ish. I pay extra not to have to anymore.
The demand is due to high paying jobs in the area not because San Fran is a nice place to live (lmao). The massive outflux due to COVID WFH is proof.
So the open market voted and decided that the area can support a high COL, but we'll choose every explanation other than that people want to live here.
People do want to live there because... of... jobs. How is this hard to understand LOL.
You really think if high paying jobs were more spread out we'd see this insane Calhoun-like concentration of people in geographically tiny areas?
Now, why are the jobs there? Is it because everyone wants to pay tons more for housing, or is it because people with higher incomes are willing to pay for better living conditions and everyone else is pulled along? Tech didn’t used to be anywhere near this concentrated but over the decades people moved out of declining cities and that produced the current hyper-concentration. That cycle is brutal - you have cities like Rochester which have a lot of comparatively cheap real estate but until the senior management want to live there, they won’t have enough businesses for any skilled workers not to think they’d be screwed if their current employment changes because there aren’t many alternatives.
Yes, I think what it comes down to is its more efficient for companies because of that positive feedback network effect.
WFH could have changed that equation and made life better for everyone. Too bad we can't have nice things.
I mean, the South Bay is a gigantic suburb and it costs more than that a month.
Doesn’t that suggest that there is so much demand that successive waves of people have settled for the closest in they can afford? I remember people talking about being priced into a hefty commute during the dotcom bubble and only the top tech workers saw income growth keeping pace with real estate prices since then.
Speak for yourself and learn to use better language.
yawn
They are working on a different planning time horizon. The older established companies would have a 10-20 year plan which is enough time for diffusion and growth of talent. Startups (unless really well-financed) think more in terms of the next 1-2 years, not enough time for the local community to grow around the company.
This is what I never understood about Americans. In my country people want to live in civilization- you can't just move your company to redneck land out in the boonies! These are highly educated liberals for crying out they want a hipster Uyghur restaurant not a McDrive.
For some of us, there's more to life than what we consume.
In their 20s sure. When they start having kids, things like affordable housing come into play.
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.
Are you from the 607? I left there for the Bay Area and never looked back, nice to see someone else from there :)
That sounds like the kind of tactic IBM would do too.
Hillsboro is pretty much a company town (well, there are some datacenters now, but those don't need a lot of employees). Actually the whole of Washington County is heavily dependent on Intel. There's also Nike, but it's also heading for significantly lower headcount than it's had in a while. So it's kind of a double-whammy here (Triple if you count federal government funding cuts hitting places like OHSU (Oregon Health Sciences University)).
I was contracting out at Intel Jones Farm campus in Hillsboro in 2004 and I'd walk around the (then) new neighborhood there by the campus and I distinctly recall thinking "What if something were to happen to Intel in, say 25 or 30 years? What would happen to these neighborhoods?" It was just kind of a thought experiment at the time, but now it seems like we're going to find out.
Not unlike what happened to Finland when Nokia went down. That took a long time to recover from, and some would say we're still trying to overcome, though it's hard to say what could have been post-Coved with the current state of the world economy.
There are hundreds of new homes being built in/near Hillsboro -- probably planned a few years ago when Intel "promised" it was expanding its Oregon facilities. Can't see them selling now. The local economy's going to take a major hit.
I live in Hillsboro. Home sales are fine. There are whole subdivisions selling out before they are finished.
The $180k figure is also inflated. Most folks being laid off don't make over $100k.
I don't think they're talking about actual home sales prices up to this point, but rather the situation going forward, over a longer period of time.
Price per sq ft in Oregon (except Bend) have been flat or down for a few years already (more than other markets).
Maybe, but Oregon as a whole is far behind on housing, and prices are inflated in the area especially relative to the available jobs. I think more likely it just drives home prices downward. There's plenty of holdouts (myself included) that would happily move sooner if prices came down.
I think it’s interest rates that are keeping that from happening , not housing prices, which have been flat for the past 2-3 years. Since these are new homes not sure how much it will drive prices down as developers expect a certain profit. But you may be right!
Hillsboro real estate has slowed down and prices have come down a bit but the whole metro is short on housing, and Hillsboro is on the light rail lines.
I used to commute from Tigard to JF5 as a contractor and I too wondered what would happen to everything I drove past.
> Hillsboro is pretty much a company town
No, it's not. Not even close.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
Saw the same thing happen 20 years ago with DEC in Colorado Springs. Lots of people assumed it would last forever until it didn't.
They were getting paid "California salaries in Colorado" (well, really Massachusetts salaries but popular sayings don't have to be completely accurate) and lots of people had virtual mansions on senior tech salaries (plus probably stock options?).
Then DEC imploded and there were almost no other options for hundreds of storage engineers. Knew a lot of people who had their houses foreclosed because so many were flooding the market at the same time.
> This is the big risk we all took when we moved away from the Bay Area to work remotely.
I suspect most of those folks did not "come from" the bay area in the first place.
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.
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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.
I heard from a friend who works for Intel that he doesn't know why he was hired in the first place; his PhD was in a completely different domain, the objectives of the project were remote to his skills, and he told me this is what his entire team was made of. Seems like a lot of bloat present in this company, and it makes sense they feel the way forward is layoffs.
Second hand knowledge, I have a cousin in Intel Oregon. Intel mass hires PhDs in Physics/ Chemistry or Biology etc, reasoning that a PhD is enough to learn whatever is needed for a process engineer. Assume 30-40 people hired every cohort and there is 12 or so cohorts a year. Another curious thing I noticed, was Intel had online multi correct tests for its engineers that they had to pass weekly, presumably to keep track whether they are actually learning on the job or not. The multi correct tests though just seem like rote memorization and easy to cheat.
Overall my 5000 ft view, was the culture was very different from FAANG or a Bay Area Tech company. If the Bay Area approach is high ownership and high accountability, Intel was much more process driven and low ownership. They even tracked hours worked for engineers in Oregon.
Yeah, my old (and best) boss at a FAANG had been at Intel. She left because they basically wouldn't promote her as she didn't have a PhD.
I 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.
I knew a guy who got a job with Intel's wearable division. Everything was chaotic, everyone was toxic, and Intel one day lost interest and fired the whole division.
The sad thing is they acquired the basis smartwatch and destroyed it, leaving only Garmin as developers of dedicated activity trackers. I considered getting a basis but was obviously glad I didn't.
I hear it’s division dependent, but just about every time someone complained about things being toxic at Microsoft they would be told at least it is not Intel.
I've been thinking of buying pixelmator pro recently for photo editing. It seems like a lovely photo editing application. And they have a lifetime license.
But Apple bought the company recently. I worry that whatever made the product great will go away post acquisition. Whether or not Apple keeps working on it at the same level of quality is anyone's guess. Or maybe they'll integrate the best features into their free Photos app and ditch the rest. Or something else entirely.
I can't think of any examples where acquisitions make a product better. But dozens where the product was killed immediately, or suffered a long slow death.
Maybe some of these will work for you; Minecraft, PayPal, GitHub, Instagram, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Android, Waze.
With Apple it's harder for me to know. How do former Dark Sky users feel about the Weather app? I think it has all the features? How about Shazam, which I never used before it became an iOS feature? TestFlight retained its identity. Beats by Dre headsets did too, though Beats Music I think became Apple Music in a way.
Some of these are hard comparisons specifically because what you are describing is really the initial exit. Acquisitions are often not funded by valuation as much as an actual plan to make money.
Something like Minecraft for an example - the existing established customer base with perpetual license was not justification for buying it. The value Microsoft saw was around things like DLC content and cosmetics, and subscription revenue through server hosting.
From what I have observed - one could say that everything Apple acquires is an accu-hire first, for a product they want to ship and trying to find a delivery-focused team to help them with that.
If the company already built a product similar to that and had it hit the market - thats great! It means that they are getting a team which has delivered successfully and maybe even have a significant head start toward Apple's MVP. That likely means also that the team will have a fair bit of autonomy too (and often retain their brands).
DarkSky's product in that light wasn't their app. It was their work on localized weather models and their weather API.
Apple's Weather App doesn't look like DarkSky, but AFAICT you could rebuild the DarkSky app on the WeatherKit REST API (including features like historical weather, and supporting alternative platforms like Android).
With the possible exception of Android (which tbh I have never used) and possibly Minecraft, it's hard to make an argument that any of those acquisitions improved the products. At best they're kept in stasis.
Facebook replaced Instagram with a completely different app, which they then made quite useful to a lot of people. (Sure, I might object to all the strings attached, but there are dimensions along which Instagram was improved – in the same way you can improve a house by bulldozing it and building a dozen single-room flats in its place.)
Github has gotten a lot more unstable (GH Actions outages every couple weeks or so), but it definitely has not been in stasis: the pace of change has been a whole lot higher since the acquisition (and I'd say generally for the better)
It is also hard to argue that they were killed off immediately or slowly died.
You'll find many (including myself) who find Microsoft's purchase of Minecraft to be a huge loss for the game. I'll admit that the acquisition wasn't the calamity people were fearing, but overall it's still been a net negative or stagnation at best.
For starters they split the community among bedrock & java. And while a minecraft copy leveraging a C++ was a good idea, it seems they've mostly made the split to justify adding heavy monetization for skins and world maps to bedrock. (Maybe they feared backlash if they did that to the OG Java version?) This monetization seems to have killed people's appetite for hobby-project mods and maps.
Likewise, it's clear that the intended demographic of their marketing has become much younger. From the mob votes, the type of things that go in updates, it seems that what's added is far less deep. That updates are now more of a social media "Llamas in minecraft, look how goofy they are!" stunt.
I recently started a 1.7.10 modded world, and was surprised to see just how much stuff was already there. The only newer vanilla things that I found I missed were bees and slime blocks.
Maybe it's nostalgia, but this version feels nicer, like it's cohesive, and respects me as a player more.
Apple is different from Microsoft or Google in that they don’t have a monopoly to subsidize mistakes. They bought things like Logic and Final Cut because they realize that not having high-quality Mac software means that Adobe gets to choose whether professionals in those fields keep buying Macs. I would expect Pixelmator will continue to be developed to compete with Photoshop.
YouTube? Twitch? I don't use either but people sure flock to them.
There are many acquisitions that lead to better products.
I would argue neither is better for it, as a user.
They're more lucrative for creators/streamers and have further reach but the platform experience is noticeably worse.
Youtube was about to get destroyed by an avalanche of lawsuits by the TV/movie industry. Without Google's army of lawyers, they would not have lasted.
True. Android might be another example.
But there's also hundreds of examples of the opposite happening: Successful products being bought by a big company and then killed post acquisition.
We probably won't know which camp Pixelmator will fall into for a few years yet.
You would be arguing wrongly YouTube today is the largest trove of knowledge accessible by the largest number of people in the world. It also has a lot of false information but overall it is one of the greatest cause of change in the world.
Would YouTube be the behemoth it is without the plethora of content (some of it, high quality)? And if it being more lucrative for creators is what got that content, I would argue the platform as a whole is better. You could have the most whizz bang video platform, but without good content, what good is that?
With the money came the greed, the over-polished mass market content, and the ecosystem of creators is now mostly driven by engagement.
Not to mention all the topics that have been soft-banned because one algorithm flags those videos as not monetizable, and the next algorithm decides that only showing or recommending videos that can show ads results in the most add revenue
I don't think YouTube is clearly better or worse than it was before acquisition, and maybe an independent YouTube would have walked the same path. It is simply a very different platform that was ship-of-theseusd
Eh, it feels like you're looking for the worst.
Follow some channels like Practical Engineering or Veritasium ... both good quality, information dense. Yes, decent production values, but that's not a bad thing at all in my book.
YouTube was acquired in 2006. I do think since then things like video quality and length have improved, although you can argue the ads everwhere are bad UX.
Youtube is an absolutely miserable product compared to where it's been in the past, are you joking?
I immediately thought of Keyhole, Inc, which became Google Earth.
I have Pixelmator Pro & Photomator. They haven't meaningfully changed since Apple's acquisition, and they don't rely on any subscription or online features that could be ruined after the fact. If a future update fucks things over, you don't have to update. Everything runs locally.
Are they still being worked on? Have either product received updates since the acquisition?
I'm tossing up between pixelmator and affinity photo.
Pixelmator was updated at the end of June.
The main changes were integration of Apple's AI stuff and improved VoiceOver support. Nothing earth-shattering but it's still active.
I had the basis. It was fantastic. I still miss it.
I know someone with a PhD in biochemistry who was hired at Intel from a cancer research lab... I'm sure he sold his chemistry background well but I always thought that was an odd hire. Maybe there are just so few qualified PhDs that they'll happily take folks from adjacent fields?
Most of the senior leadership of Amazon in the early days were a bunch of randos from a formal credential standpoint. A car mechanic leading aws engineering, a musician running logistics, a chemical engineer optimizing the network etc .
Hedge funds also hire physicists and mechanical engineers
Your phrasing _drastically_ undersells the actual relevant background and experience there:
James hamilton the “mechanic” … with EE & CS degrees and time at ibm and ms. Dave Clark the “musician” (undergrad) … and an MBA focused on logistics. Jeff wilke the “chemist” … who worked on process optimization at honeywell and supply chains at aderesen.
So sure, might as well say DeSantis is an SDE Intern figuring out software deployments, Vosshall is an amateur aircraft EE, or marc brooker is some foreign radar engineer.
Signed, some newpaper dude who was an AWS PE doing edge networking and operations.
Chemical engineers are so good at distributed systems that it is almost a trope at this point. It is their specialty. Their entire discipline is optimizing aggregate throughput in decentralized systems with minimal coordination.
It maps 1:1 with the computer science but chemical engineering as a discipline has more robust design heuristics that don’t really have common equivalents in software even though they are equally applicable. Chemical engineering is extremely allergic to any brittleness in architecture, that’s a massive liability, whereas software tends to just accept it because “what’s the worst that could happen”.
From the tone of your post, I assume that you are a ChemE who works with CompSci folks. If what you say is true, why haven't ChemEs moved into the space and taken over? Software dev pays much better than ChemE.
Almost all of the chemical engineers I know do work in software, mostly for the money. The skillset translates to computer science relatively seamlessly. Chemical engineering is essentially computer science where you swapped atoms for bits, but far more difficult because there are only distributed systems and the background error rate is always noticeably non-zero.
I studied chemical engineering after I was already working in software, so I did it backward.
Because if you need a systems designer / architect you will look for traditional credentials in the field. It’s the same reason that computer scientists cannot break into pharma despite the fact that they would really fit with the data infrastructure & processing challenges they face.
Ultimately it is all about how strict the hiring pipeline is to the credentials vs potential.
Because they want to do ChemE rather than CompSci more than they care about their pay?
My D got her degree in ChemE from a top eng school was hired out of college by a big sw firm and is full time swe 5 years in (by choice).
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.
You may as well say graph theory had its origins in Ancient Rome when they built the road network.
Most trace it back to Euler when he considered the problem of Seven Bridges of Konigsberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_K%C3%B6nigsbe...
Any good laboratory chemist can be trained to work in semiconductor research. The tools and jargon are largely similar.
in college I got a job offer from Intel without interviewing. I had applied, the hiring manager reached it and said they’d setup a loop, it never happened. then some weeks later I got an offer. super weird
also I was sorta laid off by the current Intel CEO from my last startup!
By your description it sounds like layoffs should be at the management level for incompetence, not for employees.
What would you do with all of the employees who are currently working in jobs or on projects or with skills not relevant to the company?
Look for mutually beneficial ways forward - reassignment to relevant projects, retraining where necessary, generous layoff package for those for whom neither hits. Realistically the vast majority of PhD employees are going to be highly motivated and want to work on something useful just as much as you want them to.
Let them make cool stuff the company can sell, increasing revenue and reversing the decline.
How to draw an owl: draw the owl.
They tried that, it didnt work.
Unless you're a sociopath, you let natural attrition run its course. If their skills weren't relevant when you hired them, then it's your fault. If you changed course after you hired them so that they stopped being relevant, then it's your fault. The only just thing to do is find a way to make their work meaningful until they move on.
No, you give them a fat severance and eat the losses. Maybe 6 months + 1 month per year of tenure, something like that. You're break even by the end of the fiscal year, you just gave someone a lifechanging amount of money, and they don't have the crushing morale problems of "the work I do is pointless" and get to collect unemployment in addition to severance.
If you are honest and generous with people, they aren't mad that you made a mistake and let them go. It's companies that try to give 2 weeks + 1 week per year of severance that are making a mistake, not the entire concept of layoffs.
(Without delving into the systemic reasons that layoffs are inevitable of course. If the system was different, they wouldn't have to happen, but we live in this system at the moment.)
A year or two of salary is generally not life-changing.
It doesn't have to be lifechanging to be meaningful. I'd happily take 6 months of severance over working ineffectually on a doomed product.
Imagine you're a middle tier functionary making $70k a year. Are you telling me $90k in cash after tax plus unemployment for ~6 months isn't lifechanging? That's a downpayment on a house, or your student loans paid off, or $4000 a year in permanent income for the rest of your life.
If yiu get severance, generally you don’t also get unemployment
> If you changed course after you hired them so that they stopped being relevant, then it's your fault.
Nobody can predict market conditions or technological advances.
If you don’t change course (mission, people) the company will likely fail and then everyone is out of a job, shareholders, pensioners, and 401k holding laypeople look money.
I do think that leadership is not held accountable enough for their mistakes and failures.
The situation of Intel is much more the result of bad management than the output of their current workers. For all purposes, they're effectively doing what they're were supposed to do when hired. So the logical conclusion is that Intel workers are the ones who should have the power to fire the entire management and put someone in place to fix the issue, not the other way around.
The output of workers is always a leadership problem, imho.
I disagree that the workers are the ones who should have the power to fire management unless they are shareholders. I think this should (and it does) fall upon the board and the shareholders. If the workers are shareholders, all the better.
Regardless, it's clear the current system needs work.
What a sad waste of talent in that case. A waste that could be mitigated by them finding a more productive way to help society than sticking to a pointless job.
Agree. We lean hard into sunk cost fallacy when it comes to job training.
“If your name is Farmer you’re a farmer.” mentality but self selected euphemism. “I trained as a software engineer and that’s what I am for 50 years! Dag gubmint trynna terk my herb!”
Service economy role play is the root of brain dead job life we’re all suffering through.
I would argue that should be done at a lot of companies.
What purpose would it serve? Remember, the purpose of a company is not to make good products.
Managers are also employees. Nobody's arguing they should be spared and I'm not sure that you can argue top management at Intel hasn't been let go over the years.
Also laying off incompetent managers alone won't solve the problem of having hired the wrong people
I think management has historically argued as such.
Who said they have the "wrong" people? They are doing exactly what they were hired to do.
wrong for the needs of the company. this isn't an assessment of their worth as an individual or as a professional
Do they have any clear direction for the future of the company? As it seems they don't, the idea that these workers are the wrong people is completely unfounded.
The whole thread started because of this comment
> 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.
But this is just his point of view. Intel was hiring people and training them to do the job they wanted. And if they continued employment this means they were doing what was expected.
Intel has 108,000 employees.
In comparison:
Nvidia 36,000
AMD 28,000
Qualcomm 49,000
Texas Instruments 34,000
Broadcom 37,000
It is obvious that Intel is ridiculously overstaffed.
TSMC has 83000 employees. If Intel does everything TSMC & NV do, then they should have something like 83000+36000~120000 employees?
The scale isn't really comparable. TSMC manufactures 5x more wafers than Intel, and the disparity is getting exponentially worse every year (see the chart at https://thecuberesearch.com/247-special-breaking-analysis-th...). In fact 30% of Intel's own production is outsourced to TSMC.
Sure but that's different than your original point.
The scale also isn’t linear.
The world isn’t the panning for the 2027 takeover.
Of what?
2027 is the date the CCP has announced for when it'll be militarily ready to invade Taiwan. Whether they actually do so or not is an open question.
Taiwan.
There's other reasons to think it, but 5x wafers on 8x staff seems within the realm of comparable.
My reading of the numbers it should be 0.8x staff. I think you’re off by an order of magnitude.
I sure am. Whoops.
> If Intel does everything TSMC & NV do, then they should have something like 83000+36000~120000 employees?
TSMC is a fab, not a chip designer. And NV makes GPUs and small scale SoCs like the ones in the Nintendo Switch and automotive (IIRC the Tegra SoC that powered the Switch 1 literally was an automotive chip that they repurposed).
That's quite the difference from what Intel makes: CPUs that power a lot of the world's compute capacity for laptops, PCs and servers, wireless chips (Bluetooh+WiFi), their own GPU line...
> IIRC the Tegra SoC that powered the Switch 1 literally was an automotive chip that they repurposed
Tegra was designed for mobile devices like smartphones. The automotive part came later and isn’t particularly relevant. Intel also makes low power SoCs for mobile devices, e.g. Atom.
> Intel also makes low power SoCs for mobile devices, e.g. Atom.
Last time I heard that name was well over a decade ago for crappy "netbook" devices. Just looked it up, last Atom CPU was released in 2013 per Wikipedia [1]. They might still make them for embedded computing purposes with very long life cycles, but no idea at which volume.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Atom
They still make them, they're just not called Atom anymore.
Intel runs their own fabs. NVidia, AMD, Qualcomm outsource chip manufacturing.
Their fabs have been falling well behind TSMC for nearly a decade, and in fact their higher end stuff is mostly produced by TSMC
Intel has about as many salary employees (blue badge) as contract employees (green badge). Only the blue badges are included in the counts.
None of those companies have chip manufacturing.
The only true comparison is TSMC but in only does chip manufacturing and not chip design/development.
So Nvidia + TSMC would probably be a fair comparison.
TI does
For the GP of this comment, TI mixes running their own fabs with some fabless product lines. A lot of the companies that make analog ICs still own their fabs and TI is one of them.
I know it's apples to oranges but ASML has 44,000 employees, for reference.
With this brilliant logic, you should switch to being a McKinsey consultant and start driving companies into the ground.
why would someone with a PhD apply for the position if that was the case? Were they hired and then re-tasked once employed?
Because Intel pays well (mid six figures + bonus) and PhD doesn't pay a minimum wage in most places. They were expressly hired without an overarching goal.
So in other words, that PhD was well worth the effort.
Back in 2012-2014 intel hired a bunch of “futurists” which were liberal arts majors from the northeastern US. Needless to say they spewed a bunch of nonsense and were fired years later, but I knew a few and they were puzzled they were hired to begin with.
I remember there being a bunch of Anthropologists that were hired before that, under Genevieve Bell. It wasn't clear to me why they were hired.
It felt to me like the people at the top were clueless, and so were hoping these hires would help give them an idea which direction to steer the ship.
Xerox hired an anthropologist once, Julian E. Orr, and it resulted in a really good book called “Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job”.
Of course, mostly he found was how out of touch the executives at Xerox were with what their employees were actually doing in practice. The executives thought of the technicians who repaired copiers almost as monkeys who were just supposed to follow a script prepared by the engineers. Meanwhile the technicians thought of themselves as engineers who needed to understand the machines in order to be successful, so they frequently spent hours reverse engineering the machines and the documentation to work out the underlying principles on which the machines worked. The most successful technicians had both soft skills for dealing with customers and selling upgrades and supplies as well as engineering skills for diagnosing broken hardware and actually getting it fixed correctly. It seems that none of the sales, engineering, or executives at Xerox liked hearing about any of it.
> I remember there being a bunch of Anthropologists that were hired before that, under Genevieve Bell. It wasn't clear to me why they were hired.
Yes, I remember contracting at Intel in 2006 and the Anthropologists were at one end of the building we were in. Their area was a lot different than the engineering areas. Lots of art, sitting around in circles, etc. I remember asking about what was up over there "Those are the anthropologists".
Bell went on to become Vice-Chancellor at the Australian National University. She has become a very controversial figure there.
https://www.nteu.au/News_Articles/Media_Releases/Staff_lose_...
Having a bunch of people who might at some point generate a few valuable ideas doesn't sound like a bad strategy. Intel is (was?) huge, their market penetration is enormous. I think Bell Labs did something similar back in the way -- maybe not with the liberal arts, but they certainly left a lot of room for serendipity.
What possible ideas could someone with no expertise in advanced math/physics/chemistry/or other relevant hard science have for the products and services Intel sells?
Who knows. But homogeneous thinking is bad. A bit of variation can spark innovation.
Why not throw a janitor, cook, and bus driver in the mix too then?
Almost every field require baseline knowledge of certain facts to make one's ideas useful. And we're talking about the most technologically advanced process in the world using cutting edge physics and materials science. The baseline here is basically as high as you can get.
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I applied to Intel once a long time ago when I was just getting out of school, but when they replied asking for my resume in "Word format" I stopped pursuing it.
I didn't use Word to create my resume and if they can't deal with a PDF that was their problem.
I often look at the pdf metadata when reading CVs. It tells a story all of its own. And latex automatically signals virtue to me...
That's not at all an unusual request though. Plenty of recruiters want Word. Probably so they can make changes behind your back or some such nonsense. Or, less cynically, so they can more easily copy/paste stuff into their HRM tool.
I've never had a competent company ask me for that. The only ones who did were "old fart" companies. New companies, especially ones with good tech, have always taken my PDF.
> Probably so they can make changes behind your back
Nope, I don't consent to that.
> Or, less cynically, so they can more easily copy/paste stuff into their HRM tool
Their HRM tool should support PDFs if they are competent. They should also be able to read my resume with their own eyes. If not I consider the company not a good fit for me.
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.
> 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.
Is -> Seattle a good idea? I've heard the high extra taxes are driving companies out of Seattle.
Speaking as a Seattle-based F500 employee, they're being driven out of Seattle proper but often setting up shop on the Eastside or just outside city limits. It's the Seattle City Council driving a lot of the change, not the state legislature (other than the capital gains tax).
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.
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...
Maybe thats survivor bias?
Those who liked it stayed on Intel cuz it is the only company which literally operates at all levels of tech stack
From sand to jsons
They would probably say the same about you. Nobody is required to like what they do. life is more than work.
Weak answer.
When I think of people that went into Tech 20+ years ago, this choice of work was a vocation. Not saying they were all pleasant, but they were all largely invested.
At some point Tech became a safe, lucrative profession, for people who say things like 'life is more than work. Nobody is required to like what they do.', like the managers from Intel.
> Those of the Elven-race that lived still in Middle-earth waned and faded, and Men usurped the sunlight. Then the Quendi wandered in the lonely places of the great lands and the isles, and took to the moonlight and the starlight, and to the woods and caves, becoming as shadows and memories, save those who ever and anon set sail into the West and vanished from Middle-earth.
(J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion)
If only there was a way to sail west
RIP
it's a fine answer and it's the correct answer. Obsessive behavior is not easily identifiable when everyone around you is leading an unbalanced life. I'm sure in certain circles you could find people who agree both of us.
The difference is the the psychologists and the philosophers agree with me over the long term. Being work obsessed at age 40+ when you have other aspects of life worth exploring is simply mental illness.
Did you ever even consider that such people have other things to do?
It seems like you are addressing a completely different point, and creating a false dichotomy.
It makes sense that people dont want to work with others that try to do as shitty of a job as possible without being fired, fucking over whomever and whatever happens to be collateral damage.
Being an obsessive company man is not the only alternative, and certainly not what they were suggesting. Im not sure why you thought it was being advocated for.
I don't think so. This is the perception workaholics have about people that have a normal relationship to work.
> Im not sure why you thought it was being advocated for.
aren't you? i thought i was clear. let me know if you need this explained.
yes, please explain it.
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.
https://archive.ph/9OeKK
https://web.archive.org/web/20250716200622/https://www.orego...
>Instead, Intel has embarked on an unprecedented and sustained campaign to shrink its business in response to a series of technical and financial crises.
it's not unprecedented, when companies' businesses contract, shrinking is exactly the right thing to do, not to mention that it's forced on them anyway.
It's not unprecedented, but I question if it is the right move while the industry is experiencing unprecedented growth.
"The Global Data Center Chip Market size is expected to be worth around USD 57.9 Billion by 2033, from USD 14.3 Billion in 2023, growing at a CAGR of 15.0% during the forecast period from 2024 to 2033."
https://market.us/report/data-center-chip-market/
Thinking about the Rule of 72, that CAGR is astonishing. Where will the power come from to run these data centers? Are we going to see an explosion of solar and wind farms with the express purpose of powering data centers? I say solar and wind because they are easier to get approved and built compared to nuclear or gas/coal.
Unfortunately what seems to be happening is more gas and screw the permits. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17072025/elon-musk-xai-da...
Andy Grove left in 1998, even though he was on the board of directors until 2004 (with diminished role). After he left the CEO role Intel just lost his way.
As far as I understand, Grove was at the helm when Intel started the Itanium project. Granted, he didn't see it to "completion", but poor choices were made even in his time.
He even stated the following in "Only the Paranoid Survive": One, don’t differentiate without a difference. Don’t introduce improvements whose only purpose is to give you an advantage over your competitor without giving your customer a substantial advantage. The personal computer industry is characterized by well-chronicled failures when manufacturers, ostensibly motivated by a desire to make “a better PC,” departed from the mainstream standard. But goodness in a PC was inseparable from compatibility, so “a better PC” that was different turned out to be a technological oxymoron.
One might think Itanium goes against that.
Just because Itanium last as a bet, doesn't mean it was wrong to try it. They gambled that compilers would keep up - they didn't. Today it might work! Compiler technology is very much improved. (Dotnet/Java payloads? Dynamic recompiling...) It's a software problem and as such inherently easy to underestimate the complexity of it. Itanium also had its roots in a time when Big Iron was more relevant than it is today.
Itanium was an excellent idea that needed some continued persistence. It is was a bit too early for its time.
It really wasn't. Itanium was a gamble that hard-coding static parallelism into the ISA would beat dynamic OoO. And just like architectural delay slots, it inevitably failed - using a few more transistors isn't that expensive since the alternative is "waste your time doing nothing at all".
"Compilers just need to keep up" was Intel's marketing apologia, not reality.
Compilers simply could not keep up - that was reality, not just marketing. Ideally, Intel should have coded the compilers too and removed the rough edges. But they were a bit too slow and AMD ate Itanium's target market.
You have to admit though that the EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) model was quite innovative. The philosophy influenced the LLVM project and some of the principles are used in GPU's and AI accelerator chips, even if hardware-based dynamic scheduling won the game.
I think they did though. I remember several buddies from UIUC when I was in Folsom working solely on compilers
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."
Thanks for digging this out!
I keep wondering why Andy didn't see that before nominating him?
With the premier US semiconductor fab dying, China will take the reigns in 2027 according to intelligence agencies.
What I don't get is that there are at least a couple of very large, very valuable US companies that need to have their CPUs/GPUs fabbed (Apple and NVidia) and are currently dependent on fabs in Taiwan, a geopolitically risky place to be that dependent on. Both are sitting on huge reserves of ca$h. Why not either outright buy or buy a large stake in Intel to recapitalize it and allow it to finish the new SOTA fabs it was building? The CHIPS act was intended to help the likes of Intel and Micron, but the current admin has apparently blocked any further funding. If the current admin was serious about US semiconductor manufacturing it would try to arrange some kind of shotgun wedding where Apple & Nvidia (and others) take a stake in Intel to keep it afloat. Perhaps some kind of a consortium where the investing companies get priority in getting their parts fabbed? There's really no other US alternative for advanced semiconductor fabrication unless you're going to start from scratch and that doesn't seem like a viable idea.
Yes, I understand the argument that Intel management screwed up for too long and this is the market at work, but that ignores the geopolitical risks of what we're going to end up with. Forming some kind of consortium to keep Intel fabs running (and new ones built) could also include completely changing the management of the company.
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).
I suspect buying Intel could lead to them being the Boeing to Intel's McDonnell-Douglas.
Is it because the employees themselves are so incompetent that no one wants to take this burden on. Besides, TSMC is expanding in Arizona and Samsung is expanding in Texas.
> Is it because the employees themselves are so incompetent that no one wants to take this burden on.
I don't buy this. I think the primary problem was mismanagement especially in the 2008 to 2020 timeframe. Too many bean counter CEOs during that period who did not understand the need to constantly invest in SOTA fabs.
Eh yes and no.
Intel absolutely flubbed some nodes and bad employee execution was a part of it.
But management has consistently tried to tell customers what they want/need. Intel has a history of developing products with no customer base or pulling out of markets too early. Neither of those are the responsibility of low level employees. That's higher management.
One of the big concerns about the GPU division is "Will Intel keep going long enough for this to matter or will they pull out the second there's an issue?"
[dead]
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
> If the current admin was serious about US semiconductor manufacturing
They are not.
> The CHIPS act was intended to help the likes of Intel and Micron, but the current admin has apparently blocked any further funding
Chips act was a whole lot of hot air. It passed in 22 and intel did not receive any money from it until end of 24.
Because it was incentive based. Intel has to hit milestones to get funding. Everything Intel does takes years.
Intel is also likely going to lose hundreds of millions in incentives from Oregon for failure to meet hiring objectives, but they have a while to do that.
Very little of the CHIPS act money actually got deployed. The only reporting on it blamed insane DEI requirements.
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.
> Intel would sometimes cut jobs during fallow periods but it backfilled them almost immediately.
Smells like corporate bulimia.
When I worked/lived in the Bay Area there was a sense that corporations, and residents of the Bay Area, were moving to Oregon because it was cheaper … but still close enough to Silicon Valley. (Apropos of nothing really.)
> Smells like corporate bulimia.'
If companies have extra cash on hand, don't we want them to invest it and hire? The alternatives are stock buybacks or just sitting on the cash.
Obviously every bet is not going to pan out, but hiring even on the margin is probably good.
> If companies have extra cash on hand, don't we want them to invest it and hire?
No. Hiring should be a long-term strategic investment, not something you do whenever you have extra cash lying around. If you needed the extra people you should have been trying to hire them already, and if you don't then you shouldn't hire them now.
Depends who "we" is.
If I'm a shareowner, if the company doesn't have any intelligent ideas on how to spend my money, they should send it back to me as a dividend, or buy me out (share buyback).
Please don't waste my money trying to build some immortal empire as a shrine to the CEO's ambition.
There’s an enormous amount of money being made by chipmakers, and Intel is rapidly losing access to it. That doesn’t mean hiring stupidly is good, but spending money to regain its momentum and save the company from bankruptcy is an obvious priority. Stock buybacks aren’t, unless the plan is to extract revenue and shut the place down.
Bankruptcy can only happen if you are in debt, which Intel massively is, because they ARE spending enormously to try and catch up.
I'd rather they accept reality, slim down to size, focus on making good Xeons again, and stop acting like they have a monopoly they no longer have.
So far, LBT seems to have the right idea.
TSMC as a manufacturer and Apple/Qualcomm/Nvidia as designers make an enormous amount of money.
Everyone else, like AMD/Global Foundries/Samsung/Intel don’t seem to be making an enormous amount of money.
The margins are all in the best chips. Less than best is commoditized.
No. Generally speaking, I want corporations to return capital in excess of operating needs to shareholders unless they have actual high-expected-return, ready-to-be-executed plans for what to do with their money.
When corporations just invest because they have money, there is a gigantic agency problem, and executives have a tendency to burn shareholder value on vanity projects and fancier headquarters.
Stock buybacks are exactly what I want wealthy companies to be doing with money they don't have a high expected ROI for.
Not entirely disagreeing, but Intel feels more like a poster child of buybacks that (in hindsight and in comparison with their peer group) would have been much better spent reinvested into the company https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-intel-fi...:
* they've done about $152B in stock buybacks since 1990 https://www.intc.com/stock-info/dividends-and-buybacks. I think... ~$108B in the last decade.
* during the same time period they fell behind TSMC and SEC in semiconductor fab , missed the boat on mobile (couldn't really capture the market for either smartphone or tablet CPUs), and are missing the boat w/AI training https://www.hpcwire.com/2025/07/14/intel-officially-throws-i...
Discussion of Intel's buyback behavior as excessive and wasteful was also picked up on during all the discussion of CHIPs subsidies last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39849727 see also https://ips-dc.org/report-maximizing-the-benefits-of-the-chi...
Intel did not do a good job with its (sizable) investments for the last decade. There's little reason (at least for me, a casual observer of their failure to deliver good chips) to think they would have done a better job by just throwing (more) money at the problems they were trying to solve.
The existence of markets Intel didn't dominate does not, to me, imply that it would have been a good use of resources to throw (more) money at the markets they didn't dominate. Not every company is good at every business, even if they dominate some seemingly related market.
Intel is the corporate version of Germany.
No stock buybacks, pay dividends, that's why the instrument exists. Stock buybacks are an aberration of hyperfinancialisation, just pay the shareholders proportionally to what they own.
Dividends don't currently get the same tax advantages in the US, so until tax policy gets revised, it's better for the shareholders in question if there's a buyback.
There's also the matter that dividends are meant to be long-term and recurring. So it's not great for one-time windfalls.
Companies should buy back their stock if their stock is undervalued.
This anti stock buyback meme is silly. It’s like people who are anti shorting stock. Companies list on the stock exchange in order to sell their own stock to raise capital. If they have excess capital, absolutely they should be able to buy back their stock. And buy other companies stock if they see it as undervalued also.
It's not silly, it's a terrible incentive for companies flush with cash and paying bonuses to their executives in stocks, it becomes very easy to manipulate the stock price with stock buybacks for a larger bonus while letting the company flailing with underinvestment (or simply missed investments).
A great case to see the absurdity of it is Intel, doing stock buybacks for almost a decade to push its stock price up while flailing around and losing its edge, if it was paying high dividends while flailing around then major shareholders would be asking why the fuck would they be paying dividends while the business is losing competitiveness but by doing stock buybacks it kept investors "happy" so they could jump ship and let the company fail on its own.
Stock buybacks have perverse incentives, everyone responsible for keeping the company in check gets a fat paycheck from buybacks: executives, major investors, etc., all financed by sucking the coffers dry. The buybacks at Intel just made the company as a whole lose money, they bought back stocks when they were high and it only dipped since then (10y window).
The shareholders got what they wanted with Intel. If it was the wrong decision for Intel doesn’t mean it’s the wrong decision for everyone and should be banned.
The idea that the stock market can only be used to flow shares in one direction has no merit. If you want to regulate executive compensation do that with direct clear regulation on executive compensation, not via some indirect rule change on the stock market.
Stock buybacks are the indirect rule, it wasn't even allowed for most of the existence of stock markets, it's the odd one out which created perverse incentives.
It's not about regulating executive compensation, it's to close a gap that was opened and only led to poorer decision making at the executive/board level, there's no advantage to the company. It's a stupid instrument with no reason to exist except to return money to shareholders in a way they can avoid taxation events.
If you asked CFOs why they choose stock buyback over dividends, it is simple: tax efficiency. When you pay divs, holders are required to pay tax immediately. Buybacks act like reinvestment and are not taxed until the holder sells their shares.
The only reason there's a difference is because of the psychological and incentive-based effects of 'number go up'.
Buybacks are in effect and by definition a kind of fraud even if people make excuses for it or do not want to see it that way. It's the equivalent of a vested interest driving up an auction price or, you know, buying a bunch of your own product and then using the "sales" figures to convince others to invest or buy your product at a higher rate/price due to artificial scarcity.
The fact that c-suites authorize buybacks largely to boost the stock price in order to trigger their own performance bonuses tied to the stock price only highlights that point.
If you did something even remotely similar, you would be prosecuted for fraud, because it's fraud.
1) Wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain.
2) A person or thing intended to deceive others, typically by unjustifiably claiming or being credited with accomplishments or qualities.
The problem though is that the incentive structure is so that none of the involved parties has any disincentive, let alone an adversarial incentive to end the practice, let alone has standing to do anything legally, short of sabotaging their own stock value.
It's a totally perverse and corrupted incentive structure, similar to why both Trump or Biden, or Democrats or Republicans have the real will or interests in ... non of the involved parties have any interest in revealing the rot and corruption, and all parties involved have every incentive to keep it all under wraps, suppressed, covered, up and distracted from.
In some ways, a civil activist organization could in fact buy a single stock of one of the most egregious stock buyback stock price inflation causing corporations and sue them for fraud and deception, but it would have to come with a claim at manipulation of the market due to fraudulent manipulation of the price discovery process similar to a light version of cornering the market through restriction of supply, i.e., cartel behavior.
They can only buy back stocks from people who want to sell them. The people who sell them do so because they believe it's a good deal. The process puts cash in the hands of those sellers, who can then go on to invest in something else, keeping the market more liquid rather than the first company sitting on cash reserves. The price of an individual stock is pretty much meaningless, you must multiply by the total number of stocks outstanding to determine the market cap. So it is not the buying back of stock that represents any fraud.
If there is any fraud, it would be having performance bonuses tied to individual stock price, rather than market cap. But blaming the buyback itself, is short-sighted.
The first paragraph I agree with but not this part:
This is pretty common for the board to setup stock price targets for the CEO, then pay large bonuses (cash or shares) for beating the targets.You are making a basic mistake. Assuming that the originating company or its interested parties are regular market participants.
They are in effect more like the guys who stand around a cup and ball scam to make it look like there’s action and winners and keys you think you could do better.
A buyback is a removal of the security from the market, not participation in the market.
It’s like people buying their own books to drive up sales in order to get in lists to promote more book sales, which is when they then supply the market with the books their bought once the price has been artificially elevated and has become sticky.
You may not like hearing that and it’s clearly not the mainstream street preferred narrative, but that’s what it is.
I don't find anything you said very convincing. You are simply characterizing a transaction as nefarious, and perhaps conspiratorial. Of course, there are incentives and perhaps even misincentives around such sales, but that doesn't mean they are inherently bad.
There are mechanisms that are commonly employed to REDUCE the price of the stock, (ie. a stock split), and nobody bats an eye about that. Buying back stocks is a reasonable way to employ cash reserves, and protects the firm from exposure to foreign exchange rate, and inflation risks.
I will agree with you that the way executive bonuses are structured can be a perverse incentive that borders on fraud. But blaming the buyback of stocks itself, isn't grounded in any inherent economic misdeed.
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.
You assume that simply because information exists that people will not only understand it, do so correctly, and act on it rationally and not emotionally.
Again, it’s like the Epstein narrative; the right and good thing is to release the information, but the whole system, both sides and most in between have a vested interest of one kind or another to keep it under wraps. We know there as organized human trafficking, sexual slavery, abuse, rape, and various types of racial master race level eugenics associated with out of control “intelligence” agencies, including for foreign governments against the American government …. It everyone is just covering it up because everyone is implicated or is mentally compromised and the “peasants” unlikely have the organized power to change that.
That is also all documented, in fact it was documented for how many years? 10? 15? 20?
Ever hear of a guy called Madoff? He sure made off with money of sophisticated and smart people for several decades.
Don’t lie to yourself about the confidence in the system.
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.
Because China is starting from a position of weakness and catching up, it is by definition easier for them to find high ROI projects to spend money on. Just wait 10–20 years when China is thoroughly technically ahead of us, and Chinese companies will be more like American ones.
China is massively investing in the entire energy generation sector, renewables, advanced nuclear, batteries, EVs, full self driving. This is the future we were supposed to be investing in, but we’re losing it. Maybe we got some share buybacks instead.
The share buybacks enable and encourage investors to move their money to invest in other things for the future. That's usually a better idea than e.g. Intel, who know nothing about other wind farms, building their own.
This is the thing we tell ourselves because we like share buybacks. The question is whether the numbers actually tell this story.
My concern is that America will become a sprawling no man’s land as the economy contracts to 20 percent of its present size. Rapid collapse is unpredictable and seems like a bad idea for a country with such a huge military presence.
I would not read too much into the lackluster performance of Chinese stock markets. Something is weird about a place with a fast growing economy, but the stock market performance is so poor.
This is completely opposite of how budgets work inside companies. If a department has a specific budget, then it is generally considered very bad to return part of it ever. Instead, they just find new things to do with it. Now, of course, sometimes, the new things are vanity projects, but I find that 80% of times those are actually very good investments.
You just described an agency problem.
Investors in a corporation don't want individual teams to spend money "just because it was budgeted, even if we didn't have a good thing to spend it on".
I, as a manager of a team at a corporation, of course have a partially adversarial relationship with investor goals; I want my team to be happy, in part because happier teams often are more productive, but in large part also because it's just nice to spend my work life working side by side with people who are enjoying their perks.
If my entertainment budget directly (or even partially) reduced my team's bonus pool, that would be crappy for team cohesion, but it would probably make me think more carefully about taking everyone out to lunch.
Or even dividends, once they've set up a solid rainy-day fund. Anyone remember dividends?
Roughly 80% of SP500 companies pay dividends
There is a good reason for it: Many pension funds and large money managers have a hard rule that they will not invest at full into a company without a dividend. I'm not saying that you have to agree with that strategy, but it is incredibly common for US pension managers. Also, some stocks pay one cent as their div, just to qualify.
It's the disposable side of the practice that I disagree with. Hiring should feel like a marriage or a commitment for any business. Just my opinion though.
I think we've become too complacent/accepting of corporations just laying off employees with what amounts to a shrug.
I'm kinda with you that in most situations corporations would probably be better off hiring slower and then riding out downturns on cash.
But big picture I disagree. We kind of need creative destruction in an economy - we need to be able to lay off people in horse buggey industries so that they can be hired to make Model T's. We're better off focusing on our social safety network and having a job market that encourages some amount of transit between careers.
I agree with the social safety net. It feels as much of a long-shot though as corporations acting more responsibly. :-/
> Hiring should feel like a marriage or a commitment for any business.
Treating the employer/employee relationship like some life-long commitment sounds like pure hell. It is a transaction. I don't want it to be anything more than that.
I wish it weren't such a big deal in ones life they keep their current employer (from the perspective of things like health insurance plans, retirement plans, PTO balances, basic income). If it weren't so god damned painful to change jobs or have some gaps longer than a month or two then maybe we'd have a chance to just treat jobs as jobs we move between instead of a sacred vow for life lest we be thrown into chaos when broken.
> Hiring should feel like a marriage
it does though doesn't it? divorce is so common that marriage no longer feels like it has any permanence like you imply it does
I guess I meant hiring should feel like I feel about marriage.
Married 27 years — still on the first wife. :-)
Good for you, terrible analogy though
The average marriage lasts about 20 years. Companies should be able to fire people, but they shouldn't be overhiring in good years and then tossing people out in the next rough patch.
Divorce may be common, but a divorce without trauma is still a rarer thing.
getting fired is without trauma?
Are you still producing your fired certificate, 17 years down the line, for every background check, rental application, and date?
I don't know what a fired certificate is unless you're making a funny about you needing to do that with a divorce certificate? I also don't know what that is either. There's a divorce decree issued by the court, is that what you mean? Have you actually had a date ask to see legal documents about your divorce or any of the other situations? I just have no experience with any of that so it seems very strange, and feels like your just belaboring the point.
Yes, divorces are processed through the courts. Yes, it comes with a certificate. Yes, it affects your legal life forever more.
As that's all pretty basic... Maybe you... Don't understand divorce well enough to say whether or not it fits an analogy.
Been there done that got the decree and everything. You’re right, I don’t understand your musings as not once has anyone ever asked to see proof of my divorce. Some forms that ask about marital status might have a divorced option, but not all. It does not affect my credit. It does not affect job interviews. I really just have no way to relate to what you’re saying as it has never happened to me, nor have I ever heard anyone else complain about needing to provide this certificate. You are literally the first person. That’s such an outlier that I have to question its legitimacy.
Go get a background check, as legally required for most job applications. Equifax cares about more than just your credit rating.
But as you call it a "decree", and I only know one legal system that does (Texas), we're probably from different backgrounds here.
I've had plenty of background checks. Not once have I ever been asked to provide divorce documentation. I've had security checks as well. Have I been asked if I'm divorced? Sure. Never have I needed to show someone the details of the divorce itself. It's not my employer's business who got what in the divorce.
So let's just flip this. Why have you been asked, and what were they asking to see? Proof you are divorced? Did you claim something that you were awarded by the judge and had to show proof of it? If someone is asking for that kind of information, did you not ask why they needed and get an answer? It would be much easier if you just explained your experience as it is the outlier here
You're the outlier - and the explanation is simple. Where you are, divorce and family court filings are part of the public record. A request isn't necessary, because the background checking org already can see the full documentation. They care to, because who you are in debt to, can influence you in future. And it takes about 3sec to confirm this, rather than sitting there saying "no, you".
Your employer enjoys your data without your say so [0].
EU, UK [1], Au [2], NZ... They have to ask. So they do.
[0] https://www.dshs.texas.gov/vital-statistics/marriage-divorce...
[1] https://www.equifax.co.uk/Products/learning-centre/marriage-...
[2] https://www.auscheck.gov.au/what-we-do/background-checks
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.
You have omitted shareholder dividends.
Stock buybacks are shareholder dividends with better tax consequences and less expectations.
For buy-and-hold investors stock buybacks do nothing at all whereas dividends create real income.
For buy and hold investors, stock buybacks do nothing, whereas dividends create real taxable income. Either you take the income, minus taxes, and spend it, or you reinvest it into the stock, again minus taxes.
If you reinvest it into the stock, you've had to pay taxes on the dividend amount, so you've lost vs a buyback.
If you want to spend money and your stocks don't issue dividends, you just have to sell some of your shares. Selling $X of shares will almost always generate less taxable income than receiving $X of dividends as some of it will be a return of capital; so again, if you take $X out of the holdings, you've lost with a dividend vs a buyback and you sold $X.
This is disregarding the definition of buy-and-hold investors. As the name implies, they don't sell stock. Whether or not buy-and-hold is irrational or not is a completely different topic.
Dividends create real income and decrease stock value.
Any time you want that to happen for you, simply press the sell button for some percentage.
Why would you want the company to decide the timing and the percentage for you?
Because dividends are (at least in theory) perpetual.
Selling a couple percent of stock every year or two will work for at least a century before you have to adjust the plan. Something else will come up first.
Can buy-and-hold investors use margin?
Of course, but margin is expensive for retail people.
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...
> there was a sense that corporations, and residents of the Bay Area, were moving to Oregon because it was cheaper … but still close enough to Silicon Valley.
It's a different state and a 9-10 hour drive away; in what sense is it close?
At least in the past, Intel owned a dozen 35-50 pax regional jets (https://www.planespotters.net/airline/Intel-Air-Shuttle-Airc...) and had regular scheduled flights back and forth between their Santa Clara, Phoenix, and Portland offices. (They now seem to be down to two- rise of Zoom?)
Note that these were NOT executive jets for C-suite, these were for all employees who had meetings at other locations (at least according to people I've met since I moved to AZ a few years ago to be near my in-laws).
^^ Can corroborate. Intel had a fleet of airplanes for employee use commuting between sites. You did not have to be an exec or VP to fly.
I remember the airplane tail had the number 386, or 486. It was difficult to get a seat, but it was based on first come first serve, so you just had to be diligent on the booking web site.
Coming out of San Jose, the plane would enter this corkscrew to gain altitude. I guess to avoid SFO airspace.
I would often see high level executives on the same plane.
> airplane tail had the number 386, or 486
Ha, you're right:
https://www.planespotters.net/photo/1640095/n486hf-intel-air...
https://www.planespotters.net/photo/355961/n386ch-intel-air-...
There's even a 286: https://www.planespotters.net/photo/1738295/n286sj-intel-air...
Same for Nike, I think to LA and back – although it might have been cut as well.
Nike still has 3(maybe 4) jets in the Hillsboro hangar. I run by there regularly. Saw one taking off yesterday.
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.
> 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.
There's a lot of downtime in that commute. Sitting in an airport. Talking to people. Flying is fun if you're into it.
Anyway, a 2 hour commute is normal in the bay area . I used to do the south bay to San Francisco Caltrain daily... Flying is better. Free drinks for one thing
Everyday? No. But a few days a month? Absolutely. It works really well.
How much did you pay per flight? Your carbon footprint must put Taylor Swift to shame...
I didn't commute daily. Just a few times a month
Yeah that's absolutely insane. I can't imagine the mental gymnastics needed to do that.
Why? I own a house in Portland. Company closed the Portland office. My family is settled there. It doesn't make sense to move your whole life just for a few days a month in the office . I didn't do it daily. However I did price it out and it is cheaper.
Pure financials can more than explain this, if you have a family and want space for them. Let's do some napkin math, from a quick Google search it's 150$ round trip, so 3000$ a month assuming 20 work days (maybe even less with frequent-flyer status, cashbacks and rewards).
For a 4 bedroom house, Zillow gives me around 7-8k a month in rent for SF and around 4k for SJ, so you'll at least break even and have a better quality of life for your family even if you won't see them much during the week.
Anyway: The fact that a simple adequate house for a family runs at 4k in the US is ... maddening. 1500 sqft is around 140 m², a comparable house in Berlin (one of Germany's hottest markets!) runs ~2500€. How one is supposed to live in the US when not on a typical techbro salary, I have no idea how y'all even manage that.
I thought 9-5 + 1hr commuting was bad enough. What you just said is crazy.
Different strokes for different folks.
You don't have to answer this question, but: do you live off the I-205? I'm always astounded (well, annoyed) at how, living in the inner east side, getting to Multnomah Falls via I-84 would sometimes be quicker than getting to PDX fir the 205.
I live in inner NE. I'm two miles from downtown via the broadway bridge, and four miles from the airport via surface streets (about a 10 minute drive. If someone texts me while picking up bags at baggage claim, I will be at the airport before they are out). If I lived farther out, then commuting to the airport would be a problem. However, central Portland is very livable compared to most cities.
Did the employer know you didn't live there?
Yes. This was part of the deal; that I show up in the office every once in a while. They paid for my flights too, so it was actually cheaper than renting in the bay area, and certainly more convenient (my wife and kids are well settled in Portland). The flights were so cheap ($90 - $110 round trip with south west)
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.)
> (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.
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!
Culturally, also that is physically close in the west.
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.
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...
Hypothetically a glut of unemployed but highly skilled semiconductor people hanging around might kick off a wave of startup innovation.
As a PDX native that went to Oregon State and saw a lot of people go towards Intel, I don't feel the Oregon Intel crowd has strong aptitude for starting something up. They're at Intel in the first place because it was a secure job in their hometown they could coast at. I'm sure there are many of them that can do it, but I don't feel Portland has strong startup energy.
Disagree. Hillsboro has plenty of businesses from ex-intel employees.
Just off the top of my head I can think of a dozen or so.
They're just not in tech for the most part. I can think of 2 breweries, a standardization company, two machine shops. And those are just within a mile or so of my house.
I think a lot of folks work at Intel in order to get out of tech. That's basically what I'm doing, lol. Work enough to save and get out of tech.
Tech is also expensive to start up in. So it makes sense that a lot of the intel-driven businesses would be non-tech.
Ah, I meant tech startups. Starting a brewery and machine shop is exactly what I expect from the PDX crowd. I think you echo what I said, people working in PDX tech are there for the salary and coast so they can focus on their own lives outside of work, which is perfectly fine. But not conducive to a tech startup environment
it's happening?
"Ex-Intel executives raise $21.5 million for RISC-V chip startup":
https://www.aheadcomputing.com/
I believe the founding team is all in Oregon - and mostly all ex-Intel.
Yes, these folks came out of Intel Labs. But that's also a fabless startup. When you start talking about fabs you're talking about needing real money (in the multi billions of dollars). That kind of funding could only come from the likes of Apple and Nvidia.
They did not come (directly) out of Intel Labs. They left because they were working on a moonshot project that lost corporate support. Just like Ampere computing, just a few years later.
Some are starting:
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2025/06/top-resear...
This is basically correct. The culture in PDX is totally different.
How does it compare to Silicon Valley?
It's a very laid-back place - more of a "you're missing out on life if you're not enjoying nature every weekend" type of place. Lots of new parents in the mid-to-late 30s (I think the highest proportion of any major city, actually.)
I think what hampers Oregon is that there isn't much non-Intel investment in R&D in the Portland region as well, compared to the Bay Area – there used to be a graduate institute funded by Tek et al., but that never got sustained. [1] The local academic medical research center is well-regarded and otherwise wouldn't have trouble attracting talent if it wasn't for the salaries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Graduate_Institute
I was a student at OGI back when it was still a thing. Then a lot of the DARPA grant money dried up because of the Iraq war (they wanted research that could be applied to weapons in the short term, not basic research into operating systems and programming languages).
They merged with OHSU, but it turned out OHSU was about as broke as they were, so most of the CS faculty migrated en-masse to PSU and took all their grad students (myself included) along with them. (It turns out grants generally go to the principle investigator, not the school. So if your advisor moves schools, their funding goes with them.)
> salaries
Yeah, this is going to be the ultimate deciding factor. When local companies don't pay enough to live and Bay Area companies are paying upto 10X+ the compensation (for AI roles) people are going to make the move.
Silicon Valley is filled with people who moved there to start businesses. Portland is filled with people who moved there for a better quality of life.
You only need a sprinkling of people with the entrepreneurial spark to kick it off, right?
It helps there to be a strong community of founders, employees willing to take a risk to work at startup for less money, investors, capital, and general energy in the air. PNW tech scene is relatively low-key and apathetic to startups. Anyone with that type of ambition should have already migrated
There was a strong contingent of forward looking tech people and entrepreneurs a few years ago (pre COVID). They have left due to the large restrictions during COVID and the flight of capital and the general decline of Portland due to the riots and the lockdown measures.
Were there more restrictions in Oregon than California during COVID? Or are you talking about something else?
Oregon and California were roughly on par. However, the once bustling downtown where you'd normally find people socializing after work, or hanging out, or doing tech-oriented meetups (I.e., the sorts of things that lead to business creation), was beset by 'fiery but peaceful' riots for almost an entire year. Now, the entire industry of after-work social hours, meetups, etc is dead. It is beginning to be revived but on the east side and suburbs, which is more residential and 'suburban' (although east side portland, is definitely more urban than most places). Suburban is okay, but you really need downtowns to create the sort of bustle that leads to that bay area zeitgeist.
One of the underappreciated things about the bay area is that, while it is very suburban, there are several respectably sized downtown cores -- Mountain View, Palo Alto, Redwood City, and of course the Big Kahuna - San Francisco -- all connected by relatively speedy (and from what I understand, much speedier now) rail.
Here's one thing OP might be talking about – the "skyscraper district" of PDX practically emptied out during COVID, precisely because Portland has highly segregated big-B-business and residential districts. The rise of WFH meant that the whole district nearly emptied out overnight – especially anchor tenants like law firms and tech that were most amenable to WFH. Without any residential population in the area, boom: no place for a downtown flagship office.
Since I don't want to stealth-edit my post, another one was the rise of "nuisance homelessness" – the same shelter-in-place order prevented the City from sweeping people into warehouse shelters (but lower-capacity motel shelters were set up); and a combo drug-decriminalization-and-treatment-funding bill gave us the decriminalization but never actually funded the treatment in time, and so there was a lot of open-air drug use. That didn't help the return to "downtown" either.
Yes my company (small startup) closed its Portland office during COVID. It was opened for people who didn't want to be in the bay area. Pre COVID it was en vogue for bay area startups to have a PDX office. Then COVID happened and downtown became a ghost town.
I knew the end was in sight when it became company policy that no employee stay past 6PM without HR approval due to the danger.
Do you think east of the Willamette will be where any tech scene rebuilding might end up? I wonder which neighborhood might have the right mix of housing, office space, and recreation (ie food.)
Danger of what?
All of the west coast went insane, really. It was like the entire region had a competition for how crazy and nonsensical they could make the rules.
As a result, basically every west coast city absolutely destroyed itself and will take at least a decade or more to recover… it they every really do.
This is extreme hyperbole if you have been to most West Coast cities recently. Rents have shot up to new heights for a reason.
Portland specifically is lagging a bit, but they are on the upwards trajectory (with a few big things to fix still).
I go to Portland regularly just so I can enjoy a city that's much nicer than San Francisco. And Seattle recently hit another record population, it is significantly larger than it was before COVID and will soon pass SF.
I suspect the person denigrating the West Coast cities is doing so from their basement in East Prolapse, Kentucky, as a way to rationalize their life choices.
The financial numbers paint a grimmer picture of Portland than they do of the other west coast cities.
The city, the county, and the state all spend increasing proportions on debt service, and the rewards for earning a lot of money are much less than the neighboring state.
The total fertility rate is also one of the lowest in the country. And Portland lacks a flagship university to bring in young talent.
It might be a nice place to visit during the summer months, but I don’t foresee many high paying jobs or highly profitable businesses being made there.
If OSHU could expand to a serious biotech research uni that could maybe fill the gap and kickstart something. That’s where I would start. But I don’t know if it could eve happen. Portland definitely hurt by not having OSU or OU - compared with Seattle/UW, Austin/UT, Madison/UW etc.
I don't know how good the school is, but Portland State University is right next to downtown.
Not known for its tech-related offerings. OSU has the edge in engineering but it’s out in the boonies (for historical reasons).
It's a decent school, but beset by the same 'Portland problems' that ruin it for the people who would be starting businesses. For example, during the last riot in Portland, the PSU library was taken over and rendered unusable for several quarters. If you were using this public space to do research or to work with friends to start a business... good luck... It's just gone in a day, and the university does nothing, and even encouraged the rioters.
I agree that Portland does need public space to co-work and to be close to research. Unfortunately that would take investment… and that’s not forthcoming, not even public $.
That being said, as someone who took a few graduate stats courses at PSU, I don’t think the library would have been the right place anyway - it always couched itself as a commuter access school that relied heavily on transfers from community college, and the library reflected that. It’s definitely not a well-resourced research institution, and with the retrenchment of federal funding for research and financial aid I’m not sure what it’ll focus on.
Portland has some major advantages over SF, but as someone who also goes there regularly (~5 weeks/year), I still prefer living in SF at the moment. Not considering the amount of tech jobs there (which is a major factor for me), the city in general just isnt quite there yet. There are also some very major fiscal problems that have to be sorted before I'd consider moving.
Great place though, definitely might end up there one day
I'm not denigrating Portland... I live here. I live two miles from downtown. People need to stop being sensitive
I am a critical person and Portland is currently deserving of much criticism in order to fulfill its potential. No one got anywhere by patting themselves on the back reassuring themselves they had already made it.
+1 to this. As someone who still believes that everything that made Oregon attractive is still there, and won’t be taken from Oregon soon - nature, laid-back culture, quality of life - we can’t deny that Oregon is deindustrializing more broadly. Reasonable people can disagree on the essence and details of the issues - I say this as someone who came here because of the youth culture, and still doesn’t have a family! Even we might agree on many things (as Portlanders usually do.)
But we all agree the state is seriously going to have to think hard about how to attract new business to both I-5 corridor and rural areas - whether it’s through investing in OSU upstream, or attracting more downstream manufacturing jobs.
De-industrialization is the right word. We are buoyed almost entirely by intel. Without Intel, the state is essentially cottage / mom-n-pop industries.
Paging noduerme, surely they have some thoughts on the matter
You also need funding. That tends to be harder to come by in Oregon vs Silicon Valley.
It doesn't, unless there is cheap capital floating around
Fabs aren't cheap, so you can't just start-up mentality you're way into this. This isn't a bunch of dudes living in the same house banging code on laptops. Serious investment would be needed. Even with bags of cash available, these are not available for 2-day delivery. There's a bit of lead time involved
Only if there are paradigm shifts on the horizon. Chip making is high barrier to entry, capital intensive. No small collective is going to be able to start something up.
Yeah. The big problem with chip making is the effort to start up is absolutely monumental. China is putting all their money into it and still playing catch up. Japan is trying to get into the game and they're mostly aiming to make slightly older chips and bringing in companies that already have expertise.
Those are two of the biggest economies in the world pumping loads of money and people into that engine to try to get it started and still just starting to make some progress. That's not to say there aren't great ideas out there that we're missing which could make it all easier and cheaper, but a small team is definitely going to have one hell of a time making stuff on a nanometer scale without billions and billions of dollars behind them. Software startups are easy, but hardware is hard. Massive hardware and microscopic hardware are harder.
I wonder how many are on H1Bs? Intel has tons of engineers from India.
That or they’ll have to move to Shenzhen to find work
This is the reality. The US is cooked.
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.
Surely Intel made them sign non-competes and will vigorously enforce Intel's troves of patents and trade-secrets.
Lucky for those people, California exists! Noncompetes can’t be enforced here, and amazingly, this applies even if the employee entered into the agreement before they came to California:
https://www.littler.com/news-analysis/asap/california-reache...
> amazingly, this applies even if the employee entered into the agreement before they came to California
Has this been tested? Why would an Oregon court care about what a California law says it can and cannot do?
What makes Oregon think it can enforce its law across state lines ?
> What makes Oregon think it can enforce its law across state lines ?
It’s absolutely possible to be a fugitive in one state from another. It’s also typically quite expensive and stressful.
If I were on the other side of this fight, I’d use the opponent’s absence from Oregon courts to get civil judgements in my favour and then use the federal credit system to collect.
But this is not a criminal matter
Absent any superseding federal law, a contract with unenforceable clauses in California is not going to be enforceable in California.
Since the breach of contract occurred in California, the claimant would have have legal standing
Mean to say "claimant would not have legal standing"
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.
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.
Lip Bu Tan is here for some spring cleaning.
Spring cleaning was 2022-2023, at this point they're one step from ripping the copper out of the walls.
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.
Can you still call it a spring cleaning when you take out support walls in the process?
You misspelled: "Dismantle the company to sell it piecemeal"
Don't underestimate an Asian at the helm. Give it 3 or 4 years.
Intel will be taught in business schools as a textbook example of hubris and pride.
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.
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?
It’s a local piece, but are the layoffs even disproportionate with other sites?
In Oregon, the layoffs were 3x-4x more than in AZ. What's kicked both regions in the teeth is that the layoffs were 4x-5x more than what Intel had stated. OregonLive has been reporting for weeks that 500+ Oregon Intel jobs were going to be cut -- they cut 2500 jobs. This is also round 3 (?) of Intel's layoffs in the last 12 months. It's massive and devastating.
This sounds like sell the whole company type of cuts.
What else could be the trajectory of Intel, when the CEO has admitted defeat in the current investment environment?
> Intel CEO says it's "too late" for them to catch up with AI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44532572
Well, yeah. It's the Elop and Nokia situation all over again. Remember the "burning platform" memo?
Intel actually made a decent video card that sells above MSRP: Battlemage. They can easily advance it into more powerful GPUs.
Gelsinger understood that. The current MBA empty suit doesn't.
Last stage of grief is acceptance. I think the only way left is up.
[dead]
Gelsinger was apparently Intel's last hope to avoid being sold off in pieces.
CHIPS act nuked Intel. The promise of unlimited US govt support to make a US TSMC encouraged Gelsinger to all in on domestic fab production, only to rugged first by Biden DEI stipulations, then by Trump 2.0 coercing Taipei to give up TSMC and start production in Arizona. All this while export controls cut Intel out from its second largest market (China), depriving it of much need revenue. Workers in Oregon losing jobs is downstream of all this
Workers in Oregon losing jobs is downstream of Intel not being able to produce the best chips, which earned the highest margins that Intel was used to earning. This has been in the works since the mid 2000s, and they still don’t have a competitive low power, high performance chip.
Also, Oregon is a terrible state to invest in as a business, especially one that is looking to pay high salaries.
right on your second point. i expect talent whos cut would rather work in a state without income tax
CHIPS Act also has people thinking it is some sort of Intel "bailout" act as well (compareable to 2008 GM bailout to them).
I wonder what this means for the future of High NA.
Intel should go big into quantum computing
What went wrong with Intel?
For a few decades, they paid their shareholders instead of paying competitive salaries to their employees. All the best people went to Apple/Microsoft/Nvidia/Amazon/Meta/Alphabet/Qualcomm/TSMC (adjusted for their CoL and options in Taiwan).
Intel was in the business of selling the most cutting edge, technologically advanced products in the world, but they didn’t want to pay enough for the best people.
I remember where I wanted an intel pentium 4 back in the day so bad!