15 ms·

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

269 points by cbzbc 1y ago

JKCalhoun 1y ago
> Intel would sometimes cut jobs during fallow periods but it backfilled them almost immediately. Smells like corporate bulimia. When I worked/lived in the Bay Area there was a sense that corporations, and residents of the Bay Area, were moving to Oregon because it was cheaper … but still close enough to Silicon Valley. (Apropos of nothing really.)
- legitster 1y ago
  > Smells like corporate bulimia.' If companies have extra cash on hand, don't we want them to invest it and hire? The alternatives are stock buybacks or just sitting on the cash. Obviously every bet is not going to pan out, but hiring even on the margin is probably good.
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    It's the disposable side of the practice that I disagree with. Hiring should feel like a marriage or a commitment for any business. Just my opinion though. I think we've become too complacent/accepting of corporations just laying off employees with what amounts to a shrug.
    - dylan604 1y ago
      > Hiring should feel like a marriage it does though doesn't it? divorce is so common that marriage no longer feels like it has any permanence like you imply it does
      - JKCalhoun 1y ago
        I guess I meant hiring should feel like I feel about marriage. Married 27 years — still on the first wife. :-)
        cjbgkagh 1y ago
        Good for you, terrible analogy though
      - shakna 1y ago
        Divorce may be common, but a divorce without trauma is still a rarer thing.
        dylan604 1y ago
        getting fired is without trauma?
        shakna 1y ago
        Are you still producing your fired certificate, 17 years down the line, for every background check, rental application, and date?
        dylan604 1y ago
        I don't know what a fired certificate is unless you're making a funny about you needing to do that with a divorce certificate? I also don't know what that is either. There's a divorce decree issued by the court, is that what you mean? Have you actually had a date ask to see legal documents about your divorce or any of the other situations? I just have no experience with any of that so it seems very strange, and feels like your just belaboring the point.
        shakna 1y ago
        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.
        dylan604 1y ago
        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.
      - Dylan16807 1y ago
        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.
    - legitster 1y ago
      I'm kinda with you that in most situations corporations would probably be better off hiring slower and then riding out downturns on cash. But big picture I disagree. We kind of need creative destruction in an economy - we need to be able to lay off people in horse buggey industries so that they can be hired to make Model T's. We're better off focusing on our social safety network and having a job market that encourages some amount of transit between careers.
      - JKCalhoun 1y ago
        I agree with the social safety net. It feels as much of a long-shot though as corporations acting more responsibly. :-/
    - tjwebbnorfolk 1y ago
      > Hiring should feel like a marriage or a commitment for any business. Treating the employer/employee relationship like some life-long commitment sounds like pure hell. It is a transaction. I don't want it to be anything more than that.
    - zamadatix 1y ago
      I wish it weren't such a big deal in ones life they keep their current employer (from the perspective of things like health insurance plans, retirement plans, PTO balances, basic income). If it weren't so god damned painful to change jobs or have some gaps longer than a month or two then maybe we'd have a chance to just treat jobs as jobs we move between instead of a sacred vow for life lest we be thrown into chaos when broken.
  - chasil 1y ago
    You have omitted shareholder dividends.
    - toast0 1y ago
      Stock buybacks are shareholder dividends with better tax consequences and less expectations.
      - kccqzy 1y ago
        For buy-and-hold investors stock buybacks do nothing at all whereas dividends create real income.
        toast0 1y ago
        For buy and hold investors, stock buybacks do nothing, whereas dividends create real taxable income. Either you take the income, minus taxes, and spend it, or you reinvest it into the stock, again minus taxes. If you reinvest it into the stock, you've had to pay taxes on the dividend amount, so you've lost vs a buyback. If you want to spend money and your stocks don't issue dividends, you just have to sell some of your shares. Selling $X of shares will almost always generate less taxable income than receiving $X of dividends as some of it will be a return of capital; so again, if you take $X out of the holdings, you've lost with a dividend vs a buyback and you sold $X.
        kccqzy 1y ago
        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.
        Dylan16807 1y ago
        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?
  - mercutio2 1y ago
    No. Generally speaking, I want corporations to return capital in excess of operating needs to shareholders unless they have actual high-expected-return, ready-to-be-executed plans for what to do with their money. When corporations just invest because they have money, there is a gigantic agency problem, and executives have a tendency to burn shareholder value on vanity projects and fancier headquarters. Stock buybacks are exactly what I want wealthy companies to be doing with money they don't have a high expected ROI for.
    - piva00 1y ago
      No stock buybacks, pay dividends, that's why the instrument exists. Stock buybacks are an aberration of hyperfinancialisation, just pay the shareholders proportionally to what they own.
      - rcxdude 1y ago
        The only reason there's a difference is because of the psychological and incentive-based effects of 'number go up'.
      - legitster 1y ago
        Dividends don't currently get the same tax advantages in the US, so until tax policy gets revised, it's better for the shareholders in question if there's a buyback. There's also the matter that dividends are meant to be long-term and recurring. So it's not great for one-time windfalls.
      - hopelite 1y ago
        Buybacks are in effect and by definition a kind of fraud even if people make excuses for it or do not want to see it that way. It's the equivalent of a vested interest driving up an auction price or, you know, buying a bunch of your own product and then using the "sales" figures to convince others to invest or buy your product at a higher rate/price due to artificial scarcity. The fact that c-suites authorize buybacks largely to boost the stock price in order to trigger their own performance bonuses tied to the stock price only highlights that point. If you did something even remotely similar, you would be prosecuted for fraud, because it's fraud. 1) Wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain. 2) A person or thing intended to deceive others, typically by unjustifiably claiming or being credited with accomplishments or qualities. The problem though is that the incentive structure is so that none of the involved parties has any disincentive, let alone an adversarial incentive to end the practice, let alone has standing to do anything legally, short of sabotaging their own stock value. It's a totally perverse and corrupted incentive structure, similar to why both Trump or Biden, or Democrats or Republicans have the real will or interests in ... non of the involved parties have any interest in revealing the rot and corruption, and all parties involved have every incentive to keep it all under wraps, suppressed, covered, up and distracted from. In some ways, a civil activist organization could in fact buy a single stock of one of the most egregious stock buyback stock price inflation causing corporations and sue them for fraud and deception, but it would have to come with a claim at manipulation of the market due to fraudulent manipulation of the price discovery process similar to a light version of cornering the market through restriction of supply, i.e., cartel behavior.
  - hopelite 1y ago
    There is also a bit of strategic, defensive hiring that happens, i.e., hiring people so your competition cannot hire them, let alone at a lower salary if you were not hiring. It's a little talked about issue, because it is mostly expressed as a type of C-suite FOMO tied to their performance and stock option incentives, i.e., "we need to hire because X is hiring and we can't look like we are not growing/hiring because that will drive the stock price down and risks my stock options, even if we are doing massive buybacks to glaze the stock price". It is another significant flaw in the "capitalist", i.e., publicly traded corporate system that incentivizes all the various financial shenanigans to generate false stock performance to enrich the c-suite.
  - tjwebbnorfolk 1y ago
    Depends who "we" is. If I'm a shareowner, if the company doesn't have any intelligent ideas on how to spend my money, they should send it back to me as a dividend, or buy me out (share buyback). Please don't waste my money trying to build some immortal empire as a shrine to the CEO's ambition.
    - matthewdgreen 1y ago
      There’s an enormous amount of money being made by chipmakers, and Intel is rapidly losing access to it. That doesn’t mean hiring stupidly is good, but spending money to regain its momentum and save the company from bankruptcy is an obvious priority. Stock buybacks aren’t, unless the plan is to extract revenue and shut the place down.
      - lotsofpulp 1y ago
        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.
      - tjwebbnorfolk 1y ago
        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.
  - lmm 1y ago
    > If companies have extra cash on hand, don't we want them to invest it and hire? No. Hiring should be a long-term strategic investment, not something you do whenever you have extra cash lying around. If you needed the extra people you should have been trying to hire them already, and if you don't then you shouldn't hire them now.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  > there was a sense that corporations, and residents of the Bay Area, were moving to Oregon because it was cheaper … but still close enough to Silicon Valley. It's a different state and a 9-10 hour drive away; in what sense is it close?
  - mandevil 1y ago
    At least in the past, Intel owned a dozen 35-50 pax regional jets (https://www.planespotters.net/airline/Intel-Air-Shuttle-Aircraft https://www.planespotters.net/airline/Intel-Air-Shuttle-Airc...) and had regular scheduled flights back and forth between their Santa Clara, Phoenix, and Portland offices. (They now seem to be down to two- rise of Zoom?) Note that these were NOT executive jets for C-suite, these were for all employees who had meetings at other locations (at least according to people I've met since I moved to AZ a few years ago to be near my in-laws).
    - orangechairs 1y ago
      ^^ Can corroborate. Intel had a fleet of airplanes for employee use commuting between sites. You did not have to be an exec or VP to fly.
      - thijson 1y ago
        I remember the airplane tail had the number 386, or 486. It was difficult to get a seat, but it was based on first come first serve, so you just had to be diligent on the booking web site. Coming out of San Jose, the plane would enter this corkscrew to gain altitude. I guess to avoid SFO airspace. I would often see high level executives on the same plane.
        umeshunni 1y ago
        > airplane tail had the number 386, or 486 Ha, you're right: https://www.planespotters.net/photo/1640095/n486hf-intel-air-shuttle-aircraft-embraer-erj-175lr-erj-170-200-lr https://www.planespotters.net/photo/1640095/n486hf-intel-air... https://www.planespotters.net/photo/355961/n386ch-intel-air-shuttle-aircraft-embraer-erj-135er https://www.planespotters.net/photo/355961/n386ch-intel-air-... There's even a 286: https://www.planespotters.net/photo/1738295/n286sj-intel-air-shuttle-aircraft-embraer-erj-145xr https://www.planespotters.net/photo/1738295/n286sj-intel-air...
- pstuart 1y ago
  If one is pushed out of the Bay Area but wants to stay on the Left Coast and have the next best approximation of the Bay Area, then the Portland metro is a natural default. At least in my case...
thunderbong 1y ago
https://archive.ph/9OeKK https://archive.ph/9OeKK
- neonate 1y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20250716200622/https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2025/07/intels-retreat-is-unlike-anything-its-done-before-in-oregon.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250716200622/https://www.orego...
jeffbee 1y ago
Hypothetically a glut of unemployed but highly skilled semiconductor people hanging around might kick off a wave of startup innovation.
- RetiredRichard 1y ago
  It doesn't, unless there is cheap capital floating around
  - dylan604 1y ago
    Fabs aren't cheap, so you can't just start-up mentality you're way into this. This isn't a bunch of dudes living in the same house banging code on laptops. Serious investment would be needed. Even with bags of cash available, these are not available for 2-day delivery. There's a bit of lead time involved
- hmmokidk 1y ago
  That or they’ll have to move to Shenzhen to find work
  - 20after4 1y ago
    This is the reality. The US is cooked.
- em3rgent0rdr 1y ago
  Surely Intel made them sign non-competes and will vigorously enforce Intel's troves of patents and trade-secrets.
  - ashdksnndck 1y ago
    Lucky for those people, California exists! Noncompetes can’t be enforced here, and amazingly, this applies even if the employee entered into the agreement before they came to California: https://www.littler.com/news-analysis/asap/california-reaches-across-state-lines-invalidate-employee-non-compete-agreements https://www.littler.com/news-analysis/asap/california-reache...
georgeburdell 1y ago
It’s a local piece, but are the layoffs even disproportionate with other sites?
- orangechairs 1y ago
  In Oregon, the layoffs were 3x-4x more than in AZ. What's kicked both regions in the teeth is that the layoffs were 4x-5x more than what Intel had stated. OregonLive has been reporting for weeks that 500+ Oregon Intel jobs were going to be cut -- they cut 2500 jobs. This is also round 3 (?) of Intel's layoffs in the last 12 months. It's massive and devastating.
  - saelthavron 1y ago
    This sounds like sell the whole company type of cuts.
    - consumer451 1y ago
      What else could be the trajectory of Intel, when the CEO has admitted defeat in the current investment environment? > Intel CEO says it's "too late" for them to catch up with AI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44532572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44532572
      - vachina 1y ago
        Last stage of grief is acceptance. I think the only way left is up.
        cindyllm 1y ago
        [dead]
      - cyberax 1y ago
        Well, yeah. It's the Elop and Nokia situation all over again. Remember the "burning platform" memo? Intel actually made a decent video card that sells above MSRP: Battlemage. They can easily advance it into more powerful GPUs. Gelsinger understood that. The current MBA empty suit doesn't.
MinimalAction 1y ago
I heard from a friend who works for Intel that he doesn't know why he was hired in the first place; his PhD was in a completely different domain, the objectives of the project were remote to his skills, and he told me this is what his entire team was made of. Seems like a lot of bloat present in this company, and it makes sense they feel the way forward is layoffs.
- dylan604 1y ago
  why would someone with a PhD apply for the position if that was the case? Were they hired and then re-tasked once employed?
  - MinimalAction 1y ago
    Because Intel pays well (mid six figures + bonus) and PhD doesn't pay a minimum wage in most places. They were expressly hired without an overarching goal.
    - dylan604 1y ago
      So in other words, that PhD was well worth the effort.
- dkdcio 1y ago
  in college I got a job offer from Intel without interviewing. I had applied, the hiring manager reached it and said they’d setup a loop, it never happened. then some weeks later I got an offer. super weird also I was sorta laid off by the current Intel CEO from my last startup!
- fuck_AI 1y ago
  By your description it sounds like layoffs should be at the management level for incompetence, not for employees.
  - vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
    I would argue that should be done at a lot of companies.
takklz 1y ago
I remember where I wanted an intel pentium 4 back in the day so bad!
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
mensetmanusman 1y ago
With the premier US semiconductor fab dying, China will take the reigns in 2027 according to intelligence agencies.
- UncleOxidant 1y ago
  What I don't get is that there are at least a couple of very large, very valuable US companies that need to have their CPUs/GPUs fabbed (Apple and NVidia) and are currently dependent on fabs in Taiwan, a geopolitically risky place to be that dependent on. Both are sitting on huge reserves of ca$h. Why not either outright buy or buy a large stake in Intel to recapitalize it and allow it to finish the new SOTA fabs it was building? The CHIPS act was intended to help the likes of Intel and Micron, but the current admin has apparently blocked any further funding. If the current admin was serious about US semiconductor manufacturing it would try to arrange some kind of shotgun wedding where Apple & Nvidia (and others) take a stake in Intel to keep it afloat. Perhaps some kind of a consortium where the investing companies get priority in getting their parts fabbed? There's really no other US alternative for advanced semiconductor fabrication unless you're going to start from scratch and that doesn't seem like a viable idea. Yes, I understand the argument that Intel management screwed up for too long and this is the market at work, but that ignores the geopolitical risks of what we're going to end up with. Forming some kind of consortium to keep Intel fabs running (and new ones built) could also include completely changing the management of the company.
  - lmz 1y ago
    I suspect buying Intel could lead to them being the Boeing to Intel's McDonnell-Douglas.
  - osnium123 1y ago
    Is it because the employees themselves are so incompetent that no one wants to take this burden on. Besides, TSMC is expanding in Arizona and Samsung is expanding in Texas.
    - UncleOxidant 1y ago
declan_roberts 1y ago
> Many of those who lost their jobs worked in technical fields in an industry that pays an average wage of $180,000 a year. Those were great jobs and helped buoy the whole state, but most won’t find similar work locally. This is the big risk we all took when we moved away from the Bay Area to work remotely. You arbitrage the COL difference and come out ahead big time, but it might be very hard to make the same salary locally if you can't find a remote job. Best to make some hay while the sun is shining.
- UncleOxidant 1y ago
  Hillsboro is pretty much a company town (well, there are some datacenters now, but those don't need a lot of employees). Actually the whole of Washington County is heavily dependent on Intel. There's also Nike, but it's also heading for significantly lower headcount than it's had in a while. So it's kind of a double-whammy here (Triple if you count federal government funding cuts hitting places like OHSU (Oregon Health Sciences University)). I was contracting out at Intel Jones Farm campus in Hillsboro in 2004 and I'd walk around the (then) new neighborhood there by the campus and I distinctly recall thinking "What if something were to happen to Intel in, say 25 or 30 years? What would happen to these neighborhoods?" It was just kind of a thought experiment at the time, but now it seems like we're going to find out.
  - insane_dreamer 1y ago
    There are hundreds of new homes being built in/near Hillsboro -- probably planned a few years ago when Intel "promised" it was expanding its Oregon facilities. Can't see them selling now. The local economy's going to take a major hit.
    - chneu 1y ago
      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.
vachina 1y ago
Lip Bu Tan is here for some spring cleaning.
- cyberax 1y ago
  You misspelled: "Dismantle the company to sell it piecemeal"
  - vachina 1y ago
    [flagged]
- yvdriess 1y ago
  Can you still call it a spring cleaning when you take out support walls in the process?
- Wohlf 1y ago
  Spring cleaning was 2022-2023, at this point they're one step from ripping the copper out of the walls.
- DebtDeflation 1y ago
  I was super disappointed by the recent "18A will be an internal only node, 14A will be for external customers" announcement. Immediately reminded me of "we're skipping 20A because 18A is better than expected". If Panther Lake on 18A gets delayed again beyond Q1 2026, it's pretty much over for Intel as we know it and the foundry will get spun off in late 2026.
fsckboy 1y ago
>Instead, Intel has embarked on an unprecedented and sustained campaign to shrink its business in response to a series of technical and financial crises. it's not unprecedented, when companies' businesses contract, shrinking is exactly the right thing to do, not to mention that it's forced on them anyway.
- jsemrau 1y ago
  It's not unprecedented, but I question if it is the right move while the industry is experiencing unprecedented growth. "The Global Data Center Chip Market size is expected to be worth around USD 57.9 Billion by 2033, from USD 14.3 Billion in 2023, growing at a CAGR of 15.0% during the forecast period from 2024 to 2033." https://market.us/report/data-center-chip-market/ https://market.us/report/data-center-chip-market/
  - throwaway2037 1y ago
    Thinking about the Rule of 72, that CAGR is astonishing. Where will the power come from to run these data centers? Are we going to see an explosion of solar and wind farms with the express purpose of powering data centers? I say solar and wind because they are easier to get approved and built compared to nuclear or gas/coal.
    - pjc50 1y ago
      Unfortunately what seems to be happening is more gas and screw the permits. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17072025/elon-musk-xai-data-center-gas-turbines-memphis/ https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17072025/elon-musk-xai-da...
burner420042 1y ago
It's hard for me to be specific about this but I've worked for 2 cloud FAANGs and whatever the management culture was like at Intel, whenever I work with ex-Intel management... their behavior and perspective just really rubbed me wrong. None went to work because they liked what they did. What was worse is you could feel it. They had a smell; not Tech, no imagination.
- dmead 1y ago
  They would probably say the same about you. Nobody is required to like what they do. life is more than work.
  - burner420042 1y ago
    Weak answer. When I think of people that went into Tech 20+ years ago, this choice of work was a vocation. Not saying they were all pleasant, but they were all largely invested. At some point Tech became a safe, lucrative profession, for people who say things like 'life is more than work. Nobody is required to like what they do.', like the managers from Intel.
    - gavmor 1y ago
      > 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)
      - antoniojtorres 1y ago
        If only there was a way to sail west
        s1artibartfast 1y ago
hunglee2 1y ago
CHIPS act nuked Intel. The promise of unlimited US govt support to make a US TSMC encouraged Gelsinger to all in on domestic fab production, only to rugged first by Biden DEI stipulations, then by Trump 2.0 coercing Taipei to give up TSMC and start production in Arizona. All this while export controls cut Intel out from its second largest market (China), depriving it of much need revenue. Workers in Oregon losing jobs is downstream of all this
- lotsofpulp 1y ago
  Workers in Oregon losing jobs is downstream of Intel not being able to produce the best chips, which earned the highest margins that Intel was used to earning. This has been in the works since the mid 2000s, and they still don’t have a competitive low power, high performance chip. Also, Oregon is a terrible state to invest in as a business, especially one that is looking to pay high salaries.
  - boogieknite 1y ago
    right on your second point. i expect talent whos cut would rather work in a state without income tax
- FMecha 1y ago
  CHIPS Act also has people thinking it is some sort of Intel "bailout" act as well (compareable to 2008 GM bailout to them).
buyucu 1y ago
Intel will be taught in business schools as a textbook example of hubris and pride.
shmeeed 1y ago
I wonder what this means for the future of High NA.
0manrho 1y ago
This is yet another example of something that's happening all acrossed tech: (Over?)Correcting for a systemic problem; due to either/both misidentifying the problem, or reaching for the wrong solution that promises to solve the issue regardless. The Asserted problem: Labor force/expense is too high, or at least, higher than is now thought necessary. The (IMO) core problem: Measuring professional success/skill primarily by the size of the team a person manages. The asserted solution: AI replacing Labor to reduce inflated labor costs/pools. While there is some inherent benefit there to reducing team sizes back down into allegedly functionally sized units, there is a lack of accountability and understanding as to why that's beneficial, as it at seems to be done either due to the lofty promise of AI (which I'm critical of), or a more brutalist/myopic approach of merely trying to make the big labor-cost number smaller to increase margin/reduce expenses. To be clear, while I'm a critic of AI, I fully acknowledge it can absolutely be helpful in many instances. The problem is that people are learning the wrong lessons from this, as they've improperly identified the issue, and why the force reduction is allegedly/appears to be working. Obviously, YMMV on a case-by-case/team/company basis, but Intel is known for being guilty of "Bigger = Better" when it comes to team size, and their new CEO acknowledged this somewhat with their "Bureaucracy kills innovation" speech [0]. That said, what may be good for the company (even if done for the right reasons) can still hurt the communities it built/depend on it. 0: https://www.inc.com/kit-eaton/in-just-3-words-intels-new-ceo-gave-a-masterclass-in-motivating-a-team/91169779 https://www.inc.com/kit-eaton/in-just-3-words-intels-new-ceo...
lordnacho 1y ago
Intel dropped the ball, and it was the biggest bullet I ever dodged. Even 20 years ago, I felt there was something wrong about the internal culture there, so I turned down the post-internship job offer. There's a bunch of teams there with three-letter acronyms whose origins have been totally forgotten. Like, nobody knows what LTQ or ASR stands for, or what purpose they have. When you're an intern, you tend to think that the higher-ups know what they're doing, but if you ask for an explanation, you will soon conclude that they don't know either. People were not working hard enough. At the time Intel's dominance was supreme. They should have been picking up on niche ideas like GPUs and mobile chips, it would have been cheap and adjacent to what they had. Instead, all I heard at the meetings was laughing at the little guys who are now all bigger than Intel. Even my friend in the VC division couldn't get the bosses to see what was happening. People would spend their whole day just having coffee with random colleagues, and making a couple of slides. It's nice to relax sometimes, but when I was there it was way too much of that. There was just way too much fat in the business. I still have friends there who stayed on. They tell me not to come, and are now wondering how to do the first job search of their professional lives. A couple have moved very recently. It's very odd that the guy who was famous for saying what upper management should do (set culture) ended up building a culture that has completely failed.
- smallmancontrov 1y ago
  Same. I started down the semiconductor path about 15 years ago (physics student, loved my EE classes, loved nanofab class, wanted more) and got warned away by an astonishing number of independent postdocs, interns, and seemingly successful industry contacts who all agreed on one point: the pay was such utter dogshit that one should consider it a passion career like art or music. Some of them saw consulting for the Chinese as their "big ticket light at the end of the tunnel" -- but that got shut down soon enough. I changed directions before getting first hand experience but the R&D job listings tended to support this view. "They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" seemed to be in the advanced stages at that point. At least in R&D, from the angle I saw it. Clearly, being stingy wasn't a universal problem: heavy buybacks, ludicrous M&A (in foresight and hindsight), and that $180k average salary in the article sounds completely divorced from the snapshot impression that I got. I don't know what gives, was R&D "salary optimized" to a degree that other parts of the business weren't? Did the numbers change at some point but the culture was already rotten and cynical? Or did I see noise and mistake it for signal? Dunno. In another world I'd love to have been part of the fight to make 10nm work (or whatever needed doing) rather than working on something that doesn't fully use my skills or in my private opinion contribute as much to humanity, but my employer pays me and respects my time and doesn't steer their business into every iceberg in the ocean, and in the end those things are more important.
freefaler 1y ago
Andy Grove left in 1998, even though he was on the board of directors until 2004 (with diminished role). After he left the CEO role Intel just lost his way.
- 0xffany 1y ago
  As far as I understand, Grove was at the helm when Intel started the Itanium project. Granted, he didn't see it to "completion", but poor choices were made even in his time. He even stated the following in "Only the Paranoid Survive": One, don’t differentiate without a difference. Don’t introduce improvements whose only purpose is to give you an advantage over your competitor without giving your customer a substantial advantage. The personal computer industry is characterized by well-chronicled failures when manufacturers, ostensibly motivated by a desire to make “a better PC,” departed from the mainstream standard. But goodness in a PC was inseparable from compatibility, so “a better PC” that was different turned out to be a technological oxymoron. One might think Itanium goes against that.
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    Just because Itanium last as a bet, doesn't mean it was wrong to try it. They gambled that compilers would keep up - they didn't. Today it might work! Compiler technology is very much improved. (Dotnet/Java payloads? Dynamic recompiling...) It's a software problem and as such inherently easy to underestimate the complexity of it. Itanium also had its roots in a time when Big Iron was more relevant than it is today.
  - lenkite 1y ago
    Itanium was an excellent idea that needed some continued persistence. It is was a bit too early for its time.
    - o11c 1y ago
      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.
gone35 1y ago
What went wrong with Intel?
- lotsofpulp 1y ago
  For a few decades, they paid their shareholders instead of paying competitive salaries to their employees. All the best people went to Apple/Microsoft/Nvidia/Amazon/Meta/Alphabet/Qualcomm/TSMC (adjusted for their CoL and options in Taiwan). Intel was in the business of selling the most cutting edge, technologically advanced products in the world, but they didn’t want to pay enough for the best people.
m3kw9 1y ago
Intel should go big into quantum computing
someonehere 1y ago
Part of me feels Intel was too high on the horse for years and the little ideas that were innovative were ignored. I knew Intel would be in this condition when Apple decided to move off of Intel. Apple’s switch was the canary in the coal mine. Intel wasn’t innovating and giving Apple what they wanted. So Apple, much like the little guys, found a way to innovate without them.
bcatanzaro 1y ago
I've often wondered if Intel would still be a dominant force in computing if it had kept engineering in Silicon Valley. I worked at Intel both in Hillsboro and in Santa Clara and I feel that Intel's decision to put so much engineering in Oregon was done to insulate them from the pressures of Silicon Valley. They didn't have to pay very well, and they had a very insular culture - because they could afford it. They didn't have to work very hard to keep engineers at Intel because their engineers were basically trapped in beautiful Oregon and generally wouldn't consider moving back to expensive California. Housing costs in the Bay Area are soul-crushing, but they do motivate people to work on the highest value projects because complacency just doesn't usually work if you're trying to buy a house. And so I wonder, if Intel had kept their workforce mostly in California, could they have stayed a dominant force in computing?
evereverever 1y ago
Screw Intel. When they moved all of their contract work to InfoSys in India I lost hope in them. Dev shops and design agencies in Portland and Seattle were cut out of it. They missed on buying Nvidia and in the last 5 years they have netted 30b but also spent 30b on stock buybacks. So they could still have 30b, but they chose to manipulate their stock instead. All of those workers will move. There aren't any jobs in the Portland area. Downtown is vacant and still expensive and the startup scene has dwindled.
- cloverich 1y ago
  > All of those workers will move. There aren't any jobs in the Portland area. Downtown is vacant and still expensive and the startup scene has dwindled. I am curious about this, moving out of Portland -> Seattle myself. For software I see it, but for hardware, it feels like there's a kind of inertia / concentration that still benefits staying and fixing. It seems like shedding a large chunk of their workforce is on the path to righting the ship. It also feels like chips are too important an asset to discard. I'm skeptical they'll merely bleed out, even if the current phase is quite chaotic. Also frankly Portland area doesn't have enough high tech careers to replace them (and the income tax that goes with it), I feel the state would likely incentivize them staying / growing almost whatever it takes. This is all a hot take with little insight, other than being a tech person currently living in the Portland area.
  - xhkkffbf 1y ago
    Is -> Seattle a good idea? I've heard the high extra taxes are driving companies out of Seattle.
    - psunavy03 1y ago
      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).
Pearledlang 1y ago
I heard a similar story from a friend deeply in Nokia in early 2000's. Everyone non-technical was hired. Everyone with a strong ability was seen as difficult, and kicked out.
SilverBirch 1y ago
Many years ago now I remember chatting with my senior manager at Intel - he had been getting showered with resources because his team were "the future". At one point he was literally offered a deal of "You can have 10 more people, but they've got to be in Oregon". Essentially they had tonnes of people in Oregon and they didn't really have anything to do and so they were trying to sprinkle them around in to other teams instead of laying them off. Very weird organisation.
Cuesta03 1y ago
[dead]

269 points by cbzbc 1y ago

> Intel would sometimes cut jobs during fallow periods but it backfilled them almost immediately. Smells like corporate bulimia. When I worked/lived in the Bay Area there was a sense that corporations, and residents of the Bay Area, were moving to Oregon because it was cheaper … but still close enough to Silicon Valley. (Apropos of nothing really.)

legitster 1y ago
> Smells like corporate bulimia.' If companies have extra cash on hand, don't we want them to invest it and hire? The alternatives are stock buybacks or just sitting on the cash. Obviously every bet is not going to pan out, but hiring even on the margin is probably good.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  It's the disposable side of the practice that I disagree with. Hiring should feel like a marriage or a commitment for any business. Just my opinion though. I think we've become too complacent/accepting of corporations just laying off employees with what amounts to a shrug.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    > Hiring should feel like a marriage it does though doesn't it? divorce is so common that marriage no longer feels like it has any permanence like you imply it does
    - JKCalhoun 1y ago
      I guess I meant hiring should feel like I feel about marriage. Married 27 years — still on the first wife. :-)
      - cjbgkagh 1y ago
        Good for you, terrible analogy though
    - shakna 1y ago
      Divorce may be common, but a divorce without trauma is still a rarer thing.
      - dylan604 1y ago
        getting fired is without trauma?
        shakna 1y ago
        Are you still producing your fired certificate, 17 years down the line, for every background check, rental application, and date?
        dylan604 1y ago
        I don't know what a fired certificate is unless you're making a funny about you needing to do that with a divorce certificate? I also don't know what that is either. There's a divorce decree issued by the court, is that what you mean? Have you actually had a date ask to see legal documents about your divorce or any of the other situations? I just have no experience with any of that so it seems very strange, and feels like your just belaboring the point.
        shakna 1y ago
        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.
        dylan604 1y ago
        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.
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      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.
  - legitster 1y ago
    I'm kinda with you that in most situations corporations would probably be better off hiring slower and then riding out downturns on cash. But big picture I disagree. We kind of need creative destruction in an economy - we need to be able to lay off people in horse buggey industries so that they can be hired to make Model T's. We're better off focusing on our social safety network and having a job market that encourages some amount of transit between careers.
    - JKCalhoun 1y ago
      I agree with the social safety net. It feels as much of a long-shot though as corporations acting more responsibly. :-/
  - tjwebbnorfolk 1y ago
    > Hiring should feel like a marriage or a commitment for any business. Treating the employer/employee relationship like some life-long commitment sounds like pure hell. It is a transaction. I don't want it to be anything more than that.
  - zamadatix 1y ago
    I wish it weren't such a big deal in ones life they keep their current employer (from the perspective of things like health insurance plans, retirement plans, PTO balances, basic income). If it weren't so god damned painful to change jobs or have some gaps longer than a month or two then maybe we'd have a chance to just treat jobs as jobs we move between instead of a sacred vow for life lest we be thrown into chaos when broken.
- chasil 1y ago
  You have omitted shareholder dividends.
  - toast0 1y ago
    Stock buybacks are shareholder dividends with better tax consequences and less expectations.
    - kccqzy 1y ago
      For buy-and-hold investors stock buybacks do nothing at all whereas dividends create real income.
      - toast0 1y ago
        For buy and hold investors, stock buybacks do nothing, whereas dividends create real taxable income. Either you take the income, minus taxes, and spend it, or you reinvest it into the stock, again minus taxes. If you reinvest it into the stock, you've had to pay taxes on the dividend amount, so you've lost vs a buyback. If you want to spend money and your stocks don't issue dividends, you just have to sell some of your shares. Selling $X of shares will almost always generate less taxable income than receiving $X of dividends as some of it will be a return of capital; so again, if you take $X out of the holdings, you've lost with a dividend vs a buyback and you sold $X.
        kccqzy 1y ago
        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.
      - Dylan16807 1y ago
        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?
- mercutio2 1y ago
  No. Generally speaking, I want corporations to return capital in excess of operating needs to shareholders unless they have actual high-expected-return, ready-to-be-executed plans for what to do with their money. When corporations just invest because they have money, there is a gigantic agency problem, and executives have a tendency to burn shareholder value on vanity projects and fancier headquarters. Stock buybacks are exactly what I want wealthy companies to be doing with money they don't have a high expected ROI for.
  - piva00 1y ago
    No stock buybacks, pay dividends, that's why the instrument exists. Stock buybacks are an aberration of hyperfinancialisation, just pay the shareholders proportionally to what they own.
    - rcxdude 1y ago
      The only reason there's a difference is because of the psychological and incentive-based effects of 'number go up'.
    - legitster 1y ago
      Dividends don't currently get the same tax advantages in the US, so until tax policy gets revised, it's better for the shareholders in question if there's a buyback. There's also the matter that dividends are meant to be long-term and recurring. So it's not great for one-time windfalls.
    - hopelite 1y ago
      Buybacks are in effect and by definition a kind of fraud even if people make excuses for it or do not want to see it that way. It's the equivalent of a vested interest driving up an auction price or, you know, buying a bunch of your own product and then using the "sales" figures to convince others to invest or buy your product at a higher rate/price due to artificial scarcity. The fact that c-suites authorize buybacks largely to boost the stock price in order to trigger their own performance bonuses tied to the stock price only highlights that point. If you did something even remotely similar, you would be prosecuted for fraud, because it's fraud. 1) Wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain. 2) A person or thing intended to deceive others, typically by unjustifiably claiming or being credited with accomplishments or qualities. The problem though is that the incentive structure is so that none of the involved parties has any disincentive, let alone an adversarial incentive to end the practice, let alone has standing to do anything legally, short of sabotaging their own stock value. It's a totally perverse and corrupted incentive structure, similar to why both Trump or Biden, or Democrats or Republicans have the real will or interests in ... non of the involved parties have any interest in revealing the rot and corruption, and all parties involved have every incentive to keep it all under wraps, suppressed, covered, up and distracted from. In some ways, a civil activist organization could in fact buy a single stock of one of the most egregious stock buyback stock price inflation causing corporations and sue them for fraud and deception, but it would have to come with a claim at manipulation of the market due to fraudulent manipulation of the price discovery process similar to a light version of cornering the market through restriction of supply, i.e., cartel behavior.
- hopelite 1y ago
  There is also a bit of strategic, defensive hiring that happens, i.e., hiring people so your competition cannot hire them, let alone at a lower salary if you were not hiring. It's a little talked about issue, because it is mostly expressed as a type of C-suite FOMO tied to their performance and stock option incentives, i.e., "we need to hire because X is hiring and we can't look like we are not growing/hiring because that will drive the stock price down and risks my stock options, even if we are doing massive buybacks to glaze the stock price". It is another significant flaw in the "capitalist", i.e., publicly traded corporate system that incentivizes all the various financial shenanigans to generate false stock performance to enrich the c-suite.
- tjwebbnorfolk 1y ago
  Depends who "we" is. If I'm a shareowner, if the company doesn't have any intelligent ideas on how to spend my money, they should send it back to me as a dividend, or buy me out (share buyback). Please don't waste my money trying to build some immortal empire as a shrine to the CEO's ambition.
  - matthewdgreen 1y ago
    There’s an enormous amount of money being made by chipmakers, and Intel is rapidly losing access to it. That doesn’t mean hiring stupidly is good, but spending money to regain its momentum and save the company from bankruptcy is an obvious priority. Stock buybacks aren’t, unless the plan is to extract revenue and shut the place down.
    - lotsofpulp 1y ago
      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.
    - tjwebbnorfolk 1y ago
      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.
- lmm 1y ago
  > If companies have extra cash on hand, don't we want them to invest it and hire? No. Hiring should be a long-term strategic investment, not something you do whenever you have extra cash lying around. If you needed the extra people you should have been trying to hire them already, and if you don't then you shouldn't hire them now.
yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
> there was a sense that corporations, and residents of the Bay Area, were moving to Oregon because it was cheaper … but still close enough to Silicon Valley. It's a different state and a 9-10 hour drive away; in what sense is it close?
- mandevil 1y ago
  At least in the past, Intel owned a dozen 35-50 pax regional jets (https://www.planespotters.net/airline/Intel-Air-Shuttle-Aircraft https://www.planespotters.net/airline/Intel-Air-Shuttle-Airc...) and had regular scheduled flights back and forth between their Santa Clara, Phoenix, and Portland offices. (They now seem to be down to two- rise of Zoom?) Note that these were NOT executive jets for C-suite, these were for all employees who had meetings at other locations (at least according to people I've met since I moved to AZ a few years ago to be near my in-laws).
  - orangechairs 1y ago
    ^^ Can corroborate. Intel had a fleet of airplanes for employee use commuting between sites. You did not have to be an exec or VP to fly.
    - thijson 1y ago
      I remember the airplane tail had the number 386, or 486. It was difficult to get a seat, but it was based on first come first serve, so you just had to be diligent on the booking web site. Coming out of San Jose, the plane would enter this corkscrew to gain altitude. I guess to avoid SFO airspace. I would often see high level executives on the same plane.
      - umeshunni 1y ago
        > airplane tail had the number 386, or 486 Ha, you're right: https://www.planespotters.net/photo/1640095/n486hf-intel-air-shuttle-aircraft-embraer-erj-175lr-erj-170-200-lr https://www.planespotters.net/photo/1640095/n486hf-intel-air... https://www.planespotters.net/photo/355961/n386ch-intel-air-shuttle-aircraft-embraer-erj-135er https://www.planespotters.net/photo/355961/n386ch-intel-air-... There's even a 286: https://www.planespotters.net/photo/1738295/n286sj-intel-air-shuttle-aircraft-embraer-erj-145xr https://www.planespotters.net/photo/1738295/n286sj-intel-air...
pstuart 1y ago
If one is pushed out of the Bay Area but wants to stay on the Left Coast and have the next best approximation of the Bay Area, then the Portland metro is a natural default. At least in my case...

thunderbong 1y ago

https://archive.ph/9OeKK https://archive.ph/9OeKK

neonate 1y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20250716200622/https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2025/07/intels-retreat-is-unlike-anything-its-done-before-in-oregon.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250716200622/https://www.orego...

jeffbee 1y ago

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

RetiredRichard 1y ago
It doesn't, unless there is cheap capital floating around
- dylan604 1y ago
  Fabs aren't cheap, so you can't just start-up mentality you're way into this. This isn't a bunch of dudes living in the same house banging code on laptops. Serious investment would be needed. Even with bags of cash available, these are not available for 2-day delivery. There's a bit of lead time involved
hmmokidk 1y ago
That or they’ll have to move to Shenzhen to find work
- 20after4 1y ago
  This is the reality. The US is cooked.
em3rgent0rdr 1y ago
Surely Intel made them sign non-competes and will vigorously enforce Intel's troves of patents and trade-secrets.
- ashdksnndck 1y ago
  Lucky for those people, California exists! Noncompetes can’t be enforced here, and amazingly, this applies even if the employee entered into the agreement before they came to California: https://www.littler.com/news-analysis/asap/california-reaches-across-state-lines-invalidate-employee-non-compete-agreements https://www.littler.com/news-analysis/asap/california-reache...

georgeburdell 1y ago

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

orangechairs 1y ago
In Oregon, the layoffs were 3x-4x more than in AZ. What's kicked both regions in the teeth is that the layoffs were 4x-5x more than what Intel had stated. OregonLive has been reporting for weeks that 500+ Oregon Intel jobs were going to be cut -- they cut 2500 jobs. This is also round 3 (?) of Intel's layoffs in the last 12 months. It's massive and devastating.
- saelthavron 1y ago
  This sounds like sell the whole company type of cuts.
  - consumer451 1y ago
    What else could be the trajectory of Intel, when the CEO has admitted defeat in the current investment environment? > Intel CEO says it's "too late" for them to catch up with AI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44532572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44532572
    - vachina 1y ago
      Last stage of grief is acceptance. I think the only way left is up.
      - cindyllm 1y ago
        [dead]
    - cyberax 1y ago
      Well, yeah. It's the Elop and Nokia situation all over again. Remember the "burning platform" memo? Intel actually made a decent video card that sells above MSRP: Battlemage. They can easily advance it into more powerful GPUs. Gelsinger understood that. The current MBA empty suit doesn't.

MinimalAction 1y ago

I heard from a friend who works for Intel that he doesn't know why he was hired in the first place; his PhD was in a completely different domain, the objectives of the project were remote to his skills, and he told me this is what his entire team was made of. Seems like a lot of bloat present in this company, and it makes sense they feel the way forward is layoffs.

dylan604 1y ago
why would someone with a PhD apply for the position if that was the case? Were they hired and then re-tasked once employed?
- MinimalAction 1y ago
  Because Intel pays well (mid six figures + bonus) and PhD doesn't pay a minimum wage in most places. They were expressly hired without an overarching goal.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    So in other words, that PhD was well worth the effort.
dkdcio 1y ago
in college I got a job offer from Intel without interviewing. I had applied, the hiring manager reached it and said they’d setup a loop, it never happened. then some weeks later I got an offer. super weird also I was sorta laid off by the current Intel CEO from my last startup!
fuck_AI 1y ago
By your description it sounds like layoffs should be at the management level for incompetence, not for employees.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
  I would argue that should be done at a lot of companies.

takklz 1y ago

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

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

mensetmanusman 1y ago

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

UncleOxidant 1y ago
What I don't get is that there are at least a couple of very large, very valuable US companies that need to have their CPUs/GPUs fabbed (Apple and NVidia) and are currently dependent on fabs in Taiwan, a geopolitically risky place to be that dependent on. Both are sitting on huge reserves of ca$h. Why not either outright buy or buy a large stake in Intel to recapitalize it and allow it to finish the new SOTA fabs it was building? The CHIPS act was intended to help the likes of Intel and Micron, but the current admin has apparently blocked any further funding. If the current admin was serious about US semiconductor manufacturing it would try to arrange some kind of shotgun wedding where Apple & Nvidia (and others) take a stake in Intel to keep it afloat. Perhaps some kind of a consortium where the investing companies get priority in getting their parts fabbed? There's really no other US alternative for advanced semiconductor fabrication unless you're going to start from scratch and that doesn't seem like a viable idea. Yes, I understand the argument that Intel management screwed up for too long and this is the market at work, but that ignores the geopolitical risks of what we're going to end up with. Forming some kind of consortium to keep Intel fabs running (and new ones built) could also include completely changing the management of the company.
- lmz 1y ago
  I suspect buying Intel could lead to them being the Boeing to Intel's McDonnell-Douglas.
- osnium123 1y ago
  Is it because the employees themselves are so incompetent that no one wants to take this burden on. Besides, TSMC is expanding in Arizona and Samsung is expanding in Texas.
  - UncleOxidant 1y ago

declan_roberts 1y ago

> Many of those who lost their jobs worked in technical fields in an industry that pays an average wage of $180,000 a year. Those were great jobs and helped buoy the whole state, but most won’t find similar work locally. This is the big risk we all took when we moved away from the Bay Area to work remotely. You arbitrage the COL difference and come out ahead big time, but it might be very hard to make the same salary locally if you can't find a remote job. Best to make some hay while the sun is shining.

UncleOxidant 1y ago
Hillsboro is pretty much a company town (well, there are some datacenters now, but those don't need a lot of employees). Actually the whole of Washington County is heavily dependent on Intel. There's also Nike, but it's also heading for significantly lower headcount than it's had in a while. So it's kind of a double-whammy here (Triple if you count federal government funding cuts hitting places like OHSU (Oregon Health Sciences University)). I was contracting out at Intel Jones Farm campus in Hillsboro in 2004 and I'd walk around the (then) new neighborhood there by the campus and I distinctly recall thinking "What if something were to happen to Intel in, say 25 or 30 years? What would happen to these neighborhoods?" It was just kind of a thought experiment at the time, but now it seems like we're going to find out.
- insane_dreamer 1y ago
  There are hundreds of new homes being built in/near Hillsboro -- probably planned a few years ago when Intel "promised" it was expanding its Oregon facilities. Can't see them selling now. The local economy's going to take a major hit.
  - chneu 1y ago
    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.

vachina 1y ago

Lip Bu Tan is here for some spring cleaning.

cyberax 1y ago
You misspelled: "Dismantle the company to sell it piecemeal"
- vachina 1y ago
  [flagged]
yvdriess 1y ago
Can you still call it a spring cleaning when you take out support walls in the process?
Wohlf 1y ago
Spring cleaning was 2022-2023, at this point they're one step from ripping the copper out of the walls.
DebtDeflation 1y ago
I was super disappointed by the recent "18A will be an internal only node, 14A will be for external customers" announcement. Immediately reminded me of "we're skipping 20A because 18A is better than expected". If Panther Lake on 18A gets delayed again beyond Q1 2026, it's pretty much over for Intel as we know it and the foundry will get spun off in late 2026.

fsckboy 1y ago

>Instead, Intel has embarked on an unprecedented and sustained campaign to shrink its business in response to a series of technical and financial crises. it's not unprecedented, when companies' businesses contract, shrinking is exactly the right thing to do, not to mention that it's forced on them anyway.

jsemrau 1y ago
It's not unprecedented, but I question if it is the right move while the industry is experiencing unprecedented growth. "The Global Data Center Chip Market size is expected to be worth around USD 57.9 Billion by 2033, from USD 14.3 Billion in 2023, growing at a CAGR of 15.0% during the forecast period from 2024 to 2033." https://market.us/report/data-center-chip-market/ https://market.us/report/data-center-chip-market/
- throwaway2037 1y ago
  Thinking about the Rule of 72, that CAGR is astonishing. Where will the power come from to run these data centers? Are we going to see an explosion of solar and wind farms with the express purpose of powering data centers? I say solar and wind because they are easier to get approved and built compared to nuclear or gas/coal.
  - pjc50 1y ago
    Unfortunately what seems to be happening is more gas and screw the permits. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17072025/elon-musk-xai-data-center-gas-turbines-memphis/ https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17072025/elon-musk-xai-da...

burner420042 1y ago

It's hard for me to be specific about this but I've worked for 2 cloud FAANGs and whatever the management culture was like at Intel, whenever I work with ex-Intel management... their behavior and perspective just really rubbed me wrong. None went to work because they liked what they did. What was worse is you could feel it. They had a smell; not Tech, no imagination.

dmead 1y ago
They would probably say the same about you. Nobody is required to like what they do. life is more than work.
- burner420042 1y ago
  Weak answer. When I think of people that went into Tech 20+ years ago, this choice of work was a vocation. Not saying they were all pleasant, but they were all largely invested. At some point Tech became a safe, lucrative profession, for people who say things like 'life is more than work. Nobody is required to like what they do.', like the managers from Intel.
  - gavmor 1y ago
    > 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)
    - antoniojtorres 1y ago
      If only there was a way to sail west
      - s1artibartfast 1y ago

hunglee2 1y ago

CHIPS act nuked Intel. The promise of unlimited US govt support to make a US TSMC encouraged Gelsinger to all in on domestic fab production, only to rugged first by Biden DEI stipulations, then by Trump 2.0 coercing Taipei to give up TSMC and start production in Arizona. All this while export controls cut Intel out from its second largest market (China), depriving it of much need revenue. Workers in Oregon losing jobs is downstream of all this

lotsofpulp 1y ago
Workers in Oregon losing jobs is downstream of Intel not being able to produce the best chips, which earned the highest margins that Intel was used to earning. This has been in the works since the mid 2000s, and they still don’t have a competitive low power, high performance chip. Also, Oregon is a terrible state to invest in as a business, especially one that is looking to pay high salaries.
- boogieknite 1y ago
  right on your second point. i expect talent whos cut would rather work in a state without income tax
FMecha 1y ago
CHIPS Act also has people thinking it is some sort of Intel "bailout" act as well (compareable to 2008 GM bailout to them).

buyucu 1y ago

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

shmeeed 1y ago

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

0manrho 1y ago

This is yet another example of something that's happening all acrossed tech: (Over?)Correcting for a systemic problem; due to either/both misidentifying the problem, or reaching for the wrong solution that promises to solve the issue regardless. The Asserted problem: Labor force/expense is too high, or at least, higher than is now thought necessary. The (IMO) core problem: Measuring professional success/skill primarily by the size of the team a person manages. The asserted solution: AI replacing Labor to reduce inflated labor costs/pools. While there is some inherent benefit there to reducing team sizes back down into allegedly functionally sized units, there is a lack of accountability and understanding as to why that's beneficial, as it at seems to be done either due to the lofty promise of AI (which I'm critical of), or a more brutalist/myopic approach of merely trying to make the big labor-cost number smaller to increase margin/reduce expenses. To be clear, while I'm a critic of AI, I fully acknowledge it can absolutely be helpful in many instances. The problem is that people are learning the wrong lessons from this, as they've improperly identified the issue, and why the force reduction is allegedly/appears to be working. Obviously, YMMV on a case-by-case/team/company basis, but Intel is known for being guilty of "Bigger = Better" when it comes to team size, and their new CEO acknowledged this somewhat with their "Bureaucracy kills innovation" speech [0]. That said, what may be good for the company (even if done for the right reasons) can still hurt the communities it built/depend on it. 0: https://www.inc.com/kit-eaton/in-just-3-words-intels-new-ceo-gave-a-masterclass-in-motivating-a-team/91169779 https://www.inc.com/kit-eaton/in-just-3-words-intels-new-ceo...

lordnacho 1y ago

Intel dropped the ball, and it was the biggest bullet I ever dodged. Even 20 years ago, I felt there was something wrong about the internal culture there, so I turned down the post-internship job offer. There's a bunch of teams there with three-letter acronyms whose origins have been totally forgotten. Like, nobody knows what LTQ or ASR stands for, or what purpose they have. When you're an intern, you tend to think that the higher-ups know what they're doing, but if you ask for an explanation, you will soon conclude that they don't know either. People were not working hard enough. At the time Intel's dominance was supreme. They should have been picking up on niche ideas like GPUs and mobile chips, it would have been cheap and adjacent to what they had. Instead, all I heard at the meetings was laughing at the little guys who are now all bigger than Intel. Even my friend in the VC division couldn't get the bosses to see what was happening. People would spend their whole day just having coffee with random colleagues, and making a couple of slides. It's nice to relax sometimes, but when I was there it was way too much of that. There was just way too much fat in the business. I still have friends there who stayed on. They tell me not to come, and are now wondering how to do the first job search of their professional lives. A couple have moved very recently. It's very odd that the guy who was famous for saying what upper management should do (set culture) ended up building a culture that has completely failed.

smallmancontrov 1y ago
Same. I started down the semiconductor path about 15 years ago (physics student, loved my EE classes, loved nanofab class, wanted more) and got warned away by an astonishing number of independent postdocs, interns, and seemingly successful industry contacts who all agreed on one point: the pay was such utter dogshit that one should consider it a passion career like art or music. Some of them saw consulting for the Chinese as their "big ticket light at the end of the tunnel" -- but that got shut down soon enough. I changed directions before getting first hand experience but the R&D job listings tended to support this view. "They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" seemed to be in the advanced stages at that point. At least in R&D, from the angle I saw it. Clearly, being stingy wasn't a universal problem: heavy buybacks, ludicrous M&A (in foresight and hindsight), and that $180k average salary in the article sounds completely divorced from the snapshot impression that I got. I don't know what gives, was R&D "salary optimized" to a degree that other parts of the business weren't? Did the numbers change at some point but the culture was already rotten and cynical? Or did I see noise and mistake it for signal? Dunno. In another world I'd love to have been part of the fight to make 10nm work (or whatever needed doing) rather than working on something that doesn't fully use my skills or in my private opinion contribute as much to humanity, but my employer pays me and respects my time and doesn't steer their business into every iceberg in the ocean, and in the end those things are more important.

freefaler 1y ago

Andy Grove left in 1998, even though he was on the board of directors until 2004 (with diminished role). After he left the CEO role Intel just lost his way.

0xffany 1y ago
As far as I understand, Grove was at the helm when Intel started the Itanium project. Granted, he didn't see it to "completion", but poor choices were made even in his time. He even stated the following in "Only the Paranoid Survive": One, don’t differentiate without a difference. Don’t introduce improvements whose only purpose is to give you an advantage over your competitor without giving your customer a substantial advantage. The personal computer industry is characterized by well-chronicled failures when manufacturers, ostensibly motivated by a desire to make “a better PC,” departed from the mainstream standard. But goodness in a PC was inseparable from compatibility, so “a better PC” that was different turned out to be a technological oxymoron. One might think Itanium goes against that.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  Just because Itanium last as a bet, doesn't mean it was wrong to try it. They gambled that compilers would keep up - they didn't. Today it might work! Compiler technology is very much improved. (Dotnet/Java payloads? Dynamic recompiling...) It's a software problem and as such inherently easy to underestimate the complexity of it. Itanium also had its roots in a time when Big Iron was more relevant than it is today.
- lenkite 1y ago
  Itanium was an excellent idea that needed some continued persistence. It is was a bit too early for its time.
  - o11c 1y ago
    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.

gone35 1y ago

What went wrong with Intel?

lotsofpulp 1y ago
For a few decades, they paid their shareholders instead of paying competitive salaries to their employees. All the best people went to Apple/Microsoft/Nvidia/Amazon/Meta/Alphabet/Qualcomm/TSMC (adjusted for their CoL and options in Taiwan). Intel was in the business of selling the most cutting edge, technologically advanced products in the world, but they didn’t want to pay enough for the best people.

m3kw9 1y ago

Intel should go big into quantum computing

someonehere 1y ago

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

bcatanzaro 1y ago

I've often wondered if Intel would still be a dominant force in computing if it had kept engineering in Silicon Valley. I worked at Intel both in Hillsboro and in Santa Clara and I feel that Intel's decision to put so much engineering in Oregon was done to insulate them from the pressures of Silicon Valley. They didn't have to pay very well, and they had a very insular culture - because they could afford it. They didn't have to work very hard to keep engineers at Intel because their engineers were basically trapped in beautiful Oregon and generally wouldn't consider moving back to expensive California. Housing costs in the Bay Area are soul-crushing, but they do motivate people to work on the highest value projects because complacency just doesn't usually work if you're trying to buy a house. And so I wonder, if Intel had kept their workforce mostly in California, could they have stayed a dominant force in computing?

evereverever 1y ago

Screw Intel. When they moved all of their contract work to InfoSys in India I lost hope in them. Dev shops and design agencies in Portland and Seattle were cut out of it. They missed on buying Nvidia and in the last 5 years they have netted 30b but also spent 30b on stock buybacks. So they could still have 30b, but they chose to manipulate their stock instead. All of those workers will move. There aren't any jobs in the Portland area. Downtown is vacant and still expensive and the startup scene has dwindled.

cloverich 1y ago
> All of those workers will move. There aren't any jobs in the Portland area. Downtown is vacant and still expensive and the startup scene has dwindled. I am curious about this, moving out of Portland -> Seattle myself. For software I see it, but for hardware, it feels like there's a kind of inertia / concentration that still benefits staying and fixing. It seems like shedding a large chunk of their workforce is on the path to righting the ship. It also feels like chips are too important an asset to discard. I'm skeptical they'll merely bleed out, even if the current phase is quite chaotic. Also frankly Portland area doesn't have enough high tech careers to replace them (and the income tax that goes with it), I feel the state would likely incentivize them staying / growing almost whatever it takes. This is all a hot take with little insight, other than being a tech person currently living in the Portland area.
- xhkkffbf 1y ago
  Is -> Seattle a good idea? I've heard the high extra taxes are driving companies out of Seattle.
  - psunavy03 1y ago
    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).

Pearledlang 1y ago

I heard a similar story from a friend deeply in Nokia in early 2000's. Everyone non-technical was hired. Everyone with a strong ability was seen as difficult, and kicked out.

SilverBirch 1y ago

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

Cuesta03 1y ago

[dead]