Intel CEO Letter to Employees
552 comments
·July 24, 2025johngalt
inetknght
> why do all these business leaders all do the same things at the same time? E.g. Layoffs + micromanagement + cost focus etc... Is this truly about macroeconomic forces that every business is responding to? Or is it just following the latest fad?
I thought about this a lot over the years.
I saw something that piqued my interest last year though, and kind've helped connect the dots. I was on a cruise, and most of the ship was available to guests. One day, one room was cordoned off to an invite-only meeting. The windows weren't blocked, but on the screen was a presentation about AI investments, number of jobs saved (reduced), and etc.
I found one of the attendants later during the voyage and chatted her up. She was head of HR in some big company, and the meeting was supposed to be private. But it contained a lot more than just spreadsheets about AI investments. There was homework and whatnot, but the attendees weren't all from a single company. It was "direction setting". I don't think it was Intel (topic under discussion) but certainly some loosely related tech industry.
I'm convinced that it was nothing less than business collusion.
So, back to your question:
> why do all these business leaders all do the same things at the same time?
Because they're told to.
michaelt
> I'm convinced that it was nothing less than business collusion.
Are you sure you didn't just see a sales meeting?
If you're a farmer in the market for a $200k combine harvester, sales guys will be happy to put you in a $200-a-night hotel so you can attend their invite-only presentation on how their latest models give you 10% more yield with 30% lower labour cost thanks to the new auto-steer mechanism and six-stage threshing mechanism. And they'll hand-hold you through all the calculations to write a business case.
samplatt
>Are you sure you didn't just see a sales meeting?
Considering how much the sales division of many medium and large companies dictates the direction of the whole company, "sales meeting" and "business collusion" is often the same thing.
I've worked for FAR too many companies that have lost $60million in support and maintenance on a sub-par product that sales managed to sell for $30million gross... and then the sales division (and upper management) leave the company for something better. What a surprise.
HelloNurse
A "sales meeting", intended in a loose sense, can cause involuntary and/or uncoordinated pseudo-collusion because it aligns various parties: a level playing field of information (e.g. convincing important managers of many companies that their strategy needs more AI and less actual experts) leads to similar forecasts and similar decisions.
bushbaba
You don’t have sales meetings from a vendor on a cruise ship in the west. Thats considered bribery
inetknght
> Are you sure you didn't just see a sales meeting?
It's possible!
dstroot
Here's an alternative take, but along similar lines. Many high level business leaders in large established companies loathe taking risks and sticking their necks out. Instead, they hire a management consulting company (think McKinsey) who do a study and make recommendations that said executive can take to the other execs, or to the board. If it works, executive takes credit. If not, it was those darn consultants. The thing is, the consultants are giving companies the same advice. In fact, it is even stronger when "competitor A and B" are already doing "strategy C" and they are ahead of you. I've seen this movie many times...
DragonStrength
The Capital Order lays out an argument that austerity measures are ultimately labor suppression, not necessary. Of course, that’s true of many pieces of policy wisdom: they start from an assumed good. In this case, the assumed good is the current winners should remain the winners despite, well, losing.
https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Order-Economists-Invented-Aus...
cyanydeez
I agree that this definitely is labor suppression, but it has a real cause: the end of low interest rates and inflation. They can no longer "grow" their way into their 6 month bonuses, so they basically have to trim fat and if they all collude on doing it, it _can_ work. If they dont all collude, someone gets cheap engine for growth.
firecall
>> why do all these business leaders all do the same things at the same time?
> Because they're told to.
This is largely it.
Consultants rule the earth!
alecco
> Because they're told to.
Blackrock, Vanguard, State Street.
DebtDeflation
Notice how they stopped talking about this after the election?
But yes, together, the Big 3 are the single largest shareholder in 88% of SP500 companies.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-and-politic...
pyuser583
Isn’t this straight up illegal? Anti-trust laws are no jokes. Many conventions have strict rules to prevent it.
I’ve been involved on layoff planning. It can be very cloak and dagger. But you never involve competitors. Ever.
jdlshore
As someone else said, it was probably a sales meeting or other corporate training. You’re off in conspiracy theory land.
No conspiracy theories are needed. Boards are incestious, most board members aren’t all that bright or forward looking, they have a lot of imposter syndrome about it, they worry about getting important trends wrong, and so they follow the herd. CEOs follow the board, companies follow the CEO, voila, everybody does the same thing at the same time.
And yes, I think there is an opportunity to zig while everyone else is zagging.
Also: major institutional investors (such as VCs) demand a seat on the board and then send their B team to actually sit through the board meetings of their less key investments. Those board members follow the investor company’s line, spreading it to lots of companies at once.
7thaccount
Yes, it's most likely they saw some kind of sales meeting, but collusion also happens often. I watched a documentary not long ago about how smart they are about it now. For groceries the major chains just all report each product's price to the same company which then tells them how much they can mark up their products without being undercut. Is it illegal, almost assuredly yes. Is there anybody enforcing this anymore? No.
lumost
There are a lot of venues through which collusion has become legal. Management consulting, private equity investments, conferences etc.
The incentives to collude are powerful.
7thaccount
Management consulting is a big one. It's illegal for companies to all tell each other their prices and costs. What isn't illegal? Apparently each firm hiring McKinsey who will tell you what your competitors costs and prices are because they have "industry knowledge". They'll then share your information too and then everyone can largely figure out how they can set prices above their marginal costs with some nice padding. It's probably still illegal, but it's what these firms do.
jrk
Intel’s situation in 2025 is not comparable to the rest of big tech. They have lost technical leadership, bled market share, and started losing a ton of money in a hugely capital-intensive business. They are actually in need of major triage to survive, not just hopping on a belt-tightening trend among still-massively-profitable software companies.
mbac32768
Yes this. Intel is in deep shit. This is exactly the thing you'd expect their new CEO to say right now.
lotsofpulp
One would hope HN commenters would be able to comprehend a microchip seller not having compelling products to sell means it needs to shrink its business, rather than jump to childish “CEO bad guy” sentiments.
null
ryandrake
It's almost as if CEOs aren't really that smart or creative, got to their position through mostly politics, and look externally for clues about what to do.
thbb123
CEOs like to brag about how AI is going to replace skilled workers. Yet, it should be obvious to anyone having experience in LLMs that top executives are the jobs that are most likely replaceable by AI.
Just keep smooth talking everyone into cost reductions and make arbitrary decisions to make it feel like you're actually in charge.
andsoitis
> anyone having experience in LLMs that top executives are the jobs that are most likely replaceable by AI.
That’s not my assessment. Why do you say that?
9cb14c1ec0
Seems to me like a couple of if-then-else statements could do a better job than some executives.
apwell23
> Yet, it should be obvious to anyone having experience in LLMs that top executives are the jobs that are most likely replaceable by AI.
Yes given those are jobs where hallucination is a feature not a bug
dylan604
Wouldn't that be funny to see an AI bot replace the CEO of something like Boeing, and then see the company turn around in positive moves? Feed an LLM all of the business data that a CEO would have and then ask it to make the same decisions the CEO would be expected to make. Since layoffs would be the trend online for LLMs to train on, would they come up with slop that looks like they too follow the trends? If companies are willing to replace dev with AI, why are boards not looking at all of the C-suite offices with the same mindset?
DaveZale
same with directors. BODs are incestuous, inbred.
The letter seemed contradictory: be a factory, but innovate on AI. Is AI actually smart? Human brains use the power of a dim incandescent light bulb, why does AI require so much power, that the processing chips overheat?
Sure, selected tasks can be done orders of magnitude faster, but do we, for example, really need that kind of output, like pi to a trillion digits? Or AI controlling stock market trading? How much liquidity is necessary for traders other than huge funds?
fijiaarone
It takes me an hour to write 100 lines of slop -- code or text. AI can do it in 1 or 2 minutes. That might have something to do power usage.
jofla_net
Its merely a personality contest, a sociological phenomenon. Humans band around (and more easily listen to) individuals bearing certain personality traits. These traits have very little to do with actual problem solving, and finding the most ideal path forward for an organization. Alot of times they go hand and hand but I'd wager, from the CEOs ive personally met, there are alot of them with just the charismatic set.
zeroCalories
I don't think this is entirely fair. One analogy I like is boat racing. In boat races if you follow someone you're almost always going to do just as well as them. Take a dfferent path and you could get lucky, but just as likley you're going to hit a bad current and throw the whole race. So you follow the crowd and wait for oppritunities to take the lead instead of rolling dices. I don't think they're nessesarily doing anything wrong just because they don't want to do something super aggresive.
pixxel
[dead]
breppp
what would you do if you were the CEO of Intel?
supportengineer
"Please, speak as you might to a young child or a Golden Retriever. It wasn't brains that got me here, I can assure you that."
esafak
He was being modest; he seemed shrewd.
codingwagie
It took me a long time to learn this
dlcarrier
Is this truly about macroeconomic forces that every business is responding to? Or is it just following the latest fad?
Look at it like an economist, who sees everything as market, and the answer to both is: Yes. Fads are just market bubbles. Excess employees are sometimes an asset, regardless of their effectiveness. It gives value to the team manager and sometimes the company itself, and it prevents other companies from having access to those employees. It's not a very efficient tactic, so even a small amount of overemployment can be a bubble that quickly turns from an asset to a liability. What you end up with is employment bubbles at the trailing end of economic rises. They can collapse while the economy is still growing, just because the growth slowed down.Just like any bubble bursting, that is the best time for any well-positioned company to invest in that market. The problem with Intel is that they are far from well positioned. AMD and nVidia each have about a quarter of the employees that Intel has and TSMC has about half. Intel over-invested in employment so the over-employment bubble bursting will hit them hard. Their best bet is to refocus their current employees, but they might not be the right mix, so they may need to have even larger layoffs, while simultaneously highering new employees in pertinent fields.
matt-p
Because it's driven by investor/market sentiment. That's literally all. If your investors have ask you why you've not laid off 10% of your workforce due to AI efficiencies, when that's the prevailing sentiment, then you look incompetent. If in the middle of COVID the sentiment is remote work will drive more tech adoption/usage and money is very cheap then you have to start hiring as many engineers as possible otherwise you look like you're not a growth company or lack confidence. It doesn't matter if it doesn't increase your development cadence, that is not the point. The point is that "the market" is largely vibe based. Right now the vibe is AI companies are hot so as say the meta CEO you start burning a trillion dollars on GPUs, without anyone stopping to question why Facebook needs any more AI, or how it will make it ROI.
teeray
> If your investors have ask you why you've not laid off 10% of your workforce due to AI efficiencies
Ah, see? Prosperity has not come to your business because you have not made the proper offerings to the new AI gods.
SL61
Remember that executives answer to the board of directors. The board's job is to make sure execs do things that make the company money, or in practical terms, "things the board thinks will make the company money".
A sensible, sober CEO would still need a lot of political capital to push back against a boardroom that's hounding them to jump on the latest hype train. You certainly won't get that from a CEO who just took that position a few months ago.
A sensible, sober boardroom that doesn't push their execs to jump on the hype train would need to answer to angry shareholders. It's almost certain that >50% will support the latest fad and would vote out a board that they perceive as being behind the times.
That's where startups and privately owned companies get their natural advantage of being able to go against the grain.
sokoloff
> There seems to be significant opportunity to zig as others zag. Imagine the Intel letter saying "we are going to take advantage of the current hiring environment to scoop up talent, and push forward on initiatives."
I've pitched that a couple times in my career. The difficulty is that, in a lot of cases, your future business prospects are genuinely correlated with the future prospects of other businesses.
Intel is going to sell fewer CPUs in the next 3 years if other businesses aren't hiring and expanding as quickly as they did during COVID. And I think there's a pretty good reason to think that Intel's revenues will actually shrink as a result.
That limits how much zig they can do while others zag.
barchar
Plus there's some reality bending that can go on. Everyone piling capital into something can sometimes make it happen, even if "it" is dumb.
fijiaarone
That logic probably applies to NVIDIA too.
roughly
> There seems to be significant opportunity to zig as others zag.
Historically Apple has done this - Steve Jobs noted at one point that the absolute last thing they were going to do during a recession was to cut R&D, because that was what was going to let them capitalize once the recession was over.
Left as an exercise for the reader is assessing Apple’s financial performance as relates to the rest of the industry, with extra credit for comparing that to the ongoing guidance from the finance industry set.
theflyinghorse
There are no Steve Jobs left in the American tech.
streblo
Intel missed GPUs, missed ARM, missed ASICs, missed everything right under their nose for the last 15 years. This from Andy Grove's "Only the Paranoid Survive" company, a company that in it's own past pivoted from commoditized RAM production to become the one that won the CPU race, a company perfectly positioned to win the next big cycle as the dominant leader in the industry.
This is what happens when the MBAs and the bean counters take over. They cut the fat, then they slice right through the muscle and bone.
ethbr1
> They cut the fat, then they slice right through the muscle and bone.
The issues with MBAs and bean counters are that they rarely have intuition about which is which, and only investing in areas a company is already successful in is rarely a winning long term strategy.
wpm
It was put best by Steve Jobs:
“John [Sculley] came from PepsiCo, and they, at most, would change their product once every 10 years. To them, a new product was, like, a new-size bottle, right? So if you were a product person, you couldn’t change the course of that company very much. So who influenced the success of PepsiCo? The sales and marketing people. Therefore, they were the ones that got promoted, and therefore, they were the ones that ran the company. Well, for PepsiCo, that might have been okay. But it turns out, the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies. Like, oh, IBM and Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox…So you make a better copier or a better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company is not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts usually about wanting to really help the customers.”
I’m watching this happen at my current company. It’s tragic, and so obvious.
dluan
It's happening at Apple right now. The hand picked successor to Steve was the one who could keep the ship running smoothly, not the one who pushed back with new radical product directions.
pzo
It's probably happening to ape right now as well. They haven't released interesting new hardware product like in more than 5 years. Apple vision is interesting but market validated not worth the money they asking.
Worth to compare xiaomi extensive product offering and apple. Even Amazon and Google trying to be more inventive.
xadhominemx
The issue with Intel is certainly not the MBAs, although they are numerous.
The issue is that engineering leadership failed to execute on the process technology roadmap.
dreamcompiler
But it won't cost you your job. Investing in a new strategy that fails might do so.
hn_throwaway_99
> This is what happens when the MBAs and the bean counters take over. They cut the fat, then they slice right through the muscle and bone.
Agree with the first sentence, strongly disagree with the second.
Intel's problems over the past 15 or so years certainly wasn't that they had cut away all the "fat" and then into the "muscle and bone". It was they had gotten too fat and directionless. Indeed, one of the quotes from the letter regarding their foundry business is that they invested in the wrong things: "Over the past several years, the company invested too much, too soon – without adequate demand. In the process, our factory footprint became needlessly fragmented and underutilized. We must correct our course." If they had ruthlessly prioritized before (which may have included getting rid of ill-fated initiatives earlier) they would most likely be in a better position today.
mentos
Heavily paraphrasing but I believe I remember Ed Catmul saying in his Pixar book having slogans like this are dangerous because you just say the thing and don’t actually do it.
BeetleB
> This is what happens when the MBAs and the bean counters take over.
This is a very tiring narrative. People keep complaining about Paul Ottelini missing the iPhone, but his performance at Intel was better than the next 3 CEOs, 2 of which were engineers with roots at Intel.
terminalbraid
It is tiring. It is also the correct description of reality and horrifically pervasive, which is why it is tiring.
BeetleB
When Intel's decline can be clearly linked to engineer CEOs, it's not correct.
iamleppert
You can tell from the tone of this letter and the bizarre reference to agenetic AI he is completely clueless. Compare this to someone like Jensen, a nerd's nerd who gets up on stage with the latest GPU, can talk about new CUDA API's and goes deep on specs like memory bandwidth. He knows exactly who his customer is, and what kinds of workloads they run for AI.
It's just such a massive difference. You can tell Lip-Bu spends his weekends playing golf while Jensen is checking out the latest model from Huggingface.
You can't buy passion or genuine interest in what you're doing.
fossuser
It's one reason why founders matter so much and why founder led companies often have better outcomes.
Intel is in trouble, it's not clear how or if they'll be able to get out of the hole they're in. Their only saving grace is natsec concerns and even that may not be enough to save them. I was hoping Gelsinger would be able to do it, but it was too late.
aurareturn
You can tell from the tone of this letter and the bizarre reference to agenetic AI he is completely clueless.
Why? He's basically saying Intel needs to focus on inference (agentic AI) and not training because they can't catch Nvidia.hn_throwaway_99
Agree and I really appreciate your comment, as it wasn't immediately clear to me from reading the letter.
It's not a "bizarre reference to agentic AI" - it's saying (as you point out) that Intel can't compete in the training (i.e. "compile time") race, but they can in the inference (i.e. "run time") race, which is likely where more spending is going to be anyway in the near/medium future as the scaling hype looks like a dead end.
Mars008
I'm afraid without memory bandwidth they can't compete on inference either. Not on large scale. Which leaves local small models.
combinator_y
[dead]
Tom1380
Look at Jensen's computerphile interview, he's a poser
hackable_sand
> You can tell
For those of us who cannot tell, what are the clues?
Maro
As somebody who works at a large company that routinely uses McKinsey to "set strategy" and "operating model", phrases and actual ideas overlap 100%, even though we are in a completely different business, in a completely different geography.
1. "Q2 2025 revenue above guidance" - Start with fake good news about good Q2 results. Fake because it's baselining on "guidance", which is already low since Wall Street knows Intel is in deep trouble. MBA/Finance types often cherry-pick some (semi-cooked) top-level finance number for good news, even though the whole email is about admitting the company is in deep trouble, announcing layoffs, etc.
2. "We are making hard but necessary decisions to streamline the organization..." - not hard for him, but the people losing their jobs!
3. "We are also on track to implement our return-to-office policy in September" - contract this with later comments about improving culture and empowering engineers!
4. "drive organizational effectiveness and transform our culture" - large companies with ~100k employees don't change their culture, but CEOs love to pretend so. To CEOs, transforming culture usually means making some reporting line changes, directing HR to do do some surveys and "listening sessions", firing teams with low NPS scores and thus forcing people to up their scores on subsequent surveys, and then a few months later declaring victory.
5. "We will eliminate bureaucracy and empower engineers to innovate with greater speed and focus." - for example, by forcing them back to the office? Nothing in this emil indicates actual empowerment.
6. "Strategic Pillars of Growth" - typical MBA speak.
7. "We remain deeply committed to investing in the U.S." ... "To that end, we are further slowing construction in Ohio" - great example of executive double-speak.
8. If you actually parse what this is saying, it's essentially about layoffs, cost-cutting, stopping some investment projects, RTO, and "doubling down" on existing projects like 18A and 14A. No trace of innovation in organizational culture, product design, etc.
9. "I have instituted a policy where every major chip design is reviewed and approved by me before tape-out. This discipline will improve our execution and reduce development costs." - we are improving culture by stating that only the MBA-speak CEO can make good decisions about chip designs, the other 74,999 people are idiots who slow down execution and improve costs!
10. If you look at the "Refine our AI Strategy", it's short and only has obvious things, like "will concentrate our efforts on areas we can disrupt and differentiate, like inference and agentic AI". There is no information here, because of course Intel already lost to Nvidia on training/GPUs, so training isn't a good focus area. But it's pretty shocking that in 2025 there is no actual ideas for what Intel could do in the AI space!
consp
So it is pretty much kabuki and micro management all the way from the top down. What a time to be an intel engineer.
HDThoreaun
Youre expe3cting their CEO to speak like a founder when he isnt one. Corporate speak is unavoidable in these roles, it doesnt mean he is aloof.
pertymcpert
The heck would you know? LBT studied physics and did a masters in nuclear engineering at MIT, he then started but left a PhD in that subject at MIT. He's not some clueless management scrub.
Even in this letter he says he's going to be reviewing major chip designs before tape out. JFC...
bigstrat2003
If Jensen was that much of a nerd, he wouldn't be into AI grifting, but would be excited about games. He's into AI because he's a businessman, not a nerd.
tptacek
If there's one thing I've learned in my 48 years of nerding out, it's that all of us are into games. If you're not into games, you're not a nerd. Seems simple.
dreamcompiler
I dunno. I can build a CPU from a bucket of transistors, design an ISA for it, microcode it, and write an OS for it in assembler. But games bore the shit out of me.
Except flight simulators. They're great as long as they have realistic physics.
signa11
why would you run other peoples programs when you can make your own run those ?
lotsofpulp
Real life can also be played like a game, by nerds and non nerds.
tokioyoyo
You call it AI grifting, other observer calls it selling shovels for $4.24T.
bobsmooth
As a gamer, I'm really looking forward to how devs will integrate AI into future games. I want immersive NPCs that don't repeat the same lines over and over.
SV_BubbleTime
I heard about this cool MechaHitler game, but they pulled it before I got to try.
mlsu
Another flipflop. Canceling the Germany fab, bringing SMT back.
> Looking further ahead, we’re developing Intel 14A as a foundry node from the ground up in close partnership with large external customers. This is essential to designing a process that meets specific customer requirements and enables us to address a broader segment of the market. Going forward, our investment in Intel 14A will be based on confirmed customer commitments. There are no more blank checks. Every investment must make economic sense. We will build what our customers need, when they need it, and earn their trust through consistent execution.
are these large external customers in the room with us right now?
wbeckler
I hope that pun is intentional.
null
scoreandmore
Intel was ~20k when I started in 1988. When we started to flirt with 100k in 1999~2004 there were so many senior people complaining what it would do to bonuses and raises and revenue… everyone started getting the executive bonus and stock options around this time, too, not just grade 7+, which added to the fear and greed. People were claiming Intel only had “5 years left” and more than a few smart people left. Hindsight is always 20/20, but I really think it was 20 years of stagnation and failure to take risks that landed them in such a fragile position to respond to disruption. Just weird looking back on the new-hire-a-phobia from 25 years ago.
lynguist
Intel headcount in 2022 was 131,900. Intel’s projected headcount for 2025 is 75,000. Intel fired 43% of its staff over the course of 3 years (when approximating natural retirements at zero and assuming a stop in new employments).
ac29
> Intel headcount in 2022 was 131,900.
Not sure if you intentionally picked the all time high headcount, but you did.
Intel's headcount was relatively stable between 100-110k people between 2014 and 2021 [0]. So, getting down to 75k is definitely still a major reduction, but 2022 was also an outlier. A lot of companies overhired during Covid, and Intel particularly was the beneficiary of WFH pulling in a lot of corporate spending on laptops etc.
[0] https://morethanmoore.substack.com/p/intel-2025-q1-financial...
irrational
And who did they fire? Everyone with longevity and experience. Makes sense from an accountant’s perspective. Those would be the people with the highest salaries. Doesn’t make sense from a technical perspective.
HDThoreaun
Intel is/was a Bureaucratic hell hole. The people with longevity and experience definitely needed to be on the chopping block. Time for some creative destruction over there, the longest tenured are the ones who set the culture and the culture was crap.
salawat
Then get rid of the management doing the layoff too, as when you're talking culture, they are most responsible for it.
electriclove
More cutting is needed. Nvidia has 36000 employees today.
hn_throwaway_99
NVidia is fabless, so that's an awful comparison.
electriclove
Ok, cut Intel's employee count in half. It is still underperforming.
tibbar
It's honestly impressive. Even during the major tech cuts of 2022-2023, I think many companies ended up about the same size or a even little larger over the course of a year, due to all the other hiring happening and the fact that the cuts may have partially overlapped with existing performance management anyway. 43% an incredible shrinkage for any company in such a short timescale.
whatever1
So cut headcount and pray that things will get better! Inspiring vision! It will definitely work !
ryandrake
It wouldn't be the first time an Intel CEO resorted to prayer[1] as their business implodes.
1: https://www.threads.com/@masiosare/post/C-SoS6qJbU6?hl=en
kstrauser
"Well actually..."
That wasn't a prayer. It was a quote from Proverbs, a collection of pithy sayings and life advice. Other quotes from it include "above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it" and "pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall". It's literally a book of, well, proverbs. Many are religious, but plenty of others are general life advice.
combinator_y
lol I forgot about this one, Intel have a very big collection of weirdo execs I guess.
stevenAthompson
You're missing the point. Sure, they're going to just keep doing what they've always done, but this time they're going to do it HARDER and with 15% fewer people!
javier2
So just like the plan they executed in 2023 and 2024! It must start working at some point right?
Coffeewine
Admittedly, just because something hasn’t bourn fruit doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad plan. All they need is a major stumble by TSMC or AMD or some tailwinds themselves and they could start looking much better.
neverrroot
It worked for Twitter, very well from an IT point of view.
astrange
Twitter fired all the advertising account managers, and no longer makes money because it essentially no longer has ads.
conradfr
It definitely has ads every four tweets and in the comments.
SlowTao
It wasn't a total collapse like some were expecting, they haven't really done much new however. Cutting some of the fat was a good idea but they might have gone a little too lean in places.
kevinventullo
Genuine question: what makes you think Twitter is profitable? As far as I can tell, the numbers are a secret.
owebmaster
It works great for Twitter. Every other month there is a strategy failure to get some media attention.
neverrroot
I still remember the doom preached at the crossroads. Guess what happened over the next years.
dyauspitr
Twitter doesn’t make a profit. It’s propped up by a billionaire so he can have social clout.
geodel
I mean hiring a lot over years did not make things any better so why not try the reverse.
givemeethekeys
The beatings will continue until morale improves. Layoffs and Return to Office!
Imagine doing what all your competitors are doing while being one of the least desirable big tech companies to work for.
What could possibly go wrong? /s
gishglish
> Imagine doing what all your competitors are doing while being one of the least desirable big tech companies to work for.
Good thing you have very few of them because your industry is way too capital intensive to start a competitor now.
I am generally curious what capitalisms proposed solution to this problem is.
givemeethekeys
Every large tech company is a competitor for Intel's talent.
MPSFounder
Offshore. There's your solution bud
DebtDeflation
He will announce they're selling the foundry business within the next 12-18 months. I'm certain of it.
donmcronald
That would suck.
I bought INTC to hold for 10-20 years based on the promise of long term investment in domestic manufacturing. I didn't care if they took a decade to battle back. Seeing them sell of the foundry business would be enough for me to cut my losses before the titanic hits the ocean floor. They'd be a walking corpse at that point IMO.
WoodenChair
If they spin off the foundry it's very possible stockholders will end up having stock in both companies. If they sell it for cash that's another story.
cubefox
To Nvidia?
twoodfin
If I were Nvidia, the last thing I’d want is a foundry. Much better to have multiple capital-intensive suitors—and governments!—bending over backwards for my business.
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axoltl
It'd be the final piece of Apple's vertical integration puzzle.
delfinom
Why would Apple want a foundry years behind anything TSMC is doing?
cubefox
Apple is mostly selling mobile devices, so power efficiency is very important. Which means they need cutting edge TSMC nodes. For Nvidia, being server based, power efficiency (electricity cost) is less a concern I believe.
HDThoreaun
nvidia does not want a fab. Their product relies on being the best, that means they need to chase the best fab, not tie themselves down.
MinimalAction
That letter really does not inspire investor or employee confidence. Seems to be written to falsely bolster a sense of we-have-it-together-folks, but nothing seems to be a concrete plan to generate capital. So far, they announced lay-offs and discontinuation of several plants to save capital, rather than precisely pointing where are they signing new customers. Interesting times. We are seeing a new Kodak in the falling.
Coffeewine
> Across client and data center, I’ve directed our teams to define next-generation product families with clean and simple architectures, better cost structures and simplified SKU stacks. In addition, I have instituted a policy where every major chip design is reviewed and approved by me before tape-out. This discipline will improve our execution and reduce development costs.
One would hope they would figure out if a design was a good fit for the company well before tapeout. Ideally before they were done with the rtl.
imperfect_light
Anyone have examples of companies that were in trouble and cut employees and spending heavily and that led them back to success?
My personal experience with working for such companies is that it leads to a death spiral, but I recognize my sample size is small.
bfrog
Intel is absolutely in a death spiral. Not much else to say. They are cutting cost with no real plan on growth if they are saying they won't invest in the foundry anymore. Foundry was a solid play by Pat, really their only play. Instead Intel seems set to lose whatever remaining relevance they have to their Arm, TSM, Nvidia, and AMD competitors which have a lead in both design and manufacturing a decade in the making.
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jonnycoder
Apple but only because of Steve
Jensson
Most big companies has done that at some point, why would it lead to a death spiral? Death spiral happens when you cut too late, so you are forced to cut but you are still running a deficit and just has to cut and cut and cut without thinking.
imperfect_light
I'm not arguing that layoffs lead to a death spiral.
I'm arguing that if you're on a downward trajectory and your primary strategy is layoffs and cutting expenses, rather than investing, you're not going to recover.
AIorNot
Having been on board meetings - most people just follow the trends - honestly musk triggered this way back when he laid of twitter and nothing happened
BeetleB
Twitter was not a capital heavy business.
electriclove
Yeah people still have a hard time accepting how effective that was.
booleandilemma
To any software engineer, it was obvious that was going to work.
Software companies are bloated with people who...don't make software.
barchar
I mean they also have a large number of people producing investment goods vs doing operations. If you cut the former it's gunna take quite a few years to see the effect.
Twitter was never an attractive business and isn't one now, unless the goal is to have control over the hype cycle.
The strangest part to me about the current trends: why do all these business leaders all do the same things at the same time? E.g. Layoffs + micromanagement + cost focus etc... Is this truly about macroeconomic forces that every business is responding to? Or is it just following the latest fad?
There seems to be significant opportunity to zig as others zag. Imagine the Intel letter saying "we are going to take advantage of the current hiring environment to scoop up talent, and push forward on initiatives."