What was the exact moment? Are we just horrible employees? Horrible engineers? Businessmen? When did we transition to the company that’s going to be sold off into parts?
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The only known cure for PDS (Pat Derangement Syndrome) is to pray for more Pat.
I don't believe OP ever worked for Intel.
@sn
You lay the blame on Pat, and yet all he planned for is now coming to fruition. Had he not been fired, he would have been hailed as a genius.
Regardless, the real problem with intel's rot started well before him.
The minute they put a bean counter in charge.
Intel has been on a downhill path since the late 90s and even before then was a boring place to work since the jobs there were so specialized, leading to monotony from doing the same things over and over again. Many of its managers were unbelievably rude and arrogant as well, which made it a miserable place to work. I remember hearing stories about one who papered over the windows in a conference room before abusing a female subordinate inside it while another one kept watch outside.
Pat destroyed this company. The death and disappearance of Intel is on his hands. It is legacy. To be responsible for eliminating the very company he claims to love so dearly
Buying into Pats rhetoric and bullsh-t
Half the company can't coherently speak English
DEI initiatives.
- People complain about Otellini and Apple. The reality was we didn't have a product for Apple (sure as he-l wasn't Atom), his bigger mistake was selling the ARM license to Marvel - which came from Intel's mistake of not finding a way to make ARM work alongside x86. And it really comes back to Intel's insular thinking and its arrogance. ARM was considered inferior because it didn't have the same performance.
- BK. Period. He was running fabs/manufacturing before becoming CEO and that's when things started falling apart. Then his disastrous mistake on EUV. And again, driven by Intel's insular thinking and its arrogance of "we know better"
- Intel's aversion to anything or anyone from the outside. We ran external hires out over and over and over at every level - be it ELT, be it junior engineers, or be it sales. We avoided any objective viewpoint that wasn't born from decades of "intel experience". Because we're different. Or something.
Insular thinking and arrogance. We know better. But we did this in 1988 and it worked then, so of course it will work now. We pretend to be "constructive confrontation" and "risk taking" and all that stuff. But the reality is we are a dinosaur that is stuck in our ways because we know better, we aren't taking any big risks outside of what we know with x86, and we are not gonna listen to someone from the outside tell us we're wrong, otherwise we'll cut you loose.
To add to your points. We didn’t see or learn from what happened to others in 10nm. We could have learned from the mistakes of others to avoid falling into same traps and landmines but we didn’t. Which makes us look even worse.
The 10nm fiasco was the canary in the coalmine, when things started dying. But the seeds were planted years before. Intel culture doesn't recognize & promote engineering talent, instead promotes PowerPoint and spreadsheet pushers.
IMHO - several - not just one.
- The board with short term / stock price and high margin goals
- BK and refusal to introduce EUV and we lost process leadership.
- We claimed to be paranoid of comp - never saw that.
- GPU's - spent billions, many different leaders, no real impact.
- Gave up on are ARM products because x86 was to be used for everything.
Really bad HR leadership and practices over the last 10 years. Massive hiring of employees without the right future skill sets, over burdensome performance management practices, minimal technical / innovative development and not weaving DEI into the fabric of what we do. I could go on and on, but let me get to number 2 or 1A in my list……FINANCE! They were given to much influence and decision making. They ki-led everything from Larrabbee to Apple because it did not add up at the time…….then Zinsner jumps on board the last three years and goes on a drunken sailor spending spree….it was totally out of control. I am
Glad they have cut finance by about 50% of headcount. Maybe now they can just do accounting and stay out of the decision making.
BK’s whiff on EUV ki-led the company. It’s that simple. It’s a volume game, and when you can’t make a leading edge chip, you are finished.
Silicon Jesus just hastened the downfall. Missing on mobile locked the path in, but Intel could’ve led the way in AI. This company has been run by crooks for over a decade.
The instant Intel failed was 20 years ago when they decided not to build anymore factories and run the old machines until they failed so executives to increase their profits. Remember 3D Crosspoint and the Qbit chips? They were all scams and each employee who warned about Intel's collapse was laid off until the staff was filled with obedient loyal workers that would follow Intel off the cliff.
Agreed with what you called hypnotic comment of Pat. Add in a slurry of hiring in an army of bad engineers for 10-15 years and inflating their egos telling them that they are great. This culture Pat created took those bad engineers and made them worse. And viola! We are where we are today!
It also started our reputation for being cocky dou--ebags who lied. So many lies that had at first a small amount of people calling us out. But that grew and grew with each lie. It was almost our business strategy to lie to the market. We would claim to be the first to do something in the whole world saw that but a follow up by those in the no would prove that we didn’t achieve what we said we did. But by that time, the world had moved on and only remembers that we were first. It worked for awhile. Better part of a decade honestly. But it was going to eventually catch up to us.
"The fish rots from the head down." Nowhere is this more true than at Intel. Decades of poor management, bad leadership, and missed opportunities have led to this. An IC at Intel is no more responsible for this mess than a janitor. We (the employees) have given it our all trying to realize each CEO's successively bad plans. We've watched as opportunities obvious to the entire world (iphones, anyone?) were dismissed by "leadership". We've screamed upward as great products/ideas (the NUC, WiDi, etc.) were poorly executed or simply dropped. If any of us had the power to change Intel's downward spiral, we'd be rich now. Many of us have stayed out of loyalty to a company that over the years gave us our livelihood. Many have stayed because they've been here so long the idea of interviewing for a new job terrifies them. Many have jumped ship out of a sense of self preservation; as they said in Wargames "the only winning move is not to play." However each one of us got to where we are, we all share a sense of frustration and dread with each new CEO, knowing the most likely outcome is more bad decisions, more missed opportunities, and more punishment to the actual workers from those in power.
2 bad moves by past leadership for sinking the ship: (1) not recognizing importance and evolution of mobile computing i.e. cell phones and now (2) the fast market explosion of AI (no competitive products) is putting the Titanic underwater.
2007 when a co-worker came in showing his brand new iPhone and we all stood around in a circle being amazed watching him use his finger to click on normal looking webpages on his phone. After about a minute we all looked up and understood we were all fu---d.
Grove was actually a rather kkrappyy CEO. He was not really a true tech visionary (had to be swayed from the memory biz to cpus) and his arrogant awholle personality infected the company structure and behavior. His myth is waaaay overblown.
Too many VSP also accelerated Intel demise , also too much focus on foundary business hit another nail in head ; last but not the least , I still felt Pat’s energy lead us in wrong direction , I felt he was more of hypnotic where he was able to somehow show folks that things are progressing well unless his sudden resignation…. I think one lawsuit filed against pat and Dave is right one ;also i feel myself being individual contributor was also mislead over past 4 years …
When their strategy to get into Mobile failed three times in five years.
I don’t think layoff every year is right idea , you can see lots of email regarding recent meta layoffs, we failed b/c of bad decision at top level, last 4 years were make/break under Pat but we know where we are now … I wish board sells the foundary business and let’s chip division survives so that Intel as a brand can exists ..
The day Andy Grove retired in 2005. I watched the whole thing happen.
There was no one single event. I firmly believe HR policy ki-led the company over at least 20 years. The old FOCAL was childish and promoted individualism and seriously contributed to the lack of teamwork that ultimately led to death by a thousand cuts. Of course, there were many bad big decisions and terrible leaders, but Intel rotted from within and HR was the single biggest contributor to Intel's demise. Just consider: if Intel was truly getting rid of the lowest 5 - 10% per year, every year for the past 25 years under a FOCAL or other HR system, would Intel be in the situation it's in now and has been in for 10+ years? If we promoted the best and brightest, would BK have risen to become CEO? In any given year, Intel should have at least 20 - 30 individuals that could be CEO on any given day and we have no one... Good day. GLTA.
When we told ourselves skills and intellect is not more important than a-s kissing
When we lost the 1 GHz race. But the terribleness was self contained for a long long time
A: When the WMT project was greenlit, doomed to failure as an architecture, and Haifa's Merom took over. From then on Intel was no longer an American run company. I was there and saw it all.
Right before we lost the contract with Apple was I think the last time we had a chance to turn things around. Even then I remember no one was phased at losing them as a customer, those attitudes should have been a warning
BK Day 1
When did Intel become such a terrible company?
GPT-4o mini is saying:
The perception of Intel as a "terrible" company can vary widely among individuals and is often influenced by specific experiences, market performance, and product offerings. Many people began to express dissatisfaction with Intel around the mid-2010s, particularly due to several factors:
Manufacturing Delays: Intel faced significant delays in transitioning to smaller process nodes, particularly the 10nm process, which allowed competitors like AMD to gain market share with their Ryzen processors.
Increased Competition: AMD's resurgence with its Ryzen and EPYC processors provided strong competition, leading to better performance and value for consumers, which contrasted with Intel's offerings at the time.
Product Stagnation: Some consumers felt that Intel's product innovation had slowed, with incremental updates rather than groundbreaking advancements, particularly in the consumer CPU market.
Security Vulnerabilities: The discovery of vulnerabilities like Spectre and Meltdown in 2018 raised concerns about Intel's security practices and the performance impact of patches.
Market Strategy: Some critics argue that Intel's focus on high-margin products and data center solutions led to neglect in other areas, such as consumer CPUs and integrated graphics.
While these factors contributed to a negative perception, it's important to note that Intel remains a major player in the semiconductor industry and continues to invest in research and development. The company's reputation can vary based on individual perspectives and experiences.
First as a trickle then as a flood
SET
I mean ACT
I mean CPM1
I mean CPM2
When did the ELT stop trusting the masses with the truth?