Have you looked at the tools we use to run these factories? Archaic doesn’t even begin to cover it. It’s a miracle anything makes it out the door. We operate in a black box—limited visibility into the process, barely any actionable data at the line, let alone post-escape. We're not managing advanced manufacturing; we’re performing a séance and hoping the spirits align.
Our automation systems? Imagine a tangle of spaghetti code duct-taped to tribal knowledge, with a UI that feels like a late-90s SharePoint experiment. Want intuitive interfaces or seamless automation that actually reduces manual errors? That’s for the competition. At Intel, we write dense, rarely-read wikis about TD “advanced” features that never see standardization. Each factory invents its own flavor of inefficiency. Fixing one tool’s issue takes weeks, and god forbid you try to reuse that fix—your neighbor’s system speaks a completely different dialect of disaster.
And let’s talk about our priorities. Not yield. Not device health. Nope—CE! Let’s obsess over naming conventions and tweak charts that don’t correlate to product quality, just so we can say we’re “aligned.” Meanwhile, our metrology gaps are Grand Canyon-sized, but instead of investing in solutions, we tighten irrelevant specs and then act shocked when product suffers. Do we learn? No. We blame “product mix.”
I’ve hoped for reform—for vision, for ingenuity to be rewarded, for leadership to actually lead. Instead, what do we get? Commitments missed with clockwork regularity. Leaders who fail upward like it’s a competitive sport. Talented engineers and insightful ICs shown the door, while the low-performers cling to the wreckage like barnacles. So much for a “targeted” layoff.
Failure, as bleak as it sounds, may be our only way out. We’ve burned through every other option. Lip Bu Tan—you say you want to change the culture. Fantastic. How do you plan to make this an engineering-driven company again, when Intel hasn’t operated with technical integrity in over a decade?