It’s never happened before, but maybe this is when it starts. In all honesty, I wouldn’t mind it if that’s the case. Getting rid of the most experienced and knowledgeable people just because they earn the most has never made sense to me. It only serves to hurt the company in the long run.
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Performance and attendance does matters. I would worry if you have a Written Warning, received an Improvement Required, or always on some kind of Medical Leave.
Be honest with yourself, how does Intel benefit, how does your team benefit by keeping you?
@1zm The Hunger Games start at the conclusion of the Worker Fun event.
No reason for the sheeple to be hungry until they are fired.
@1zm Performance always matters, but especially after these layoffs when the competition for the relatively few remaining roles and any chance of advancement will be fierce.
Going forward, expect to see cloud ranking and periodic termination of the lowest performers. May not see any 'layoffs' for a long time, just a constant churn of new hires and conversion of existing workers to 'customer'.
This is no different from any of the larger tech companies right now, and for the foreseeable future.
The performance terminations start in July, the day after the current hunger games has concluded, and are expected to wrap up..never.
Welcome to the New Normal.
@1mc Stupid kids thought performance didn't matter.
Now they get to move back in with their parents.
@1gt OP is asking if this round of layoffs is performance based and the answer is as usual, somewhat.
The largest reductions are not about performance of the individual, but decisions about products and projects.
The company has plenty of low performers but not 21,000.
Performance based terminations are what is almost certainly what is coming. Read about what all the other tech companies are doing, or just read the descriptions of the other posters on this topic.
That will enable the lowest performers to be routinely terminated, while new hires are brought onboard, enabling the company to keep headcount flat to down while still trying to improve performance.
Intel should have been doing this all along. Management got lazy.
This is a stupid post. The layoffs are indeed based on performance. The company has ZERO incentives to fire smart people. That would work against the managers and companies self interest.
Sure there are rare cases where good people get let go, but be intellectually honest... for the most port the weakest players hit the street.
PIP is even better than cloud ranking, because it randomly selects most workers to be pushed out of the company, regardless of what their manager thinks.
But add PIP and Cloud Ranking together and you get a twofer.
Add in AI adoption and it becomes a win-win-win
@13z+ The Rank part is completed, with only the Yank part to be done.
Do this a few dozen more times and everything will be pretty awesome!
@hc+1 Bunch of tech companies have announced versions of the Jack Welch, GE style of cloud ranking, as part of an effort to hold down headcount while constantly bringing in RCGs and other new people.
All these companies need to stay sharp on various technology, not the least of which is AI. But it is too expensive to keep adding headcount so they are all getting very serious about performance management.
Many of these companies are doing PIP whether they call it that or not, and that is designed to force employees to prove they should remain employed, regardless of their existing performance rating.
PIP is essentially making workers reapply for their job, on a regular basis.
I have no doubt whatsoever that is what is coming to Intel, as the company needs to seriously upgrade technical talent and shed a whole generation of low performers.
Anyone born after about 1990 is gonna get a serious reality check.
@hc Rank & Yank is back in style.
Now comes the semiannual hunger games, where the Bottom 5% are chosen from each group.
I heard HR rep saying it was going to be like oh my god, like totally, I'm sure.
The immediate layoffs are more about restructuring but have no doubt that what follows is a multiyear period where underperformers are routinely terminated.
At the same time the company will be hiring, to try to improve engineering and also to replace those it terminated.
This is what all the tech companies are doing and if anything it is getting more intense as they prepare for adoption of AI to eventually replace many of the workers.
Cloud Ranking is making a comeback!
Meta wants managers to put 15% to 20% of employees in the bottom bucket compared with 12% to 15% last year.
Managers can select employees for performance cuts based on criteria including a "below expectations" rating in their midyear review, if they were formally disciplined within the past six months, or if they had an "employee relations" case in the first quarter.
Those cases are when an employee was on a plan to manage their performance.
@c2 It's all fun and games till security taps you on the shoulder.
@c2+1j This isn't about WFH, but interesting that you went there..
@cb That IT and HR team (~6 people) work at this full time and someone is terminated almost daily for various violations.
Remember, it is a big company, so a few hundred or even a thousand or so terminations would not be noticed by many people.
They would not maintain the cost of the team if it did not produce results.
I reposted some comments made on another thread because they seemed appropriate.
I used to work with IT and was aware of how they support HR in rooting out IP theft.
That monitoring has become far more advanced in recent years, but is used at the discretion of HR, so it may seem like nothing has changed yet it has.
In any case, for legal reasons the terminations which result from this activity are kept quiet so unless you know someone affected and they spoke to you after being fired, then you might notice they are gone but not know why.
I wasn't trying to make anyone paranoid with this info, but be aware and do the right thing.
You may still get laid off but no reason to give the company a reason to deny you an exit package.
@c7 Unless you know the people involved then you wouldn't know they had been walked.
There are countless examples, including some where entire groups were terminated for policy violations, like setting up their tools then going (repeatedly) bowling.
Yes that actually happened.
None of this gets advertised and I'd agree that in the past the company was historically very lax with policy, but that was when the company had huge market share or even a near monopoly in various markets.
NOW, the company has lost that dominance and it may not come back. At the least the company is getting more serious about terms of employment as part of the effort to be more competitive.
Get with it or risk being pushed out.
Performance is an arbitrary measure of bias at Intel
@c6+1
I've been at my site for over 20 years. People are not being walked for various policy issues. The only time people are being walked is either during an ISP (usually the poorest performer or someone who can't get along with their peers) or for being caught doing something illegal (timecard fraud, coming to work intoxicated, etc). There are a variety of people out there working the system that are skating by until their manager has the opportunity to cut them (ie ISP). I don't work at one of the newer sites, so maybe my site is the anomaly, but there is definitely no Big Brother activities going on over here.
@c5+1 Not sure why you would think it is not an issue when people are currently being walked for various policy issues.
As the poster said, HR ramps up this activity when headcount reductions are happening.
No need to be paranoid about it but understand that the monitoring capabilities are being upgraded all the time. The days when none of this mattered are long gone.
Not just Intel doing this, If anything they remain far behind other tech companies. Intel has always been lax about performance but is now focusing intently on it.
Every now and then the situation changes and this is one of those times.
I have been witness to enough people working the system at my site to know that none of this is happening. A manager I know couldn't even get badge swipe information from Security on an employee he suspected of swiping and leaving for hours at a time. I can't speak for all sites, but at my site this is far from the truth. You literally have to get caught red-handed to get fired/disciplined.
@by+1 Anyone who has managed to remain employed for more than 10 years has seen how others have been summarily dismissed along the way.
I'd agree that the job code is a factor, and that those who are considered replaceable (regardless of experience) are most at risk.
Even where they have done nothing wrong, they are still the first to be selected by HR and management for CPM.
Regardless of job code, staying too long in grade is another great way to get pushed out, as the company sees that as stagnation. In many cases it is that the employee is satisfied with what they are doing, but that makes no difference.
Also, anyone who has more than one manager or is in any way not visible to their manager (works at another site, WFH, whatever) is at high risk of CPM.
Reality is that very few roles are considered hard to replace. That even includes some roles which require a PhD or other highly specialized training. There are a few people in TD and chip design who are considered high value and everyone else is at risk.
@c2+1 This effort is ongoing. HR gets very active when the company is doing headcount actions.
This is not fake news.
The fear mongering in this thread is hilarious. No one is going to check historical badge scans of hybrid workers to decide who gets laid off this round. That might happen in the future after hybrid is better enforced but not this time.
Keyboard content is also monitored as well as various measures of productivity.
If you are on site then you've got an assigned workstation, and both the RFID in your badge as well as the cameras are recording your movement.
Nothing special or unique about any of this. Tech companies have been escalating employee monitoring for years and many other large companies do the same.
When they need to do headcount actions, this data can be rolled up and with AI, it doesn't take much effort to rank and yank the low performers.
Think about it. If you are a productive employee, you don't waste time hanging out in the cafe, sleeping in your car, posting gibberish on various social media sites and such.
The people who are recorded doing those things are not useful employees to any company.
HR aggressively seeks terminations for cause when the company is doing headcount reductions.
It is the perfect time to shed those who are violating company policy. They otherwise mostly rely on reporting to catch those people.
There is no severance package or unemployment when an employee is terminated for cause, making it a win-win for Intel.
HR & IT have a team that constantly scans for company policy violations on the network, and they go into overdrive when there is a call to generate performance-based terminations.
If you get invited to a meeting with IT, know that you will have about 5 minutes to explain why you should not be terminated, and the chance of success is very low at that point.
That will be your LDI (Last Day at Intel).
A bit late for those who have been abusing the hybrid policy, but know that badge scans, the RFID in your badge and AI-assisted cameras have been in use for years.
Whenever the company needs to generate a list for terminations, data like this is analyzed and acted upon.
The rest of the time it has in the past only been used when an issue was brought to HR attention, such as reports about some entire fab shift not being on site.
A lot of newer employees are likely not aware of how much monitoring the company does. It is the same at all larger tech companies.
The cameras are doing facial recognition as you enter and leave.
The badge is just part of it.
The RFID tag in your badge tracks you throughout the facility.
You can choose to believe it or not, but Intel was actually doing all this before it became popular at Amazon and other tech companies. Intel was doing it to catch people who were stealing or otherwise needed to be watched.
They added AI to these systems, which used to just be recorded and lightly monitored.
Amazon is now showing all the other companies what the new AI workplace will be, so read up on how that is going because if you are working at all, it will be in that environment.
May get to a point where you never meet your human manager, kind of like how it is for amazon drivers and warehouse workers now. They work for an app, and the app is paying close attention to what they are doing at all times.
I think the correct answer depends on what value the role is considered to add, and that the worker experience is a secondary matter.
If they are in a job role which is considered relatively easy to onboard, then it doesn't matter how experienced they are, and the company can reduce cost by encouraging turnover.
This is why fab workers are routinely walked off the premises, even where they have decades of experience. It doesn't get riskier than that.
People would like to think there is some tenure but there isn't. It is a relatively simple HR calculation which is attempting to identify the roles where experience matters. Everyone else is at high risk of being pushed out.
If you have been in a role for years and are not advancing in grade, consider that a red flag no matter what you bring to the role.
Sorry, life is harsh and then you die.
This round will likely be reorg based. They are determining which work will continue and what things to stop doing entirely. The next round(s) will have more performance based actions.
Intel has done performance based headcount reductions in the past (SET, ACT). It does make a lot of sense to cut the bottom performers if you trying to become more efficient and retain your best workers. LBT has already stated that doing the early retirement layoffs the in 2023 and 2024 were a major mistake and as a result Intel lost a lot of critical experience. That is why enhanced retirement is not being offered this time.
Bean counters don't care about experience or knowledge. They are paid to cut costs and save money. PERIOD. FACT.