I was at Intel for 23 years and retired just before layoffs were announced (no buy out :( )… I busted my a-s for most of those to include working on my days off (I was exempt) on projects. Most of the people I’ve seen bad-mouthed here did too. It wasn’t for lack of effort or dedication that we fell from grace.
We believed our own propaganda: we were going to advance Moore’s Law and it was a destiny to lead the industry just because we were Intel. In truth, we made the wrong bet on Lithography technology and couldn’t deliver on 10nm…in 2015/16, we gave up the lead. When they merged D1 Ramp, PTD and D1C, they lost most of the Ramp engineers and line managers who knew how to bring up a line. The PTD engineers weren’t used to having limited tools/people and working within a budget. We became focused on hot box performance rather than tool availability and fleet health and our yield was cr-p when we tried to go to high volume.
Even still, TSMC just ki-led us on costs. They can make it cheaper, they spent money and they had thousands of wafer starts per week to improve their processes rather than the hundreds we tried to ramp with. I think we were doomed for the past 8 years…didnt’ know it then because I trusted the judgement of the people I worked for who were very smart and dedicated….but, in restropect, wrong.
I had techs who would obviously sham and take 4 hour breaks…but I had more that I was worried about NOT coming of the factory and work 8 hours straight to finish a PM.
DEI did su-k not because it’s bad (we actually needed it to get the workers we (thought ) we needed but because we were just so bad at it. It was more performative than effective. It was all about numbers and taking the right pictures for our advertising rather than finding talented DEI candidates and keeping them. I can’t tell you how many female managers we lost from the fab just because they weren’t challenged..most them went off to Google, Microsoft or the defense industry with one or two years at Intel on their resume (which was a good thing then).