I used to work at Intel. Left a few years back. Even then, most things in that company were a mess. First big issue? No meritocracy. You could totally botch a project, and nothing would happen—there were always "objective" excuses, so the people responsible never faced consequences. Wasting resources was insane—multiple teams across different locations working on the same projects, creating internal competition and just absurdly burning through money. Building teams across far-flung locations was d-mb as he-l—caused collaboration issues, time zone headaches, and long, pointless business trips. Meetings were a huge time su-k. Then there were these ridiculous, ideology-driven trainings. No real way to objectively evaluate employees. Acquisitions? Total disasters. I can’t think of a single one that was a win for Intel. That place was dysfunctional years ago, and looking at the current situation, nothing’s changed. They roll out a new CPU, and surprise—it’s got basic performance issues. Unreal. The quality of management is a complete trainwreck. The biggest flaw in Intel’s culture was this idea that managers shouldn’t actively contribute to the projects they oversee—just manage. That cut them off from what was actually happening on the ground. So, all the managers, from the lowest level up, just churned out PowerPoint decks and sat in meetings all day. That’s the opposite of what I’ve seen in companies that actually succeed. At Intel, a ton of managers are straight-up clueless about the tech.
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dysfunctional is what you get when managers hire their friends regardless of their qualifications. i could name names. Buy We all know what country they're from.
Intel's been dysfunctional longer that I have been there, for 15 years. Too many people without any real leadership experience making decisions.
Very good observations! You are lucky that you have left all the mess behind.
OP, that’s exactly how I see it, you summed it up nicely well said.
""You could totally botch a project, and nothing would happen—there were always "objective" excuses, so the people responsible never faced consequences. ""
FDIV bug wrecked us. That just recently 'celebrated' 30 years BTW. Intel prided itself in never identifying the culprit even though it cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
OP, you are right about moving to global teams. The idea was that projects would continue to advance 24 hours a day but in reality it added a 2 day delay every time you needed information from someone half way around the world or you had to work ridiculously long hours. No matter how many late night meetings you took you still had to be in the office from 8-5 as a minimum. Intel was fun to work at until around 2012. I left almost 4 years ago and retired. I come back and read this site when I hear big news about Intel like today. Reading the posts and comments makes me feel bad for the current employees.
Exactly! Intel's culture is messed up and toxic. Used to be "only the paranoid survive," now it's "only the sneaky survive."
Great post! Most IC's also brown nosed or buddy buddied as much as possible to the manager for focal review purposes, since that was all the managers did along with the powerpoints created to defend their headcount. I always laugh at the issues they have faced...so many at Intel thought they were kings and better than other so many tech companies, just living off the success they had up to 2000 and always thinking they would come back as a growth company and on Wall Street as well.