With stonewalling from HR/management, refusal to disclose criteria for firings and senior executives giving themselves fat pay and retention bonuses in the middle of it?
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At least in many cases of SET, the business unit had to make the hard choice of who to let go, usually using a skills assessment that each business unit was responsible before. It was also opaque for the managers in terms of knowing where on the skills ratings the cut line would be drawn, and the somewhat arbitrary definition of skills. In my experience at the time, perhaps half of the people hit were truly low performers, while the other half were unfair casualties of the system and politics. I think that was unacceptable at the time, and I believe even Otellini later came to see it as a mistake and apoligized years later. (I could be wrong on this).
What infuriates me about the new BK Intel action of last year and this year typifies inability to make hard decisions. Instead we have a faceless algorithm do it, and then have the unbelievable arrogance and dishonesty to label affected people as "low performers" publicly. Intel has avoided making many hard choices for years, a key cultural problem. This is more of the same. If the company needs to cut 10%, it would be far better in my view to make the project cuts, put people in redeployment or lay them off. Or force business units to do the skill assessment and figure out what and who they need moving forward. Or give business units a smaller budget and tell people in senior positions there is no longer a job for them and that they need to apply for a lower level position at a lower salary or leave. But manufacturing "performance issues" is so completely disingenuous that it has destroyed this once great and innovative culture, and instead perversely reinforces a key Intel blind spot that there is a systemic inability to make decisions.
@dbv and what of the 'site closings' and 'BU consolidations' ? What is the algo for who gets a relo and who gets the boot?
For SET it was spans and levels, # of reports which led to the famous 1000 manager firing. Other actions were local group skills assessments and grade level scope layoffs. This time, 10 years later, its very algorithm based. Intel has gotten in legal trouble with skills assessment based layoffs with bias cases. This time Bain created a master algorithm which chooses people on different criteria. For ISP it was SL4 one time last year, minus a few exceptions. VSP it was time in grade and nothing better than S SL3 for 4 years. And for efficiency cuts they look at a 10 year history and rank people in 10% groupings giving managers the choice what XX% cut per grouping of alike teams/groups.
I recall skill assessments and job codes were a big deal in the SET days. Stock levels were not.
SET was a black box selection. Nobody really knew what the criteria was. So kind of, yes.
SET was a black box selection. Nobody really knew what the criteria was. So kind of, yes.