Thread regarding Intel Corp. layoffs

The problem with VPG is that nobody wants to work there. You rarely see people transfer in but so many people wanted to transfer out that they had to freeze transfers!

So any decent manager got out of there, leaving what you see now. So sad.

OP you are describing most design teams at Intel but I will give you that VPG is one of the worst managed.

@ayn

Is struggling project manager name starts with letter "T"?

Moved from Intel to Apple 2 years ago.

Apple management is highly technical and the company is proud to be driven by technical people.

The 2nd difference is that the company is very flat. Very few layers of management between the people doing the work and the senior VP in charge of them.

Technical skills are a liability at intel. Makes you a target. If you have some I would be careful about letting it show too much.

Avoid people manager if you are not strong on political skill. They can only value performance politically.

@qbn: your lack of kowledge and experience is showing. I'll grant you that managers needs some people skills, especially when dealing with RCGs, but they must have at minimum a clue on what the managed team is doing. I've seen too often that some hardware guy, possibly brilliant in his/her own area, is 'promoted' to manage software teams with disasterous results. Incompetent developers can, and do, BS those managers for years.

As for scrum, it's a disaster of it's own. It's detrimental to any career growth (the sooner people realize that the better), to quality, and accountability. Kind of what one would expects from a javascript dominated community I guess. The notion that you can 'soft skill' your way through technical jobs is hilarious, as is the idea that Apple management was non-technical (again age showing). Nokia was victim of carefully planned desctructive campaign by M$ and their stooge Steven Elop (worst CEO in history). His first act was to get rid of the technical leadership and R&D. And for what? A WinPhone (Lumia) that not even M$ employees want to be seen in public with.

And finally, you can 'soft skill' interviews all you want but if you don't have the 'hard' skills to back it up you will not be hired by any sane company for a technical position.

The problem is wrong project decision all over the manager.So many project decision makers are technically incompetent. I have seen a person who voiced the disagreement to project decision was rated low performer and ISPed by people manager.

Sad Truth OP. Unfortunately nobody can fix this. You must move on.

@wji agree.

An aged grade 9 project manager who failed in CCG hides in VPG. Struggling there too. Funny is seeing him learn basics of project management in his old age.

yes it is funny when op writes "No smart guy/gal has stuck around." so op basically told us already what level of intelligence to expect from him if no smart guy has stuck around.

I think what Intel should rather get rid of are people who still think that managers should be highly technical ultra-experts and that they would be good managers themselves just because they are technically skilled.

Skill number one that a manager needs is people skills. Technical skills come somewhere at the end of the priority list. The technical skills are supposed to be in the team. Anyone who wants to put a valuable technical expert in a management job is an idiot who obviously lacks basic logic and comprehension. "Hey, that guy is the best technical expert in the team! Let's take him out of the engineering work and give him a non-technical job!" Apparently, that sounds smart to OP.

You want to get rid of Scrum? You think it exposes non-technical morons? Nope, it exposes people without soft skills who cannot work in teams. Like you OP. That's why you chafe under Scrum. If you don't like it, why aren't you looking for a job somewhere else? Why are you stuck in a company with managers who are supposedly so dumb? The anwer is obvious: Because someone without soft skills does not interview very well anymore in the year 2017. Someone who thinks that people with technical skills are best suited to lead others have no place in modern product development, so changing jobs is a difficult proposition for you.

Apple was made great by non-technical management 10 years ago. Nokia was killed off by a board full of highly technical geeks and a promote-the-biggest-geek culture 10 years ago. Still, people don't want to learn a lesson from that.

The problem at Intel is not that we don't have enough technical managers. The problem is that we have too many technical managers who think that because they have some technical knowledge, it's their job to micro-manage their teams. We need to get rid of technical managers without management skills instead of putting even more people into management roles who know everything about technology and nothing about how to manage people.

The short answer is that Intel remains shockingly profitable and that gives it the ability to waste huge amounts of money on, among other things, useless layers of management, pointless acquisitions, etc.

The virtual monopolies that have supported huge margins and market share for many years have begun to erode. But they're not over yet.

Intel leadership and management largely came of age in an environment where "the competition" was your fellow Intel employees for internal funding and promotion. This has reinforced itself over time to the detriment of those who don't prioritize "managing their careers" over all else (you know, like actually innovating, knowing industry - vs. Intel proprietary - best practices and serving customers).

100% agree. Vpg is ruled by cheap status collectors. Who are rejects from other groups.