When honest worker bees get actively targeted, hunted down and offered as sacrifices to appease the layoff gods of failed initiatives, bureaucracy, and inefficiency. Oh, and this time, security holes, lawsuits and potential recalls.
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GPTW
If you have a manager who (along with his or her boss) fights for their employees and vigorously goes after the EE/O/promos while fending off the BE/IRs, even the crappiest employee can survive or even thrive. If your manager is more conflict averse, you'll never get anything beyond a successful with a SL2 thrown in -- as Dr. Evil would say -- as a "fricken bone".
@RkDMLCM-1usl Cannot agree with you more! That takes care of your brag sheet and makes it very impressive even if you don't do much. Don't forget another basic technique - brown nose your GL. If you can do those two well, you can survive, perhaps even succeed at Intel.
@iqjj the basic technique to play this focal game is to involve all the most important projects. But, don't make any clear responsibility for yourself, must have others taking the same responsibility. Than at focal time you can choose how to take others credit or dump failure to others by being the buddy to the focal ranking maker. You will get promoted if you are good at this.
Nothing will change as the current Focal system favors the bigshots (g10 and above) vs the worker bees who are easily expendable sacrifices to the layoff gods.
Wasn‘t Focal supposed to get a huge makeover? Did that happen in any business units already? We‘re still running business as usual.
Name of the game at Focal is to claim credit for anything and everything positive, even if you had nothing to do with it. And blame everyone else for anything negative, even if it was directly your fault. This will get you the big raises and promos in no time.
Intel focal rating is mostly on skills of butt kissing and backstabbing. Other skills are not as important. The key skill is how to successfully label your competitor lack of teamwork. This can clear the way for your promotion.
Let’s not forget ethics and appearance of anything illegal, Sell it all, well at least as much as I can legally 🤭🤡
By the time that Focal rolls around, managers have already decided who will be on the chopping block. What you have done is largely irrelevant. As is what your manager writes.
This, of course, works against the way that companies and their managers should handle employee rating and development. But why fix something that's broken when the company is going to be torn apart and reorganized anyway?
@ypf Are you new to Intel? It has been like this since basically forever. This whole meritocracy thing is centered around the idea of letting the best survive at the expense of the not-so-good. Teams are ranked and the bottom 3-5% are cut. Each and every year. People just didn‘t notice it before ACT, but now they pay attention to every little layoff.
Only reason why I am still at Intel is that I am lucky enough to be the best in a team of good-but-not-great performers. So every year, I come out with a nice increase and great RSU allotment. I get more, because other team members get less. Sorry. Basically, I am milking the Focal cow, until one day, it will turn against me. So for me, it works (for now), but if you‘re not the best on your team, you should consider getting out of the Focal Hunger Games as quickly as you can.
Funny by the way how Intel HR always emphasizes how important teamwork is. A couple of years ago, managers were sent to trainings to learn about things like SCARF, avoiding fear in employees and positive motivation, while at the same time, Focal should be mentioned as a bad example in every book discussing these issues.
Some Hunger Games $hit happening at Intel these days. And it's about to get much worse.