Thread regarding Intel Corp. layoffs

I have worked in PTD for 3 years and during this time it had slowly changed me in following ways:

1. Being happy, delighted happy go lucky person, I turned into grumpy, clumsy, faded memory, dark circled-eye individual quite similar to zombie
2. from a perfectly healthy individual to anxious, all time palpitating, frustrated, phychotic, worrying individual.

I have never been more happier than ever as soon as I left that toxic org,

Just say for a moment SA is really removed who has the know how of the TMG machinery to manage it, let alone fix it. AK, that is even more laughable if it is she plus another insider out outsider.

The you look below: MA, PC, PB, PN, MM, KM, RS and all on down qualified or will change and fix things? Dang even look as low as AM level or even GL and they are all brainwashed. The culture has pretty much so polluted the whole organization to the core it is FUBAR.

The rot started more than a decade ago and BoD selection of successive bigger stooges culminating in the clown resulted in this.

The Titanic is indeed past the tipping point. Organization and cultural take years to decades to form and one as large and strong and toxic as intel will take years to overhaul. The impossible challenge is it is so complex and large you can’t just remove the head or house clean and fix it.

Can 10nm, a broken design approach or architecture be fixed by replacing the head? No different than a fat and overweight person can one day wake up with a new head and be a world class athlete, doesn’t happen and that is why it is way past the tipping point.

Thanks BoD and Andy for all that great stewardship, this is an epic BOD fail, why so long to act, says it all.

As one lengenday turnaround leader said, just need execution but in the chip design and chip manufacturing the issue isn’t execution it is the decisions made a decade ago and way they are made were all wrong

So now after Sohail is fired, can we expect to stop the model of indiscriminate hiring of RCG's, di versity hiring etc etc and hire some experienced professionals in engineer roles if possible even from competitors? This model has ruined ntel. Long time!

Intel's competitors are gaining all the way by stealing engineers from Intel.

https://www.fool.com/amp/investing/2018/05/23/these-2-intel-executives-need-to-be-replaced.aspx?_gl=113wtk3e_ga*YW1wLVYybWhDbW42bE1UNDlsNVhMbXpzUjNvMnVDVjJ4dlJnMWFSUnR6WnliOHROTzhuMkYzUFNkeEVmeG9zUDdUQzY.

Sohail Ahmed fired????

@9tqd.... It seems one of your prophecies came true!

SA got fired.

Exec PD happening these days. Happened earlier too. When BK was there, exec chanted “virtuous cycle” mantra and passed down, that ivirtuous cycle was the key to all success one can dream to achieve. Once BK gone, the groupies found another one to cheer for and the same exec’s started ranting a new slogan of “get back to work” as if everybody was involved in a tailgating party!!!

Just ABOMINABLE

Lots of real pain has started pouring in,🤣🤣🤣🤣

Dang got my 10th page since last nights dinner, wht can’t the guys on the floor dispo the lot, do t need no PhD, can’t with for my coverage next week to get some sleep, first time in 10 days

PTD. Reorg imminent. Matter of months maybe weeks.

Welcome to desi club for PTD

———— —————————

DB -> CEO

MR -> LTD chief

SA -> Fired.

Layoffs -> 2019 Q2...

Not sure why people complain about PTD.

It is nice place where many PHD engineers can party and just sustain without thinking much at all.

Know many PHD's both in D1C/D1D, who do not want a bit to understand, study or grow. They are happy with sustaining, because they do not and cannot think. If a D1C engineer have to solve a quadratic equation, that itself becomes a huge lot of work.

Got a job and just want to sail without putting much effort in deep thinking and problem solving.

Yes the only complain they may have is the hours are non POR, promotions take year, but work type is POR to 90% of the PHD's

So why blame PTD management only? Engineers love this structure anyway.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4188142-3-failures-brian-krzanich-part-3

Very nice article.

If Tools become more important than Process and Engineer skills, assets and interests, this is bound to happen.

I have never understood PTD business model, where both process and tool has to be managed by the same engineer. Why can’t a BS/MS handle tools and operations while the full process optimization/development and R&D delegated to PHD’s or very experienced BS/MS who want to get involved in R&D.

No more process development ar PTD. PTD is to keep engineer busy with OPS.

Relevant and well written article....

http://theconversation.com/happy-50th-birthday-intel-you-look-a-lot-like-the-next-kodak-100065

Yes PhD is any physical or natural science is a candidate, if a URM even tier three school will get you an onsite, don’t screw interview up and you are hired.

PTD has so many Indians and Asians it became a problem to get approvals for even onsite from tier 1 for those.

The hiring is just one problem that runs far deeper with cultural, methodology and delegation/trust.

Won’t be easy to fix, the hiring isn’t the basis of the problem but am clear indicator

Have seen couple of posts mentioning biology PHD ascPTD process Engineers.

Is it true? If yes then, that is worrying!

If Biology Ph.D can handle process flow in a company like Intel, the rest of the flow can be well understood.

This is a company with toxic levels of corruption.

On whose watch did PTD move from process laggard to equal than on to process leaders, that momentum carried them for a long while even during the terrible leadership change. After that change the lack of any adaptation and evolution as the technical and business environment changed with the new management is the issue. The result of that new leadership resulted in the new trend from Tick Tock like clock work execution to totally broken system was from failure to adapt to the more complicated business and technical environment that the management was incapable of comprehending that continued resting on false belief in the momentum and decision the prior better managerment had in place during a different phase. This all happened before 14nm and we saw the first cracks earlier a longtime back for those perceptive enough to see and on the inside, but first fully exposed on 14 and like a retarded child fully exposed now on 10nm for the whole world. Very very unlikely to change quickly as no immediate changes in leader or adjustments in cultural or methodology have been made to the fundamental issues that simmered from a decade earlier and now those issues permeates every level and everything PTD does, a total FUBAR

Very simply, management, arrogance, deception, and incompetence.

SA provided as much bad direction as he provided good direction. In any case, it had to be done HIS way! Factory managers were scared $hitle$$ of him. Never could believe such snivelling, frightened little cowards hiding in the corner, shivering in his presence. These same mgrs would act like big men by sacrificing their lower level mgrs and engineers to SA just to protect themselves.

Well said. A company which has to pay and advertise for diversity instead of performance says it all.

The cultural shabbiness and quality metric of Intel has been evident in the $0.50 cafeteria celebration last week for its 50 years.

Just like the event, Intel is just a symbol and shadow of its old self.

How screwed up is PTD? Put it this way. It's a place where FLM earn safety "points" for commanding their dregs to stand every two hours at the equipment they are using to do some silly ergonomic stretching. Then they bring it up at their huddle in the morning about it's importance. Oh, and by the way, they often ball and chain their PhD engineer to the equipment for up to 20 hrs at a time.

Where is PTD now??? Everything is Ramp!!!! Everywhere it is Ramp!!!

PTD days are over.

I am a PTD litho engineer for the last 4 years, with a background in ChemE. Couple of months back, I applied to Intel, AZ, for a process R&D engineer related to litho

I was asked q’s ranging from optics fundamentals, diffraction and litho. For litho questions, I was able to answer some, but fell flat on optics.

I was outright rejected, and was also told, that PTD engineers know all these and I am not quite up to the mark.

Naturally I felt dejected and depressed by lack of knowledge and felt I am not suited for PTD at all. I thought I need to get this skills and to get up to speed, the PTD engineers will be the best individuals to get the help from. I asked at least 15 Engineers, GL inclusive (experience of them in litho group ranging from 3-10 years). Without any sort of exaggeration, nobody, I repeat nobody, had any minimal knowledge of use of diffraction in litho, let alone fundamentals of optics.

The incident may have boosted my ego, but I really understood, where we stand as PTD Engineers. That place is extremely fragile and maybe soon will be hopeless if not now.

PTD’s devious culture, arrogance and manhandling of engineers can succinctly be described by the following famous quote.

"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." - Abraham Lincoln

@U6tzNgn-3gge excellent and accurate post of SA and the senior leadership at TMG.

How does a organization with so many people and so critical to the company and its future get this way?

Absolute power and success let run unmanaged becomes corrupted absolutely setup for absolute collapse is the only outcome.

Wonder if BoD Andy Murthy know enough and bold enough to make the required changes.

But what do you do? Cutting off the head leads all the leaders like AK, PC, MA, BS, KM, PB won’t have a clue or know how to work together and independent.

That is likely the reason the BoD and also Murthy and future CEO will have limited options.

Removing the head of the snake will result in total meltdown, removing 50% of the worse of the names folks will also result in meltdown. Thus paralysis do nothing and hope it all works out.

It was obvious when SA ran litho the management, was obvious when he ran LTD it got worse and worse and all the writing was on the table during 14nm that management style was getting worse not better, and how does the person run of a multi tens of thousand organizations with so many senior VPs continue to run and control the smallest of details like this is astounding failure of the BoD. Like I noted the lack of variable options will result in collapse.

The failure started decades ago when such behavior wasn’t coached out of the organization, now it is the DNA and cultural, what do you do.

I too know, watched and experienced this first hand and sadly feel for the colleagues and all that talent ruined and wasted by it. Puke isn’t the word this is a modern management and technology tragedy of epic magnitude that’s failure will now be watched by all. Kind of like the Nazis or many other extreme organizations.

As a person who worked directly for SA and left the company, I can say that SA is a micro manager who thinks he is the smartest person who has all the answers. He hardly listens or seeks inputs from others. He has all the answers and everyone who reports to him are simply highly paid order takers and yes men. If you have your own independent thought process and share it, SA does not like it and interprets that as a lack of loyalty. I don’t blame him, it’s a result

Of the deep rooted culture he comes from. He promotes people who are loyal to him and he can trust since they say yes to everything he says and simply execute to his orders. He destroys senior people who are not order takers. It was funny to observe VP level direct reports on how subservient they were in interactions with him. One had to sell his soul to work for this guy. The sad part is that he does not ever envision the future and define new strategies to drive innovation. He is a one trick donkey and all he is good at is to squeeze and squeeze cost and drive people harder by fear and intimidation. That’s the reason technology development processes did not scale and they are in as much as they are. It started with 14nm but SA simply fires a few senior people because he thought its their incompetence while he needed to have stepped back and evaluated what he should do differently. Of course, he had all the answers and would not ask anyone for inputs. 10nm came along and he is in worse shape because he did not fundamentally drI’ve organizational and operational adjustments to handle the non linear increase in complexity. Squeezing more from the same strategy worked for a decade

For him and it has finally fully broken. It’s sad he does not see it and he blames everyone else - oh, the design guys don’t know what they are doing and don’t leverage the technology as they should for PPA. While there is some truth to that. He has not paused and wondered why every foundry customer had an issue with the PPA of the odd process and eventually decided not to sign up? How long can he hide his incompetency and survive blaming everyone else? They continue to focus on transistor performance and density shrink as the leadership indicator. How about power? Anyways SA is bad for TMG And Intel. He should just walk away before he destroys everything completely. I feel like puking when I think of the days I worked for him and feel blessed I don’t have to deal with this guy ever again

Never had a company has such technolgy leadership and opportunity and so much talent and money to only squander and miss manage and piss it all away.

Three year silicon technology leadership that translated into double the density, 30% performance and possibly up to 30-50% less powered. Imagine the possibilities beyond x86!

Billions upon billions, let’s just say money shouldn’t have been a problem to develop derivative or multiple option process for any and all chip applications.

Brand name after all it is Intel and ability to attract the best educated PhD in any and all disciplines

What did they do, x86 and miss every big thing and when they seized it came with their x86 arrogance and methodology.

What a FUBAR

@2zwo A thesis can be drafted on PTD’s fails which will be thousands of pages long. Only arrogance... arrogance... arrogance......

In the name of IP, PTD has over the years promoted just toxicity, closure, paranoia, hatred and ego.

Nevertheless, these words are now a cliche, which have become synonymous with PTD.

I remember a situation when a PTD module had extremely faulty calibration of one of their calibration tools. Their particular toolset was then set up based on this faulty baseline. Similar modules in factories could not replicate the data. Factories were the ones that found the problem in PTD. Issue was covered up with no accountability in PTD and nobody fired. Factories then had to "fix" their toolsets to match the poorly calibrated tools in PTD. Situation completely buried because mgrs thought they'd get fired if exposed. Just another example of "what is wring with PTD".

Gentle reminder to not use full names - the admin tends to nuke any post using them. Board rules, like them or not.

Oh, boy, if they hire DB (as many internal people are saying), this will NEVER get fixed. It's ALREADY never going to get fixed, but a DB CEO would seal the deal.

The operating philosophy is to hire RCG who will work 15 hours everyday including some weekends, since they initially are overwhelmed with the money.

Once the RCG gets saturated and used to the money and he starts wearing out to work for 15 hours, time is ripe to replace him with a new RCG.

So now please anyone tell me, is there anyway we can get technology development in this sh**???

I agree wholly with @2csk. But if the total structure is rotten from top to bottom, firing one will never help. As a matter of fact, that Sohail is here after so many fiascos are a clear proof, how corrupt this company/organization is from inside out.

Fire Sohail, then there are Peng/Phi/etc etc who will bring back the same culture back many times more in no time.

A complete shake up us needed. I do not see it happening.

What is wrong with PTD? The one word answer that no one has dared to mention is SOHAIL AHMED. This guy is what is all wrong with PTD. He created this toxic cesspool of politics, micromanagement, bad technology decisions and everything else starting from the 32nm days. Why haven't they fired him yet?

@U6tzNgn-2mvv So are you saying after 7-8 years of working 7 days a week and answering pages at all hours of the night and weekends with the only break is when I go out of country on vacation that I have to play the game right just to get about 3% and the get to the top and get a couple E and then 15% promo so after that only at 1.4x of starting salary and still working like a dog? Wow GPTW at least I get free fruit and drinks

After the merge, given the number of engineers even in a single module, assuming there is no layoff, transition from GR7 to GR8 ( engineer only, not as GL) for a reasonably successful Engineer (of course not with political qualities!!) over the years will take a median value of 8 years. That is a open secret now.

However that is a utopia, as everyone knows layoffs will happen every year on a regular basis, and that may possibly reduce the median time by 2 years at max.

Thus after 6-8 years of work as a beast, you get a meager 8-10% increase (maybe) in your base salary asking you to be a more hard working beast, says it all about PTD, or Intel as a whole.

@U6tzNgn-1qbx Yup hear many a rant about how only PTD knows how to do development, 10nm is a great showcase of that

In recent times a trend in PTD is rampant.

A person (maybe an AM in group Y) who has no idea of a group X (say) and never ever handled the group X in his entire career, suddenly takes over as the AM of group X along with Y.

Nepotism/Cost cutting/Favouring Mediocres?

God only knows!

Absolutely. Intel knows mostly foreign PhDs will work like bonded slaves, because they have the highest stake be either family back home, raising a family here, continuously at the mercy of employer.

These days I heard they file for GC fast for PHD, but that's also to be safe to the goverment in showing that they have us persons only.