Thread regarding Intel Corp. layoffs

Oddly enough, with so many companies ditching DEI and moving to MEI (merit,excellence,intelligence) how is Intel so out of step. My group was told this year that employees could no longer be "graded" against one another and all advancement would be based on societal need. Not a lot of work being done in my group any more since there is no reward beyond "special needs". It's a shame that reward is based on "who, not what these days."

Woke goes broke....we are broke.

DEI, ironically, IS a business strategy...

What we need is more of the same at the C suite. Clearly the most competent and highest performing executives were hired over the past decade. Just look at the financials and the stock price. It's the pesky black people who were never hired but got interviews because of dei. Yeah it's all their fault.

H1Bs, unless they have exceptionally specialized skill sets, should be let go before US citizens. This is just common sense.

Most that I work with in the fab do not have this degree of specialization.

DEI didn't ki-l Intel, bad business strategy did. Leaders got way too co--y with 90-00s success decades, and cultivated a culture of "don't question the BKM, because it's the OKM". The so called Groveian ideal of questioning bad decisions and bad strategy was beaten out of everyone, in favor of creating a company of rubber-stamping bureaucrats who have a well defined path to internal promotions. Intel was never known to be customer focused, but in the last decade it has completely lost all customer centric business strategy. Became too big to care about any outsider's opinion, including the customer.

Does anyone purely get hired based on DEI? I'm not trying to argue, I've just never seen it. Everyone I see getting hired is qualified. I take DEI to mean consider diverse backgrounds and people when hiring, which seems like a decent strategy, otherwise its easy to get stuck in a "yes man" group think situation. Are the most cutting edge products going to come from a mono culture?

The DEI focus under BK and BS may have had a major role in the company not being able to catch up again. I’m not talking about anyone’s race, gender, anything like that. When you’re not prioritizing hiring the best, but rather looking for anyone fitting certain checkboxes regardless of their qualifications, you won’t be competitive.

I left before PG, but before then I remember that the performance aspect was taken out of the review process and there was a lot of focus on things like lists of words to avoid saying. There were about 15 words, including “tool” and many other commonly used words. This made it hard to even communicate with others, struggling to remember the bad words and think of workarounds. How did that help?!

Gee, what do Gelsinger, Swan, Krzanich, Otellini all have in common? Buck stops at the top.

There is no “DEI” department. HR and recruiting did, in fact, put emphasis on diversity hiring. That, in itself, isn’t bad. The simple reason is that we need to attract diverse candidates mainly because the pool of “traditional” candidates (aka, white guys) has shrunk. Many more women graduate colleges today than men. Even for techs, we couldn’t find enough men from colleges and the military (who are having their own recruiting problems).

The problem I had with Intel staffing and HR was that they actually su-ked at diverse hiring. It was mainly performative. They kept focusing on women hiring but, if you want women for example, support child care. We had too many good female techs leave because they had a second kid and child care would cost them more they made. Also, support child care that matches a compressed work week schedule. I had techs that worked on different shifts and passed their kids off in the parking lot. The lawyers don’t like child care since they think the company will be sued even if child care was done by an outside agency.

Want more vets? Have a full time military hiring team with people that have military experience and let them visit bases. We currently have one military coordinator that seems to change every year (and none of them have been veteran, at least for the past five years). Every other major manufacturing company supports Skillbridge where military personnel can work up to six months at government expense for a civilian company before they get out. Over 2000 companies participate in it but Intel hasn’t…because our lawyers don’t like it.

We hired a lot of great female first line managers in the past few years but we didn’t challenge them. They didn’t want coddled - they wanted to grow - but all that happened was that they got beat up over hot box velocity and ergonomic reports on their techs. Most of them left within 18 months to Google, Apple or Microsoft.

But, again, we su-k at DEI. I was personally offended when we opened the 50th anniversary of the company with a video first showing our founders (Noyce, Moore, Grove) and then the current leadership (mainly non-white and female) and then they highlighted the difference. Fine…but most of those they highlighted as the “new team” are already gone and we’re behind in the technology.

There is no mass of qualified white guys who didn’t get hired because we hired women instead. There are no jobless vets out there (vet unemployment rate is about 2.5% - lower than the national average). Diversity efforts, done right, are good for business. Done poorly, they don’t produce anything positive except making some HR managers feel good about themselves and otherwise damaging the credibility of the company for its own workforce.

Did DEI done badly ki-l the company? No. It’s more a matter of not adapting to business conditions and the fact that TSMC just has a better model than we do now and can ki-l us with scale. Having the smartest, non-DEI workforce wouldn’t have changed that.

Intel was a pioneer in DEI, long before it became widespread. However, stories from over 16 years ago about negative impacts on the work environment are troubling(and are a big tax on innovation and merit reward).

To survive, Intel needs to return to core principles, make data-driven decisions, embrace fearless innovation, and take real ownership of customer satisfaction—both internal and external. The focus on inclusion is irrelevant if the company is sinking. If DEI continues to steer this ship towards failure, a layoff would be a better option. Objective truth is clear and continues to confront Intel. You can't market your way out of continuous failure for the last 8 years

I haven’t seen any big DEI initiatives since BK left the helm. Funding for all ERGs went to virtually 0. You’re just trolling.

Waste of money and time. Hire/promote based an individual's ability and performance not gender or race.

Get rid of Gelsinger first…

Yes. It is racist.