To set the stage: I’ve heard the recent news about layoffs with Intel. Before that I read from their new CEO “On training, I think it is too late for us”. Lastly there has been some offhand comments (from LTT) that they’re preparing to sell the company.
Yet while I have no doubt that they are behind; their revenue is about 55 billion since 2023, down from the high of 78-80ish Billion during the pandemic, but about the same as the plateau leading up to the pandemic 2015-2019.
Maybe i’m naive about the way businesses work; but if your still profitable, and you know you need to “catch up” why lay off people and close sites? Maybe that works for a consumer goods company; if your overhead is too high and your not making a profit: slim down.
However for a company where RND is really where the value is, like Intel, it just doesn’t seem to make sense; your not going to get better designs and processes by reducing your experienced staff and letting them go work for the competition. Maybe some restructuring, (in the engineering sense not the euphemism for layoffs).
They sat on their monopoly and didn’t innovate, got taken over by AMD and still didn’t innovate and instead of letting engineers do what engineers do c suite morons and execs took a bad situation and ran the company into the ground all in an effort to keep shareholders happy.
As soon as your engineering company starts taking advice from business instead of engineers, you’ve lost. See also - Boeing.
Are you kidding?
From the perspective of capitalists, Boeing is the fucking dream. They can innovate fuck not at all, they can bury inconvenient data AND the people who know it with impunity, and since they’re too big to fail in literally the cronyest capitalist industry on Earth, American War, the government not only won’t lift a finger, but will actively print money to give to them to let them keep doing all of the above in perpetuity.
Boeing is the capiteeliest of capitalist success stories. You didn’t think modern corporations actually believed their own propaganda about free markets deciding profit and success based on herp derp honest compertition? Thats just the bullshit they drive into kids minds when they can’t yet muster questions or concerns to ruin their lives and forge them into wage zombie husks. Capitalists want to win, preferably at the gunpoint of their captured governments, because actually prouducing products/services that people actually want is for suckers.
Well, in the short term that’s true, because they won’t be allowed to fail. You have to think either the government will get much more involved or all their civilian customers will go away if this continues on, though.
We’ll here’s a lecture by Peter Thiel basically saying “competition might be good for society but being a monopoly is good for business”. Ghoul says it openly.
You are bouncing on Boeing’s dick so hard I can hear the “boeing” from here. Jesus christ.
If you want to believe me calling them the peak of capitalism by capitalism’s own inhuman metrics is a compliment, knock yourself out.
;)
Patrick Gelsinger was an engineer.
Nvidia is run by a former engineer. I don’t know if that’s an argument for or against the idea.