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Comment by aluminussoma | Hacker News Reader

A good friend was laid off from Intel during their last round of layoffs. Without going to into details that would identify my friend, he was laid off after losing a game of internal politics. His division's vice president even apologized to him for his layoff.

My friend's story gave me the impression of Intel being a highly dysfunctional company. My friend was sad to leave Intel, but I think it was good for him in the long run.

For those about to be laid off from Intel, I hope it also works out for you.

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Are there companies with >100,000 employees who are not highly dysfunctional?

Number of employees as a metric for dysfunction? Why not number of court injunctions? Number of union strikes?

I mean, if we're getting serious, we could write a dysfunction function, D = dysfunctional points:

  D = (points for threat posed by dysfunctional government)
    + 4*(points for direct environmental harm done by company)
    + 2*(points for environmental harm caused by subcontractors)
    + (points for each lobbying dollar spent)
    + 2*(points for frivolous or non-FRAND patent lawsuits)
    + 10*(points for fighting against a free and open internet)
    + (points for trying to track users / violate privacy)
    + 10*(points for getting hacked, releasing user's private data)

etc.

As Andy Glew said, "Only the paranoid survive." I was part of a section laid off en masse under similar circumstances. Our group got a paper "award" for cross-team collaboration, and the partner group got to keep their jobs.

The severance was decent, and my new job pays twice as much, so I've got that going for me, which is nice.

you mean Andy Grove?

Indeed I did. Sorry, Andies.

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