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Comment by intelinsider | Hacker News Reader

I work for Intel, so here is a first-hand data point: I have worked for a number of large organizations in my career, including the U.S. government and several large companies, but Intel is the hands-down champion of dysfunctional bureaucracy. Case in point: last week I took a week off. When I came back, I discovered that my remote access had been disabled. It turns out that my contract happened to be up for renewal during the week I was off and someone entered an incorrect date, so I was effectively fired while I was away but I was not notified, nor was anyone in my chain of command. This happened on Monday, and today is Friday, and they still have not managed to get me reinstated. And that is just the most recent in a long list of similar incidents.

So yes, Intel's market failures cannot be attributed entirely to financialization. They have screwed up in many, many ways.

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If I were you, I'd change or delete this comment. You've mentioned specific details which would make it very easy to identify you. And disparaging your company when you are already in a precarious situation is not ideal.

I agree, and OP, remember you can use the support email at the bottom of the site for this sort of thing (since you probably can’t edit the comment yourself at this point).

Being fired for complaining about dysfunctional corporate bureaucracy is absolutely ridiculous. I’m not saying someone lying about or slandering their employer should go unpunished, but everyone, everywhere should be entirely free to criticize their employer for valid concerns, in private and in public. Anything less creates a further tilts the power imbalance between employees and their employer in favor of the employer. This is bad for labor markets and can slowly destroy companies from the inside.

> You've mentioned specific details which would make it very easy to identify you

Not in a dysfunctional bureaucracy!

If he was so easily identifiable, they wouldn't have disabled his remote access, hah!

Short INTC 56, 60, 65

Stop loss on all three lots at 70

How many other people do you imagine this sequence of events happened to over the past two weeks? To me it looks like you doxed yourself while also desparaging your former employer. So maybe you will remain fired?

Imho, if above comment were a reason to be fired at intel, then it really wouldn‘t be an organization worth working for.

I haven't been fired. I am in a weird limbo state where part of the bureaucracy thinks I've been suspended but other parts know that this is just an administrative error and are trying to fix it. So I'm still being paid, I'm just unable to actually do any work because my security credentials were accidentally revoked (because part of the bureaucracy thought I was due to be fired because someone entered the wrong date into the system) and no one seems to know how to restore them despite the fact that everyone agrees that this is what needs to be done.

And, like I said, this is not an isolated incident. I don't know if this particular problem has ever happened to anyone else, but I have experienced similar issues that have affected others in addition to myself. This sort of thing happens regularly. No one is at all surprised by it. There are multiple processes that are deeply broken with no possibility of fixing them.

Here is another example: the design group I work with has been assigned a shared storage area of 100GB -- and no, that is not a typo: one hundred gigabytes shared across a dozen engineers. And we do chip design, so we generate lots of data. Needless to say, that shared storage is always very nearly full, and we get regular emails nagging us to delete stuff that we no longer need. So we have a dozen engineers spending time triaging their data in order to save a few dollars on storage costs. Yes, it is every bit as insane as it sounds. I once tried to point out that this is insane, with the result being that I was admonished for being a troublemaker. So now I don't bother any more.

So there is no doubt in my mind that at least some of Intel's troubles are entirely of their own making, and I'm in a position to know.

That’s absurd. 100gb is a few bucks a month on [cloud provider]. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to expand it instead of micro managing the talent?

> Here is another example: the design group I work with has been assigned a shared storage area of 100GB -- and no, that is not a typo: one hundred gigabytes shared across a dozen engineers. And we do chip design, so we generate lots of data.

I remember a late 90's labs with that type of storage.

Any chances you somehow posted this from your Sun Machine?

mate, you're under NDA with the contract you're bound to, and they can easily claim everything you just disclosed violates the NDA as grounds to swap you out of the contract.

Now if that's what you want, godspeed. But you're perfectly identifiable to anyone managing insider threats at INTC; you're strongly advised to delete everything you posted under this account.

You run the risk of impacting not just yourself but the contractor you work for, and depending on how crucial this business is to the contractor, the outcome could be a years-long pain in the neck.

While you are clearly concerned, it’s very unlikely. If the bureaucracy there was really that good at catching stuff like this, they wouldn’t be so incompetent at allowing this whole situation in the first place. also I doubt anyone really cares enough. It’s not like intel is a family business or even a closely held company with someone taking anything personally.

Also, while it is true that I did sign an NDA, it listed very specific things that I'm not allowed to disclose, and internal policies and procedures were not on the list.

Well if the bureaucracy catches him then I guess it is not that incompetent after all. Anyway if I was a business leader there is no way that I would want to renew this kind of contractor. His job is to do contract engineering not complain about what he thinks are organisational failures in a public forum. This kind of complainer is typically entitled and does not have a good work ethic or work output. If he thinks Intel is such a bad organisation then he should seek work elsewhere. These are the same kind of people who want to "work" full time from home for 4 hours a day.

You get what you pay for. Working long hours is orthogonal to working effectively. Modern capitalists don’t resort to moralizing work style like that.

Just make sure to tell them your name is Buttle, not Tuttle.

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