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Comment by fl8190a | Hacker News Reader

I was there when it hummed, and I was there when it failed. This is a gross mischaracterization (of an extremely complex failure) that owes its appeal to a simple and familiar explanation: greed / optimizing for shareholder returns.

I'd love to dish, but there is no simple and salacious story to tell, and it's too soon to talk about it anyway as far as I am concerned (and I imagine their lawyers agree). I do think the emergence of high-margin software companies as providers of mostly high-pay, low-stress jobs (and thus magnets for sharp and motivated engineers or aspiring engineers) was one of many contributing factors. I'd tell you how process engineers in the most critical areas used to work, but you'd never believe me.

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> I do think the emergence of high-margin software companies as providers of mostly high-pay, low-stress jobs (and thus magnets for sharp and motivated engineers or aspiring engineers) was one of many contributing factors

Are you implying Intel's margins weren't high enough for it to compensate its engineers well or provide better working conditions?

Perhaps he means that some intel jobs are inherently high stress? I could imagine this being the case in a fab.

I didn't mean to imply that exactly (since the margins were still pretty high and comp was still incredible by conventional standards), but I'm implying that high-margin software companies could easily offer previously unthinkable comp so they could recruit the best talent possible. I think most HW companies were slow to adjust across-the-board comp to compete. It's not like there was a mass exodus to these SW companies, but I think it was a small factor in this story (and was for nearly every tech company that wasn't operating at absurd $/employee margins).

Even if you ignore the software world which has been easily outpacing hardware compensation for the last decade, if you only look at hardware companies, Intel has been either at or very close to the bottom of the pay scale until very recently. In the industry it became a bit of a joke where ex-Intel employees would joke by comparing their pay raises upon resigning.

Intel was very clear that it was not willing to pay top dollar not because they didn’t have the money, but because top technical talent tended to resist or reject Intel culture. This meant the big bucks always went to management and other enforcers of said culture.

In 2021 Pat Gelsinger told HR to increase pay to match market in an attempt to stanch the attrition. The problem with this is that Intel management didn’t try to fix the broken culture, and instead propped it up by handing the new cash over to the “critical talent” that again, were the cultural enforcers. Pat G genuinely believes Intel is the greatest company on the planet, so he won’t see this as a problem.

There are some things that money can’t fix.

One technical failure that definitely happened:

Selecting desktop processors over mobile processors as strategy. Basically a double-down on what had always worked rather than paying attention to the signs of the market.

We've all heard the story of Steve Jobs asking for a mobile processors for the iPhone and being shutdown by Intel management. I knew a number of Intel engineers and managers who were pushing the mobile path in 2009-2011 even after the iPhone showed that mobile was the money maker. When push came to shove, those Intel engineers got shutdown hard and most of them left Intel. When the evidence in your face is ignored and all you hear is "stupidity" - the non-masochists get out!

I used to work for Intel so seeing it collapse like this roll out as a slow-motion tragedy has been sad. But that's also been true (for many of the same stupid management/strategy reasons) of Hewlett-Packard for whom I worked for 10 years when Bill and Dave were still alive. Leadership matters. Probably more than anything else, even technology know-how.

Yeah agreed. I was there through the high point, through when the company committed suicide and finally resigned when the corpse started to stink publicly. Blaming everything on the bean-counters is entirely misleading.

One of these days the demise of Intel will be taught in business schools as a case study of how to destroy a tech company from within.

> I'd tell you how process engineers in the most critical areas used to work, but you'd never believe me.

Please share! I've worked in the games industry, I'll believe anything :-)

I'm curious, what did you experience in the game industry in order to believe anything?

Games industry is notorious for abusing their employees: mandatory weekend work for months at a time, etc.

Even when no one is being abused you have people who pour their lives into a game, knowing that they have a deadline. What they get into a particular game by a deadline can effectively define their career. Its not just a lot of pressure, its a lot of pressure with a lot of passion and a lot of visibility.

I made it sound too interesting. I just meant to point out two things that are pretty obvious to external observers (one of which is that manufacturing work is often less predictable and more after-hours than something like SW development).

Given the stories I've heard, I don't think anyone can compete with the gaming industry!

Is there a source / blog post with rough explanation what you mean? I'm really curious.

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