Silicon Valley needs to stop laying off workers and start firing CEOs
businessinsider.com
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But I think it's much deeper -- having worked at a couple big companies now, I realize (at least to my limited observations) that the path of a company is set by the deeply ingrained culture that has been established over many years by its founders, by its evolution, its successive leaders, and in fact, the competitive environment in which it operates. Things (good or bad) that last far beyond any one leader.
It manifests in the little incentives that people far below the CEO understand to do their jobs in a certain way, to pursue certain things and decide to drag their feet or ignore certain other things.
If you were hired at a company and worked there for years understanding that if you did <x>, you got <y>, it will be hard to change a whole workforce of that notion, especially when one individual gets beaten back in line if they stray. Even if others want to change just as much. Even if the CEO says to change. It takes years for that info to percolate. Sometimes it never does.
No, sometimes companies need to die in order to be reborn.
But then you get turnaround CEOs, the ones the board hires because the company is in dire financial straits, who comes in, fires executives, sets new strategy, communicates openly and plainly across all layers of management and labor. Things can change quickly under the right leadership.
And they were all smart guys, courageous, right incentives etc. Large organizations are complicated. The post above is right - there is no silver bullet.
I also remember what happened when steve jobs came back from medical leave, and lots of directionless meandering was cancelled out as someone took the rudder again.
Absolutely agreed, but here's my take: Enabling failure to be more equitable either helps fix a company's problems faster, or causes the company to fail faster. These are both healthy things.
You describe corporate culture as being something that's very difficult to change. Absolutely true. If culture, to some degree, is a root problem for why a company isn't performing well, lay-offs aren't going to improve things. They're only going to make things worse. Exiting the CEO or other leadership and bringing in new leadership that can reorganize, push culture in a specific direction, increase output, etc; could help things. Change isn't easy, and many people will resist the change, but being able to view that resistance through the lens of a conversation with the people resisting rather than a broad and blind lay-off actually helps. At a high level, you can build the framework of new expectations; identify problem departments, teams, and people; help them adjust to the new normal; and at worse have that hard conversation.
But, of course, some companies are just rotten beyond repair; and changes like this would change too much and potentially disrupt the whole organization. It sucks, but its better to identify that sooner rather than later.
Saying "ah darn, well running a company is hard, if only there was a panacea for our problems ah darn!" is so fucking often used as an excuse to keep bad leadership around. No: There isn't a panacea. That does not exempt leadership from criticism!
If you want to argue for a particular CEO not executing on grand strategy beyond the layoffs that's completely valid.
If you just want to be mad at the persons responsible the CEOs are the intentional scapegoats, the root cause is above them.
This is ultimately why I support board-level employee representation and why I think it's a good idea for employees to collectively own a non-trival amount of corporate stock. Providing jobs to generate stability in society has become a critical role of business, and the public at large is coming to expect more from publicly traded corporations than just quarterly profits. Wall Street shouldn't be the only voice in corporate governance.
I recall reading an article that for some companies in germany, the board-level employee representative have successfully negotiated during the GFC, to not have layoffs, but instead collectively took a pay cut and survive through the difficulties. The company got to retain the talents and save on the costs of retraining etc.
Having a dissenting voice can lead to better ideas. However, if the intention is to prevent employees from being fired even when it is in the best interest of the shareholders, then this employee representation is only going to decrease the shareholder value, and ultimately the profitability of the company.
> collectively own a non-trival amount of corporate stock.
how do these stock get granted? Because if the employees themselves pay for the equity, then they're part owners. If they don't actually pay, then they'd be usurping control in a way that is not fair to those paying the equity.
I am pretty sure most non tech people around me would take the pay cut over the risk of becoming unemployed for an uncertain amount of time, having to find a new job, maybe moving to a different place etc….
> If they don't actually pay, then they'd be usurping control in a way that is not fair to those paying the equity.
From a capitalist point of view. Socialists would argue that shareholders are already usurping the labor of the employees by not paying their fair value.
but then you have to question the idea of what fair value is. The market rate is a pretty fair value to use. The argument that the employee's wages are always less than the full market value of the goods/services they produce, thus they must not be paid their fair share, is not correct - what happened to the capital that the employees uses to produce their output (the guaranteed wages are also considered capital in this case)?
Again, I think capital should get profit in exchange for risk taking and organization, but there is no moral argument that shareholders should continue to rake in record profits while working Americans continue to get squeezed tighter every year. At what point does it become rent?
After all, if you pay a guy to mow your lawn a few times, does he now have a say in what you do with your house?
Giving employees regular input into big decisions is a good idea in the long term. Giving them stock is a way to motivate them to be less inward-looking and think about the company as a whole, and a convenient mechanism to formalise and fine-tune the power balance. If you have a bunch of stock (initially 100%), you can think of the voting power it entails as a resource that you can spend on people who are going to vote well with good information and the right kind of interest in making the company sustainable. Giving it to employees is a good way to spend that resource. They know more than regular shareholders and are empowered to change the course of the company from within.
If you can’t bring yourself to give away any stock due to unstoppable greed and a belief that employees are dumb lawn mower operators who would never know what’s good for them, then basically… good luck. There is a reason so many law firms operate as a partnership to buy into, so many investment firms give out units of a trust, so many startups and megacorps alike give out equity (usually as options). Of those, it’s usually only law firms that are giving out voting power. All people are saying here is that we should not shy away from giving out voting power as well as the economic interest that this practice is usually restricted to.
Apologies for adding a slightly empty comment but clicking the little "upvote" button didn't feel like it was enough.
I don’t think we should seek to require that employment be more stable, because down that route lies moribund companies and an ossified economy, and at some point, that can no longer sustain the standard of living that Westerners are accustomed to, because companies in places that don’t have that will eat their lunch. I think we should just seek to make the penalties of not being employed less severe, with much improved social safety nets. Let people continue to compete hard, let them continue to associate and dissociate freely, but don’t let the penalty for dissociation be financial ruin for employees. If we achieve that, we’ll likely make the economy more dynamic, as risk taking is no longer so personally risky - it would give everyone the ability to operate from a place of security and rationality rather than fear and anxiety (from “a position of fuck you”, if you’ve seen that clip from The Gambler) and do what they should do rather than just trying to tread water.
If your response to challenges as a company is to shut out your employees and tell them to obey, you are missing out on this machine’s power. The only reason you would want to miss out on that power is if you had no other choice, because you were unable to frame the challenge in a way the employees can respond positively to. Democracies have a way of correcting that (among other things), which is called getting voted out; companies don’t by default, so at best you’re usually running a shitty version of democracy and yeah, bad democracies sometimes perform pretty poorly.
I think my main argument is to not mandate structure with law, I’ve seen a number of people calling for that. I think that if we strengthened social safety nets, this sort of thing would become more common, as people became more free to leave workplaces they didn’t feel invested in, and more companies would try to foster it to attract employees.
A pretty huge issue in modern capitalist economies is that people are locked into underpaid jobs with no prospects and no investment in their future other than to hold on for dear life. That’s a massive waste of our potential and a terrible experience for those workers. (And because failing these people is part of the complex of interconnected root causes that lead to anti-democratic sentiment, it is an existential problem.) You want companies to compete to use people better than that, and sharing in the rewards and the decision-making makes for a much better plight for a worker at the lower end of the pay scale. Heck, there are companies today that pay everyone the same salary, determined by the company’s profit divided by N. Their people post on HN sometimes.
I said that being paid for a job does not imply ownership.
> If you can’t bring yourself to give away any stock due to unstoppable greed and a belief that employees are dumb lawn mower operators who would never know what’s good for them
That rude comment doesn't deserve a reply, but I wrote one anyway.
The parent I replied to wanted to use the government to force the issue.
You and anybody else are free to set up and run a corporation the way you please. If it works better, others will copy it. You can even set up a collective, or a commune, or a workers' cooperative. It's not illegal in the US.
Whether I am open to your vision of how a company should operate is irrelevant. In a free market, you get to choose how your company will operate. And the best structure will win.
Company owners are not so stupid they will turn down a corporate structure that will be more profitable. Tech companies are famous for handing out stock options like popcorn. Back when I ran Zortech, which was privately held, we gave each employee a cut of the monthly sales.
When I worked at Boeing, I bought Boeing stock out of my own pocket. It paid off handsomely.
That’s really awesome man, I wish you’d started with that.
And ... they loved them! They were really proud of their suits (for many it was their very first one) and enjoyed visiting customers with them on. Our customers liked it, too, and would remark that no other tech company representative would wear one. They took it as a mark of respect for the customers, as tech representatives usually were slobs. It was a big win for us, and a fun way to differentiate us from our competitors.
The conventional wisdom is one's dress doesn't matter, but in my experience it makes a big difference.
If the state deems it good policy for corporations (say, above $x,000 capitalization or y employees) to have employee representation on their boards, the state is well within its rights to introduce this condition.
Without the threat of the Soviet Union or even a semblance of an organized labor movement, there is nothing meaningful to support.
Also by revenue, US automakers are bigger than German ones.
How do you support these ideas?
Silicon Valley pays the highest and employs the most number of programmers and has done so with employees on boards. Other places and countries with board-level employee representation seem to do worse.
What's the logical argument that board-level employee representation won't employee pay or total employment?
I have read the parent comment twice, what is the argument or data supporting employees on boards will be good overall?
What data point do you have? Do you have a causal data point? Would love to hear that!
> Correlation and causation, just because US has high salaries doesn't mean it's because of that etc etc
Read again. I didn't suggest that.
Day to day moves in the market happen for many reasons. I doubt that over any sort of reasonable term (let's say a few quarters) the companies doing massive layoffs are going to outperform the companies that are not.
How is it impressive and worth multi-million dollar salaries to lay off people when your revenue is down?
How is it amazing to do what the board wants all the time?
What about mistakes and past decisions? If you make a decision, it turns out to be wrong, you aren't exceptional to then fix it. If I am making a customers order at McDonalds, get it wrong, then redo it that's certainly nice but how is that more than what anyone else would do?
If a companies revenue is down the CEO's decisions should be analzyed to see if his actions contributed to it and perhaps lose his job if so.
It might appear to be a lack of planning, but another way to look at it, is these companies are running at full throttle in a vehicle sense, and the CEO and others have taken their foot off the throttle to negotiate a bend.
>How is it amazing to do what the board wants all the time?
I've seen stats delivered to management and the board, and I've seen the board tell management to reverse their actions within minutes of those stats being delivered at shortly after 6am.
Keeping a currently work-to-rule, minimum-productivity workforce happy when it affects the business in other ways is important to the board.
> If a companies revenue is down the CEO's decisions should be analzyed to see if his actions contributed to it and perhaps lose his job if so.
Look at the UK Prime Minister situation, 3 PM's in a year. Its an interesting lesson for the whole world if you consider the British PM to be a CEO of a country.
Look for the parallels and whose Authority do you trust?
Do you find pieces of paper from a University to be an interesting Authority object? Do you find money to be an interesting Authority object?
Do you find the internet, regardless of website to be an intelligent training exercise? Do you find life and society is one giant over populated prison?
The companies of CEOs who were able to higher employees quickly and capitalize benefitted.
Now capital is much more expensive and companies cannot afford some percentage of those inefficient employees. CEOs that act quickly on this and cut staff typically end up protecting more company revenue.
CEO decisions also are absolutely analyzed by the board and CEOs are typically fired based on performance relative to the market as a whole.
No one could have predicted that you could hire people you don't need or are ""inefficient"" and a company could still be profitable?
Again, is this a complex notion? Is this like some revelation that could only be understood after a certain date? I mean I think not. It's such a simplistic concept
Also you keep claiming the people hired were inefficient and the people fired were inefficient. How do you know that? Like what is inefficient? It bothers me how you said it twice and implied everyone was inefficient (of those fired and hired)
And if you can predict interest rates, then no need to be a CEO, you can make billions just by placing a few trades per year.
Agree. However, will you also apply the same logic to the current administration of your government who created the economic conditions which set the CEOs up to fail?
You did not have to have a degree in economics to see the effects of shutting down an entire countries economy for over a year would eventually come back to bite us in the arse. The Tech crowd predominately leans left and a large majority supported these measures and even heralded them at the time.
This is now the fallout of those decisions and we are to live with the result of our convictions.
Saying you want someone else to take the fall is just asking to have your cake and eat it too, which I do not support at all.
That would suck, but that didn't, even to a first approximation, happen. Not for a year, not for a month, and not for a day.
Schools, Restaurants, department stores, and just about anything that wasnt a pharmacy, grocery store, or gas station was forced closed. Borders with countries allies and foes alike were closed. In some 1st world countries like Germany this went on for MORE than a year.
Then you had a partial shutdown of the economy with vaccine requirements that shut out the economy for millions who did not have the vaccine yet or had no plans to get the vaccine.
You supported this. I will bring it up to you again, and again, and again because what you supported was wrong.
I will not stop telling the people that you and whoever supported these horrible measures are part of the reason we are in the situation. No matter how much you say No No No. You are partly responsible.
2. The most severe shutdowns were in the early stages of the pandemic, under President Trump and a Republican Senate. Not sure why you are laying the blame entirely at the feet of those who “lean left”.
3. During those same shutdowns, the companies laying people off today went on hiring sprees. That wasn’t the decision of the employees being hired, it was the decision of management at the company. So even if it is true that this economy was inevitable due to the pandemic, and that anyone should have been able to see it, then the responsibility lies with those who chose not to act accordingly but instead overhire, which again, is management.
This was voluntary however since many would follow it there would be an economic impact
You don't pay an executive millions because he has fourth-grade economic understanding.
1. Boards are mostly made up of (drum roll please)... other CEOs. There is a kind of class solidarity making sure that overall CEO pay only goes up and up and well beyond any kind of inflation; and
2. The real issue with many companies having poor financial performance has nothing to do with "bloat" or "over-hiring" and everything to do with poor leadership. Case in point: the tens of billions Meta has sunk into the Metaverse despite there being no product-market fit, no business model and no end to spending in sight.
But it's employees who are bearing the brutn of these poor decisions, which is extra ironic when you remember that those employees have no power over those decisions.
And notice...all management below the CEO are expected to inherit the stockholder priority.
That is to say, management (for which I have been) are the foot soldiers of the capital class. This is done by incentivizing management with larger and larger percentages of compensation based on stock, thus aligning management's incentives with investors rather than with non-management labor.
Its funny, and indicative, that even "Business Insider" doesn't recognize the difference.
FWIW, Silicon Valley "hires and fires" founders. Sometimes they also happen to be good CEOs for Wall Street, until they are not (involuntarily for performance reasons, or voluntarily because of age or enthusiasm).
Put more simply if these people were making the company money it wouldn't lay them if managers are rational.
A team at Google making a few more millions than they spend doesn't justify buying Google stock at it's current price.
Google isn't a startup anymore, so it might be worth going after a bigger piece of a smaller pie
In the long run tech companies will be valued just like normal companies. Innovation is slowing down. Expect a reduction in tech salary rates relative to more traditional engineering.
Three things propping up tech salaries over the past decade are loose money policy, the advertising bubble, and the rapid turn over hardware and software in the market place.
There are few fundamentally new things of value in 2022 vs 2012. It just costs more to pay programmers to make the same thing and takes more computing horsepower. In the long run this is unsustainable.
For example GB of RAM to run a web browser or OS. I could watch videos online in 2012. I can in 2022 too.
This is often why the salaries are so high - they generally want the right candidate regardless of cost and then don’t want the CEO to leave. CEO realises their value to the company and is generally good at extracting value, so negotiates a high pay package.
But at the scale of google, paying 100x less for a leader that makes 1% errors is probably not worthwhile when that 1% error could ruin the company.
Perhaps because it's not a real market and no one actually cares about what you're saying, they're just all in a club and we aren't in it.
With that said, I still don't believe CEO pay is justifiable. It is the board of directors who are responsible to the shareholders. The CEO is supposed to execute the will of the board. In reality, the board and the CEO are often are clueless about the future as anyone else. E.g., for decades now, big tech has been lobbying for increasing the H1B quota saying they can't find enough workers. Now, big tech is saying all this hiring is a mistake. E.g., on HN we have endless conversations about the mythical man-month and that measuring lines of code and pull requests are just ridiculous measures of productivity. What is even more ridiculous, is that managers now want workers to return to the office, to have butts in seats, because that is the only way they can measure productivity. TLDR: big tech, CEOs, and managers are clueless like everyone else; they have just have the gift of dressing up their S@IT using pseudo scientific management mumbo jumbo.
We cant blame CEOs for exploiting workers to maximize profits. This is very predictable behavior that is currently incentivized.
But unfortunately we have decided to tie your ability to stay alive to your job, so until we fix that we should have safety nets in place so that companies can't ruin their employees lives at a whim.
Agree about healthcare. That's just dumb.
Healthcare tied to a job is crazy though.
An employee is an economic input, just like land or capital or machinery. Why do you think you're entitled to not being treated like a commodity exactly? It's their money and their risk:reward profile, not yours. You don't get a vote just because you have emotions. Labor IS a commodity. Labor takes no risks when they show up to work and collect a guaranteed paycheck.
All you can do is focus on gaining competitive skills that allow you to enjoy the luxuries you think you're entitled to automatically. You're entitled to nothing.
Working does consume one's time, energy and health.
If one is not getting the best bang for one's potential in wage terms then one is feeling the negative potential of this missed opportunity risk.
Conversely if one is getting paid more than they are worth and one is experiencing the upside of this risk. The downside is still present too...they could be laid off and find a less well paying job.
So employees absolutely take on risks by engaging in particular jobs vs. alternate opportunities.
The most valuable things any person possesses are time and health.
To the extent that the labor market is efficient and human capital is well utilized this risk is minimized.
It is not, and this attitude that profit is all that matters is exactly what's wrong with our current system, or why the current system is just wrong. Eg 'shareholder value' was only enshrined as the existential goal for companies in the early 20th c, and only really driven aggressively following the Lewis Powell collusio.. uh, memo.
Yes, companies should be profitable, to prove that they are doing something that society values, given the lack of any other realistic gauge (maybe we can invent something less clumsy and random, more elegant, in future).
But the reason for work, and therefore companies, is to provide goods and services to society, not just to 'make profit'. What does 'make profit' even mean, really? Markets, capital, profits, are all just current (flawed) methods to enable work, to decide what work should be done, to encourage invention of new valuable work, etc. The reason for the work is to feed, clothe, educate, heal, entertain ourselves.
tech ceo's didn't screw up. the current economic turmoil has been caused by overstimulus in the context of the covid lockdown and related supply chain knock-on effects, and subsequent over-easing of the money supply. Everybody knows this already. And the stock market mini-bubble preceding the recent dip should have been obvious to everybody (me included), because why with a pandemic lockdown would we all think that it made sense for the stock market to soar so high?
The whole “Many Americans got an extra few grand in 2020 and that caused inflation!!!” narrative is as fake as the “Organized shoplifting is causing retailers to lose a huge amount of money!!!” fake story and the “Our cities are burned out hulks because we defunded the police!!!” fake story and the “People aren’t applying for these open jobs because they’re lazy and can get paid to sit around!!!” fake story.
Every one of these stories serves a particular purpose for which it was designed, planted, and amplified by specific groups of people with specific policy objectives.
Why do you think those greedy companies got greedy since 2020 and didn't in 2019? They were always greedy, they are just responding predictably to market conditions caused by the Fed and Congress. That's what changed, not the companies.
That's a misinterpretation of the point. The companies were greedy in both years, but 2020 gave them an external thing to blame. Consumers largely accepted the "it's COVID, what can you do?" explanation.
In my city, the privatized gas/electricity utility is blaming COVID now, in 2023, for massive billing issues where folks are getting $10k bills and I'm only getting a bill every other month. It's not very plausible, but they're still using it as an excuse.
But then 10 years ago I'd have never imagined it possible for things to ever get to this point, so what do I know.
I cant tell if this is sarcasm or trolling.
Between PPP and the stimmy checks sent out, amassed to about 6 trillion dollars of direct stimulus during the COVID outbreak. Yes, this will have an effect on inflation. No I am not an economist but you would have to be trolling or demented to think not.
This is not how economics works. Companies don’t need an excuse to raise prices, and margin has nothing to do with what the price point should be; margin simply sets a floor for the price, and it gets too low the business is not viable and shuts down to move the capital to another business with better margins.
Prices are increased if and only if the overall profit increases because the lost sales due to the higher cost are offset by the increased revenue from the price increase.
This is not due to any artificial excuse or fake stories. This situation can be caused for a lot of reasons, but macroeconomic situations are certainly part of it.
Imagine you sell eggs and bird flu kills a ton of chickens around the country, but you’re chickens are fine. Your comment makes it seem like you are supposed to keep selling your eggs at the same price, because your margins haven’t changed. It still costs you the same amount to raise the chickens, so raising the price is just going to increase your margins.
But if you don’t raise prices, you are just going to sell out too fast and there will be an egg shortage. The correct thing to do is to raise prices to match the supply with the demand. Yes, this means the margins will increase, but that isn’t dishonest or wrong. There is a reduced supply, it has to happen.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34679892
As Apple and other companies who didn't overhire go to show, you don't always have to buy into overstimulus.
It's amazing how well the world economy works most of the time given that everybody is flying by the seat of their pants.
if one tech CEO screws up (Zuckerberg with Meta?) you can see it. But when the whole sector screws up it's a pretty good sign something macro is taking place.
Google - 5yr Beta 1.09
Amazon - 5yr Beta 1.22
Meta - 5yr Beta 1.22
Apple - 5yr Beta 1.28
Not even close to Beta 2.0, more like 1.0, i.e. just copying market trends. Moreover, from all those companies, only Apple, "the worst" of them beta-wise, didn't have layoffs.
Not an attack on OP or the article, its not too bad... its just I get tired of people saying they would _never_ do these things if they were CEO.
If the developers were so hard to find, wouldn't companies adjust their expectations and work with who they can find, instead of having them play Leetcode and other crazy games that have very little to do with day to day realities of work at the company?
When there's a famine, people don't complain that their T-bone steak is medium well done, they eat what little food they can find.
When companies were executing on projects that required workers and couldn’t find them, yes there was a shortage. When companies cancelled several projects and had extra headcount, they let workers go. I suspect in the not so distance future the very same companies laying off workers now will need more of them, and that will be even more difficult than today.
Is it really that bad or companies just mindlessly parroting FAANG interview process? No, you don't really need 5-stage leetcode-style interview to hire your Billy-the-junior-React-guy.
I suspect plenty of devs just can't be bothered with it; they either stay where they are, jump to somewhere they already have an 'in' by personal recommendation, go full time time on a side project or freelance, and maybe just play the interviews for practice.
Also, saying Google was surpassed by ChatGPT is equivalent to saying something else reliable than Wikipedia is beating them. That's nowhere near realistic.
From other historical news on the strange fate of a group of skiers in the Ural Mountains: “In classic Soviet style, a number of officials who had little to do with the tragedy were either punished or fired, including the director of U.P.I. and the chairman of its sports club, the local Communist Party secretary, the chairmen of two workers’ unions, and a union inspector.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/17/has-an-old-sov...
While I am sure it feels great to have and voice an opinion about everything, at some point, in the interest of not engaging in self-deception, one has to be honest in recognizing lack of knowledge.
Put a different way: If you have never had to fire 100 people or more, it might be a good idea to recognize you likely are not equipped to understand that reality.
Also just a heads-up: copy-pasting the first few words of someone's comment and formatting your reply around it looks really juvenile and petty.
No, it did not. At all. My post had exactly nothing to do with the article’s author. Not one bit.
> not part of the elite, untouchable few who are allowed comment on the goings-on in Silicon Valley
Yet another misrepresentation. Please read what I actually wrote.
> looks really juvenile and petty.
That’s your interpretation. From my perspective it’s poetry in motion, a light-hearted intro to a reply rather than the offensive style you chose to assign to it. Take it easy. All in good fun.
This is your daily reminder that tech capitalism is fundamentally an extreme inequality engine, and corporations do not give a damn about YOU, they never have, they never will.
It's not perfect, but it doesn't make Google look all that great. Google dumped tons of engineers and has plenty of engineering roles currently open, they didn't even bother trying to move folks around.
So yeah, kudos Intel
From a LinkedIn post that I assume this author sourced for their opinion:
Things Intel did this time around, that weren't done last time, nor by Google/MSFT: * Advance notice it was coming to all employees. * The goal was budget reduce, so large business units had some ability to reduce (not eliminate) layoffs with extreme cost-cutting measures. Point is, there was a clear stated goal besides elimination of jobs. * Per public sources, the CEO is taking a 25% pay cut, leadership team 15%, etc, with the goal of reducing that number of people laid off. * Some Intel business groups gave people a chance to 'sign up' for voluntary separation. * Personally told by my manager I was impacted. * 1-2 weeks to wrap up my work. * Then 9 weeks(!!!) paid employee of Intel for the sole purpose of finding a new opportunity inside or outside Intel.
This is all on top of the severance, which is the lone similarity with the other big tech layoffs.
https://www.nextgov.com/cxo-briefing/2023/02/nsa-bills-itsel...
I dunno.
It's doubtful CEOs saw the end of ZIRP (the driver of this crazy growth) coming, given that nearly 0 people in the industry on this board did, etc.
The forces that lead to the "everything bubble" including overhiring, and the subsequent pop & cooling are much larger than any one CEO or even industry.
Everyone wants so malign actor to be responsible when bad things happen, but systems are more complicated than that.