Interesting. But correct me if I'm wrong, but don't they need to play catch-up with other chip makers? Won't firing people impede that?
Disclaimer: I despise companies that do layoffs and I am not a proponent of them, but I do acknowledge that companies do them for a reason.
[0] https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other...
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-24/tech-layo...
[2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3690309/about-those-te...
[3] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-03-0...
[4] https://techreport.com/news/3493451/microsoft-layoffs-ethics...
I don't remember that being the main idea behind the Mythical Man Month.
I think the major take aways were more like "Adding people to a late project makes it later" and "Some tasks don't get faster with more people.
For example, you can't get 9 women to birth a baby in 1 month". Other tasks _do_ get faster with more people (doubling the number of people digging a ditch will result in the ditch getting dug faster).
True, AMD is able to spin new CPU designs with quite a few less people because they seem to be better at leveraging design automation. Jim Keller went to Intel to try to improve their design process and make it more productive, but it doesn't seem like he was able to turn the supertanker in a more productive direction. Lots of cultural inertia there.
Their reputation has taken quite a hit because they're used to charging a premium, so they've been selling hardware with similar performance and worse power consumption for higher prices than AMD. Which isn't a good look. But it's not because they have a bad design, it's because AMD's design is just as good with a superior fab.
A lot of people credit AMD with chiplets, which really was a clever way to deal with fulfilling their contract with GF, and has a major advantage for server chips where they have a large number of compute dice. But the mobile chips and some of the desktop APUs are a single die and don't seem to be suffering for it. It's not the reason the Ryzen 7 5800X uses so much less power than the equivalent Core i7.
Not if their upper management has deemed the output/productivity of those employees "not worth it" from a business perspective, or not if the employees they are firing are in the wrong department/organization for that goal.
CEO/board/executives initiate "we want to lay off X people", they send it down the ladder through management. One manager says to another "hey, you have to pick at least 2 people you want to lay off" for example.
I don't know how important/critical you are in the grand scheme of things if your manager selected to choose you instead of somebody else on the team.
That's all if your manager doesn't also get scrapped/if a manager above your manager didn't choose your entire team to get scrapped, etc.