Intel is laying off over 10k employees
theverge.com
theverge.com
Isn't squandering incredible engineering resources exactly how Intel got into this situation in the first place?
There is this interesting phenomenon where people outside an organization view R&D potential as elastic. That is to say, there is always a positive return on investment for the marginal R&D dollar.
It is clearly not in the case or every company would have exponential growth simply by reinvesting in R&D.
In reality, it is difficult to create growth from R&D at all, let alone the marginal dollar.
I don't think that's the view here; instead, I think the idea is that R&D personnel could be reassigned to work on something more profitable, rather than simply laying them off. Assigning R&D people to work on something unprofitable or a dead-end is the fault of management and their poor vision, not the people assigned to research that stuff.
Indeed, wouldn't every company love to just reallocate all of its employees to the areas that are most profitable. But alas, adding eight more women to the project of birthing a baby does not reduce pregnancy time to one month.
if they are more profitable, they probably have more space and budget by defauly. Outside of these strange times, it's not like Tech has historically been oversaturated and companies shy away from hiring new talent.
Not sure what you're basing this assertion on. I've never been at any tech company where the fact that a project is profitable somehow inherently means that we can just keep adding engineers to it and those additional engineers will magically increase the revenue the project generates.
In fact there's almost no industry where such an assumption would be logical. Even if your work has a very straightforward financial model, like manufacturing where you simply make Y dollars for every X parts you produce, that still does not imply you can just keep adding assembly line workers. At a certain point you have to consider whether there are even enough purchase orders to cover the volume of goods you're creating, or if they are just going to become wasted surplus sitting in a warehouse.
The corporate analog would be sustaining dozens of projects, partnerships, and business areas that never really took off and had the results you hoped for.
In the case of firing,
either way, companies are not staffed by omniscient leaders. The are staffed by humans, which don't know where to put R&D today to guarantee profitable inventions tomorrow.
Human uncertainty and imperfection underlies all business risk.
This is nothing new: even when I worked there decades ago, they were always making stupid decisions, such as the whole Itanic idea, the dumb idea of making their P4 processors dependent on expensive RAMBUS memory, refusing to make a serious 64-bit version of x86 until AMD did it first, etc. It seems they still haven't learned (or hired some better executives).
If the money printing machine works to well, everybody forgets how to repair it by the time it breaks down.
Their press statement essentially R&D is too bloated, dysfunctional, and disorganized in the current state to produce.
If they cut 20%, they will still have an obscene budget.
If you read the press release the idea is to focus on their core competencies, like making good processors. That means laying off people that can't help with that goal.
sure, the standard press response to layoffs. They'll be back to chasing AI in a year, despite more or less having already lost the race.
That said, if they keep failing to turn a profit, it wont matter.
Intel similarly cut their project Larrabee / Knights Landing / Knights Mill product line, which could have thrust x86 into the AI space in a way no other platform does offers today. They just quit too soon. Which suggests lack of vision or inability to properly communicate that vision to the management / board / investors.
AMD's having a ton of success with Epyc and Threadripper putting up very similar numbers.
The development story for Knight's Mill was a lot simpler than for any GPU. Consequently, I don't think developers were the ones who needed convincing.
More discussion on official release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41133084