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A few years ago a CEO of Intel (not Gelsinger) said something like "our CPU architecture is so well-known every college student can work on it". A friend working at Intel at that time translated it to me: "we will hire cheap students to work on chips and we will let the expensive engineers leave". At least in his department the senior engineers left, they were replaced by fresh graduates. It did not work, that department closed. I have no idea how widespread this was inside Intel, but I saw it in other big companies, in some with my own eyes.

Funny you mention this. In my brief stint there, I saw a fresh college graduate get promoted to a lead for a Scanning Unit simply because the current lead was retiring (I was actually offered that position, but I was leaving and turned it down). They were trained in less than a month by shadowing the lead on-the-verge-of-retirement. The engineer who got promoted was at Intel less than a year, and had no prior internship experience (they were hired in 2021 when chips were in desperate need of talent. You might recall the chip shortage that affected cars etc.)

> A few years ago a CEO of Intel (not Gelsinger) said something like "our CPU architecture is so well-known every college student can work on it". A friend working at Intel at that time translated it to me: "we will hire cheap students to work on chips and we will let the expensive engineers leave"

Reminds me of the Boeing managers saying that they didn't need senior engineers because its products were mature..

A few blown doors and deadly crashes later, that didn't age well..

https://archive.is/H9eh9#selection-3935.0-3935.163

I know some people who understand x86 [0] very well. Most of them do not work at Intel. Those that do tend to be on the OSS side and don’t really have any sway in the parts of Intel that design new hardware.

And this is a problem! Most of Intel’s recent major architectural changes over the last decade or so have been flops. [1] Quite a few have been reverted, often even after they ship. I presume that Intel does not actually have many people who are really qualified to work on the architecture.

[0] I’m talking about how it interacts with an OS and how you put it together into a working system. Understand stuff like SIMD is a different thing.

[1] AVX and its successors are notable exceptions, but they still have issues, and Intel did not really rock the early implementations.

> Most of the talent I know is either at Apple or Facebook/Google

A relative of mine with a PhD sounds exactly like this. Worked for Intel on chip-production tech then was hired by Apple about 10 years ago, working on stuff that gets mentioned in Apple keynotes.

While I am sure the foot soldier quality is important, we ought to put the burden on leadership a bit more. I am not sure AMD had a better talent pool (I don't work in the industry so I don't know!) ten years ago. Culture is predominantly shaped by those already in power -- it sounds like they need a change in culture.

> lack of genuine interest in fabs - most people are there for the Intel name

I can actually believe this. Of most of the rest of the arguments, that tend to be rather vague, and wave at implementation, or some stock related motivation (like we need TSMCs business), a lack of genuine interest in the employees that was not sold to them or the market especially effectively seems fairly believable.

Most people are there for the chips, for making great designs in silicon, and being market leaders in CPU architecture. Not running the equivalent of an offshoring division making other people's stuff.

The entire implementation has seemed rather haphazard and not sold with much real motivation. Honestly, the entire situation feels a bit like Afghanistan (if that's a bit incendiary)

Nobody really knows why they're going. Nobody really knows what they're trying to accomplish. The objectives on the ground seem vague, ephemeral, and constantly changing. There's not much passion among the ground troops about the idea. The leaders always seem to be far away, and making strange proclamations, without actually putting boots in the dirt. The information released often feels multiple personalityish, like there's far too many cooks in the kitchen, or far too many puppeteers pulling strings in every direction. And afterward you find out it was mostly some dumpster fire driven by completely different motivations than what were publicly acknowledged.

The senior engineers I saw there are talented. And Intel has benefits and stock packages that rival those of big tech. I think I can expand on your point by saying the more senior engineers were risk averse and on the verge of retirement, and the young engineers were just there for the Intel name or some other reason. There is surprisingly very few middle-aged long-term people down there. This would be expected in software (Facebook/Google), but it is a recipe for disaster in hardware where long term thinking is critical to advance lithography (changed don't happen overnight). I also was surprised by how few of Intel's engineers believed in Intel. The most stark observation I made was senior engineers would max their stock purchase plan, but many young engineers would abstain. If the engineers don't believe in the product they are working on, I don't accept that the gov. must bail it out. I hope some investigative journalist writes a book on Intel and Boeing someday, as I would be curious as to how things unfolded and got to this point. There are many similarities (I never worked for Boeing, but have friends in Seattle that describe the culture in similar terms to what I saw at Intel). Also, to your last point, the Intel name does not hold as much weight as it did in the Grove days.

> And Intel has benefits and stock packages that rival those of big tech.

Given Intel’s stock returns over the past 15 years, Intel would have to offer insane cash compensation to rival big tech.

Levels.fyi indicates Intel heavily underpays, which is what I would expect.

https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Intel,Apple,Google&track=Sof...

Should have mentioned Hardware. I remember Intel pays more than Apple hardware when adjusted for COL (Intel in Oregon/New Mexico vs Cupertino). It has been a while since I looked into the salaries though. I agree they do not pay well relative to big tech on the software side of things though

Top talent who can shop around for more pay is going to demand higher pay in exchange for the opportunity costs for having to live in Oregon/New Mexico compared to Cupertino.

It does help to retain the talent, those 5-10y engineers have a house on mortgage and need a higher pay incentive to uproot their lives. At least, that was probably the reasoning before, things have changed:

- WFH means you do not even have to move.

- Competitors have set up satellite offices in Hillsborough/Portland to poach talent.

- Intel does not feel like the stable employer anymore, with the almost yearly layoff waves since the BK era.

This case kind of depends on your priorities. If your goal is the Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Mountain View lifestyle and lateraling between the various companies in the area, then it's an opportunity cost. Has other positives also: low crime, wealthy neighbors, investment money, startup opportunities, mountains and hiking in the area, ocean nearby.

Has it's downsides though. Having visited NASA Ames over in Mountain View because of space agency work, it has a lot of the same issues as Aspen. Lot of sameness, lot of architecture that's McWealthy pseduo-Pueblo, lot of expensive blast plain suburbia, lot of people that start with "you're leaving money on the table" mentality, San Jose and San Fran traffic nearby can be nightmarish, and the crime of Oakland doesn't have that far to walk.

With many family in the Portland, Hillsboro, Beaverton area, that area also has it's positives: relatively low crime in Hillsboro / Beaverton (Portland's not great on the East side)[1], wealthy neighbors, huge amounts of hiking / outdoors / mountain climbing / biking / botanical gardens / parks, much less of blast plain suburbia, somewhat private feeling / hidden housing developments, ocean nearby, Columbia River nearby, significant art culture, lots of breweries / restaurants / food trucks / foodies, decent public transit, if you want dry desert wealth like Cali then Bend is not that far away.

Comparing the shows Portlandia vs Silicon Valley and Weeds is not a bad approximation.

[1] https://www.thetrace.org/2023/02/gun-violence-map-america-sh...

Thank you for the pay comparison website link. The pay scale difference is frankly is a little challenging to even believe in some cases. Facebook pays an M2 software manager $1,426,471? Comparables at other (F)AANGs are $700,000 to $800,000. Double ??? at the same grade? That seems like nonsensical escalation. Does not seem like FB/Meta/saggy infinity symbol formerly known as Prince is getting their money's worth.

When equity compensation is such a high proportion, one can not simply compare numbers. You have to take into account volatility of the business and its impact on share price (and hence impact on your compensation).

The equity compensation figures on levels.fyi are very rough estimates on what one might sees, but it is possible that Meta has to offer more equity due to more perceived volatility in its business rather than, say, Apple or Microsoft. Or maybe more expected work hours/days.

But also, Meta has long been known to pay more, famously being the business that eschewed the collusion that resulted in the famous high-tech employee antitrust litigation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Like I mentioned down below, used to work with the space agency back in the day, and by extension, Boeing. Even late 2000's, early 2010's, Boeing was a dumpster fire. Visited their local offices and the place looked like a hoarder hole. Boxes thrown everywhere, haphazard cabinets just left places, roaming meetings in sparse rooms. Seemed like homeless were camping there rather than a functional company.

The meetings with them felt that way too. Watch the same slides for months and wonder how nobody was moving anywhere with anything actually involving choices. "So, we've got these three alternatives for SLS, and like 10 other nice-to-have engineer pipe dreams." "Right, you'll choose the obvious low cost choice A. Why are we having this meeting again?" Many months later, after endless dithering, surprise, obvious choice using almost no hardware changes is chosen. All engineer nice-to-have pipe dreams are thrown away. There was much rejoicing at the money successfully squandered.

Do you think Intel can improve the quality of engineers on the fab side by offering PhD level salaries to people with BS/MS from good graduates from good US schools? I suspect that Intel hires PhDs from subpar universities.

Were you working on the fab side of things?

Don't want to dox myself, but I worked at one of the fabs (Fab11X)

Your two major problems would both be solved by paying more, but it sounds like they are paying well, according to you?

Genuine interest is not the only way to get great results. Excellent pay can do so as well.

And lack of talent, again, excellent pay.

> Most of the talent I know is either at Apple or Facebook/Google

That's a damn shame. Big tech monopolies are screwing up the talent market. Nobody can match their comp and it's bullshit

The problem is that Intel is poorly run. Intel should be printing money, and did for a long time until a string of bad leadership. If they had brought in Gelsinger after Otellini, which they were reported to have considered, the company might be in a much better position.

But alas, Intel is a mega bureaucratic company with a few tiny siloed teams responsible for innovating and everyone else being test and process jockeys. I think Gelsinger wasn't given enough time, personally, and agree with the OP that even someone like Elon would struggle to keep this sinking ship afloat at this point.

BK wanted wearables and Bob Swan wanted to cut costs; neither of them were visionaries nor did they really understand that Intel was a hard tech company. Intel had achieved such dominance in such a in-demand, growing market, that all they had to do was make the technology better (smaller, faster, lower power) and the money would continue to flow. The mandate was straightforward and they failed.

The companies that are big tech today took the risks and are now reaping the rewards. Intel decided not to take the risks, so now it doesn’t reap the rewards.

No one stopped Intel from paying for talent. Intel’s shareholders decided to pay themselves instead of investing in the business by hiring great employees. That’s how you go from being a leader to a laggard.

I am sure Intel has enough cash to hire some good talent (like just offer talented people next-level salary at $FAANG), the problem is deeper in the hiring pipeline -- convincing people of the budget and actually scouting and retaining good people