Several conversations on this topic have brought up that pay rates at Intel are now less than the median of the industry. This would be fallout from actions by the MBAs in charge, but I don't think it's just an MBA issue. Something is clearly rotten in middle management in Intel. Either the people investigating the problems with their process weren't given the freedom to experiment to narrow down the scope of the problem, or they lost all their competent process engineers and are left with insufficient clue to fix the problem. If Intel has to rebuild their process group from scratch, they could be in for additional years of pain as new people come up to speed. Given that the United States is no longer a leader in bleeding edge process technology, this could take far longer than expected. How long will it take Intel to poach enough talent from TSMC to make a difference? And will they be able to integrate into Intel's culture?