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Comment by adrr | Hacker News Reader

Intel received almost $20 billion from the CHIPS act and cuts their employees. So glad we gave them money.

It’s called the CHIPS act, not the JOBS act, for a reason. Intel has a lot of employees that are not working on chip manufacturing. I was hired to work on flashy things that the previous previous CEO could point to while avoiding talking about why 10nm didn’t work. They were right to lay me off. They also gave a great severance and plenty of time to find a different job internally.

What was your job there?

Flashy things production, obviously. (In industry we call them "presentations")

Intel’s and the US’s main priority is for Intel to survive as a business over the coming decades and become competitive again. They’re going to do whatever they have to.

How does reducing the amount of work they are capable of help this though? especially now when they are going to be dealing with the fallout of this chip oxidation issue?

I don't understand the logic of it.

When someone is sick they need more support , not less.

It depends on whether or not those employees were producing more than they cost. It could be that Intel is shuttering unprofitable projects the way Steve Jobs did when he returned to Apple. He killed almost everything Apple was doing and got the company to focus on a handful of products, one of which was the iPod.

A lot of people provide negative value. Not net negative, in their work is less valuable than their salary, but actually negative value in that they just slow things down, waste resources, or prevent innovation for their own job security

>heir work is less valuable than their salary, but actually negative value in that they just slow things down

i don't buy it. . if those 15k people were truly a problem before why weren't they already removed?

Change is hard, firing people isn’t fun, and incentives don’t always align

I would guess that's < 5%, whereas "a lot" sounds like 30 or 50%

>I don't understand the logic of it

Intel is floundering. Do you presume all of these people were adding value at the front lines of chip manufacturing? They have to lean out and figure it out.

Because some people cost more than they produce? Seems pretty straightforward

Intel has more employees than AMD, TSMC, and NVIDIA combined. When AMD leapfrogged them they had less employees than the number just laid off. They need capital to build out new fabs and that has to come from somewhere.

CHIPS act was to build foundries in the US. How many people did they cut from this division? Cuts came from R&D and marketing according to the earnings call.

The point of the CHIPS Act is to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the U.S. Whether it will be a success or not is another discussion. GlobalFoundries, TSMC, Samsung, and others also received money from the CHIPS Act.

The point of the CHIPS act was to have supply chain security, not as a jobs program.

How else will the poor shareholders and top execs get their fair share??

They cut the dividend to zero and execs are paid in stock grants which have been haircut in value by 60% ytd. So both of those parties are doing badly.

There was a South Park episode that called out airlines for doing the same thing nearly twenty years ago. This behavior isn’t new.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entity_(South_Park)

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