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Comment by christkv | Hacker News Reader

The CEO had only been in charge since 2021 bringing an engineer back to the helm. How long does it take to bring a big ship like Intel around and undo decades of internal rot? It will be interesting to see who is let go in the coming months.

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Though prior to Gelsinger, Youtuber and chip leaker / rumor monger "Moore's Law is Dead" mentioned that Jim Keller's stint at Intel was so short (April 2018 - June 2020) because of internal cultural toxicity. In particular, things like leaders of major groups in Intel trying to get employees of other groups fired, so as to make their own relative progress look better. Take with a pound of salt of course, but MLiD's sources have been pretty decent.

You only resolve that kind of badness by firing a bunch of SVPs and VPs and Gelsinger hasn't done that, for many possible reasons.

>Youtuber and chip leaker / rumor monger "Moore's Law is Dead"

He might be right but that youtuber has a poor track record. He's just constantly pushing out rumours for the sake of content farming. Some of the rumours are right, some are wrong as hell.

I knew Intel was a dying company when Jim Keller quit in disgust. The man is pure productivity, a relentless optimiser that just wants to build great things. Intel broke him and he ran away screaming.

PS: Microsoft demoting Jeffrey Snover (inventor of PowerShell) is in the same category of a business decaying from the top down. He quit too, and is now working for Google.

> How long does it take to bring a big ship like Intel around and undo decades of internal rot?

If it takes that long, then this is your actual problem, and not how many engineers are in the loop at the board level.

>If it takes that long, then this is your actual problem

Most IC design life cycle are 5+ years. Expecting to turn over in less is part of the problem intel is having currently.

I'm skeptical. Big company, design & manufacturing cycles on the order of years because chips are that sophisticated these days, I don't know what you'd expect to see within 3 years of a new CEO.

to be honest, they should have done a layoff 3 years ago, as soon as Pat Gelsinger came onboard, and fired 2 entire layers of management.

No engineers or support people, but just pure middle managers - fire 2 or 3 layers. if they did that 3 years ago, they would be in a better position now.

Gelsinger would be shooting blind and in order to cut enough to force compliance he would ultimately be sabotaged as the entire workforce unites against him unless he had the ability to bring in a few thousand loyal soldiers to manage every unit. He’s got the much harder job of ferreting out deep corruption and incompetence that perniciously hides in corners protected by knowing whose buried what bodies. Rough job that he cannot possibly accomplish. Instead he’s probably trying to root out these toxic messes and quarantine them in safe environments where they can be productive enough to realize ROI but disempowered and segregated while he works on fixing the broken systems and teams that got Intel to this point. Maybe this layoff was in his back pocket waiting for the right time to cut the shit loose with cover or maybe he failed to realize that should have been his first order of business and this was a desperate move to stop the hemorrhaging and Intels books are going to be even worse two years out when the consequences of firing qualified staff begins to manifest.

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