Intel Continues To Rehire Veterans: At Some Point They'll Run Out (anandtech.com) 34
Intel has rehired 28-year veteran Shlomit Weiss into the position of Senior VP and Co-General Manager of Intel's Design Engineering Group (DEG), a position recently vacated by Uri Frank who left to head up Google's SoC development. "Weiss is the latest in an ever-growing list of 're-hiring' Intel veterans, which leads to the problem that at some point Intel will run out of ex-employees to rehire and instead nurture internal talent for those roles," writes Dr. Ian Cutress via AnandTech. From the report: As reported in Tom's Hardware and confirmed in her own LinkedIn announcement, Weiss will be working at Intel's Israel design center alongside Sunil Shenoy and is "committed to ensuring that the company continues to lead in developing chips." [...] In her first 28-year stint at Intel, Weiss is reported to have lead the team that developed both Intel Sandy Bridge and Intel Skylake, arguably two of the company's most important processor families over the last decade: Sandy Bridge reaffirmed Intel's lead in the market with a new base microarchitecture and continues in its 6+th generation in Comet Lake today, while Skylake has been Intel's most profitable microarchitecture ever. Weiss also received Intel's Achievement Award, the company's highest offer, but is not listed as an Intel Fellow, while CRN reports that Weiss also founded the Intel Israel Women Forum in 2014. Weiss left Intel in September 2017 to join Mellanox/NVIDIA, where she held the role of Senior VP Silicon Engineering and ran the company's networking chip design group. In her new role at Intel, Tom's is reporting that Weiss will lead all of Intel's consumer chip development and design, while the other Co-GM of Intel DEG Sunil Shenoy will lead the data center design initiatives. AnandTech goes on to note that Intel has hired 12 veterans since Dec. 20th of last year. "Of these named hires (plenty of other people hired below the role of VP), seven are listed as ex-Intel employees being rehired into the company, mostly into engineering-focused positions," writes Cutress. He continues: It should be noted however that number of engineers that Intel could rehire is limited -- going after key personnel critical to Intel's growth in the last few decades, despite their lists of successful products and accolades, can't be the be-all and end-all of Intel's next decade of growth. If we're strictly adhering to typical retirement ages as well, a number of them will soon be at that level within the next ten years. Intel can't keep rehiring veteran talent into key positions to get to the next phase in its product evolution -- at some level it has to reignite the initial passion from within.
[I]f Intel is having to rehire those who enabled former glory for the company, one has to wonder exactly what is going on such that talent already within the company isn't stepping up. At some point these veterans will retire, and Intel will be at a crossroads. In a recent interview with former Intel SVP Jim Keller, he stated that (paraphrased) "building a chip design team at a company depends on volume -- you hire in if you don't have the right people, but if you have a team of 1,000, then there are people there and it's a case of finding the right ones." In a company of 110,000 employees, it seems odd that Intel feels it has to rehire to fill those key roles. Some might question if those rehires would have left in the first place if Intel's brain drain had never occurred, but it poses an interesting question nonetheless.
[I]f Intel is having to rehire those who enabled former glory for the company, one has to wonder exactly what is going on such that talent already within the company isn't stepping up. At some point these veterans will retire, and Intel will be at a crossroads. In a recent interview with former Intel SVP Jim Keller, he stated that (paraphrased) "building a chip design team at a company depends on volume -- you hire in if you don't have the right people, but if you have a team of 1,000, then there are people there and it's a case of finding the right ones." In a company of 110,000 employees, it seems odd that Intel feels it has to rehire to fill those key roles. Some might question if those rehires would have left in the first place if Intel's brain drain had never occurred, but it poses an interesting question nonetheless.
also a signal to other employees (Score:5, Interesting)
It's likely that some of those high performers who left, did so because of dysfunction and idiocy under previous management, and this fact may be well understood.
Signaling that those people were right all along is a good message to current employees and future employees: that those who do well technically will be valued, retained and rewarded.
This helps recruiting as well.
Re:also a signal to other employees (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed. When you rehire a "boomerang," you get someone who knows your culture, knows your people, and can "click" right into place and be productive.
They are often brimming with ideas about fixing sh*t because they know what is broken, and they saw it being done better elsewhere.
My company keeps good relations with alumni, inviting them to occasional company BBQs and events, and we have a good record of rehires.
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They are rehiring older staff, this is more pursuing a different work ethic. People who work for the corporation, rather than those who seek to exploit the corporation.
It is a creative engineering thing. Will new creative engineers provide creative work or will they seek to keep it for their own future use. Only doing the work as defined and holding onto all innovation, to seek future employment or patents.
The greed and exploitation of professionals have turned professionals into uncreative lumps, greedy
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Re: also a signal to other employees (Score:4, Insightful)
Appreciate your employees and make them feel proud of working for you.
Too many corporations just see employees as totally replaceable with other people from the street. Reality is that it takes about a year for an employee to become efficient in your organization, mostly by being able to navigate around all organizational snags and build an informal net that can create a warp speed solution when there's a crisis. This is real agility.
But then it's also important to have manufacturing close to development because developers that can see the manufacturing first hand better understands how to optimize the design. Internal recruiting is also a piece of the cake - go from manufacturing to development can be valuable because you'd get people seeing a wider picture.
Re:also a signal to other employees (Score:4, Insightful)
My company keeps good relations with alumni, inviting them to occasional company BBQs and events, and we have a good record of rehires.
Seems odd to me that more companies don't do this. Leaving seems to be considered an unforgivable act of betrayal. Maybe it's the at-will California culture but it's weird that people just disappear one week with basically no notice (this doesn't happen in the UK on the whole, due to notice periods, though the attitude can be the same).
Seems much more civilised to give long notice, then finish off cleanly and maintain good relations and maybe return one day. The whole "this person gave notice now they are evil and untrustworthy OFF THE PREMESIS NOW!!!" is just weird.
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It depends on the company. When hot professionals are blocked in career growth by competent people one level up, it can make sense for them to leave and get some other experience, especially with a business partner on good terms with their original company. This happens with on-site consultation in a good company: they can also maintain a professional relationship with their original employer.
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It's probably because most people leaving do so because they have been screwed in some way. Occasionally people go to relocate for family reasons etc. but it's usually down to being underpaid, office politics, bad boss or some other thing that causes them to go.
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It's likely that some of those high performers who left, did so because of dysfunction and idiocy under previous management, and this fact may be well understood.
Signaling that those people were right all along is a good message to current employees and future employees: that those who do well technically will be valued, retained and rewarded.
This helps recruiting as well.
Changing organizations is also a good way to learn new things.
Take two employees who started together, one who worked for Intel 20 years and another who worked 10 years, left Intel for 10 years, then came back.
The employee who left and came back might have more to offer than the employee who never left.
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Changing organizations is also a good way to learn new things.
Jurisdictions that make job-hopping easy tend to have higher productivity than jurisdictions that make it difficult.
California's ban on non-compete agreements is one reason for SV's success.
In general, companies benefit more from stealing ideas than they lose from having their ideas stolen.
It's Market Economy 101. (Score:2)
Have dimwitts and douchebags doing bad governance and making stupid decisions - lose the people who get the job done, fix problems and innovate. It's quite simple actually. There's a German proverb "The fish stinks from the head on downward." And if the fish starts stinking and you don't look to stop it, your shop will eventually falter. It's that simple.
Re: also a signal to other employees (Score:1)
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It also has the stink of desperation to it.
Maybe .. (Score:5, Insightful)
If Intel is having to rehire those who enabled former glory for the company, one has to wonder exactly what is going on such that talent already within the company isn't stepping up.
When I worked for Boeing back in the early 2000's, they had a pretty serious cutback in engineering. The ones that didn't have a problem finding a new (and possibly better) position elsewhere took the golden parachutes and left. The ones that had no hope of finding another job hung on for dear life. Perhaps the same thing happened at Intel. And "the talent" already in the company isn't all that talented.
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Indeed. The continued failures Intel is slowly piling up would indicated that. And at some time even the fanbois may realize they are getting screwed over time an again and that could lead to a landslide. Intel already is badly prepared to move away from the AMD64 architecture. In fact, given the relative sizes of Intel and AMD, that the current one is the AMD64 architecture and that Intel completely failed to come up with a viable 64 bit architecture is a sign the rot had ample time to set in deep because
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Alternative explanaition: at the pointy end of the ORG chart you run out of places inside the company to be promoted to.
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I worked at a division manufacturing and designing microcontrollers. We were kept around longer than the memory division due to demand for our product and the resulting profits. As microcontrollers became more powerful, and competition increased, intel refused to invest in our R&D, announcing - with a smiling face - that we would be a "cash cow". Once I understood what this meant, I could see we would be closing shop in the near future.
The inse
Just in the nick of time. (Score:2)
Ten years is about time for Intel to pull a...Ryzen out of their hat. They're already doing some of the same things AMD are with chiplets and HBM.
Re: Just in the nick of time. (Score:4, Interesting)
Intel has lost 10 years of competence development. A 10 year old processor is still decent compared to the bulk volume processors of today. Not like the breakneck performance increase we saw with 286-386-486-pentium etc. Up to the first Core i7. For every generation the speed increase was so obvious that you got a thirst for more. Then it just went marginal relatively spoken and you seldom felt any difference anymore. Most speed difference seen last years have been due to things like SSDs.
The veterans will have a hard time turning around the ship.
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Some performance gains over the past decade had to be wound back due to Spectre/Meltdown?
And the focus has been battery life. If you remember working in an office last millennium, computers were noisy. Quiet, thin laptops aren't necessarily compatible with speed.
Anyhow, for battery life they're going hybrid - using little Celeron cores for low power and big Core cores for heavier workloads.
But if x86 needs ditching entirely to save the company then they've misplayed their hand on Risc-V and SiFive - Windows
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Intel has lost 10 years of competence development. A 10 year old processor is still decent compared to the bulk volume processors of today. Not like the breakneck performance increase we saw with 286-386-486-pentium etc. Up to the first Core i7.
[waves]
Posting from an 11 year old laptop. First gen i7 Q820. It's beginning to feel slow on huge websites, but it's my day to day machine. I only switch on my Ryzen desktop if I need to do something heavy (deep learning, 4k video editing).
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The "286/386/486" technology was tapped out. Intel stole Alpha technology from DEC for the Pentium. When you've gotten that large, it becomes difficult to find innovation significant enough to steal.
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A 10 year old processor is still decent compared to the bulk volume processors of today.
Surprise! Windows 11 deprecates all of those old processors! So an upgrade is now compulsory!
Something missing from the story? (Score:4, Insightful)
Intel is bringing new fabs online in the US. IIRC, this is part of a (hopefully) industry-wide push to become less reliant on foreign fabs that both increase supply instability and uncertainty, and make IP theft easier.
Perhaps these rehires have experience and expertise in building and running fabs. Perhaps they have fab-specific design knowledge that Intel has been relying on foreign sources for. Maybe they're just expecting / planning for a growth spurt and want seasoned hands who not only know the industry, but know Intel. Some or all of these seem likely to me, but keep in mind that I'm just speculating.
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a) Bringing new fabs online is not an exceptional occurence for Intel, just a regularly scheduled event on the capital expenditure calendar.
b) Of the 12 named people in the AnandTech article NONE are fab side. The closest you get is Hong Hao at Intel Foundry Services.
Inwardly Focused (Score:2)
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The 432 was not a marketing failure. It was a technical-suckage failure.
Will Intel ever get round to fixing the MMU ? (Score:1)
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Maybe kids have gotten smart, and you can't pay them to ruin their lives anymore. Or maybe they're just waiting longer before they start their families and become desperate for bigger paychecks.
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Many men will still take the money, do the hours, and gain promotions for it. Women n the workforce are less likely to favor work so heavily in the work-life balance: it's one of the underlying reasons for the gender pay gap and the glass ceiling, though both exist due to biases as well.
No Reward For Loyalty (Score:2)
Um ... what happened to promoting from within?
Giving senior positions to outsiders, even if they are rehires, over promoting local talent ... just tells people to leave if they want to be promoted.
For every senior position, there's N candidates vying and hoping for that promotion, and BOOM.. Hopes crushed. How is this helping company morale? I'd say it's time to leave if they won't put the effort into training and grooming current employees for promotion. You can get a paycheck anywhere. Being re
Re:No Reward For Loyalty (Score:4, Insightful)
If those existing employees you are referring to who feel entitled to senior positions without having done anything to earn them other than remain with the company long enough leave, then Intel will almost certainly be better off.
Not much help (Score:1)