Intel's handing out pink slips. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on February 13 that, according to filings with the California Employment Development Department, the company plans to lay off 129 employees from its Santa Clara headquarters.
The layoffs appear to be related to Intel's realignment of its Data Center Group, which is now the Data Platforms Group, in January. That realignment was expected to lead to "at least several hundred" layoffs in several of the company's locations.
Intel told the Chronicle that its "business units are focusing their resources on areas where we have the greatest opportunity for growth and, as part of that, some are planning to eliminate roles associated with projects that are no longer priorities."
The company also reiterated that the layoffs affect less than 1% of its global workforce. It's also hiring for another 1,300 positions, although it's not clear if the people mentioned in these filings were given the opportunity to apply for those jobs.
Intel reportedly said in the filings that it will offer affected employees severance pay based on how long they worked for the company; it also plans to give them enough money to pay for their health insurance premiums for an undisclosed length of time.
Or younger employees that are not yet able to command large salaries. I worked at one company where it was very obvious what they were doing based on the people that were being given pink slips, often ones who'd been with the company for years. So much for any loyalty to your employees.
For a while they would regularly cull the bottom 10% of employees. That might sound wise, but if everyone is terrified of being in that bottom 10%, you get a lot of back-stabbing and one-upsmanship, rather than the kind of teamwork that research has shown to produce the best results.
They also did things like cutting everyone who didn't get a promotion in the past 3 years (as you get more senior, promotions naturally tend to take longer, so this almost seems designed to cull more senior employees, other than super stars).
They frequently shutter offices and divisions, which probably creates a workforce that's continually looking around for their next opportunity, instead of focusing only on success of their current endeavor.
So, is it any wonder that they are now having issues staying at the cutting edge of markets and production stages (such as fabrication), where they have traditionally dominated?
Wall St. doesn't care about that. The average tenure of a CEO is just a few years. So, for them, it's obviously going to be tempting to take a short-term gain of making cuts, when they might not even be around to suffer most of the cumulative fallout.