Sorry, I’m not sure if I follow your point?

Basically, I was saying that top-engineers are irreplaceable but they need replaceable engineers to execute menial, boring, repetitive work. There is a lot of this to be done.

His point is, when you go from being practically the only game in town in 2014, to being a joke-ass also-ran "competitor" being trounced by the underdog processor company[0] who damn near went bankrupt and had to sell their fab just to stay afloat; and when your two biggest allies 1) make their own System-on-a-Chip that fucking slaughters your best offerings in a ton of benchmarks and real world tests, and also does it on 1/4th the power[1] and 2) is actively working with another company to also make their own System-on-a-Chip that you can be damn sure will also go into, not only their premium tablet and laptop line, but likely also their cloud service division [2], you had better shape your ass up with a quickness and do whatever you need to do before you end up a footnote of history.

[0] - AMD

[1] - Apple

[2] - Microsoft

This feels like a distraction from what I was driving at. Whether it’s Intel, AMD, etc. any large company needs a lot of work to be done. You don’t need top engineers for that.

You are confusing "top" engineers/employees with top-technical employees, that is not the same at all. If you staff a company with geniuses in R&D and gray mediocrities in all the other departments I am pretty sure you know what will happen. You want great CAD designers, PM, QA, logistics, marketing people? Pay them accordingly and not like mediocrities.It is pretty obvious you have no idea what you are talking about.

Either that or he is unwittingly expressing the underlying problem with intel's corporate culture that got them into this mess.

Good engineering is about finding reusable solutions to problems, it's not manual labor.

If you have good engineers the relationship between amount of work and number of engineers needed is non-linear.

> You don’t need top engineers for that.

Top-tier companies have to pay top-tier compensation.

Unethical companies have to pay top-tier compensation. You don't have to pay Google/FB bucks if you don't have sex scandals and employee retaliations in the news every day, or if the students you're recruiting don't think you're brainwashing their grandparents.

That's a very weak idea and unhelpful. Many companies pay excellently and aren't even connected to advertising.

If you are/become a leader, this mentality can seriously hurt your org. Pay for the talent you want to attract and keep. Pay generously for performance.

Hiding in those pools of 'replaceable' engineers are the next generation of top-level engineers. Intel seems to have failed to recognize that fact and now have become as replaceable as their employees are.

Having a boring or menial job is not an indictment of a person's potential or capabilities.