Are you implying Intel's margins weren't high enough for it to compensate its engineers well or provide better working conditions?
Intel was very clear that it was not willing to pay top dollar not because they didn’t have the money, but because top technical talent tended to resist or reject Intel culture. This meant the big bucks always went to management and other enforcers of said culture.
In 2021 Pat Gelsinger told HR to increase pay to match market in an attempt to stanch the attrition. The problem with this is that Intel management didn’t try to fix the broken culture, and instead propped it up by handing the new cash over to the “critical talent” that again, were the cultural enforcers. Pat G genuinely believes Intel is the greatest company on the planet, so he won’t see this as a problem.
There are some things that money can’t fix.
Selecting desktop processors over mobile processors as strategy. Basically a double-down on what had always worked rather than paying attention to the signs of the market.
We've all heard the story of Steve Jobs asking for a mobile processors for the iPhone and being shutdown by Intel management. I knew a number of Intel engineers and managers who were pushing the mobile path in 2009-2011 even after the iPhone showed that mobile was the money maker. When push came to shove, those Intel engineers got shutdown hard and most of them left Intel. When the evidence in your face is ignored and all you hear is "stupidity" - the non-masochists get out!
I used to work for Intel so seeing it collapse like this roll out as a slow-motion tragedy has been sad. But that's also been true (for many of the same stupid management/strategy reasons) of Hewlett-Packard for whom I worked for 10 years when Bill and Dave were still alive. Leadership matters. Probably more than anything else, even technology know-how.
One of these days the demise of Intel will be taught in business schools as a case study of how to destroy a tech company from within.
Please share! I've worked in the games industry, I'll believe anything :-)
Given the stories I've heard, I don't think anyone can compete with the gaming industry!
I'd love to dish, but there is no simple and salacious story to tell, and it's too soon to talk about it anyway as far as I am concerned (and I imagine their lawyers agree). I do think the emergence of high-margin software companies as providers of mostly high-pay, low-stress jobs (and thus magnets for sharp and motivated engineers or aspiring engineers) was one of many contributing factors. I'd tell you how process engineers in the most critical areas used to work, but you'd never believe me.