Just look at their track record on the BIOS for server boards. A company I worked with ran into the exact same PCIe probing bug in the BIOS on every new generation of Intel server motherboard + CPU. And it always took 6 months for the BIOS guys to get around to reimplementing the same fix because the next gen CPUs fork off before the production fixes are complete.

I had a business partner who was impressed with Intel in a way that I just couldn't understand. In my own area of software expertise Intel was hiring freshers to make half-baked projects that were even more half baked than my own half baked projects and I could never get him to understand how it was a software person would find it almost impossible to be taken seriously in a company that thinks its main competence is hardware.

(That said, NVIDIA is a bit of a counterexample. As much as people complain about their drivers a lot of the brilliance in their product is in the CUDA compiler. I wound up having to fight with NVIDIA's drivers to make a family of machine language learning products deployable and came to have a lot of appreciation for the release engineering work that goes into their drivers even if, in the end, the drivers seem to be just another way to build a mailing list of people to spamannoy)

Do they value any employee at all? As per the latest grapevine, they have stopped giving RSU refreshers as well; I guess that may be a smart decision if they know all the smart horses have left the stable.

Intel basically just gave the whole company a substantial raise back in November, so I don't know. The RSU thing is news to me.