
Intel accused by workers of prioritizing chip output over safety - fortran77
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-08/intel-accused-by-workers-of-prioritizing-chip-output-over-safety
======
Jaygles
I can't imagine what higher ups in Intel are feeling about the current state
of things especially since they are spending nearly 10x on R+D as AMD is($1.5b
AMD[0] vs $13.1b Intel[1]). Of course AMD doesn't need to spend R+D money on
the process they're using from TSMC although I'm sure some of the money
they're handing over to them goes to R+D.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the board meeting room.

[0] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/267873/amds-
expenditure-...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/267873/amds-expenditure-
on-research-and-development-since-2001/)

[1] [https://www.investopedia.com/news/amazons-23b-rd-budget-
sets...](https://www.investopedia.com/news/amazons-23b-rd-budget-sets-record-
recode/)

~~~
mikepurvis
I was recently putting together a desktop PC for some light gaming after being
out of the market for a long time, and I couldn't believe how incremental
Intel's progress has been in the CPU space over the past few years.

I know there's a non-trivial mobile performance penalty, but a fourth gen mid-
range i5 I got on eBay for $30 has nearly the performance of the 8750H in last
year's Dell XPS (my work laptop). Even when you get away from mobile, compare
two i7 chips that were released _five years apart for basically the same
price_ , and userbenchmark.com shows just a 21% overall performance difference
in them:

[https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-
Core-i7-4790-vs-...](https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-
Core-i7-4790-vs-Intel-Core-i7-9700/2293vsm816180)

This windows shrinks even further when you look at what overclockers get out
of the older chips with fancy cooling setups. But yeah, when else in the
history of personal computing has five years of progress yielded such small
gains?

I know eventually I'll upgrade my system for real, probably to something
AM4-based, but when I saw these numbers, it became a no brainer to just bump
up the CPU on an old LGA1150 system I had lying around rather than spend a
bunch of money on an all-new motherboard, new RAM, etc.

~~~
Firehawke
Five years? Make that ten; the progress since Sandy Bridge has been incredibly
slow. If you take a Sandy Bridge i5 or i7 CPU and turn off the mitigations,
it's still within spitting distance of the current i5/i7 models. The only
reason I changed out my old i5-2500K two years ago was that the motherboard
had finally failed. It was holding up fine with any software I was running,
including modern games from that time such as Doom 2016.

Intel really has got to be in an internal panic. The last time AMD pushed
Intel this hard, Intel went to extraordinary tactics to push AMD out of the
market. I wouldn't be surprised if pushing their workers well beyond safety
limits was in the current playbook.

~~~
mikepurvis
That's a good point; past a certain point I think it's less about the single
threaded performance and more about interconnect constraints— slower RAM
speeds, slower PCIe lanes, slower SATA, USB, etc.

There's a funny series of LTT videos from this past fall where they bring up a
2008 Skulltrail mobo and try running some modern games on it, with and without
overclocking:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNo7qoLRtkQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNo7qoLRtkQ)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hl7Dx895ND4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hl7Dx895ND4)

------
smaddox
I worked at Intel in a fab for 2 years. The culture is extremely safety
conscious, if not safety obsessed. The moto is Safety, Quality, Output, in
that order. In my experience, Intel strives to create an environment in which
workers are safer at work than at home.

~~~
blitmap
Speaking as someone who knows nothing about fab: What are the most dangerous
aspects of the job? What's the most likely injuries to happen doing x?

~~~
ISL
I've done lithography in research settings. To me, the chemistry is the
scariest.

High voltages, high-power optics, vacuum systems, etc, all exist, too, but the
risks associated with chemistry/process-gas accidents are perhaps the
greatest.

As a teaser, HF is used throughout the industry -- it is spooky stuff (and
_awesome_ at getting things done).

~~~
tedsanders
Seconded. TMAH is particularly scary, though less common than HF. If enough
splashes on your skin, you die. Highly toxic stuff.

~~~
hectormalot
Off topic, but that reminded me of some horror stories from my chemistry days:

Dimethylmercury able to kill through 2 drops absorbed through a latex glove:
[https://www.acsh.org/news/2016/06/06/two-drops-of-death-
dime...](https://www.acsh.org/news/2016/06/06/two-drops-of-death-
dimethylmercury)

And of course the amazing series of ‘things I won’t work with’. E.g.:
[https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2014/10/10/th...](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2014/10/10/things_i_wont_work_with_peroxide_peroxides)

------
sascovid19tw
I have firsthand experience with this, albeit not at Intel. Several known
positive cases have appeared Samsung's fab in Austin. Samsung mandates they
not return and quarantine at home.

Before any of that, I'd already decided back in early March—when it became
clear that things were more serious than people had been taking
everything—that I'd stick around until we either temporarily shut down or when
the reported cases start getting too close for comfort.

A few weeks ago I sat down in the morning to find another company-wide email
sent out at 9:00PM the night before (don't know why they hadn't also forwarded
a copy of this one to my personal inbox that I could access from home, as with
the ones before). In this case, symptoms were reported 4 days before, and now
with confirmation having tested positive. This time it was on my floor, not
far from where I sit in our open office. I sent an email that I was leaving
and would not be returning for at least two weeks and pending further info
about any spread. That was a Friday. I got fired over email (although not in
those terms) at the end of the day the following Monday:

 _Although you did not resign failure to report to your scheduled shift(s) has
been taken as a voluntary resignation. We have gone ahead and ended your
assignment for you. Please do not report back to the SAS site as your
assingment here is done._

This was all within the last two weeks. At the time, our group had been doing
a piss poor job of observing both company and local rules about distancing. It
had been less than a week since people around me had finally gotten moved to
different workstations. It wasn't an availability problem, because (a) half
the office was already a ghost town due to select folks ordered to work from
home, and (b) the rest of the company had been been working spread out for
something like a month already—but not our group.

At the beginning of April, we were supposed to get a scheduled payout for
earned PTO, but we received an email that due to COVID they were actually
going to _delay_ the payout. I had to jump through a lot of hoops alternately
taking on extra days that I wasn't ordinarily scheduled and taking off other
days to burn the PTO to give the effect of getting the payout for the hours
I'd accrued.

~~~
colechristensen
The issue here is you could probably have not lost your job if you had made
this a request to HR or your manager instead of a blanket email.

There is a big difference between unilaterally announcing that you won't be
coming to work and having your request refused and getting fired for leaving
anyway.

~~~
nickff
This seems correct.

It looks like the employer interpreted the message as a type of ultimatum. In
the face of such an ultimatum, they basically have no choice but to treat it
as a resignation.

The ultimatum is a very dangerous negotiating tactic, and generally harmful to
long-term relationships. As an example, I recommend against posing an
ultimatum to a spouse or partner.

~~~
pmiller2
No, they also have the choice to implement proper safety measures. You sound
as if you believe the employer is entitled to abuse every bit of power they
have over an employee.

Edit: speaking of "ultimatums," what do you call a strike? Is it only an
"ultimatum" (thus unacceptable) when one person does it, but not when a large
group does it?

~~~
nickff
The problem is not the legitimacy of the issue; the problem is the approach.
Grandparent comment said: "I sent an email that I was leaving and would not be
returning for at least two weeks and pending further info about any spread."

If they had said that they have concerns about safety, and requested an urgent
(possibly remote) discussion, the employer would have more options. By telling
the employer that they were leaving immediately, and not coming back until
they felt something had changed, they force an immediate decision of either
treating it as a resignation, or accepting and condoning unilateral actions by
employees.

Strikes are definitely ultimatums, though they generally have clearer
objectives, and are usually preceded by a series of discussions. Strikes are
not conducive to good relationships.

~~~
romwell
I think you missed the part where the employee was notified of a coronavirus
case on their floor _by an email they could only read at work_.

Read this again, and comprehend that the HR unilaterally and knowingly
subjected them to risk of contacting the virus.

Subsequent self-quarantine at home benefits the company as it reduces the
chances of spread. It was the right thing to do, and there's not much to
negotiate here given the initial screw-up.

~~~
nickff
You are looking at this issue from a moral/ethical lens, while I am looking at
it from a game theory perspective.

I am not making a judgement as to who is at fault for the situation. I am only
stating that the decisive move was the grandparent's e-mail, which left the
employer only one rational option (that I know of).

~~~
pmiller2
You seem to be making an argument for unionization in the tech industry, then.

------
zozbot234
All in all, COVID19 is just about the one thing that's _not_ a safety concern
in a chip-fabbing cleanroom. Hydrofluoric acid is somewhat harder to deal with
though, so I'm not at all sure that 'deprioritizing' workplace safety is the
right approach.

~~~
janekm
We're not talking about the folks in bunny suits here, obviously.

~~~
klyrs
Idle concern -- what about the _inside_ of those bunny suits? Are they
sanitized between uses? As I understand it, folks wear 'em to keep the
cleanroom clean, not so much to keep them safe from eachother's germs

------
klenwell
Since reading about Paul O'Neill's turnaround of ALCOA, I've been convinced
that worker safety (or well-being for less life-and-death office environments)
should be the one OKR/KPR/whatever-you-want-to-call-it every company is
focused on. Especially for manufacturing companies. As Charles Duhigg notes in
writing about O'Neill's leadership, it's a focus that can improve
communication and performance all around:

[http://txti.es/duhigg-keystone-habits](http://txti.es/duhigg-keystone-habits)

Instead, it feels like most corporations are managed by the people who run
Royco in Succession:

[https://youtu.be/UcTmBfA7Qik?t=48](https://youtu.be/UcTmBfA7Qik?t=48)

~~~
hpoe
I heard about that story, albeit through "The Power of Habit" by Duhigg, which
is probably what your referencing. My reservation about just saying "safety is
the top priority" is that it can quickly turn into management cargo culting if
someone doesn't actually understand what changes it made at ALCOA and why it
worked.

Its the same as a manager who hears that being interested in the well being of
his employees can get them to work harder so he starts pretending to be
interested in his employees, not because he cares but because he wants
performance improvements. It ends up being insincere, creepy and off putting
instead.

If the brass of a company try and emphasize safety to try and get the benefits
ALCOA got, they won't pull it off, not because safety isn't important but
because they didn't really care about safety in the first place.

------
vikramkr
How has demand for chips looked over the past few months? Has it been enough
to potentially necessitate from a business perspective keeping output high? I
can imagine arguments for higher or lower demand that seem perfectly
reasonable (low because consumer segment slowdown, high because surge in cloud
service use increasing failures/expansion demand or business laptops for WFH)
and I'm wondering what the dominant force is.

~~~
ksidkrk9
Personally demand for chips is not the measure I’d want them to use.

Stabilizing employee mindset is the measure they should care about.

Hard to ship chips if they feel the company doesn’t care about their demand to
stay alive and they all quit. AMD wouldn’t mind a bunch of chip experts being
suddenly available.

Ogling market economics first and foremost is really not the priority for
agency these days.

If demand falls such that we’re just generating chips for science and
industry, so be it.

No one owes tech nerds tech to fetishize.

~~~
vikramkr
Oh I completely agree that it's a bad measure. I'm not looking for a
_justification_ , I'm curious for an _explanation_ of why management might be
incentivized to act this way. If theres a business case for it it's fairly
easy to rationalize as a manager why you have a moral responsibility to put
employees at risk (the economy is running in WFH powered by our CPUs! They
need us!). Especially if they're in for a nice bonus if sales spike in higher
demand. I'm more curious if there's even a business case to be made which
might explain (but not necessarily justify) reckless behavior.

------
csours
Even safety conscious employers have a hard time reacting to new and different
safety related areas.

For instance, see the USCSB's video on the BP Texas City refinery explosion.
The refinery operator had a great record for safety, but it was measuring
individual worker safety, ie PPE and recordable injuries. It was not measuring
Process safety.

[https://www.csb.gov/bp-america-refinery-explosion/](https://www.csb.gov/bp-
america-refinery-explosion/)

\---

Edit: I should probably make clear that I don't think BP actually had a great
safety record. I think they measured and cared about a certain class of
safety, but not another class of safety, and that's the point I was trying to
make.

------
ben509
The whole notion of priorities in safety vs. revenue never works for me. (And
you can s/safety/security/ or s/safety/privacy/.)

In a very limited scope, it could work. If a team has a sprint or something,
they can work on the safety tasks first.

But that's not really how a company operates. You have a whole mess of
tradeoffs and often the costs and benefits can't be clearly quantified.

What they do is work out an operational model, some people work exclusively on
examining safety, and they put out guidelines to management and employees who
then have to practice safety themselves. Generally, you only know if it works
after the fact by examining the results, maybe even tally up the costs of
lawsuits or bad PR.

But it's meaningless to say "safety is job #1" because you're doing all the
jobs 2 and on or you're going out of business. And that means _all_ of them;
no one says "taking out the trash is job #1" or "sending out W2s is job #1"
but a company grinds to a halt pretty quickly if they aren't done.

------
eBombzor
Not the location in the article but my roommate is a technician for one the
fab plants in Hillsboro and he is still required to go to in-person classes
alongside his main role despite the non-essential lockdown order in Oregon.

------
jl2718
The fab is probably the safest public place on earth right now.

------
say_it_as_it_is
Let's be specific: _managers_ prioritized chip output over safety. The call
came from the top -- the board of directors.

~~~
oliwarner
This seems redundant. Who else would be?

~~~
nickff
You might be surprised to see how many times manufacturing/warehouse employees
ignore safety protocols for reasons of aesthetic/fashion, comfort, or
convenience. Many managers have to discipline employees for disregarding
precautions.

------
Doc-Saintly
As for the original topic, it's patently wrong. It sounds like an individual
case being blown out of proportion or a disgruntled employee trying to leave a
mark. I can speak from experience that their safety standards are above and
beyond regulation, and sometimes reason.

------
neonate
[https://archive.md/8cE95](https://archive.md/8cE95)

------
tpmx
Intel should have placed that fab here in Sweden. What this accusation is
saying is the norm here.

------
supernova87a
At first, I thought the headline meant chip designers were pressured to create
chips that had huge performance at the risk of catching fire.

~~~
the-dude
They have an opcode for this :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_\(computing\))

------
magwa101
So this is how it's going to be right? Endless lawsuits based on what really??

------
IlyaMoroshkin
If you are a healthy adult, COVID-19 is barely more lethal than the Flu, so
what is the concern here?

~~~
ivoras
Many healthy adults have parents and non-healthy friends.

That's the pretty much entire reason for pandemic-mitigating measures.

------
simlevesque
Are workers rights a thing in the USA? Seems like it's not.

~~~
sanderjd
The serious answer is: yes, but it requires courts, which are slow.

I'm curious how this works in other countries; if a company lets someone go
inappropriately, is there faster recourse than the courts? Can you go to the
police and have them escort you back in, or what?

~~~
robocat
This is what the NZ government says: [https://www.govt.nz/browse/work/workers-
rights/your-options-...](https://www.govt.nz/browse/work/workers-rights/your-
options-when-you-have-a-problem-at-work/)

If you need to get legal, it says “It can take a few weeks or a few months for
an application to be processed, heard, and determined by a member. The length
of the process will depend on things such as urgency of the application,
whether parties have tried to resolve their problem at mediation, the
availability of parties, representatives and the complexity of the case.”

~~~
sanderjd
That does not sound dissimilar to the situation in the US. (But it's hard to
know without having been involved in a labor dispute in either country.)

------
acd
This posting made I am buying AMD CPU the next time.

~~~
derision
AMD's superior CPUs is why you should be buying them

------
luckydata
Oh wow, who would have thought weak labor protection laws and no unions would
end up reproducing exactly the same conditions that lead to labor protection
laws and unions?

I'm shocked.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle)

~~~
luckydata
"your boos mean nothing to me, I've seen what makes you cheer"

