
Intel lays off hundreds of tech administrators - mykowebhn
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2019/03/intel-lays-off-hundreds-of-tech-administrators.html
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cannonedhamster
It seems really perverse incentive wise that layoffs always seem to bump stock
prices. Companies are going to need to transition at times and have cut backs
and pivots but it doesn't seem like it should be a market signal that the
company is doing something worth investing in so consistently. Many times what
these cuts do, in many companies, is just offload the tech overhead to another
department, or lower quality and quantity of work being done by another
department. When I was in IT they wouldn't replace workers who had left. This
caused IT hold times to go from less than a minute for an answer to over an
hour. We estimated that it ended up costing the company over a million dollars
in man hours over some non-trivial period because of wasted time on users who
were no longer able to perform their duties. They outsourced the call center
after I left. I heard it's only gotten worse as the call center frequently
hangs up if the call is too hard or is taking too long since they are tracked
on call times and numbers. Perverse incentives.

~~~
hinkley
Tech companies don't know how to fire people, and the market seems to know
this.

It's generally assumed that the first round of layoffs, if small, is to cull
underperformers. Further rounds seem to make everybody jumpy.

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mistrial9
> Tech companies don't know how to fire people, and the market seems to know
> this.

citation on that?

~~~
Rexxar
HN is not wikipedia but I don't have any citation to prove it.

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apo
That last line caused me to do a double-take:

> Intel shares were trading up 0.9 percent Friday at $53.61. The stock is near
> its highest point since the dot-com era.

Sure enough, it hasn't recovered its pre-crash price (~ $75). That's 20 years
in the red if you happened to invest at the top.

Many (most?) of the high fliers from back then that are still around did
recover (e.g., AMZN, MSFT, AAPL). Even ORCL (but barely).

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Are the numbers inflation normalized?

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dmoy
No, and they also probably don't account for dividends.

Edit: after dividends it would be 10.7% higher, but annualized returns of <1%.
So still really bad, but not less money than you went in with.

~~~
dmoy
Actually after dividends but after inflation too you're still negative I
guess, hah.

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stuff4ben
If anyone affected by this happens to be well-versed in Kubernetes/SRE, please
shoot me an email!

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rhacker
Oregon and many other states are often providing companies with massive tax
breaks. These kinds of layoffs, in my book, justify terminating such tax
breaks. (actually in my book no companies would get a tax break - but just
say'n)

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_actually in my book no companies would get a tax break_

Generally speaking, I agree with that. Tax breaks lead to a race-to-the-
bottom. The "winning" location gives away so much that it's often a negative
for the municipality. This may well have been the situation with the recent
proposed HQ for Amazon in NYC.

However, there are exceptions. I don't know the exact details of the "massive
tax breaks" you are referring to. But they could be justified in this case.
Otherwise the investment would simply go to another state.

Here's now it has worked in Oregon with Intel in the past: The tax breaks were
because of the extraordinary high cost of a semiconductor fab. It costs
literally billions of dollars to build and equip a modern fab. This cost is
far out of proportion to what a more mundane industrial development would
cost. Assessing a property tax on the full value of that fab would mean the
amount of tax is far far far out of proportion to the cost of providing
government services to that fab.

So lets say, making up some numbers, a municipality has an existing property
tax base of $5 billion. Intel builds a new $5 billion fab there. The burden of
that fab on resources such as fire and schools is minimal. So, does everyone
else in the municipality get their property taxes cut in half just because the
expensive new building appears? Or does the municipality now get 2x the
previous revenue (which whey will most likely spend recklessly).

The same argument as property taxes can be made for income taxes on the
business. Let's say a company can build a widget factory for $5 billion. The
widgets from that factory can generate a profit of $1 billion per year, at
very little cost to the municipality or the state. Should the state collect
income tax on that full $1 billion of profit?

If you say yes, collect the full amount of property or income tax, then the
factory just gets built elsewhere. Maybe even in another country. In that
scenario, the USA loses and the state loses. They lose the high paying jobs
that the factory brings. They lose all the "trickle down" that the factory
brings. They simply lose.

Dont forget, all the new local employees buy homes, pay property taxes, pay
state income taxes, pay capital gains taxes on all the appreciated Intel stock
they sell. In Oregon, unlike at the Federal level, there is no tax reduction
for long term capital gains and there is no tax reduction for dividends. The
income tax rate hits 9% at $8,401 in income.

Oregon gets plenty of money at the 9% state income tax rate that most people
easily hit. Oregon takes 9.9% above $125,000 but that's not a big added burden
for most people.

Semiconductor fabs are so very capital intensive that I think adjustments must
be made to the general method of taxing both property and income.

~~~
mjevans
What you're saying seems to argue for a different corporate tax structure.

Tax a some based net employee pay and per employee (cover municipal costs like
roads and such per employee).

Tax by land area usage (everyone should be taxed this)

Also by how much of the commons is affected (noise, exhaust, etc).

~~~
PhantomGremlin
Those things make sense to me, but change is usually difficult to accomplish.

Still, there already is quite a bit of differentiation between states. E.g.
Oregon state taxes income at up to 9.9%, but has no sales tax. Adjacent
Washington state has no income tax, but has a sales tax of between 6.5% and
10.4%.

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IronWolve
Some telecoms call app admins, SMEs, Subject Matter Experts. They administrate
a service. I'm guessing Tech Administrators are the same thing, they run
internal applications, databases, internal tools, non-major platforms, more of
a sysadmin+app admin role.

If you bounce around different projects internally, you can grow your
experience in that company. You can learn networking, databases, operating
systems (diff flavors), deployment tools, etc, and further your career. Major
companies offer a yearly educational package also.

This is how I qualified for tiger teams at a few companies. Teams formed to
troubleshoot major problems, check new projects for issues, etc. Collection of
experts.

Not sure if Intel "Tech administrators" are just production facilities app
owners, some of those apps are so old, running dos/95, that upgrading it would
be too expensive.

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40acres
Technical administrator is a strange title, but also seems kind of accurate. I
know folks who are in IT at Intel and a majority of those who were let go seem
to be 'systems analysts' and management of systems analysts. Where the systems
in this case are internal enterprise tools.

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chrisseaton
What does a technical administrator do?

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gwbas1c
Probably things like being a DBA.

Intel has a lot of 1-off databases for internal tools used in manufacturing.
The database sees a lot of heavy use, but is tied to one particular step in
manufacturing, so there aren't a lot of traditional users.

I suspect that they've migrated these databases to versions that don't require
as much heavy oversight.

~~~
JetezLeLogin
That's exactly what they did. In the past year or so they've migrated
everybody from a custom DBA type arrangement to a self-serve DBaaS system.
They've also turned over the keys for people to do their admin stuff in a
self-serve way in the on-premises-hosted cloud. You can now spin up an onsite
VM very easily and do your thing, without letting the precious-precious flow
outside of Intel at any time to e.g. AWS, Azure etc. (Though if what you do is
below a certain secrecy level, you can do that too.)

The downside is that for those applications that have tried to stay on the
custom model (cough), IT service quality and quantity has gone straight down
the shitter. You can submit help tickets and like never hear back. I guess now
I know why - it wasn't so much "Thanks for coming, enjoy your stay" as it was
"Run for the lifeboats, we're sinking the ship!"

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tejtm
And here I was thinking they were laying off the administrators because they
are an impediment to progress in tech

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thomas
Never heard of this role. It’s a general name for people that work in tech? An
Intel-specific term?

~~~
pcurve
They probably refer to people that have been maintaining legacy apps,
database, or web servers that have been in more or less maintenance mode for a
long time until new replacement came long.

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bluedino
Offshoring?

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yourapostasy
If so, then even the offshore teams are vulnerable to the tsunami change
coming with devops, SRE, elastic infrastructure, etc.

It drives me a little crazy inside when I go to clients and see their system
administrators have never developed automation for routine "small" events and
are _still_ after N years (where sometimes N>10!) responding to the same disk
full alerts in exactly the same way, with absolutely zero automation of what
they learned, cleaning up the same selection of files, and so on. And this is
before I try to extol the virtues of devops over lunches, or go tactical and
encourage them to try out Terraform, Pulumi, or the like (MEGO is my usual
audience reaction). Fortunately my clients don't pay me to transform their IT,
so it's no skin off my back.

But make no mistake, that change is building a powerful head of steam, and I'm
excited to work on automation solutions that embrace these principles,
tooling, culture, etc., in my own service offerings for another part of my
business. The folks who are resisting this change though, are not going to
react well if/when the change starts seeping into their worlds.

~~~
crispyambulance
I think that many of these seemingly change-resistant folks actually would
have loved to embrace new stuff.

The problem, in many places, is that they're in departments like operations
that value "convergent" work. This means they're stuck with their noses to the
grindstone at all times and judged on volume and consistency of work. If they
want to change something, they need to go through an onerous process designed
to keep mistakes from happening at all costs. There is NO experimenting in
such places and the workload is such that it's hard even to get some
interstitial time to explore new ideas, of course forget about conferences and
20% time.

The way they end-up canned or otherwise scattered to the wind is when someone
way higher up in org see's that there's a better way and brings in someone
from the outside to implement much needed change. It usually never occurs to
these folks (the managers bringing in consultants) that they would not have
had to do that in the first place if there was some value placed on
innovation.

~~~
president
So true. Always love it when a new hire comes in and trashes how everything is
done inefficiently, tries to change things, and then ends up putting up with
it after realizing the futility of it all. The only way it ever works out is
if you have a supporting environment where not everybody is stressed out and
overworked, which doesn't seem to exist in tech anymore.

~~~
oblio
Or the new hire just up and leaves: me, at 2 companies already. I've learned
that life is too short to put up with so much bullshit. I generally give them
about 6 months to decide if there's any chance of turning them around. But
frequently it seems that they'd rather go down with the ship...

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joejerryronnie
Tech Administrator sounds like some type of government job

