Lip-Bu Tan was previously on the board but left after disagreements:
> Over time, Tan grew frustrated by the company’s large workforce, its approach to contract manufacturing and Intel’s risk-averse and bureaucratic culture, according to the sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly.
> The current CEO was supposed to be a down to earth, technical, no bureaucracy guy as well.
Turning a ship the size of Intel is a super power in it's own right. Especially one with such a large entrenched bureaucracy as Intel has.
Politics aside for a moment - we're seeing the death bellows of many large, entrenched bureaucracies right now with DOGE - the main difference is the fight is in full public view instead of behind closed doors. We can only imagine and speculate at the resistance Pat and others met while trying to change Intel's course.
The infamous Oscar Wilde quote is very applicable: "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." - Ever large bureaucracy eventually exists largely to preserve itself. This is why it is so incredibly difficult to reduce the size of a bureaucracy. Every member is convinced the organization will fail tomorrow if they are let go today, and every member fights/resists any and all changes that threaten their bureaucracy and the status quo.
Best of luck to Tan - I truly hope they succeed where many have failed at Intel. AMD needs a healthy Intel to drive motivation and competition. The world will be watching.
I do not live in the US, and I don't follow all that's happening too closely, but from what I hear it seems that most of DOGE actions are about eliminating people and cutting budgets, which may be a valid way to save money. This has nothing to do with bureaucracy.
If, to complete a process, you needed approval by three people and you still need the same approvals, the bureaucracy is untouched -- it will just take longer without people and money.
Bureaucracies are about process. Process require people, a ton of people if you have a ton of processes. If you can slim the processes, a.k.a reduce bureaucracy, then a ton of people can be let go. Also if you let go a ton of people, processes are forced to become more efficient. This becomes problematic only once your processes are reasonably optimized. The later is what I view is essentially the vision of DOGE, they say processes are not efficient. Letting people go should not meaningfully decrease the efficacy of these institutions in the long term.
> Letting people go should not meaningfully decrease the efficacy of these institutions in the long term.
I disagree, of course it will meaningfully decrease the efficacy. The purpose of DOGE is to dismantle organizations which provide accountability for the private sector and the executive, including organizations which literally focus on optimizing processes.
Of course, the same amount of stuff needs to get done. The workload doesn’t actually decrease because these jobs are complex in nature. There’s a lot of citizens to provide services to, or a lot of organizations to regulate. Those factors stay constant. The hope is that they’re unable to do their jobs in time, and we get more “asbestos in baby powder” type incidents as a result. Or shitty water (literally) or listeria, or watergates, or pick whatever bad thing you want when regulation goes down.
I truly don’t understand how people make such bold statements as “letting people go changes nothing!” Really? What’s the mechanism for that? Process just… become more efficient? Do we even know how efficient the processes currently are? Because something tells me you have no idea. You’re assuming they’re inefficient because that’s easy to believe and requires no analysis.
> The purpose of DOGE is to dismantle organizations which provide accountability for the private sector and the executive, including organizations which literally focus on optimizing processes.
If you working from a bad faith PoV like this it really makes no sense to talk about it.
The mechanism is pretty obvious to me. The pareto principle is well studied.
Like a government agency has no self cleaning mechanism like a cooperation has. As far as I understand it. DOGE is trying to be that.
> Like a government agency has no self cleaning mechanism like a cooperation has.
What? No.
1. Unlike the private sector, the public sector is built on hard budgets, not speculation. They don’t balloon up like your typical money-burning tech company.
2. They can, and do, fire people for performance. No idea where the myth that they can’t do that came from.
3. They run probationary periods just like the private sector to make firing easier and, in fact, their probationary periods are much longer!
4. There are inspectors and agencies directly responsible for optimization.
1. That is simply a budget cap. There is still no pressure to optimize. It's like if I tell this function has to run in 10 seconds. You will make it run in 9.9 seconds and stop there. Maybe the function could run in 9.0 seconds, 5.3 seconds or even one second. Forcing continuous optimization is what is needed. Not a hard budget cap.
2. Firing individual people is obviously not what this is about. It's about department wide processes.
3. Oke, see my prior point.
4. Well yeah now there is, it's called the department of government efficiency.
1. Okay, and this is somehow better than, say, Uber, making approx -500 million a year every year for a decade and a half.
2. Firing people isn't what this is about? Or you blind or just dishonest? The only action DOGE has taken has been firing people. That's literally the only thing they've done! Not only is firing people "all this is about", it's all it could possibly be about!
4. No, there was MANY before. MANY of which were actually cut by the DOGE! And, somehow, DOGE has convinced bumbling idiots such as yourself that they're "saving" something. You aren't getting anything, and it should've been obvious a long time ago.
I don't even know why I'm arguing with you, it's obvious you're a cultist for Trump and Musk and will literally parrot anything they say, no matter what. You've said multiple things now that are just... blatantly untrue. Just, no evidence at all behind them. And this is all public information. You can see how the departments run, how the inspector generals work, how the Government Accountability Office works, etc. Why am I wasting my breath, or keystrokes, on someone who is either a diehard cultist or a literal computer program?
1. In the long run Uber won't exist if they cannot optimize. In fact Uber is a great example. they turned multi billion profit in 2024 after years of optimization.
2. Firing people in large groups is definitely part of it. Not firing individuals. That is what you originally said.
4. Considering the real impact DOGE has already made in the few weeks it has existed I think we can at least conclude they weren't doing their job then.
Ah now I understand. You simply don't like musk and trump and anything they do must be obviously bad. I really don't like them either but at least I can still see that the government is not a lean functioning machine. I hope DOGE can fix that. And I don't particularly care if trump, musk or even Obama had done it.
Even if you believe the government is inefficient - which is just that, a belief - you can’t support DOGE.
Again, they’ve fired people at the office of government accountability, which are the inspectors who literally ensure tax dollars aren’t wasted.
That’s not me “hating musk”. That’s the reality of what’s happening. Following that, we must admit DOGE has no plans to save anyone any money.
Their goal is LESS accountability, not more. Government spending will only go UP.
If you read Project 2025 you would know the explicit goal of this is to cripple bureaucracy so that that power can be concentrated in the president. Not “save money”. Come on now.
>> If you can slim the processes, a.k.a reduce bureaucracy, then a ton of people can be let go. Also if you let go a ton of people, processes are forced to become more efficient.
Or broken. The latter has a higher a probability.
This is pretty naive, one dimensional thinking. Making things efficient requires deep systems understanding and lack of which is on display here (Chesterton's fence). And one can achieve it reasonably for physical/technical things, however dismantling social processes that have evolved over the years for variety of reasons indicates neither the capability nor the desire to improve them.
> we're seeing the death bellows of many large, entrenched bureaucracies right now with DOGE
That's one interpretation, sure. I hope you'll concede that another equally valid one is that we're hearing the deliberate shattering of the only institution in the country capable of standing up to the oligarchs.
So far the verifiable cuts made by DOGE are less than a tenth of a percent of the federal budget. However, a lot of has been cut so far has been very favourable to the ultra rich. The most obvious ones being cutting the IRS enforcement budget
and gutting the CFPB.
It's possible to argue that all of that is good policy, but the facts make it very to claim that all of the destruction being wrought is going to make a meaningful dent in the government's spending.
Isn't a tenth huge? DOGE is brand new so I'm honestly surprised they have done so much.
Anyway at this point it's impossible to predict what will happen. There is no doubt a ton of inefficiency at these bureaucracies. You are making the point that cutting the budget will mean they will become less effective. But that doesn't follow if the departments are totally inefficient. Look at twitter. Musk fired like 80% of the software engineers. I'm not a heavy twitter user but I haven't noticed any difference in terms of reliability.
Have you read the misc "why can't America build things any more" criticisms? Like why our mega projects are super expensive, late, and over budget.
The recurring punchline is: Lack of administrative capacity.
The trials and tribulations of California's ill fated high speed rail is such a case study. Decades of outsourcings and privatization eliminated CA's ability to manage the effort.
There is a massive difference though. It doesn't matter to anyone if Twitter works or not, while a lot of people depend on functioning government agencies.
And there are people who rely on it that aren't appropriately handled today. What I mean with that the current state is far from perfect too.
Your argument is essentially change is risk. Which is true. But what is also true is that never changing will yield a much worse system in the long run.
Just because one is something people rely upon and the other isn't is not really a reason they are incomparable. Just because the end goal is different doesn't suddenly mean nothing applies.
After getting rid of most third party app support, 99.9% of all API access, losing massive chunks of active userbase and virtually all advertising except penis pills and scams, site performance probably isn’t terrible for casual users, it would difficult for it to not be adequate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"we're seeing the death bellows of many large, entrenched bureaucracies right now with DOGE"
DOGE is just Musk bribing Trump into letting him settle scores and shut down agencies that are investigating him or that he doesn't like. Finding and eliminating "inefficiency" is just another one of Musk's myriad lies. I'm shocked at how many people still consider him to have any credibility at all.
I agree with grandparent commenter that it's shocking a lot of people (also here) think DOGE is a serious endeavour and not some slapstick bunch of people. The realization is that even in here, plenty of people's emotions cloud their ability to think.
In my experience the highly intelligent are simply more able to find and generate rationalizations and justifications.
It's similar to a science-believing schizophrenic, their brain finds physically possible but implausible ways to deceive them. This split demonstrates that intelligence and being grounded in reality are two orthogonal psychological phenomenon. Being grounded in reality is simply the ability to be open to being wrong. That's largely independent of being smart.
we're seeing the death bellows of many large, entrenched bureaucracies right now with DOGE
What is political about that statement? You may disagree with him, I certainly don’t think all of what happened with DOGE is justified, but that was a neutral statement.
It presumes that DOGE will be successful in a political fight, which is possible but not certain. The statement is no more neutral (and less accurate IMO) than saying “we’re seeing the culmination of a decades-long war on competence”.
It's political because it assumes anything happened besides what actually did, which was arbitrary number of people were fired from the agencies that Musk was most easily able to do so at, with no regard for what their roles were or their relation to the actual functions of the agencies.
The comment (despite protests to the contrary) injected politics unnecessarily and a bit randomly (there’s no particular reason to believe Intel and the US government are very similar).
Not really, no. Governments aren’t businesses. There isn’t much of a market for governance, people mostly become citizens by birth instead of by shopping around.
Governments have natural “monopoly” over their territory (if there is competition for governing inside a territory, you have a civil war going on).
Or, there is no monopoly, since you can “shop around” by moving to other countries. It depends on how you want to line up the analogy. (There’s room to line up the analogy in multiple ways because it is an analogy, and not a description of what countries actually are).
Governments don’t innovate much on governance. They might enable innovation in other sectors. But the process of governance itself should generally be pretty slow-and-steady because the stakes are higher than an individual business. The goal of a government is not to create new and interesting governance-products and then sell those products, but to rule over an area in a way that doesn’t annoy the populace too much.
Hah. Not even, though. Redness is a characteristic that means the same thing in the context of your shirt and a bus. Because there isn’t generally a competitive market for the service of “being governed” monopoly doesn’t even make sense there.
It is more like saying strawberries and ethyl methylphenylglycidate are both red tasting.
It's really simple - either Intel is shipping products on 18A (Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest) by Q1 of next year or they are not, and their entire future hinges on this.
I'm not an expert in the silicon business, but I'm pretty sure the lead time is long enough that an incoming CEO has little impact on whether or not they are shipping a new architecture in less than 12 months.
Intel's valuation might hinge on it, but evaluating the CEOs success or not... that doesn't strike me as a great idea.
Totally agree. Even the 3.5 years in the role that Pat Gelsinger got was insufficient to see his strategies come to fruition. At this point it's baked and there's not much anyone can do. My point isn't to assign credit/blame, it's simply to point out that Intel will not survive in its current form if they are not shipping 18A products by this time next year.
Agree you can’t evaluate entirely on ship date, but you can evaluate on how well the company handles either the last year of development or pivoting and adapting if it’s late. It’s challenging times at Intel, lots of opportunity for a CEO to show great leadership either in success or adversity.
Agreed, and to the sibling comment who ponders if the new CEO is too late to influence this... He may be. But he needs to decide if he thinks it can be solved, and if not immediately push the fab business out. Even if it gets pushed out to bankruptcy or sold for $1.
I own some Intel stock so I sure hope it works, but they need to take urgent action if it's not...
I'm agnostic, but I wouldn't personally be offended or bothered if my Indian CEO sent out a letter asking my coworkers and I to try Hindu meditation or yoga, nor would I be offended or bothered by Pat's suggestion, nor by a suggestion that I try fasting for the month of Ramadan, etc etc.
Am I misunderstanding some aspect of this? Was Pat demanding rather than asking or something like that?
Maybe we're just different, but I would be extremely offended by a suggestion that I fast for ramadan, just as I would if I were asked to eat kosher for a month, or to go on a vegan diet for a month, or even just to watch his favorite cooking show for a month. Whether they were suggestions, requests or demands, I find these to be unreasonable intrusions of the company into people's private lives. Asking people to pray, might be a tiny bit less intrusive, but I still find it to be unreasonable.
Would you be more offended by your employer contacting you during your vacation to ask you to work, or is that less offensive to you because it's less unrelated to work?
Is the company asking you to go to a morale event where free food is being served less offensive?
Perhaps a better way to ask what I'm trying to get at... if asking (not demanding) you to try fasting is too intrusive into your personal life, what are some examples of an appropriate amount of intrusion into your personal life for the company, by way of voluntary, optional requests?
Is the problem that there's an ask with nothing offered in return? Is it that the ask isn't work-related? Is it that it's the company's leadership asking, rather than your coworker?
I am a big proponent of voluntarism - I believe that voluntary interaction free of coercion is at least partially inherently ethical in a way that involunatry interactions featuring coercion aren't. I tend to give a lot of good faith leeway to voluntary interactions (requests) that I do not give to coercion (demands), so your perspective is very intriguing to me and I want to understand it better.
I appreciate your curiosity and the way you phrased your point.
You hit the nail on the head with:
> Is it that it's the company's leadership asking, rather than your coworker?
I'm a fan of voluntarism too, but don't believe that a company leader can just "ask" something. Same as it is with sexual advances, when a boss asks something from their employees, it automatically implies that doing so will be beneficial to their position in the company, even if they didn't intend it.
As for your examples, I'd generally be ok with requests that can in some way be justified by the typical person as good for the company (e.g offsite team-building), but would draw the line at requests that go beyond that.
Fasting and prayer are pretty universal. Fasting itself has pretty interesting physiological effects wrt healing.
As a straight up atheist if pushed to make a decision, I'd probably participate. The prayer part id probably just interpret as picking an aspect of this news to explicitly make present in my mind for the day.
> Over time, Tan grew frustrated by the company’s large workforce, its approach to contract manufacturing and Intel’s risk-averse and bureaucratic culture, according to the sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-board-member-quit-a...