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Intel Hardware

Pre-Retirement Interview With Intel CEO Barrett 106

Posted by timothy from the getting-his-licks-in dept.
kevcol writes "The San Francisco Chronicle has an excellent interview with Intel's CEO Craig Barrett who retires next year. In it, he is asked about topics ranging from labor distribution (oh I'm sorry- outsourcing), the Chinese market, the perils and promise of expanding operations in the Middle East, the state of K-12 schools in the U.S. and declining numbers of home-grown engineers, and more. Notably absent are any questions of AMD. Notice how he likes to pick on sensationalist press by prepending some comments with 'you in the media...'. Anyway, good interview."
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Pre-Retirement Interview With Intel CEO Barrett More

Pre-Retirement Interview With Intel CEO Barrett

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  • Dishonest (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Raul654 ( 453029 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @05:57PM (#10357404) Homepage
    "We're graduating a decreasing number of engineers each year" -- Get your ass whomped for 4 years in a engineering program, while all your friends slide by as buisness majors. When you all graduate, they get jobs as managers and you stand in the unemployment line because Intel outsourced all those jobs to India or filled them with H-1B workers. Wow, with those prospects, who *wouldn't* want to go into engineering. (PS - I say this as a PhD student in engineering)

    • Re:Dishonest (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Epistax ( 544591 ) <epistax @ g m a il.com> on Sunday September 26, 2004 @06:11PM (#10357474) Journal
      This is a little bit off topic from what you said but it relates to Intel engineers vs managers. I had a 6-month internship at Intel and I plan on going back next summer. One thing I noticed was how unbusiness-like the managers were. It seems most of the people just decided to go up form being an engineer. Most engineers don't want to adopt a life of PowerPoint and endless (truly endless) meetings even if it does mean a raise. Those who do (and obviously also show promise) gradually move up the chain. Others stay as engineers. It's not like Intel doesn't pay the engineers well either-- if you work hard, you get rewarded big time.

      I don't know the atmosphere of their upper level management. The most I got to see was a talk with Fister (now CEO of Cadence). He was a senior VP at Intel, and is an electrical engineer (masters). Any business education he's had (I'm sure he's had some) wasn't mentioned in his bio. This suggests it might just be company classes. I think how someone becomes a higher ranking member of a company is completely different company to company, and from what I see I like how Intel does it.

      • Re:Dishonest (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Rewarded big time? I'm an Intel engineer. I work many many hours. How am I rewarded? With large pay raises? With huge bonuses? Nope. Just your standard 3% raises to account for inflation.

        Stock options? Yeah. I do get those. And 90% of them are under-water. Will I be at intel long enough to cash in on them? Probably not. Intels base-pay is way lower than almost every other silicon company. But, I live in an area where Intel is my only option, and I'm not keen on moving right now.

    • Re:Dishonest (Score:2, Insightful)

      by The Hobo ( 783784 )
      Amen. I myself am a computer engineering student in Canada's top engineering university and know of graduates from here. They are having a hard time finding jobs. I'm not even sure I'll be able to get one once I'm done here without having to do post-secondary like you are.
    • Get your ass whomped for 4 years in a engineering program, while all your friends slide by as buisness majors.
      The IT folks are learning there are no guarantees for engineering jobs. When I graduated, most of my friends who were not EE or CompE didn't get jobs related to their engineering discipline. ChemE had to be a database manager, aerospace engineer did mechanical modelling, mat sci ended up doing unrelated contract lab work, another chemE did programming.
      And business people don't have it much bette
    • My friend James polishes hire H1-B workers to polish his Johnson.
    • Get your ass whomped for 4 years in a engineering program, while all your friends slide by as buisness majors.
      Don't you agree that simply being able to make significant things that people use is worth that time and effort?

      When you all graduate, they get jobs as managers and you stand in the unemployment line because Intel outsourced all those jobs to India or filled them with H-1B workers
      The way I see it, with Moore's law still in effect, there will be plenty of work to go around for years to come.

      • The way I see it, with Moore's law still in effect, there will be plenty of work to go around for years to come.

        Oh, there will be engineering jobs long into the future - especially after all those baby boomers retire. But that's a decade off. There are those of us who don't want to wait 10 years to get a job. And, the point is - there are none right now, and outsourcing/H-1B workers only exacerbate a bad situation.
    • Just as the young men were sacrificed on the altar of patriotism in every bogus, cooked-up war in history, courtesy of munitions manufacturers in early wars, now they are sacrificed on the altar of labor market manipulations, courtesy of multinational corporations....

  • Intel's Performance (Score:4, Funny)

    by Jazzer_Techie ( 800432 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @05:59PM (#10357413)
    "We have very high standards for our performance at Intel, for a variety of reasons. The memo was in reference to our performance and (said) that we could improve our performance and we should improve our performance." How many times can you say performance?
    • I think Intel needs to improve it's performance and it needs to start at the top!

      Barret's "one Generatation ahead" program made the Prescott a barbeque chip instead of a computer chip. They struggled to put the chip into production with a 90 nanometer process that just was not ready.

      The Itanic disaster happened after he fell for contrived benchmarks that hid the fact that the processor was not all that powerfull. A good boss should see through and ask the question " how does it perform in real life?"

  • Smugness . . . (Score:4, Insightful)

    by StateOfTheUnion ( 762194 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @06:03PM (#10357431) Homepage
    The other contributing feature is: We build the most complicated things that human beings have ever built. First of all, you can't see what you're building, and you're building a lot of them. You're building transistors you can't see, and the biggest transistor budget we have is a product that comes out next year called Montecito, from the Itanium processor family. It has 1.75 billion transistors in it.

    This guy's smugness is a more than a little ridiculous . . . Unlike Newton, who said that he stood of the shoulders of giants . . . this guys thinks he is a giant.

    It sounds so incredibly smug. I would say that building something with a lot of transistors is like building something with a lot of bricks (how many bricks/stones in the Great Wall of China?). . . If you count bricks, or rivets, or grams of steel, there are lots of complicated things out there that humans have built . . . Many of these things take a lot more labor and a lot larger organization than Intel . . . Saturn 5's, Great Pyramids, etc. Some things are even intangible . . . the supply chain and resourcing used to move the military might of the US to Europe during WWII for example. At one time there were over one million US troops based in the UK alone . . . and that doesn't consider their supplies and equipment. Not to say Intel doesn't do complex and amazing things, they do . . . but let's keep it in perspective.

    And finally for that matter, if I build a multi-processor system am I making a more complicated device than he is? I'm using move transitors than he is . . .

    • Re:Smugness . . . (Score:3, Insightful)

      by nbert ( 785663 )
      yes, it sounds smug, but keep in mind that building the next generation of chips will take more effort than landing on the moon.

      He's probably right, but I agree that he sounds arrogant - most of the stuff they are using has been invented before Intel even existed. They are just making the next step...

    • Re:Smugness . . . (Score:3, Insightful)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

      What I'd like to know is, how many bricks are in the wall of china? The bricks [people.com.cn] used to repair and extend the wall during the Ming dynasty are "36 cm in length, 17 cm wide and 9 cm thick". The wall is about 6,700 km long; If the wall were composed of a single line of bricks it would be (my math could be off by an order of magnitude...) 18,611,111.11(bar) bricks long. The wall has an average height of 7.8 meters; a wall one brick thick would be 86.66(bar) bricks tall, or 1,612,962,962.962962(bar) bricks in t

  • That's right, Craig, (Score:5, Interesting)

    by melted ( 227442 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @06:07PM (#10357450) Homepage
    You gotta retire undefeated. Mark my words, folks, no sooner than Steve Ballmer says he's "retiring" you can say that "Microsoft is dying".

    Intel is in a LOT of trouble right now I've heard. Their chips have historically been overpriced, and this just doesn't work anymore because AMD is undercutting them. They've fucked up the 64-bit transition, too. Their only undefeated front right now is mobile processors - they kick all sorts of butt there. But other than that, "it's time for CEOs to retire".
    • Heh, though you have to wonder, is the desktop really the prize market anymore? Now keep in mind this is anectodotal evidence, but I am seeing more and more people use their laptop as their only computer. Why shouldn't they? For a reasonable price, you can get a laptop that does everything most people need to do(web, email, word processor), they are mobile, and now with wireless internet, they look even more attractive.
      I think Intel's own worst enemy is themself. I see less and less reason to upgrade
      • Laptops still remain the option for the rich only. I use my laptop instead of my desktop (my wife uses the desktop PC I was using previously) and I'm thinking of getting rid of the desktops altogether. The convenience comes at a steep price though, my laptop costs about twice as much as what a similarly configured desktop PC would cost. While the additional $700 is not much of a problem for me, it is a problem for the majority of the US population.
    • Check this quote:

      "Barrett, who taught at Stanford University before joining Intel in 1974, turned 65 last month, reaching the Santa Clara firm's mandatory retirement age for the office of CEO."

      You can't force a person into retirement because of their age. That's age discrimination! He is going willingly, or unwillingly because he is being forced out. In this case, I fully believe that it is willingly.

      Is this actually on paper though?

  • F.A.C.E. Intel (Score:4, Informative)

    by reporter ( 666905 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @06:08PM (#10357453) Homepage
    Too bad, the interviewer did not ask him about the suicides of employees at Intel [faceintel.com]. The F.A.C.E. Intel web site gives the relevant information [faceintel.com] about the grueling conditions of employment at a sweatshop.

    For the uninformed, I note that Intel grades its employees on a bell curve each quarter. Any employee who falls in the bottom 25% for two consecutive quarters "qualifies" to be fired. During an economic recession, the employee is automatically fired. When there is a labor shortage, the employee is given a stern warning.

    My information comes from a managing director at Intel.

    • I don't doubt that there are various things that need to be brought to light about Intel's employment policies, but WHY if that site has such a VALID MESSAGE to promote and has ALL THE NECESSARY FACTS to back up their case do they need to resort to sensationalism and sub-high-school-newspaper journalism to get their point across? The whole site reads like a propaganda newletter, with links supposedly linking to relevant documentation just pointing at more sensationalist commentary, and their random emph
      • Because almost every media outlet in the USA takes money from Intel, at least indirectly. Who do you think funds most of the cost of all those computer ads that have "Intel Inside" and/or that anoying sound in them? That's right, Intel.
    • What's the criticism?

      Should Intel fire their best employees rather than their worst? Should they keep people who can easily be replaced by better people? Should they keep paying people when they don't have work for them to do?

      • You obviously haven't heard of this special bell curve (as used at Microsoft). The principle is that if you have 4 guys, all working their butt off and meeting milestones etc., one of them HAS to be marked low. So even though they all are performing well, one will get shafted.

        So your 'fire their best employees' might actually come true. The result in the workplace is a vicious 'every man for himself' attitude.
        • this is a myth, promoted by the faceintel site (run by a disgruntled former employee).

          There is no requirement to fit a bell curve. There is a guideline that says how many should fit into the upper and lower reaches of expectations, given a large enough sample. But I know of many instances of exactly what you describe (a small group of excellent people) where the guideline is ignored for the obvious reasons.
      • Well, it kind of depends on your perspective. If it makes prices lower, it is a good thing. But if they are using all the money saved by layoffs and outsourcing so that the executives can cram another digit on to their paycheck, then it is really stupid. I wish companies that outsourced jobs would always be willing to do so that prices are lower. And keep in mind that the people in Asia doing these jobs often do the small, simple, and repetitive jobs. If you have something really big, chances are your going
      • What's the criticism?

        Measuring performance on a curve is bad for a variety of reasons.

        Those who tend to be below the curve will be less motivated to work. They perceive that no matter how hard they work, they will never be rewarded because someone else will always be above them. They see that they will never measure up, so they lose motivation.

        Those in the middle fo the curve will be knocked down by those above. They could be competent, and putting in good effort, but they will never be recognised as
    • 1. They call Intel "dastardly". I tend to not
      trust adults who talk like dungeon masters.

      2. Any company with tens of thousands of employees
      will have a "string of suicides" going at any
      given time. Suicide is common.

    • Re:F.A.C.E. Intel (Score:2, Informative)

      by kolding ( 55685 )
      Ken Hamidi is a crank. He got fired years ago by Intel, and has been on a tirade against them ever since. I've heard that even his attorney has told him that he needs serious help. There are many things wrong with Intel, but Hamidi doesn't really hit them on the head.

  • I would have liked to have seen some Itanium q's (Score:5, Interesting)

    by grasshoppa ( 657393 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @06:12PM (#10357479) Homepage
    I haven't done any research, but I'd be willing to bet that the itanium was the most expensive processor ever researched, and possibly the most complex. I'd have liked to have asked if he feels it is a sucess, or if it will be, and how AMD's quick response to public demand in the 64bit market affects ( effects? ) the itanium.

    I can well imagine the response, but this guy is a joker: I am a god, you all need to put in 80 hour weeks, because that's what I do. No I don't care if you have families to take care of, ect... ( relative worked for intel ).

  • Reminds me of Home Simpson (Score:3, Funny)

    by antifoidulus ( 807088 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @06:46PM (#10357663) Homepage Journal
    The following quote just tells me how hard CEOs must work:
    A: We have very high standards for our performance at Intel, for a variety of reasons. The memo was in reference to our performance and (said) that we could improve our performance and we should improve our performance.
    while working for Scorpio:
    Homer(to some geeks):"Are you guys working?"
    Geeks:"Yes sir."
    Homer:"Can you work harder?"
    Oy, and he wonders why Americans don't want to become engineers anymore.....

  • excellent? (Score:4, Funny)

    by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @06:47PM (#10357680) Homepage Journal
    it hardly goes in deep to any of the subjects.

    when you read it, what's left is that the guy is a big fan of tests(exams) to put people in a nice order(from best to worst) and that he would have chosen forestry if it had been available in stanford.

    *** Balance your personal life with your professional life, but do both at 200 miles an hour.

    Q: What do you play hard at?

    A: I play hard at outdoor activities. My wife and I own a ranch in Montana, which we get to as often as we can. When I was a little kid, I always wanted to be a forest ranger, but I went to Stanford and they don't have a school in forestry, so I became an engineer. But I've always had this passion to be a forest ranger, so now I have a ranch in Montana, and I'm my own forest ranger.
    ****

    there's a golden nugget of insight right there, when you're growing a forest DO IT AT 200 MPH! damn is he gonna be disappointed after planting those trees and watching them grow at abit less than 200mph for a long time..
    • if he REALLY wanted to be a forest ranger he woulda chose a more appropiate school.
      • How funny..... At Cal, we have the Forestry major he's looking for. It most likely exists to take care of the Stanford mascot. Yeah.... little do they know the Forestry people are really Cal Black Ops....

        (soon it will be the right time of year to kidnap the mascot, mwahahahahaha)

        http://espm.berkeley.edu/ugmajors/

  • Yay for the "rule of 65" (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm probably not the only Intel employee that won't be missing Craig. Hopefully Paul Otelleni can make less bad choices over the next decade.

  • Where did he get this nugget? (Score:4, Informative)

    by zogger ( 617870 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @08:11PM (#10358516) Homepage Journal
    I encountered this jaw-dropper from the interview:

    "How much does the United States invest annually in basic R&D in physical sciences? About $5 billion."

    Huh? Anyone know any different? Or is this A-1 confirmable fact? I call shenanigans, so I will go look...

    google found me this reference back to 2002, where the figure is stated to be 100 billion [eetimes.com].

    Is this dude talking out his nether regions, using his "exalted" CEO royal intellectual poohbah position going up against a lowly journalist, just to buffalo him? Or d'ya think he believes his 5 billion figure?

    Maybe it's a good idea he's being forced to retire..... Or maybe something terrible happened between 2002 and now, just don't know, but 5 billion just seemed incredibly low ball. I mean, that seems the buidget for maybe just one firm, like IBM perhaps. Or is this apples/oranges? What is considered "hard" science research?

    And his views on outsourcing and what it means job wise for US middle class folks... popuh leeze, here's a guy talking about his multiple homes, his 12,000 acre + sized "ranch", his private corporate airline, etc, and he's qualified to *relate* to joe worker, even if joe worker is an engineer?

    Sounds like these millionaire politicians who "feel your pain" when they are talking it up at some diner for the TV cameras. Just "regular guys", aw shucks and stuff...

    Joe sixpack white collar with a calculator and a PC loses his job to some guy who has to come up with 35$ (whatever, low ball for example) a month rent. Uh huh, he's supposed to "compete" wage wise with that inside the US. uh huh. Yep, that's gonna be just *spiffy* for the economy.

    We got rid of buggywhip jobs when most folks switched from carriages and horses. What we are getting rid of now are *not* buggywhip jobs. That's the big difference between what happened with the industrial revolution and this scam they push called "globalization". I certainly didn't see Mr. Barret outsourcing HIS job for 1/2 price or less so his corporation could save money and make profits for the investors. And funny, I don't see any news reports of any other CEOs doing that either. Why is that? Oh ya, THEY like THEIR jobs, don't they?

    Big famous rich dudes talking up globalization is an example of "do as we say, not as we do".

    Hypocrites
    • Precisely! To repeat an often repeated phrase: if offshoring jobs is so great - why ain't they offshoring CEO and senior management jobs - those are the most costly and most incompetent....
    • On the otherhand, the education level of our (American) workers doesn't justify paying the premium on them over foreign workers of comparable educational level. He's 100% right when he says our educational system is fucked up and that something needs to be done to switch things around.
      • In most of that sense I agree. if it was me, I'd start with eliminating the department of education at the federal level. Many billions a year to do nothing but running a redundant bureaucracy, monies that could be retained by the individual taxpayer and the respective states in total, to use for education as they see fit.

        The other part is basic societal "worth", we don't reward brains as much as we should. I mean, look at this site - "news for nerds". We all know how society feels about nerds, don't we? O
  • Re: outsourcing

    He says:
    >There are four things you can do in the United
    >States to be competitive, and none of them is
    >easy. The education system is first and foremost.
    >You need to fix

    Uh.. The Indians and Chinese are sending their best and brightest university students here all the time to be in our "inferior" school system.

    Yet, we are still deep to our eyeballs in unemployed software engineers from coast to coast of the USA, including many who are top class, work(ed) hard, and graduated with t

    • Re:I CALL BULLSHIT (Score:4, Interesting)

      by DeepHurtn! ( 773713 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @09:23PM (#10359047)
      Uh.. The Indians and Chinese are sending their best and brightest university students here all the time to be in our "inferior" school system.

      That's not entirely true, at least in India's case -- the Indian Institutes of Technology [wikipedia.org] (IITs) are amongst the most well-respected technical universities in the world.

    • I call competition. Get over it. This is what happens when you have to compete with other people and yeah, it sucks. Guess what, it has always happened. Someone is in power, something changes, and look at that, there is someone is a poor little country that can do your job just as well as you can.

      well, what do you do then, you better make youself worth that extra money they can pay you because if the code is written and it does what it is supposed to, then does it matter who wrote it?

      and yes, life doe
  • Craig you were never more than a "More of the same thing too" guy. You were never more than a "Whatever you say Mr. Bill, you da Man!" guy. You were never more than the mouthpiece for your institutional investors.

    Face it Craig. You were always bush league. You're not qualified to carry Andy's Volt Ohm Meter.

  • quite typical CEO interview (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sewagemaster ( 466124 ) <sewagemaster@NOSpAm.gmail.com> on Sunday September 26, 2004 @11:35PM (#10359842) Homepage
    the article's basically a typical CEO interview. A lot of "I'm the pioneer; I'm God" type of arrogance that you often see in any typical EE Times [eetimes.com] interviews. Basically he's just using "outsourcing", which sounds negative, into "[is just our way of expansion because we're starting to have higher demand of our products overseas, and we need our man power there to do production and support]". It's just another way of him to say that his company's products are doing well and because [they're "customer oriented"] (damn I hate these stupid business-type buzzwords) they need to have the man-power there to provide the support of their (uhh.. again) "solutions".

    Well I see he's a pretty good speaker... in turning something negative and make it seem positive, but in the end it's the company that benifits, not us, the north-american engineers.

    For the record, I'm working my ass off in my Masters EE program (takes longer to finish in Canadian schools than US,) and I really hope I'll be able to find some decent employment when I finish within this academic year... Unless I can find full-time employment in my field, I wouldn't want to do a PhD. fulltime.

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