Intel Layoffs Finally Kick Off With A Chaotic Start In Oregon

technical staff are bearing the brunt of the cuts, not managers

Ever since Lip Bu Tan took the helm at Intel, the company’s employees have known that drastic headcount cuts were on the cards. Now, after months of waiting, Intel has begun notifying employees across the globe of their fate. The process got off to a rather ignominious start at the company’s largest location, Oregon, with over 20,000 employees. On July 7, Intel sent this WARN notification to state officials as required by law, noting that ~529 staff were being made redundant.

However, when the supporting document with the list of specifically impacted roles was sent out last week, that number had skyrocketed to 2,392 employees, details here. That’s one hell of a change from barely a week earlier and implies a certain amount of chaos surrounding the process, despite it being months in the making.

While Mr. Tan has spoken a lot about the need to reduce management layers, you might have expected a heavy emphasis on manager cuts and less on more technical employees. Well, you would have been incorrect in that assumption. Based on our analysis of the impacted job titles in Oregon, just under 9% of the cuts involved jobs with “manager” in the title and many of the technical roles eliminated would appear to be directly correlated with Intel’s efforts to improve the yield and generally ramp its 18A process technology. This suggests an across the board headcount reduction rather than a targeted, surgical approach. Let’s dig in…