[chickenpotpie]

I don't think that less employees/layoffs directly correlates with less productivity. As the mythical man month has teached us: what one engineer can do in one month, two engineers can do in a year. It's possible that Intel is trying to reduce the amount of decision makers and streamline their process.

Disclaimer: I despise companies that do layoffs and I am not a proponent of them, but I do acknowledge that companies do them for a reason.

[MikeTheGreat]

> As the mythical man month has teached us: what one engineer can do in one month, two engineers can do in a year.

I don't remember that being the main idea behind the Mythical Man Month.

I think the major take aways were more like "Adding people to a late project makes it later" and "Some tasks don't get faster with more people.

For example, you can't get 9 women to birth a baby in 1 month". Other tasks _do_ get faster with more people (doubling the number of people digging a ditch will result in the ditch getting dug faster).

[908B64B197]

Most of these layoffs are "Non-Technical staff". [0] [1] [2] [3] [4]

[0] https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other...

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-24/tech-layo...

[2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3690309/about-those-te...

[3] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-03-0...

[4] https://techreport.com/news/3493451/microsoft-layoffs-ethics...

[UncleOxidant]

> I don't think that less employees/layoffs directly correlates with less productivity.

True, AMD is able to spin new CPU designs with quite a few less people because they seem to be better at leveraging design automation. Jim Keller went to Intel to try to improve their design process and make it more productive, but it doesn't seem like he was able to turn the supertanker in a more productive direction. Lots of cultural inertia there.