Friday, April 13, 2007

In the news...

A few unrelated items that didn't fit into the other posts I'm working on but I thought worth mentioning . The Mini-Mirosoft blog had a good post recently on employees choosing to stay at Microsoft (or not). I'm not advocating that people should stay or leave Intel. From my perspective, more people are voluntarily leaving than is the norm, but I don't have any hard data. It also seems like the people leaving are in the 9-12 year tenure range. It could just be that I know more people who have been at Intel for longer periods of time than shorter. People past 14-15 years don't appear to be moving on at the same rate, nor do those with less than 7-8 years. Not drawing any conclusions, just making an observation.

A writer named Eric Sherman sent me a note to mention that he'd done an interview with Intel VP Don McDonald for an article in Advertising Age magazine. He posted the full interview on his blog. I debated on whether or not I wanted to give a magazine a plug here, but I figured the reading the short interview with Don was appropriate. (Thanks for the reference, Eric.)

Google and Intel appear to be working on a deal to get a bunch of new servers configured to their specs. I wasn't even aware that Google was running non-Intel servers. 300-400K servers is a nice number, but I've got to believe the bragging rights for winning back Google is a bigger deal than the actual sale. Nice job to whoever made this happen at Intel.

For the truly geeky: Intel is doing some platform announcements, including adding vPro into Centrino. I'm not sure what to make of them. There price on Viiv chipsets was dropped. If I'm reading this correctly, the cost to of the Viiv chipset for motherboard makers is $1. I'll post about Viiv and some other products in the near future, but it says a lot that neither me nor my über-geek friends know what it does or how it adds value. (It either needs to bring content into the home, or manage it in a new, easy, seamless manner. Think TiVo or iPod.) There seems to be push to energize the platform market, which seems to be a little confusing.

Someone asked in a comment to my previous post what I thought about "the fact that your CEO threw Intel IT under the bus for losing emails?" I'm not sure I would characterize that way. The latest news seems to be that Intel now has until next week to find the missing docs. I don't have any inside info, but I find it hard to believe that Intel intentionally lost any email and fairly easy to believe that it was lost. (Disclaimer: this is my opinion only, and is not meant to represent Intel Corporation, the CEO, or any other employees.) I delete a ton of email as a matter of necessity. I'd be drowning in email if I didn't. Unless I was explicitly instructed to keep something, and the instructions were clear and obvious, I doubt I'd know exactly what to keep. Until you're getting 100+ emails per day that all require a response or some action, it's hard to imagine how hard it is to keep up. Trying to keep track of all the email is nearly impossible. Trying to know after the fact what I saved and why would be absolutely impossible.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

In our department, we finally got our focal results this week. Most folks were not happy with their raises. Also, again there was mandate to managers to give 5-10% BE/IR ratings since our department has been well below with these in previous years. Is this the alternative for Intel trying to fire people? Is this what others have observed as well?

Anonymous said...

The Focal system is what it is. You can read multiple analysis on the web. The oregonian just did a story on it as well. The IR system is the way Intel fires people. You get an IR with a development plan and if you do not execute it within the time period, you can be terminated.

Intel IT Guy said...

I've always been in groups that insisted on hitting focal targets. If the senior manager in a group is measuring their managers on hitting a focal distribution, that's what they're going to do. In my group this year most people were not happy with their raises either.

I'm not sure it's an alternative to firing people, but people getting a strong message certainly may be more inclined to leave.

And I agree with the former inteller: it is what it is. If you can't stand focal, Intel may not be a good place to work. It can be a less than motivating experience.