Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da #2

With IT layoff announcements coming this week, employees are getting more nervous and many people are on edge. The time window is certainly shorter for this round of layoffs than the previous one, but waiting to hear if you're going to be fired is unpleasant in any time frame. Employees are conducting themselves well - I've witnessed only a couple of people acting out negatively. Many are frustrated with the process, and a few are angry. But practically all are supportive of each other and acting professionally. It's impressive to watch people handling this so well.

Similarly, I've seen only a small amount of questionable management behavior. One senior manager sent a long note to his group that said nothing helpful and added no value. He essentially excused himself for not sending a note sooner and then reassured people that management is working hard ensure that people get laid off on schedule. Of course he added the obligatory "this is hard for me too" line. A friend of mine often uses a saying that I think applies here: "if you have nothing to say, say nothing."

With very few exceptions managers have been conducting themselves well throughout the process. This is a job they don't like but that still has to get done. I'm seeing a lot of compassion and better sensitivity across the management chain. Some managers are visibly upset about having to give hard messages to their employees. The process in general is working well, which I'm not sure is a good indicator. Do we want to get better at firing people? Either way, I'll say again that I think it's being handled about as well as it could be.

Some managers may be trying too hard. There are a few messages being shared that really aren't helpful, despite the good intent. Some keep reminding us that "layoffs are only impacting ~10% of the organization, which means that 90% of us are going to keep our jobs." That's absolutely true. But 100% of the people are worried about losing their jobs. That message seems obvious and redundant, and feels like spin to try and makes us feel better, which actually makes us feel worse. For the one or two managers who may be reading this, my advice is to stay away from the platitudes. The best way to help is to follow the IT advice of informing your people as soon as possible and with compassion.

Iz.I.T.4.V.S.P

Best to get your Aretha version of Respect before reading the lyrics below. Note that VSP refers to Voluntary Separation Package-a severance package Intel has occasionally offered to employees to leave the company.

What we want
JJ you got it
What we need
Do you know that you got it?
All we're askin'
Is for a little voluntary separation (just a little bit)
Hey JJ (just a little bit) separation
(just a little bit) mister JJ (just a little bit)

We can't keep goin' too long, workin' hard
Ain't gonna do you wrong (oo) 'cause we don't wanna (oo)
All we're askin' (oo)
Is for a little voluntary sep when you redeploy (just a little bit)
JJ (just a little bit) when you redeploy (just a little bit)
Yeah (just a little bit)

(With apologies to Otis and Aretha.)

Most of you are aware that IT is going through another round of layoffs (called "redeployment" at Intel). This is primarily "skills based" redeployment, which means we are going through a skills assessment process for each employee, scoring them, comparing scores, and then determining which skills we can most afford to lose from our individual groups. It's unpleasant, painful work, and just not going well - at least not for my team. The skills assessment process is (imo) meant to ensure that we're legally defensible and identifying people objectively. And to the best of our ability I think it has been objective. But the results are ugly. No matter how we slice it, we will have to redeploy good people to hit our numbers. We're past the point of trimming the fat - we're now into the muscle of the organization.

Based on the scores it looks like a lot of technical women on my team would be impacted. While nobody has told me that I need to try and balance diversity with redeployments, I hate to see my group become dramatically less diverse as a result of these layoffs. But then I also wouldn't want to target white guys between 30-50 just because they happen to be white guys between 30-50. The bottom line when I look at the skills assessment scores for my team is that there are no good answers.

Another problem with skills based redeployment is that it doesn't address what work stops getting done. Once I decide which 10% (or 8% or 12%, no firm number yet) of my team I need to lose, I then need to determine which work I stop doing. It's rumored that the one lone VP on IT staff had decided not to use skills assessments for redeployment, but instead to pick one group in his org to redeploy. This a much better approach, as it saves his managers from going through this large effort and having to pick which people they fire, and nobody has to determine which work needs to stop being done. The work and the people all get cut at once. It also strikes me as a infinitely more fair and humane way to lay-off people. Rather than saying "Sorry, you weren't skilled enough to stay here" it's a luck of the draw situation. So kudos to Bill for having the balls to make this decision, if this is indeed what he's doing.

Another issue is that we have a lot of people who are hoping to be redeployed. They want to leave, but they want the severance package that comes with redeployment rather than just walking out empty handed. About 10% of my team have asked if they could be considered for redeployment. Unfortunately, they can't be, unless they happen to fall below the line in the skills assessment process. So let's say 10% of my team wants to leave, and I redeploy another 10% that want to stay. What I end up with is a 10% gap now, and another 10% who are very likely to leave Intel soon anyway, or at least leave IT. Either way I have to deal with ~20% turnover.

We need to lose some people. We have motivated people who really want to stay, who work hard, but will nonetheless get redeployed. We have burned-out, bitter, highly skilled people who want to leave and will do the bare minimum until they can find other jobs. Why would we not want to keep those who want to stay, and help those who want to leave by giving them a decent incentive to move on? I know Intel is worried about losing the wrong people if they offer VSP. But we're going to lose them anyway. Better to lose them now and preserve jobs for those who want to be here.

We need to offer VSP before this redeployment happens.

C U When U Get There

IT has announced the work-from-home policy and site strategy we've been hearing about for the last year or so. There we no real surprises, and most of the rumors were accurate. There are preferred locations for IT work around the world, and everybody is expected to be in the office at least 4 days/week, with one day as a work-from-home day (with your manager's approval). Having higher numbers of IT people at specific sites makes a lot of sense. You get more density of people at a single location, likely working on similar projects.

The idea that everybody needs to be in office 4 days/week is raising a lot of questions. We haven't gotten a good explanation why someone who doesn't have any peers or internal customers in their office can't work from home most of the time. If you have a job where you're working by yourself or are always on the phone, how can it possibly make any difference where you sit? These situations are rare, but the new policy comes across as "because we said so" rather than something based on logic or reason. I get that allowing someone to work from home sets an expectation that they may always be able to do so. And it puts managers in the position of having to answer questions of "why her and not me?" and "what will it take for me to get a work-from-home job?" So from the perspective of consistency, this makes sense, but needs to be better communicated.

It's also kind of funny. Years ago when IT and eBG starting moving our jobs offshore, they told us that it didn't matter where people sat, and that since we were all connected we could work from anywhere. "This is the future" they said. Many of us were not convinced, and complained that by breaking up in-tact teams it would be more difficult to get work done. That not being able to solve problems with small, co-located work groups would slow us down. That the kind of brainstorming breakthroughs we take for granted when face-to-face would not occur on the phone. We were convinced that efficiency, team affinity, quality, and results would all suffer.

"Nonsense!" they said. "You guys are stuck in your old office-bound mentality. If you can't make this work, then you don't want this to work! In the Internet age people will be working from home, or on the road, or anywhere else they can get connected." But now the reasons they're giving for wanting everyone back in the office are exactly the reasons we gave for not waiting to send work offshore: lack of efficiency, poor teamwork, and bad results.

As we watch the slowly moving pendulum of irony swing back the other direction, you have to wonder if JJ and those on IT staff have any sense of how absurd this all seems.

Pieces Don't Fit Anymore - follow-up

The last post generated a relatively high number of comments, and I want to address a few of them. Someone made the point that employee blogs don't contribute to productivity. As measured by what? I have no idea if my blog helps productivity, but I like to think that it isn't hurting any. I'm fairly sure that Jeff M's internal blog adds a lot to productivity. At the bottom of a previous post I mention why speaking out can help. If people feel some empathy from others, or have an opportunity to vent, or realize that they're not alone, how can that not help? I can't speak for this blog, but I know other blogs have had an impact on management decisions and communication. If people feel that someone else is speaking out and it makes them feel better, how can that not be good morale, and therefore good for productivity?

I found it almost quaint that one commenter seems to think that IT is around to fix laptops. There's no point in me trying to defend the role IT plays, or to compare the value of IT to Intel manufacturing. IT is a pure cost center, and needs to be run as efficiently as possible. If you don't get why losing people at the top of the performance and skill set pool is bad for Intel, then I can't explain it to you. There actually will be impact beyond getting your laptop fixed.

The only comment I considered blatantly incorrect was the one stating that employees with over 10 years experience add less value and don't have good ideas. No doubt there is some dead wood at Intel, but if you've been there more than a couple of years, it should be obvious that length of tenure is not a factor in focal. Everyone is required to be competitive. There are a few places people can hide for a while, but the process is fairly good at eventually identifying below average performers. One indicator of innovation at Intel is invention disclosures and patents. Go take a look at correlation between patents and tenure, and then get back to me on the lack of fresh ideas from experienced employees.

And then there was the commenter who wrote:

It's damn annoying to keep reading complaint after complaint from those in a service organization lamenting about how hard they have it. What, not enough time to work on your level 32 Dork-Wizard on World of Warcraft?

which I found quite funny. He also pointed out IT people are expendable. True. But he may want to consider that, like all Intel employees, he is expendable as well.

Pieces Don't Fit Anymore

I've been having conversations with people recently about whether or not IT staff actually wants people to leave, and if their actions are encouraging them to do so. As I mentioned previously, attrition seems to be high. We're hearing that IT wants their employees to work at "hub" sites, and will be getting more restrictive about allowing people to work from home. Nobody really knows what this means yet. The impression by IT employees is that these changes will have some impact on convenience, flexibility and work/like balance. Are we being told that we need to work elsewhere if we want these perks?

Intel is unique for many reasons, and one of most unique features has been they way that many, if not most, employees approach their jobs. Intel instills sense of ownership for solving issues that most other companies do not. If there's a problem that is being caused elsewhere, you are expected to address it and to help resolve it. Everyone is expected to understand the strategic goals of their group and to help move toward them. This sense of ownership for items you don't directly control leads to a far better and more efficient solutions.

IT seems to be challenging some of these differences relative to other companies, primarily cost. Money is always and issue, and some IT managers are saying that the cost of IT at Intel is 5x that of other companies, such as Dell. It's possible that Intel spends more in IT than do other companies, but 5x is a ridiculous number. I haven't seen any evidence that shows this is an apples-to-apples comparison. This claim seems so outrageous that I've completely discounted it as propaganda. I discussed some of the pitfalls of comparing our IT spending to other IT shops here.

I have a friend who left Intel a couple of weeks ago to go work for Nike. In this short time he's already seen a dramatic difference in attitudes between the two. Practically no IT people at Nike have laptops. When he asked about it the answer was "why would you want a laptop?" The idea of working from home, or being able to connect and work flexible hours, or longer hours, is foreign to them. I'm not saying that IT people at Nike don't work hard, just that their mind-set isn't to be able to work from anywhere, anytime like it is at Intel. I believe Intel gets a large benefit by allowing people to work remotely: they will often work an extra hour in the morning or evening because they can, and because it's beneficial for their job schedule or that of others. It's a lot easier to call into a 7:00am meeting from home than from the office.

Another difference my Nike friend pointed out was that IT folks at Nike seem to be less invested. Nike appears to be more of a classic IT shop than Intel, where people tend to work with business groups in a more segregated manner. This isn't bad, it's just different, and it isn't Intel. And if you look at costs, it might even be cheaper. But it requires a service attitude rather than one of ownership. It allows people to say "not my problem" when something isn't in fact their specific problem. It allows people to literally work 8-5 and not worry about whether or not their work is helping to drive strategic goals, or if IT is going to hit their quarterly indicators.

My concern is that by moving to a more traditional, less flexible working environment, we're going to retain only the more traditional, less flexible people in IT. Do we want a group populated by people who don't take their work home with them, who don't drive as hard to solve problems, and who don't reach across other groups to solve problems? I would encourage IT staff to think hard about what the long term outcome of these changes could be.

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.

Gimme Some Mooly

I would encourage every employee to read the February edition of the MPG Bulletin written by Mooly Eden. He talks about the difference between efficiency (doing things right) and effectiveness (doing the right things). He also talks about killing off products during engineering or development when it's obvious they aren't going to be successful, and finding the "wow" factor for every product he works on. I consider his newsletter to be the best Sr. Management communication happening at Intel. It's not self promoting. He addresses real problems. The style is upbeat and positive, but not filled with the type of cheer leading that has become typical at Intel. This one short newsletter encapsulates so much of what is great about Intel, and how effective leadership can really make a difference. For any VPs reading, go take a look at Mooly's newsletters. That's how it is done.

He points out that that part of taking risks is knowing that some things are going to fail. He gives an example of killing off a product and then realizing he could have shut down even earlier than he did. He didn't realize that it should have been stopped sooner, but I'll bet someone on his team did. And if so, why did it take another two months of work on an already dead product to get it stopped? This is not an uncommon situation, and Mooly stopped short of addressing why it's hard for teams to kill products, programs, or projects.

The answer is that, with the exception of Mooly and a few others, we all think we have to be right all the time. If you propose a product that fails, you risk being associated with that failure. Most project managers get vested in their projects and want to see them succeed. Nobody wants to see months of years of their work amount to nothing. Most of us resist pulling the plug even when it's obvious that success isn't possible. And in many cases people working on these products know they won't be successful, but they aren't the decision maker.

Employees would be more willing to identify programs and projects to be cut if there was less personal risk. It's hard to kill a product or program. But it's much harder to suggest to your management that a project should be killed. I've worked on large programs where my boss (and their boss) staked their reputation on it being delivered, or being delivered on time. Hearing something like "We're really against the wall on this one, we can't afford another slip" is fairly common. Even harder to deal with is "We've spent a fortune on this thing and we need to make it work." During one particularly bad year I was tasked with implementing an enterprise tool that someone had already spent money on. It was expensive, had not been successfully implemented at any other company, and would require a lot of business process change. Suggesting that we either try to get our money back or wait for the next major version was met with a fairly hostile reaction.

It's one thing to suggest that something won't work because you don't want it to succeed, or because you don't understand it. That's negativity and cynicism for the sake of it. But having some data or information that demonstrates how and why something can't be successful is exactly the kind of information managers should crave. But they don't. We (yes, I'm including myself in this group) think we can find ways to make things successful. "Maybe is just needs more time? I know it's not working now, but we'll get it right in the next version." Or it's the situation I described above where a more senior manager isn't open to hearing that something is going to fail.

People need to have the faith that they'll get rewarded, or at least not published, for speaking the truth about product or program issues. The issue is that we don't measure success on these terms. I can't think of any metric at Intel that tracks how effectively someone saved the company from taking a wrong turn. Some Sr. Managers (perhaps Mooly) may do this. But right now the only measure of success is success itself. We need to figure out how to make it safer for people to speak up and drive the right product changes sooner.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Some changes are taking place that I thought were worth mentioning. I've gotten several "I'm leaving..." notes from Intel people over the last week. Perhaps I wasn't paying attention, but it seems like we're either at the beginning or the tail end of another round of layoffs. Assuming people had about 2 months to find another job this would mean that they were given notice in early January. Or they just got laid off. The notes I've gotten are more from professional acquaintances rather than close friends, so I'm not asking about their circumstances. All of them seem to have landed good positions elsewhere, and their messages sound positive. Some genuinely good people are leaving us, which is inevitable with layoffs. What's odd is that I'm not hearing anything about these people leaving beyond their goodbye notes. I wonder if we've all become a little numb or accustomed to people leaving?

Our CIO has reset his expectations for monthly status reports (MSRs). He now wants us to do a short update for each quarterly deliverable we have, and then mention anything else we worked on. We should see more succinct MSRs with less marketing spin. I'm not quite arrogant enough to presume that my post on this topic was the reason for the change. But maybe I was able to influence someone who mentioned to JJ that writing long MSRs was not a good use of our time. (It's my blog, and I'll have delusions of influence if I want to.)

I just recently noticed another, more subtle change that's been taking place over the last 2-3 years: Intel people don't hang out after work the way they used to. I still have my circle of Intel friends, some of whom are in my smaller circle of close friends. We don't socialize outside like we used to. It could be that we're all getting older and other obligations keep us from stopping for a beer after work. But the old stomping grounds aren't full of Intel people they way they used to be. I'm not sure why this is, or what it means.

I also notice that people are generally working less than they used to. Don't get me wrong - I think this is a good thing overall. I used to get emails from many people well into the evening. Now it's rare that I get e-mails very far outside of business hours, except from people in different time zones. People used to work long hours for two reasons: the first was that they had to. This seemed to get increasingly common in IT and eBG as we were trying to roll out bigger, more complex solutions. But before that and until the last few years many people wanted to work long hours to get their jobs done better. Some were workaholics, but many just wanted to get the work done and appreciated an hour or two in the office when it was quiet. I still see people at work early and late, but far fewer than previously.

Part of this may be due to telecommuting, but if that were the case my inbox would still be getting hit with mail in the evenings. I'm guessing this is due to a combination of the depressed and flat stock price, and more recently the environment of layoffs. It could also be that Intel is driving people less hard to feel competitive every hour of every day. Do you see the same thing?

Vote Beeblebrox!

I've got a couple of posts just about ready to go, but was sidetracked for a couple of weeks doing some volunteer election work in the evenings. I was primarily making calls to encourage people to vote, helping them to find polling places, and answering any other questions. The organization I was calling for had us make calls in areas where races were close, to people who were registered but unlikely to vote. Calling people cold is not a very rewarding experience, but overall I'm glad I participated in the process. After having made several hundred calls, I'll offer the following state-specific observations based only on my experience:

Florida - generally cordial about the calls
Massachusetts - the most willing to talk about actual issues
Ohio - I spoke to a lot of angry people
Connecticut - Most people didn't answer the phone
Missouri - probably the best answer rate, and people were generally polite
Pennsylvania - people were guarded but cordial
Virginia - better than Ohio, but overall not happy people

I don't have much data, but people in Ohio and Virginia just sounded completely worn out by the election. I suspect they are tired of being in the in the national spotlight, and are tried of being polled, advertised to, and harassed. I got a few comments like "this is the ninth time someone has called me!" In all states about 10% of my calls were to people who actually wanted some information about how and where to vote. This about the same percentage who told me clearly that they "didn't give a fuck about my election" and slammed the phone down.

I also learned the following:

• People don't like to be called at home
• People really don't like to be called at home after 8:30pm
• People really, really don't like to be called at home after 8:30pm to be told they should vote

I'll try to find a different way to help get out the vote in '08.

Missing Pieces

Some fallout that I didn't anticipate from the recent layoffs at Intel was that large gaps would start appearing in some areas. The recent layoff actions were skills based, and on paper the people with the lowest skills match to those Intel needs were let go. I know of several groups under 100 people that lost 40-75% of their people. When cutting this deeply, you're obviously going to lose highly skilled people along with those who are less skilled.

Within the teams I work with, which includes IT and some business groups, I'm starting to see that a percentage of the people let go were doing undesirable, low visibility, but nonetheless critical work. Now that people are gone I'm asking their managers how these tasks are going to get done. The answer is inevitably "we're working on it." The high visibility, sexy, fun stuff is already covered, but some of the ugly work that requires heavy lifting seems to have been dropped. It some cases it appears that managers either didn't know anything about this work, or they didn't value it. The gaps I'm seeing now are largely mundane background tasks that just seemed to magically happen.

We all know the "go-to" people in our workplace, whether it's Intel or any other company. Some people reliably get stuff done, and some don't. There are people who will see a gap and fill it themselves because they think it's important, because nobody else is doing it, and because they can. They'd rather just get it done than ask for permission, or ensure that it's prioritized, or wait for extra resources to appear. And I'm not talking about people who drop more important work to do what they want, but those who shoulder some extra work because nobody else has done so. Given the number of critical people that are gone and the number of gaps, I'm starting to wonder if the layoff process isn't seriously flawed. Keeping the right skills is important. But we're not adequately recognizing and valuing initiative, teamwork, and someone's willingness to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty.

Our value system for work often seems completely backwards to me. Year after year, I see people working on well funded, high profile projects get more praise, recognition, and rewards than those working on the more banal, day-to-day tasks needed to keep the company running. Anybody will work on the new stuff. It's far easier to work on something fun and interesting than it is to do KTBR (keep the business running) work. Working on highly visible projects is a reward in itself, so in effect we're doubly rewarding people who are working on the good stuff, and doubly penalizing people who work on KTBR.

Actually, when I look at some of the gaps that are emerging, I'd say that we're triple penalizing these people. The third penalty is that that we let them go because their "skills" didn't make them competitive enough. Willingness and ability to do this work is a skill, and one we've undervalued. I'll dig into this more deeply in my next couple of posts as I discuss Intel's infamous annual review process.

Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da

Both a good day and a sad day as an Intel employee.

There is some excellent press about Paul's presentation at the Intel Developer Forum taking place in San Francisco. Also some pictures and other info. Paul announced that we'll be shipping quad core processors in November. And a large part of an an AMD's law suit (du jour) against Intel was dismissed by a federal judge. Paul showed off some Teraflop processors. Overall a good news day.

The more I see Paul out doing these events, the more I like him. He seems to be a charismatic guy and is good with the press, which to me is as important as having the ability to run the company. Will we see Paul sitting across the table from Larry King anytime soon?

It was a sad day at Intel as I heard about some cuts starting to take place. This will be happening over the next week or so, and as I've said before, it's hard on everyone. It's worst for the people who are let go, but also bad for the people who have to tell them they're going, and for the rest of us watching friends leave. Chins up, guys.

A couple of additional housekeeping notes: I'm traveling and am still working on some other posts. I've got some e-mail from several readers that I won't be able to return until later this week. Thanks for your patience.

Please Mr. Postman

I'm working on a few posts that should be ready to publish shortly. In the meantime, I'll cover some housekeeping and address some email questions I've gotten.

A few of you have asked why I'm blogging externally rather than using the internal blog system at Intel. There are few reasons for this. First of all, I like that Intel has an internal blogging system for employees. There are several blogs that I read regularly. I'm not sure where the exact boundary is between acceptable or not for blogging internally, but I can almost guarantee that I'd be crossing a line with this blog. There's one particular funny, popular, insightful blog inside Intel that recently retracted a post that poked fun at the CEO after an open forum meeting with employees. It was a humorous, insightful, and well written post. The blogger said some things that many of us were thinking, but was far funnier than most of us were in our own heads. I didn't think any less of the CEO after having read it, and actually was impressed that Intel would allow someone to post that blog entry. But then it was gone shortly after being posted.

Did someone ask the blogger to take it down? I don't know - he wrote that he removed the post voluntarily. I'm guessing he removed it after having a conversation with his boss or HR. I say this because, as a fellow blogger, I doubt he would have written and posted an entry he was not comfortable with. And why would a smart, funny guy retract a smart, funny post? Btw, I fully support some boundaries - clearly you can't let employees say anything they want on an internal blog. But it's determining where that gray area is that causes a problem, and that one retracted post was an indicator for me. So that's why I'm writing out here and not in there.

I've gotten comments from a few non-Intel people who are reading. One from an Intel spouse, and a couple from friends of Intel people. They seem to appreciate the perspective they're getting here. This wasn't intended, but if this blog helps give non-Intel employees a better perspective, I think it can only be helpful.

I was asked about the post that disappeared for a while last week. I don't know what happened, but it was moved to my blog drafts folder. This may be a quirk of the blog software, or more likely something I did. While I will edit for punctuation and readability after posting as needed, I don't plan to remove any entries, or heavily re-edit (as I did with one post). My posts will stay out there, and I'll make corrections or address issues in subsequent entries if needed.

A couple of folks asked whether or not they should be reading this blog from inside Intel. I can't really answer that, as it's a personal choice. Like many employees I tend to access the Internet infrequently during the day, and I think it's considered acceptable. Please do what you feel comfortable with.

The Blue Badge of Courage

There are two recent articles published on the internal company web site that I found interesting. Both are positive, well written, and give good information. My reactions to the two articles could not be more different. The first was a Q&A with the VP running the company wide efficiency effort (our CFO). It was only a few questions, and they were soft but direct. I thought the answers were good. I think he gave a fair overview of what the efficiency team is trying to get done, explained the reasoning for several actions, and talked about the long time line and the anxiety it's causing. Overall it was well done, and acknowledging that it's stressful for employees shows empathy, which reduces employee stress. I appreciate the information he provided, and better about the effort efficiency overall. I was happy with the message and appreciate the CFO answering those questions.

The other was an article about decision making. It was a good description of what's happening to improve decision making across the company. But it was missing any mention of a large, possibly the largest, issue I see with decision making: delegation. How delegation is handled obviously varies from manager to manager. But it seems that over the past few years managers have been less willing to delegate true decision making. Too often I've seen managers delegate and then overrule the decisions that get made. Thinking about delegation got me thinking about trust, and courage.

Here's a tip for those managers who delegate decision making authority and then change their employee's decisions: that's not delegation. True delegation requires trust, and some faith in your employees, and risk taking on your part. You have to be willing to let your people make decisions you don't like, and let them figure out how to deal with that. And maybe help them deal with it. I'm obviously not talking about irresponsible delegation, or decisions that put the company at risk. When overruling decisions I've heard some managers explain "you made the wrong decision." No, they didn't. If you delegate a decision, then the decision that gets made is the right one, by definition. If you already know the answer you want, you shouldn't delegate, you should dictate. Saying "Go do this" is perfectly acceptable, and far more efficient than saying "go make a decision, but only the right decision."

A few years ago the eBusiness group (now part of IT) determined that decision making was a big problem. Many people in the organization were complaining about it, and it bubbled up to the VP and her staff. One problem was that decisions made by the staff were too often being reversed later by the VP, and there was a rebound effect on the organization. An even bigger problem was delegation. People were told they were empowered to make decisions, but they were often overruled by the staff or VP, so it often seemed like there was little real empowerment below that level.

After hearing enough complaining about this, the VP assigned someone to look into the decision making problem and come back with a recommendation. After a couple of months a whole new decision making system was rolled out that included formal tools and training. We all took the training and were advised to use the tools. This led to me having conversations with my manager like this:

Me: We lost of one our QA people. I'm going to move an engineering guy over to cover. I think the schedule will be ok.
Manager: How did you decide to do that?
Me: It makes the most sense. This guy understands QA, he's ok with the move, and it will keep us on schedule.
Manager: Do you use the decision making matrix?
Me: What? No. This is the right thing to do. QA is the critical path.
Manager: You need to use the decision making matrix. Please go through the process and get back to me.

This is an extreme example, but my boss was determined to have us use a new, cumbersome process to do what we were already doing well. I don't know what he really thought about the process - I suspect he was doing it because he was told to.

Allowing true delegation requires courage, and faith in your people. The courage to let people make decisions that could make you look bad. The faith to trust that they want to make you look good. The same kind of courage is needed to question using a new process that seems stupid and inefficient. It takes the same courage to let people speak their minds about their work environment, or their management, knowing that they may say things you dislike. And the faith to trust that they'll write the truth, perhaps help others feel better, and maybe allow people to laugh a little in the middle of a tough day. These things take courage.

Blog's Labours Lost

I was writing a long post about managers admitting mistakes. I had it 90% done but did something stupid and lost it. I am apparently destined to re-learn the lesson about saving drafts of my work many times. I'll get it rewritten in a day or two, and for now will share a few other items.

There was an interesting article about Intel culture in the Oregonian a couple of weeks ago. It's a good article, but I don't agree with all of it. It's a short read.

Traffic to this site is fairly low. But I'm still surprised to be getting any traffic at all. The visitors I am getting can probably be attributed to the generosity of Josh and PentrinoVI IV. I thanked them both privately for mentioning this blog on theirs, but wanted to do so publicly as well. Thanks guys! I recommend checking both their blogs if you haven't yet (they have permanent links in my Other Interesting Blogs section).

Things are starting to heat up as we approach the next round of cuts. I've had several conversations lately with people from one sub-group that is going to get hit hard. (I'm choosing not to say which group out of respect for them.) They've all be told that about 75% of their ~100 person group is going to get laid off, and they don't know yet who will be keeping their jobs. These guys know their chances are not good, and are scrambling to line up temporary assignments or find something outside of Intel. Most impressive is that the people I've spoken to are philosophical about it. They all want to find something else, but none of them are angry or bitter. Real pros, these guys.

We'll see more and more of this over the next couple of weeks. Some people will take it in stride, some won't. No one way of reacting or handling this situation is better than another. Those who are laid off need to get through it the best way they can. Most people just want to work and go home to their families. I don't have any sage advice to offer. As I said in a comment to a previous post, this is hard on everyone at Intel, and doubly so when you start seeing people you know and like being impacted.

I appreciate you reading, and especially appreciate the comments I've gotten. I had originally posted a longer version the "Don't Speak" post which read much better and had more impact, but I thought it was too long and whittled it down. Someone had read the original before I edited it, and commented that they were unimpressed with shorter version. So going forward I'll worry more about content than length. Let me know what you think and I'll consider making adjustments.

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

If life seems jolly rotten,
There's something you've forgotten,
And that's to laugh and smile and dance and sing.

I'm working on about 5 other posts for this blog. When I took a step back and looked at them, they all seem to be critical and negative. This is probably what you expect to read in an anonymous employee blog about a large company, which is unfortunate. I don't want to post only negative items, and I don't feel only negatively about Intel. If I did I wouldn't be working there.

So why so many negative thoughts? I think it's because they're kind of backed up. We don't get to vent at Intel the way we used to. At least I don't. As I mentioned in my last post, at some point it became unacceptable and potentially career limiting, so I stopped doing it.

I generally like working at Intel. I have liked it more than I do now, and I've liked it less. But after more than a few years I still find it a good (if not great) company to work for. I get to work with a lot of smart people, and a few brilliant ones. I get to learn a lot. I get exposed to a lot of cool technology. I have some good friends here. And overall most people work hard and try to do the right thing. To have a company this large that has this many bright, hard working people is surprising, and one of the things that keeps me here. And my fondness for the company and the people is one of the reasons I fell compelled to write about it, especially now.

And Intel's processors are back on top! (I wish I could say that I helped this happen, but I didn't.) Core 2 Duo rocks! I'll admit to having a huge bias toward Intel processors, but from what I'm reading the Core 2 Duo processors are fantastic. I don't have one yet, but I did order my 6600 yesterday. They appear to run great out of the box, and people are overclocking the crap out of these things. There are some availability issues, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing if it gets solved before the holiday buying season. This is a great example of what Intel is good at.

The core of the company is solid, even though the stock price sucks. For those of us with older Intel options, it really sucks. But if you look at the financials, Intel is still doing well. Most companies can only dream about making the money that Intel does.

So overall I feel lucky to be working here, and I like the company. I may not be the most gruntled (go ahead and look it up if you don't believe me) guy at Intel, but I'm far from the most disgruntled. Thanks for letting me indulge in a little positive balance before some other critical posts.