[HN Gopher] Arm to drop up to 15 percent of staff, about 1k people
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Arm to drop up to 15 percent of staff, about 1k people
Author : analyst_9
Score : 215 points
Date : 2022-03-15 13:21 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| swamp40 wrote:
| You always see 10-15% cuts leading up to an IPO. Investors love
| it for some reason. It wouldn't surprise me if they intentionally
| overhired in anticipation of this. It's mostly not the technical
| talent.
| belval wrote:
| > Investors love it for some reason.
|
| "Some reason" is a reduction of operating expenses which boost
| profit margins. From an investor perspective it makes sense,
| ARM is an established brand that has limited headroom to grow,
| you can't expect hyper growth from them so they need to make a
| case that the ROI is worth it, especially now that a buyout is
| off the table.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > "Some reason" is a reduction of operating expenses which
| boost profit margins.
|
| Well, that "profit" comes at the expensive of some difficult
| to measure forms of capital. It is very likely a net-negative
| for the company, but it does look good on the books.
| avrionov wrote:
| I don't think that we always see 10-15% cuts before IPOs. Most
| companies continue to hire after successful IPO.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| They overhired because it was part of the deal to sell to
| softbank
|
| > As part of SoftBank's deal to acquire Arm for PS24bn in 2016,
| the UK Takeover Panel stipulated that it would have to double
| its UK headcount over a five-year period, which stood at 1,600
| at the time. The requirement to do so expired last year.
| Traster wrote:
| To be honest, Arm doubled head count of the last 5 years, and
| really haven't delivered. So it wouldn't be surprising to me that
| their costs are way too high compared to comparable companies.
| Having said that successfully getting back down to the correct
| head count is probably impossible. You just can't figure out who
| is essential, and you can't re-assure the people you want to
| stay, so the people who can leave, do leave, and you're left with
| the people you wanted to get rid of, but know you can't get rid
| of them because they're the only ones you have left. Then the
| good people who didn't leave take a look around and realize
| they're no longer working with the smart people they thought they
| were working with and start looking to leave too. And it's easier
| for them to leave because they've suddenly got a load of contacts
| at competitor companies.
| ProAm wrote:
| This is just pre-IPO behavior for the road show. They're going to
| make the books look good for a fiscal year
| smk_ wrote:
| While speaking from limited expertise, it is my general
| understanding these layoffs are a vital part in keeping a company
| lean and reducing bloat. Over time, in any company, some roles
| will be made redundant and is the reason for these occasional
| layoffs. If I was an investor, I would see this as a good sign of
| vision and a clear direction.
|
| They say so themselves: > "To stay competitive, we need to remove
| duplication of work now that we are one Arm; stop work that is no
| longer critical to our future success; and think about how we get
| work done."
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Exactly. When faced with a slowdown in demand you can either be
| IBM and cut aggressively, or you can be DEC and keep people
| employed working on inane doomed projects until the company
| falls flat.
| michelb wrote:
| About the same amount that would have had to leave if the
| takeover went through?
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Any chance of seeing these talented folks start new Chip design
| shops.
|
| The person who can create a fab for less than a few million,
| while offering competing performance will be very rich.
|
| Every bigger country will want some capacity to build chips.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Everything competitive is locked up in patents, but maybe with
| the chip shortage there's room for more competition for
| existing chips. Question is: can they get seed funding?
| 999900000999 wrote:
| https://www.wired.com/story/22-year-old-builds-chips-
| parents...
|
| It's possible to build something with next to no money, and I
| can't imagine it impractical to see some senior engineers
| gathering together and making a good funding pitch
| armheadcount wrote:
| https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/10/11/arm-racing...
|
| I wonder if it's related to this?
| acomjean wrote:
| Kinda Galling when Arm walked away with over 1.25 billion dollars
| after the Nvidia deal collapsed. that pays a lot of salaries.
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/08/arm_cancels_sale_to_n...
|
| "Under the terms and conditions agreed by the companies, SoftBank
| Group will retain the fee of $1.25bn paid by Nvidia (this will be
| recorded as a profit in its fourth quarter) and Nvidia will keep
| hold of its 20-year Arm licence."
| PeterisP wrote:
| Well, Arm did _not_ walk away with that fee, Softbank did -
| that money was never going to enter the company even if the
| deal went through.
| acomjean wrote:
| Good point. Though if I own an asset that made me over a
| billion dollars for basically doing nothing, I might consider
| reinvesting at least some of it...
| twblalock wrote:
| Softbank doesn't want to invest in ARM. That's why they are
| trying to sell it.
| marricks wrote:
| There's always a lot of disconnect between folks talking
| about how the world _should_ work and how it _does_ work.
| Seldom does switching between those modes leading to
| productive conversations.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Great outcome for SoftBank
| lbarrow wrote:
| The quoted section says that _SoftBank_ will retain the fee,
| not ARM?
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| Idiotic strategy which is about as smart as pissing in your pants
| to stay warm.
|
| Big firings like this create bad blood, undermines loyalty to
| company and get many talented people to look at alternative
| companies to work.
|
| A talented organization takes time to build up but is relatively
| quick to tear down. Skill in this industry is not exactly easy to
| get hold of. Talent which leaves may prove very hard to get back.
| blippage wrote:
| I think Jordan Peterson had a comment about that. You get rid
| of people you think are rubbish, but then the top people begin
| to wonder if they're next. So they leave, because they have
| options, whilst the whole company slowly slides into
| mediocrity.
|
| It's not like Arm are facing long-term financial difficulties,
| their market share is presumably as good as ever, so getting
| rid of staff seems a bad idea.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| I have seen three redundancy rounds at different companies.
|
| The first resulted in every engineer in the team taking other
| jobs within weeks of notice. Quite a few were hired back at
| 3x their wage as a contractors as the projects while the
| talent found better pay and conditions and never returned.
| The company ended up paying more for its least influential
| engineers but without them it would have been in real
| trouble.
|
| The second the mere threat caused 10% of the engineers to
| leave within weeks. Some stuck out the redundencies but
| clearly management had no clue who the talent was and ended
| up getting rid of some pretty important people. So the rest
| left gradually over the next year. The brain drain to
| competitors was very real, 15 years later they have not
| recovered and I receive regular calls to do contracts for
| them to bring some software engineering experience even a
| decade later, its a bit embarrassing really.
|
| The third ended up getting rid of all the people who run a
| critical system in one of the UK's largest banks. I saw only
| the aftermath. All the software guys are long gone and its
| just full of system operators migrating binaries to more
| modern hardware, many of those systems are completely
| unmaintained now and have no team and no one knows where the
| code is stored, if it is still there. When the bugs started
| rolling in and management couldn't find a place to get them
| fixed they started hiring to replace the talent they had made
| redundent but all of them left within a week because the job
| was clearly impossible without source code which the company
| had lost.
|
| I haven't yet seen a redundancy round result in anything but
| the almost complete exodus of talent and the gutting of a
| companies prior capability. I stuck around for one of them
| but I wouldn't do so again because the aftermath was horrible
| and all the people who made it interesting had left or were
| leaving. Everytime its been abundantly clear that who goes is
| mostly random, its not based on anything to do with
| importance to the company and the people that make the place
| tick know this.
| staticman2 wrote:
| That's an interesting counter argument to Jack Welchs' "Fire
| 10% of the company for the sake of firing 10% of the company"
| management philosophy.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Jack Welch started his tenure in 1981. You can't
| sustainably do that for 40+ years.
| nojito wrote:
| It doesn't matter how talented your organization is if you
| can't keep your finances in check.
| ggreg84 wrote:
| Their goal - and only option - is to sell the company for as
| much $$$ as possible, and this strategy helps them towards
| their goal.
|
| This is the simplest and most effective way to make Arm books
| look good, which is what regulators all around the world -
| including the UK - have decided is what's best for the world.
|
| So this is not idiotic, this is effective, and is finance 101.
|
| For Arm's long term success this is a very stupid decision. But
| that's not what any of the parties involved need or care about.
| What they care about is $$$ right now.
|
| I won't be buying and holding Arm stock, particularly not as a
| long term investment, cause it looks like its going to be a
| poor one.
| robert_foss wrote:
| Pumping perceived share owner value is only in the interest
| of the owner of ARM, Softbank. This is the kind of pump and
| dump scheme that American investors are famous for.
|
| If indeed ARM needed to cut down on people, having a hiring
| freeze is the way to go.
| bogomipz wrote:
| From the article:
|
| >"Arm China, meanwhile, is contemplating a float of its own. The
| rogue Arm outpost, which is led by CEO Allen Wu and majority
| owned by Chinese entities, has become something of a problem for
| Arm because Wu was fired but has managed to retain his position."
|
| Is this not a huge meatball that ARM has hanging out here?
| Further from a link in the linked article[1][2]
|
| >"Following the investigation of Wu by Arm and Hopu, the Arm
| China board voted 7-1 to dismiss Wu. Given Wu's refusal to vacate
| his role, Arm is growing anxious over the security of Arm China's
| intellectual property, assets and finances, according to the
| people with knowledge of the matter."
|
| How would any investor ever feel confident in investing in ARM
| unless this is resolved? Even if it is resolved what are the
| assurances that the IP is actually safe? This sounds like a
| debacle. Is this something that happened on Softbank's watch?
|
| [1] https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3168443/arm-
| china...
|
| [2] https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-
| tech/article/3089901/softbank-...
| Gareth321 wrote:
| >Is this not a huge meatball that ARM has hanging out here?
| Further from a link in the linked article
|
| Yes, but mostly no. Most of ARM's market cap is tied up in IP;
| much of which is publicly available knowledge anyway. Wu stole
| said IP, but he has very few markets in which he's legally
| allowed to sell. It would be like someone setting up another
| Disney in China. Okay, so you can sell Mickey Mouse branded
| clothing in China, but you're definitely not going to be able
| to sell in any modern market.
|
| ARM got off light. Millions of Western businesses have been
| destroyed this way.
|
| It _should_ be a stark warning for companies setting up shop in
| China: they _will_ steal your technology, your IP, your
| facilities and assets, your trade secrets, your branding and
| trademarks, and all your equity. The government permits and
| encourages this. It 's only a matter of time.
| amelius wrote:
| > "To stay competitive, we need to remove duplication of work now
| that we are one Arm; stop work that is no longer critical to our
| future success; and think about how we get work done."
|
| In other words: we have no clue how to make use of a large force
| of capable workers.
| justsaying12 wrote:
| Arm has been hemmoraghing talent to direct competitors for the
| last year. Do a search on GraphCore, SiFive, Imagination
| Technologies etc.
|
| Not sure what went wrong, but people who have a clue have been
| bailing out left and right.
|
| Reminds me of Amazon also - Something similar happening at AWS.
| When Bezos left, lot of people streaming out the door.
|
| Steady talent exodus, and they are not the dumb people leaving.
| The great ones leave instantly. The trapped or mediocre (can't
| leave...for some reason), too lazy, unmotivated etc stay and pay
| compounding interest and poison the company.
| ggreg84 wrote:
| What went wrong is that people learned how much NVIDIA pays,
| figured out they were significantly underpayed, Arm is not a
| very profitable business so couldn't compete, and the moment it
| started looking like the NVIDIA deal was not going to fly, top
| talent started jumping ship.
| pyb wrote:
| It may well be that ARM could pay better if they wanted to.
| But the culture in Cambridge, and the UK, has been to pay
| engineers pretty poorly. So perhaps they don't yet understand
| that they need to. Also, salary inversion within the company
| would be a huge problem.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| It's also easier to attract talent from London to SV than
| it is to attract talent from SV to London.
| gifnamething wrote:
| Arm is about 90 minutes away from London
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| On a typical day, SV is farther than that from SF.
| pertymcpert wrote:
| Not even that. A 10 minute taxi to the station and a ~50
| min train to KGX.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| The UK seriously underpays software engineers, if US
| companies want to tap into the talent pool its relatively
| easy to do so especially with remote work. The UK has a
| serious lack of management talent and a trickle up economy
| that is damaging everything and the economic situation is
| not great. Its primed for a big brain drain.
| robert_foss wrote:
| Graphcore is just in the AI space, and Imagination is a company
| that ARM outcompeted to the extent that they barely exist
| anymore.
|
| SiFive is a real competitor, but they are much smaller and
| offer only a fraction of the IP portfolio of ARM.
| mataug wrote:
| > Reminds me of Amazon also - Something similar happening at
| AWS. When Bezos left, lot of people streaming out the door.
|
| People aren't leaving Amazon by following Bezos, people are
| leaving because of their terrible working conditions[0] and bad
| policies, including employees in corporate offices.
|
| [0]: https://archive.ph/M2p1Z
| discreteevent wrote:
| > The great ones leave instantly
|
| Some of the talented ones leave instantly and maybe some of the
| great ones. But some really great ones stay because they are
| personally committed to the work and couldn't care less about
| their linked in or who's running the company. How much change
| was there at Bell Labs but the likes of Dennis Ritchie never
| left.
| robocat wrote:
| I agree, talent doesn't always care about money: Oxide has
| been able to get some people to work there for a significant
| pay cut. Oxide computer is a mixed hardware/software play and
| they currently pay a flat $180k wherever you live.
|
| Talked about in this podcast:
| https://soundcloud.com/user-760920229/why-your-servers-
| suck-...
|
| And an older article:
| https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-reflection-
| of-...
| Traster wrote:
| Ok, so to be clear, paying 2-3 times what the average ARM
| employee in the UK is earning...
| dclaw wrote:
| Thanks IPO
| rob74 wrote:
| > _The planet is not exactly flush with such folk at present, and
| much of Arm 's appeal to investors lies in its deep technical
| expertise. It is therefore likely that most of the redundancies
| will be staff not directly involved in Arm's core activities._
|
| This "cost-cutting exercise" (lovely euphemism) may not directly
| target technical people, but for some of them it may be a wake-up
| call nevertheless: "if they start lay-offs now, who says this
| will be the last round? And who says that I won't be next?". So
| they start looking around for alternatives, which I hear are
| plentiful at the moment, and hey presto, you got rid of the
| people you didn't actually want to get rid of...
| m463 wrote:
| There's also culture death during layoffs. People get nervous,
| start focusing on their own tasks and don't altruistically help
| others.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Counter-take: There's also cultural improvement during
| layoffs, when you no longer have to interface with someone
| who doesn't want to do their job and/or is bad at it.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The "bad" people will hold on as long as they can -
| partially because they won't have it as easy to find a new
| job, partially because they gamble on enough "high
| performers" leaving that they cannot be fired because
| otherwise everything would collapse.
| gedy wrote:
| That should really be taken care of as it comes up in a
| case by case basis, not mass layoff.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I'm not pro-stack ranking, but I also can't argue that
| sweeping layoffs don't also have _some_ benefits.
| caoilte wrote:
| You don't need to stack rank to ease people out who
| aren't happy doing their job.
| herval wrote:
| Can you cite a couple of examples where it _did_ improve
| things?
| time_to_smile wrote:
| Have you actually been at a company that has had massive
| layoffs?
|
| I've been a few times and I recall losing lots of friends
| and valuable team members. Even management typically
| doesn't spread the ridiculous myth that they're laying off
| people "who doesn't want to do their job and/or is bad at
| it".
|
| Layoffs are heart-breaking and I can't earnestly believe
| that someone who has been through them would have this
| "counter-take".
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| Worked at the largest stock market listed supermarket in
| the 90's which is one of the largest employers in the UK
| after the NHS. They banned all but essential recruitment
| and cut back on everything like payrises, capital
| replacements to maximise profits because they didnt know
| how the Socialist Labour Govt was going to be with
| taxation. As it happened the Govt introduced working tax
| credits so a wage top up for the lowest paid, paid for by
| higher earning workers and it meant these companies could
| keep wages suppressed so they could build up a war chest
| and expand overseas which ended disastrously in the US.
|
| Theres more than one way to skin a cat as they say, so
| layoffs can be seen in a few different lights.
|
| Edit. Just because a company is listed on the stock
| market, like govt's doesnt mean they are not fronts for
| criminal activity!
| clavoie wrote:
| While I hear what you're saying, I doubt that's often the
| case. Either you have a company who either tolerated bad
| employees for a long time or just figured out they were bad
| at their job.
|
| Neither points to a very healthy culture to start with.
| ravitation wrote:
| I've been through numerous rounds of layoffs, both of
| entire teams and of select individuals or roles, and it has
| never had a net positive effect on culture.
|
| Large-scale layoffs very rarely (i.e. never) simply cut
| people that are "bad at [their jobs]."
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| It seems to depend on the company, but based on my
| observations the people who are first to go seem to
| correlate strongly with people, who management does not
| like. The remaining layoffs are a weird function of
| people, who know what they are doing and can't ingratiate
| themselves.
| pmontra wrote:
| In my personal experience the first to go are the non
| management highest paid employees, the degree of
| competence doesn't matter. The really good ones go before
| the layoffs. The next layer of skilled employees leaves
| between the first and the second wave of layoffs.
| Eventually you get a company of drones with some
| management on top of them. Possibly a lot of management
| because sometimes they contract the same very people they
| laid out because they need the expertise but they want to
| transform capex to opex.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| I have never, and probably will never, see a culture
| improve after layoffs.
| pjbeam wrote:
| Which then in turn puts pressure on the spiral of talent loss
| in the departments management wasn't targeting.
| Yoric wrote:
| Yep. I've been exactly there ~15 months ago (not at Arm, but in
| another fairly big tech company). I haven't checked the actual
| numbers but it is my understanding by some former colleagues
| that the number of tech people who decided to leave was
| comparable to the number of people who were laid off.
| hgomersall wrote:
| I've heard it suggested that the best way to stimulate a bunch
| of startups is to collapse a big tech firm. I know of at least
| two clusters that can be traced back to big companies going
| under.
| petercooper wrote:
| Or even half an industry. I don't think it's a coincidence a
| lot of significant technical developments or companies came
| out of the post dot-com "fallow" period of 2002-2006 (like
| the spread of Ajax, Rails, Django, .NET and Mono, Skype,
| WordPress, much of Web 2.0's innovation with Flickr, Twitter,
| and Facebook all founded in this period, AWS).
| mikepurvis wrote:
| The Toronto-Waterloo tech corridor can be pretty heavily tied
| back to the slow implosion of RIM/BlackBerry over the course
| of the early 2010s. Even the companies that predate those
| events still benefited a lot from the glut of qualified
| personnel coming available, and there are others which had
| been funded or bootstrapped by early RIM employees.
| bregma wrote:
| Where I work at BlackBerry it seems to be all ex-Nortel
| people. So it goes.
| navaati wrote:
| Sun
| mattkevan wrote:
| Pretty sure that most of Silicon Valley, including Intel, was
| founded by people exiting Fairchild Semiconductor when things
| got rough there in the '70s.
|
| https://computerhistory.org/blog/fairchild-and-the-
| fairchild...
| Clubber wrote:
| I agree. To add, usually when this happens seemingly at random,
| it's to make the company look more attractive for a sale, in my
| experience.
| redleader9345 wrote:
| I've seen companies go on hiring sprees just prior to being
| acquired, which I don't fully understand. I guess the company
| tries to puff itself up to fetch a larger asking price?
| Guessing base cost factors in to sale price.
|
| It's shitty, cuz their playing with people's lives. As soon
| as the acquiring company takes over, their like "what's with
| all these unnecessary people?"
| guiriduro wrote:
| Maybe it is to create the 'inefficiencies' which the merger
| can then 'synergize' away, so that the acquiring execs can
| get bigger bonuses. Because I've yet to see one instance
| where real (non-stupid/contrived) synergies actually
| occurred as foreseen, but plenty of cynical M&A. Also
| plenty of absolutely atrocious dysynergies in corp history
| of course.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Given the outcry after the last attempt at a sale and the
| fact that nVidia got blocked (a US company) who would risk
| buying arm at the moment given that multiple competition
| watchdogs are currently paying attention.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| You could sell to private capital, or a company not
| currently in the semi industry that wanted to enter.
|
| [edit] Oh it says it right in the article: "SoftBank, Arm's
| owner, responded to that setback with a plan to float the
| chip design firm by March 2023."
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Would either of those things genuinely put other companies
| off? If I were looking to expand into that market then it
| wouldn't put me off. They're manageable hurdles to
| purchasing rather than reasons that buying ARM would be bad
| business.
| cinntaile wrote:
| They're preparing to IPO in 2023. It's a shame the Nvidia
| sale didn't go through, now they'll likely die a slow death
| because they don't have enough R&D resources to compete
| with the big boys who are just going to design their own
| CPUs instead of buying the design.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| That's an interesting idea.
|
| The Apple M1 lineup, for example. The M1 standard, pro,
| max, and ultra are not differentiated by their ARM cores
| other than the quantity of them. It's really the GPU
| cores and media encoding components. And that Neural
| Engine thing is really important for many apps and OS
| features. At what point do the general purpose CPU cores
| on a modern chip become minor players that have very
| little impact on overall chip performance? I don't think
| we're there yet, but it certainly _could_ happen.
|
| EDIT - I'm saying M1 vs M1 Pro vs M1 Max vs M1 Ultra.
| _Not_ M1 vs Intel i7
| yywwbbn wrote:
| That not really true though. M1 had considerable better
| single core performance at the time of release than
| anything else with a comparable TDP. And the Neural
| Engine is only useful is fairly narrow use cases.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| I wonder if there were similar conversations about math
| coprocessors when they joined the CPU. What did people
| say about increasing specialization of cores then? The
| closest recent analogue is GPUs joining the CPU on mobile
| devices, but it was only recently that those weren't
| complete garbage.
| kcb wrote:
| Apples ARM cores have been significantly ahead of off the
| shelf ARM designs for years now.
| swamp40 wrote:
| Small ARM Cortex's have taken over the microcontroller
| market. Billions made each year from every large
| microcontroller manufacturer. They aren't going anywhere.
| It's hard to believe ARM wouldn't make enough from
| licensing fees and from each one sold to make an easy
| profit. Maybe the license doesn't account for individual
| sales, IDK?
|
| New secure ARM Cortex's are launching everywhere too, so
| they are very much alive and well, for the next 20 years
| minimum.
| fundmondawyaya wrote:
| Small RV32/64 cores could supplant them.
|
| For example, GigaDevices makes an STM32F1 clone which
| comes in two flavors with the same peripheral memory map:
| ARM Cortex-M3, or RV32IMAC.
| swamp40 wrote:
| Lots of things _could_ supplant them, but the base is too
| large now and it has grown to cover the entire ecosystem.
|
| They spent the last 10 years beating out PICs, 8051s,
| etc. Because they were BETTER.
|
| And now a million engineers now how to use them, and the
| tooling from 1000+ companies is all in place to support
| them.
|
| They aren't going anywhere.
| chmod600 wrote:
| "They aren't going anywhere."
|
| That seems to be said of a lot of things that do end up
| disappearing. Hard to tell whether there are real roots
| in the market or if it's going to evaporate like so many
| other things.
| fundmondawyaya wrote:
| I dunno if Cortex-M chips will be better for long,
| though. Some of the RISC-V specifications like interrupt
| controllers need a bit more time, but they have very good
| support in mainline compilers like the GNU toolchain.
|
| My experience writing C for RISC-V MCUs is about the same
| as doing so for Cortex-M platforms. They're a bit low-
| volume/expensive atm, but the core is very appealing to
| chip makers because it has solid software support and no
| royalties.
|
| I also wouldn't write ARM off, though. Their 'coming-
| soon' MCU neural accelerators could open a lot of doors
| if it works well on a low power budget.
| humanwhosits wrote:
| Bill Of Materials.
|
| ARM will have to lower prices, as if you can save even
| just 1 cent per-device by using RISC-V in your
| microcontroller..
| ksec wrote:
| >compete with the big boys
|
| Which big boys are designing their own CPU instead of
| buying from ARM? Apart from Apple and arguably Qualcomm
| with Nuvia?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The "big boys" you mentioned are all holders of ARM
| Architectural Licenses - there are only 15 of them in
| total and they likely pay a _shitload_ of money for the
| privilege [1].
|
| And they will need to hold on to the ARM architecture and
| thus the license payments for quite the time... I bet
| Apple _could_ go and develop a completely new ISA from
| scratch, but that would mean a third infrastructure
| switch in two decades on the PC and the first one on
| everything mobile - a lot of work for everyone involved
| with no real benefit, and especially after they spent
| multiple billions on getting their ARM stuff to the
| performance (in compute power and power efficiency) point
| they need.
|
| Even the "biggest boys" aka nation states fail at making
| decent alternatives to the x86/64 and ARM duopoly - the
| Russian Elbrus and Indian SHAKTI CPUs are utter exotics
| and Chinese Loongson are a plain fork of MIPS (and again,
| completely exotic).
|
| [1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/7112/the-arm-diaries-
| part-1-h...
| mattkevan wrote:
| That's happening where I work.
|
| There was a shock round of layoffs a few months ago, triggering
| a mass exodus. They've now had to start hiring again to make up
| numbers.
|
| The amount of team disruption, lost domain knowledge and hiring
| expenses, especially as new people will want to be paid more,
| must have cost the business far more than they saved from the
| layoffs.
|
| So short sighted.
| ThrowawayIP wrote:
| I'm sure your CEO got their bonus though, if not a premium on
| the bonus because they lead the company through such hard
| times.
| gadders wrote:
| https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
| Gareth321 wrote:
| I finally have a use for my MBA. The theory on this one is not
| good. You're right: people will leave of their own volition.
| Problem is, it's usually the people with the highest
| marketability. In laymen's terms, the most skilled and
| productive employees. In any given organisation you'll find 20%
| doing 80% of the heavy lifting. Losing half of the most
| productive employees results in a real world 40% reduction in
| output. Of course, much of this output is intangible and easy
| to hide, so investors don't see the damage for years. Soon
| enough, lack of productivity bites cash flows, and another
| round of layoffs is announced. Wouldn't you know it, the most
| productive leave this time too.
| andrewjf wrote:
| As far as I can tell, this kind of thinking (the best people
| leave first and you're stuck with the lowest performers) _is_
| accepted common knowledge.
|
| So what's the thought process that goes into triggering the
| good people to leave? Is there just no other option?
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| I suspect that past a certain scale, some good people
| leaving is so unavoidable it becomes necessary to make
| everyone replaceable. That tends to hobble the top
| performers the most, turnover justifies shifting the
| culture more in that direction, etc.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I don't really buy this argument. Another thing one sees
| is companies deciding that a certain level of
| 'unregretted attrition' is good and then effecting
| policies that end up raising attrition in general and of
| course it disproportionately rises for the more
| productive marketable employees. So maybe those companies
| don't realise what they're doing or they don't know who
| is important to keep or they think the attrition is worth
| it. I don't think one can merely consider it unavoidable
| when companies actively increase it.
| humanwhosits wrote:
| "If they can't afford those other people, I'm probably not
| getting paid enough to stay"
| caoilte wrote:
| The thinking is, Good people leave anyway. Everybody is
| replaceable.
| 01100011 wrote:
| A couple of coworkers with experience in the defense industry
| related a story about a company, Cubic I think, which started
| offering buyouts in order to reduce headcount and boost
| profits. The best engineers took the offer because they could
| just get another job somewhere else. The worst employees
| stayed behind and proceeded to do the same buyout approach
| next time the company needed to save money. It was a natural
| selection feedback loop that took the company's engineering
| talent into the gutter.
| mprovost wrote:
| Bruce Webster named this the "Dead Sea Effect". [0] Imagine
| your talent evaporating, leaving an increasingly salty
| residue.
|
| [0] http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-
| the-d...
| pfortuny wrote:
| It is also a great way to make technical people do non-
| technical work and end up wasting a ton of time.
|
| Overall, cost-cutting in the short term. Just that.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > you got rid of the people you didn't actually want to get rid
| of
|
| And to add salt to the wound you will end up retaining those
| who are good at surviving such layoffs by doing some optical
| work. It's the worst of all the worlds.
|
| It should also be pointed out that people are not plug-and-play
| parts of a machinery. They carry domain knowledge, context
| (Chesterton's fence), intra-company network they have
| painstakingly built and such intangible value. Besides, layoff
| doesn't mean the _work_ disappears. It gets distributed, often
| unevenly, among existing workforce. I 've seen it first hand
| and the aftereffects are just terrible.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| _So they start looking around for alternatives, which I hear
| are plentiful at the moment_
|
| On the other hand, if you think the layoffs are due to an
| impending economic downturn, you could end up moving to a new
| job and being the new guy, so if they need to make cuts, you're
| first to go.
|
| I was working for a small (~500 people) but well established
| startup around the time of the original dot-com bust. I have
| some friends that tried the same thing -- saw the writing on
| the wall and tried hopping to a bigger more established company
| for job protection, but they were the first to lose jobs when
| layoffs hit the industry. We had relatively layoffs in some
| areas of the company, but not in the core engineering team.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Just to be slightly contrarian, I've also seen in tech
| companies that layoffs are often the only way to get rid of
| "mediocre-ly poor" but not egregiously bad performers.
|
| That is, I've worked with people that didn't completely suck,
| but to quote Office Space, they always did the absolute bare
| minimum. Few companies have the Netflix mindset of letting
| people go with a large severance if they aren't top performers,
| so these mediocre folks can just be allowed to fester.
|
| TBH, I've been _glad_ as an engineer to see the company
| (belatedly) handle these sub-par performers, and to these folks
| benefit they get a fair severance and can usually find other
| jobs quickly.
|
| Of course not all layoffs are like this, and often times
| layoffs at a large company are done "unevenly" as others have
| pointed out, but I have been in a company before where layoffs
| allowed the company to focus and perform better.
| kradeelav wrote:
| I understand the annoyance at underperformers (I really do),
| but that feels a little, mm, unkind on some level. Some
| people just want a steady paycheck without having to be a
| rockstar, and I can't blame them for that.
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| There's a difference between "I don't want to be a
| rockstar" and "I am doing the bare minimum to make it not
| worth it to fire me." I think the post is talking about the
| latter.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| How does "I'm doing the bare minimum to make it not worth
| it to fire me" compare to "I'm being paid a larger
| proportion for the value I create" for you? To clarify,
| the former happens by decreasing output and the latter by
| getting paid more for existing output and obviously can
| be harder to achieve in practice. In both cases the
| company could be getting (or feeling they're getting)
| lower value for money from the worker.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I certainly don't blame them, but at the same time I rarely
| feel bad for people that are laid off in a company in a
| _growing_ industry if they are given a fair severance. Yes,
| it can be challenging and disorienting to have to go find a
| new job, but again, as others have noted, I have no doubt
| that all these people will get snatched up quickly.
|
| I contrast that with people that are laid off in a
| _shrinking_ industry, and I have a ton of sympathy for
| those folks, because it 's basically musical chairs around
| who gets to keep their jobs. Folks who are laid off in
| shrinking industries often need to take a large, permanent
| pay cut, or leave the workforce entirely.
| Calamitous wrote:
| Yep. As soon as the layoffs start (or even reliable rumors),
| I'm polishing my resume.
| tlogan wrote:
| Large layoffs is always a politic game and in many cases very
| smart people working of cool projects ended up being laid off.
|
| I was in one large corporation (not large anymore) which did
| something like that. And sure, cafeteria was still full of
| marketing and sales people even after layoffs.
| toss1 wrote:
| >> "To stay competitive, we need to remove duplication of work
| now that we are one Arm; stop work that is no longer critical to
| our future success; and think about how we get work done."
|
| Sounds good, but it is extremely likely a strong sign that the
| executive suite does not know what they are doing.
|
| A company cannot achieve greatness by cost-cutting.
|
| This is especially so in these times where it is so hard to find
| talent. Even if there are some redundancies, your key asset is an
| existing talent pool that has already been recruited and is up to
| speed on your products, technology, and internal processes.
| Strategically redeploying them to greater effect is a sign of
| knowledge & strength. Merely cutting and hacking is a sign of
| either incompetence, or that they DGAF and are trying to
| temporarily make the numbers look better for some near-term
| result (e.g., the likely pending new China IPO mentioned in the
| article), and leaving the resulting problems for their successors
| to deal with.
|
| It is really rather obscene.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| this is great, 1k people to now start working on riscV
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