AMD axes 4% of staff while staring hungrily at AI, servers

AMD has confirmed plans to cut approximately four percent of its global workforce - about 1,000 jobs out of a total headcount of roughly 26,000. This comes right after the Ryzen designer put out its third-quarter financial results, which were pretty solid: $771 million in net income on $6.8 billion in revenues – a year-over- …

[Anonymous Coward]

[FD: I work there]

The semi-custom thing is just cyclical. All of the major consoles use AMD, but anyone who wants a Playstation or XBOX already has one. There’s nothing to be done except ride along until the next-gen consoles are released. (Assuming you win the sockets!)

[diodesign]

Fair point

Yeah, that's cool. I've added more context to the piece on that subject.

C.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmmm ... our net income's grown 158% year-on-year so, we're laying off 1,000 of you to celebrate!?!?!? Not sure that smells quite right to me (even considering cyclical products) ... Viewed from the outside, it looks very much like snatching defeat from the jaws of victory IMHO, again!

[Persona]

4% is a tiny number. In most offices you can invariably identify at least 1 in 25 people who not only contribute nothing, their very presence reduces what the productive people do. The easiest way to avoid these problems is in a possibly annual across the board redundancy where those in scope are "let go". Normally they are given redundancy compensation that will help them till they get a new job. As the reason for them being out of work is "redundancy" they don't the stigma of being fired for being "bloody useless", so getting a new job should be easier.

It's harsh, but if you don't do this over time the numbers of these people will grow and grow. They never seem to leave of their own accord, whereas the good people get frustrated and leave.

[computing]

This is a dangerous culture to foster.

Often, the almost - useless person is the one selecting whom to fire.

[trevorde]

Meanwhile at IBM

[Arvind Krishna, CEO] [looks up from article] Hold my beer!

[IGotOut]

Gotta maintain growth and fuck the employee.

If people haven't heard it, I highly recommend the podcast "Better Offline" where the presenter takes a very angry look at exactly what is going on in tech, and this is a classic example.

More profits, bigger bonuses, but we must lay off staff to show growth.

Yes we are absolutely doing well, but investors need to see growth, so if we lay off a fuck ton of people that got us here, and do a new thing, we can say "Hey look at the growth in this area".

So will the CEO be punished for having to many staff, so that these cuts were need. Bollocks, they will be rewarded.

Will they be fired when the bullshit AI bubble bursts? Don't be stupid. They'll lay off these newly employees AI teams, get a big fact pay check and move onto the next shiny new investor bullshit buzzword.