Tag: intel

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Intel’s Ingenious Actors

“The real inventors are not in the ads; they are played by actors. Mr. Bell said he wanted to ensure the commercials were humorous, and avoid arguments with Intel employees over which should be featured.” NY Times, May 6, 2009, on Intel’s newest ad campaign.

It tells you a lot about Intel that when they decided to run a bunch of ads that supposedly showcase how their own engineers and technicians are on par with rock stars and artisans, it couldn’t stand to show real employees. So they hired actors to play Intel’s real employees.

This is about as cynical as you can get.  The whole point of the ad should be that the people in it are authentic.  They are counting on audiences to be stupid.  They are probably not wrong.

One of them is tagged as co-inventor of USB. It tells you a lot about consumer ignorance that most people will regard that as a heroic achievement. USB is a cooperative venture between Microsoft and Intel intended to dodge the cost of adding a 1392 (“Firewire”) port invented by Apple. Firewire has been around for years and years before USB, and it is still faster and more reliable and doesn’t screw up your computer when you plug in or unplug devices. (I am copying large number of very large files right now to a USB device and, as I watch them slowly crawl across the ports, I crave a Firewire connection instead.)

Why on earth did they not use Intel’s real engineers? Because they have no regard for honesty and authenticity whatsoever. None. Not an ounce of respect for truth or accuracy or integrity. None. None whatsoever. Nil. Zero. They didn’t hesitate: let’s tell people about our company. Let’s lie.

Surely the advertising agency will defend itself by saying that advertisers use models all the time. That’s true– and the public knows that ads that feature unrealistically beautiful people in it posing beside cars or swimming pools drinking beer are using models and actors. But the Intel ads deliberately adopt the style normally used (by Home Hardware, for example) to show real employees in order to intentionally confuse the viewer into thinking these are real Intel employees. They even tag the “actor” with the real name of the engineer without identifying him as an actor.

And I know that nobody else cares. And I know that nobody cares that I care. But this is my web page and I get to say what I like.

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Intel’s Sweatshops

Some former employees of Intel have set up a website which complains bitterly about Intel’s employment practices. According to Ken Hamidi, Intel hires young university graduates, drives them to work like slaves–sacrificing family, personal life, and sometimes health–and then casts them off like so much lint, so they can cycle the next generation of programmers and engineers through the system. How do they get rid of these employees? By giving them negative job evaluations, demanding more and more from them, and offering incentives to “quit”, to minimize Intel’s exposure to wrongful dismissal suits.

Intel denies Hamidi’s allegations. Do you believe Ken Hamidi? Maybe Hamidi is just an embittered former employee who couldn’t hack life in the fast lane. On the other hand, I have no problem believing that a large corporation like Intel can be dominated by materialistic sadists with the personal ethics of alley cats. Who is right?

Consider this. Intel’s employees all have e-mail accounts. Intel’s email system is directly linked to the Internet. The Internet is public and free— except in China and Afghanistan and a few other enlightened polities. Well, Ken Hamidi decided to send information about his website to all Intel employees. When Intel found out about this, they put a filter on their e-mail system to keep Hamidi’s messages out. Then they went to Hamidi’s internet service providers and allegedly bullied them into terminating Hamidi’s account. To top it off, they persuaded these ISP’s to delete any replies from Intel employees to Hamidi’s messages.

A little heavy-handed? A little like the Taliban? Don’t forget, this is the corporation that tried to put a hidden serial number into everybody’s computer so that user activities on the Internet could be traced.

I suspect that Hamidi is largely correct in his assessment of Intel’s corporate culture. For one thing, we have statements from Intel executives themselves that indicate that they believe that employees are only “useful” for a limited amount of time. There is a stage in a person’s life, between, say, 24 and 35, when one wants to get ahead in the work world, and is willing to work outrageous hours and put with horrendous abuse to get there. This is, coincidentally, also the age at which people are still pretty naïve about how employers really feel about them.

I hope those employees at Intel join a union.