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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (177342)	4/2/2004 1:01:41 AM
From: Amy J	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Lizzie, I think the reason why you may be struggling with understanding why options are important for engineering, even in the face of offshoring, is because you don't understand the subtleties of what is being offshored and why. You lump this all into one basket. You also incorrectly assume all engineers overseas don't get options, which is incorrect. Why do you think I have engineers still in the USA? Why do you think they need to be compensated at least as good, if not much better, than China? RE: "I see no effort on the part of SV management to keep engineers in the USA, that is the point I am trying to make." Because our overseas costs have lowered the total costs, we will soon be able to hire one of the world's best network engineer, in the USA, to forge ahead aggressively on new ground. RE: "If a company like Juniper offshores R&D along with Google and every other "star" company, then options are not necessary for engineering because wage deflation is so dramatic, the best workers can hope for is a good salary." Google is a consumer company, not exactly everyone's definition of scientific innovation. Are they innovative, absolutely yes, but scientific? It's not like they are creating a new field of science. You got me on Juniper. It's funny you mention them, because they are the only network firm that had a bug in an account of ours. RE: "Executives use offshoring as a bargaining chip to get salaries down also." The outrageous demands that almost crippled companies during the boom, was certainly our motivator. I'll PM you about the last engineer we interviewed in the USA, before we offshored. You won't believe it. RE: "Engineering is not a cushy destination for options anymore, options are going only to the executive suite." Mathematically, because execs only take up a few % of the company compared to a whole company, I bet it'll be tempting for companies to compensate the execs options but not the employees, if this ruling goes through. So, this also is my concern too, because it could create a two tiered environment. As soon as I heard about the potential ruling, poked around and asked people what they thought about putting a junior employee on our exec compensation committee, as a means to keep everything in balance. People liked the idea. All companies should do that - so the info flows between all groups. Why should execs decide what execs get? An employee should also help decide this because it helps bring all perspectives to the table. RE: "That is the argument Dan Gilmore is making. If executives were so concerned about retaining top engineering teams locally...Too late for the "we need options for engineering" argument." If Gilmore wants to promote a two-tier society, by all means, that's his right. Personally, I doubt it's good. Especially once we move on to the next innovative wave, which I feel will happen inside the USA (if Bush stops negatively impacting stem research and science). You want a company that works well together, not the "us" vs "them" attitude you see at old, two-tier companies outside of hightech. RE: "To quote Carly Fiorina, "americans must compete for jobs" blah blah blah. Thats pretty much it for support of options from the peanut gallery, I'd say." Carly is HP, and she wasn't speaking about Intel's compensation. In fact, Intel's board recently proposed to reign in options to the top executives. Basically, make the plan linear to salary, rather than geometrically higher the higher the rank, to avoid the two-tier compensation that started to occur when the downturn happened. I would bet it's Grove's idea. Sounds inverse to HP's board of directors. I'm really pleased about this, because Intel tends to have a huge influence on what the rest of the hightech community does. Am keeping my fingers crossed and hope everyone does it Intel's way, rather than the two-tiered way I've been hearing about from other companies. But Carly's idea about being competitive is right-on --- someone had to shake people out of their slumber to get a move on it -- though at this point, everyone seems to have noticed they need to get more competitive. Finally. Regards, Amy J