It's not 2021 any more. Intel revenue dropped significantly in 2022, meanwhile they were hiring as though the revenue growth would continue. It's a similar story to many other tech companies. But at least at Intel, leadership is taking responsibility by cutting their own pay more than their employees' pay.
They still made 8 billion in profit in 2022. There's ~130k employees, let's be generous and say average income for all of those is $120k a year. This is generous because there's a massive amount of factory workers that get paid nowhere near this. That's $15 billion a year in salaries. Cutting that by 10% is $1.5 billion. Intel still would have had several billions in profit.
As I said - no reason except greed. The business is not in jeopardy.
> leadership is taking responsibility by cutting their own pay
This is a really empty gesture. Leadership has leverage to get that pay bumped up again very quickly, and I guarantee they will. They may even get bonuses to offset it in the future.
Non-leadership employees have extremely little to no leverage to get their pay back up. And in terms of financial stress, a leader making $300k a year taking a 15% cut isn't going to feel much different. Someone making $60k a year on the fab floor is going to have to make lifestyle changes with a pay cut.
