Vampire Inside

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.

May 2, 1999