It all feels a bit strange to Andy Robbins, his new office in a Northwest Portland coworking space. There’s the lofty ceilings, ornate staircase, beer keg and pingpong – along with all the twentysomethings dreaming up new businesses and technologies.
After 26 years in Intel’s cubicle farms, Robbins said, he didn’t think he’d ever work anywhere else. He wasn’t sure he could.
Last spring, though, he joined an exodus comprising thousands of workers the chipmaker either bought out or pushed out in preparation for a long-term decline in its core PC business. Robbins took an early retirement package and started over.
He now runs an executive consulting firm, West Haven Coaching, that seeks to bring some of the leadership experience Robbins took from Intel to the startups populating downtown Portland.
“I don’t consider myself the old geezer there,” said Robbins, 51. “But I probably am.”
Age and experience could be an asset, he said, if he can translate what he learned at Intel’s suburban campuses into something of use to the new generation of entrepreneurs in the city. To do that he’s become an entrepreneur himself, abandoning corporate confines for an opportunity to build something brand new.
“I used to work in what I describe as a world of certainty. I knew what the game I was playing was,” Robbins said. “Now I’ve stepped into a world of uncertainty. Even though it’s uncertain, it really is a world of possibility.”
Thousands of Intel workers are in similar situations, approaching 10 months since the biggest cutback in the company’s history. Intel eliminated 15,000 jobs worldwide, according to regulatory filings.
Last year’s restructuring had a profound effect in Oregon, Intel’s largest site, which had 19,500 workers before the cuts. It’s not clear how many remain; Intel laid off 784 in Washington County, but hundreds or thousands more left their jobs through buyouts.
Asked to grade last year’s restructuring, Intel’s CEO gave it a C.
The chipmaker cushioned their exit with cash and severance packages that ranged from several weeks of pay to nearly a year’s worth. Like many corporate cutbacks, though, Intel’s staff reductions skewed older, meaning those looking for work are mostly in their 40s, 50s and 60s.
That’s commonly a tough age range to be starting over, harder still for veterans of the highly specialized chip industry. And though Portland’s economy is enjoying an especially robust stretch – joblessness in the metro area is near a 17-year low – Intel employees are accustomed to working at one of the world’s largest companies. So their skills may not easily translate to the outposts and small upstarts prevalent here.
So Intel alumni are getting creative, rebooting their skills and rearranging their lives. Those who lost or left their jobs in 2016 are starting their own businesses, telecommuting or – often with some degree of regret – leaving Oregon for opportunities elsewhere.
“I would, to be honest, have preferred to stay in Portland,” said Jerry Jimenez, 43. He spent six years at Intel before last year’s restructuring and is now a senior program manager for Microsoft, near Seattle.
With an MBA and a strong professional network, Jimenez had expected to find plenty of opportunities. What he got instead was a “reality check.” Companies seemed to be filling the midlevel management jobs he sought from their own ranks rather than considering outsiders.
So Jimenez expanded his network and his skills, attending meetups and taking online courses to develop familiarity with more technologies and practices. He revamped his LinkedIn page to give him, and his resume, more vibrancy.
After a few months the work produced results – nearly simultaneous offers from a big company’s Portland outpost and the Microsoft job. Either would have been great, but Jimenez said the Microsoft gig was a promotion from his last role at Intel – and he figured the Seattle area offered more options down the road than Portland.
Still, he misses Oregon every time he confronts the Seattle traffic, the cost of living, or thinks back on the Portland Timbers he left behind.
“I have to root for the Sounders now,” Jimenez lamented. “That hasn’t sunk in.”
Flemming Andersen would have liked to have stayed in Oregon, too. Originally from Denmark, he said Portland’s climate, lifestyle and downtown core all felt like home.
Andersen, 61, would have liked to keep his job as a processor engineer at Intel, too. He was baffled when Intel handed him his walking papers last spring and immediately ushered him out the door.
“When that happened I thought I’m never going to work for another big company again because that’s not how I wanted to be treated,” Andersen said.
So Andersen said he passed up offers from other large computing companies and accepted a position as a professor at Texas A&M University, in the far-off town of College Station. His wife helped him move into a one-bedroom apartment, then returned home to Oregon. Andersen plans to come back in the summers, doing research here, and ultimately retire in Oregon.
Just a few weeks into his new role, Andersen said he misses Oregon’s myriad shades of green, and all the outdoor activities. But teaching is fun, and he looks forward to academic research.
“The salary’s not at all the same but at least you get a decent working environment,” he said, “and some good colleagues.”
Jen Coyne spent nearly 20 years at Intel, holding a variety of senior positions including chief of staff to Intel’s chief information officer. When she lost her job last spring, her first instinct was to find a similar position.
As she began exploring the possibilities, though, Coyne found most opportunities were at companies considerably smaller than Intel. She said there was a “mutual question,” from her and from prospective employers, about how she would fit in.
Intel was a huge part of her life, Coyne said, but never her whole life – she’s a glass artist, too, and said she’d always harbored an entrepreneurial spark.
So with her Intel severance package providing a financial cushion, Coyne took some time to reflect and opted for a new approach. She and a former Intel colleague started a management consulting firm, The Peak Fleet, to help companies grow more engaged with their workers.
Though she didn’t plan her exit from Intel, Coyne said that she’s trying not to focus on how it ended and instead capitalize on what she learned there.
“I could probably have a bigger impact on the world if I decided to do something on my own,” she said. “That was really my big motivator.”
Intel hired an outplacement firm to help employees find new jobs after the cutbacks but won’t disclose placement statistics. Early indications were discouraging – the Intel Eliminati, an Oregon group of former Intel employees, said very few workers found jobs following a pair of job fairs last year.
In time, though, more people may be finding their way.
“I would say it’s mixed. I’d say roughly half of them are doing well,” said Daniel Walsh, 42, a former Intel engineering manager. “I’ve seen a few other cases where people are, quite honestly, still in shock or trying to find their footing.”
“Intel lifers,” he said, people who were completely consumed by the company and its culture, are having the hardest time making the break. But after leaving, Walsh said he discovered a world beyond that of friendly, welcoming Portland technologists eager to help people find their way.
“Any job function you had at Intel, there’s a meetup group for it on the outside,” he said.
For Walsh, the path forward was teaming up with longtime colleagues at Intel on a consulting firm, nuCognitive, that offers coaching and training to large corporations. Intel sent him to postings around the world, he said, and paid for his graduate degree from MIT. He’s confident those skills will be of use to other companies.
“As an employee you can’t really predict when those cuts are coming through,” Walsh said. “You just try to make the most of it.”
Rohith Gunawardena, 62, spent 18 years at Intel before being caught up in a round of layoffs in 2015 that foreshadowed last year’s cutbacks. For him, though, the layoffs weren’t a setback.
Intel gave him severance and a few months of health insurance, which gave him enough time to find a job laying out computer chip circuitry for semiconductor manufacturer GlobalFoundries. Since March he’s been working from home, starting each day with a 6 a.m. teleconference and wrapping up around 2:30 or 3 in the afternoon.
Now, Gunawardena’s commute is all of 60 feet. He wakes, brushes his teeth, grabs coffee and sits down to work. It’s a contract job without benefits, but he has health insurance through his wife and he said the pay is better than what he was earning at Intel.
“Looking back, that was the best thing that happened in this stage in my career,” Gunawardena said. “There is life after Intel.”
— Mike Rogoway; twitter: @rogoway; 503-294-7699
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