Being a former employee at GF I still have a lot of friends who are there since I left in 2016 and took a job at a smaller company, best decision I ever made!! Overall, I wish the company well and hope they will succeed. I still have many friends inside Globalfoundries and we all discuss strategy and future outlook for Globalfoundries and my current company. Here are the issues at Globalfoundries:
- Currently they are projecting missing revenue in 2023 so they are slashing R&D budget for 2023, very short-term thinking, this is driving the layoffs coming soon to GF so they don't miss their gross margins and the CEO, CFO, etc get fired, slash the technical talent so execs save their jobs classic short vision decision.
- With only offering solutions to 12nm the TAM/SAM will continue to shrink, today it might be 60-70% but it will continue to shrink. GF is trying to grow revenue from $6B to $15B+ in a shrinking market, broken strategy!!
- The current strategy is to layoff many US and Singapore employees as possible and outsource as many jobs as possible to places like Malaysia, Bulgaria and India moving much of their R&D there. This is a broken strategy and here is why!! The skill base in those areas will allow you to produce a widget but the widget will be average at best. You become a bottom feeder company without differentiation. There is a famous saying which holds true, you get what you pay for ..... In terms of the US Chips bill, GF should get $0 given their outsourcing staffing strategy.
- The attrition levels I'm hearing at GF are really bad up in the 20% or more per year range, this makes a company with continuous new/inexperienced people driving the technical deliverables, again your widget will be at best average but often less than average. The upcoming layoff will add doubt in employees mind about GF and the attrition will get higher with time.
- GF is a sinking ship unless the above items get addressed. For the employees who remain there all I can say is come together and form a union, GF executives do not care about you so protect yourself with a union, this won't allow the foolish outsourcing decisions to happen where experienced best in class employees are being cut and lower cost new college grad employees in low cost geographies replacing them.
Good luck Globalfoundries, I wish you the best, however, the employees in US should immediately rally and form a union to protect themselves moving into the future.