Making a mistake is not in-it-of-itself a problem. Mistakes are inevitable, if nothing else because people cannot be oracles. If you bet into the river because you have a flush draw, you'll lose around 75% of the time - but that doesn't mean it was a mistake in those 3/4s of a time.

If as a board you unduly punish executives when bets they make don't pan out, you risk causing a culture of fear that prevents innovation and big bets.

Obviously there's a limit, and the reasoning is important behind the bets.

That being said it's not like all of the tech ceos were perfectly competent - that's not what I'm saying. But the knee-jerk "well, fire them too" reaction from the internet is mostly an emotional response.

If the executives are "just human" then they should be paid like humans along with everyone else. They shouldn't have their cake and eat it too. If you get paid orders of magnitude more than everyone else, you should take on orders of magnitude more risk (including going to prison when the company breaks the law).

That's not really a correlation that exists anywhere else. A white collar office worker on average makes significantly more than a blue collar worker but they don't particularly take more risk or anything.

People are paid based on opportunity cost. Executives are paid very highly because the cost of them making a poor decision, or not making a good decision, is very high. Meanwhile, the cost of hiring me and me not performing to expectations is low. It's not because they're God's or anything. The supply of people with leadership experience is also definitionally low.

Of course there's a lot of old boys club in executive roles in reality but that's the boards and shareholders problem when they do a bad job.

I've seen a few 'old boys clubs' form, and the conclusion I've come to over time is that a large part of this is due to two characteristics. The first is that it's very hard to find credible talent. Think about the people you've worked with - there's probably 100+ or so of them, yes? Now think of how many of them you think are really exceptionally good. Probably only a few, even amongst people with the same role, and it likely took you quite a while to realise that. So, when you come to hire someone, you look at your network, because you've worked with a lot of people, and have opinions on who is and is not good. You simply have more information. The second is that once in a more senior role, it's much harder to judge whether a peer is doing a good job or not, because you don't see a lot of their work and you're likely more reliant on self reported state of world. That tends to weaken your decision making ability on the above, while heightening the importance of doing it correctly. Neither of those things are excuses, but they're certainly reasons. I think it's relatively straightforward to find incompetent executives who've wasted money and who are known for this.

A layoff doesn’t mean you over-hired for the market conditions which were present when the hiring happened.

And under-hiring today because your crystal ball says market conditions will deteriorate in the future is also not always the best course of action.

The myriad causes which lead Intel to this point exist at many levels from individual, corporate, competitive, and macroeconomic.

It’s overly reductive to assume a layoff is due to some mistake, that a layoff is due to over-hiring, or that a layoff’s root cause is the executives who mapped out a past hiring plan.

For starters, the hiring plan will be based on revenue projections which will be based on technical market analysis overlaid with a technical roadmap. This is a distributed effort and major analysis at the level of a corporation like Intel spread across potentially dozens of business units. The hiring plan could easily have been “perfect” based on faulty product roadmaps / product performance projections or any number of other factors.