I'm not sure how you can blame everything on the CEO of a company that has had over 130,000 employees on everything that has gone wrong within the company, as much of if it will have to do with lower level management as well.
Yes, the CEO has ultimate responsibility, which is why they get fired at times, but the issues here are not things that happened just because of Pat.
Did he promise a lot and under deliver? Sure, he was talking big and was unable to get the company to deliver on those promises.
However, at the same time, look at how unfocused the company has become over the past 20 years.
Intel tried to branch out and make everything from antivirus software (McAfee) to self driving cars, things they knew nothing about, but apparently wanted to dabble in.
They did alright early on in the SSD market, but with failures (not in terms of performance) like Optane, which must've cost them a ton of cash, it wasn't so strange that they sold that part of the company in the end.
Intel also bought companies like Altera and hoped that was going to be the next big thing, but apparently it wasn't a roaring success either, but I don't think they're losing money here.
Then there was the cable router/modem business that never really took off, largely due to them using a really broken Atom core in their SoCs and that was a business that was bought and then sold on for pennies compared to what they paid for it.
How about the XMM modem business they sold to Apple in the end? I don't think they ever made any money out of the few products they produced. Outside of laptop add-in cards, almost no-one except Apple used their modems and they never managed to deliver any 5G products.
Prior to that, Intel bet hard on making it in the mobile phone processor business, I can't remember how many Computex press events I attended where they showed off new, hot (running) hardware from smaller device makers that never really ended up taking any market share (ok, Asus isn't that small, but they are tiny in the mobile phone space).
Do companies have to diversify? Well, maybe, it depends on what you're doing, but when you neglect your core products at the cost of diversifying your product range, then something is seriously wrong.
If what I've heard is true they are worse, very long days and high stress work environments like a lot of companies in that part of the world. They always had a work very hard attitude in you Ork day but then western hours started seeping in now you have a culture that is work till you drop then get a few hours sleep and repeat 7 days a week because they got zero employment laws to protect them like maximum shift or weekly hours limit well maybe have official laws that are flat out ignored. Just modern slavery imo.
Yeah, no, Taiwan has employment protection laws, although they're quite weak. TSMC run shift work, as their factories operate 24/7/365, except when there's an earthquake. If it was a horrible company to work for, why would so many Taiwanese want to work for them?
Have there been incidents? Sure, but it's also a big company with over 75,000 employees worldwide and not all of them work in the fabs.
I highly doubt it's the best company in the world to work for if you work in the fabs, but you don't see much in terms of complaints about them in Taiwan. Most of the complaints and issues (even deaths) appear to have happened in the Arizona plant in the US. Most of the deaths appears to be construction related though and even if that's awful too, it's a more likely environment for something like that to happen.
Unfortunately I don't know any of the fab workers, but I know a German that have worked for them for over 15 years, admittedly in a different capacity and most likely he earns many times more than the fab workers, but if it was such a horrible company, I'm sure he wouldn't have stayed there for that long.
I also don't know how TSMC treats their staff in xina and Singapore, maybe it's different there.
