So whatever their problems are, throwing more money at R&D is unlikely to solve them.
Also, Intel has committed to not doing stock buybacks and has stopped the dividends completely. They may resume at some point, but it's unlikely to be soon.
150-200k for a mid career engineer, according to the internet, which does seem a little behind. It's a livable wage in Washington county, Oregon, so if the standard for decent salaries is "pays a livable wage", then it seems they do. But if decent implies more than just livable, then it's questionable.
$200K after taxes and insurance and 401K contributions comes out to around $10K a month. If you live in a low cost state, that's great. If you are stuck in SV, that's not as great.
Also, when I interviewed with them out of college in the late 1990s, they offered stock options and if you worked there 7 years, you get a paid 3 month sabbatical. I'm not sure if they still do that; that was in the Andy Grove days.
I wanted to learn databases and application dev. They wanted me to wear a bunny suit and support their VAX/VMS systems. No thanks.
It's really a perspective and "keeping up with the Jones's" situation.
You are a tech engineer and "live comfortably" means that you "live like a tech engineer" in the area. Which means "not making financial sacrifices to work at company X".
Live comfortably for some people means single family home with yard, 4 bedrooms, 2-3 annual vacations, eating out once a week, shopping at expensive grocery stores, etc. etc.
Now put all these $200k or dual income $400k people in the same area and it becomes a race to the bottom of "who is willing to live closest to paycheck to paycheck".
In the US, salaries are always given as gross (pre-tax). Someone earning $200k gross in California would take home around $130k/year if single and $145k/year if married.
The more money people have, the bigger they spend, the bigger their monthly payments are. Somebody making 100k and somebody making 200k both feel like they're barely getting by. Meanwhile somebody making 50k (in the same city) is also getting by, but may as well be invisible to the first two..
In this context, decent would imply sufficient to incentivize a sufficiently smart person to work at Intel, and live wherever Intel needs them to compared to other opportunities, such as living in the Bay Area and earning multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and the potential for much more by starting your own company.
Microchip manufacturing is supposedly one of the most difficult things to do in the world, but why should the smartest people in the world do that if they have a maximum potential of a few hundred thousand dollars per year when writing software can get them far more?
If you want to attract smart people now, you have to compete with their pay now.
Letting your organization rot for 15 years while the owners reap the rewards is fine, just don’t be surprised when you’re irrelevant in the future. Or maybe do that because you’ll get a bailout from the US federal taxpayers.
https://www.intc.com/financial-info/income-statement
So whatever their problems are, throwing more money at R&D is unlikely to solve them.
Also, Intel has committed to not doing stock buybacks and has stopped the dividends completely. They may resume at some point, but it's unlikely to be soon.