Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO?
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mondaynote.com
The thing about Intel's culture that I observed was that it wasn't toxic at all. The worst thing that I could say about it was that it was boring, which was why I left so quickly.
If anything was "toxic," it could be that some managers and co-workers had very bad people skills... But that happens at all large companies. HR can't witness and guide every interaction between employees. In reality, when I was there, Intel's HR made every effort to create a culture where, if something "toxic" happened, they could fix the situation as quickly as possible.
Granted, things did happen. The "toxic" situations were more of ordinary human nature, and can happen anywhere, even in non work situations.
Various people assign the ‘toxic’ label to various things. What may be ‘meh’ for one person could be ‘toxic’ to another.
Also: Mandatory HR is not your friend reminder. HR is there and it’s trained to protect the corporation.
Slightly. Ultimately, the high-level culture is set by the execs.
> Various people assign the ‘toxic’ label to various things. What may be ‘meh’ for one person could be ‘toxic’ to another.
No, definitions are important. The word "toxic culture" has a very clear meaning; and the article does not use it correctly.
Specifically, toxic culture means an environment that leads to high stress and poor mental health. That's not what the article discussed, and it's completely appropriate to criticize. A "toxic culture" is a very serious accusation, so incorrectly using the term isn't something that falls under the "I say toe-may-toe, you say toe-mah-toe" attitude.
Depends on the size and the structure under which the institution operates. If there's autonomy within an institution execs might attempt to set a culture, but they can obviously not control it and the result will be a mix of organic bottom-up developments that diverge from section to section, and top-down guidelines.
At a company the size of Intel, with over 100k employees, it is almost impossible to have an iron grip on the entire workforce.
Sometimes the high level directives are great but the culture sucks, sometimes (less offen) the culture is great in spite of high-level.
Yes and no. Some of the biggest conflicts I’ve seen started because of misunderstanding ‘basic words’. So definitions matter in the sense that they help clarify intent. But they also can make things harder if you insisting on a certain definition comes across as condescending.
But its important to recognize, that HR is only to your benefit, when interests align, the OP is right, that HR is not there to protect you, but to protect the company, sometimes protecting you however, is protecting the company as well.
I think that very much depends on how HR decides to view things.
Someone complains about another coworker's behavior.
"Oh man we better protect the company by addressing that person's behavior."
"Oh man we better protect the company by addressing the person who complained."
Just about every HR situation can go in a lot of directions, it just depends on what HR decides their best choice is. The problem as an employee is that you DON'T KNOW what HR thinks or will do, pretty much ever.
HR as an organization has all your personal information, and HR groups expect / requires you share that with them .... but generally you have no relationship with them and no reason to trust them. It's a weird situation.
>Also: Mandatory HR is not your friend reminder. HR is there and it’s trained to protect the corporation
That I will not dispute. However, I would also say that _everyone_ is there for the progress of the company. We’re all hired to do what’s good for the company, not the boss, manager, subordinate, colleague, etc. Now, yes, HR has a special direct role to execute that goal.
So in your view, does toxic culture have shared meaning or not?
https://projectfailures.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/project-fro...
"Toxic" seems a poor choice of phrase based on everything I've seen. Boring--which is to say very heavily into process in all things--is perhaps apropos.
Their biggest issue was projecting x86 into everything. Either by assuming they had the ability to push ecosystems into existence by dint of being Intel (see WiMax) or by inventing essentially non-reasons why x86 would succeed in areas like mobile (Flash will run better if it's the same architecture as desktop).
I get why Intel was pushing x86. OTOH, they also pushed on other architectures for networking which also didn't pan out for other reasons.
The thing about margins is that it's a lot more fun to work in a division with high margins. Low margin businesses are grim, because every cost matters. When you can charge $5000 for the latest Xeon, you can pay high salaries and have fat travel budgets. So it's hard to get people used to working on high-margin divisions to move into a new low-margin division, even if it might eventually be bigger.
There does seem to be a lot of dissatisfaction with leadership, though, and it's related to those high margins. In theory one would expect that those high margins would trickle down to compensation, but it seems to all be going to dividends, stock buybacks, and acquisitions. When it comes to employees, "we haven't budgeted for that".
[1]https://semiaccurate.com/2018/06/29/intels-firing-of-ceo-bri...
I guess it's a continuous spectrum. What you describe is the worst possible end. Maybe next to it you have people which just don't care about people and take advantage of them by all means. Well and then there are places were people get burned out, managers loose their shit and yell at employees etc.
Seen it all, in fact it's like a domino effect. People involve in this, then they also involve in similar stupid activities.
That wiki page was started in 2011 and it's based on a pop-management book. It's hardly an established term.
Yet you said...
>You can't prescribe how language is used. Toxic culture now means this.
So apparently you can.
Here’s a concrete example: “citizen” meant something completely different 100 years ago. At that time it meant “member of the set of landowners”, which resolved to “white male landowner”. Now the concept of citizen is much different and a lot more contentious.
Right, and _both parties agree to the current definition_. That's the entire point.
All words and phrases are made up. None of them have an “inherent concrete meaning”. Commonly-accepted deifnitions today may have been entirely foreign a few decades ago.
When in spite of this shared language/domain situation, a phrase is gobbledygook, it is fair to say it has "no inherent concrete meaning".
I do agree that it all glarps like slofting ar a six year old.
Seriously? You can't prescribe how language is used either.
Meaning in language is constructed around conversations about how words should or should not be used. No single person can prescribe language, but discussions about what words mean in their context is how language evolves.
Big organizations get like that. There's a generation that's raised on the company Kool-Aid and they live and breathe the company slogans and they forget that reality is a different place. That's not TOXIC ... that's just the nature of human organizations.
And I mean all organizations that are large. If you ever hang out with DNC or GOP people who work for the party you'll see the same blinders. Same goes for people that work at NASA ... or in certain academic fields. They all believe certain myths internally that no experts outside their group believe.
The point about Intel being addicted to narratives that aligned with its profits is true. And Microsoft was addicted to Windows and Office narratives too before Satya Nadella.
It certainly makes you admire IBM as a company a lot more, doesn't it? They have weathered so many changes in the landscape, and they are still around.
No, scratch that. Ask an IBM customer if the quality of IBM's workforce is as good today as it was 10 years ago.
Often it's the culture and education system. Many cultures are very top down and everyone just says yes to whatever the boss wants and then tries to make it happen. The educations systems are often very focused on rote memorization. These translate to extremely poor software (among other things).
> why call them monkeys
It's a long standing term for people that write code but do little else. There has never been any racial undertone to the term.
Gassee also makes the point that the culture of the company is more influential on its success or failure than its financial position.
I found his argument fairly persuasive. Of course I worked at Intel during the Andy Grove years and understood that Intel is addicted to the high margins the x86 processors commanded. So when Gassee describes it as a cultural aversion to anything that might impact margins negatively, I can see that as a valid way of looking at it.
That said, the margins Apple has continued to make on its hardware suggest that not licensing MacOS was the right choice for the company.
Would be interesting to hear from someone who knows if Intel still uses OKRs, and if their long-term usage contributed to the current "toxic culture". I really like OKRs as a concept, just wondering what long-term usage looks like, and what the downsides are.
Or maybe it's sensationalism, and the culture isn't that toxic?
http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-ranking-system-okr-20...
It's a bit of an odd system and I wouldn't ascribe too much weight to it. It was never taken very seriously and there was a lot of gaming going on.
That said, it boils down to just writing down your goals and coming up with metrics to decide how close you got. That's not exactly revolutionary but not a bad idea either and most companies don't systematise it to the level that the OKR system does.
I was the TL of a very small team at Google. My manager and nearby senior engineers were very good at forcing me to plan my team's work for the quarter in the form of OKRs, and the results were quite surprising. I would say something like "I'll add that to next quarter's OKRs" and people trusted that it was actually going to get done. There were no weekly status meetings, or nag emails, or anything like that... people assumed that if my team said we were going to do something, it was going to be done. And they were right, because we actually focused on exactly what we said we were going to focus on. We had to prioritize, and so we spent a little more time on features than on system stability than I would have without any plan ("just one more day to automate this part of the release that only saves 5 seconds once a month!"). It was quite good.
Meanwhile, when I first joined Google, I went to the company OKR scoring meeting. There was a KR like "have one billion active foobar users" and the score presented was .7, the minimum "passing" score. They did not have 700,000,000 users though. I distrusted company OKRs ever since. I can do multiplication; you lied.
TL;DR: planning is valuable. Making up a number to make yourself feel good is pointless. The key is to not tie self-directed and self-graded OKRs to anything important, just look at it like a reasonable todo list for the next 3 months.
Seems like a super obvious move to me.
I agree this is really the most suggestive next step. I posit she left as a result of the CEO position opening up, not by mere coincidence.
I am conflicted about whether I would want her to return as the culture (as pointed out by others), is very stagnant (one of the reasons I left), and the classic good ole boys network (which is how Intel was really toxic) was still there and stronger than ever when I left in 2013.
Because I was not serious about staying at Intel for a long time, I took a lot of risks that made my experience more fun. Most people probably wouldn’t do so.
There was significant beaurecratic bloat and overhead, the whole organization felt stodgy and a lot of the people simply weren’t doing their jobs. This caused me to feel like I constantly had to cross lines I didn’t want to cross in order to execute at a decent pace. I come from a startup background and couldn’t tolerate the endless delays and lack of responsiveness I saw there.
From my part of the company I mostly had a good time but I did see that I would not have a good time at many other parts of the organization. There are a lot of dead product lines with no future that need to get cut. No two ways about it. Cutting those products won’t be fun.
Ossified is a good word for many parts of the company.
I feel like the cultural harm caused by some of the layoffs left many people disenchanted. I heard one ex Intel employee say something like: “I got laid off because I am just another old white man.” That sentiment really is corrosive, I heard of that several times.
Unfortunately, I think the successor to BK is going to be saddled with some ugly clean up work. Or they could be cowards and continue to turn the same crank for wall street. BK cleaned some of the mess (and created several new ones), there are many more to clean.
It’s easy to be too pessimistic.
Intel has unbelievable engineering skills under the hood. They are incredibly dangerous if they are able to shake this off and re-energize.
I hope they find a truly progressive leader and don’t continue their descent into mediocrity.
If Intel does survive, it will be as a company with far lower margins in a brutally competitive environment.
Read Ben Thompson on this: https://stratechery.com/2018/intel-and-the-danger-of-integra...
TMSC and Samsung are going to spend money on R+D on chips irrespective of what intel does. Intel has a moat in the x86 market it has none in the ARM world. Read porters 5 forces and you will see why going into the mobile world made no sense for them.
In my opinion Intel throwing money at lower margin business would not make sense to me. I guess we will find out what happens in the future.
For a long time intel could hold all this off - sure competitors were cheaper, but intel was enough faster that they were worth it just because you could get more done with them (time is money). However intel has been facing issues with the laws of physics that limit their ability to get better. As their competition catches up intel has nowhere to go.
They have generated 50 billion in cash over the last 5 years. Let the shareholders pick who they want to invest in.
Can they find a next step? I don't know. I'd benefit if they do (faster CPUs would help me), but if they can't I benefit as well (I switch to cheaper mobile chips that are just as fast)
But the same stagnant culture that prevented them from seeing and embracing the mobile revolution also prevented them from making things like the Intel AppStore work.
At this point, Intel really is just a vertical implementation of a company like TSMC.
Intel Silicon will continue to produce the best in class x86 chip, from Desktop, Server, Notebook to Modem, FPGA, GPGPU and Network processor. And Storage like Optane and SSD.
Intel Foundry will focus to be the best Foundry on the planet. Not only just tech and yield, but also the ecosystem around it; from tools to libraries.
Intel IP will allow customers to use Intel's IP to fab their custom solution in Intel Foundry. x86 Core, 5G Modem, WiFi, Bluetooth, Network Processor, Memory controller, GPU, every building block Intel uses for Intel silicon. To be make to anything from SoC for PS5, Xbox with CPU and GPU, to Mobile SoC using ARM CPU + Intel Modem.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Near-term_limits
That said, the "death of Moore's law" is kind of this memetic doomsday device that doesn't really mean anything. We haven't had significantly faster single-threaded performance for years and we're developing ways to cope with that.
Intel's real problem is that they keep missing the boat on new markets for chips. ARM got smartphones. Nvidia got machine learning. (Xeon Phi is cool. Maybe someone will notice. Maybe they'll fix the instruction decoder so it can actually operate at full speed. Who knows.) Intel killed off Itanium and then we discovered that every modern CPU design except Itanium is horrifically vulnerable. IBM is rapidly encroaching on the server market with innovations like CAPI/BlueLink.
If Intel is "dead", it's not because of the death of Moore's Law, it's because they let everyone else eat their lunch.
iow, the symptom should not be confused with the cause.
No one else really seems to have the vision that a CEO needs to step up to that particular plate.
Intel has an insane treasure trove of technology that they don't seem to know what to do with because they have confused profit with market domination (related ideas, but not equivalent, and one often leads to the other in both directions).
Example: Intel obsesses over x86 in a very weird and unhealthy way. Intel has repeatedly developed new CPU architectures that did not suffer from the burden of the technical debt that has accrued.
A lot of money was sank into, for example, the XScale ARM series. What killed it off was not because there was something technologically inferior with the product (it was rather popular for the time, the Snapdragon of it's age): what killed it was upper management thinking ARM sales could harm x86 sales, instead of just focusing on making sales happen.
The result? Marvell bought it, and turned merely took the breaks off the product line and let it naturally evolve. Marvell didn't really do anything other than that; Intel intentionally strangled the project and that's why it was sold.
That made no financial or logical sense no matter how much Intel apologists try to spin it. Intel cannot change the reality that their x86 designs are not for low power (which they finally admitted when they killed off the Atom SoC line for phones and tablets, which was drank power like it was going out of style), and Intel has locked itself out of one of the largest markets in the world.
Another Example: I have two Haswell-era machines in my house. Both of them are intended to be used with CPUs that have iGPUs. They both have mini-Displayport plugs. Neither have Thunderbolt controllers.
My Ivy Bridge-era MBP? Has a Thunderbolt controller, and it is the only machine in my house that would never benefit from it. The inclusion of said Thunderbolt controller was at the behest of Apple, not because of Intel.
What could have happened? Every Intel machine since Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge should have had a Thunderbolt controller baked into iGPU, and Intel's sales of Thunderbolt controllers would have gone through the roof. Instead, Intel has to compete with USB 3.x, produces controllers intended for TB-over-Type-C, and does not produce USB 3.x device SoCs (essentially losing money on every sale since Intel should be doing this), only integrated host controllers for existing Intel platforms.
The job of the CEO is to promote a culture inside of management where such decisions happen regularly. As CEO, I wouldn't be the one making decisions such as, say, making onboard Thunderbolt the default: I'd be making it possible for such decisions to happen naturally, to make sure the proper behavior is rewarded and diagnose issues in the corporate policy on why Intel isn't promoting the desired outcome internally.
From everything I have seen, Intel doesn't particularly have a toxic culture internally, not in a way that compares to the posterchildren of that particular disease. What Intel has is a weird obsession with the past, and an absolutely immense treasure trove of technology that just sits there and isn't sold or marketed meaningfully.
I think people have written entire books about the missteps of Intel. The problem is, all of us here know they were missteps, but Intel management glorifies them as the right choice and what lead to Intel's greatness.
I just see a company that doesn't understand how to profit in the right ways, and instead has lead to a public perception that Intel doesn't care about customers, hides ticking time bombs in their products intentionally (Meltdown et al.), and has lead to the term "Intel Tax".
AMD doens't sell a better CPU, nor a faster one. What they sell is a CPU that is fit correctly for the market, and have a public perception of actually caring about customers, caring about the long term support of their products, and try to leverage their technology in ways that benefit both the customer AND the shareholder.
If I was tossed in as the CEO today? I'd try fix the public perception, try to figure out why Intel just sits on endless technology and isn't part of the right markets (even though they have or had technology that fits those markets), and try to figure out why good ideas (and the people that make them) are not promoted from with in.
Intel is pretty much no different than Broadcom or Qualcomm, yet Intel can't sell the stuff they need to in a way that makes sense. Yet, every cell phone has Qualcomm parts in it, tons of IoC and network and NAS stuff has Broadcom parts in it (due to their huge family of ARM and MIPS SoCs), Broadcom also sells more Ethernet controllers than Intel.
So, what the hell. If I become CEO today, I am delivering disruption to the management culture that prevents Intel from thriving the way it should.
Some people seems to use this as meaning "anti-social" or "excessively aggressive" but the word only appears in the article as "toxic fixation on margins" where it's equivalent to "harmful".
The gist of the article seems to be that Intel lost in the mobile space because it refused to chase opportunities with lower margins. But decisions regarding such deals are made by a small handful of people at the top, the "culture" of the rest of the organization is irrelevant.
Allusions to people being poisonous are particularly destructive. This was very common in the military, if a soldier didn't fit in, he was labeled as something similar to toxic so that others knew not to associate with him. Even then, when the military does it, there's a practical solution: the soldiers get out of the military.
If you claim a larger group is toxic, you have to ask: these are our neighbors, what do we do with them?
> But decisions regarding such deals are made by a small handful of people at the top
Yeah, that really blew the article for me. Something like not-invented-here syndrome is a cultural issue, not bad corporate strategy.
Correlating statistics is useful when looking for potential causes in a large space of unknowns, but horrible when misused as evidence to justify a negative label on a category of people. Its not an olive branch for peace.
The phrase "toxic masculinity" isn't directed at one SPECIFIC man, so you can dry your tears.
A massive organization that has gone stagnant tends to exhibit the same mechanics. You're on a team solving a problem for a stakeholder. You might not know who the stake holder is or where they are. You might meet your real stakeholder once every month or never. If your company is process minded they'll create proxy stakeholders to create the illusion of task identity.
Proxy stakeholders are the worst. Since the gizmo you're working on isn't for them, any enthusiasm for your work is feigned. They're your only line to the person(s) that actually care(s). The human connection between you, your labor and its consumer is severed, isolating you further. This puts the employee on a slalom to resentment and alienation. The better your proxy is, the shallower the grade, but you'll end up there eventually.
Despite the fact I've seen quite a few successful techniques to obviate this eventuality, 99% of companies don't have a symbol in their minds for the trajectory and it happens anyways. The flat org chart thing is an interesting cudgel to solve the problem, I'm convinced it's not the best solution.
I do