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Comment by derision | Hacker News Reader

Intel is more like 3 steps behind, one of their shoes is missing and the other is missing laces

Having lived inside similar but much smaller dramas, it smells to me like Intel is titrating bad news.

There was a goal. The goal became PR. Someone in management began to believe the PR, and turned it into a promise, predicated on 'and then a miracle occurs' (the engineers figure out how to do some things that haven't been done before). The engineers keep trying to explain how nobody has done this before because you can't. To do so involves violating the laws of physics or Information Theory. Anyone who cracks this problem deserves a Nobel nomination, so that probably isn't us.

Middle management is stuck in the middle because someone has made promises we can't keep, and they either make it worse or help cover it up by playing for time.

You either solve a different problem that has similar behavior (or at least, until researchers discover Meltdown), or you slowly reset expectations until people are chronically grumpy but nobody is yelling.

This exact scenario is parodied in the show Silicon Valley[0]

It's probably fairly commonplace.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZ7m7mV864A

I can never decide if Mike Judge is really this good, or we are really this transparent that a mostly-outsider can peg us so accurately.

They have very good industry-insider consultants for the show. Plus, Mike Judge was a Silicon Valley engineer a long time ago, so I'm sure his experience gives him some insight into how to interpret the consultants and portray the modern incarnation.

Considering how poorly and inaccurately tech is portrayed in most other shows, I'm inclined to believe it's Mike Judge and the people that he chooses to listen to.

There's almost no useful public insider information about the actual state of Intel's next gen technologies. We only know what is actually shipping and promises in PR slides. Sometimes I wonder if they don't know much more inside the company. There's roadmaps, projects, timelines, factories, teams, project managers, middle managers etc. but nobody has a clear picture of what's actually necessary and what's going to work in time. Engineers overpromise on the timeline, managers misreport "minor" hangups and upper management is left in the dark until it's much too late to change horses. Then there's stories of the old guard of engineers leaving but the replacements aren't getting up to speed quickly. Management even needs to consider outsourcing production to other companies because their homegrown engineering failed them time and time again lately. I really hope the core of the company is still solid and they get their act together soon.

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