New Intel CEO rehiring retired CPU architects
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
My secondhand understanding was that Intel was losing top talent due to pressure to pay closer to median industry compensation. Top engineers recognized they were underpaid and left the company.
I've been part of a similar downhill slide at a smaller company in the billion dollar revenue range. To be blunt, once the [mediocre] MBAs start realizing that the engineers are getting paid more than they are, the pressure to reduce engineering compensation is strong. Frankly, there are plenty of engineering candidates on the market who are happy with median compensation. Many of them are even great engineers and great employees.
However, being a top company in a winner-take-all market requires the top engineers. The only way to attract and retain them at scale is to offer high compensation. I'm hoping that's part of what's happening here.
At Intel engineers are paid supposedly similar rates at similar levels and similar locations. And given my level (two levels above Senior Developer) I estimate I was paid better than at least 90% engineers.
Where I worked in R&D the doors were constantly revolving and many people admitted they wait to register enough of prestigious time at Intel on their CV to get hired at a much better rate for another company.
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I don't see these moves as encouraging, more like signs of complete and utter panic. You go to these moves when whatever you do isn't working and you don't have strategy to do something new so you try to default on what has worked in the past (this both for the choice of CEO as well as bringing retired people).
This doesn't necessarily mean it is a wrong move (see Steve Jobs coming back to save Apple as a proof it doesn't have to be bad) but I wouldn't call it encouraging.
Rehiring retired people to me signals the new CEO has no trust in people that already are there. And that is usually bad news.
Add to it outsourcing CORE competency to competitor (https://www.eenewseurope.com/news/intel-TSMC-5nm) and it seems that if there is a plan it is to keep the ship afloat for a little while longer.
Hopefully the ship is going to be afloat for as long is necessary to reshape the organization, but I think we haven't yet seen any concrete moves to see what is the strategy.
Recruiter H/R: "We need to hear your salary requirements to move forward with this position".
me: "I would like to hear your offer".
Recruiter / HR: "We won't be able to consider your candidacy without your salary expectations"
Me: "Then, despite my interest in this outstanding company, and the high value I believe I can contribute to it, I will be forced to go with the employers that make a salary offer first".
Best fuck I ever had.
I’m well established in my career (and I don’t have SV costs of living to be fair) - but anywhere even in the galaxy of $200 an hour would be life-changing for me.
Everyone is 15+ inches and making six figures minimum and if you're not, you're pathetic and are getting taken advantage of.
HN is great, but it really is not an accurate sample of real world wages.
$45 * 8 (hours a day) * 22 (days a month) * 12 (months) = $95k
You were getting paid the equivalent of $95k/year as an intern??
$45/hr|$90K would be too low nowadays. GP's experience could have been more than a few years ago.
The immigrant will agree to a low salary because the alternative is getting deported.
!!!...
Edit for background: I have 9 years experience, an MSIS working at a financial company.
A recurring issue I've found is, "Jack the EE picked up programming in a week, why are you worth as much or more than him when you aren't even a 'real' engineer?" Substitute another field for EE based on industry. Software is simultaneously too easy for them to take seriously, and too hard for them to fathom its depths.
In west coast tech hubs, that's about half of median salary alone. If you factor in bonus, stock options, etc. That's about 1/3 or 1/4 of total comp.
That said, 45 is really low for any position in an engineering company, unless it’s ancillary support services that get farmed out. Something like ‘Lab Admin’ type of thing.
Or did you mean this is $45/hr post-tax rate?
Having contracted a lot in the past, the fact that Intel is hiring contractors signals a hiring crisis.
Either nobody wants to work there, or work is ramping up. But a company full of contractors might not be too healthy.
>Rehiring retired people to me signals the new CEO has no trust in people that are already there.
And why should he, given the conditions you just outlined? I certainly wouldn’t. They’ve demonstrated they can’t advance either the process tech or the chip architecture in any meaningful way.
And I don’t even fault the engineers, but rather a finance-oriented CEO who managed for the bottom line, to goose stock prices and executive comp, while cannibalizing the engineering corps of the high-output talent and experienced technical leadership and mentoring necessary to advance one of the most complex, difficult technologies.
One possibility here is that Gelsinger is reversing that, rebuilding the original proven team from the top down, starting with the people who both know how that works, and have the connections to and respect from additional top technical talent to bring them on as well.
If Gelsinger also restructures compensation for these folks to ensure they’re appropriately compensated (way above “market rate”) then that’s confirmation that this isn’t panic but the right strategy of rebuilding Intel’s talent base.
And that report you linked was discussed yesterday, unclear how reliable it is:
The reason I made more money than them was Marc Andreesen. Someone got wind of how much they had been compensating him not to leave and they put the kibosh on it, but they were smart about it. They sugar coated the change by compressing the pay scale toward the middle, instead of squashing it down. If you weren't Marc Andreesen (and he'd been gone for over a year and the people he had poached gone for ~8 months at this point), then your pay didn't change. If you were new, like me, you were better off with the change.
You can keep top end people by giving them autonomy instead of more money, but I don't know if, in the long term, that's in Intel's best interests either. People generally trust that my heart is in the right place, but I'm human. Some of my decisions are wrong, and some are just so abstruse that they appear wrong, so I get push-back on both. I've worked at places that are 'top-heavy', where enough people have been Peter Principal-ed into MAX_RANK and there's no room in the org chart to dilute them with more promising people. In fact I work at one of these now. To a first order approximation, I'm just collecting the pay while I convince myself what I want to do next, which is proving to be more difficult than it ever has before, so I'm just here.
At this point, suspect it’s nothing but dregs. Would not hire any of the people I left behind who are still there. Period.
That's right. Any time an organization goes with "let's bring back the band," I become a little more skeptical than before. Not just because of what it implies on the quality of the bench, but I'm also wary of this halo effect of the good old days masking what's really needed today instead of living in yesteryear.
Gelsinger seems like a pretty good pick for Intel given how disastrous their last CEO search went, but in the earnings call today, there was a lot of invoking the Old Gods and Intel history. I get why they're doing it, but it's a different competitive landscape and Intel today.
Again with this location based compensation trend. Maybe it works for flipping burgers but it seriously break down when you are a global player hiring from a pool of global talent.
You can play CoL games and count beans as much as you want, but the engineering talent Intel is after are also pursued by companies like Apple that are wat above market rate.
So I can believe Apple doesn't pay non-SW folks that much.
I read the GP more in the lines of since everything is on fire and most of the house has already turned into coal, they demonstrating some panic is a much better behavior than the previous indifference about the fire, and a signal that they may decide to do something about it. Thus, expectations on Intel improved.
One dev can spend 2 weeks automating some process or building a prototype web app that goes on to generate tens of millions for the company with no overhead.
Your hypothetical EE can spend 2 years designing a chip. The chip will then require 100s of millions of dollars to be spent on testing, manufacturing, and sales in order to be economically useful to the company (note that none of those functions involve the EE who designed the chip).
Sad? I dunno, maybe. True, yep. Nonsensical? Definitely not, there's clear logic to why certain kinds of work pay what they do.
Consider the reality shows The Voice, America's Got Talent, game shows etc., that generate millions of dollars of revenue for the studios. But the people who are performing the acts, aren't compensated highly (unless they "win").
Frankly I think that many of these highly paid SWEs are really not worth what they are paid, and that many people could be doing their jobs.
I think this is part of the reason of my struggles in the job market since being laid off in June. There has become an obsession that if you're not in the "top 1% of SDEs", you are in essence, worthless and shouldn't be hired.
That is... downright absurd. God, it's enough to make one wonder where we'd all be if Intel weren't asleep at the wheel.
Intel has grading system which you can try to google. You are paid according to your grade (+ benefits based on performance, etc.) Also, you are evaluated against your grade and you can gain or loose a grade based on performance (but more likely than loosing a grade is that you will be let go).
I have been given a grade that was over my head at the time and would require me to technically advise and coordinate multiple projects, have outside presence (ie present at tech conferences, take part in opensource projects, etc.) and basically work at a level that I have not been ready for. And yet I was not able to make ends meet.
I guess when I was hired I got absolutely excited about what I am going to work on and plans for bright future, that I have completely ignored the possibility that I may be over my head and that I may not be able to advance so quickly.
Your one company gentrifies the hell out of some things, not everything, and ultimately all fates are tied to their fortunes. They do a layoff, hiring freeze or even a salary squeeze and eight months later a few restaurants and one of your favorite stores shut down. You find out they've been late on payments to people and vendors for the past 6 months.
I recall the first time I heard someone interviewing at Intel and I asked why they were, 'in the middle of nowhere in Oregon' and nobody had a good answer to that.
What I've learned about manufacturing since then makes me think, "lax environmental rules and watchdogs".
It is much easier now with remote work being prevalent.
When the MBA consultants and salespeople from the acquirer found out, they couldn’t believe he made that much — all while they personally managed $2MM-$3MM books of business.
What do you think happened? He was slowly stripped of responsibilities and eventually forced out, for the crime of standing out as an exceptional performer.
>Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
>First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
>Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
>The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
For anyone else reading, I enjoyed it tremendously and highly recommend it. It's a very fun book to read.
I love that dynamic /s
We need to get people out of this kind of thinking, and the sooner the better.
MBAs, in my experience, is the worst example of it. They treat themselves as some higher order creatures, without actual skills or understanding of things.
"Microsoft recently came to my graduate school to recruit for user experience design and user experience research positions. 10 folks out of my program (about 25% of us) scored and interview. Every single one of us had no intention of working for Microsoft and joked about it intensely. Microsoft had be relegated to the realm of other boring places to do our type of work but that you interview at for practice (and, you know, just in case that job at google doesn't pan out).
In my interview, the topic of digg.com came up and neither interviewer had heard of them. I said they were like a type of slahsdot, or maybe magnolia. Never heard of those either I quipped "oh, maybe you're not involve much in the web / web development world".
"Actually, I'm one of the project managers for Internet Explorer."
The interview went downhill, from Microsoft, from that point forward. My heart wasn't even in it "just in case" anymore."
Hard to believe Microsoft was so utterly reviled by competent people in 2007. Nowadays I look at some of the things they're doing (mostly Surface line) and I would love to be involved with that. I feel like, even though they're not always hitting the bullseye, Microsoft is really aiming for the target with Surface devices. I know the Surface Duo got a lot of hate, and I really wanted to get one, but I feel like it just isn't "there" yet. Microsoft has been on that sort of track record for the past 5 years or so... the first version of a new product is a little questionable, the second is decent enough, but the third iteration, they're really nailing it.
My Surface Book 3 is the best laptop I have ever owned, and I've had many.
In my experience, there are many great leaders with MBA degrees. However, you never hear about their MBA degree because they have so many other accomplishments to lead with. They are managers who happen to have completed an MBA program in the past.
The troublesome people are those who lean on credentialism in the hopes that merely having the MBA degree will allow them to skip to the head of the compensation structure. Anyone who builds their identity around the university they attended or the degree they received will raise a lot of red flags.
99% of MBAs give the rest a bad name.
That's the usual MBA mistake when dealing with IT. Most of what you've been taught applies to ditch diggers or bottling Coca Cola.
CompSci -> Work in industry -> MBA usually produces the best managers.
In the case I described, the issue was literally that having an MBA put you on a lower payscale than being a mid-tier engineer.
The problem was that we had several people who invested years of their lives and six figures into post-graduate MBA education with the expectation that it was a cheat code for moving them up to the top of the payscale. It was a shock to land in a company where that was not true at all, and furthermore that it was codified into the payscale.
Having an MBA is certainly not a negative signal like HN tends to suggest. The bigger issue is resistance to the modern dual-track career ladders. Many people still want the management title (or an MBA credential) to guarantee them higher compensation, and they're resistant to any system which doesn't match those expectations.
My pet theory is that they just have more time to spent scheming, and influencing others. While engineers are busy trying to get shit done.
and/or too busy arguing with product/engineering managers (for better or worse)
They all share the same "pointless" features:
- lawyers: reason for hiring: the company doesn't get sued for breaking laws (boils down to reducing costs even if you only consider the statutory damages)
- accountants: reason for hiring: the company doesn't hide deficits / key employees can't divert money (boils down to reducing costs)
- MBAs: reason for hiring: so that existing processed are optimized, and employees don't slack off too much (boils down to reducing costs)
To which I'd add HR:
- HR: reason for hiring: so that the company doesn't get sued for discrimination or gets bad PR that will reduce sales/good hires (boils down to reducing costs) -- connected to lawyers, except HR may also care about stuff that doesn't directly break laws.
So I think all of them are important! Then again, I'm now a capitalist pig, so feel free to dismiss my concerns.
But even if you only care about the visible features of a product, understand you can't innovate or even excel on a budget - which means reducing costs and trimming expenses whenever possible.
> reducing costs
yeah, or risk mitigation. Haven't decided which is truer.
> Then again, I'm now a capitalist pig, so feel free to dismiss my concerns
Yeah I own a company with ~50-60 employees (call me Mr. Pig). Business owners need to take input from these risk-mitigation roles into consideration but, ultimately, they shouldn't be decision makers. Taking risk is important.
Decision makers should be creators (eng, design) and the sellers (sales, marketing).
Businesses aren't built on reducing costs, they are built on making money. But, then again, you can use money you save by reducing costs and feed it into the creation->sales machine. It's a balance.
I’ve had some great market research done by providing assignments to MBA students (though when I did my engineering MS and we had joint classes I stayed as far away from group work with them as I could - different grading gives different incentives), I just feel they sometimes might have difficulties understanding concepts like opportunity cost, probability or non-linear developments.
I regularly pay engineers more than I pay myself as a CEO (granted: I am not really interested in draining the company's coffers for my own benefit, since I have equity). It just seems obvious that, at the end of the day, so much of the business's success turns on the engineering quality of the product, of the production lines, of the efficiencies, of the final delivered product quality.
While I take time to try to understand engineering issues, I am not an engineer by training and recognize that these people are much, much better at it than I am. So it's strange to see all these MBAs -- the types of people I used to work more closely with -- simply not get it. In most industries, you simply can't paper over operational and engineering incompetence with a slick marketing plan. So you need great engineering and operational chops. For many industries, more than a slick marketing plan.
I worked once for a company where I was doing a product for the iPad. I literally, could not get the company to buy the newest iPad for us to test on. The only iPad we had for development had a bad sensor and would throw errors constantly.
One day, marketing brings me 12 new iPads because-- they want me to install a beta of the app on them, because they're going to Fiji for a company-paid vacation (with their families!).
I have the flip side story:
We had spent almost 6 figures on factory experiments and needed to get some customer feedback from Europe at the behest of marketing.
Being mischievous and predicting the response, I actually asked marketing if they could purchase our engineering team a pelican case to protect the marketing samples ($300 cost).
They said it wasn’t in their budget to support, so we used bubble wrap.
First, it has nothing to do with MBAs.
And of course we don't really know how budgets are allocated? That they might have just bought their iPads as part of the purchase cycle whereas 'Eng guy' already had one, and 'the sensor' wasn't enough to justify a new one? And that everything customer-facing has to be relatively new? And that 'the trip' they were on has nothing to do with anything?
If he's complaining about a bad sensor it means that sensor was hindering his testing, otherwise he wouldn't have even noticed.
It's a matter of who is valuable and who is not, in the eyes of the people making the budget.
When they joined a company and realized that their graduate degree was not a guarantee that they'd be at the top of the payscale, they interpreted that as an error in the compensation structure.
The challenge is that many (though not all) MBA programs virtually promote this idea that an MBA is a key to unlocking the highest salaries. MBA program advertising material often implies that an MBA will have huge ROI and greatly increase their compensation. It can be a shock to land at dual-track companies and realize that compensation is a strict ordering according to credentials.
I work in a different industry, but it's the same story everywhere. MBAs are the worst thing to ever happen to American business. We've created an entire class of people with large egos and expensive credentials who don't actually know anything practical, and we've put them in charge.
We've come up with this weird idea that you can abstract running a business away from the nuances of a particular business and industry, but that's completely untrue. Business are not these clean theoretical constructs you see in business school or an economics class, they're real, they're messing, and it's not always crystal clear why a particular business works or doesn't work.
Unfortunately, this feels all too true. I believe this kind of mental bias trap is true and widespread.
The engineer working on CAD, layout, specs, RFQs, Suppliers, Equipment, etc are hardly going to revolutionize anything. Their work is valuable but they’re entirely replaceable.
For every top engineer, you need 20 minions to execute. Folks who think otherwise haven’t really worked in a large company. In the words of Jim Keller - “It’s craftsman’s work. It’s fun.”
You just named all specialist who would get N-times the salary outside of the industry.
That's the problem of the industry.
A man who can "just write a CAD plugin" in semi industry would probable be an instant senior hire in any CAD vendor.
A mid-level semi PM would be a senior PM, GM level manager, or a COO anywhere else.
Analog IC designer is by default a top-tier EE.
A fab "junior technician" is likely an engineering, or physics master, or more likely a PhD in Taiwan.
And so on, and on.
I think this is a very elitist mindset that unfortunately many people have.
To me engineering is primarily a learning process on how to build better tools. And you can probably always build a more suitable tool on top of existing tool.
So saying, this is "boring work", that requires "just minions" is akin to saying that the existing tools cannot be improved, or people who use these tools cannot figure out a way to improve them themselves, they need to be told by somebody.
Intel is replaceable.
Basically, I was saying that top-engineers are irreplaceable but they need replaceable engineers to execute menial, boring, repetitive work. There is a lot of this to be done.
[0] - AMD
[1] - Apple
[2] - Microsoft
Having a boring or menial job is not an indictment of a person's potential or capabilities.
Anyone remembers Blackberry?
That's pretty much what killed them. Going there typically meant you weren't good enough to get a callback from Apple.
I am extremely interested in this long and irrelevant story.
Graduated with my MS and three internships with Intel into what I thought would be my 'rest of life' job. I wanted Brian's job, which at that point was the head of the fabs. Got less than one month of training and then told 'all yours now'. Worked my ass off for like 18 months, made a name for myself in the factory, was literally on call 24x7 by myself for 11 months. Got an annual review were I was told 'we had limited budget for bonuses and raise budget, and we gave it to XX because he has kids'. Sucked it up, told myself I was playing the long game and to just put my head down and work. Hacked together software that made stuff which never worked work. Worked and worked and worked. Lost a marriage over it...who would want to be 25 and married to someone who works over 100 hours a week and gets woken up by a phone call almost every night?
I had been working an issue for months, got no buy in, got told it was no big deal/no budget/ignored. The fourth time the same thing broke, suddenly it was an emergency. I was supposed to leave on vacation that day...a vacation I had given 10 months notice on because I had no coverage. Got asked to cancel the vacation. I walked out.
I've learned, I'm smarter than that now, I respect myself in new ways I wasn't ready to understand. Now when I mentor undergraduates I am laser focused on quality of life mattering and learning to respect yourself beyond how someone else evaluates your work. I still know what my ring tone on my on call cell phone there was...and I know that it still cause anxiety when I hear it (but not panic attacks anymore). The ring tone is in a James Bond movie, I don't watch that movie.
I discovered a kid out in Utah on YouTube named Joshua Fluke and his story is very similar to yours, and he often says much of what you say in terms of quality of life, the corporate attitude of most companies, etc.
I've only ever worked for someone else twice in my life (I considered military service to be just that - serving the nation, not so much "working" for the American people, although I suppose one could make that argument), so many of these tales are pretty foreign to me, and since I also have "fuck you" money now, they're made all the stranger to me that anyone would tolerate such behavior. I don't accept the, "I have bills to pay," mantra - to me its more akin to, "Either you respect yourself or you don't."
EDIT: Glad to see you did come to respect yourself in a healthy way.
It's a bad leadership thing, not an MBA thing.
The handful of Apple engineers I know are incredibly happy and devoted to their work at Apple and being paid 50% more to work for Google would feel like a step backward to them.
That, in combination with their business results is, to me, evidence of excellent leadership at Apple.
I think your point misses a crucial distinction.
The issue isn't whether or not "holding down the costs of your key inputs" is good or bad, all other things being equal. Rather, the issue was that Jobs formed an illegal cartel to accomplish that goal.
It’s bad, because good leaders are supposed to take sacrifices for those they are protecting. Our system doesn’t necessarily promote good leaders though.
Maybe they reasoned that they're located in a lower cost of living market and so those big paychecks aren't necessary. Or maybe the policy people just get sticker shock because of that.
Either way, making rational decisions 24 hours a day is very different than being able to consistently make them 8 hours a day 5 days a week. I've known plenty of trustworthy coworkers who make irrational personal decisions. You can't use 'econ brain' to price employee salaries and benefits.
SV is so familiar with the cheaper, irrational solutions that they're a cliche that occasionally rises to the level of self parody.
These 'useless MBAs' 'only engineers are worthy beings' generalisations on HN are getting seriously tiring. A lot of people have both backgrounds fyi. There's bad Apples in every profession.
"MBA" is being used here as a shorthand for a professional management class who don't have any other skills, I don't think it means explicitly the qualification. And because they don't have any specific non-management skills, they think they can manage anything, which makes them mediocre managers at anything they do (at best).
In other words MBA has become a label for such people because the programmes appear to promote that worldview. But of course you can get people who have an MBA and who could also do their teams work, there's no rule that says you can't. And the discussion would probably not apply to those people.
This is what happens when you're run by bean counters who don't understand your core business or industry.
EDIT:
Two stories that still annoy me to this day:
1. We had been complaining about our slow machines for a while and my PM told me to write up a proposal to send to his boss for new parts. Which, side note, was the last time I went out of my way to /beg/ for equipment to do my job better. Anyway, I write up an email with the reasoning for why we needed new hard drives (SSD's, we were still on spinning rust) and/or more RAM (I think we had ~16GB but we were running VMs). I explained how each part would help and even found cheap versions of both online that would be sufficient for our needs (we are talking <$1-2K total for all of it for the whole team of 4). I specifically said that if it had to come down to one or the other that the SSD would help more than the RAM (and it was cheaper). I never got a reply to the request and then a few weeks later we got new RAM... Like why even pay people with the knowledge/skills if you aren't even going to listen to them or even engage/discuss it.
2. The company was going to buy the developers new machines (finally) and they were testing out various machines (with hardly any input from the developers). All of the developers (4, this wasn't a huge company) had personal Macs they used for meetings/WFH (we only had desktops from work) but the company refused to even consider buying Macs because someone up the chain had a vendetta against Macs. They were looking at crappy laptops that cost the same or more than the MBP's we all wanted but it a complete no-go. This was also the company where I used my personal MBP for work (with begrudging approval) because it was way better than the Dell desktop they gave me (to run Linux on). What made it infuriating was we did cross-platform development (iOS/Android) but I was the only team member who could build/test the iOS builds because I had a Mac. The company provided an old cheese grater Mac Pro (pre-trashcan) that couldn't even be updated to a new enough OS to build apps that could be submitted to Apple...
It was astounding how large the disconnect had grown between management and the front line. And also astounding how cheaply the employee morale was fixed once he wrote that cheque.
My dad ran a software consulting company eons ago and he had a new programmer start but he didn't have a laptop so my dad took him to Best Buy (that's where you bought computers back then) and told him to pick out a laptop. They guy picked one and my dad was like "How about this one, isn't it better?" and the guy said "Yeah, but it's more expensive". My dad bought the better laptop and gave it to the guy and told him it was his now (as in not the companies). That guy was over the moon and my dad told me that it was the best money he ever spent. Not only did he effectively "buy" a ton of loyalty with that move but he would make up the cost of the laptop in a week or so off that programmer alone (difference between what he paid the employee and what he billed them out at).
I also remember going to Sam's Club with my dad to buy snacks for the office. He kept snacks, candy, drinks, etc well stocked at all times and told his employees they could have as much as they wanted, no limits. Happy employees are productive employees, why more people don't get that I'll never know...
That's just the nature of leadership positions. As people get high up in the position, the view of the company is shaped by their staff and reports. The VP never hear of the problem simply because no one ever told the VP. VP never asked about it because again no one ever told the VP. That's why corporates seem to ask a million surveys and reports because there is no other way to know that information.
What if employee surveys were never conducted? The VP would only know about the employee satisfaction issue if everyone left, well beyond the point that it's fixable. If you are on the ground, it's easy to ask your coworkers for that information. But if you are the VP, that's not possible.
Isn't this the core of the MBA-hate argument ? That they occupy middle-layer positions, and actively obfuscate messages and merit from front line in order to redirect all the benefits for themselves ?
There is also a darwinian component there, where such behavior is beneficial to game company evaluation, so that only people with similar principles end up being promoted, then actively scuttling any other middle managers that don't adhere to the same set of principles since they are effectively representing a dangerous rival set of values, thus ensuring that after a few cycles, only they remain.
That's how culture evolve in (most) big companies where upper management don't make an active effort to keep middle management in check. A begrudging hard work, that most prefer to skip (get the quick compensation, and move on).
That's also why there is a big difference when companies still have their founders in, as they tend to pay more attention to these issues since they are personally invested in company's future and brand, than recently promoted middle managers which are just temporarily in for the check.
Then loaded so much security crap on it that all cores are maxed out without me even touching machine. Base vim nearly unusable. Then they made it so I could only access things via a double Remote Desktop tunnel.
Basically an expensive space heater.
3 months of nothing done until security software suffered an unfortunate accident.
scheduled or unscheduled?
To be fair, I can assure you that developers give very little thought to the experience of people who have to support their software too.
Time to switch job?
I was helping an intern out, and they had him using literally the worst laptop I have ever seen. It had about as much power as a Chromebook, and it was running the same spyware that I had. No wonder he couldn't get anything done.
Same for the current COVID situation. Providing every engineer with minimum dual monitor and a proper desk is only going to provide you with output gains for very little investment.
(i use this cmd a lot!)
Have you tried running git gc (maybe --aggressive) and similar commands?
Lemme call this BS. Apple's hardware is expensive crap compared to other. I can make at least 50% cheaper from parts desktops/laptops having the same performance.
Quote 2: "...but we were running VMs...but I was the only team member who could build/test the iOS builds because I had a Mac."
I call this another BS. My machine is running Windows as host OS. My VMs are Linux(Ubuntu and Mint)/Android(both Vm and emulators - Bluestacks an Memu)/Raspbian and MacOS (at least 10 MacOS VMs starting with Mountain Lion 12 years ago and copy/upgrade a new one every time a new MacOS was released). I can run any flavor I want and do cross-platform build at the same time.
Conclusion - you're lying.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Tesla,Google,Facebook,Micros...
so, the new old guys are brought in at market and higher - otherwise how you'd bring them in? - ie. it sounds like at the scale of at least 3x+ of the current engineering comp at Intel. Lets see how that would sit the the current engineers at Intel. I don't think it would result in high collaboration and team cohesion.
Also Intel issue seems to be process node, not the "architecture" per.se., and one can wonder how several years gap may affect one's utility at solving intricate issues of current node.
Anyway, fab to fabless is a classic paradigm shift , and Intel just fails to grasp it and to adapt.
Ringing up elderly chipmakers to help shore up a company that's been run into the ground by marketing and management only confirms the same disastrous management practices are still at play
As a leader trying to resuscitate a brand, eschewing new talent for old is just going to get you handfuls of engineers familiar with corporate ladder climbing and various no wake zones that might challenge the status quo. It also sends a clear message to newly minted PhD and graduates: Intel is closed for new ideas.
I forget the specific role the manager was hiring for, but it sounded like a quality/reliability engineer. Basically run a bunch of tests, identify and analyze errors on newly manufactured equipment.
I immediately lost interest when the manager said the role would either work until 9 PM or start the next day at 4 AM due to an important (daily?) 7 AM meeting where the results would be presented. Ontop of that, it was required that you be on call during every weekend and most holidays. You would be required to do this for your first two years as an entry bachelor degree worker. Entering masters level students wouldn't need to be on call.
After that, he mentioned this role would pay ~$65,000 USD. Bonus < $5000. To live in the bay area. Then he bragged to us about the ability to buy intel stock at a 15% discount or something like that.
The manager presented in a room with fully qualified people to work at any FANG/Graphics/Aerospace company.
I sold all my intel stock the next day [late 2019], it made up most of my portfolio at the time. I just did not see how intel would attract talent if it over-worked and under-compensated entry level employees like that. Compared to the FANG employee getting free meals, game rooms, huge salary, etc.
So I spoke to a recruiter and opened with: so what's the work life balance look like for technical ICs at your company? The recruiter literally laughed at me like I was doing stand-up comedy. Well, uh... ok? Waste of time, lol.
Would you prefer them to lie to you? At least the recruiter was honest, even if the company's WLB was poor.
At least the recruiters you spoke with were upfront about expectations. Do you know if there was WLB as one got into a more senior role and climbed the corporate ladder there?
This past summer I did some contracting work, putting in 80+ hr work weeks, 7 days/week. Management figured I had nothing better to do cause of covid, so they just piled on work. I'm not complaining about the work, it molded me to be a better employee. I was also fairly compensated for my time. But my health was so bad. Blood pressure sky-rocketed, resting heart rate in the 80's as a mid 20's male. Eyes red when I woke up every day. Blurry long distance vision.
Now that I have balance between work/life, I am back to an excellent blood pressure & RHR. Eyes all fine again. I learned an extremely valuable lesson last summer to never forgo life & free-time.
edit: I don't have a problem working more than a 40 hr work week. In fact, my worldview believes it is necessary to work more than the average person. I found out I can stay healthy and happy by taking Friday nights and Saturdays off. I ideally try to work/learn 55-57 hours in a normal week.
“They piled on work” > I’m not complaining Health was shit > But I have no problem working more than 40hs.
I hear this constantly in the US. Observing the overworked state one is in, but throwing a “no but I’m still good eh, don’t get me wrong” after to back pedal it a bit. Almost as if everyone was guilty, or if they had to show they are also as strong as the next guy working 60hs.
I work at a place where people feel like they will be fired if they work less than 50h/week when they are exempt even if they could finish the work in 36hs.
I notice this is embedded in the American work culture. Feeling sorry for not working more than the amount of time they are being paid for.
Working from home and going back to the computer after hours because idk.
I’m not sure if it’s not having anything else to do and getting anxious, hating the life at home, wanting to show they are “so exhausted”, pride, or what, but we need to start thinking differently if we want to be healthier together.
Sorry if this is too off-topic, but why did it make up a sizable fraction of your portfolio in the first place?
Reason for Apple: At my elementary school, everyone loved using the Power Mac G5's during computer lab. Every kid had/wanted an iPod or iTouch (and eventually iPhone).
It makes sense to be less risk averse in that situation than a mid-career software engineer with a family to support planning for retirement.
If you wait long enough (and you should be investing for 10+ years from now) doing things that hurt growth doesn't risk you losing money, it guarantees it. And diversification hurts growth because of transaction costs.
Still, probably better to buy SPY.
1. TSMC/Samsung - fabrication
2. AMD/Amazon-Graviton - Cloud Server
3. Apple-M1/AMD - Laptop
4. Nvidia/Amazon - Cloud ML/DL Accelerator
Intel has made giant blunders in the past (e.g. Itanium [1], Atom [2], WiMAX [3]) but I'm not sure that any of these past challenges were equivalent to the current four-front war. I would not count Intel out at this point but it will be several years before we know if they were able to right the ship.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium
But the first point on your list is where their real loss is, it's historically the source of their strenght and they've never been losing at this one.
pc-centric "client computing group" made 40b revenue last year, over half their 78b total. probably something like 250 million cpus at an average price of $160
I think we need more details on the CCG split between notebooks and desktops. When I chose "Laptop" as the description of my 3rd category I was trying to choose a label that included the Apple M1 but didn't imply PC-Centric which I associate with Windows. I'm fine with Laptop+Desktop or some other permutation; I wasn't trying to be overly fine grained with the categories.
> The company also announced that its board of directors approved a cash dividend increase of five percent...
A 5% increase in dividend for a technology company is expected for a massive cash-cow with limited future growth. The Financial Report is an interesting read.
Amazon's Graviton ARM Neoverse CPUs only implement ARM NEON SIMD rather than the newer SVE2. I don't know if ARM SVE2 has Matrix math instructions like AMX does. Intel AVX++ might be an important alternative to discreet ML/DL accelerators. DL Training accelerators appear to be focused on RDMA Over Converged Ethernet [1] (RoCE) and I'm assuming that this technology is new enough for Intel to gain a foothold.
I don't know if I understand this space well enough but I think there are enough truths in this explanations to keep me from ruling out Intel.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDMA_over_Converged_Ethernet
Accelerators have a very clear space for themselves on the training side, and no amount of fancy ISA magic is really going to make up for the fact that TPUs and the like beckon. It's where most of the real money is.
Intel Acquires Artificial Intelligence Chipmaker Habana Labs [1]:
> Intel estimates the total addressable market (TAM) for AI silicon by 2024 will be greater than $25 billion, and within that, AI silicon in the data center is expected to be greater than $10 billion in the same timeframe.
Amazon EC2 instances powered by Habana Gaudi [2]:
> Up to 40% better price performance for deep learning models
Matrix CPU math is another plausible future; Intel, AMD, and/or ARM are positioned to drive such an ISA extension. Accelerators, coprocessors, FPGAs, and CPU ISA extensions all seem to be in play; it is too early to pick winners in this nascent market.
[1] https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/intel-ai-acquisitio...
They're using TSMC out of necessity, not desire. Intel's fabs are integral not only to their success and profits, but to the infrastructure of the United States itself. We simply cannot allow all CPU fabrication to be offshored, especially when most of it is close to China (Taiwan / TSMC). Samsung is too busy pumping out smartphone / tablet CPUs and NVIDIA's GPUs, so even if Intel wanted to use them, there's not enough capacity.
Intel is going to have to get their shit together, not just for their own sake, but for strategic manufacturing security interests of the United States as well.
Given the expensive involved in bleeding edge manufacturing and the comparatively low volumes of sales, the consolidation of manufacturing capacity is not really surprising.
It makes much more sense for them to focus on making content than making ARM chips.
Intel will probably never get a run like the last decade, but they have enough market share and money to get themselves back on track.
Q1 2021 Revenue Guidance
Intel $17.5bn - 12% YOY
TSMC $13bn + 20% YOY
Gelsinger not doing the rehiring
Architects = 1 architect
Three ways in which the headline is misleading.
How about 'New CEO helps recruit retired architect'
That's what he says and it is probably true. But it could also be true that saying so would put him in good graces with the new CEO and he would basically be expected by everyone to say that's what pushed him over the edge even if it wasn't, so him saying so adds little new information.
If the negotiation was all smooth he would have been working with Intel by now. Remember he was retired, he doesn't need 30 / 60 days notice to anyone apart from family.
Intel needed help, but sometimes even money cant move some people. They fail to attract any talent, especially those who have already worked in Intel and knows their culture.
Having Pat meant finally shit will get done. And for most engineers, that is far more important because we all hate politics.
Pretty disappointing headline from Anandtech.
They did say right at the end: As we can see, Pat is already having an effect before his name is even on the door at HQ.
But the way I read this headline, it kinda sounds like Pat actively rehired folk.
I'm not a big fan of Intel, but this type of news makes for exciting possibilities from Intel again.
Though the performance per watt of the M1 I type this on, is going to take some beating.
I’ve been through 2 architecture deaths in my life, at least this one wont be as painful as I stopped viewing this as a religion and more like tools.
While all this is a good news, microarchitecture is not the bottleneck for Intel. At least now there are guys in charge who are only one level away from the real problem and used to talking to them.
Intel failed in foundry business.
---
Intel FY 2020 results just came out
Revenue up 9%
Gross margin 56.0%
Operating margin 30.4%[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15846/jim-keller-resigns-from...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer)
[3] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/319301-report-intel-wi...
Here's the webcast link from the Intel website:
https://edge.media-server.com/mmc/p/vjapujpe
If you don't want to click that because of the URL, you can also find it on https://www.intc.com/.
Hinton, OTOH, is the real deal. I had the privilege of spending some time with him and the gang back in the Nehalem days.
Hinton and Keller don’t belong in the same conversation.
Unless you're arrogant enough to look back at everything Jim's designed, from the DEC Alpha 21164, 21264, VAX 8800, K7, A4, A5, Tesla Autopilot hardware, and of course Zen, and then say "Yeah this guy that did Nehalem is more talented..."
I would work for Jim Keller for free. Lightning strikes everywhere he goes, that's not by accident. No one is that lucky - no one. I said on my investing blog that Keller would get pushed out by Intel's shit corporate structure and I was right. Intel isn't rotten, its gangrenous, and there's a lot of tissue that needs to be excised if the patient is going to be saved.
Everyone who listens to Jim Keller ends up with better products and more sales. Every time. Without fail.
If you think that isn't being the "real deal", there's something wrong with you, not Jim.
Something I've noticed is that many people prefer to work with pleasantly incorrect people over bluntly correct people.
This seems to have an obvious remedy: just be pleasantly correct.
Okay, now try to tell someone their "baby is ugly" in a pleasant way! It's basically impossible. Their feelings will get hurt.
The difference between people like Steve Jobs and Jim Keller versus the middle managers that got to their positions through making nice is that the former don't hesitate to call people's babies ugly. Or beautiful. Or mediocre.
They call it like it is, and some people just prefer to be lied to...
I give it a 50/50 chance they are still alive in 10 years! Having so many clowns running the company for the last 10 years is likely to destroy them forever. Tech Industry is very unforgiving of stupid ...
One way of comparing your own purchasing power is to take a basket of goods and services that you use, including rent, power, local taxes (as an indication of local government services) and convert that to how long you have to work to earn that money, net of federal taxes.
People earn a lot of raw money in SV/FAANG but the cost of living is very high and the lifestyle of SV and surrounds may not be what you enjoy.
Intel appear to be deep into a death spiral.
Also, it would be interesting to see significant changes with the instruction set.
But I personally doubt Intel will get back on the path to greatness any time soon. However, any steps in the right direction will bring more competition in the market, which will ultimately benefit consumers. So this has to be a win, even if it only shows us that Intel is going to keep fighting.
This is a fluff piece, which looks like it (perhaps intentionally) should buoy INTC share price. I suspect it's fluffy partially from a fanboi author, and partially to keep in Intel's good graces.
Makes me wonder - why now and not earlier? They've been slipping for years.
- Antitrust investigations still ongoing.
- Arm China issues not yet resolved.
They're legends!
If somebody doesn't see the value in "Got to work with a living chip design legend", especially because they're so stuck up about "their" perceived value, you don't want them as an employee at all.
* AMD
* NVIDIA+ARM
* and now Apple
Intel will have to hustle for 5 years at least to catch up.
ARM in the datacenter should be Intel's main fear.
They don't have much to lose, as AMD is already killing their x86 lines anyway.
If they keep pushing the old model of ever more GHz, they'll fail.
The front end is mostly single threaded (JavaScript) but browsers can use multiple threads to speed up the UI and we can also use web workers to do some real multithreading in JavaScript. Maybe some frontend framework uses them to speedup managing its DOM model. I hope I gave the idea, the terms are probably all wrong, I'm definitely more about the backend.
Several languages today have features to manage thread creation, pooling, and task execution with minimal developer involvement. Coroutine & promise libraries are widely available in many languages and developers are generally comfortable with using them anymore.
Concurrent programming, like it or not, is the future.