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Comment by httpz | Hacker News Reader

While Samsung's culture could be considered toxic, blaming their recent issues on culture would need more backing. Samsung has seen good growth and has been one of the top semiconductor companies for the past decade. It's not like their culture drastically changed in the recent years. It's the same "toxic" culture that got them here and blaming the culture for their recent hiccups just seem like a sensationalist writing.

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Intel had toxic culture since Brian Krzanich took the lead in 2013, around the switch to 14nm.

His mistakes weren't seen clearly until almost 2019, when it became obvious 10nm was a disaster, and 14nm++++++++ was their only workable product.

We're still seeing it today as Intel has 250w TDP products competing with AMD 140w TDP products.

Semiconductors is a space where mistakes take a while to bit you.

Former Samsung head Lee Kun-hee had a heart attack in 2014, and his son Jay Y. Lee took over. I don't know if that had any effect on the alleged culture problems the article talks about.

Semiconductors is a space where mistakes take a while to bit you.

Although as we've seen with AMD, it is possible to come back from them. With the right course correction, Samsung is diversified enough to tough things out. Didn't they have a massive turnaround sometime in the 80's too?

It's interesting. I read about how Samsung learned and followed a lot of processes from Boeing and lately Boeing has been faltering quite a bit and Samsung seems to be following suit.

AMD completely left the semiconductor manufacturing space and it took them like a decade to get their chip designs in a good place.

You can also read that as trying to do both might be too broad for a smaller company to tackle. Apple is a clear example of how chip design and chip manufacturing don't need to be linked and may in fact hinder.

Most folks blame the culture shift on Paul actually. He was the cause of it all. Brian being a horrible symptom of what he created, and Brian definitely propagated it far.

This is an odd stance to take. Just look at Boeing. Unless you were directly involved with Boeing, you likely weren't aware of the cultural issues in the company. Up until the Max crisis, it looked like a successful, well-run business. Cultural issues can fester for a long time and get worse and worse before they finally reveal themselves in poor performance, accidents or other issues later on. In Boeing's case, it's been a growing issue since the late 90s.

Seems not that far-fetched for Samsung to be facing cultural issues as well and that a company can be successful despite them for a long time. It seems like it's finally catching up to them as their competition becomes stronger.

Al Jazeera did an investigation into Boeing ages ago (I think pre 2013) that convinced me there were problems.

My memory is fairly poor, but I'm confident I'd heard complaints about management's move out of Seattle and the resulting disconnect with engineering causing problems for many years.

I've heard about issues coming out of Samsung for years too. I don't think these are things nobody knows about, but often they're not exactly common knowledge. Often it's hearsay and rumours from unconfirmed sources with the occasional article that goes under in all the noise or is otherwise brushed aside by the larger public. It's very hard to judge how accurate or relevant a certain news report is, or how biased or misinformed it might be, so it's easier to dismiss it.

Success can cover a lot of failures. But once there is a hiccup or competition catches up the true scale of the problems can suddenly become apparent.

See: Pentium 4

Companies have employee turnovers. Maybe it wasn't toxic to previous employees, but is toxic to current employees.

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