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Comment by Kukumber | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully for them that includes executives and managers, they are the ones responsible of the death of that company, not the engineers

Congrats to Apple and AMD for having done better

Microsoft ignoring AMD in their latest Surface lineup is a hint for the people looking for answers

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> Microsoft ignoring AMD in their latest Surface lineup is a hint for the people looking for answers

I think the entire new surface line-up is a giant conspiracy.

The Surface Pro 9 5G has a Qualcomm 8cx Gen 3 with some tweaks called the SQ3. It does not match the performance of 12 Gen intel in a 15w power envelope, which is important because the Surface Pro 9 non-5G (intel) uses an i5-1235u, a 15w chip. But the last Gen, the pro 8 used a 28w 11th gen part. This means that the y/y perfromance is actually about the same (but better power/heat). If they used a matching 28w CPU it would have been a much bigger jump comapred to the ARM SQ3 5G.

But then, it gets WAY weirder.

The new (FOUR THOUNSDAND DOLLAR) Surface Studio 2+ ? 11th gen laptop CPU (11370H)...which is as fast as SQ3 will be.

Surface Laptop 5? Exact same specs as Surface Pro 8.

Casual reminder that the now two year old Apple M1 still smokes every single chip I just mentioned, all in a fanless iPad Air. The would-be Surface Laptop AMD Ryzen 6800U would be right on par with M1...which would make that SQ3 look like a bad deal.

Microsoft is sandbagging the lineup for ARM.

So, it seems they're shooting themselves in the foot

Surface pads do not seem to be too popular and might become even less now

People need to remember that desktop/laptop ARMs outside of Apple have kind of royally sucked...

E.g. when the first Surface Pro ARM was released (the X, 2020ish), it was ridiculously more expensive, less performing and had less battery life (!) than the cheaper Intel options https://www.notebookcheck.net/Microsoft-Surface-Pro-X-Review...

The previous Surface non-Pro ARM attempts (RT, 2012ish) were even crappier (Tegra procs) but at least they were cheaper than the Pro/Intel variants...

> People need to remember that desktop/laptop ARMs outside of Apple have kind of royally sucked...

I've got an SQ1 and Apple M2 and they're both truly excellent.

(disclaimer: I worked years in engineering in both Qualcomm and Apple)

Got some benchmarks?

Good point: they're excellent for MY benchmarks, to your point (I think).

Essentially I run them all day with Visual Studio Code and vim sessions, Firefox scanning news and documentation (and of course normal email etc), and ssh to cloud hosts.

Your mileage and evaluation could of course vary.

Microsoft has an exclusivity agreement with Qualcomm that isn't doing them any favors.

It will do them great favors when the Qualcomm Hamoa Chip comes out which is supposed to be as good if not better than the Apple M2

The time-tested strategy of releasing many iterations of a terrible product and hoping people will still care once it's good.

Just in time to compete with the Apple M4.

> the now two year old Apple M1 still smokes every single chip I just mentioned, all in a fanless iPad Air

Well yes, but then you have to use macOS and the locked down close ecosystem that is Apple. That's not really something they're directly competing against.

Tell me again how MacOS is more locked down than Windows and why most people should care?

The iPad runs iOS, which I suppose is what they meant. Windows ARM is less locked down than Windows S. iOS is still a walled-garden with a few holes here and there.

The second part of your question is key though "why most people should care." They obviously don't. It "just works" and generally keeps them from doing insecure shit. Want to buy hardware from someone else? Tough shit! Why would you anyway? You've got money to burn and no desire to write code that runs on your box without a second "real" computer. Buy some more lightning cables while you're at it. Don't forget to mention green bubbles next time you message an Android peasant.

I said that last part pretty snarky, but you're not wrong about most people not caring. That's their audience and they've nailed it.

> The iPad runs iOS, which I suppose is what they meant. Windows ARM is less locked down than Windows S. iOS is still a walled-garden with a few holes here and there.

The conversation never mentioned “iOS” or phones and the submission is about Intel who has nothing to do with mobile or Android. He specifically said MacOS:

>> Well yes, but then you have to use macOS and the locked down close ecosystem that is Apple.

What does any of your response have to with Intel, Windows or MacOS?

It is mentioned a long way up this thread:

>> Casual reminder that the now two year old Apple M1 still smokes every single chip I just mentioned, all in a fanless iPad Air.

That’s a stretch when my question was specifically about the Mac vs Windows and the person I replied to specifically cited macOA.

You don’t think the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop are competing with the Mac and iPad lineup? They seem like direct competitors to me.

That’s always the problem. An R&D group I worked for laid off developers but no managers, which lead to more layoffs because overhead went up, which mean rates went up, which meant more consultants came in instead.

Really at least a fifth of your layoff should be managers. If you lay off about six reports, that’s one less manager you need. So 1/7. If you lay off six managers, that’s one skip level you don’t need. 1 + 6 + 36 = 43. Go to three levels and that’s 1 + 6 + 36 + 216 = 259, or 43 / 259 or about 1/6.

But if you want to keep production capacity, you should move to slightly more reports per manager, not maintain steady state. Just to keep the math simple, if you had 216 developers reporting to an organization of 43 managers, if you went to 7 reports per manager you need 31 line managers, not 36, which is a 2% RIF without losing a single producer. Or if you do both you get about 1/5th of laid off people as managers if you lay off less than half your developers.

Edit: fractions and ratios are not interchangeable, bad math.

Why not both? Even much smaller organizations tend to have low-impact teams that could be absorbed by others and their work deprioritized. If you're going to fire a dozen managers then the implication (or at least possibility) exists that maybe even the bottom 20% of that group is assigned to low-priority projects and perhaps even under-performing.

Then 216 => 43 becomes 203 => 29

Now you've reduced the workforce by 10% and put some miserable projects entirely out of their misery at the same time!

And suddenly reduce the velocity of all other teams because whoops it turns out those low priority projects were dependencies of everyone else.

I worry about any company that doesn’t track priority and severity separately. Priority is political, and often bullshit (everything is top priority!) but some tasks, if not completed, are company killers, and some just embarrass a loud-mouthed salesperson in front of a customer.

Just to check my math, let’s look at an org that has a multiple of 6²x7²=1764 staff.

We had 294 line managers, 49 managers, and 8+ program managers. 351 managers, 2115 employees total. I need to lay off at least 15% or 318 people.

We go from 294 line managers to 252, plus reductions up the chain to 36 + 5 = 293. 58 down, 260 to go. I lay off 5 managers, 35 line managers, and 245 staff, that’s 58 + 285 = 343 people total, so I can argue for keeping a couple extra line managers and all their reports. Call it 327 layoffs, 96 of them managers, 28.4%.

>Microsoft ignoring AMD in their latest Surface lineup is a hint for the people looking for answers

For those of us who are bad at subtext, could you elaborate further? What are the questions that this is the answer to?

my guess: "will Microsoft continue to take AMD as seriously as it does Intel?"

Pfft, as bad as the managers are at Intel, don't try to pretend that they have top tier talent (in SW) when they are paying on average about half of what a FAANG pays.

When I was there, they called Intel "Great place to leetcode" (a corruption of Intel claiming they are a "great place to work" everywhere)

Intel is known for good WLB and quiet quitting because the non technical managers didn't have a clue about what was actually being done on their own team. It's easy for engineers to BS these kinds of people, and this was the norm since any passion for SW was killed by working there long term...

I really hope that Intel will be a role model example to showcase what happens if you dont cut the cancer known as terrible management.

Far too long managers are not taking responsibility for their bad decisions - not only business decisions but also simple feedback disregard.

„Look at what happened to Intel thats what happens if you let your managers loose”

But is it not the management that makes such decisions?

> Hopefully for them that includes executives and managers

Yeah, its always them that get cut \s

It’s usually the fault of the previous generation of managers, hard to tie that together.

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