Overall my 5000 ft view, was the culture was very different from FAANG or a Bay Area Tech company. If the Bay Area approach is high ownership and high accountability, Intel was much more process driven and low ownership. They even tracked hours worked for engineers in Oregon.
I think it speaks to common challenges when hiring mangers are disconnected from the work, degrees and resumes are worthless, and turnover is difficult.
In many companies team leads dont have a role in the hiring or firing of the employees working for them.
The sad thing is they acquired the basis smartwatch and destroyed it, leaving only Garmin as developers of dedicated activity trackers. I considered getting a basis but was obviously glad I didn't.
But Apple bought the company recently. I worry that whatever made the product great will go away post acquisition. Whether or not Apple keeps working on it at the same level of quality is anyone's guess. Or maybe they'll integrate the best features into their free Photos app and ditch the rest. Or something else entirely.
I can't think of any examples where acquisitions make a product better. But dozens where the product was killed immediately, or suffered a long slow death.
There are many acquisitions that lead to better products.
They're more lucrative for creators/streamers and have further reach but the platform experience is noticeably worse.
But there's also hundreds of examples of the opposite happening: Successful products being bought by a big company and then killed post acquisition.
We probably won't know which camp Pixelmator will fall into for a few years yet.
Not to mention all the topics that have been soft-banned because one algorithm flags those videos as not monetizable, and the next algorithm decides that only showing or recommending videos that can show ads results in the most add revenue
I don't think YouTube is clearly better or worse than it was before acquisition, and maybe an independent YouTube would have walked the same path. It is simply a very different platform that was ship-of-theseusd
Follow some channels like Practical Engineering or Veritasium ... both good quality, information dense. Yes, decent production values, but that's not a bad thing at all in my book.
I'm tossing up between pixelmator and affinity photo.
The main changes were integration of Apple's AI stuff and improved VoiceOver support. Nothing earth-shattering but it's still active.
With Apple it's harder for me to know. How do former Dark Sky users feel about the Weather app? I think it has all the features? How about Shazam, which I never used before it became an iOS feature? TestFlight retained its identity. Beats by Dre headsets did too, though Beats Music I think became Apple Music in a way.
Something like Minecraft for an example - the existing established customer base with perpetual license was not justification for buying it. The value Microsoft saw was around things like DLC content and cosmetics, and subscription revenue through server hosting.
From what I have observed - one could say that everything Apple acquires is an accu-hire first, for a product they want to ship and trying to find a delivery-focused team to help them with that.
If the company already built a product similar to that and had it hit the market - thats great! It means that they are getting a team which has delivered successfully and maybe even have a significant head start toward Apple's MVP. That likely means also that the team will have a fair bit of autonomy too (and often retain their brands).
DarkSky's product in that light wasn't their app. It was their work on localized weather models and their weather API.
Apple's Weather App doesn't look like DarkSky, but AFAICT you could rebuild the DarkSky app on the WeatherKit REST API (including features like historical weather, and supporting alternative platforms like Android).
For starters they split the community among bedrock & java. And while a minecraft copy leveraging a C++ was a good idea, it seems they've mostly made the split to justify adding heavy monetization for skins and world maps to bedrock. (Maybe they feared backlash if they did that to the OG Java version?) This monetization seems to have killed people's appetite for hobby-project mods and maps.
Likewise, it's clear that the intended demographic of their marketing has become much younger. From the mob votes, the type of things that go in updates, it seems that what's added is far less deep. That updates are now more of a social media "Llamas in minecraft, look how goofy they are!" stunt.
I recently started a 1.7.10 modded world, and was surprised to see just how much stuff was already there. The only newer vanilla things that I found I missed were bees and slime blocks.
Maybe it's nostalgia, but this version feels nicer, like it's cohesive, and respects me as a player more.
Hedge funds also hire physicists and mechanical engineers
Graph theory originated in Chemistry. Not Computer Science.
Musicians know harmonics and indirectly lots of cyclical travel stuff. And waves.
The good car mechanics I know are scary smart.
Most trace it back to Euler when he considered the problem of Seven Bridges of Konigsberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_K%C3%B6nigsbe...
James hamilton the “mechanic” … with EE & CS degrees and time at ibm and ms. Dave Clark the “musician” (undergrad) … and an MBA focused on logistics. Jeff wilke the “chemist” … who worked on process optimization at honeywell and supply chains at aderesen.
So sure, might as well say DeSantis is an SDE Intern figuring out software deployments, Vosshall is an amateur aircraft EE, or marc brooker is some foreign radar engineer.
Signed, some newpaper dude who was an AWS PE doing edge networking and operations.
It maps 1:1 with the computer science but chemical engineering as a discipline has more robust design heuristics that don’t really have common equivalents in software even though they are equally applicable. Chemical engineering is extremely allergic to any brittleness in architecture, that’s a massive liability, whereas software tends to just accept it because “what’s the worst that could happen”.
Ultimately it is all about how strict the hiring pipeline is to the credentials vs potential.
I studied chemical engineering after I was already working in software, so I did it backward.
Your observation is interesting because early ideas in object oriented design were likewise inspired by biological robustness in the face of a non-zero background error rate (see any of Alan Kay's early writings, and his Turing lecture). I wonder if half of a CS degree shouldn't also involve basic chemeng and bioeng.
also I was sorta laid off by the current Intel CEO from my last startup!
“If your name is Farmer you’re a farmer.” mentality but self selected euphemism. “I trained as a software engineer and that’s what I am for 50 years! Dag gubmint trynna terk my herb!”
Service economy role play is the root of brain dead job life we’re all suffering through.
Nobody can predict market conditions or technological advances.
If you don’t change course (mission, people) the company will likely fail and then everyone is out of a job, shareholders, pensioners, and 401k holding laypeople look money.
I do think that leadership is not held accountable enough for their mistakes and failures.
I disagree that the workers are the ones who should have the power to fire management unless they are shareholders. I think this should (and it does) fall upon the board and the shareholders. If the workers are shareholders, all the better.
Regardless, it's clear the current system needs work.
If you are honest and generous with people, they aren't mad that you made a mistake and let them go. It's companies that try to give 2 weeks + 1 week per year of severance that are making a mistake, not the entire concept of layoffs.
(Without delving into the systemic reasons that layoffs are inevitable of course. If the system was different, they wouldn't have to happen, but we live in this system at the moment.)
Also laying off incompetent managers alone won't solve the problem of having hired the wrong people
> I heard from a friend who works for Intel that he doesn't know why he was hired in the first place; his PhD was in a completely different domain, the objectives of the project were remote to his skills, and he told me this is what his entire team was made of. Seems like a lot of bloat present in this company, and it makes sense they feel the way forward is layoffs.
In comparison:
Nvidia 36,000
AMD 28,000
Qualcomm 49,000
Texas Instruments 34,000
Broadcom 37,000
It is obvious that Intel is ridiculously overstaffed.
TSMC is a fab, not a chip designer. And NV makes GPUs and small scale SoCs like the ones in the Nintendo Switch and automotive (IIRC the Tegra SoC that powered the Switch 1 literally was an automotive chip that they repurposed).
That's quite the difference from what Intel makes: CPUs that power a lot of the world's compute capacity for laptops, PCs and servers, wireless chips (Bluetooh+WiFi), their own GPU line...
Tegra was designed for mobile devices like smartphones. The automotive part came later and isn’t particularly relevant. Intel also makes low power SoCs for mobile devices, e.g. Atom.
Last time I heard that name was well over a decade ago for crappy "netbook" devices. Just looked it up, last Atom CPU was released in 2013 per Wikipedia [1]. They might still make them for embedded computing purposes with very long life cycles, but no idea at which volume.
The only true comparison is TSMC but in only does chip manufacturing and not chip design/development.
So Nvidia + TSMC would probably be a fair comparison.
It felt to me like the people at the top were clueless, and so were hoping these hires would help give them an idea which direction to steer the ship.
Yes, I remember contracting at Intel in 2006 and the Anthropologists were at one end of the building we were in. Their area was a lot different than the engineering areas. Lots of art, sitting around in circles, etc. I remember asking about what was up over there "Those are the anthropologists".
Of course, mostly he found was how out of touch the executives at Xerox were with what their employees were actually doing in practice. The executives thought of the technicians who repaired copiers almost as monkeys who were just supposed to follow a script prepared by the engineers. Meanwhile the technicians thought of themselves as engineers who needed to understand the machines in order to be successful, so they frequently spent hours reverse engineering the machines and the documentation to work out the underlying principles on which the machines worked. The most successful technicians had both soft skills for dealing with customers and selling upgrades and supplies as well as engineering skills for diagnosing broken hardware and actually getting it fixed correctly. It seems that none of the sales, engineering, or executives at Xerox liked hearing about any of it.
https://www.nteu.au/News_Articles/Media_Releases/Staff_lose_...
Almost every field require baseline knowledge of certain facts to make one's ideas useful. And we're talking about the most technologically advanced process in the world using cutting edge physics and materials science. The baseline here is basically as high as you can get.
I didn't use Word to create my resume and if they can't deal with a PDF that was their problem.
> Probably so they can make changes behind your back
Nope, I don't consent to that.
> Or, less cynically, so they can more easily copy/paste stuff into their HRM tool
Their HRM tool should support PDFs if they are competent. They should also be able to read my resume with their own eyes. If not I consider the company not a good fit for me.