Pvt. Parts posted:lol and what was their motivation until now? a hobby?
|
|
# ? Aug 4, 2022 12:20 |
|
|
# ? May 31, 2024 23:04 |
|
SwissArmyDruid posted:If ever there was a sign that Intel no longer exists to build chips, there it is. They are now a investment return engine that is funded by being the largest chipmaker in the world. I uhh.. welcome to every publically traded company in existence?
|
# ? Aug 4, 2022 22:59 |
|
SwissArmyDruid posted:If ever there was a sign that Intel no longer exists to build chips, there it is. They are now a investment return engine that is funded by being the largest chipmaker in the world. building chips was also an investment return engine? at no point was intel interested in design or furthering the state of the art, the x86 design studio is a small concern that happens to produce profitable designs for the chip fabs for a few decades
|
# ? Aug 5, 2022 00:52 |
|
I have a running theory for tech companies that once you stop putting the executive part of the company in the Executive office, (in the case of Intel, the example would be "engineers") that company is no longer concerned with making poo poo anymore. Like, at some point, companies stop being about doing the thing, and about just amassing more money, and put a Finance ghoul in the CEO seat, where they most certainly should never be, because they almost invariably start cutting costs to make the balance sheet look better, the detriment of doing the thing. Intel was like, one of my last holdouts for the theory, considering, I think, before Swan, every other Intel CEO was an engineer that came up through the ranks through the COO seat. I dunno. I haven't revisited the theory in several years, I probably need to scrap it and come up with a new hypothesis for it, or wait and give Gelsinger more time.
|
# ? Aug 5, 2022 06:32 |
|
SwissArmyDruid posted:I have a running theory for tech companies that once you stop putting the executive part of the company in the Executive office, (in the case of Intel, the example would be "engineers") that company is no longer concerned with making poo poo anymore. Gelsinger spent 30 years at intel before going to VMware when he didn’t get the ceo job the first time around, he famously claims that he “went through puberty at intel” and is an engineer’s engineer, if he can’t fix intel I really doubt anybody still alive could.
|
# ? Aug 5, 2022 06:40 |
|
There have also been several engineers who made it to senior management who were terrible at strategy (notably Brian Krzanich and Sohail Ahmed)
|
# ? Aug 5, 2022 06:57 |
|
God, you ain't gotta tell me. loving Hector Ruiz, man.
|
# ? Aug 5, 2022 09:25 |
|
BK was good at strategy, but the strategy was to inflate the share price in the short term and give himself a golden exit.
|
# ? Aug 5, 2022 09:53 |
|
canyoneer posted:There have also been several engineers who made it to senior management who were terrible at strategy (notably Brian Krzanich and Sohail Ahmed) Sohail should have been prosecuted imo and not given an honorable exit with a stupid banner with his portrait on it during an all company meeting on his way out
|
# ? Aug 5, 2022 14:38 |
|
canyoneer posted:There have also been several engineers who made it to senior management who were terrible at strategy (notably Brian Krzanich and Sohail Ahmed) Which just shows that engineering (or other subject matter expertise in other companies) is necessary but not sufficient.
|
# ? Aug 5, 2022 15:43 |
|
BK's strategy was DRONESDRONESDRONES which coincidentally was a pet hobby, make himself into a rockstar CEO, and dip his pen in the company ink. Man was ego and vanity incarnate Bob was actually not a completely horrible CEO in comparison. Honestly, Intel has too much rot in the middle management layer that has survived many many new CEOs, company wide layoff mandates, and Keller's "what the gently caress is going on here" eye. It's basically persistent. No CEO is going to succeed until that is gone, even if they fix hiring C-level and VP level buffoons WhyteRyce fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Aug 5, 2022 |
# ? Aug 5, 2022 16:57 |
|
SwissArmyDruid posted:Intel was like, one of my last holdouts for the theory, considering, I think, before Swan, every other Intel CEO was an engineer that came up through the ranks through the COO seat. you're completely forgetting Paul Otellini? 2005-2013, Econ degree, his giant leap to a completely different part of the company was to... finance
|
# ? Aug 5, 2022 17:04 |
|
So I know it's a different department, but I wonder how Raja's gonna bounce back from this most recent ARC fuckup.
|
# ? Aug 6, 2022 08:57 |
|
JawnV6 posted:you're completely forgetting Paul Otellini? 2005-2013, Econ degree, his giant leap to a completely different part of the company was to... finance Otellini is why I came up with the theory in the first place, did I not mention that? edit: oops, guess not.
|
# ? Aug 6, 2022 09:29 |
|
I haven't looked too close into Ampere's history, but they're out there shipping competitive server chips at scale 4 years after the company was founded, which is insane. Did any Intel leadership other than Renee James go to Ampere?
|
# ? Aug 6, 2022 15:23 |
Twerk from Home posted:I haven't looked too close into Ampere's history, but they're out there shipping competitive server chips at scale 4 years after the company was founded, which is insane.
|
|
# ? Aug 6, 2022 21:05 |
|
BIG HEADLINE posted:So I know it's a different department, but I wonder how Raja's gonna bounce back from this most recent ARC fuckup. well he’s angling for a board seat now, so he may be out of there by the time the bill comes due on Arc. Maybe not though, this one is exploding right in his face, but so did Vega and Intel hired him anyway… fwiw Jim Keller has supposedly spoken highly of him, and he was supposedly heavily involved with AMD during the Terascale 3000/4000 glory days, so maybe he’s just been dealt the shittiest hand two rounds in a row, but, there’s also a phenomenon where he gets credit for all the successes and none of the failures, Vega was his baby up until it wasn’t, etc. It doesn’t help that the guy is relentlessly public, he openly courts celebrity and controversy pretty much. I guess that’s one way to get to the top but he’s pretty nakedly a climber and his track record is obviously mixed at best.
|
# ? Aug 6, 2022 21:32 |
|
Renee also was the brains behind buying the $7.7B McAfee albatross, which cost more than the next fab would cost. Putting that money into a fab would have definitely had a better return in the next 10 years (4 of which had a chip shortage) than the $3B bath they took on the deal. Amazing how people can fail upward from something like that
|
# ? Aug 6, 2022 21:36 |
|
canyoneer posted:Renee also was the brains behind buying the $7.7B McAfee albatross, which cost more than the next fab would cost. Putting that money into a fab would have definitely had a better return in the next 10 years (4 of which had a chip shortage) than the $3B bath they took on the deal. Holy poo poo I totally forgot / missed that Intel had bought / JV’d McAfee.
|
# ? Aug 6, 2022 23:17 |
|
McAfee Didn't Uninstall Himself.
|
# ? Aug 6, 2022 23:46 |
|
WhyteRyce posted:Honestly, Intel has too much rot in the middle management layer that has survived many many new CEOs, company wide layoff mandates, and Keller's "what the gently caress is going on here" eye. It's basically persistent. No CEO is going to succeed until that is gone, even if they fix hiring C-level and VP level buffoons So, I don't actually know, but a guy I know who worked there briefly claims that Focal (the stack ranking compensation system at Intel) heavily incentivizes middle managers to literally sabotage each other and play politics instead of trying to build things. And that while there was a lot of internal pushback against it when it was implemented, it has now been in place for long enough that everyone who isn't heavily optimizing for the system is no longer a manager there, one way or another. He blames literally everything that's wrong at Intel on this. I don't know how much weigh I should put on that opinion, because he quit in disqust immediately after his first full assesment. Might be sour grapes, but I dunno.
|
# ? Aug 9, 2022 13:18 |
|
Tuna-Fish posted:So, I don't actually know, but a guy I know who worked there briefly claims that Focal (the stack ranking compensation system at Intel) heavily incentivizes middle managers to literally sabotage each other and play politics instead of trying to build things. And that while there was a lot of internal pushback against it when it was implemented, it has now been in place for long enough that everyone who isn't heavily optimizing for the system is no longer a manager there, one way or another. He blames literally everything that's wrong at Intel on this. It seems very possible. Just look at early vs late Ballmer Microsoft vs Satya Microsoft.
|
# ? Aug 9, 2022 14:47 |
|
The Focal has been dropped off a few years ago, though how the new system actually compares from the manager's POV I have no idea.
|
# ? Aug 9, 2022 15:14 |
|
Stack ranking of any sort is a death spiral waiting to happen. It was invented by jack welch as a way to explicitly decimate and demoralize management teams in preparation for takeover, then it was cargo culted into a "management strategy". It is one of the biggest single red flags you can observe at a dying company. Most of tech walked away from it in 2013 when the Microsoft horror stories came out, the fact that it's still alive at intel is not surprising but also an extremely bad sign.
|
# ? Aug 9, 2022 15:25 |
|
Dr. Fishopolis posted:Stack ranking of any sort is a death spiral waiting to happen. It was invented by jack welch as a way to explicitly decimate and demoralize management teams in preparation for takeover, then it was cargo culted into a "management strategy". It is one of the biggest single red flags you can observe at a dying company. Most of tech walked away from it in 2013 when the Microsoft horror stories came out, the fact that it's still alive at intel is not surprising but also an extremely bad sign. everyone copies jack welch because of how incredibly successful he was at GE at boosting stock prices by delivering consistent earnings unfortunately everyone doesn't really realize that what made jack welch so successful at delivering consistent earnings was accounting fraud, which is why all of his acolytes crash and burn when they get their own companies
|
# ? Aug 9, 2022 16:12 |
|
focal was bad, the compensation/reward structure is bad, the new system is bad but it's all just bad tools being hijacked or wielded like a club by bad managers when you have forced ranking you're going to create a scarcity of resources and politics. bad, political managers are going to thrive in that scenario WhyteRyce fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Aug 9, 2022 |
# ? Aug 9, 2022 17:36 |
|
Six Sigma (the real management cult that's been the grifting, management process worship mutant variation of W. Edwards Deming's methodology) has been shown to be negatively correlated with S&P 500 company growth trailing its peers. Whether it's because they took on Six Sigma or if failing companies tend to take on Six Sigma is not clear still.
|
# ? Aug 9, 2022 17:46 |
|
WhyteRyce posted:But your manager should 100% already know that stuff anyway so it felt like busy work that's really only there for other managers and yourself to reference when moving jobs not true lol
|
# ? Aug 9, 2022 17:55 |
|
JawnV6 posted:not true lol Your self-assessment covers the big picture deliverables that you own and accomplishments you are using to justify your performance rating, your strengths, as well as areas of improvement. None of those things should come as a surprise to your manager and it should all be topics and points of conversation in regular meetings Frequently they are not because bad managers are aplenty and why the company moved to enforced regular, formal discussions on this WhyteRyce fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Aug 9, 2022 |
# ? Aug 9, 2022 18:07 |
|
Intel went back to Grove's OKR system. It's not even clear to old-timers why the old objective-driven system was dropped for something like Focal in the first place. I tend to agree with the cargo cult management hypothesis.
|
# ? Aug 9, 2022 22:13 |
|
evilweasel posted:everyone copies jack welch because of how incredibly successful he was at GE at boosting stock prices by delivering consistent earnings Did GE's pivot to being a financial services company happen during or after Welch's reign?
|
# ? Aug 9, 2022 22:21 |
|
well if a bunch of tech firms start doing mass layoffs, it'll be fun to see the systems they adopt to ID poor performers
|
# ? Aug 10, 2022 00:38 |
|
git checkin frequency, obvs
|
# ? Aug 10, 2022 00:57 |
|
Intel once removed the low performer rating and then targeted for mass layoffs people that were given 0 RSUs in performance review, a criteria that was not once used to indicate low performance and “coincidentally”largely impacted older employees
|
# ? Aug 10, 2022 02:04 |
|
And how many of those did they have to rehire? 'Oops we fired all our mixed signal circuit engineers.'
|
# ? Aug 11, 2022 03:30 |
|
Beef posted:And how many of those did they have to rehire? Actually…a lot. Blind rumor was that with all the appeals (both from managers and employees) and the compensation packages the decision ended up costing more money than it saved. I know many fired engineers that got rehired on the basis of their managers complaining that 0 RSUs was never a fireable metric and they never would have given them that if they knew and that they were too intrinsic to the department. It was an absolutely dumb metric to use, BK thought he was being sneaky and backdoor firing older employees but forgot that managers had created a whole artificial system of rules and tricks behind focal After the surprise mass layoffs they did a round of voluntary separation with huge financial incentives. Like a year of pay to walk away and then walk back later. Quite a few VPs were rehired like this WhyteRyce fucked around with this message at 04:39 on Aug 11, 2022 |
# ? Aug 11, 2022 03:56 |
|
WhyteRyce posted:
Yeah, similar things happened even at sites in Poland (joining in the layoffs for solidarity with US or something) - throwing money at people to rehire them a year later. At least the money wasted was like 25% compared to US layoffs due to differences in pay.
|
# ? Aug 11, 2022 06:28 |
|
Laying off mixed signal groups seems like a theme, my ex company did that too after trimode gen3, gen4 was contracted out and required a lot of babysitting to drag over the finish after delays (but worked well), and then the decision was made to rebuild the team for gen 5. Which was a massive, spectacular, and still ongoing disaster. And then was a big reason (but not the only one) why a huge number of senior architects and designers left. Don’t mess with mixed signal groups and keep them refreshed with oddball new grads!
|
# ? Aug 11, 2022 06:35 |
|
priznat posted:Laying off mixed signal groups seems like a theme, my ex company did that too after trimode gen3, gen4 was contracted out and required a lot of babysitting to drag over the finish after delays (but worked well), and then the decision was made to rebuild the team for gen 5. Which was a massive, spectacular, and still ongoing disaster. And then was a big reason (but not the only one) why a huge number of senior architects and designers left. Gotta respect your analog wizards.
|
# ? Aug 11, 2022 07:31 |
|
|
# ? May 31, 2024 23:04 |
|
I got a little excited when I learned that Rocket lake has AVX-512 support (I have a 11600K), because it's supposed to be useful for RPCS3 (PS3 emulator). But then I realized that it's probably on by default (from what I can tell from RPCS3's wiki, this is the case, but I'm not positive), and the performance I was seeing was already reflecting that.
|
# ? Aug 20, 2022 02:29 |