7 ms·

I worked at Intel for several years. The problems are self made, through years of control in the hands of number crunchers, complacency, and arrogance. I sat th

I worked at Intel for several years. The problems are self made, through years of control in the hands of number crunchers, complacency, and arrogance. I sat through leadership meetings where the only strategy discussed was - we're Intel, they would be fools to not listen to us. There is talent but it is working with its hands shackled to its feet and keys thrown away. There is zero morale. During the years i was there, my memories are marked with bigwigs threatening people to leave with the offered severance lest they are forced to leave empty handed, while the bigwigs cashed out in tens of millions. Egos stoked at the expense of the company's future, short term metrics tied to substantial bonuses, that clearly paid a few top execs 10s of millions optimizing for those and leaving the ruins for others to clean up

dmead 5y ago
whos bright idea was it for intel to buy smartwatch companies?
- nikanj 5y ago
  Someone who wanted to hang around fitness people, instead of datacenter people. Depressingly often strategy is based on personal preferences of upper management
  - xiphias2 5y ago
    I didn't understand why Google aquired Boutiques.com in 2010, but now it makes so much more sense. A lot of hot people joined the company with designer clothes, even though they didn't have to go through the usual interview process.
    - yourapostasy 5y ago
      > A lot of hot people joined the company with designer clothes, even though they didn't have to go through the usual interview process. That sounds ludicrous. If true, it has to count up there as among the most expensive way to get at "OPP" (in the Naughty By Nature sense). I don't see how the BoD and all sorts of DD processes could have signed off on it. Then again, I simply don't know how politics and power works at those levels, so I'd certainly welcome enlightenment.
      - dmead 5y ago
        I believe it, because I've seen it. At some level the marketing mangers just have carte blanche to hire hot people to be the face of the company. google/alphabet is not special in this regard.
jp42 5y ago
I confirm that several things said in above comments are true.
nurspouse 5y ago
Spent years at Intel. Definitely saw what is described here. Must also add that it is a big company with no clear culture, so many people will have been in teams for years and not have encountered what skynetv2 is describing. My two cents: Intel is full of people who are career oriented and not product oriented. Their main goal is to get a promotion, and often find means to do so without contributing anything meaningful to Intel's products. It's also full of senior leaders who believe strongly in credentialism[1], complexity[2], and style over substance (i.e. how the message is delivered vs the content).[3] From a SW standpoint, I have not yet been in a team where all teammembers can handle branches.[4] This is quite acceptable. In one team I was in, I was leading the efforts for a product that required features A and B by the customer. I was a junior member of the team with no domain knowledge, but I was somewhat of an expert for that customer's domain. Everyone was on board with the technical work. In every meeting we had for about a year, there would always be some person in the team who'd suggest things that would nullify feature B. I would have to remind them that we agreed to do features A and B." The response would always be "Oh, we're also doing feature B?" The person who would say this varied from meeting to meeting. But I was very frustrated that they couldn't remember this basic fact, and often ended up writing code that had to be undone. And then deal with their frustration as if I had never mentioned feature B to them. I can understand if this happens once or twice, but I have to remind them in every meeting. But this was normal behavior. I was the odd person who thought this was unacceptable. Oh, and coming to meetings unprepared is the norm. No one will read your emails briefing them about the meeting ahead of time. [1] "Let's hire the PhD with no experience and not the internal MS employee who's already doing the job they are hiring the PhD for" [2] "I don't care if your code sped up our workflow by 5x. It's just what, 200 lines of code? Anyone can do that." [3] Presentations break most rules of effective communications/presentations. A senior person once told me "You explained things too well, and your slides are fairly sparse. Fill it up with jargon and lots of plots, and don't explain it as well as you did. If senior management understands your work too easily, they will believe the work you did was trivial. If they have trouble understanding it, they'll be in awe." [4] One former manager: "Every person will get his/her own private branch. Do all your experimental work there. There will be no more branches." A senior member in another team said "Why complicate things by adding new branches for our various experiments? Let's just keep it in the main branch and enable the different algorithms via command line flags."
jacquesm 5y ago
There is something self-defeating about large tech companies. I wonder if this is fixable or if it is something that we simply have to accept. I don't know of a single large tech company that managed to keep their engineering spirit alive over the longer term, eventually all of them (even HP!) lose their way and end up being run in short-term, short-sighted mode which more or less kills them, even though they can stick around for many years afterwards on momentum alone.
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  I think it's that successful momentum can paper over internal business failures for a while, which means you lose a sort of natural selection where the worse employees -- and especially the worse managers -- would screw up in an obvious way and get booted out. And without that pressure around, people don't have to perform. Basically, a company that's in an extremely strong position from prior successes may lose internal feedback loops that kept the people and culture on track.
- choikwa 5y ago
  Apple?
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Fair enough, but they had gone down quite far down that exact same road before Jobs came back and their current trajectory is a replay. It's a consumer gadgets company now, and one that hasn't really innovated in the last couple of years.
    - fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
      The trajectory doesn’t seem comparable. Apple is the biggest company in the world, makes the best products in nearly every category they’ve entered (with real improvements every generation), and is still growing at a fast pace. If this is bad, I want to hear what good looks like.
      - 5y ago
api 5y ago
Sounds like the decline of the West in microcosm. Posturers tend to eclipse doers over time because doers are too busy doing to spend all their time posturing and social climbing.

dmead 5y ago

whos bright idea was it for intel to buy smartwatch companies?

nikanj 5y ago
Someone who wanted to hang around fitness people, instead of datacenter people. Depressingly often strategy is based on personal preferences of upper management
- xiphias2 5y ago
  I didn't understand why Google aquired Boutiques.com in 2010, but now it makes so much more sense. A lot of hot people joined the company with designer clothes, even though they didn't have to go through the usual interview process.
  - yourapostasy 5y ago
    > A lot of hot people joined the company with designer clothes, even though they didn't have to go through the usual interview process. That sounds ludicrous. If true, it has to count up there as among the most expensive way to get at "OPP" (in the Naughty By Nature sense). I don't see how the BoD and all sorts of DD processes could have signed off on it. Then again, I simply don't know how politics and power works at those levels, so I'd certainly welcome enlightenment.
    - dmead 5y ago
      I believe it, because I've seen it. At some level the marketing mangers just have carte blanche to hire hot people to be the face of the company. google/alphabet is not special in this regard.

jp42 5y ago

I confirm that several things said in above comments are true.

nurspouse 5y ago

Spent years at Intel. Definitely saw what is described here. Must also add that it is a big company with no clear culture, so many people will have been in teams for years and not have encountered what skynetv2 is describing. My two cents: Intel is full of people who are career oriented and not product oriented. Their main goal is to get a promotion, and often find means to do so without contributing anything meaningful to Intel's products. It's also full of senior leaders who believe strongly in credentialism[1], complexity[2], and style over substance (i.e. how the message is delivered vs the content).[3] From a SW standpoint, I have not yet been in a team where all teammembers can handle branches.[4] This is quite acceptable. In one team I was in, I was leading the efforts for a product that required features A and B by the customer. I was a junior member of the team with no domain knowledge, but I was somewhat of an expert for that customer's domain. Everyone was on board with the technical work. In every meeting we had for about a year, there would always be some person in the team who'd suggest things that would nullify feature B. I would have to remind them that we agreed to do features A and B." The response would always be "Oh, we're also doing feature B?" The person who would say this varied from meeting to meeting. But I was very frustrated that they couldn't remember this basic fact, and often ended up writing code that had to be undone. And then deal with their frustration as if I had never mentioned feature B to them. I can understand if this happens once or twice, but I have to remind them in every meeting. But this was normal behavior. I was the odd person who thought this was unacceptable. Oh, and coming to meetings unprepared is the norm. No one will read your emails briefing them about the meeting ahead of time. [1] "Let's hire the PhD with no experience and not the internal MS employee who's already doing the job they are hiring the PhD for" [2] "I don't care if your code sped up our workflow by 5x. It's just what, 200 lines of code? Anyone can do that." [3] Presentations break most rules of effective communications/presentations. A senior person once told me "You explained things too well, and your slides are fairly sparse. Fill it up with jargon and lots of plots, and don't explain it as well as you did. If senior management understands your work too easily, they will believe the work you did was trivial. If they have trouble understanding it, they'll be in awe." [4] One former manager: "Every person will get his/her own private branch. Do all your experimental work there. There will be no more branches." A senior member in another team said "Why complicate things by adding new branches for our various experiments? Let's just keep it in the main branch and enable the different algorithms via command line flags."

jacquesm 5y ago

There is something self-defeating about large tech companies. I wonder if this is fixable or if it is something that we simply have to accept. I don't know of a single large tech company that managed to keep their engineering spirit alive over the longer term, eventually all of them (even HP!) lose their way and end up being run in short-term, short-sighted mode which more or less kills them, even though they can stick around for many years afterwards on momentum alone.

TulliusCicero 5y ago
I think it's that successful momentum can paper over internal business failures for a while, which means you lose a sort of natural selection where the worse employees -- and especially the worse managers -- would screw up in an obvious way and get booted out. And without that pressure around, people don't have to perform. Basically, a company that's in an extremely strong position from prior successes may lose internal feedback loops that kept the people and culture on track.
choikwa 5y ago
Apple?
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Fair enough, but they had gone down quite far down that exact same road before Jobs came back and their current trajectory is a replay. It's a consumer gadgets company now, and one that hasn't really innovated in the last couple of years.
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
    The trajectory doesn’t seem comparable. Apple is the biggest company in the world, makes the best products in nearly every category they’ve entered (with real improvements every generation), and is still growing at a fast pace. If this is bad, I want to hear what good looks like.
    - 5y ago

api 5y ago

Sounds like the decline of the West in microcosm. Posturers tend to eclipse doers over time because doers are too busy doing to spend all their time posturing and social climbing.