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There’s an implicit assumption in the article that, because Gelsinger was technically competent, he was going to be a great CEO of given enough time. Personall

• hulitu 2y ago
  > Management is all about delegation. yes, but a manager who has no idea about his products, is a bad manager. Sometimes the teams below compensate and this is not visible, but, when the shit hits the fun, it becomes obvious.
• jackyinger 2y ago
  If you care to read the article you’ll find evidence of Pat’s competence.
• Zigurd 2y ago
  There's a strong case to be made that Intel CEO is the worst job in tech, and also the most complex, and it also has mediocre upside. Which prompts the question: Is there someone better than Pat Gelsinger who actually wants that job?
  • rsanek 2y ago
    $50m yearly salary is limited upside? interesting take
    • eric-hu 2y ago
      That’s a lot of money to you and me, but we’re not in the running for a CEO position at Intel. For the people who might be, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s peanuts.
      • Earw0rm 2y ago
        It's also, weirdly, not going to make a lot of difference to the person earning it. If you're next in line to that, you can already afford literally everything. Or stop working tomorrow and still afford _almost_ everything. So it's about whether or not it's a good job to work in, and one that will enhance your reputation and status.
        • aitchnyu 2y ago
          IIRC 10 year old report states 100 million usd net worth is enough to buy whatever you want.
          • Earw0rm 2y ago
            Depends on your appetite of course. But I think it's safe to say that if you're not satisfied at $10m net worth, you're never going to be, and you'll just keep on chasing til circumstances force you to stop.
      • njtransit 2y ago
        50M in salary is actually quite high. The S&P 500 average is less than 20M. I’ve seen companies half the size of Intel pay their CEOs ~11M.
        • BeetleB 2y ago
          It is high. And it is wrong. See details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42341514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42341514
    • alecco 2y ago
      When you can get fired by the board within 6 months, it matters. This could be a death blow gig for a competent career CEO.
    • BeetleB 2y ago
      > $50m yearly salary is limited upside? interesting take OK. Rule of thumb. Any sensationalist headline about CEO making $N dollars is always wrong. The real details are in the Proxy statement they are now required to file. As an example, when Pat signed on, his compensation package was worth over $160m. How much did he actually get? $10M. Why? Because the rest of the package was contingent on high share prices (I think $80 was the lowest target). He got none of it. And the punchline: His total payout during his whole tenure is $46-49M. That's over almost 4 years. And includes his sign on bonus and severance bonus. So yes, your claim of $50m yearly salary is ludicrous. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pat-gelsinger-lost-massive-140-213723546.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pat-gelsinger-lost-massive-14...
      • nimish 2y ago
        Incredible that they set his performance targets on stock price and not on market share and technological superiority. Priorities and incentives matter
• rvba 2y ago
  Guy praying on twitter does not sound like some scientist to me, although article says he did 486
  • Zigurd 2y ago
    He's religious but that shows publicly only on his personal social media posts once a week, where he posts a bible verse. That's unusual in the tech industry. For some people like for example, Cathie Wood, conspicuous religiosity is a red flag. But I've never seen any evidence that Pat Gelsinger has any problems like that.
  • tgma 2y ago
    Lots of top tier scientists have been religious. Knuth is too, for instance. It strikes me as strange that believing in "simulation theory" has become cool and acceptable in tech circles, but somehow traditional popular religions are frowned upon. Feels dogmatic to believe so strongly that scientists necessarily have to be in direct contrast with religion.
    • shiroiushi 2y ago
      >It strikes me as strange that believing in "simulation theory" has become cool and acceptable in tech circles It has? I like to bring it up in comments sometimes, and I see other people do too, but this doesn't mean anyone actually "believes in it". Imagining it as a possibility is not at all akin to a religious belief, where you have a strong, dogmatic belief in something despite a total lack of evidence (or even evidence to the contrary).
      • lupusreal 2y ago
        > a religious belief, where you have a strong, dogmatic belief "Strong" belief is probably overselling the strength of the belief of an average religious adherent. A whole lot of people have doubts, only go to church a few times a year, etc. There are a lot of people for whom Pascal's Wager is persuasive, who stick with a religion despite severe doubts "just in case." In either the case of traditional religion or simulation theory, you have people with varied levels of conviction believing in something for which there isn't empirical evidence. As an atheist, I consider simulation theory to be one of the many manifestation of the innate religious tendencies in humans. It lacks a supernatural component per se (that's debatable, it depends on what is meant precisely by supernatural), but it's a framework commonly used to construct many of the same spiritual systems traditionally seen in religions (our reality was intentionally created, we have a purpose to the creator, we're being watched, we're being judged, etc)
• shiroiushi 2y ago
  >Also, I’m not sure good engineers always make good managers. I worked at Intel when Craig Barrett was CEO. He was also a former engineer, and he was a terrible CEO. Intel got involved in a bunch of stupid stuff during his tenure, like the P4 Netburst architecture, the RAMBUS fiasco, and lots of side businesses that didn't pan out. Otellini took over and fixed things by going to the Core architecture, IIRC. I'd say that good engineers becoming good managers (esp. upper managers) is the exception, not the rule.
  • tgma 2y ago
    > I'd say that good engineers becoming good managers (esp. upper managers) is the exception, not the rule. Good managers are exceptions, period. Still, good engineers are leaps and bounds more likely to be effective as managers, even if they make managerial mistakes. This is probably even more true for high level executives than line managers. There's a common bigco school of thought that does not say this explicitly, but believes "nerds are bad managers," so if you are good at engineering you're less likely to be good at management, so let's go hire pro managers (that end up being schmoozers and less technical). In my experience, the less technical managers have been bozos AND bad at management.
    • packetlost 2y ago
      I had a conversation today about that topic sorta. I find the abstract tradeoffs of writing software (ie. efficiency vs flexibility) to be inherent to company social structures as well. I suspect the intuition that engineers build up of knowing when to favor either side is applicable, just with different error signals.
      • YZF 2y ago
        There are a lot of similarities between software and organizations. But being a CEO also requires people skills. Many of us software folks have good intuition about how to make technical projects successful but the way to get there often involves getting other people to cooperate. AKA leadership. That's the tough one. That said I agree that a CEO of a company like Intel has to be technical. I mean we saw what happened to Apple when the CEO came from Pepsi. But you need someone technical, in the domain, who is also a strong leader and a visionary and those people are not that common.
• roenxi 2y ago
  I don't think the article did assume that. If you read between the lines the writer might well believe Intel is beyond saving no matter what Gelsinger does. Zero in on: > The CEOs who got Intel into this mess were much longer than Pat and a worse fit. Meanwhile, the board let most of his predecessor’s activities go unchecked as they sped through disaster. That really captures the spirit of the article. It is pointing out that the people ultimately responsible for getting Intel into a mess are still in charge and have started to flail. That doesn't mean the writer thinks Gelsinger was going to be a great CEO because he is technical. They think that the board is terrible and there is evidence that it hasn't changed. This behaviour by the board would be a common enough pattern in both business and political failures. Something goes wrong, the people in charge don't admit they made mistakes (or everyone just assumes it is too late to recover) and retain power.
  • njtransit 2y ago
    The article focuses on the boards alleged ineptitude, not about Gelsinger directly, but the article directly states that Gelsinger was the best possible candidate: > But the reality is he’s the single best candidate for the company. However, directly before this, the author offers this: > Meanwhile, Pat wanted to pursue the big, bold IFS bet, with 100s of thousands of wafers, when the reality is just getting 10s of thousands of wafers is a massive problem as is. This sounds oddly reminiscent of people I've worked with in the past. They have grand, pie-in-the-sky visions of what something should be, but don't know how to quickly and efficiently take the steps to get there.
• BeetleB 2y ago
  > Personally, I’ve heard nothing but bad things from Intel during Gelsinger’s tenure. He had some lofty ideas, I don't know if I can say he was doing a good or bad job - it's really hard to say. But were there good things about him that people say? He was the first CEO to say Intel was underpaying. He promised to raise pay, made a deal with the board to do so, and delivered. Most people got something like a 20% pay boost. Still not FAANG level, but compared to the prior CEOs who said "We pay fair market rates"... yeah, he won points with a lot of employees for that. He quickly banned stock buybacks. Throughout his tenure he focused on his Foundry plans and improving engineering practices, at the cost of share value. His plan was "Let's fix our fabs and our efficiency, get back to building world class products, and the financials will take care of themselves". As opposed to all his predecessors who did stock buybacks instead of investing the money into the company. He convinced the board to cut the dividend to a third of its value - because Intel was paying triple the dividends that its competitors paid. No doubt many didn't like declining stocks, but no one can argue he was trying to artificially prop up the share price. His overall compensation was low.[1] He didn't earn any of his performance based stocks, and didn't try to manipulate those prices for personal gain. In the end he made a little over $10m per year - that includes the severance pay and signing bonus. He was fairly good with transparency. He wanted the world to see the fab's financials when he knew they were poor. The point was to give the world a real number that could be used as a metric of how well Intel is doing. $8B loss this year, with the hope of breaking even in the next few years. This last thing is what probably got him fired because the stock tanked after that (I don't know why - everyone knew it was unprofitable...). Declining revenues are due to Intel products not competing. How much of that is Pat's fault - hard to say. Intel was making poor products for a while, and partly due to a poor fab process - which is precisely what Pat was trying to fix (5 nodes in 4 years is unprecedented, and it looks like Intel will achieve it). Lunar Lake was built on TSMC, and is a fairly decent product. Overall, the gap between AMD and Intel has shrunk. Finally, perhaps the reason people really hated him: The layoffs. But as is often pointed out on HN, if you compare Intel's headcount with comparable companies (AMD, Nvidia), you can see Intel is really wasteful. The revenue per person is much, much lower. You can compare just the Intel Products head count (excluding the fabs). The layoffs had to happen. And there have to be more if Intel wants to be competitive. It can no longer command high margins. So yeah, plenty hate him. But plenty do like him. > but he clearly wasn’t executing well with Intel’s bread and butter business. Nor were the previous two CEOs. [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pat-gelsinger-lost-massive-140-213723546.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pat-gelsinger-lost-massive-14...
• adrian_b 2y ago
  I have followed Intel's products closely. While they suck enough that there have passed more than 5 years since I have bought for the last time Intel CPUs (but before that I had spent a lot of money on Intel CPUs and other products), I have not seen any problem that can be attributed directly to Pat Gelsinger. Unlike most companies, Intel publishes relatively detailed roadmaps with years in advance. Since Pat Gelsinger has become CEO, all those roadmaps have been accomplished in time, even if the products have not been as good as they could have been, due to things like low clock frequencies for any new fabrication process at launch (but this is a problem that has plagued Intel for the entirety of the last 10 years) or high intercommunication latencies for the first Intel multi-tile CPUs, like Sapphire Rapids and Arrow Lake, which can be attributed to an unavoidable lack of experience with such designs (because the former Intel management has delayed for too many years the transition to such designs, with jokes about the "glued" CPUs of the competition). According to the roadmaps published years ago, the recent years have been intended as transitional years, with the first really competitive Intel products being launched only in the second half of 2025. Only then it would have been possible to judge correctly whether Pat Gelsinger had done a good job or a bad job as CEO. As outsiders, we do not have enough information about what Pat Gelsinger has done. The roadmaps have been reasonable, the main thing that could be criticized is that there have been too many intermediate steps before reaching desirable products. However, it is likely that Intel could not have sustained financially a more abrupt transition. Even with this slower transition that has included the launch of many intermediate products intended to avoid a collapse of the sales, the financial losses have been high enough that they have been used as an excuse to eject Pat Gelsinger. It seems that Pat Gelsinger did not have the power to do a real cleanup of the Intel managers, especially of those from the fabs. For years many of those managers must have lied continuously both to other Intel divisions and in the public presentations. There is no public information that any of those managers have suffered adequate consequences for their actions. Also, it does not seem that he has succeeded to improve the internal cooperation between various Intel divisions. Some internal competition is good, but withholding information and lack of cooperation is bad. At Intel, too many products appear to have been developed independently by different teams, instead of all teams sharing some common designs as a base for their products.