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The CEO is, literally, one of these MBA types and he has recursively applied this thinking throughout the whole organization.
"received a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University at Buffalo School of Management in 1983 and his MBA from Binghamton University in 1985." "January 31, 2019, Swan transitioned from his role as CFO and interim CEO" They got what they paid for, I guess...
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I think they have lost a lot of their best employees because their pay is not that great. They aimed for paying at the 50th percentile in wages and the top companies come in and can offer double or more their current pay. Doesn't help they switched from large cubes with five-foot high cubicle walls which did a good job on minimizing noise and visual distractions to having cubicle walls with a height of about 3-4 feet…
Pay at Intel is about half of FAANG, can confirm. They seem weirdly proud of this and then weirdly confused and disappointed when great people leave.
You could use the parking lots as a proxy for employee prosperity. The chip guys drove better cars than the students, but the government and other corporate people had better cars on average. The chip bigshots made bank though. The chip people would also have crunch periods where they worked crazy hours.
The workers making bank were the tradesmen building the facilities that housed tools.
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Yes on both counts. I was contacted a couple years back about a machine learning contracting gig. When I asked what the hourly rate was the recruiter said $45/hour. I laughed and said that the going rate for that kind of skill set is like $120+/hour. That has not been an isolated incident.
>> $120+/hour Even this would be a substantial discount for most qualified people.
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"received a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University at Buffalo School of Management in 1983 and his MBA from Binghamton University in 1985." "January 31, 2019, Swan transitioned from his role as CFO and interim CEO" They got what they paid for, I guess...
To be fair, most of the 10 nm problems were already in place when BK was still the CEO.
Is there good coverage of how Intel became so uncompetitive? My instinct is to say this is just the natural result of the presence of MBAs who are trained to focus _exclusively_ on this quarter's results so ignore R&D investment and also shit on employees by doing gimmicks like hotdesking to pinch pennies. I'm willing to bet my intuition is wrong, especially given my extremely deep bias against MBAs and 'this quarter…
I think we've all taken the ability to reliably introduce process node improvements for granted to some extent. Intel has clearly been caught out by its inability to get 10nm - which I understand was overambitious - to work and pretty much everything else follows on from there. At the same time AMD has been fortunate that TSMC has been able to continue with its node shrinks - supported by demand from and cash generat…
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The CEO is, literally, one of these MBA types and he has recursively applied this thinking throughout the whole organization.
Most CEO are MBAs.
A few examples:
* Lisa Su (CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)): BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and is a fellow of IEEE
* Jensen Huang (CEO and founder of NVIDIA): BS in electrical engineering from Oregon State University, master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University
* C.C. Wei (CEO of TSMC): Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Yale University
* Simon Segars (CEO ARM): Bachelor of Engineering degree in electronic engineering at U of Sussex, Master of Science degree from the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester
* Sundar Pichai (Alphabet/Google CEO): Has an MBA, but also has an M.S. from Stanford University in materials science and engineering
* Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO): BS in Engineering, M.S. degree for designing and implementing a network, and PhD degree in EECS, with a dissertation about the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems
* Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO): Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BSE) in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton
* Mark Zuckerburg (Facebook CEO): In Harvard studied Psychology and Computer Science (did not earn a degree, but did study it for a few years and implemented the first version of Facebook).
* Tim Cook (Apple CEO): MBA from Duke University and a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering from Auburn University.
* Satya Narayana Nadella (Microsoft CEO): Bachelor's in electrical engineering from the Manipal Institute of Technology in Karnataka; M.S. in computer science at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business
* Reed Hastings (Netflix CEO): Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics (Bowdoin College), MS Computer Science (Stanford University)
I'm sure there are more examples, but I think that amply demonstrates my point.
The only other example I found of a no-tech CEO leading a tech company was Safra Catz (Oracle CEO), who has a bachelor of arts and a J.D. (Law School). My search wasn't exhaustive, but it was illuminating.
Now let's compare this to Bob Swan (Intel CEO), who received a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University at Buffalo School of Management in 1983 and his MBA from Binghamton University in 1985. No tech at all. Maybe Mr. Swan can do well anyway, but his lack of technical education is extremely unusual when compared to most other tech companies.
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A desktop CPU with a single-core performance equal to half a normal 8-core chip This isn't possible. The cores are already as fast as they can be, so moving from 10 big to 1 big would only reduce performance.
The bigger problem is you need operating system support. Linux/android has it. iOS has it. If iOS has it there’s a very good chance that macOS has it (we’ll probably find out on Tuesday). What does Windows support heterogeneous cores at all? I don’t think it does. And until that happens, would you be able to sell a chip to the public?
The US needs to do whatever it takes to get TSMC to build not only top-tier fabs but centers of excellence here. As it stands TSMC on Taiwan, which is threatened by China, has damn near a monopoly on competitive fabrication. A single hit on Taiwan could terminally stall the entire global supply chain for top-tier chips.
TSMC is now the only reason Taiwan can count on the US coming to its defense when China invades. You can't put a price tag on that.
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Why would Taiwan let TSMC move its operations away and thus weaken Taiwans U.S. Defense Guarantees?
Who would've thought that high-end chip manufacturing could be a (n enormous) bargaining chip.
Silicon backdoors are the new nukes.
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> capitalize R&D That's the problem with "MBA thinking". You can't put a dollar value on R&D. You just can't. Anything you do will be a gross approximation, and because the number is so fuzzy, you'll be encouraged (even subconsciously) to fudge it around to make other things look better, which will undoubtedly lead you to undervalue R&D to the point where it negatively impacts your business, but you have no idea why,…
What? Sure I can. It’s on the income statement. Then I can show that some firms see more of a return on that R&D spending than others, and that impacts how valuable they are. It’s the same as how some firms get more return out of spending the same amount on factories as others. They are better factories.
It's on the income statement five years from now, not the one you have when you're making the decision today. The R&D paid for five years ago will commonly have been under different market conditions.
> Then I can show that some firms see more of a return on that R&D spending than others, and that impacts how valuable they are.
The question is, how do you cause your company to be the one getting more of a return?