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New Intel CEO rehiring retired CPU architects

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Re: New Intel CEO rehiring retired CPU architects

#92

This is an encouraging move. My secondhand understanding was that Intel was losing top talent due to pressure to pay closer to median industry compensation. Top engineers recognized they were underpaid and left the company. I've been part of a similar downhill slide at a smaller company in the billion dollar revenue range. To be blunt, once the [mediocre] MBAs start realizing that the engineers are getting paid more…

It's weird for me to hear all these stories about MBAs. While I'm not an MBA myself, I was in investment banking and planned to get an MBA before I left finance and did something else instead. I regularly pay engineers more than I pay myself as a CEO (granted: I am not really interested in draining the company's coffers for my own benefit, since I have equity). It just seems obvious that, at the end of the day, so mu…

I can assure you you're an outlier (but delightfully so).

I worked once for a company where I was doing a product for the iPad. I literally, could not get the company to buy the newest iPad for us to test on. The only iPad we had for development had a bad sensor and would throw errors constantly.

One day, marketing brings me 12 new iPads because-- they want me to install a beta of the app on them, because they're going to Fiji for a company-paid vacation (with their families!).

Re: New Intel CEO rehiring retired CPU architects

#93
post #82
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a startup that was acquired by an unsexy behemoth. It was not covered in TechCrunch. We had a sales guy who easily cleared over $1MM in salary and bonuses, several times the CEO and founders, because he went above and beyond, closing $15MM of new business a year. When the MBA consultants and salespeople from the acquirer found out, they couldn’t believe he made that much — all while they personally manage…

I know how that goes I guess. Slowly "rules" and "procedures" from the behemoth come into play. Before he knows it, his successful methods are "against the rules", and doors slowly close. I love that dynamic /s

To play devil's advocate here: are any of those rules and procedures in place to prevent sales tactics that, while they might be successful, are also predatory?

Re: New Intel CEO rehiring retired CPU architects

#94
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been approached by headhunters for contract work at Intel. They want all kinds of machine learning knowledge & experience and the pay is.... $45/hr. I kid you not. I just sort of laugh and tell them that that's about 1/3 of market rate for that kind of thing.

Sometimes recruiters get things wrong, mix things up. That might have been for a different position that got redefined without commensurate pay adjustment. That said, 45 is really low for any position in an engineering company, unless it’s ancillary support services that get farmed out. Something like ‘Lab Admin’ type of thing.

This happened more than once over the last few years. If it was a mistake I could see it happening once. But not three times.

Re: New Intel CEO rehiring retired CPU architects

#95

If he's going to focus on maximizing threads instead of performance per thread, they'll come out on top. The race to make a single instruction thread move ever faster has obviously hit its limits as the main driver of overall compute performance. If they keep pushing the old model of ever more GHz, they'll fail.

That depends on if developers can be convinced to actually use multiple threads...

We already did for a long time. In my business, web applications, that is mostly server side and it came as either running the app in multiple processes (Rails, Django) or with a runtime that natively use all cores (BEAM / Elixir).

The front end is mostly single threaded (JavaScript) but browsers can use multiple threads to speed up the UI and we can also use web workers to do some real multithreading in JavaScript. Maybe some frontend framework uses them to speedup managing its DOM model. I hope I gave the idea, the terms are probably all wrong, I'm definitely more about the backend.

Re: New Intel CEO rehiring retired CPU architects

#96
post #78

In my estimation, Intel has four categories in which it is being outperformed by key competitors: 1. TSMC/Samsung - fabrication 2. AMD/Amazon-Graviton - Cloud Server 3. Apple-M1/AMD - Laptop 4. Nvidia/Amazon - Cloud ML/DL Accelerator Intel has made giant blunders in the past (e.g. Itanium [1], Atom [2], WiMAX [3]) but I'm not sure that any of these past challenges were equivalent to the current four-front war. I woul…

Your list is skewing toward Amazon, but point well taken. If you include Google and Microsoft, they're all chip-designers as well because they can simply license ARM's designs. Imagine if Netflix decided to hire chip designers. All that's left is fabrication and Intel is exiting that.

Re: New Intel CEO rehiring retired CPU architects

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading all comments grilling MBAs in HN is one of my guilty pleasures. I think I need to collect them all and put them in one place.

Unashamed MBA checking in here! MBAs are the classic punching bags for HN. It seems we’re willing to bend the “civility” rules a bit here in order to have a nice hearty MBA-bash. I’ve seen all sorts of awful generalizations posted here about MBAs that would get you flagkilled if made about other professions or degrees. Some of us actually have tech/coding backgrounds and aren’t the stereotypical pointy-headed-bosses,…

If it helps, all those MBA-bashing cool tech startups busy giving away a percentage of their revenue to Amazon, don't realise that AWS was the brain-child of a Harvard MBA.

Re: New Intel CEO rehiring retired CPU architects

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading all comments grilling MBAs in HN is one of my guilty pleasures. I think I need to collect them all and put them in one place.

:) Why is it that MBA types always end up on top ? My pet theory is that they just have more time to spent scheming, and influencing others. While engineers are busy trying to get shit done.

> While engineers are busy trying to get shit done.

and/or too busy arguing with product/engineering managers (for better or worse)

Re: New Intel CEO rehiring retired CPU architects

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading all comments grilling MBAs in HN is one of my guilty pleasures. I think I need to collect them all and put them in one place.

Unashamed MBA checking in here! MBAs are the classic punching bags for HN. It seems we’re willing to bend the “civility” rules a bit here in order to have a nice hearty MBA-bash. I’ve seen all sorts of awful generalizations posted here about MBAs that would get you flagkilled if made about other professions or degrees. Some of us actually have tech/coding backgrounds and aren’t the stereotypical pointy-headed-bosses,…

> we aren’t all bad!

99% of MBAs give the rest a bad name.

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