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Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO?

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Re: Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO?

#61

Post by ghaff »

gwbas1c wrote: post #18

I worked at Intel 2005-2007. I read the article hoping to see an independent description of the culture I observed. I hoped to see someone use words to explain something that I can't explain. The thing about Intel's culture that I observed was that it wasn't toxic at all. The worst thing that I could say about it was that it was boring, which was why I left so quickly. If anything was "toxic," it could be that some m…

I never worked for Intel but they were clients for a number of years and I wrote an in-depth strategic analysis of them at one point.

"Toxic" seems a poor choice of phrase based on everything I've seen. Boring--which is to say very heavily into process in all things--is perhaps apropos.

Their biggest issue was projecting x86 into everything. Either by assuming they had the ability to push ecosystems into existence by dint of being Intel (see WiMax) or by inventing essentially non-reasons why x86 would succeed in areas like mobile (Flash will run better if it's the same architecture as desktop).

Re: Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO?

#62

Post by threatofrain »

mirceal wrote: post #31
gwbas1c wrote: post #18

I worked at Intel 2005-2007. I read the article hoping to see an independent description of the culture I observed. I hoped to see someone use words to explain something that I can't explain. The thing about Intel's culture that I observed was that it wasn't toxic at all. The worst thing that I could say about it was that it was boring, which was why I left so quickly. If anything was "toxic," it could be that some m…

At a big corporation, like Intel, we cannot really talk about just one culture. I would say that your experience can vary quite a lot based on the team you’re in and to a certain degree the org you’re in. Various people assign the ‘toxic’ label to various things. What may be ‘meh’ for one person could be ‘toxic’ to another. Also: Mandatory HR is not your friend reminder. HR is there and it’s trained to protect the co…

> Various people assign the ‘toxic’ label to various things. What may be ‘meh’ for one person could be ‘toxic’ to another.

So in your view, does toxic culture have shared meaning or not?

Re: Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO?

#63

Post by repolfx »

wiremine wrote: post #2

I've been reading "Measure What Matters" by John Doerr, which outlines Objectives and Key Results, a concept heavily influenced (invented?) by Andy Grove. Would be interesting to hear from someone who knows if Intel still uses OKRs, and if their long-term usage contributed to the current "toxic culture". I really like OKRs as a concept, just wondering what long-term usage looks like, and what the downsides are. Or ma…

OKRs came to Google via Doerr, I think.

It's a bit of an odd system and I wouldn't ascribe too much weight to it. It was never taken very seriously and there was a lot of gaming going on.

That said, it boils down to just writing down your goals and coming up with metrics to decide how close you got. That's not exactly revolutionary but not a bad idea either and most companies don't systematise it to the level that the OKR system does.

Re: Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO?

#65

Post by PeCaN »

novaRom wrote: post #56

Intel PR was always too much addicted to Moore's Law. The Moore's Law is almost dead and so is Intel (Most semiconductor industry forecasters, including Gordon Moore, expect Moore's law will end by around 2025) Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Near-term_limits

I mean, in the strict formulation of "transistor counts doubling every 2 years" it's been dead since like 2015 if not earlier.

That said, the "death of Moore's law" is kind of this memetic doomsday device that doesn't really mean anything. We haven't had significantly faster single-threaded performance for years and we're developing ways to cope with that.

Intel's real problem is that they keep missing the boat on new markets for chips. ARM got smartphones. Nvidia got machine learning. (Xeon Phi is cool. Maybe someone will notice. Maybe they'll fix the instruction decoder so it can actually operate at full speed. Who knows.) Intel killed off Itanium and then we discovered that every modern CPU design except Itanium is horrifically vulnerable. IBM is rapidly encroaching on the server market with innovations like CAPI/BlueLink.

If Intel is "dead", it's not because of the death of Moore's Law, it's because they let everyone else eat their lunch.

Re: Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO?

#66

Post by [deleted] »

duxup wrote: post #55
Aloha wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HR can be your friend, when the interest of the company, and your interest happen to align, which in my experience is more often than not. But its important to recognize, that HR is only to your benefit, when interests align, the OP is right, that HR is not there to protect you, but to protect the company, sometimes protecting you however, is protecting the company as well.

>HR can be your friend, when the interest of the company, and your interest happen to align, which in my experience is more often than not. I think that very much depends on how HR decides to view things. Someone complains about another coworker's behavior. "Oh man we better protect the company by addressing that person's behavior." "Oh man we better protect the company by addressing the person who complained." Just…

[deleted]

Re: Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO?

#67

Post by ericnyamu »

gwbas1c wrote: post #18

I worked at Intel 2005-2007. I read the article hoping to see an independent description of the culture I observed. I hoped to see someone use words to explain something that I can't explain. The thing about Intel's culture that I observed was that it wasn't toxic at all. The worst thing that I could say about it was that it was boring, which was why I left so quickly. If anything was "toxic," it could be that some m…

Teasing the public about upcoming cpus isnot boring ,

Re: Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO?

#68

Post by ShabbosGoy »

lmm wrote: post #40
danmg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For this author it does mean this. Feel free to use this phrase however you want though.

Communication is a two-way street. A word becomes meaningful when the recipient is able to understand the author through it; if there is no such consensus, then the word can't be said to mean anything.

A word is simply a shared reference to a concept. The consensus is around whether or not that reference is valid anymore.

Here’s a concrete example: “citizen” meant something completely different 100 years ago. At that time it meant “member of the set of landowners”, which resolved to “white male landowner”. Now the concept of citizen is much different and a lot more contentious.

Re: Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO?

#69

Post by samfisher83 »

shimon wrote: post #57
samfisher83 wrote: post #53

The article is mentioning they missed the mobile revolution. How many mobile chip manufacturers are making that much money on mobile chips. If you look at QCOM's earnings a majority of it is licensing its patents. QCOM chip business net income is 15%. INTC net is almost 30%. In its data center business its 50%.

This is exactly the logic that led Intel down this path. They thought they were avoiding a field with low margins and could deepen their manufacturing advantage by remaining focused on the high-margin data center business. Meanwhile, the growth in mobile/GPU/SOC chips was so massive that it enabled Intel's competitors to actually catch up on manufacturing. Those competitors are going to eventually compete in the high…

Which of intel's competitors that make mobile chips are doing as well as intel? Please give me an example. I gave you numbers for QCT which makes mobile chips.

TMSC and Samsung are going to spend money on R+D on chips irrespective of what intel does. Intel has a moat in the x86 market it has none in the ARM world. Read porters 5 forces and you will see why going into the mobile world made no sense for them.

In my opinion Intel throwing money at lower margin business would not make sense to me. I guess we will find out what happens in the future.

Re: Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO?

#70

Post by MrLeap »

kanox wrote: post #5

WTF does "toxic culture" even mean, other than clickbait? Some people seems to use this as meaning "anti-social" or "excessively aggressive" but the word only appears in the article as "toxic fixation on margins" where it's equivalent to "harmful". The gist of the article seems to be that Intel lost in the mobile space because it refused to chase opportunities with lower margins. But decisions regarding such deals ar…

I'd describe it more as a palpable malaise. Teams feel like they're on islands 1000 miles apart from one another. You can feel it in the air the moment you enter any organization like this (if you know what the other side feels like).

A massive organization that has gone stagnant tends to exhibit the same mechanics. You're on a team solving a problem for a stakeholder. You might not know who the stake holder is or where they are. You might meet your real stakeholder once every month or never. If your company is process minded they'll create proxy stakeholders to create the illusion of task identity.

Proxy stakeholders are the worst. Since the gizmo you're working on isn't for them, any enthusiasm for your work is feigned. They're your only line to the person(s) that actually care(s). The human connection between you, your labor and its consumer is severed, isolating you further. This puts the employee on a slalom to resentment and alienation. The better your proxy is, the shallower the grade, but you'll end up there eventually.

Despite the fact I've seen quite a few successful techniques to obviate this eventuality, 99% of companies don't have a symbol in their minds for the trajectory and it happens anyways. The flat org chart thing is an interesting cudgel to solve the problem, I'm convinced it's not the best solution.

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