Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you break the laws of physics and help us get Moore's Law back on track?
Physics is raping our company. We need to make a better deal with physics.
Please don't do this here.
Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO?
91–100 of 111 posts
Re: Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 opi…
The problem is we are forecasting the future. Today Intel makes better product that their mobile competitors. However those competitors are making their product better and better all the time. Already companies are starting to look at those cheaper mobile CPUs and ask if they are good enough, some are answering yes, and there are signs that more will in the future.
For a long time intel could hold all this off - sure competitors were cheaper, but intel was enough faster that they were worth it just because you could get more done with them (time is money). However intel has been facing issues with the laws of physics that limit their ability to get better. As their competition catches up intel has nowhere to go.
Re: Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO?
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you articulate your vision here?
Sure. Intel has an insane treasure trove of technology that they don't seem to know what to do with because they have confused profit with market domination (related ideas, but not equivalent, and one often leads to the other in both directions). Example: Intel obsesses over x86 in a very weird and unhealthy way. Intel has repeatedly developed new CPU architectures that did not suffer from the burden of the technical…
Sounds good to me. However I don't think you could pull it off - you could start but I think that you would be fired for non-performance before your efforts can actually make a difference.
Re: Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO?
#94WTF 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…
"Toxic" in this context just means negative or harmful. There are many ways in which something can be negative or harmful, not just one.
Anyone who uses toxic in this way is just going to look silly.
Re: Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 opi…
The problem is we are forecasting the future. Today Intel makes better product that their mobile competitors. However those competitors are making their product better and better all the time. Already companies are starting to look at those cheaper mobile CPUs and ask if they are good enough, some are answering yes, and there are signs that more will in the future. For a long time intel could hold all this off - sure…
If they did go make mobile chips what is their value proposition? How are they any different than any other chip maker. Qcom has its modem what does Intel have?
They have generated 50 billion in cash over the last 5 years. Let the shareholders pick who they want to invest in.
Re: Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO?
#96The term 'toxic culture' is mostly used to describe widespread harassment and bullying. 'Ossified' or 'stagnant' are more apt terms for a company that can't seem to seize new opportunities. The thing about margins is that it's a lot more fun to work in a division with high margins. Low margin businesses are grim, because every cost matters. When you can charge $5000 for the latest Xeon, you can pay high salaries and…
> The term 'toxic culture' is mostly used to describe widespread harassment and bullying.
I guess it's a continuous spectrum. What you describe is the worst possible end. Maybe next to it you have people which just don't care about people and take advantage of them by all means. Well and then there are places were people get burned out, managers loose their shit and yell at employees etc.
Seen it all, in fact it's like a domino effect. People involve in this, then they also involve in similar stupid activities.
Re: Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO?
#97I worked at Intel for several years. I really enjoyed myself most of the time and got to work on interesting things.
Because I was not serious about staying at Intel for a long time, I took a lot of risks that made my experience more fun. Most people probably wouldn’t do so.
There was significant beaurecratic bloat and overhead, the whole organization felt stodgy and a lot of the people simply weren’t doing their jobs. This caused me to feel like I constantly had to cross lines I didn’t want to cross in order to execute at a decent pace. I come from a startup background and couldn’t tolerate the endless delays and lack of responsiveness I saw there.
From my part of the company I mostly had a good time but I did see that I would not have a good time at many other parts of the organization. There are a lot of dead product lines with no future that need to get cut. No two ways about it. Cutting those products won’t be fun.
Ossified is a good word for many parts of the company.
I feel like the cultural harm caused by some of the layoffs left many people disenchanted. I heard one ex Intel employee say something like: “I got laid off because I am just another old white man.” That sentiment really is corrosive, I heard of that several times.
Unfortunately, I think the successor to BK is going to be saddled with some ugly clean up work. Or they could be cowards and continue to turn the same crank for wall street. BK cleaned some of the mess (and created several new ones), there are many more to clean.
It’s easy to be too pessimistic.
Intel has unbelievable engineering skills under the hood. They are incredibly dangerous if they are able to shake this off and re-energize.
I hope they find a truly progressive leader and don’t continue their descent into mediocrity.
Re: Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO?
#98The term 'toxic culture' is mostly used to describe widespread harassment and bullying. 'Ossified' or 'stagnant' are more apt terms for a company that can't seem to seize new opportunities. The thing about margins is that it's a lot more fun to work in a division with high margins. Low margin businesses are grim, because every cost matters. When you can charge $5000 for the latest Xeon, you can pay high salaries and…
I work for Intel. I agree that "toxic culture" is a term I would reserve for work environments where harassment is tolerated, which doesn't describe my experience.
There does seem to be a lot of dissatisfaction with leadership, though, and it's related to those high margins. In theory one would expect that those high margins would trickle down to compensation, but it seems to all be going to dividends, stock buybacks, and acquisitions. When it comes to employees, "we haven't budgeted for that".
Re: Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Slightly. Ultimately, the high-level culture is set by the execs. > Various people assign the ‘toxic’ label to various things. What may be ‘meh’ for one person could be ‘toxic’ to another. No, definitions are impo…
Re: definitions are important Yes and no. Some of the biggest conflicts I’ve seen started because of misunderstanding ‘basic words’. So definitions matter in the sense that they help clarify intent. But they also can make things harder if you insisting on a certain definition comes across as condescending.
Possibly true but irrelevant here, since the OP does not come across as condescending, and their distinction between Intel’s culture and a toxic culture is making it easier to understand Intel.
Re: Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Around" is relative. The last thing IBM innovated was Watson and they're downsizing that division because they can't figure out how to market it. IBM is mostly just a body shop for cheap overseas code monkeys now, isn't it?
Bit of an ignorant statement even if it is IBM. What’s wrong with developers “overseas” (a completely relative term but forgivable in the YC context) why call them monkeys (not an sjw so not even going to go down that words rabbit hole). Having worked with many a yank their quality is just as variable and I’ve seen better output standard maintained by some European teams even if scale is limited.
> What’s wrong with developers “overseas”
Often it's the culture and education system. Many cultures are very top down and everyone just says yes to whatever the boss wants and then tries to make it happen. The educations systems are often very focused on rote memorization. These translate to extremely poor software (among other things).
> why call them monkeys
It's a long standing term for people that write code but do little else. There has never been any racial undertone to the term.