Comment by interesting_pt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by interesting_pt | Hacker News Reader

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I worked at Intel in a very closely related area.

I quit after getting vaccinated for COVID, only stayed because of the pandemic.

The biggest problem was that Intel simply couldn't execute. They couldn't design and manufacture hardware in a timely manner without too many bugs. I think this was due to poor management practices. My direct manager was amazing, but my skiplevel was always dealing with fires. It felt like instead of the effort being orchestrated that someone approached a crowd of engineers and used a bullhorn to tell them the big goal and that was it. The left hand had no idea what the right hand was doing.

I often called Intel an 'ant hill', because the engineers would swarm a project just like ants do a meal. Some would get there and pull the project forward, some would get on top and uselessly pull upward, and more than I'd like would get behind the project and pull it backwards. Just a mindless swarm of effort, which generally inefficiently kinda did the right thing sometimes.

The inability to execute started to effect my work. When I got a ticket to complete something, I just wouldn't. There was a very good chance that I'd have an extra few weeks (due to slippage) or the task would never need to get done, because the hardware would never appear. Planning was impossible.

Conversely, sometimes hardware CAME OUT OF NOWHERE, not simple stuff, but stuff like laptops made by partners. Just randomly my manager would ask me to support a product we were told directly wouldn't exist, but now did. I needed to help our partner with support right now. Our partners were starting to hate us and it was palpable in meetings.

I'm so glad I quit, I was being worked to the bone on a project which will probably fail and be a massive liability. Even if the economy crashes, and I can't get a job for years, and end up broke, it'll still have been worth it. I also only made 110K/yr base.

I’ve been reading about Pat Gelsinger turning things around on execution, but many of the announced products for this year are already late (Sapphire Rapids, GPUs, even alder lake roll out was late).

Do you know if anything has changed at Intel? Is it reasonable to expect changes within a year and a half of starting on the job given the size of the company and the changes needed?

He came on as CEO a little over a year ago. A new CPU from inception to release might take 5 years on a good day. Design tools and methodologies take many years to change and improve. I imagine the manufacturing side of it has much longer lead times, if anything. And then perhaps slowest of all can be the institutional structure. Executives, managers, even technical leaders can remain entrenched in their positions for years, decades. And it may not be that they're not doing good work or are incompetent (on the contrary they may be extremely bright and productive) so it's not like you can just come in and fire them all, it's just that they may be stuck on ideas that used to be great. Big organizations turn more like an oil tanker than speed boat, in large part due to this institutional entrenchment.

Although keep in mind they have a lot of momentum that is going largely in the right way to begin with. They have among the best logic designers, circuit designers, EDA, silicon research and manufacturing process and technologies, and software division in the world. Despite Intel having had a > 5 year train wreck in their 10nm manufacturing technology, they're able to release CPUs which are for many cases among the best if not the best in the market which goes to show how far ahead they were and how good their design capability still is.

So I think the problem is both bigger and smaller than people think (i.e., they've not completely crashed and burned, but it won't be a matter of just wiping the slate clean and ordering the engineers to deliver on the next product).

I'll somewhat echo the other response: I believe in Pat. He clearly communicates during his press releases, obviously is very technical and has a good understanding of the industry. He also seems to work well with others. I think it's possible he can turn that ship around (and may already be doing so), but it was just too late for me.

I haven't sold the $INTC I got as comp, and that probably speaks louder than whatever I say here.

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