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Comment by AMDAnon | Hacker News Reader

AMD is doing 5 day RTO for almost everyone with 3 months of notice in an obvious attempt to get people to quit before vesting their 5x stock grants.

The rule includes >90% of "remote" workers who have discovered they were classified as hybrid (a classification now eliminated) and their manager didn't make it official. Now, remote approvals are SVP level.

The issue is, AMD still pays significantly less than any company with an RTO mandate, even with the stock appreciation. And the stock has gone down 25% in the past few weeks so it's even less competitive. The typical engineer was not given an equity-weighted package, even L9 only 30% of your TC is in stock.

It's a recruiting bonanza right now and everyone's getting calls offering 50% pay bumps from 5-day office semi corps like Broadcom or Qualcomm. The better people are getting offers at Google or Apple for 3-day RTO for even greater TC bumps.

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I'm not surprised.

The board should've sacked the entire leadership team of Intel and AMD years and years ago.

The fact that you can sit through both a mining boom and now a generational AI boom and have little to show for it and still keep your job is a Yahoo!-level fumble.

They can't find new leaders! Sharon Zhou, VP who handles all our engagements with the frontier labs quit today to be an MTS at Anthropic. https://lnkd.in/p/g53S3-fG

Sharon was the AI Chief of Staff brought in through an acquihire, managed all the high-visibility external/internal AI engagements, reported directly into Lisa Su, and was being groomed to be Lisa's successor. Even with all that, she couldn't make it 2 years at AMD.

I don't see any way out of this hole. We can't fire our execs and promote internally because our internal directors/VPs are mostly non-technical. We've been trying to pull leadership in with acquihires but we've been losing them too. Best win was replacing Alan Lee w/ Anush Elangovan which finally got ROCm working but there's a massive re-org coming he might not survive.

Sharon was acqui-hired after Lamini failed to find product market fit, and she had to fire her co-founder Greg. Greg went to Tensorwave (another AMD play) and eventually quit there as well.

The way I look at it, AMD and others dumped $25m into a very early AI play that never was going to be successful. I don't fault them for trying.

There was no way she could even come close to successor of Lisa though. The grooming thing was a media play at best. Dr. Fei-Fei Li would be a heck of a lot more appropriate than Sharon.

Anush is excellent and turned around the software story. If he goes, the party is over.

How sad.

I remember buying an AMD K6-2 back in the day as it was cheaper and better. I've dropped in and out of the AMD sphere depending on who was winning at the given moment.

Now they're both losing.

> our internal directors/VPs are mostly non-technical

why not start with trying to fix that?

well, that explains everything.

unfortunately most us industry fell victim to this mba-ization of companies.

100% Lisa Su is a control freak and thought Zhou was a threat. Cult of personality CEOs do not generally end well for the company

Jobs being the exception that proves the rule

Jobs failed hard and was outed in the first place. And he didn't 'come back' he was quite literally bought in with NeXTSTEP. Don't forget $150M from Microsoft and the Office for Mac deal.

NeXT software on lower end Apple hardware was a winning combination.

And the software ecosystem was already in place (even though everything had to be rewritten).

He backed it up with actual product-building merit and enough (but not a lot of) reality-testing. His products were successful largely because of him. Too many copycats forget about the merit part of the equation.

Not all products, NeXT was a major failure, with a few books telling the story how it all went down, only due to Apple's acquisition there was a moment that with Apple's remaining cash, and what was left of OpenSTEP, they managed to survive both companies.

Had Apple gone with Be instead, most likely all three companies would have gone bankrupt before 2000, and Pixar would be Jobs last successful company instead.

I am no Steve Jobs fan but NeXT was amazing and much of the tech is still commercially important today. There is no way you can call it a technical failure.

Where NeXT went wrong is in being astronomically expensive, which drove its addressable market to nothing. This is the exact same mistake Jobs made with the Lisa. The significantly inferior Apple II platform was far more successful.

I can apply as a ceo if you accept master students. Having studied drama, I can definitely say I act better than pat gelsinger

Sure, but do you have any missionary / evangelism experience?

Unfortunately no, but I can pray really hard maybe

You might be better qualified as a shareholder then

"Even with all that, she couldn't make it 2 years at AMD." imagine how toxic and rotten the company must be from the inside

Ryzen series chips might not have been released if AMD's entire leadership team was sacked many years ago.

The heavy investments into HMB between SK Hynix & AMD might also not have happened. They went down this road before HMB demand popped off and it was a risky bet.

Rory Read doesn't get enough credit for saving AMD from bankrupty.

What are we talking about in this thread. This post is literally about AMD revenue going wild during the AI boom.

Ok, I'm glad I'm not the crazy one. I wondered for a second lol

> This post is literally about AMD revenue going wild during the AI boom.

You mean going mild.

The $17bn that AMD is projecting to make mid-2026 is what NVIDIA was already making mid-2023.

Both companies were somewhat similar in revenue towards the end of 2022 (just before/around the ChatGPT launch), so it's not as if NVIDIA was already that far ahead in financial terms. But right around ChatGPT, NVIDIA went all-in on AI, for example by securing massive leading-edge capacity at TSMC, even outbidding Apple.

That's what the GP meant by "sitting out a generational AI boom".

And when the boom goes bust guess who will still be around chugging along?

Intel have gone through 3 leadership teams in 10ish years

They brought back some questionable former managers like the guy responsible for 14nm, Sanjay Natarajan, which was the first process to get stuck with a protracted period of low yields.

Gosh, you're right. I thought it was just one.

"The fact that you can sit through both a mining boom and now a generational AI boom..."

It's not necessary for every company to 'revenue maxx' by jumping on every trend.

AMD made $3.5 billion in profit last year, money left over after all salaries were paid and all expenses were settled. It might be galling to this generation of avarists, but maybe that's enough?

'Doing a decent job' seems to have become seen as archaic these days, which explains much of how the stock market works. The line doesn't _have_ to keep going up faster and faster.

AMD is also a hardware company with significantly more overhead than a software house that is swimming in margin.

Even Yahoo has an AI and better search results than they did in the past…

I think Intel figured out way to be even worse…

Intel stock is down 49% in just the last month alone.

A lot of said gains have been erased.

Interesting data point as a stock holder, thanks.

> The issue is, AMD still pays significantly less than any company with an RTO mandate

I'm sure they pay more than Intel ;-)

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