AMDAnon

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.

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.

> considering how well it appears AMD is executing from the outside.

The party line is that the stock price is up because the market expects us to perform well in the future, and we won't get a bonus until we actually perform well.

> I definitely got yelled at over trivial performance regressions which looked like noise so people were measuring performance.

It depends on team, we have some testing, and progress is being made. But it's not "working" or comprehensive as we get complaints from our big customers. We should be replicating their setup internally and not have them catch problems.

> Not top of market by any stretch but firmly in the category of engineers don't care what the steak costs.

We need to pay top of market to steal people from our competitors. We can't pay less than Nvidia and outcompete them. Paying less is a signal we're aiming for second and to copy the market leader.

> constantly scrapping things and starting over and thus the ecosystem never matured

AMD hires talented people at below-market and doesn't promote them or give raises. This causes employees to aim at resume-driven development by reinventing the wheel so they can get a job somewhere else.

It's a similar problem to Google, except at Google it's because promotions are explicitly for people that ship new products.

The MBAs have always been in charge to an extent.

But the real issue is we don't want to invest in beating Nvidia on quality. Otherwise we wouldn't be doing stock buybacks and instead use the money on poaching engineers.

The mindset is that we maintain a comfortable second place by creating a shittier but cheaper product. That is how AMD has operated since 1959 as a second source to Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. It's going to remain the strategy of the company indefinitely with Nvidia. Attempting to become better would cost too much.

> Sounds like the AMD board needs to get their heads out of their asses and shake up leadership.

Knocking out Lisa Su would be stupid, since she has the loyalty of the whole company and is generally competent.

What they should do is bump TC by 60-70% and simultaneously lay off 50% of the engineers. Or phase in the same over a longer period of time. The company is full of people that do nothing because we've paid under market for so long. That's fine when competing against Intel, it's not acceptable when competing against Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, Google, and Nvidia.

Lisa Su is the only CEO in the S&P500 who can get away with mass layoffs and still have the loyalty of the rest of the employees.

AMD pays the bare minimum in software to get a product out the door. The company does not even have working performance testing and regressions routinely get shipped to customers. Benchmarks the executives see are ad hoc and not meaningful.

HipKittens is an improvement but AMD does not have the ability to understand or track kernel performance so it'll be ignored.

This isn't fixable overnight. Company-wide DevOps and infrastructure is outsourced to TCS in India who have no idea what they're doing. Teams with good leadership maintain their own shadow IT teams. ROCm didn't have such a team until hyperscalers lost their shit over our visibly poor development practices.

Even if AMD did extend an offer to hire all the people in the article, it would be below-market since the company benchmarks against Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Walmart, instead of Google, Nvidia, or Meta.

We haven't had a fully funded bonus in the past 4+ years.