[elihu]

I work at Intel. Maybe my experiences are not representative, but everyone I've worked with is competent at what they do, and most people are helpful and friendly. But the trouble is that isn't enough. The really effective programmers aren't just good at writing code, they're also good at designing elegant interfaces, and at understanding customer problems, and strategic thinking, and so on. Competent programmers aren't useless if they don't have those skills, but you need some people that do if you want to make great products rather than just check off boxes in feature lists.

Intel doesn't have as many of those great programmers as I would like, but I think their bigger problems are organization rather than individual. There just isn't enough high-level coordination and sharing of information. Every group just kind of does their own thing, and if you want to know how something works you have to know who to ask. Too much tribal knowledge (which often has a short expiration date) and too little writing stuff down in one place where it's easy to find.

It's funny you mention git, because I joined Intel from a startup that used SVN and that was the one bright spot about Intel's technical culture that they used git pretty extensively. I don't think I've ever used a non-git source repo at Intel. I assume that there was some major internal struggle to get to that point, but it was before my time.