[skynetv2]

I worked at Intel for several years. The problems are self made, through years of control in the hands of number crunchers, complacency, and arrogance. I sat through leadership meetings where the only strategy discussed was - we're Intel, they would be fools to not listen to us. There is talent but it is working with its hands shackled to its feet and keys thrown away. There is zero morale. During the years i was there, my memories are marked with bigwigs threatening people to leave with the offered severance lest they are forced to leave empty handed, while the bigwigs cashed out in tens of millions. Egos stoked at the expense of the company's future, short term metrics tied to substantial bonuses, that clearly paid a few top execs 10s of millions optimizing for those and leaving the ruins for others to clean up

[jacquesm]

There is something self-defeating about large tech companies. I wonder if this is fixable or if it is something that we simply have to accept. I don't know of a single large tech company that managed to keep their engineering spirit alive over the longer term, eventually all of them (even HP!) lose their way and end up being run in short-term, short-sighted mode which more or less kills them, even though they can stick around for many years afterwards on momentum alone.

[windexh8er]

I've been around a number of silicon valley organizations now, from large (30k+) to small (employee # 58). I've seen some good and a lot of bad over the years now - but it all seems to stem from one place: the sales organization. Now I'm not saying all sales organizations are bad, but in fact they do seem to follow the many of the stereotypes they've been cast into over the years.

Watching some of Intel's recent events seem to be driven by sales and marketing in a very tone-deaf manner. It's almost always been the case, in my experience, that sales leaders don't see competition. They continually talk about how what they represent is the best and you can't have a lucid conversation with most of them because they don't fundamentally understand what may make the competition better, or even fundamentals of their own product. It's black and white and many seem to just go all in on FUD to a ridiculous level, when forced.

When executives are far more focused on what wall street thinks than what their own customers want you know that the cancer runs deep. I continuously hear things like "our customers want a subscription model for our software because it's more flexible and is often cheaper!". Neither is, generally, true when it's being broadcast like that. It's a dark pattern (most notably in enterprise software / hardware) for a company to pull in long term revenue on a product that is, potentially, not evolving fast enough to warrant customers wanting to pay for an upgrade or new version. And a lot of SaaS just to "SaaSify" something, even though the customer could very well run it themselves, where they'd like, and be far better off.

It's just frustrating to have been in the industry as over 20 years now and to see even less inspiring, less charismatic and ignorant people continually failing up and driving companies down. I know C-levels that have lied, cheated and been fired for the former - yet they continue to land better positions, somehow? Some days it's beyond maddening to watch. But more often than not these folks are in some way, shape or form tied to the overarching sales machine.

[ethbr0]

Sales and consulting are two sides of the same coin.

Both bring in revenue, but neither creates product.

If you have leadership that allocates resources to boost revenue, without an understanding of why customers are paying, more and more resources and power accrue to sales and consulting departments. Eventually, this kills the company.

Above anything else, the lack of a distinct and political sales and/or consulting org is what makes startups startups. Most of the people fulfilling those roles are dual-hatted elsewhere, or at least sit close enough to people who are that they have a more holistic view.

[N1H1L]

A world without McKinsey will probably be a better world.

[jacquesm]

These grafted on SaaS models are a particular pain in the behind.

[nicoburns]

> There is something self-defeating about large tech companies.

If you remove "tech" from this sentence I think it's still true, and it points you towards the solution: bias the economy towards small companies (for example, via progressive corporation tax). There's a bit of nuance here: I think a lot of the problem is with public companies. So we could probably do a lot by reforming the public ownership system.

[GDC7]

It's not even companies. It's people! As they progress they become more risk averse and are terrified by the idea of losing their wealth.

That's why we have entire sectors of the economy focused on wealth preservation without volatility.

These people want a stable and steady climb upwards.

I think it's because there is an alarming lack of arrogance and self-confidence in the world. It's visible in every possible datapoint . People say those things are bad, but in reality they keep the system honest.

The best way to redistribute wealth is wealthy individuals overplaying their hand. It doesn't ever happen, there is something deeply wrong in Bill Gates being at the top of the Forbes rich list for 30 years.

His brain should have adapted to the new normal and compelled him to risk his whole fortune in the hope of making even more money, maybe becoming the first trillionarie. That's how wealth is redistributed; rich people becoming greedy and overplaying their hand.

It doesn't happen, rich people are happy being at the top and they are not ambitious enough to reach for the impossible milestones.

The only nut out there who does it is Musk but his wealth is not real yet, it's paper wealth.

We'll see how Bezos decides to go about it.

[nicoburns]

> His brain should have adapted to the new normal and compelled him to risk his whole fortune in the hope of making even more money

Why do you think this should happen? That doesn't sound very rational to me. If you have more than you could possibly ever need then why would you choose to risk that? This is one reason why we should never reward people with these ridiculous levels of wealth in the first place.

> The best way to redistribute wealth is wealthy individuals overplaying their hand.

This sounds like a very wasteful and unreliable way to redistribute wealth to me. Unreliable because as you say it often doesn't happen. Wasteful because if it does happen it involves wasting enormous amounts of resources on a failed project.

IMO the best way to redistribute wealth is to not allow people to become as ridiculously wealthy as they are in the first place.

[GDC7]

> If you have more than you could possibly ever need then why would you choose to risk that?

Because you don't simply do it for the stuff. You do it for the brain juices which are released when you win.

Bill Gates biggest wins happened in the late 80s and 90s.

His brain should compel him to do better than that to release those elusive juices once again.

The only way to do so is having even bigger wins than the ones in the 80s and 90s

> Failed project

The entrepreneur's failed project is the worker dream job where you get paid for doing nothing.

Kinda like the influencers hired by Bloomberg in his 2020 campaign. Nobody was checking if they were really doing the job and they just pocketed the money.

[nicoburns]

> Because you don't simply do it for the stuff. You do it for the brain juices which are released when you win.

Well sure, but those motivations exist regardless of any financial rewards. We are talking here about the additional effect of financial incentives. IMO the possibility of making say $1m or $10m is pretty motivating if you don't have much. But once you reach say $1B, financial incentives are unlikely to be as relevant to you. You're made for life, why should you do anything you don't want to do.

> the worker dream job where you get paid for doing nothing.

I think most workers would prefer to be paid to something useful/meaningful, unless they can literally go and do something completely different with no restrictions. But is rarely how billionaire's failed projects go. They usually involve a lot of people working very hard to no end.

[majormajor]

> Because you don't simply do it for the stuff. You do it for the brain juices which are released when you win.

You say this, but you point at evidence saying the opposite.

[inshadows]

> This is one reason why we should never reward people with these ridiculous levels of wealth in the first place.

Who are we and why do "we" do that?

[nicoburns]

"we" are society deciding on an economic system and taxation regime.

"we" currently reward people with this amount of wealth generally because of a majority belief in one or more of the following (none of which are true in my opinion):

  (1) They deserve this money, because either:
    (1a) it represents a proportional reward for work put in
    (1b) any money gained under a market system are deserved/earnt, and taxing those earnings is stealing

  (2) That rewarding people in this manner (without limits) is the only way to motivate people to work hard, and that this ultimately produces better outcomes than distributing our economic output more evenly

[WJW]

There are definitely benefits to having large companies as well, though. Economies of scale are a real thing for one, and especially in the semiconductor industry the price of modern production facilities (>20 bn per fab) is well outside the reach of any company you could still call "small".

[nicoburns]

There are, but even in these cases there are economic downsides: notably with semi-conductors, risk if any of these big companies fail. I think that if the benefit of scale is so great, then you should be able to prove it by withstanding the higher tax burden.

[TulliusCicero]

I think it's that successful momentum can paper over internal business failures for a while, which means you lose a sort of natural selection where the worse employees -- and especially the worse managers -- would screw up in an obvious way and get booted out. And without that pressure around, people don't have to perform.

Basically, a company that's in an extremely strong position from prior successes may lose internal feedback loops that kept the people and culture on track.

[kbenson]

Perhaps we need to be more aggressive with laws encouraging competition (or more accurately discouraging leaders of a market from getting too large a lead). It really does seem to be better for most involved (except for those that want to capitalize on enough success for short term greed that destroys momentum and talent pools).

What that actually means in a situation like this, where technology and production pipelines are years long and a misstep can set you back a decade or more (like it did for AMD, and like it's doing now for Intel), I don't know. I do know it sure seems like markets with at least three major players are more healthy than those with two, as we keep seeing again and again (iOS and Android being another recent example, if exhibiting a different problem).

[burnished]

The skills that make you successful at producing a product (the various types of engineering, product design, marketing, process analysis, manufacturing, the real work essentially) in the first place are not the same skills that make you successful in a corporate organization as an individual (politicking). As time moves on and a company becomes a money-printing machine because the 'real work' has already largely been performed the organization becomes host to parasites, or I guess you can just call them people that are better and better at extracting personal value even at the expense of group well being. I think its sort of inevitable due to finite human lifespans and non-transferable skillsets.

[apohn]

>There is something self-defeating about large tech companies.

It's all large companies. They think they are too big and entrenched to fail.

I've worked for 2 large non-tech companies where managers and leaders loved to say "We are X. We have the resources to do anything. If we apply ourselves, we are unstoppable." One of those companies tried to enter a new market and failed miserably because they kept trying to tell customers what they wanted instead of listening to their customers. The other company is a classic example of what people talk about when they make fun of "too big to fail" companies.

[malandrew]

> "We are X. We have the resources to do anything."

Management will say this and in the next breath say that we either don't have headcount to alleviate an understaffed team or we don't have budget to retain some amazing engineer that they want to see how long they can underpay before they leave. I've lost track of the number of times I've told management about how import it is to retain certain individuals and how they absolutely should make sure those people are happy with everything within management's control, and then they ignored those warnings and then the talent left. These losses happen slowly and then suddenly when enough of the remaining talent looks around and realize that most of the good engineers have abandoned ship.

[ethbr0]

In good companies I've worked for, there was optimistic realism. "We hear that we need X, but we can't afford that right now. Could we Y?"

Admitting you have a problem, first step, etc.

[xyzzy21]

It's mostly NOT fixable.

The problem comes from the sociological fact that groups differ from individuals in serious cognitive, sociological, moral and motivational ways.

And as a general rule, groups of people DO NOT SCALE WITH SIZE.

This is the fundamental reality that has been shown to limit the size of companies: the ability to reliably transmit critical operating information from one side to the other as needed fails with increasing size.

And computers do NOT improve things because it's actually a specific type of information required: knowledge applied with skill in a timely fashion. That is what fails with size.

Related to this is the inevitably "Chinese Whispers" losses that arise as the organization grows vertically and as decision making is centralized: the knowledge about the markets served inevitably goes 180 degrees out of phase where every direction and decision becomes exactly the wrong or worst possible. The system starts to tear itself apart destroying its competitive abilities and opening up large swaths of market for smaller competitors to take and occupy.

The real world has more information in it than what any planning or system can describe accurately enough to use for predictions. So without accurate feedback from the outside reality, the corporation will fail.

Big tech components can only be "fixed" by breaking themselves apart so they can regain the proper feedback loop accuracy, or by doing what HP USED TO DO: pushing down decision-making to the lowest possible level in a Federated form. This isn't perfect either but it's better than a Top-Down command-and-control system when it comes to performance and competitive fit.

Control-freak executives always screw both of these up because they can't handle letting go.

[krona]

Louis Gerstner (ex. IBM CEO who transformed the company in the 90's) called it 'success syndrome': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cHVgA2tgWI

[dralley]

Louis Gerstner laid a lot of the groundwork for IBM's undoing, himself.

[krona]

Some of the worst aspects of IBM's internal dysfunction survived Gerstner, even though he claimed to had fix them. It's hard to blame him personally, he's just one person. The important point is he perfectly identified the problems, which I find amazing considering most corporate CEO's don't have a clue about how their companies are actually operating.

disclaimer: ex-IBM.

[dralley]

I'm curious how you feel about this analysis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4b1D1vWRnc

[moedersmooiste]

My guess would be that it's the fate of all publicly listed companies. They tend to focus on short term shareholder value. A lot of family owned companies focus more on the long term.

[choikwa]

Apple?

[jacquesm]

Fair enough, but they had gone down quite far down that exact same road before Jobs came back and their current trajectory is a replay. It's a consumer gadgets company now, and one that hasn't really innovated in the last couple of years.

[simonh]

I'm sorry, the transition to their own silicon, and the tour de force that is the M1 doesn't count as innovation? What would count? We're literally discussing the failures of an iconic chip design firm, so it's particularly ironic that you would overlook this.

[jacquesm]

You mean like IBM is innovating when they use their own silicon? This is just vertical integration at its best, I'm not sure that M1 is a 'tour de force', to me it's just another CPU that was tailored for a specific niche.

The first ARM, that was a tour de force. The 6809 was too, and of course the 4004. But most other CPUs to me are run of the mill and the M1 is in that sense to me nothing special though of course it will give Apple a bit of an edge, but when all is said and done it's just another ARM based SoC.

At best it is an optimization, the most interesting part of the M1 is the dedicated neural net, and I'm not sure if anybody has already done something with that that the main CPU could not have done.

[jve]

Wow.

Intel is now chasing some design decisions within M1 with Intel Thread Director with different types of cores: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16881/a-deep-dive-into-intels...

How not M1 is not an Innovation? I'm not claiming M1 is the first CPU to do it, I don't know, but they may have executed it flawlessly. Great performance, great battery life and great silence. If you don't call it innovation, at least call it breakthrough.

[simonh]

IBM does a lot of research into basic chip technology and designs their own chips pushing forward with new architectures and features. Yes, of course they count. It boggles my mind that you think they wouldn't.

[siva7]

The M1 Laptop is currently in many factors miles ahead of its competition for the general consumer market, so calling it just tailored for a specific niche isn't really true.

[jasonlotito]

> and the tour de force that is the M1 doesn't count as innovation?

Not really. You can't buy an M1. It's a part of a bigger product. Is the M1 impressive alone? Or is the MacBook and everything else including the M1 impressive?

And it's not the first chip Apple has done. It's just the first one for a small selection of computers. The M1 a tour de force? No.

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

The trajectory doesn’t seem comparable. Apple is the biggest company in the world, makes the best products in nearly every category they’ve entered (with real improvements every generation), and is still growing at a fast pace. If this is bad, I want to hear what good looks like.

[ben_w]

> makes the best products in nearly every category they’ve entered (with real improvements every generation)

I like Apple at its best, but I wouldn’t say they’re the best in every (or even nearly every) category they’ve entered.

Yes they have iPhones (top range, even if they have competition from top range Android alternatives), iPads (peerless), Apple Watches (dominant), iPods dominated the MP3 market back when that was a thing anyone cared about…

But they also make really weird mice (Magic Mouse 2: charger on the bottom; many models: one button; Mighty Mouse: scroll nipple; iMac: unergonomic puck), the Apple TV and HomePod are nothing special (the latter is a pity, given I don’t trust their Voice Assistant competitors), and the device power cables have been infamously fragile for a long time.

[jacquesm]

They're doing fine, but I don't see the 'real improvements' over the last couple of generations. The M1 may be such a development, time will tell.

[bayindirh]

Apple is becoming like Bentley (or similar higher-end car manufacturer), where the improvement is not in the feature but in the overall package. In other words, the package you get is the feature.

Some improvements like fit & finish, tolerances, endurance, so on are not visible on paper. Others like battery life and weight are visible on paper. When these combine with the xOS (where x={mac, i, iPad, tv}) ecosystem, whole thing becomes visible or palpable, one may say.

It's not an ubiquitous thing to have in technology space, and only possible with tight integration Apple provides, and strives to keep.

[jonplackett]

You can’t expect breakthrough products like the smartphone every few years. That was decades in the making culturally and technologically.

Doesn’t mean something bad is happening, yet.

[gsinclair]

Isn’t the M1 a significant innovation?

[jacquesm]

Let's wait a couple of years before making that call. It could be, it could be a short-lived edge.

[simonh]

No edge in technology lasts forever, and once a new design is out it's much easier for others to copy. The fact is M1 was a nasty shock to their competition and was the biggest single advance in desktop/laptop CPU performance and power efficiency in a long time. If that doesn't count as innovative, I suspect there's some shifting around of goal posts happening.

[Wowfunhappy]

Not old enough yet, if you count from when they were “reborn” in the 2000s with OS X, the iPod, and the iPhone. And you should count from there, because before that they were nearly bankrupt.

[nurspouse]

Spent years at Intel. Definitely saw what is described here. Must also add that it is a big company with no clear culture, so many people will have been in teams for years and not have encountered what skynetv2 is describing.

My two cents: Intel is full of people who are career oriented and not product oriented. Their main goal is to get a promotion, and often find means to do so without contributing anything meaningful to Intel's products. It's also full of senior leaders who believe strongly in credentialism[1], complexity[2], and style over substance (i.e. how the message is delivered vs the content).[3]

From a SW standpoint, I have not yet been in a team where all teammembers can handle branches.[4] This is quite acceptable.

In one team I was in, I was leading the efforts for a product that required features A and B by the customer. I was a junior member of the team with no domain knowledge, but I was somewhat of an expert for that customer's domain. Everyone was on board with the technical work. In every meeting we had for about a year, there would always be some person in the team who'd suggest things that would nullify feature B. I would have to remind them that we agreed to do features A and B." The response would always be "Oh, we're also doing feature B?"

The person who would say this varied from meeting to meeting. But I was very frustrated that they couldn't remember this basic fact, and often ended up writing code that had to be undone. And then deal with their frustration as if I had never mentioned feature B to them. I can understand if this happens once or twice, but I have to remind them in every meeting.

But this was normal behavior. I was the odd person who thought this was unacceptable.

Oh, and coming to meetings unprepared is the norm. No one will read your emails briefing them about the meeting ahead of time.

[1] "Let's hire the PhD with no experience and not the internal MS employee who's already doing the job they are hiring the PhD for"

[2] "I don't care if your code sped up our workflow by 5x. It's just what, 200 lines of code? Anyone can do that."

[3] Presentations break most rules of effective communications/presentations. A senior person once told me "You explained things too well, and your slides are fairly sparse. Fill it up with jargon and lots of plots, and don't explain it as well as you did. If senior management understands your work too easily, they will believe the work you did was trivial. If they have trouble understanding it, they'll be in awe."

[4] One former manager: "Every person will get his/her own private branch. Do all your experimental work there. There will be no more branches." A senior member in another team said "Why complicate things by adding new branches for our various experiments? Let's just keep it in the main branch and enable the different algorithms via command line flags."

[caminante]

>I have to remind them in every meeting.[...]But this was normal behavior. I was the odd person who thought this was unacceptable.

For perspective, this is typical LargeCorp behavior, especially at a company like Intel which makes 77 billion/year in revenues (700k/employee) at a 25% net income margin! The unwritten rule is that managers aren't incentivized to police this behavior. It's liberating to recognize this and modify one's approach.

> Oh, and coming to meetings unprepared is the norm. No one will read your emails briefing them about the meeting ahead of time. >A senior person once told me "You explained things too well[...] If they have trouble understanding it, they'll be in awe."

Wise words. In cultures that do this, you have to adapt and work more on narrative/story-telling. In many ways, this is how things actually work no matter how efficient you think you're making the team. Instead, write the same emails, but only to gather your thoughts. Then, lead the discussion. In large teams, it feels like this approach reminds me to avoid doing someone else's work.

[nurspouse]

> The unwritten rule is that managers aren't incentivized to police this behavior.

Unless it is the manager who has to constantly do the reminding. Then there is swift policing :-)

Yes, this is actually normal "human" behavior. But this level of extreme was ridiculous, even within Intel. I quickly left the team once the project was over. Life is too short.

> Wise words. In cultures that do this, you have to adapt and work more on narrative/story-telling.

Narrative/story telling is good, but is orthogonal to the issue here. The usual flow is to use narrative/story telling to explain the why (motivation, etc). However, some senior management will expect you to also talk about the details. And this is where the advice came in: "Put the details, and make sure they don't understand them." My sin was that I was presenting the details in a manner where they could understand it (without losing the nuances and details - I was mere presenting the same material "well").

A more severe example will enlighten: I once solved a challenging problem with a really simple solution. My manager had multiple sessions with me to coach me on how to present that simple solution in a much more complex way. He emphasized that senior management should not realize that the solution was simple - no matter how impactful it was.

Yes - this is also a general "human" problem, and is common in lots of places. However, when you're striving to be the best company in X, it is wise not to settle for "average".

[sennight]

Psychopathy has entered the chat

[sangnoir]

If humans acted the way companies are expected to (and do!), they'd be classified as psychopathic.

[sennight]

Which has nothing to do with the methods of kingdom building addressed above. There is a massive difference between deceitfully contriving information asymmetry between departments and dispassionately directing a company's strategic objectives.

[api]

Sounds like the decline of the West in microcosm.

Posturers tend to eclipse doers over time because doers are too busy doing to spend all their time posturing and social climbing.

[jp42]

I confirm that several things said in above comments are true.

[dmead]

whos bright idea was it for intel to buy smartwatch companies?

[nikanj]

Someone who wanted to hang around fitness people, instead of datacenter people. Depressingly often strategy is based on personal preferences of upper management

[xiphias2]

I didn't understand why Google aquired Boutiques.com in 2010, but now it makes so much more sense. A lot of hot people joined the company with designer clothes, even though they didn't have to go through the usual interview process.

[yourapostasy]

> A lot of hot people joined the company with designer clothes, even though they didn't have to go through the usual interview process.

That sounds ludicrous. If true, it has to count up there as among the most expensive way to get at "OPP" (in the Naughty By Nature sense). I don't see how the BoD and all sorts of DD processes could have signed off on it. Then again, I simply don't know how politics and power works at those levels, so I'd certainly welcome enlightenment.

[dmead]

I believe it, because I've seen it. At some level the marketing mangers just have carte blanche to hire hot people to be the face of the company. google/alphabet is not special in this regard.