[AceJohnny2]

It has been clear to us for years that Samsung has baaad internal communication issues. When you're at the forefront of technology, you're bound to trip up as bets and explorations don't pan out. Humans being humans, mistakes will happen, but they must be recognized to be corrected and prevented in the future.

It's clear that Samsung culture prevents people from admitting mistakes, which of course only leads to more of them as stress builds up.

I remember the Samsung Galaxy Note battery problems, and how apparently it was clear to people outside Samsung what the problem was (too tight a clearance a the corners in the case for the batteries, causing bending of the internal electrodes, leading to short-circuits) before Samsung themselves recognized it.

You can't always be at the top, a sign of good culture is what happens when you slip.

Samsung keeps slipping.

[jason-phillips]

> It has been clear to us for years that Samsung has baaad internal communication issues... It's clear that Samsung culture prevents people from admitting mistakes...

Jesus H. Christ on a fucking hockey stick. I doubt I've ever read such a breathless hit piece with so many unsupported assertions summarily presented as fact.

I worked for Samsung Semiconductor for ten years and left as a software engineering manager. None of these assertions and accusations in the comments here or below leveled at the people with whom I used to work ring true from my perspective.

Communication issues? Not admitting mistakes? Please... enlighten me. Tell me how we worked.

[krisoft]

> Communication issues? Not admitting mistakes? Please... enlighten me. Tell me how we worked.

I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a satire or not. The forcefull and quite frankly agressive way you denied ever having a problem with admiting mistakes makes me think that there might be something to this allegiation.

Every company I ever worked with had occasional issues with communication, and even rarer issues with admiting mistakes. Large companies are also very uneven. Maybe the parts you worked in were great while the parts these other folks talk about were not so great? Either way swearing and writing in an unprofessional way is not the right way to go if you want to convince people about what you are saying.

[jason-phillips]

> frankly agressive way you denied ever having a problem with admiting mistakes...

Respectfully, that is a straw man. I never made that claim.

I am saying that GGP's claim is unsupported and therefore baseless. Knowing myself exactly how things really work there, I read it as ignorant hyperbole.

To answer your questions, are there problems in Samsung? Samsung has the same problems with communication and admitting mistakes as other companies for whom I've worked of similar size. I've actually seen much worse at small companies, i.e. startups.

I personally never had issues at Samsung. I could directly communicate with anyone in the company and did so, often. When necessary, we coordinated work ahead of time, even after hours. It wasn't a problem.

I don't want to make it sound like working at Samsung was a walk in the park, because it wasn't. Samsung was by far the hardest job I've ever had. But working there taught me that with the right team and good teamwork, you can accomplish anything. We did some amazing things there.

[tomatowurst]

It's an outright lie that disseminates. I bet you parent has never set foot in Samsung or has even interviewed for them. I bet you that they haven't even read past the headline seeing they are unable to actually cite the actual content or work experience at Samsung. How does someone on HN know more about Samsung from an article than somebody who has worked there?

[kortilla]

Responding with swearing to unsubstantiated allegations about people you’ve worked with for decades is fine. It’s not even worthy of any response in my opinion and it’s a little sad that the armchair analysis has received so many upvotes.

[cxr]

> people you’ve worked with for decades

It's more an instance of "place where one has worked". Someone in that position at SAS simply doesn't have the experience to confirm or deny the sorts of things the article gets into. Not to equate being a software engineering manager with being a janitor, but it is, on some level, like asking a janitor what was really going on at Enron just because they were in the same building.

[xunn0026]

> The forcefull and quite frankly agressive way you denied ever having a problem with admiting mistakes makes me think that there might be something to this allegiation.

This is some amazing mental gymnastics! You should get into politics!

Maybe Samsung does not have a problem about admitting mistakes. But a problem about admitting mistakes in their problem admitting mistakes procedures. It's always the meta-problems that get you!

Again, this above comment shows people can twist anything into anything and will just stick to what confirms their bias.

[iron2disulfide]

I've worked with Samsung Semiconductor as a partner/customer and it did seem to me from the outside that there was a culture of not admitting mistakes/failings, and poor communication between different parts of the company (i.e. foundry to silicon engineering). Granted, you could say the same thing re: communication about many large companies -- I'm sure the same phenomenon occurs at Intel or IBM (back before they went fabless). Things may have been different on software teams vs. silicon/hardware teams.

[mardifoufs]

I agree that the article is very lacking in substance and as you said, a hit piece. Yet there really seem to be a problem with Samsung's chips, especially their SoCs. They have underperformed for years now, and have always been inferior even in the high end (except maybe for the galaxy s6). That's despite repeated performance promises and a complete control over the entire production process (from design to fab to assembly). So what gives? I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on that especially since it's hard to find any legitimate information beyond rumors.

[jason-phillips]

I was a software engineer and did not work in LSI, so I cannot comment on that in a way which would be most informative, but I will try from a different perspective. An accurate answer would be incredibly complex, obviously.

Samsung, from my perspective, mostly focuses on this year's production and developing next year's model. Yes, there is work done planning for new fabs and global supply chain systems, but 98% of cycles are spent on this year's production and designing next year's model.

Samsung accounts for a huge percentage of South Korea's GDP, about 20%. Therefore, Samsung needs to favor stability over taking risks associated with living at the bleeding-edge of innovation. Samsung always did play the safe game when I worked there (and for good reason when you're babysitting a $20 billion factory with $100 million of product that could be scrapped at any time).

Again, I wasn't in LSI but this is my perception overall having worked there, traveled to Korea and learned Korean culture.

[dylan522p]

Good thing the article even says Samsung is a well oiled machine in many areas outside of the ones with issues discussed in this article. Almost like large companies can have varrying success and culture.

[jason-phillips]

Absolutely. It's a very complicated subject.

[glowingly]

In many ways this is still true of Intel today. Like Samsung, their chips draw more power (even with "Intel 7" supposedly drawing parity to TSMC 7N) and are often slower than their competition's chips.

Maybe it's an IDM mindset issue? It seems the market has moved on to pure play foundries. For example, Nvidia's first fab partner was STMicro, an IDM, and Nvidia noted STMicro was unable to focus on being a fab partner. After that, Nvidia moved onto TSMC, also working with IBM, UMC, and Samsung at later points in time.

[cxr]

NB: Jason is referring to "S2" aka Samsung Austin Semiconductor. I'm familiar with Jason's previous comments in threads about Samsung, but outside of that I don't know him (even, say, by name). This makes sense, given the separation between the work of an SE manager and the actual day-to-day operations that are involved with getting wafers fabbed and shipped.

I worked at SAS in lots of different areas—Metro, Photo, and PIE (process integration).

The emotional defense above notwithstanding (which I'd characterize as not actually being supported, either...), SAS indeed has very, very deep cultural problems that make for a shockingly bad example of how to do engineering in a large organization. There are several factors contributing to this.

SAS doesn't treat information systems, or things IT-related generally, as an engineering concern. If it doesn't look like a materials science problem, SAS doesn't have the capacity to critically evaluate its impact on rates of production and yield.

Problems, though, range from lots of things, like:

- far too many things in-fab being handled with pen and paper

- reports that have to be tediously assembled manually, so they get sent out once a day, while realistically they should be available to an engineer at any given time (behind a button that generates them on the fly instead of throwing $45k/year technicians at the problem like a 1960s-era secretary pool)

- workers committed to this state of affairs remaining so indefinitely

- Conway-style balkanization and groups who have no idea what their role is ("are they asking me or are they telling me?")

- a bunch of dumb macho shit that is used to prevent critical productivity problems from being addressed because being lazy and not addressing it is somehow virtuous and not lazy—it's the application of basic engineering principles to eliminate a problem that's lazy!

- an effect that I have no way to describe except as the proliferation of mid-40s to 50s men of mediocre talent (to a degree that's even worse than what you can expect to see elsewhere, generally)

- an overreliance on the labor pool of people with military experience / government work for no reason other than they've been conditioned to survive in the kind of bureaucratic senselessness that SAS exemplifies

- unabashed credentialism, which gets people hired who shouldn't be

- Microsoft Office products being abused for everything—including areas where a different Microsoft Office product would be the most appropriate tool for the job (reaching for PowerPoint when the problem calls for Word—or any word processor)

- work showstoppers caused by truly ridiculous problems, like Windows crashing a half a dozen times a day; Caps Lock on a fab tool keeping people from remoting in from within the office, so they have to suit up, go into the fab, press the Caps Lock key, and return to their desk and resume work; lots of monkeying around just to share a file with someone, because everything has to be ferried through a proprietary document sharing system that amounts to a crippled, quasi-web-based thing that wants to be Windows Explorer-cum-Google Drive

- unit parts (i.e. manufacturing divisions) basically re-discovering/re-inventing the value version of control and implementing it in an ad hoc way for the tools that they ineract with, poorly—not to mention all opportunities for human error (which does happen regularly but no one does anything about it because 40% of the job is CYA and the CYA approach tends to be "don't let anyone find out this happened")

- tons of janky-ass software from S1, like "Simax", which is written in a proprietary Lisp-ish(?) that uses ActiveX to run in an IE9-10-11 window and that re-invents its own window management and basic form controls, was never fully localized into English (so you're clicking buttons with terse messages in Hangul that still don't make sense even if understanding the language is no problem), and times out and ends your session if you look away from it for 10 minutes (or whatever)

- overall just really bad engineering discipline; people putting wafers on hold and not being clear about they're expecting to do with them next or what they need someone else to do; people inventing new acronyms all over the place (because job security and also "mediocre talents") and using them liberally in the notes they do leave for others; people not documenting why something happened, which also happens to help when covering something up and hoping that no one has the time budget to untangle things to the point where it's obvious/incontrovertible that something did go wrong; also lots of people not having a dedicated workstation of their own, so when shifts change they have to be out of their seat so it can be ready—no putting in a little extra time to make sure that the kinds of fires that were put out that day won't just happen again tomorrow and the day after, ad infinitum

[astrange]

> - tons of janky-ass software from S1, like "Simax", which is written in a proprietary Lisp-ish(?) that uses ActiveX to run in an IE9-10-11 window and that re-invents window management and basic form controls, was never fully localized into English (so you're clicking buttons with terse messages in Hangul that still don't make sense even if understanding the language is no problem), and times out and ends your session if you look away from it for 10 minutes

I've always been surprised when I see things like this, from websites with all the controls reinvented to MDI-based Windows apps. Where do they get the _time_ and designer resources to waste all their time doing this?

Maybe I just learned programming in a different way, since one of the first things I learned was "laziness is a virtue".

[ravel-bar-foo]

These browser apps are relatively common inside Korean companies. The IE base dates to the pre-crypto-export days, when the Korean government mandated crypto be provided as an ActiveX module. This requires specialized secure input forms within the browser and within-browser error popups, so why not build a within-browser windowing system...

As a user, interfacing with these systems was always hell. Setting up online banking on a new computer would take the better part of a day, and would fail if you didn't have IE security exceptions set, if you were missing Korean font packs, or if your name was too long. And different ActiveX controls installs were required by every webapp. Our company (healthcare) finally rolled out a native Windows app in 2019. It includes its own floating tile manager, and for tasks like viewing PDFs, browser frames are now embedded in a tile...

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

I don't know the lineage of this particular system. But I have worked on janky systems in the past. In one instance, an intern built a language during a summer project. It was an expedient solution to a problem that a team was having, so they began using it. Then they put work into making it faster and integrating it to other systems. Eventually they wrapped a service interface around it and reexported it to other teams. But there were serious semantic problems with the language as a concept and with the technical implementation of the language. Once it had users who came to depend on its bugs, it became very hard to fix, and the whole mess became more convoluted as people tried to build sensible extensions on the rotten core.

It's finally gotten to the point where there is the action potential to fix it in my case, but for a lot of systems with a complex and expedient lineage like this, it never gets there. So garden well, I guess, is the takeaway.

[ethbr0]

Almost every instance of this I've come across can be described by repeated localized, short-term optimization.

No one ever sat down and said "How can I design a terrible system that's a pain in the ass to work with and unable to be extended?"

Everyone sat down and said "How can I make that one thing that's actually my job faster?"

[seanp2k2]

sometimes people also sit down and ask "how can I build a platform to do this kind of thing so expanding and maintaining that platform can be my new job here?"

[patrickk]

Your experience closely matches what I’ve seen in another Korean company, in a different industry. Tedious manual reports (for cover your ass reasons), PowerPoint used for everything, crap internal tools because of a strong ‘not invented here’ culture, mid 40s to 50s guys of mediocre talent but often inflated egos, and so on. Thanks for typing it up.

[sidewndr46]

I've personally known a number of SAS employees and even more secondhand. My general impression was that it was dysfunctional.

One guy I know works 6 days a week, Monday-Saturday. He goes in on work around 2pm Sunday to get caught up. This isn't the 'crunch' schedule. It's just his regular work schedule.

[jason-phillips]

I hear what you're saying and I totally get your frustration. Many of my co-workers also shared similar frustrations.

In a massive operation running 24/7 that never stops to catch its breath, it's chaotic. There are certain techniques I adopted that helped me be successful there, but I definitely understand your frustrations.

[cxr]

> In a massive operation running 24/7 that never stops to catch its breath, it's going to be chaotic.

No, it isn't. Describing it like this is needless apologetics.

The "chaos" is not even necessarily the worst part of the problem. It's these kinds of just-so dismissals that have the effect of framing the chaos as somehow unavoidable—the response that goes, roughly, you'll learn; this a natural consequence of what we're doing; it's a big operation, and this is what it looks like when you play with the big boys. I can tell you: I am a big boy. I have too much experience to the contrary for these casting couch excuses to work. Much of the day-to-day toil at Samsung is inexcusable and entirely avoidable. There is no excuse, for example, for dealing with version control in a billion dollar manufacturing operation like we're living in 1995 or a neverending sophomore-level group project.

[ethbr0]

I liked your framing of version control requiring a culture of encouraging admission of failure.

I'd never looked at it that way, and it succinctly describes why the least devops-mature organizations I've worked with have been those that heavily penalize any admission of failure. And vice versus.

[pm90]

Cultures where failure is punished are just the worst. It’s not just the vain pursuit of something unachievable (systems will break) but all the effort involved in covering up rather than simply admitting the problem and then coming up with solutions to fix it/not repeat it. It’s a lost opportunity to improve the system.

Unfortunately, without active checks and balances, orgs will tend to the blame game. Avoiding it requires an org-wide commitment to openness around failures.

[dogecoinbase]

I genuinely hope you can appreciate how funny this exchange was, in which you asserted there were no problems, someone pointed out a bunch of specific problems, and then you said "sure, I knew about all those problems".

[causality0]

Ok, so what's the origin of the problem? Over the last ten years I've seen Samsung's reputation absolutely plummet. In many areas such as home appliances it's now a joke, and people tell each other to avoid it. A decade ago it seemed to have the same feeling as Sony and now people say "Samsung" with a sigh.

[megablast]

> unsupported assertions

What else could there be?? Do you think the company will release this information in a press release??? Do you think people will put their names to these criticisms??

[lostlogin]

Could you tell us how you worked?

[jason-phillips]

Just to clarify, is this with or without Aaron Franklin brisket for lunch?

[lostlogin]

This has shot right over my head, but as a google suggests the place is well regarded, I’m going to say ‘with’…

[jason-phillips]

We worked hard and we worked well together. We did whatever it took to succeed. Sometimes that meant working 20 hours days on some global supply chain project. I worked with a lot of really great people and a lot of terrific engineers. Best users I've ever had.

[noirbot]

Given what I know about Samsung in Austin, I'm pretty sure you're not paying nearly enough to justify anything close to 20 hours a day. Just because you work with "great people" on "a global supply chain project" doesn't sound like anywhere I'd ever want to work, and it seems like the attrition numbers I've seen agree with that.

[vasco]

Imagine looking back at 20 hour days fondly. And you were an engineering manager. Nobody does good work 10+ hours into a shift. 20 hour days are good for one thing, allowing your boss to understaff teams with no consequence.

[MikusR]

>too tight a clearance a the corners in the case for the batteries, causing bending of the internal electrodes, leading to short-circuits

That turned out not to be the cause. https://news.samsung.com/global/infographic-galaxy-note7-wha...

[e44858]

The page you linked says this:

> The negative electrode was deflected within the upper-right corner of the battery

Maybe better clearance would have prevented that from causing a short?

[AtlasBarfed]

I've heard Samsung gives new VP level heads of divisions a year to be a success, or they are canned. So if a division isn't a success when the leader comes in, a year probably isn't enough in high technology, so a VP/director churn happens.

Is this true? That model would NOT work for semiconductors, where each fab generation is a bit of a hit or miss, but the game requires that you gamble.