[AMDAnon]

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.

[schainks]

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

This is WILD to hear considering how well it appears AMD is executing from the outside.

[AMDAnon]

> 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.

[schainks]

OOF.

[BNE]

> Teams with good leadership maintain their own shadow IT teams.

Yes, this is true. Painfully true.

[JonChesterfield]

This doesn't sound right. I definitely got yelled at over trivial performance regressions which looked like noise so people were measuring performance.

They've paid serious amounts in RSUs over the last six years. Not top of market by any stretch but firmly in the category of engineers don't care what the steak costs. Bonus might be team dependent, I remember being annoyed and nicely surprised by it in different years.

The aql profiler confuses me quite a lot but it's definitely a tool for measuring performance.

[slavik81]

I don't think anon is correct, but I can understand how they'd come to their conclusions. I certainly didn't choose AMD to maximize my pay, though it's always been a comfortable salary.

With regards to performance, there are some things tracked carefully and other things that are not tracked at all. I suspect that is why some folks think we're really good at it and others think we're terrible. There's lots of room for improvement, though. Excitement over trivial performance regressions is more a sign of immaturity than of good tracking.

[AMDAnon]

> 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.

[observationist]

The MBAs are in charge, and now AMD is the new Intel?

It's not only not fixable overnight, but it's not fixable at all if the leadership thinks they can coast on simply being not as bad as Intel, and Intel has a helluva lot of inertia and ability to simply sell OEM units on autopilot.

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

[AMDAnon]

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.

[Aurornis]

> What they should do is bump TC by 60-70% and simultaneously lay off 50% of the engineers.

I was part of company with a similar problem. If AMD’s situation is similar to what I dealt with, it’s more complicated. When you start doing deep cut layoffs at the IC level combined with expectations of big salary increases for those who remain, the office politics escalate to a level I didn’t know was possible.

All of those people who do nothing find a way to join forces with those people who are showing those inflated benchmarks to execs and before you know it the layoffs are about as accurate as random chance when it comes to cutting the dead weight from the company.

In my experience, the change needs to start closer to the top: Upper layers of management need to be shaken up. Middle management audited by new upper management hires who have fresh eyes and aren’t afraid to make honest evaluations. High performing teams who are stuck under management hell need to be identified and rotated into other projects that are critical for the company but have become occupied by fiefdom-building managers. Hiring needs to ramp up to bring in new talent that was previously priced out by the low comp.

It’s hard. I wish there was an easy way to cut the low performers, but they have an amazing way of teaming up with the bad managers. Maybe because they have so much free time to do office politics because they’re not doing much work.

[FuckButtons]

"Maybe because they have so much free time to do office politics because they’re not doing much work.”

I mean, isn’t that always the way? Honestly, I feel like you could do a lot worse than just firing most of the people who demonstrate above average social skills. Sure, some would be fired unnecessarily, but I can’t think of any engineers that have seemed almost pathologically shy that also didn’t want to work hard.

[sho]

Came into this thread hoping for good news about GPUs and instead there's some surprisingly thoughtful management discussion!

> What they should do is bump TC by 60-70% and simultaneously lay off 50% of the engineers.

Tell me you're an engineer without telling me you're an engineer. The problem is they don't know which half and they can't know. It's an issue of legibility and transparency - put yourself into the shoes of the C-suite. You're staring down a complete black box of, what, 5,000 people. How can you possibly know who's good and who's not? Think of the information they have at hand - what the chain of command tells them. What if the chain of command itself is the problem? Think about how you yourself could protect a bad employee if you were a manager. You could! How can they possibly find the truth?

People rightly hate stack ranking, but you can see why ideas like that exist - attempts to come up with organizational pruning algorithms that are resistant to the managers themselves being the problem.

And this is also why CEOs incoming with a turnaround mission often do a clean sweep and stack the c-suite with all their friends. Not because they're giving jobs to their mates - although sure, that does happen - but because they're trying to establish at least a single layer of trust, which can then in time hopefully be extended downwards. But it all takes time, and for some organizations, they never do manage it. When unlimited orgs all compete for the same limited number of good managers - well, some of them are going to lose.

Ironically I'm bullish on AI being able to greatly help with all of this. Maybe running on AMD GPUs...

[creato]

> How can you possibly know who's good and who's not? Think of the information they have at hand - what the chain of command tells them. What if the chain of command itself is the problem? Think about how you yourself could protect a bad employee if you were a manager. You could! How can they possibly find the truth?

Senior managers should look at what people are actually doing. It doesn't take that much time. If tickets and PRs/MRs/changes are searchable by author, reviewer, and the files they touch (if they aren't, that's your problem right there) then it takes a few minutes to figure out who did the critical work, and who doesn't do much of anything.

In big tech, I've had senior managers (1-3 levels up) that do this, and ones that don't. The ones that do it are great managers. Under this type of manager, people are usually focused on making things actually work and making projects successful. The ones that don't do it can be good managers, but usually aren't. Under these types is where politics festers and dominates, because why wouldn't it? If you don't let the actual work guide your understanding, you're left with presentations and opinions of others.

When I do this (a few times a year), it takes 10 minutes for the easy cases, 1 hour for the hard cases, and once you do a few of these kinds of investigations in the same work area, you start to understand what the collaborators are doing before even looking at them specifically. So you're talking a few weeks of work for 100s of people. A few weeks a few times a year is not too much to ask someone to spend on their primary responsibility as a senior manager.

Past some point in scale, this does become impractical, I don't expect the CEO of a 10k person company to be doing this. But at that scale, the metrics are different anyways.

[latchkey]

Get rid of half the lawyers who are sitting in the way most of the time and take the risks necessary to move closer to the top.

[FuckButtons]

Madness. I see the accountants are in charge then.