10 ms·

Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO?

112 points by redial 8y ago

wiremine 8y ago
I've been reading "Measure What Matters" by John Doerr, which outlines Objectives and Key Results, a concept heavily influenced (invented?) by Andy Grove. Would be interesting to hear from someone who knows if Intel still uses OKRs, and if their long-term usage contributed to the current "toxic culture". I really like OKRs as a concept, just wondering what long-term usage looks like, and what the downsides are. Or maybe it's sensationalism, and the culture isn't that toxic?
- hammock 8y ago
  Google uses OKRs (they took it from Intel). Not sure why I'm being downvoted http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-ranking-system-okr-2014-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-ranking-system-okr-20...
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    I think it's really funny that OKR grades are public but ostensibly not used for promotions... Everything associated with you gets entered in to people's brains, and they draw from it when evaluating you whether it's in the policy to do so or not.
- taeric 8y ago
  I have found this news interesting to follow because of that book. It was a fun listen, but focusing on success stories seems problematic.
- repolfx 8y ago
  OKRs came to Google via Doerr, I think. It's a bit of an odd system and I wouldn't ascribe too much weight to it. It was never taken very seriously and there was a lot of gaming going on. That said, it boils down to just writing down your goals and coming up with metrics to decide how close you got. That's not exactly revolutionary but not a bad idea either and most companies don't systematise it to the level that the OKR system does.
  - jrockway 8y ago
    People game OKRs, but it doesn't matter. Planning work a quarter out for your team is very valuable, no matter what you call it. I was the TL of a very small team at Google. My manager and nearby senior engineers were very good at forcing me to plan my team's work for the quarter in the form of OKRs, and the results were quite surprising. I would say something like "I'll add that to next quarter's OKRs" and people trusted that it was actually going to get done. There were no weekly status meetings, or nag emails, or anything like that... people assumed that if my team said we were going to do something, it was going to be done. And they were right, because we actually focused on exactly what we said we were going to focus on. We had to prioritize, and so we spent a little more time on features than on system stability than I would have without any plan ("just one more day to automate this part of the release that only saves 5 seconds once a month!"). It was quite good. Meanwhile, when I first joined Google, I went to the company OKR scoring meeting. There was a KR like "have one billion active foobar users" and the score presented was .7, the minimum "passing" score. They did not have 700,000,000 users though. I distrusted company OKRs ever since. I can do multiplication; you lied. TL;DR: planning is valuable. Making up a number to make yourself feel good is pointless. The key is to not tie self-directed and self-graded OKRs to anything important, just look at it like a reasonable todo list for the next 3 months.
delbel 8y ago
Missing an opportunity isn't a Toxic Culture problem, eh? I disagree with this narrative.
- politelemon 8y ago
  I'm not sure if the author understands the word's context or usage; the article also links to "Intel's toxic fixation on margins" but nowhere on the target page does the word toxic appear.
kanox 8y ago
WTF does "toxic culture" even mean, other than clickbait? Some people seems to use this as meaning "anti-social" or "excessively aggressive" but the word only appears in the article as "toxic fixation on margins" where it's equivalent to "harmful". The gist of the article seems to be that Intel lost in the mobile space because it refused to chase opportunities with lower margins. But decisions regarding such deals are made by a small handful of people at the top, the "culture" of the rest of the organization is irrelevant.
- pohl 8y ago
  "Toxic" in this context just means negative or harmful. There are many ways in which something can be negative or harmful, not just one.
  - dismantlethesun 8y ago
    Anyone who uses toxic in this way is just going to look silly.
    - pohl 8y ago
      It's been used this way in the English language since the mid 17th century.
- ben509 8y ago
  "Toxic" is one of those terms like "problematic" that rely on in-group knowledge to understand. I've often heard it in reference to masculinity; often used by feminists who have a more concrete definition in mind. And, sure you can look at any violent crime stats to see masculinity has its problems, but instead of the more reasonable claim they're making a very nasty one that's indefensible. Allusions to people being poisonous are particularly destructive. This was very common in the military, if a soldier didn't fit in, he was labeled as something similar to toxic so that others knew not to associate with him. Even then, when the military does it, there's a practical solution: the soldiers get out of the military. If you claim a larger group is toxic, you have to ask: these are our neighbors, what do we do with them? > But decisions regarding such deals are made by a small handful of people at the top Yeah, that really blew the article for me. Something like not-invented-here syndrome is a cultural issue, not bad corporate strategy.
tlb 8y ago
The term 'toxic culture' is mostly used to describe widespread harassment and bullying. 'Ossified' or 'stagnant' are more apt terms for a company that can't seem to seize new opportunities. The thing about margins is that it's a lot more fun to work in a division with high margins. Low margin businesses are grim, because every cost matters. When you can charge $5000 for the latest Xeon, you can pay high salaries and have fat travel budgets. So it's hard to get people used to working on high-margin divisions to move into a new low-margin division, even if it might eventually be bigger.
- danmg 8y ago
  You can't prescribe how language is used. Toxic culture now means this. Changes in usage happen over time.
  - tlb 8y ago
    If you google 'toxic culture', all the top results (other than this article) refer to harassment and bullying rather than slowness to adapt to change. Same with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_workplace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_workplace. So a descriptive linguist would agree with me.
    - danmg 8y ago
      Maybe the phrase 'toxic culture' was imprecise and lazy to begin with. Now people are adapting it in a more precise way. That wiki page was started in 2011 and it's based on a pop-management book. It's hardly an established term.
      - EpicEng 8y ago
        >It's hardly an established term Yet you said... >You can't prescribe how language is used. Toxic culture now means this. So apparently you can.
        danmg 8y ago
colinprince 8y ago
>Money, or its lack, doesn’t cause a financial collapse, human folly does; the numbers simply follow iow, the symptom should not be confused with the cause.
sergiolchan 8y ago
me
izzydata 8y ago
I volunteer myself. I promise to make only the best decisions. Forever.
- JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
  Can you break the laws of physics and help us get Moore's Law back on track?
  - excalibur 8y ago
    Physics is raping our company. We need to make a better deal with physics.
    - dang 8y ago
      Please don't do this here.
      - NCWV 8y ago
        Do what?
  - redial 8y ago
    He can promise to :)
gwbas1c 8y ago
I worked at Intel 2005-2007. I read the article hoping to see an independent description of the culture I observed. I hoped to see someone use words to explain something that I can't explain. The thing about Intel's culture that I observed was that it wasn't toxic at all. The worst thing that I could say about it was that it was boring, which was why I left so quickly. If anything was "toxic," it could be that some managers and co-workers had very bad people skills... But that happens at all large companies. HR can't witness and guide every interaction between employees. In reality, when I was there, Intel's HR made every effort to create a culture where, if something "toxic" happened, they could fix the situation as quickly as possible. Granted, things did happen. The "toxic" situations were more of ordinary human nature, and can happen anywhere, even in non work situations.
- mirceal 8y ago
  At a big corporation, like Intel, we cannot really talk about just one culture. I would say that your experience can vary quite a lot based on the team you’re in and to a certain degree the org you’re in. Various people assign the ‘toxic’ label to various things. What may be ‘meh’ for one person could be ‘toxic’ to another. Also: Mandatory HR is not your friend reminder. HR is there and it’s trained to protect the corporation.
  - gwbas1c 8y ago
    > At a big corporation, like Intel, we cannot really talk about just one culture. I would say that your experience can vary quite a lot based on the team you’re in and to a certain degree the org you’re in. Slightly. Ultimately, the high-level culture is set by the execs. > Various people assign the ‘toxic’ label to various things. What may be ‘meh’ for one person could be ‘toxic’ to another. No, definitions are important. The word "toxic culture" has a very clear meaning; and the article does not use it correctly. Specifically, toxic culture means an environment that leads to high stress and poor mental health. That's not what the article discussed, and it's completely appropriate to criticize. A "toxic culture" is a very serious accusation, so incorrectly using the term isn't something that falls under the "I say toe-may-toe, you say toe-mah-toe" attitude.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
Interesting discussion here on the toxic culture reference. As I understand it, especially given the food analogy, Jean Gassee believes that the culture that Intel has evolved over time, prevents them from taking the steps that are necessary to continue to move forward. This culture is 'toxic' in that it is weakening the company rather than strengthening it. Gassee also makes the point that the culture of the company is more influential on its success or failure than its financial position. I found his argument fairly persuasive. Of course I worked at Intel during the Andy Grove years and understood that Intel is addicted to the high margins the x86 processors commanded. So when Gassee describes it as a cultural aversion to anything that might impact margins negatively, I can see that as a valid way of looking at it.
- alain94040 8y ago
  I'm surprised Jean-Louis didn't highlight the similarity between Intel's refusal to focus on mobile and his own push-back on licensing MacOS a decade earlier. Both decisions (cultures) have to do with switching from a high-margin product to a low-margin product, with no guarantee that you'll make up the difference in volume.
  - ChuckMcM 8y ago
    I agree that it would have been a good example of where Apple could have encroached on the Windows market more effectively. That said, the margins Apple has continued to make on its hardware suggest that not licensing MacOS was the right choice for the company.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    The issue was never licensing. The issue was that he chased after margins and not market share.
baybal2 8y ago
>Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO? I do
DiabloD3 8y ago
I'd do it. No one else really seems to have the vision that a CEO needs to step up to that particular plate.
- tlb 8y ago
  Could you articulate your vision here?
  - DiabloD3 8y ago
    Sure. Intel has an insane treasure trove of technology that they don't seem to know what to do with because they have confused profit with market domination (related ideas, but not equivalent, and one often leads to the other in both directions). Example: Intel obsesses over x86 in a very weird and unhealthy way. Intel has repeatedly developed new CPU architectures that did not suffer from the burden of the technical debt that has accrued. A lot of money was sank into, for example, the XScale ARM series. What killed it off was not because there was something technologically inferior with the product (it was rather popular for the time, the Snapdragon of it's age): what killed it was upper management thinking ARM sales could harm x86 sales, instead of just focusing on making sales happen. The result? Marvell bought it, and turned merely took the breaks off the product line and let it naturally evolve. Marvell didn't really do anything other than that; Intel intentionally strangled the project and that's why it was sold. That made no financial or logical sense no matter how much Intel apologists try to spin it. Intel cannot change the reality that their x86 designs are not for low power (which they finally admitted when they killed off the Atom SoC line for phones and tablets, which was drank power like it was going out of style), and Intel has locked itself out of one of the largest markets in the world. Another Example: I have two Haswell-era machines in my house. Both of them are intended to be used with CPUs that have iGPUs. They both have mini-Displayport plugs. Neither have Thunderbolt controllers. My Ivy Bridge-era MBP? Has a Thunderbolt controller, and it is the only machine in my house that would never benefit from it. The inclusion of said Thunderbolt controller was at the behest of Apple, not because of Intel. What could have happened? Every Intel machine since Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge should have had a Thunderbolt controller baked into iGPU, and Intel's sales of Thunderbolt controllers would have gone through the roof. Instead, Intel has to compete with USB 3.x, produces controllers intended for TB-over-Type-C, and does not produce USB 3.x device SoCs (essentially losing money on every sale since Intel should be doing this), only integrated host controllers for existing Intel platforms. The job of the CEO is to promote a culture inside of management where such decisions happen regularly. As CEO, I wouldn't be the one making decisions such as, say, making onboard Thunderbolt the default: I'd be making it possible for such decisions to happen naturally, to make sure the proper behavior is rewarded and diagnose issues in the corporate policy on why Intel isn't promoting the desired outcome internally. From everything I have seen, Intel doesn't particularly have a toxic culture internally, not in a way that compares to the posterchildren of that particular disease. What Intel has is a weird obsession with the past, and an absolutely immense treasure trove of technology that just sits there and isn't sold or marketed meaningfully. I think people have written entire books about the missteps of Intel. The problem is, all of us here know they were missteps, but Intel management glorifies them as the right choice and what lead to Intel's greatness. I just see a company that doesn't understand how to profit in the right ways, and instead has lead to a public perception that Intel doesn't care about customers, hides ticking time bombs in their products intentionally (Meltdown et al.), and has lead to the term "Intel Tax". AMD doens't sell a better CPU, nor a faster one. What they sell is a CPU that is fit correctly for the market, and have a public perception of actually caring about customers, caring about the long term support of their products, and try to leverage their technology in ways that benefit both the customer AND the shareholder. If I was tossed in as the CEO today? I'd try fix the public perception, try to figure out why Intel just sits on endless technology and isn't part of the right markets (even though they have or had technology that fits those markets), and try to figure out why good ideas (and the people that make them) are not promoted from with in. Intel is pretty much no different than Broadcom or Qualcomm, yet Intel can't sell the stuff they need to in a way that makes sense. Yet, every cell phone has Qualcomm parts in it, tons of IoC and network and NAS stuff has Broadcom parts in it (due to their huge family of ARM and MIPS SoCs), Broadcom also sells more Ethernet controllers than Intel. So, what the hell. If I become CEO today, I am delivering disruption to the management culture that prevents Intel from thriving the way it should.
known 8y ago
Firms with greater market power may innovate less https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/07/07/companies-appear-to-be-gaining-market-power https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/07/07/c...
excalibur 8y ago
Six months of doing my best but failing miserably because I have no idea how to run a massive company, followed by a multi-million-dollar golden parachute? Sign me up!
jpao79 8y ago
Saw this the other day. Seems like it would make sense. https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/03/google-clouds-coo-departs-after-7-months/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/03/google-clouds-coo-departs-...
TheMagicHorsey 8y ago
I worked at Intel for two years. They don't have a "toxic" culture. They are just like any other big company. Believe it or not, Google and Facebook will end up like that in 25 years too. Big organizations get like that. There's a generation that's raised on the company Kool-Aid and they live and breathe the company slogans and they forget that reality is a different place. That's not TOXIC ... that's just the nature of human organizations. And I mean all organizations that are large. If you ever hang out with DNC or GOP people who work for the party you'll see the same blinders. Same goes for people that work at NASA ... or in certain academic fields. They all believe certain myths internally that no experts outside their group believe. The point about Intel being addicted to narratives that aligned with its profits is true. And Microsoft was addicted to Windows and Office narratives too before Satya Nadella. It certainly makes you admire IBM as a company a lot more, doesn't it? They have weathered so many changes in the landscape, and they are still around.
- dreamcompiler 8y ago
  "Around" is relative. The last thing IBM innovated was Watson and they're downsizing that division because they can't figure out how to market it. IBM is mostly just a body shop for cheap overseas code monkeys now, isn't it?
  - shindog 8y ago
    Bit of an ignorant statement even if it is IBM. What’s wrong with developers “overseas” (a completely relative term but forgivable in the YC context) why call them monkeys (not an sjw so not even going to go down that words rabbit hole). Having worked with many a yank their quality is just as variable and I’ve seen better output standard maintained by some European teams even if scale is limited.
    - dreamcompiler 8y ago
      Ask an IBM employee with 20 years experience who's been replaced by someone in a country with cheap labor with 2 years experience. No, scratch that. Ask an IBM customer if the quality of IBM's workforce is as good today as it was 10 years ago.
slivym 8y ago
No one going to point out that Diane Bryant mysteriously left Google recently? Long experience at Intel, expert in cloud, female face fits into the progressive culture they're trying to chase? Left Google at the perfect time? Seems like a super obvious move to me.
- eatbitseveryday 8y ago
  > Left Google at the perfect time? I agree this is really the most suggestive next step. I posit she left as a result of the CEO position opening up, not by mere coincidence.
- medunham97123 8y ago
  I worked at Intel for 15 years in IT, and Diane, was by far, the best CIO Intel ever had. I am conflicted about whether I would want her to return as the culture (as pointed out by others), is very stagnant (one of the reasons I left), and the classic good ole boys network (which is how Intel was really toxic) was still there and stronger than ever when I left in 2013.
samfisher83 8y ago
The article is mentioning they missed the mobile revolution. How many mobile chip manufacturers are making that much money on mobile chips. If you look at QCOM's earnings a majority of it is licensing its patents. QCOM chip business net income is 15%. INTC net is almost 30%. In its data center business its 50%.
- shimon 8y ago
  This is exactly the logic that led Intel down this path. They thought they were avoiding a field with low margins and could deepen their manufacturing advantage by remaining focused on the high-margin data center business. Meanwhile, the growth in mobile/GPU/SOC chips was so massive that it enabled Intel's competitors to actually catch up on manufacturing. Those competitors are going to eventually compete in the high end, and it's an uphill battle for Intel to become competitive in the fields they've ignored to date. If Intel does survive, it will be as a company with far lower margins in a brutally competitive environment. Read Ben Thompson on this: https://stratechery.com/2018/intel-and-the-danger-of-integration/ https://stratechery.com/2018/intel-and-the-danger-of-integra...
  - samfisher83 8y ago
    Which of intel's competitors that make mobile chips are doing as well as intel? Please give me an example. I gave you numbers for QCT which makes mobile chips. TMSC and Samsung are going to spend money on R+D on chips irrespective of what intel does. Intel has a moat in the x86 market it has none in the ARM world. Read porters 5 forces and you will see why going into the mobile world made no sense for them. In my opinion Intel throwing money at lower margin business would not make sense to me. I guess we will find out what happens in the future.
    - medunham97123 8y ago
      Before I left Intel in 2013, they had recognized that the money was really in the value added chain of the mobile segment (i.e. iTunes). But the same stagnant culture that prevented them from seeing and embracing the mobile revolution also prevented them from making things like the Intel AppStore work. At this point, Intel really is just a vertical implementation of a company like TSMC.
mesozoic 8y ago
I volunteer. Gimme that golden parachute.
novaRom 8y ago
Intel PR was always too much addicted to Moore's Law. The Moore's Law is almost dead and so is Intel (Most semiconductor industry forecasters, including Gordon Moore, expect Moore's law will end by around 2025) Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Near-term_limits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Near-term_limits
- PeCaN 8y ago
  I mean, in the strict formulation of "transistor counts doubling every 2 years" it's been dead since like 2015 if not earlier. That said, the "death of Moore's law" is kind of this memetic doomsday device that doesn't really mean anything. We haven't had significantly faster single-threaded performance for years and we're developing ways to cope with that. Intel's real problem is that they keep missing the boat on new markets for chips. ARM got smartphones. Nvidia got machine learning. (Xeon Phi is cool. Maybe someone will notice. Maybe they'll fix the instruction decoder so it can actually operate at full speed. Who knows.) Intel killed off Itanium and then we discovered that every modern CPU design except Itanium is horrifically vulnerable. IBM is rapidly encroaching on the server market with innovations like CAPI/BlueLink. If Intel is "dead", it's not because of the death of Moore's Law, it's because they let everyone else eat their lunch.
ashishb 8y ago
I feel that their hegemony in the server market might be lost even faster: https://ashishb.net/tech/three-reasons-why-intel-might-lose-server-market-even-faster-than-consumer/ https://ashishb.net/tech/three-reasons-why-intel-might-lose-...
frmintel 8y ago
I worked at Intel for several years. I really enjoyed myself most of the time and got to work on interesting things. Because I was not serious about staying at Intel for a long time, I took a lot of risks that made my experience more fun. Most people probably wouldn’t do so. There was significant beaurecratic bloat and overhead, the whole organization felt stodgy and a lot of the people simply weren’t doing their jobs. This caused me to feel like I constantly had to cross lines I didn’t want to cross in order to execute at a decent pace. I come from a startup background and couldn’t tolerate the endless delays and lack of responsiveness I saw there. From my part of the company I mostly had a good time but I did see that I would not have a good time at many other parts of the organization. There are a lot of dead product lines with no future that need to get cut. No two ways about it. Cutting those products won’t be fun. Ossified is a good word for many parts of the company. I feel like the cultural harm caused by some of the layoffs left many people disenchanted. I heard one ex Intel employee say something like: “I got laid off because I am just another old white man.” That sentiment really is corrosive, I heard of that several times. Unfortunately, I think the successor to BK is going to be saddled with some ugly clean up work. Or they could be cowards and continue to turn the same crank for wall street. BK cleaned some of the mess (and created several new ones), there are many more to clean. It’s easy to be too pessimistic. Intel has unbelievable engineering skills under the hood. They are incredibly dangerous if they are able to shake this off and re-energize. I hope they find a truly progressive leader and don’t continue their descent into mediocrity.
dbuder 8y ago
Intel is so big that they need 3 CEOs and one of them has to be a silicon genius. That a company with so much talent can't bring dynamic products to market is a tragedy for the American economy. x86 doesn't need to die it just doesn't HAVE to be the only future.
ksec 8y ago
In an organisation like Intel, how much fight is needed for a new CEO to break the Company into three, Intel Foundry, Intel Silicon, and Intel IP, along with Intel Holding being the holding company? Intel Silicon will continue to produce the best in class x86 chip, from Desktop, Server, Notebook to Modem, FPGA, GPGPU and Network processor. And Storage like Optane and SSD. Intel Foundry will focus to be the best Foundry on the planet. Not only just tech and yield, but also the ecosystem around it; from tools to libraries. Intel IP will allow customers to use Intel's IP to fab their custom solution in Intel Foundry. x86 Core, 5G Modem, WiFi, Bluetooth, Network Processor, Memory controller, GPU, every building block Intel uses for Intel silicon. To be make to anything from SoC for PS5, Xbox with CPU and GPU, to Mobile SoC using ARM CPU + Intel Modem.

112 points by redial 8y ago

I've been reading "Measure What Matters" by John Doerr, which outlines Objectives and Key Results, a concept heavily influenced (invented?) by Andy Grove. Would be interesting to hear from someone who knows if Intel still uses OKRs, and if their long-term usage contributed to the current "toxic culture". I really like OKRs as a concept, just wondering what long-term usage looks like, and what the downsides are. Or maybe it's sensationalism, and the culture isn't that toxic?

hammock 8y ago
Google uses OKRs (they took it from Intel). Not sure why I'm being downvoted http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-ranking-system-okr-2014-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-ranking-system-okr-20...
- whatshisface 8y ago
  I think it's really funny that OKR grades are public but ostensibly not used for promotions... Everything associated with you gets entered in to people's brains, and they draw from it when evaluating you whether it's in the policy to do so or not.
taeric 8y ago
I have found this news interesting to follow because of that book. It was a fun listen, but focusing on success stories seems problematic.
repolfx 8y ago
OKRs came to Google via Doerr, I think. It's a bit of an odd system and I wouldn't ascribe too much weight to it. It was never taken very seriously and there was a lot of gaming going on. That said, it boils down to just writing down your goals and coming up with metrics to decide how close you got. That's not exactly revolutionary but not a bad idea either and most companies don't systematise it to the level that the OKR system does.
- jrockway 8y ago
  People game OKRs, but it doesn't matter. Planning work a quarter out for your team is very valuable, no matter what you call it. I was the TL of a very small team at Google. My manager and nearby senior engineers were very good at forcing me to plan my team's work for the quarter in the form of OKRs, and the results were quite surprising. I would say something like "I'll add that to next quarter's OKRs" and people trusted that it was actually going to get done. There were no weekly status meetings, or nag emails, or anything like that... people assumed that if my team said we were going to do something, it was going to be done. And they were right, because we actually focused on exactly what we said we were going to focus on. We had to prioritize, and so we spent a little more time on features than on system stability than I would have without any plan ("just one more day to automate this part of the release that only saves 5 seconds once a month!"). It was quite good. Meanwhile, when I first joined Google, I went to the company OKR scoring meeting. There was a KR like "have one billion active foobar users" and the score presented was .7, the minimum "passing" score. They did not have 700,000,000 users though. I distrusted company OKRs ever since. I can do multiplication; you lied. TL;DR: planning is valuable. Making up a number to make yourself feel good is pointless. The key is to not tie self-directed and self-graded OKRs to anything important, just look at it like a reasonable todo list for the next 3 months.

delbel 8y ago

Missing an opportunity isn't a Toxic Culture problem, eh? I disagree with this narrative.

politelemon 8y ago
I'm not sure if the author understands the word's context or usage; the article also links to "Intel's toxic fixation on margins" but nowhere on the target page does the word toxic appear.

kanox 8y ago

WTF does "toxic culture" even mean, other than clickbait? Some people seems to use this as meaning "anti-social" or "excessively aggressive" but the word only appears in the article as "toxic fixation on margins" where it's equivalent to "harmful". The gist of the article seems to be that Intel lost in the mobile space because it refused to chase opportunities with lower margins. But decisions regarding such deals are made by a small handful of people at the top, the "culture" of the rest of the organization is irrelevant.

pohl 8y ago
"Toxic" in this context just means negative or harmful. There are many ways in which something can be negative or harmful, not just one.
- dismantlethesun 8y ago
  Anyone who uses toxic in this way is just going to look silly.
  - pohl 8y ago
    It's been used this way in the English language since the mid 17th century.
ben509 8y ago
"Toxic" is one of those terms like "problematic" that rely on in-group knowledge to understand. I've often heard it in reference to masculinity; often used by feminists who have a more concrete definition in mind. And, sure you can look at any violent crime stats to see masculinity has its problems, but instead of the more reasonable claim they're making a very nasty one that's indefensible. Allusions to people being poisonous are particularly destructive. This was very common in the military, if a soldier didn't fit in, he was labeled as something similar to toxic so that others knew not to associate with him. Even then, when the military does it, there's a practical solution: the soldiers get out of the military. If you claim a larger group is toxic, you have to ask: these are our neighbors, what do we do with them? > But decisions regarding such deals are made by a small handful of people at the top Yeah, that really blew the article for me. Something like not-invented-here syndrome is a cultural issue, not bad corporate strategy.

tlb 8y ago

The term 'toxic culture' is mostly used to describe widespread harassment and bullying. 'Ossified' or 'stagnant' are more apt terms for a company that can't seem to seize new opportunities. The thing about margins is that it's a lot more fun to work in a division with high margins. Low margin businesses are grim, because every cost matters. When you can charge $5000 for the latest Xeon, you can pay high salaries and have fat travel budgets. So it's hard to get people used to working on high-margin divisions to move into a new low-margin division, even if it might eventually be bigger.

danmg 8y ago
You can't prescribe how language is used. Toxic culture now means this. Changes in usage happen over time.
- tlb 8y ago
  If you google 'toxic culture', all the top results (other than this article) refer to harassment and bullying rather than slowness to adapt to change. Same with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_workplace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_workplace. So a descriptive linguist would agree with me.
  - danmg 8y ago
    Maybe the phrase 'toxic culture' was imprecise and lazy to begin with. Now people are adapting it in a more precise way. That wiki page was started in 2011 and it's based on a pop-management book. It's hardly an established term.
    - EpicEng 8y ago
      >It's hardly an established term Yet you said... >You can't prescribe how language is used. Toxic culture now means this. So apparently you can.
      - danmg 8y ago

colinprince 8y ago

>Money, or its lack, doesn’t cause a financial collapse, human folly does; the numbers simply follow iow, the symptom should not be confused with the cause.

sergiolchan 8y ago

izzydata 8y ago

I volunteer myself. I promise to make only the best decisions. Forever.

JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
Can you break the laws of physics and help us get Moore's Law back on track?
- excalibur 8y ago
  Physics is raping our company. We need to make a better deal with physics.
  - dang 8y ago
    Please don't do this here.
    - NCWV 8y ago
      Do what?
- redial 8y ago
  He can promise to :)

gwbas1c 8y ago

I worked at Intel 2005-2007. I read the article hoping to see an independent description of the culture I observed. I hoped to see someone use words to explain something that I can't explain. The thing about Intel's culture that I observed was that it wasn't toxic at all. The worst thing that I could say about it was that it was boring, which was why I left so quickly. If anything was "toxic," it could be that some managers and co-workers had very bad people skills... But that happens at all large companies. HR can't witness and guide every interaction between employees. In reality, when I was there, Intel's HR made every effort to create a culture where, if something "toxic" happened, they could fix the situation as quickly as possible. Granted, things did happen. The "toxic" situations were more of ordinary human nature, and can happen anywhere, even in non work situations.

mirceal 8y ago
At a big corporation, like Intel, we cannot really talk about just one culture. I would say that your experience can vary quite a lot based on the team you’re in and to a certain degree the org you’re in. Various people assign the ‘toxic’ label to various things. What may be ‘meh’ for one person could be ‘toxic’ to another. Also: Mandatory HR is not your friend reminder. HR is there and it’s trained to protect the corporation.
- gwbas1c 8y ago
  > At a big corporation, like Intel, we cannot really talk about just one culture. I would say that your experience can vary quite a lot based on the team you’re in and to a certain degree the org you’re in. Slightly. Ultimately, the high-level culture is set by the execs. > Various people assign the ‘toxic’ label to various things. What may be ‘meh’ for one person could be ‘toxic’ to another. No, definitions are important. The word "toxic culture" has a very clear meaning; and the article does not use it correctly. Specifically, toxic culture means an environment that leads to high stress and poor mental health. That's not what the article discussed, and it's completely appropriate to criticize. A "toxic culture" is a very serious accusation, so incorrectly using the term isn't something that falls under the "I say toe-may-toe, you say toe-mah-toe" attitude.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

Interesting discussion here on the toxic culture reference. As I understand it, especially given the food analogy, Jean Gassee believes that the culture that Intel has evolved over time, prevents them from taking the steps that are necessary to continue to move forward. This culture is 'toxic' in that it is weakening the company rather than strengthening it. Gassee also makes the point that the culture of the company is more influential on its success or failure than its financial position. I found his argument fairly persuasive. Of course I worked at Intel during the Andy Grove years and understood that Intel is addicted to the high margins the x86 processors commanded. So when Gassee describes it as a cultural aversion to anything that might impact margins negatively, I can see that as a valid way of looking at it.

alain94040 8y ago
I'm surprised Jean-Louis didn't highlight the similarity between Intel's refusal to focus on mobile and his own push-back on licensing MacOS a decade earlier. Both decisions (cultures) have to do with switching from a high-margin product to a low-margin product, with no guarantee that you'll make up the difference in volume.
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  I agree that it would have been a good example of where Apple could have encroached on the Windows market more effectively. That said, the margins Apple has continued to make on its hardware suggest that not licensing MacOS was the right choice for the company.
- scarface74 8y ago
  The issue was never licensing. The issue was that he chased after margins and not market share.

baybal2 8y ago

>Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO? I do

DiabloD3 8y ago

I'd do it. No one else really seems to have the vision that a CEO needs to step up to that particular plate.

tlb 8y ago
Could you articulate your vision here?
- DiabloD3 8y ago
  Sure. Intel has an insane treasure trove of technology that they don't seem to know what to do with because they have confused profit with market domination (related ideas, but not equivalent, and one often leads to the other in both directions). Example: Intel obsesses over x86 in a very weird and unhealthy way. Intel has repeatedly developed new CPU architectures that did not suffer from the burden of the technical debt that has accrued. A lot of money was sank into, for example, the XScale ARM series. What killed it off was not because there was something technologically inferior with the product (it was rather popular for the time, the Snapdragon of it's age): what killed it was upper management thinking ARM sales could harm x86 sales, instead of just focusing on making sales happen. The result? Marvell bought it, and turned merely took the breaks off the product line and let it naturally evolve. Marvell didn't really do anything other than that; Intel intentionally strangled the project and that's why it was sold. That made no financial or logical sense no matter how much Intel apologists try to spin it. Intel cannot change the reality that their x86 designs are not for low power (which they finally admitted when they killed off the Atom SoC line for phones and tablets, which was drank power like it was going out of style), and Intel has locked itself out of one of the largest markets in the world. Another Example: I have two Haswell-era machines in my house. Both of them are intended to be used with CPUs that have iGPUs. They both have mini-Displayport plugs. Neither have Thunderbolt controllers. My Ivy Bridge-era MBP? Has a Thunderbolt controller, and it is the only machine in my house that would never benefit from it. The inclusion of said Thunderbolt controller was at the behest of Apple, not because of Intel. What could have happened? Every Intel machine since Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge should have had a Thunderbolt controller baked into iGPU, and Intel's sales of Thunderbolt controllers would have gone through the roof. Instead, Intel has to compete with USB 3.x, produces controllers intended for TB-over-Type-C, and does not produce USB 3.x device SoCs (essentially losing money on every sale since Intel should be doing this), only integrated host controllers for existing Intel platforms. The job of the CEO is to promote a culture inside of management where such decisions happen regularly. As CEO, I wouldn't be the one making decisions such as, say, making onboard Thunderbolt the default: I'd be making it possible for such decisions to happen naturally, to make sure the proper behavior is rewarded and diagnose issues in the corporate policy on why Intel isn't promoting the desired outcome internally. From everything I have seen, Intel doesn't particularly have a toxic culture internally, not in a way that compares to the posterchildren of that particular disease. What Intel has is a weird obsession with the past, and an absolutely immense treasure trove of technology that just sits there and isn't sold or marketed meaningfully. I think people have written entire books about the missteps of Intel. The problem is, all of us here know they were missteps, but Intel management glorifies them as the right choice and what lead to Intel's greatness. I just see a company that doesn't understand how to profit in the right ways, and instead has lead to a public perception that Intel doesn't care about customers, hides ticking time bombs in their products intentionally (Meltdown et al.), and has lead to the term "Intel Tax". AMD doens't sell a better CPU, nor a faster one. What they sell is a CPU that is fit correctly for the market, and have a public perception of actually caring about customers, caring about the long term support of their products, and try to leverage their technology in ways that benefit both the customer AND the shareholder. If I was tossed in as the CEO today? I'd try fix the public perception, try to figure out why Intel just sits on endless technology and isn't part of the right markets (even though they have or had technology that fits those markets), and try to figure out why good ideas (and the people that make them) are not promoted from with in. Intel is pretty much no different than Broadcom or Qualcomm, yet Intel can't sell the stuff they need to in a way that makes sense. Yet, every cell phone has Qualcomm parts in it, tons of IoC and network and NAS stuff has Broadcom parts in it (due to their huge family of ARM and MIPS SoCs), Broadcom also sells more Ethernet controllers than Intel. So, what the hell. If I become CEO today, I am delivering disruption to the management culture that prevents Intel from thriving the way it should.

known 8y ago

Firms with greater market power may innovate less https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/07/07/companies-appear-to-be-gaining-market-power https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/07/07/c...

excalibur 8y ago

Six months of doing my best but failing miserably because I have no idea how to run a massive company, followed by a multi-million-dollar golden parachute? Sign me up!

jpao79 8y ago

Saw this the other day. Seems like it would make sense. https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/03/google-clouds-coo-departs-after-7-months/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/03/google-clouds-coo-departs-...

TheMagicHorsey 8y ago

I worked at Intel for two years. They don't have a "toxic" culture. They are just like any other big company. Believe it or not, Google and Facebook will end up like that in 25 years too. Big organizations get like that. There's a generation that's raised on the company Kool-Aid and they live and breathe the company slogans and they forget that reality is a different place. That's not TOXIC ... that's just the nature of human organizations. And I mean all organizations that are large. If you ever hang out with DNC or GOP people who work for the party you'll see the same blinders. Same goes for people that work at NASA ... or in certain academic fields. They all believe certain myths internally that no experts outside their group believe. The point about Intel being addicted to narratives that aligned with its profits is true. And Microsoft was addicted to Windows and Office narratives too before Satya Nadella. It certainly makes you admire IBM as a company a lot more, doesn't it? They have weathered so many changes in the landscape, and they are still around.

dreamcompiler 8y ago
"Around" is relative. The last thing IBM innovated was Watson and they're downsizing that division because they can't figure out how to market it. IBM is mostly just a body shop for cheap overseas code monkeys now, isn't it?
- shindog 8y ago
  Bit of an ignorant statement even if it is IBM. What’s wrong with developers “overseas” (a completely relative term but forgivable in the YC context) why call them monkeys (not an sjw so not even going to go down that words rabbit hole). Having worked with many a yank their quality is just as variable and I’ve seen better output standard maintained by some European teams even if scale is limited.
  - dreamcompiler 8y ago
    Ask an IBM employee with 20 years experience who's been replaced by someone in a country with cheap labor with 2 years experience. No, scratch that. Ask an IBM customer if the quality of IBM's workforce is as good today as it was 10 years ago.

slivym 8y ago

No one going to point out that Diane Bryant mysteriously left Google recently? Long experience at Intel, expert in cloud, female face fits into the progressive culture they're trying to chase? Left Google at the perfect time? Seems like a super obvious move to me.

eatbitseveryday 8y ago
> Left Google at the perfect time? I agree this is really the most suggestive next step. I posit she left as a result of the CEO position opening up, not by mere coincidence.
medunham97123 8y ago
I worked at Intel for 15 years in IT, and Diane, was by far, the best CIO Intel ever had. I am conflicted about whether I would want her to return as the culture (as pointed out by others), is very stagnant (one of the reasons I left), and the classic good ole boys network (which is how Intel was really toxic) was still there and stronger than ever when I left in 2013.

samfisher83 8y ago

The article is mentioning they missed the mobile revolution. How many mobile chip manufacturers are making that much money on mobile chips. If you look at QCOM's earnings a majority of it is licensing its patents. QCOM chip business net income is 15%. INTC net is almost 30%. In its data center business its 50%.

shimon 8y ago
This is exactly the logic that led Intel down this path. They thought they were avoiding a field with low margins and could deepen their manufacturing advantage by remaining focused on the high-margin data center business. Meanwhile, the growth in mobile/GPU/SOC chips was so massive that it enabled Intel's competitors to actually catch up on manufacturing. Those competitors are going to eventually compete in the high end, and it's an uphill battle for Intel to become competitive in the fields they've ignored to date. If Intel does survive, it will be as a company with far lower margins in a brutally competitive environment. Read Ben Thompson on this: https://stratechery.com/2018/intel-and-the-danger-of-integration/ https://stratechery.com/2018/intel-and-the-danger-of-integra...
- samfisher83 8y ago
  Which of intel's competitors that make mobile chips are doing as well as intel? Please give me an example. I gave you numbers for QCT which makes mobile chips. TMSC and Samsung are going to spend money on R+D on chips irrespective of what intel does. Intel has a moat in the x86 market it has none in the ARM world. Read porters 5 forces and you will see why going into the mobile world made no sense for them. In my opinion Intel throwing money at lower margin business would not make sense to me. I guess we will find out what happens in the future.
  - medunham97123 8y ago
    Before I left Intel in 2013, they had recognized that the money was really in the value added chain of the mobile segment (i.e. iTunes). But the same stagnant culture that prevented them from seeing and embracing the mobile revolution also prevented them from making things like the Intel AppStore work. At this point, Intel really is just a vertical implementation of a company like TSMC.

mesozoic 8y ago

I volunteer. Gimme that golden parachute.

novaRom 8y ago

Intel PR was always too much addicted to Moore's Law. The Moore's Law is almost dead and so is Intel (Most semiconductor industry forecasters, including Gordon Moore, expect Moore's law will end by around 2025) Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Near-term_limits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Near-term_limits

PeCaN 8y ago
I mean, in the strict formulation of "transistor counts doubling every 2 years" it's been dead since like 2015 if not earlier. That said, the "death of Moore's law" is kind of this memetic doomsday device that doesn't really mean anything. We haven't had significantly faster single-threaded performance for years and we're developing ways to cope with that. Intel's real problem is that they keep missing the boat on new markets for chips. ARM got smartphones. Nvidia got machine learning. (Xeon Phi is cool. Maybe someone will notice. Maybe they'll fix the instruction decoder so it can actually operate at full speed. Who knows.) Intel killed off Itanium and then we discovered that every modern CPU design except Itanium is horrifically vulnerable. IBM is rapidly encroaching on the server market with innovations like CAPI/BlueLink. If Intel is "dead", it's not because of the death of Moore's Law, it's because they let everyone else eat their lunch.

ashishb 8y ago

I feel that their hegemony in the server market might be lost even faster: https://ashishb.net/tech/three-reasons-why-intel-might-lose-server-market-even-faster-than-consumer/ https://ashishb.net/tech/three-reasons-why-intel-might-lose-...

frmintel 8y ago

I worked at Intel for several years. I really enjoyed myself most of the time and got to work on interesting things. Because I was not serious about staying at Intel for a long time, I took a lot of risks that made my experience more fun. Most people probably wouldn’t do so. There was significant beaurecratic bloat and overhead, the whole organization felt stodgy and a lot of the people simply weren’t doing their jobs. This caused me to feel like I constantly had to cross lines I didn’t want to cross in order to execute at a decent pace. I come from a startup background and couldn’t tolerate the endless delays and lack of responsiveness I saw there. From my part of the company I mostly had a good time but I did see that I would not have a good time at many other parts of the organization. There are a lot of dead product lines with no future that need to get cut. No two ways about it. Cutting those products won’t be fun. Ossified is a good word for many parts of the company. I feel like the cultural harm caused by some of the layoffs left many people disenchanted. I heard one ex Intel employee say something like: “I got laid off because I am just another old white man.” That sentiment really is corrosive, I heard of that several times. Unfortunately, I think the successor to BK is going to be saddled with some ugly clean up work. Or they could be cowards and continue to turn the same crank for wall street. BK cleaned some of the mess (and created several new ones), there are many more to clean. It’s easy to be too pessimistic. Intel has unbelievable engineering skills under the hood. They are incredibly dangerous if they are able to shake this off and re-energize. I hope they find a truly progressive leader and don’t continue their descent into mediocrity.

dbuder 8y ago

Intel is so big that they need 3 CEOs and one of them has to be a silicon genius. That a company with so much talent can't bring dynamic products to market is a tragedy for the American economy. x86 doesn't need to die it just doesn't HAVE to be the only future.

ksec 8y ago

In an organisation like Intel, how much fight is needed for a new CEO to break the Company into three, Intel Foundry, Intel Silicon, and Intel IP, along with Intel Holding being the holding company? Intel Silicon will continue to produce the best in class x86 chip, from Desktop, Server, Notebook to Modem, FPGA, GPGPU and Network processor. And Storage like Optane and SSD. Intel Foundry will focus to be the best Foundry on the planet. Not only just tech and yield, but also the ecosystem around it; from tools to libraries. Intel IP will allow customers to use Intel's IP to fab their custom solution in Intel Foundry. x86 Core, 5G Modem, WiFi, Bluetooth, Network Processor, Memory controller, GPU, every building block Intel uses for Intel silicon. To be make to anything from SoC for PS5, Xbox with CPU and GPU, to Mobile SoC using ARM CPU + Intel Modem.