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AMD employs 10,000 people, yet they are spectators watching NVIDIA rake in monopoly profits on GPGPU year after year. And you're saying it's because they can't

AMD employs 10,000 people, yet they are spectators watching NVIDIA rake in monopoly profits on GPGPU year after year. And you're saying it's because they can't afford to get 10 good engineers to work on framework support because their shares may crash at some point in the future? I'm sorry, but this makes absolutely no sense at all. P/E or corrections have absolutely nothing to do with it. Salaries are paid from revenue, not from profits, and their revenues have been growing for years. They don't need to pay engineers in stock options. This is about priorities and execution. Getting 10 engineers to focus on an obvious multi-billion dollar opportunity that leverages existing investments is not "throwing your weight around". It's basic management competence. And it's interesting work. I don't believe that engineers need low P/Es as an incentive to work on a key part of AI infrastructure that only very few people get to work on.

fluffy87 7y ago
FWIW I applied to AMD for an HPC application engineer position (GPU compute) and a couple of weeks later to a similar position by a direct competitor. In the time it took the other company to contact me, do 6 interviews, negotiate contract, and get me signed, I haven’t even been contacted by AMD. Their position is still open, I’m a perfect fit and I haven’t been rejected either. I suppose I’ll get an automatic rejection letter at some point. The online application system for AMD is just quite bad. Looking at my application in their system, everything is full with “Unknown” and I can’t event put in my skills. It wouldn’t surprise me if on their database I’m a horrible candidate.
m0zg 7y ago
>> And it's interesting work. It's also a hard slog, and something very few people _really_ know how to do. Ideally you have to be both deep learning / HPC expert _and_ low level programming expert, and on an "exotic" platform to boot, not on the CPU. Such people are scarcer than hen's teeth, and they have no problem whatsoever getting mid-six-figure employment at companies that don't treat them as an afterthought, and where they can hope for a strong upward trajectory career-wise. I agree with the rest of your point, and in particular that this is an existential threat to AMD as a whole. I don't get why they don't treat it as one. Be that as it may, I think you're severely overestimating the present level of "management competence" allocated to something that's not currently perceived as a do-or-die situation at a company that was dying just a year ago.

fluffy87 7y ago

FWIW I applied to AMD for an HPC application engineer position (GPU compute) and a couple of weeks later to a similar position by a direct competitor. In the time it took the other company to contact me, do 6 interviews, negotiate contract, and get me signed, I haven’t even been contacted by AMD. Their position is still open, I’m a perfect fit and I haven’t been rejected either. I suppose I’ll get an automatic rejection letter at some point. The online application system for AMD is just quite bad. Looking at my application in their system, everything is full with “Unknown” and I can’t event put in my skills. It wouldn’t surprise me if on their database I’m a horrible candidate.

m0zg 7y ago

>> And it's interesting work. It's also a hard slog, and something very few people _really_ know how to do. Ideally you have to be both deep learning / HPC expert _and_ low level programming expert, and on an "exotic" platform to boot, not on the CPU. Such people are scarcer than hen's teeth, and they have no problem whatsoever getting mid-six-figure employment at companies that don't treat them as an afterthought, and where they can hope for a strong upward trajectory career-wise. I agree with the rest of your point, and in particular that this is an existential threat to AMD as a whole. I don't get why they don't treat it as one. Be that as it may, I think you're severely overestimating the present level of "management competence" allocated to something that's not currently perceived as a do-or-die situation at a company that was dying just a year ago.