5 ms·

Intel restructures and creates new business units and leadership roles

75 points by mroche 5y ago

dijit 5y ago
I guess this is because they got a new CEO recently, which makes total sense as a shakeup is needed. But; has anyone else ever experienced the "swell" of middle management and "restructuring" which always seems to result in more people in management positions? I've now worked in three companies where this is extremely apparent. In the latest company I've gone from 3-degrees from the CEO to 6 in little over ten months. I think I understand why this happens: you need to promote people, but: 1) Is it bad, I suspect it is because there's usually not _more_ managerial work than there is individual contributor work- but then more managers tend to need more managers to talk to/make powerpoints for/make decisions without involving the team 2) If it's bad, is there any way to stop it?
- fallingknife 5y ago
  https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
  - markus_zhang 5y ago
    If we imagine companies as empires, this almost comes as obvious or apparent.
- Afforess 5y ago
  Highly hierarchical, "top-down" organizations end up requiring a lot of managers in order to "enact" the top down policy decisions. The more decisions are imposed top-down instead of bottom up, the more management and administrative overhead you incur. Management is needed for top-down decisions because you need someone to "convince" teams to do something for you. Ideally, it's obvious to employees that the change is good and necessary, but if it's not, then this coercement requires enforcement - hence more management. The opposite end of the spectrum is "flat" orgs, like Valve software, who have few/no managers. In a flat org, all decisions are bottom up.
  - Galxeagle 5y ago
    And just to defend top-down orgs a bit, the corollary is that because different teams might make different decisions, flat/bottom-up organizations tend to be less standardized - more flexible at the cost of some chaos. A tendency for launching and killing products in quick succession is one possible implication. For Valve launching different games that works, at Google launching/killing chat apps is starting to hurt their reputation. An ideal company is a mix of both, but which policies are ‘imposed from above’ and which are allowed to ‘boil up from the bottom’ is usually an endless source of discussion - I wonder which way Intel is going
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      > An ideal company is a mix of both The best company I've ever worked at (retail, surprisingly) squared the circle thusly: Strategy (i.e. goals, culture, priorities) flowed top-down. And the company spent serious time doing it pervasively and well. Solutions (i.e. implementations, features, products) flowed bottom-up. Part of their corporate culture was that a manager above team level should never suggest how to do something. You could bounce ideas off them, but they were pretty serious about it being the person doing the implementation work's decision.
      - ketzo 5y ago
        Wow, that seems like a really strong set of guiding principles. I like that a lot.
  - varjag 5y ago
    What is "bottom up" exactly if as you say there is no hierarchy?
  - geofft 5y ago
    I used to work for a flat organization, with few formal managers. I now work for a much "taller" organization, with four levels of management between myself and the owner. In practice, at the flat organization, there were ways that the people at the top were able to impose their views and preferences on the company. Most obviously, the folks who had been at the company for a long time were friends with the owners, and they had a lot of unofficial influence over things went, even if there was no org chart putting them over other people. If a change seemed good and necessary to the in-group, then they were in a position to enforce it. If it did not, there was no way to get them to go along with it. Also, in practice, at the taller organization, there are a lot of bottom-up decisions anyway. It's just that those decisions get to be in fact bottom up - I go to my manager, who talks to some other manager while I keep hacking on something else, and either that manager agrees, or more likely they point out something else and my manager comes back to me with a more balanced alternative. At the flat organization, decisions were bottom sideways. I had to go to a bunch of ICs from different teams and try to convince them of the merits of some idea, and if they had conflicting goals, I had to mediate that myself. I'm much happier at the taller organization which has a paperwork-heavy performance review and promotion process (compared to the flat organization, which also had no titles and where performance reviews were a brief closed-door meeting with the one manager between you and the owners). I find it works better for me: I understand better other people's expectations of me and I am better able to communicate what I want to change too. It's extra time, but it's well worth it for the predictability, and I feel much more supported trying to make difficult cross-team changes. It doesn't work for everyone, of course; different people have different personalities.
- EricBurnett 5y ago
  > 1) Is it bad? Yes and no. It's hard for any given manager to support a large team - managing too many often results in either burning out, or being very hands-off with the team... limited career coaching, limited knowledge of the individual context, etc. And it's somewhat worse at higher levels of middle management, where the individual is responsible for aggregating the needs of between say 2 and 25x that of the managers below them. Of course, it's not that simple. avg 5 reports vs 10 is only 1 or 2 on org chart depth, but almost 2x on the number of middle managers. (And so 3 sounds particularly bad, if you're 'average'). If middle management is growing because the company is growing, that's probably fine, including resetting after large growth in the lower levels. If it's growing because fan-in is reducing, that's more of a concern... possibly managers are becoming lower quality, or there's a lot more top-down burden, or individuals are becoming harder to manage (for many reasons). None of those are great signs.
  - EricBurnett 5y ago
    Relatedly, I'd love to see an experiment in segregating "people managers" from "organizational managers". Imagine having one manager who is responsible for coaching your career growth, helping ensure you have the right opportunities, etc; and another manager who is responsible for the product you work on. You could have lots of people managers for support, and few organizational managers for minimizing org chart depth between products and the CEO. Of course, in some places this approximates the split between PM and eng. I don't have great breadth of experience, but I haven't seen that work amazingly... though admittedly, more from PM churn issues than necessarily fundamental infeasibility. But still, it might not be as simple as that.
    - m-ee 5y ago
      What your describing is a matrix org. I’ve only seen managers praise it and every IC I know hates it, including myself. But maybe it’s done right somewhere.
    - lupire 5y ago
      "And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now."
- mdorazio 5y ago
  I've personally seen it go both ways, depending on the type of restructuring, the type of company, and the direction of the new leadership team. Sometimes you end up with more managers, other times managers are gutted to make the company leaner. Promotions rarely come into play unless there's a strong fear that good people will leave en masse if they don't get promoted. I would say that whether it is good or bad depends on the goals of the restructuring and how well the result matches those goals. More middle management is neither good nor bad on its own - sometimes very flat organizations need more management to enforce processes and policies that let the company grow efficiently, other times very hierarchical organizations need less management between decision makers and ICs to move faster.
- th-miracle-257 5y ago
  If this is what they mean by shakeup then it’s just the regular stuff in recent Intel past. When I was at Intel in 2 years I saw at least 6 reorgs and had 4 managers. You can imagine my career growth or the lack of it. Unfortunately it needs a real deep clean of non technical power pint happy management and clueless engineers. And the politicking is so deeply entrenched in culture now that the new CEO himself might be a victim of it if he is under false illusion that restoring Intel to past glory is just about turning a few knobs. Thankfully I left for a FAANG before it was too late with a wonderful hike, better colleagues and working conditions. The most irsksome thing for Intel to attract back those who have left is almost no one of those I know and in touch with who have left wants to be back and it’s not the money but the poor experience of working there. If anyone can give Amazon a run for its money in treating its employees badly, my bet is on Intel.
  - reedjosh 5y ago
    > If anyone can give Amazon a run for its money in treating its employees badly, my bet is on Intel. For sure this, but for me it is the money. In the last year I was promoted and gained 11% at Intel. I left for a startup, and gained 40% more. I'm pending an offer from a FAANG now and I anticipate that within a year I will have 2.5x my previous total comp at Intel. Further, Intel markets to its own employees in an extremely disgusting manner. Great Place to Work, Overpriced food branded as healthy, Programs for meditation and whatnot, which all sound nice, but mean next to nothing. Just provide some decent comp and remove non-technical managers from managing technical people and processes. Pitching a project was always a nightmare of whether the non-technical manager would get the idea (or understand the possibilities) or not.
  - willk 5y ago
    > When I was at Intel in 2 years I saw at least 6 reorgs and had 4 managers. You can imagine my career growth or the lack of it. Unfortunately it needs a real deep clean of non technical power pint happy management and clueless engineers. My experience at Intel as well. Just about 4 years and had 7 managers through 6ish reorgs. Oddly enough, they never changed the director level management. They did an other reorg the week after I left. I think Intel's problem is a senior leadership problem more than anything. They keep shuffling the pieces around just to get the same results.
- User23 5y ago
  This is a well known phenomenon that was described by C. Northcote Parkinson[1]. While Parkinson's law is often misunderstood by readers, including Wikipedia editors, who can't make it past the first paragraph of a work, the actual law is a formula describing the growth of bureaucracies: x = (2k^m + p)/n, "where k is the number of staff seeking promotion through the appointment of subordinates; p represents the difference between the ages of appointment and retirement; m is the number of man hours devoted to answering minutes within the department; and n is the number of effective units being administered. Then x will be the number of new staff required each year." In this context "minutes" are basically printed out emails. There's much more to it and it's a great read. And to answer your second question, in virtually all cases the only thing that can be done is to wait for the organization to fail. There's a reason there aren't many 100 year companies. [1] http://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf http://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf
  - pram 5y ago
    "It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." This is gold
- pram 5y ago
  Last company I was at did a reorg which switched from product to functional based orgs (I guess) ... and I went from 4 managers to the CEO, to like an almost incomprehensible web of directors. Then a manager was added to my team which sent us a level down even further. This was ostensibly done to 'streamline' the orgs which seems deeply hilarious
- lumost 5y ago
  Managers outwardly grow by acquiring prestige/reports/products. There are many counterproductive methods of gaming this success criteria via empire building, irrational promotion of internal managers, and over-hiring. Growing startups either need to hire skilled management from successful firms by offering an outwardly visible step up - or promote internally. Either way your odds of hiring a manager gaming the metrics to one extent or another are pretty high. A good alternative is to aim for less management overall and explicitly avoid using metrics like hiring etc in your evaluation of managers. Almost every large and successful firm I’ve known has gone through a “less management” phase prior to reverting to the mean.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > I've now worked in three companies where this is extremely apparent. In the latest company I've gone from 3-degrees from the CEO to 6 in little over ten months. On the other end of the spectrum, I worked at a company where the CEO tried to eliminate middle management and manage engineers through 1 layer of management or even directly by himself. It was terrible. Large companies require subdivision and layers of amazement. Getting it right is difficult. Getting it wrong is easy. In my opinion, it requires an executive management team that is focused on deliberately building the right structure rather than letting it evolve organically. Organic middle management growth usually turns into a race for headcount because the quickest way to move up is to put more people underneath yourself. An upper management that knows how to set the structure from above and have zero tolerance for political games is key.
- ksec 5y ago
  Doesn't it depends? I mean you cant expect everyone to be within 3-degrees from the CEO if you are at Apple or Intel. The organisation is way too large. Google thought all management sucks only to find themselves in complete chaos once they grow to certain size. I mean everything is a balancing Act. But Silicon Valley, and technology somehow has some embedded extremism within it. And I dont understand why.
foobarbazetc 5y ago
This'll be the restructuring that fixes it...
SkyMarshal 5y ago
This is basically an update on ways Intel is executing the strategy new CEO Pat Gelsinger layed out a few months ago [1]. "Focus and execution" are key priorities for Gelsinger, so creating business units with more limited scope, vs everything and the kitchen sink, and led by experts in those areas, makes sense. [1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26568598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26568598
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
xt00 5y ago
So seems like from this grouping of exec's: 1. make semi-custom Xeon chips for cloud providers with expected prices 2. make a competitor to the Apple M processors? 3. keep making desktop class processors 4. everything else that Intel does (iot stuff, mobile-eye stuff, etc) 5. GPU / high performance computing stuff for cloud providers / HPC customers Basically seems like the way they would differentiate things would be: 1. Apple M class processor competitor (low power, low cost, integrated GPU, reasonable core count) 2. Desktop class: compete directly with high core count AMD processors 3. Servers / HPC: ask the customers what they want and build it 4. deprioritize all of the "everything else" category except Mobileeye stuff 5. seems like stuff like discrete GPU's is the odd man out here, so probably will not be a priority Probably missing something... hmm..
- b9a2cab5 5y ago
  You forgot to mention they put the former Chief People Officer in charge of Datacenter & AI... where are the engineers?
  - ZeroCool2u 5y ago
    This took me by surprise at first too, but here's a bit more context: "Prior to her role serving as Intel’s chief people officer, she led Intel’s Network Platforms Group." From her bio: "Rivera holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Pennsylvania State University. She sits on the Equinix board of directors; she is a member of Berkeley’s engineering advisory board and a member of the Intel Foundation Board; and she is part of Intel’s Latinx Leadership Council."
syntaxing 5y ago
Used to work in the Semi industry and I hear Intel pays super mediocre. Has this changed?
- oumua_don17 5y ago
  Nope, not at all. They still pay poorly compared to FAANG to whom they have already lost a big chunk of engineering talent.
gumby 5y ago
Based on the past this is just moving the deck chairs (and dropping a couple of extras in for good measure). Given where they are need someone focused on core execution (process & design) not markets.
ksec 5y ago
Trying to not read too much into the politics cough, but; Navin Shenoy is out. Sandra Rivera - It was always strange she moved ( or sidelined ) to Chief People Officer in 2019. ( One of those Intel politics we may someday figure out ). Nick McKeown - ex Barefoot Networks. But never got much to do at Intel since he joined 2019. When you have talent and you dont use them. At least he is in charge of Network now. Greg Lavender coming in from VMWare. I am guessing Pat Gelsinger needs someone close to help shake things up faster, or as he put it "but we must move faster to fulfill our ambitions,”. Intel is too big and moving too slow for changes. Raja Koduri - ....... personally I am very skeptical. But Jim Keller seems to like him, so I guess he gets some benefits of doubt and we shall wait and see. These changes come on the heels of a larger as-yet unconfirmed effort to restructure the company's Manufacturing and Operations and separate Global Supply Chain groups into one Manufacturing, Supply Chain and Operations group. - So even more shaking up coming soon.

75 points by mroche 5y ago

I guess this is because they got a new CEO recently, which makes total sense as a shakeup is needed. But; has anyone else ever experienced the "swell" of middle management and "restructuring" which always seems to result in more people in management positions? I've now worked in three companies where this is extremely apparent. In the latest company I've gone from 3-degrees from the CEO to 6 in little over ten months. I think I understand why this happens: you need to promote people, but: 1) Is it bad, I suspect it is because there's usually not _more_ managerial work than there is individual contributor work- but then more managers tend to need more managers to talk to/make powerpoints for/make decisions without involving the team 2) If it's bad, is there any way to stop it?

fallingknife 5y ago
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  If we imagine companies as empires, this almost comes as obvious or apparent.
Afforess 5y ago
Highly hierarchical, "top-down" organizations end up requiring a lot of managers in order to "enact" the top down policy decisions. The more decisions are imposed top-down instead of bottom up, the more management and administrative overhead you incur. Management is needed for top-down decisions because you need someone to "convince" teams to do something for you. Ideally, it's obvious to employees that the change is good and necessary, but if it's not, then this coercement requires enforcement - hence more management. The opposite end of the spectrum is "flat" orgs, like Valve software, who have few/no managers. In a flat org, all decisions are bottom up.
- Galxeagle 5y ago
  And just to defend top-down orgs a bit, the corollary is that because different teams might make different decisions, flat/bottom-up organizations tend to be less standardized - more flexible at the cost of some chaos. A tendency for launching and killing products in quick succession is one possible implication. For Valve launching different games that works, at Google launching/killing chat apps is starting to hurt their reputation. An ideal company is a mix of both, but which policies are ‘imposed from above’ and which are allowed to ‘boil up from the bottom’ is usually an endless source of discussion - I wonder which way Intel is going
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    > An ideal company is a mix of both The best company I've ever worked at (retail, surprisingly) squared the circle thusly: Strategy (i.e. goals, culture, priorities) flowed top-down. And the company spent serious time doing it pervasively and well. Solutions (i.e. implementations, features, products) flowed bottom-up. Part of their corporate culture was that a manager above team level should never suggest how to do something. You could bounce ideas off them, but they were pretty serious about it being the person doing the implementation work's decision.
    - ketzo 5y ago
      Wow, that seems like a really strong set of guiding principles. I like that a lot.
- varjag 5y ago
  What is "bottom up" exactly if as you say there is no hierarchy?
- geofft 5y ago
  I used to work for a flat organization, with few formal managers. I now work for a much "taller" organization, with four levels of management between myself and the owner. In practice, at the flat organization, there were ways that the people at the top were able to impose their views and preferences on the company. Most obviously, the folks who had been at the company for a long time were friends with the owners, and they had a lot of unofficial influence over things went, even if there was no org chart putting them over other people. If a change seemed good and necessary to the in-group, then they were in a position to enforce it. If it did not, there was no way to get them to go along with it. Also, in practice, at the taller organization, there are a lot of bottom-up decisions anyway. It's just that those decisions get to be in fact bottom up - I go to my manager, who talks to some other manager while I keep hacking on something else, and either that manager agrees, or more likely they point out something else and my manager comes back to me with a more balanced alternative. At the flat organization, decisions were bottom sideways. I had to go to a bunch of ICs from different teams and try to convince them of the merits of some idea, and if they had conflicting goals, I had to mediate that myself. I'm much happier at the taller organization which has a paperwork-heavy performance review and promotion process (compared to the flat organization, which also had no titles and where performance reviews were a brief closed-door meeting with the one manager between you and the owners). I find it works better for me: I understand better other people's expectations of me and I am better able to communicate what I want to change too. It's extra time, but it's well worth it for the predictability, and I feel much more supported trying to make difficult cross-team changes. It doesn't work for everyone, of course; different people have different personalities.
EricBurnett 5y ago
> 1) Is it bad? Yes and no. It's hard for any given manager to support a large team - managing too many often results in either burning out, or being very hands-off with the team... limited career coaching, limited knowledge of the individual context, etc. And it's somewhat worse at higher levels of middle management, where the individual is responsible for aggregating the needs of between say 2 and 25x that of the managers below them. Of course, it's not that simple. avg 5 reports vs 10 is only 1 or 2 on org chart depth, but almost 2x on the number of middle managers. (And so 3 sounds particularly bad, if you're 'average'). If middle management is growing because the company is growing, that's probably fine, including resetting after large growth in the lower levels. If it's growing because fan-in is reducing, that's more of a concern... possibly managers are becoming lower quality, or there's a lot more top-down burden, or individuals are becoming harder to manage (for many reasons). None of those are great signs.
- EricBurnett 5y ago
  Relatedly, I'd love to see an experiment in segregating "people managers" from "organizational managers". Imagine having one manager who is responsible for coaching your career growth, helping ensure you have the right opportunities, etc; and another manager who is responsible for the product you work on. You could have lots of people managers for support, and few organizational managers for minimizing org chart depth between products and the CEO. Of course, in some places this approximates the split between PM and eng. I don't have great breadth of experience, but I haven't seen that work amazingly... though admittedly, more from PM churn issues than necessarily fundamental infeasibility. But still, it might not be as simple as that.
  - m-ee 5y ago
    What your describing is a matrix org. I’ve only seen managers praise it and every IC I know hates it, including myself. But maybe it’s done right somewhere.
  - lupire 5y ago
    "And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now."
mdorazio 5y ago
I've personally seen it go both ways, depending on the type of restructuring, the type of company, and the direction of the new leadership team. Sometimes you end up with more managers, other times managers are gutted to make the company leaner. Promotions rarely come into play unless there's a strong fear that good people will leave en masse if they don't get promoted. I would say that whether it is good or bad depends on the goals of the restructuring and how well the result matches those goals. More middle management is neither good nor bad on its own - sometimes very flat organizations need more management to enforce processes and policies that let the company grow efficiently, other times very hierarchical organizations need less management between decision makers and ICs to move faster.
th-miracle-257 5y ago
If this is what they mean by shakeup then it’s just the regular stuff in recent Intel past. When I was at Intel in 2 years I saw at least 6 reorgs and had 4 managers. You can imagine my career growth or the lack of it. Unfortunately it needs a real deep clean of non technical power pint happy management and clueless engineers. And the politicking is so deeply entrenched in culture now that the new CEO himself might be a victim of it if he is under false illusion that restoring Intel to past glory is just about turning a few knobs. Thankfully I left for a FAANG before it was too late with a wonderful hike, better colleagues and working conditions. The most irsksome thing for Intel to attract back those who have left is almost no one of those I know and in touch with who have left wants to be back and it’s not the money but the poor experience of working there. If anyone can give Amazon a run for its money in treating its employees badly, my bet is on Intel.
- reedjosh 5y ago
  > If anyone can give Amazon a run for its money in treating its employees badly, my bet is on Intel. For sure this, but for me it is the money. In the last year I was promoted and gained 11% at Intel. I left for a startup, and gained 40% more. I'm pending an offer from a FAANG now and I anticipate that within a year I will have 2.5x my previous total comp at Intel. Further, Intel markets to its own employees in an extremely disgusting manner. Great Place to Work, Overpriced food branded as healthy, Programs for meditation and whatnot, which all sound nice, but mean next to nothing. Just provide some decent comp and remove non-technical managers from managing technical people and processes. Pitching a project was always a nightmare of whether the non-technical manager would get the idea (or understand the possibilities) or not.
- willk 5y ago
  > When I was at Intel in 2 years I saw at least 6 reorgs and had 4 managers. You can imagine my career growth or the lack of it. Unfortunately it needs a real deep clean of non technical power pint happy management and clueless engineers. My experience at Intel as well. Just about 4 years and had 7 managers through 6ish reorgs. Oddly enough, they never changed the director level management. They did an other reorg the week after I left. I think Intel's problem is a senior leadership problem more than anything. They keep shuffling the pieces around just to get the same results.
User23 5y ago
This is a well known phenomenon that was described by C. Northcote Parkinson[1]. While Parkinson's law is often misunderstood by readers, including Wikipedia editors, who can't make it past the first paragraph of a work, the actual law is a formula describing the growth of bureaucracies: x = (2k^m + p)/n, "where k is the number of staff seeking promotion through the appointment of subordinates; p represents the difference between the ages of appointment and retirement; m is the number of man hours devoted to answering minutes within the department; and n is the number of effective units being administered. Then x will be the number of new staff required each year." In this context "minutes" are basically printed out emails. There's much more to it and it's a great read. And to answer your second question, in virtually all cases the only thing that can be done is to wait for the organization to fail. There's a reason there aren't many 100 year companies. [1] http://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf http://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf
- pram 5y ago
  "It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." This is gold
pram 5y ago
Last company I was at did a reorg which switched from product to functional based orgs (I guess) ... and I went from 4 managers to the CEO, to like an almost incomprehensible web of directors. Then a manager was added to my team which sent us a level down even further. This was ostensibly done to 'streamline' the orgs which seems deeply hilarious
lumost 5y ago
Managers outwardly grow by acquiring prestige/reports/products. There are many counterproductive methods of gaming this success criteria via empire building, irrational promotion of internal managers, and over-hiring. Growing startups either need to hire skilled management from successful firms by offering an outwardly visible step up - or promote internally. Either way your odds of hiring a manager gaming the metrics to one extent or another are pretty high. A good alternative is to aim for less management overall and explicitly avoid using metrics like hiring etc in your evaluation of managers. Almost every large and successful firm I’ve known has gone through a “less management” phase prior to reverting to the mean.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> I've now worked in three companies where this is extremely apparent. In the latest company I've gone from 3-degrees from the CEO to 6 in little over ten months. On the other end of the spectrum, I worked at a company where the CEO tried to eliminate middle management and manage engineers through 1 layer of management or even directly by himself. It was terrible. Large companies require subdivision and layers of amazement. Getting it right is difficult. Getting it wrong is easy. In my opinion, it requires an executive management team that is focused on deliberately building the right structure rather than letting it evolve organically. Organic middle management growth usually turns into a race for headcount because the quickest way to move up is to put more people underneath yourself. An upper management that knows how to set the structure from above and have zero tolerance for political games is key.
ksec 5y ago
Doesn't it depends? I mean you cant expect everyone to be within 3-degrees from the CEO if you are at Apple or Intel. The organisation is way too large. Google thought all management sucks only to find themselves in complete chaos once they grow to certain size. I mean everything is a balancing Act. But Silicon Valley, and technology somehow has some embedded extremism within it. And I dont understand why.

foobarbazetc 5y ago

This'll be the restructuring that fixes it...

SkyMarshal 5y ago

This is basically an update on ways Intel is executing the strategy new CEO Pat Gelsinger layed out a few months ago [1]. "Focus and execution" are key priorities for Gelsinger, so creating business units with more limited scope, vs everything and the kitchen sink, and led by experts in those areas, makes sense. [1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26568598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26568598

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

xt00 5y ago

So seems like from this grouping of exec's: 1. make semi-custom Xeon chips for cloud providers with expected prices 2. make a competitor to the Apple M processors? 3. keep making desktop class processors 4. everything else that Intel does (iot stuff, mobile-eye stuff, etc) 5. GPU / high performance computing stuff for cloud providers / HPC customers Basically seems like the way they would differentiate things would be: 1. Apple M class processor competitor (low power, low cost, integrated GPU, reasonable core count) 2. Desktop class: compete directly with high core count AMD processors 3. Servers / HPC: ask the customers what they want and build it 4. deprioritize all of the "everything else" category except Mobileeye stuff 5. seems like stuff like discrete GPU's is the odd man out here, so probably will not be a priority Probably missing something... hmm..

b9a2cab5 5y ago
You forgot to mention they put the former Chief People Officer in charge of Datacenter & AI... where are the engineers?
- ZeroCool2u 5y ago
  This took me by surprise at first too, but here's a bit more context: "Prior to her role serving as Intel’s chief people officer, she led Intel’s Network Platforms Group." From her bio: "Rivera holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Pennsylvania State University. She sits on the Equinix board of directors; she is a member of Berkeley’s engineering advisory board and a member of the Intel Foundation Board; and she is part of Intel’s Latinx Leadership Council."

syntaxing 5y ago

Used to work in the Semi industry and I hear Intel pays super mediocre. Has this changed?

oumua_don17 5y ago
Nope, not at all. They still pay poorly compared to FAANG to whom they have already lost a big chunk of engineering talent.

gumby 5y ago

Based on the past this is just moving the deck chairs (and dropping a couple of extras in for good measure). Given where they are need someone focused on core execution (process & design) not markets.

ksec 5y ago

Trying to not read too much into the politics cough, but; Navin Shenoy is out. Sandra Rivera - It was always strange she moved ( or sidelined ) to Chief People Officer in 2019. ( One of those Intel politics we may someday figure out ). Nick McKeown - ex Barefoot Networks. But never got much to do at Intel since he joined 2019. When you have talent and you dont use them. At least he is in charge of Network now. Greg Lavender coming in from VMWare. I am guessing Pat Gelsinger needs someone close to help shake things up faster, or as he put it "but we must move faster to fulfill our ambitions,”. Intel is too big and moving too slow for changes. Raja Koduri - ....... personally I am very skeptical. But Jim Keller seems to like him, so I guess he gets some benefits of doubt and we shall wait and see. These changes come on the heels of a larger as-yet unconfirmed effort to restructure the company's Manufacturing and Operations and separate Global Supply Chain groups into one Manufacturing, Supply Chain and Operations group. - So even more shaking up coming soon.