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I interviewed a candidate a couple of years ago who was, at the time, working on Intel's internal self-driving car team. It sounded like a totally directionless

by jpm_sd 5y ago

I interviewed a candidate a couple of years ago who was, at the time, working on Intel's internal self-driving car team. It sounded like a totally directionless, amateurish also-ran catastrophe. Years behind the competition. I wonder if this product line was in a similar situation.

krasin 5y ago
RealSense cameras are/were pretty good. Lower latency than Microsoft Kinect Azure (~70ms vs 300ms), decent depth quality and a well-maintained open source SDK.
ethbr0 5y ago
The problem with most of these "pet VP" projects is that there's never any clear link to the external market. Who are they benchmarking against? What are their performance targets? As a result, you get a team who's only deliverable is "PowerPoints that go up and to the right, compared to last week." And the project soldiers on, because to can it and admit failure would embarrass someone. If it's the CEO, even worse. Which is maybe explainable for a brand new technology (say, Palm with handwriting recognition), but less so when there are serious competitors out there with known performance levels.
nurspouse 5y ago
I was involved in the self-driving efforts at Intel. Can confirm the incompetence.
- junon 5y ago
  Yep. We had a really interesting medical use case for them but Intel didn't want to entertain us or even give a quote.
PhantomGremlin 5y ago
That sort of thing isn't new. About a dozen years ago I worked for a company that partnered with Intel on a big project. Ultimately the project failed. The biggest problems I saw were: 1) Too many cooks. Different groups from several locations had their fingers all over it. So there were too many expensive, useless features. 2) Too many engineers making product decisions. Engineers often are interested in neat technical features, not in whether a product should include those features. And often engineers don't really care how much those features cost in terms of design time and effort. 3) No real sense of urgency. Consequently there were other, hungrier, companies that ate Intel's lunch. None of this was new even then. All of this was understood by (other) Intel people way back in the early 1980s. The problem is just how do you herd cats (or engineers or chip architects)? It's very difficult. You may need to have a small, focused startup to accomplish something. Then that startup gets acquired by the big behemoth. See e.g. Cisco back about 20 years ago. I imagine the same thing happens now, but I don't follow the industry very closely any more. Also, Cisco at least acquired somewhat related companies. WTF was Intel doing buying companies like McAfee? Sometimes the spunky competition can even be internal. Again, going back a ways, Intel USA marketing was pushing the architects and engineers to do the Netburst architecture (clock speed was all-important). Which had a lot of problems. Fortunately Intel had what amounted to a startup in Israel. They came up with the Core architecture that saved Intel's ass.

by jpm_sd 5y ago

krasin 5y ago

RealSense cameras are/were pretty good. Lower latency than Microsoft Kinect Azure (~70ms vs 300ms), decent depth quality and a well-maintained open source SDK.

ethbr0 5y ago

The problem with most of these "pet VP" projects is that there's never any clear link to the external market. Who are they benchmarking against? What are their performance targets? As a result, you get a team who's only deliverable is "PowerPoints that go up and to the right, compared to last week." And the project soldiers on, because to can it and admit failure would embarrass someone. If it's the CEO, even worse. Which is maybe explainable for a brand new technology (say, Palm with handwriting recognition), but less so when there are serious competitors out there with known performance levels.

nurspouse 5y ago

I was involved in the self-driving efforts at Intel. Can confirm the incompetence.

junon 5y ago
Yep. We had a really interesting medical use case for them but Intel didn't want to entertain us or even give a quote.

PhantomGremlin 5y ago

That sort of thing isn't new. About a dozen years ago I worked for a company that partnered with Intel on a big project. Ultimately the project failed. The biggest problems I saw were: 1) Too many cooks. Different groups from several locations had their fingers all over it. So there were too many expensive, useless features. 2) Too many engineers making product decisions. Engineers often are interested in neat technical features, not in whether a product should include those features. And often engineers don't really care how much those features cost in terms of design time and effort. 3) No real sense of urgency. Consequently there were other, hungrier, companies that ate Intel's lunch. None of this was new even then. All of this was understood by (other) Intel people way back in the early 1980s. The problem is just how do you herd cats (or engineers or chip architects)? It's very difficult. You may need to have a small, focused startup to accomplish something. Then that startup gets acquired by the big behemoth. See e.g. Cisco back about 20 years ago. I imagine the same thing happens now, but I don't follow the industry very closely any more. Also, Cisco at least acquired somewhat related companies. WTF was Intel doing buying companies like McAfee? Sometimes the spunky competition can even be internal. Again, going back a ways, Intel USA marketing was pushing the architects and engineers to do the Netburst architecture (clock speed was all-important). Which had a lot of problems. Fortunately Intel had what amounted to a startup in Israel. They came up with the Core architecture that saved Intel's ass.