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> It has been clear to us for years that Samsung has baaad internal communication issues... It's clear that Samsung culture prevents people from admitting mista

> It has been clear to us for years that Samsung has baaad internal communication issues... It's clear that Samsung culture prevents people from admitting mistakes... Jesus H. Christ on a fucking hockey stick. I doubt I've ever read such a breathless hit piece with so many unsupported assertions summarily presented as fact. I worked for Samsung Semiconductor for ten years and left as a software engineering manager. None of these assertions and accusations in the comments here or below leveled at the people with whom I used to work ring true from my perspective. Communication issues? Not admitting mistakes? Please... enlighten me. Tell me how we worked.

lostlogin 5y ago
Could you tell us how you worked?
- jason-phillips 5y ago
  Just to clarify, is this with or without Aaron Franklin brisket for lunch?
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    This has shot right over my head, but as a google suggests the place is well regarded, I’m going to say ‘with’…
    - jason-phillips 5y ago
      We worked hard and we worked well together. We did whatever it took to succeed. Sometimes that meant working 20 hours days on some global supply chain project. I worked with a lot of really great people and a lot of terrific engineers. Best users I've ever had.
      - vasco 5y ago
        Imagine looking back at 20 hour days fondly. And you were an engineering manager. Nobody does good work 10+ hours into a shift. 20 hour days are good for one thing, allowing your boss to understaff teams with no consequence.
      - noirbot 5y ago
        Given what I know about Samsung in Austin, I'm pretty sure you're not paying nearly enough to justify anything close to 20 hours a day. Just because you work with "great people" on "a global supply chain project" doesn't sound like anywhere I'd ever want to work, and it seems like the attrition numbers I've seen agree with that.
        jason-phillips 5y ago
        > doesn't sound like anywhere I'd ever want to work What if I threw in a brisket from Franklin's and told you I would be your pal
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
mardifoufs 5y ago
I agree that the article is very lacking in substance and as you said, a hit piece. Yet there really seem to be a problem with Samsung's chips, especially their SoCs. They have underperformed for years now, and have always been inferior even in the high end (except maybe for the galaxy s6). That's despite repeated performance promises and a complete control over the entire production process (from design to fab to assembly). So what gives? I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on that especially since it's hard to find any legitimate information beyond rumors.
- glowingly 5y ago
  In many ways this is still true of Intel today. Like Samsung, their chips draw more power (even with "Intel 7" supposedly drawing parity to TSMC 7N) and are often slower than their competition's chips. Maybe it's an IDM mindset issue? It seems the market has moved on to pure play foundries. For example, Nvidia's first fab partner was STMicro, an IDM, and Nvidia noted STMicro was unable to focus on being a fab partner. After that, Nvidia moved onto TSMC, also working with IBM, UMC, and Samsung at later points in time.
- jason-phillips 5y ago
  I was a software engineer and did not work in LSI, so I cannot comment on that in a way which would be most informative, but I will try from a different perspective. An accurate answer would be incredibly complex, obviously. Samsung, from my perspective, mostly focuses on this year's production and developing next year's model. Yes, there is work done planning for new fabs and global supply chain systems, but 98% of cycles are spent on this year's production and designing next year's model. Samsung accounts for a huge percentage of South Korea's GDP, about 20%. Therefore, Samsung needs to favor stability over taking risks associated with living at the bleeding-edge of innovation. Samsung always did play the safe game when I worked there (and for good reason when you're babysitting a $20 billion factory with $100 million of product that could be scrapped at any time). Again, I wasn't in LSI but this is my perception overall having worked there, traveled to Korea and learned Korean culture.
  - dylan522p 5y ago
iron2disulfide 5y ago
I've worked with Samsung Semiconductor as a partner/customer and it did seem to me from the outside that there was a culture of not admitting mistakes/failings, and poor communication between different parts of the company (i.e. foundry to silicon engineering). Granted, you could say the same thing re: communication about many large companies -- I'm sure the same phenomenon occurs at Intel or IBM (back before they went fabless). Things may have been different on software teams vs. silicon/hardware teams.
cxr 5y ago
NB: Jason is referring to "S2" aka Samsung Austin Semiconductor. I'm familiar with Jason's previous comments in threads about Samsung, but outside of that I don't know him (even, say, by name). This makes sense, given the separation between the work of an SE manager and the actual day-to-day operations that are involved with getting wafers fabbed and shipped. I worked at SAS in lots of different areas—Metro, Photo, and PIE (process integration). The emotional defense above notwithstanding (which I'd characterize as not actually being supported, either...), SAS indeed has very, very deep cultural problems that make for a shockingly bad example of how to do engineering in a large organization. There are several factors contributing to this. SAS doesn't treat information systems, or things IT-related generally, as an engineering concern. If it doesn't look like a materials science problem, SAS doesn't have the capacity to critically evaluate its impact on rates of production and yield. Problems, though, range from lots of things, like: - far too many things in-fab being handled with pen and paper - reports that have to be tediously assembled manually, so they get sent out once a day, while realistically they should be available to an engineer at any given time (behind a button that generates them on the fly instead of throwing $45k/year technicians at the problem like a 1960s-era secretary pool) - workers committed to this state of affairs remaining so indefinitely - Conway-style balkanization and groups who have no idea what their role is ("are they asking me or are they telling me?") - a bunch of dumb macho shit that is used to prevent critical productivity problems from being addressed because being lazy and not addressing it is somehow virtuous and not lazy—it's the application of basic engineering principles to eliminate a problem that's lazy! - an effect that I have no way to describe except as the proliferation of mid-40s to 50s men of mediocre talent (to a degree that's even worse than what you can expect to see elsewhere, generally) - an overreliance on the labor pool of people with military experience / government work for no reason other than they've been conditioned to survive in the kind of bureaucratic senselessness that SAS exemplifies - unabashed credentialism, which gets people hired who shouldn't be - Microsoft Office products being abused for everything—including areas where a different Microsoft Office product would be the most appropriate tool for the job (reaching for PowerPoint when the problem calls for Word—or any word processor) - work showstoppers caused by truly ridiculous problems, like Windows crashing a half a dozen times a day; Caps Lock on a fab tool keeping people from remoting in from within the office, so they have to suit up, go into the fab, press the Caps Lock key, and return to their desk and resume work; lots of monkeying around just to share a file with someone, because everything has to be ferried through a proprietary document sharing system that amounts to a crippled, quasi-web-based thing that wants to be Windows Explorer-cum-Google Drive - unit parts (i.e. manufacturing divisions) basically re-discovering/re-inventing the value version of control and implementing it in an ad hoc way for the tools that they ineract with, poorly—not to mention all opportunities for human error (which does happen regularly but no one does anything about it because 40% of the job is CYA and the CYA approach tends to be "don't let anyone find out this happened") - tons of janky-ass software from S1, like "Simax", which is written in a proprietary Lisp-ish(?) that uses ActiveX to run in an IE9-10-11 window and that re-invents its own window management and basic form controls, was never fully localized into English (so you're clicking buttons with terse messages in Hangul that still don't make sense even if understanding the language is no problem), and times out and ends your session if you look away from it for 10 minutes (or whatever) - overall just really bad engineering discipline; people putting wafers on hold and not being clear about they're expecting to do with them next or what they need someone else to do; people inventing new acronyms all over the place (because job security and also "mediocre talents") and using them liberally in the notes they do leave for others; people not documenting why something happened, which also happens to help when covering something up and hoping that no one has the time budget to untangle things to the point where it's obvious/incontrovertible that something did go wrong; also lots of people not having a dedicated workstation of their own, so when shifts change they have to be out of their seat so it can be ready—no putting in a little extra time to make sure that the kinds of fires that were put out that day won't just happen again tomorrow and the day after, ad infinitum
krisoft 5y ago
> Communication issues? Not admitting mistakes? Please... enlighten me. Tell me how we worked. I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a satire or not. The forcefull and quite frankly agressive way you denied ever having a problem with admiting mistakes makes me think that there might be something to this allegiation. Every company I ever worked with had occasional issues with communication, and even rarer issues with admiting mistakes. Large companies are also very uneven. Maybe the parts you worked in were great while the parts these other folks talk about were not so great? Either way swearing and writing in an unprofessional way is not the right way to go if you want to convince people about what you are saying.
- kortilla 5y ago
  Responding with swearing to unsubstantiated allegations about people you’ve worked with for decades is fine. It’s not even worthy of any response in my opinion and it’s a little sad that the armchair analysis has received so many upvotes.
  - cxr 5y ago
    > people you’ve worked with for decades It's more an instance of "place where one has worked". Someone in that position at SAS simply doesn't have the experience to confirm or deny the sorts of things the article gets into. Not to equate being a software engineering manager with being a janitor, but it is, on some level, like asking a janitor what was really going on at Enron just because they were in the same building.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jason-phillips 5y ago
  > frankly agressive way you denied ever having a problem with admiting mistakes... Respectfully, that is a straw man. I never made that claim. I am saying that GGP's claim is unsupported and therefore baseless. Knowing myself exactly how things really work there, I read it as ignorant hyperbole. To answer your questions, are there problems in Samsung? Samsung has the same problems with communication and admitting mistakes as other companies for whom I've worked of similar size. I've actually seen much worse at small companies, i.e. startups. I personally never had issues at Samsung. I could directly communicate with anyone in the company and did so, often. When necessary, we coordinated work ahead of time, even after hours. It wasn't a problem. I don't want to make it sound like working at Samsung was a walk in the park, because it wasn't. Samsung was by far the hardest job I've ever had. But working there taught me that with the right team and good teamwork, you can accomplish anything. We did some amazing things there.
megablast 5y ago
> unsupported assertions What else could there be?? Do you think the company will release this information in a press release??? Do you think people will put their names to these criticisms??
causality0 5y ago
Ok, so what's the origin of the problem? Over the last ten years I've seen Samsung's reputation absolutely plummet. In many areas such as home appliances it's now a joke, and people tell each other to avoid it. A decade ago it seemed to have the same feeling as Sony and now people say "Samsung" with a sigh.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

lostlogin 5y ago

Could you tell us how you worked?

jason-phillips 5y ago
Just to clarify, is this with or without Aaron Franklin brisket for lunch?
- lostlogin 5y ago
  This has shot right over my head, but as a google suggests the place is well regarded, I’m going to say ‘with’…
  - jason-phillips 5y ago
    We worked hard and we worked well together. We did whatever it took to succeed. Sometimes that meant working 20 hours days on some global supply chain project. I worked with a lot of really great people and a lot of terrific engineers. Best users I've ever had.
    - vasco 5y ago
      Imagine looking back at 20 hour days fondly. And you were an engineering manager. Nobody does good work 10+ hours into a shift. 20 hour days are good for one thing, allowing your boss to understaff teams with no consequence.
    - noirbot 5y ago
      Given what I know about Samsung in Austin, I'm pretty sure you're not paying nearly enough to justify anything close to 20 hours a day. Just because you work with "great people" on "a global supply chain project" doesn't sound like anywhere I'd ever want to work, and it seems like the attrition numbers I've seen agree with that.
      - jason-phillips 5y ago
        > doesn't sound like anywhere I'd ever want to work What if I threw in a brisket from Franklin's and told you I would be your pal
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]

mardifoufs 5y ago

I agree that the article is very lacking in substance and as you said, a hit piece. Yet there really seem to be a problem with Samsung's chips, especially their SoCs. They have underperformed for years now, and have always been inferior even in the high end (except maybe for the galaxy s6). That's despite repeated performance promises and a complete control over the entire production process (from design to fab to assembly). So what gives? I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on that especially since it's hard to find any legitimate information beyond rumors.

glowingly 5y ago
In many ways this is still true of Intel today. Like Samsung, their chips draw more power (even with "Intel 7" supposedly drawing parity to TSMC 7N) and are often slower than their competition's chips. Maybe it's an IDM mindset issue? It seems the market has moved on to pure play foundries. For example, Nvidia's first fab partner was STMicro, an IDM, and Nvidia noted STMicro was unable to focus on being a fab partner. After that, Nvidia moved onto TSMC, also working with IBM, UMC, and Samsung at later points in time.
jason-phillips 5y ago
I was a software engineer and did not work in LSI, so I cannot comment on that in a way which would be most informative, but I will try from a different perspective. An accurate answer would be incredibly complex, obviously. Samsung, from my perspective, mostly focuses on this year's production and developing next year's model. Yes, there is work done planning for new fabs and global supply chain systems, but 98% of cycles are spent on this year's production and designing next year's model. Samsung accounts for a huge percentage of South Korea's GDP, about 20%. Therefore, Samsung needs to favor stability over taking risks associated with living at the bleeding-edge of innovation. Samsung always did play the safe game when I worked there (and for good reason when you're babysitting a $20 billion factory with $100 million of product that could be scrapped at any time). Again, I wasn't in LSI but this is my perception overall having worked there, traveled to Korea and learned Korean culture.
- dylan522p 5y ago

iron2disulfide 5y ago

I've worked with Samsung Semiconductor as a partner/customer and it did seem to me from the outside that there was a culture of not admitting mistakes/failings, and poor communication between different parts of the company (i.e. foundry to silicon engineering). Granted, you could say the same thing re: communication about many large companies -- I'm sure the same phenomenon occurs at Intel or IBM (back before they went fabless). Things may have been different on software teams vs. silicon/hardware teams.

cxr 5y ago

NB: Jason is referring to "S2" aka Samsung Austin Semiconductor. I'm familiar with Jason's previous comments in threads about Samsung, but outside of that I don't know him (even, say, by name). This makes sense, given the separation between the work of an SE manager and the actual day-to-day operations that are involved with getting wafers fabbed and shipped. I worked at SAS in lots of different areas—Metro, Photo, and PIE (process integration). The emotional defense above notwithstanding (which I'd characterize as not actually being supported, either...), SAS indeed has very, very deep cultural problems that make for a shockingly bad example of how to do engineering in a large organization. There are several factors contributing to this. SAS doesn't treat information systems, or things IT-related generally, as an engineering concern. If it doesn't look like a materials science problem, SAS doesn't have the capacity to critically evaluate its impact on rates of production and yield. Problems, though, range from lots of things, like: - far too many things in-fab being handled with pen and paper - reports that have to be tediously assembled manually, so they get sent out once a day, while realistically they should be available to an engineer at any given time (behind a button that generates them on the fly instead of throwing $45k/year technicians at the problem like a 1960s-era secretary pool) - workers committed to this state of affairs remaining so indefinitely - Conway-style balkanization and groups who have no idea what their role is ("are they asking me or are they telling me?") - a bunch of dumb macho shit that is used to prevent critical productivity problems from being addressed because being lazy and not addressing it is somehow virtuous and not lazy—it's the application of basic engineering principles to eliminate a problem that's lazy! - an effect that I have no way to describe except as the proliferation of mid-40s to 50s men of mediocre talent (to a degree that's even worse than what you can expect to see elsewhere, generally) - an overreliance on the labor pool of people with military experience / government work for no reason other than they've been conditioned to survive in the kind of bureaucratic senselessness that SAS exemplifies - unabashed credentialism, which gets people hired who shouldn't be - Microsoft Office products being abused for everything—including areas where a different Microsoft Office product would be the most appropriate tool for the job (reaching for PowerPoint when the problem calls for Word—or any word processor) - work showstoppers caused by truly ridiculous problems, like Windows crashing a half a dozen times a day; Caps Lock on a fab tool keeping people from remoting in from within the office, so they have to suit up, go into the fab, press the Caps Lock key, and return to their desk and resume work; lots of monkeying around just to share a file with someone, because everything has to be ferried through a proprietary document sharing system that amounts to a crippled, quasi-web-based thing that wants to be Windows Explorer-cum-Google Drive - unit parts (i.e. manufacturing divisions) basically re-discovering/re-inventing the value version of control and implementing it in an ad hoc way for the tools that they ineract with, poorly—not to mention all opportunities for human error (which does happen regularly but no one does anything about it because 40% of the job is CYA and the CYA approach tends to be "don't let anyone find out this happened") - tons of janky-ass software from S1, like "Simax", which is written in a proprietary Lisp-ish(?) that uses ActiveX to run in an IE9-10-11 window and that re-invents its own window management and basic form controls, was never fully localized into English (so you're clicking buttons with terse messages in Hangul that still don't make sense even if understanding the language is no problem), and times out and ends your session if you look away from it for 10 minutes (or whatever) - overall just really bad engineering discipline; people putting wafers on hold and not being clear about they're expecting to do with them next or what they need someone else to do; people inventing new acronyms all over the place (because job security and also "mediocre talents") and using them liberally in the notes they do leave for others; people not documenting why something happened, which also happens to help when covering something up and hoping that no one has the time budget to untangle things to the point where it's obvious/incontrovertible that something did go wrong; also lots of people not having a dedicated workstation of their own, so when shifts change they have to be out of their seat so it can be ready—no putting in a little extra time to make sure that the kinds of fires that were put out that day won't just happen again tomorrow and the day after, ad infinitum

krisoft 5y ago

> Communication issues? Not admitting mistakes? Please... enlighten me. Tell me how we worked. I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a satire or not. The forcefull and quite frankly agressive way you denied ever having a problem with admiting mistakes makes me think that there might be something to this allegiation. Every company I ever worked with had occasional issues with communication, and even rarer issues with admiting mistakes. Large companies are also very uneven. Maybe the parts you worked in were great while the parts these other folks talk about were not so great? Either way swearing and writing in an unprofessional way is not the right way to go if you want to convince people about what you are saying.

kortilla 5y ago
Responding with swearing to unsubstantiated allegations about people you’ve worked with for decades is fine. It’s not even worthy of any response in my opinion and it’s a little sad that the armchair analysis has received so many upvotes.
- cxr 5y ago
  > people you’ve worked with for decades It's more an instance of "place where one has worked". Someone in that position at SAS simply doesn't have the experience to confirm or deny the sorts of things the article gets into. Not to equate being a software engineering manager with being a janitor, but it is, on some level, like asking a janitor what was really going on at Enron just because they were in the same building.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jason-phillips 5y ago
> frankly agressive way you denied ever having a problem with admiting mistakes... Respectfully, that is a straw man. I never made that claim. I am saying that GGP's claim is unsupported and therefore baseless. Knowing myself exactly how things really work there, I read it as ignorant hyperbole. To answer your questions, are there problems in Samsung? Samsung has the same problems with communication and admitting mistakes as other companies for whom I've worked of similar size. I've actually seen much worse at small companies, i.e. startups. I personally never had issues at Samsung. I could directly communicate with anyone in the company and did so, often. When necessary, we coordinated work ahead of time, even after hours. It wasn't a problem. I don't want to make it sound like working at Samsung was a walk in the park, because it wasn't. Samsung was by far the hardest job I've ever had. But working there taught me that with the right team and good teamwork, you can accomplish anything. We did some amazing things there.

megablast 5y ago

> unsupported assertions What else could there be?? Do you think the company will release this information in a press release??? Do you think people will put their names to these criticisms??

causality0 5y ago

Ok, so what's the origin of the problem? Over the last ten years I've seen Samsung's reputation absolutely plummet. In many areas such as home appliances it's now a joke, and people tell each other to avoid it. A decade ago it seemed to have the same feeling as Sony and now people say "Samsung" with a sigh.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]