10 ms·

Hopefully for them that includes executives and managers, they are the ones responsible of the death of that company, not the engineers Congrats to Apple and A

Hopefully for them that includes executives and managers, they are the ones responsible of the death of that company, not the engineers Congrats to Apple and AMD for having done better Microsoft ignoring AMD in their latest Surface lineup is a hint for the people looking for answers

chao- 4y ago
>Microsoft ignoring AMD in their latest Surface lineup is a hint for the people looking for answers For those of us who are bad at subtext, could you elaborate further? What are the questions that this is the answer to?
- xdavidliu 4y ago
  my guess: "will Microsoft continue to take AMD as seriously as it does Intel?"
hinkley 4y ago
That’s always the problem. An R&D group I worked for laid off developers but no managers, which lead to more layoffs because overhead went up, which mean rates went up, which meant more consultants came in instead. Really at least a fifth of your layoff should be managers. If you lay off about six reports, that’s one less manager you need. So 1/7. If you lay off six managers, that’s one skip level you don’t need. 1 + 6 + 36 = 43. Go to three levels and that’s 1 + 6 + 36 + 216 = 259, or 43 / 259 or about 1/6. But if you want to keep production capacity, you should move to slightly more reports per manager, not maintain steady state. Just to keep the math simple, if you had 216 developers reporting to an organization of 43 managers, if you went to 7 reports per manager you need 31 line managers, not 36, which is a 2% RIF without losing a single producer. Or if you do both you get about 1/5th of laid off people as managers if you lay off less than half your developers. Edit: fractions and ratios are not interchangeable, bad math.
- twodave 4y ago
  Why not both? Even much smaller organizations tend to have low-impact teams that could be absorbed by others and their work deprioritized. If you're going to fire a dozen managers then the implication (or at least possibility) exists that maybe even the bottom 20% of that group is assigned to low-priority projects and perhaps even under-performing. Then 216 => 43 becomes 203 => 29 Now you've reduced the workforce by 10% and put some miserable projects entirely out of their misery at the same time!
  - RhodesianHunter 4y ago
    And suddenly reduce the velocity of all other teams because whoops it turns out those low priority projects were dependencies of everyone else.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      I worry about any company that doesn’t track priority and severity separately. Priority is political, and often bullshit (everything is top priority!) but some tasks, if not completed, are company killers, and some just embarrass a loud-mouthed salesperson in front of a customer.
- hinkley 4y ago
  Just to check my math, let’s look at an org that has a multiple of 6²x7²=1764 staff. We had 294 line managers, 49 managers, and 8+ program managers. 351 managers, 2115 employees total. I need to lay off at least 15% or 318 people. We go from 294 line managers to 252, plus reductions up the chain to 36 + 5 = 293. 58 down, 260 to go. I lay off 5 managers, 35 line managers, and 245 staff, that’s 58 + 285 = 343 people total, so I can argue for keeping a couple extra line managers and all their reports. Call it 327 layoffs, 96 of them managers, 28.4%.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
agloeregrets 4y ago
> Microsoft ignoring AMD in their latest Surface lineup is a hint for the people looking for answers I think the entire new surface line-up is a giant conspiracy. The Surface Pro 9 5G has a Qualcomm 8cx Gen 3 with some tweaks called the SQ3. It does not match the performance of 12 Gen intel in a 15w power envelope, which is important because the Surface Pro 9 non-5G (intel) uses an i5-1235u, a 15w chip. But the last Gen, the pro 8 used a 28w 11th gen part. This means that the y/y perfromance is actually about the same (but better power/heat). If they used a matching 28w CPU it would have been a much bigger jump comapred to the ARM SQ3 5G. But then, it gets WAY weirder. The new (FOUR THOUNSDAND DOLLAR) Surface Studio 2+ ? 11th gen laptop CPU (11370H)...which is as fast as SQ3 will be. Surface Laptop 5? Exact same specs as Surface Pro 8. Casual reminder that the now two year old Apple M1 still smokes every single chip I just mentioned, all in a fanless iPad Air. The would-be Surface Laptop AMD Ryzen 6800U would be right on par with M1...which would make that SQ3 look like a bad deal. Microsoft is sandbagging the lineup for ARM.
- raverbashing 4y ago
  So, it seems they're shooting themselves in the foot Surface pads do not seem to be too popular and might become even less now
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  People need to remember that desktop/laptop ARMs outside of Apple have kind of royally sucked... E.g. when the first Surface Pro ARM was released (the X, 2020ish), it was ridiculously more expensive, less performing and had less battery life (!) than the cheaper Intel options https://www.notebookcheck.net/Microsoft-Surface-Pro-X-Review-Microsoft-s-ARM-based-tablet-with-poor-compatibility.529218.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Microsoft-Surface-Pro-X-Review... The previous Surface non-Pro ARM attempts (RT, 2012ish) were even crappier (Tegra procs) but at least they were cheaper than the Pro/Intel variants...
  - jjtheblunt 4y ago
    > People need to remember that desktop/laptop ARMs outside of Apple have kind of royally sucked... I've got an SQ1 and Apple M2 and they're both truly excellent. (disclaimer: I worked years in engineering in both Qualcomm and Apple)
pojzon 4y ago
I really hope that Intel will be a role model example to showcase what happens if you dont cut the cancer known as terrible management. Far too long managers are not taking responsibility for their bad decisions - not only business decisions but also simple feedback disregard. „Look at what happened to Intel thats what happens if you let your managers loose”
- orestarod 4y ago
  But is it not the management that makes such decisions?
Der_Einzige 4y ago
Pfft, as bad as the managers are at Intel, don't try to pretend that they have top tier talent (in SW) when they are paying on average about half of what a FAANG pays. When I was there, they called Intel "Great place to leetcode" (a corruption of Intel claiming they are a "great place to work" everywhere) Intel is known for good WLB and quiet quitting because the non technical managers didn't have a clue about what was actually being done on their own team. It's easy for engineers to BS these kinds of people, and this was the norm since any passion for SW was killed by working there long term...
mensetmanusman 4y ago
It’s usually the fault of the previous generation of managers, hard to tie that together.
me_me_me 4y ago
> Hopefully for them that includes executives and managers Yeah, its always them that get cut \s

chao- 4y ago

>Microsoft ignoring AMD in their latest Surface lineup is a hint for the people looking for answers For those of us who are bad at subtext, could you elaborate further? What are the questions that this is the answer to?

xdavidliu 4y ago
my guess: "will Microsoft continue to take AMD as seriously as it does Intel?"

hinkley 4y ago

That’s always the problem. An R&D group I worked for laid off developers but no managers, which lead to more layoffs because overhead went up, which mean rates went up, which meant more consultants came in instead. Really at least a fifth of your layoff should be managers. If you lay off about six reports, that’s one less manager you need. So 1/7. If you lay off six managers, that’s one skip level you don’t need. 1 + 6 + 36 = 43. Go to three levels and that’s 1 + 6 + 36 + 216 = 259, or 43 / 259 or about 1/6. But if you want to keep production capacity, you should move to slightly more reports per manager, not maintain steady state. Just to keep the math simple, if you had 216 developers reporting to an organization of 43 managers, if you went to 7 reports per manager you need 31 line managers, not 36, which is a 2% RIF without losing a single producer. Or if you do both you get about 1/5th of laid off people as managers if you lay off less than half your developers. Edit: fractions and ratios are not interchangeable, bad math.

twodave 4y ago
Why not both? Even much smaller organizations tend to have low-impact teams that could be absorbed by others and their work deprioritized. If you're going to fire a dozen managers then the implication (or at least possibility) exists that maybe even the bottom 20% of that group is assigned to low-priority projects and perhaps even under-performing. Then 216 => 43 becomes 203 => 29 Now you've reduced the workforce by 10% and put some miserable projects entirely out of their misery at the same time!
- RhodesianHunter 4y ago
  And suddenly reduce the velocity of all other teams because whoops it turns out those low priority projects were dependencies of everyone else.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    I worry about any company that doesn’t track priority and severity separately. Priority is political, and often bullshit (everything is top priority!) but some tasks, if not completed, are company killers, and some just embarrass a loud-mouthed salesperson in front of a customer.
hinkley 4y ago
Just to check my math, let’s look at an org that has a multiple of 6²x7²=1764 staff. We had 294 line managers, 49 managers, and 8+ program managers. 351 managers, 2115 employees total. I need to lay off at least 15% or 318 people. We go from 294 line managers to 252, plus reductions up the chain to 36 + 5 = 293. 58 down, 260 to go. I lay off 5 managers, 35 line managers, and 245 staff, that’s 58 + 285 = 343 people total, so I can argue for keeping a couple extra line managers and all their reports. Call it 327 layoffs, 96 of them managers, 28.4%.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

agloeregrets 4y ago

> Microsoft ignoring AMD in their latest Surface lineup is a hint for the people looking for answers I think the entire new surface line-up is a giant conspiracy. The Surface Pro 9 5G has a Qualcomm 8cx Gen 3 with some tweaks called the SQ3. It does not match the performance of 12 Gen intel in a 15w power envelope, which is important because the Surface Pro 9 non-5G (intel) uses an i5-1235u, a 15w chip. But the last Gen, the pro 8 used a 28w 11th gen part. This means that the y/y perfromance is actually about the same (but better power/heat). If they used a matching 28w CPU it would have been a much bigger jump comapred to the ARM SQ3 5G. But then, it gets WAY weirder. The new (FOUR THOUNSDAND DOLLAR) Surface Studio 2+ ? 11th gen laptop CPU (11370H)...which is as fast as SQ3 will be. Surface Laptop 5? Exact same specs as Surface Pro 8. Casual reminder that the now two year old Apple M1 still smokes every single chip I just mentioned, all in a fanless iPad Air. The would-be Surface Laptop AMD Ryzen 6800U would be right on par with M1...which would make that SQ3 look like a bad deal. Microsoft is sandbagging the lineup for ARM.

raverbashing 4y ago
So, it seems they're shooting themselves in the foot Surface pads do not seem to be too popular and might become even less now
AshamedCaptain 4y ago
People need to remember that desktop/laptop ARMs outside of Apple have kind of royally sucked... E.g. when the first Surface Pro ARM was released (the X, 2020ish), it was ridiculously more expensive, less performing and had less battery life (!) than the cheaper Intel options https://www.notebookcheck.net/Microsoft-Surface-Pro-X-Review-Microsoft-s-ARM-based-tablet-with-poor-compatibility.529218.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Microsoft-Surface-Pro-X-Review... The previous Surface non-Pro ARM attempts (RT, 2012ish) were even crappier (Tegra procs) but at least they were cheaper than the Pro/Intel variants...
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  > People need to remember that desktop/laptop ARMs outside of Apple have kind of royally sucked... I've got an SQ1 and Apple M2 and they're both truly excellent. (disclaimer: I worked years in engineering in both Qualcomm and Apple)

pojzon 4y ago

I really hope that Intel will be a role model example to showcase what happens if you dont cut the cancer known as terrible management. Far too long managers are not taking responsibility for their bad decisions - not only business decisions but also simple feedback disregard. „Look at what happened to Intel thats what happens if you let your managers loose”

orestarod 4y ago
But is it not the management that makes such decisions?

Der_Einzige 4y ago

Pfft, as bad as the managers are at Intel, don't try to pretend that they have top tier talent (in SW) when they are paying on average about half of what a FAANG pays. When I was there, they called Intel "Great place to leetcode" (a corruption of Intel claiming they are a "great place to work" everywhere) Intel is known for good WLB and quiet quitting because the non technical managers didn't have a clue about what was actually being done on their own team. It's easy for engineers to BS these kinds of people, and this was the norm since any passion for SW was killed by working there long term...

mensetmanusman 4y ago

It’s usually the fault of the previous generation of managers, hard to tie that together.

me_me_me 4y ago

> Hopefully for them that includes executives and managers Yeah, its always them that get cut \s