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I've never worked there, but according to "The Story of ISPC," Intel has a very cutthroat culture. Some extracts: > The problem was that just a few jerks, esp

I've never worked there, but according to "The Story of ISPC," Intel has a very cutthroat culture. Some extracts: > The problem was that just a few jerks, especially in positions of power or influence, could fuck you up real good. > Intel had more than its share of them and therefore, everyone at Intel balanced some amount of technical work with some amount of politics work. You had to. Politics was more than the standard “advocate for yourself” stuff; at minimum it was periodically defending yourself against attacks from others who wanted your territory and would try to get your project shut down so they could take it. > Some people there approached their work with little in way of technological contributions, but a lot of politics. It turned out that that could be a perfectly successful career strategy—undermining others as necessary to maintain and advance your position without ever actually delivering much of substance yourself. Those were the jerks. From https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/20/ispc-volta-going-all-in https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/20/ispc-volta-going-all-... > As it turns out, some teams would jealously guard their source code, only making binary releases available to other teams at Intel, and only at well-defined delivery points. It was one defense against the jerks. > Here’s how it went: if you were working on something that others wanted to attack, sometimes they’d take the in-progress version of the system and pick it apart, finding a bunch of examples where it didn’t yet work well, and putting together an argument that your thing was in terrible shape wasn’t working, and thus should be canceled. > And sometimes that sort of tactic actually worked; management was shockingly receptive to this sort of hysteria. Maybe it was that they were too far away from the technology to be able to evaluate the arguments on their merits, or maybe again it was an appreciation for gladiatorial combat as decision making process. > The best case scenario was that the your team would have to spend a lot of time convincing management that they were actually on track and that things were fine. The easier thing was to just not share your code in the first place. From https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/22/ispc-volta-first-results https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/22/ispc-volta-first-resu...

potamic 2y ago
This is unfortunately very common in the corporate world, especially once an organisation grows to a certain size. It's the nature of animals to be territorial and competitive so there is a primal force behind this. But humans are intelligent and build societies. Good societies understand game theory and incorporate cooperation to maximise benefits for everyone in the long run. I feel this doesn't happen well enough within corporate societies which tend to be much more vicious and hostile in their own realm compared to the outside world. There is a lot of content out there on org building, leadership and what not but I've not come across anything which addresses this fundamental issue. What kind of structures do you need to build to incentivise high degrees of cooperation and discourage unhealthy competition? What would the evolution in terms of next generation of org structures look like?

potamic 2y ago

This is unfortunately very common in the corporate world, especially once an organisation grows to a certain size. It's the nature of animals to be territorial and competitive so there is a primal force behind this. But humans are intelligent and build societies. Good societies understand game theory and incorporate cooperation to maximise benefits for everyone in the long run. I feel this doesn't happen well enough within corporate societies which tend to be much more vicious and hostile in their own realm compared to the outside world. There is a lot of content out there on org building, leadership and what not but I've not come across anything which addresses this fundamental issue. What kind of structures do you need to build to incentivise high degrees of cooperation and discourage unhealthy competition? What would the evolution in terms of next generation of org structures look like?