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>Also, I’m not sure good engineers always make good managers. I worked at Intel when Craig Barrett was CEO. He was also a former engineer, and he was a terrib

>Also, I’m not sure good engineers always make good managers. I worked at Intel when Craig Barrett was CEO. He was also a former engineer, and he was a terrible CEO. Intel got involved in a bunch of stupid stuff during his tenure, like the P4 Netburst architecture, the RAMBUS fiasco, and lots of side businesses that didn't pan out. Otellini took over and fixed things by going to the Core architecture, IIRC. I'd say that good engineers becoming good managers (esp. upper managers) is the exception, not the rule.

tgma 2y ago
> I'd say that good engineers becoming good managers (esp. upper managers) is the exception, not the rule. Good managers are exceptions, period. Still, good engineers are leaps and bounds more likely to be effective as managers, even if they make managerial mistakes. This is probably even more true for high level executives than line managers. There's a common bigco school of thought that does not say this explicitly, but believes "nerds are bad managers," so if you are good at engineering you're less likely to be good at management, so let's go hire pro managers (that end up being schmoozers and less technical). In my experience, the less technical managers have been bozos AND bad at management.
- packetlost 2y ago
  I had a conversation today about that topic sorta. I find the abstract tradeoffs of writing software (ie. efficiency vs flexibility) to be inherent to company social structures as well. I suspect the intuition that engineers build up of knowing when to favor either side is applicable, just with different error signals.
  - YZF 2y ago
    There are a lot of similarities between software and organizations. But being a CEO also requires people skills. Many of us software folks have good intuition about how to make technical projects successful but the way to get there often involves getting other people to cooperate. AKA leadership. That's the tough one. That said I agree that a CEO of a company like Intel has to be technical. I mean we saw what happened to Apple when the CEO came from Pepsi. But you need someone technical, in the domain, who is also a strong leader and a visionary and those people are not that common.
    - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
      Reminds me a lot of Conway's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
- bjarneh 2y ago
  > the less technical managers have been bozos AND bad at management The golden combo.
- lnsru 2y ago
  Technical founder sold a company (where I currently work) to a big corp. Big corp sends here regularly directors with MBA to fix things, but things are worse and worse every year. People ask me why I joined a company in free fall every week. The thing is that technical understanding of MBAs is close to zero. Result will not improve throwing away 15% of the employees (the guy before current director did this). It’s obvious to me as an engineer with experience in operations - the products are not designed for easy production and manual testing takes too long and has bad error coverage. I have experience to fix obvious technical problems. No MBA will see them in first place. No MBA with their arrogance will listen to an engineer. Let’s wait for recession to end and look for new jobs.
  - oneshtein 2y ago
    Talk to your manager manager. Talk in manager's language. Be rich. :-/
- silvestrov 2y ago
  It's a very common business school line of thought that managers are always smarter than the people they manage. Employees are seen as "resources", not as talents. So by definition nerds (and other non-business school people) cannot be as good.
ethbr1 2y ago
The difference between immediate pre-P4 and now Intel problems is stark though. Immediately pre-P4, Intel need a better architecture than K6-* or AMD-next (revealed as Athlon). That's not a process problem. Now, Intel needs their leading node to work. That's a process problem. Arguably, none of Intel's business model works if their process is substantially behind TSMC. Consequently, the CEO and board should be 100% focused on returning to process parity. Gelsinger at least had an economically viable plan for that. Without him? No strategic plan: the board sure as shit isn't going to come up with one.
- YZF 2y ago
  Intel historically was the best at semiconductor manufacturing processes. That's what got it where it got to. I bought some Intel shares when it crashed last time but the latest events are changing my mind on the prospects of this company. Intel getting to be the best at process happened over years or decades of people and culture. If that's gone there's no way to reproduce it. Looking from the outside it looks like through offshoring, layoffs and culture issues they've basically lost what they had. I think AMD managed to make it through tough times (and Intel way back then as well) because even when the company was struggling financially it managed to maintain people and culture that enabled it to overcome the challenges. But now the times have changed and executives don't see people or culture as leverage, and are happy to get rid of those. You better not need any amazing execution from that point on.
  - tgma 2y ago
    > Intel historically was the best at semiconductor manufacturing processes. That's what got it where it got to. Exactly. AMD has been executing perfectly on the CPU side, but they also happened to be a key beneficiary in an unprecedented event in the past few decades: TSMC overtaking Intel in their process which would likely not have happened without Apple betting on them. Intel did not benefit from the stagnation they had which was enabled by their success and monopoly. Internet Explorer 6-level stagnation: from Haswell to ~2018 they successfully shipped the same product over and over again and when AMD pressure started to mount, they basically trickled down higher core counts into cheaper SKUs. It would have worked, except at the highest end, they needed the process to be competitive and it wasn't, which messed up everything.
wbl 2y ago
Hindsight is 20/20. If higher clocks won out because extractable IPC was lower Netburst was the right design.
- giantrobot 2y ago
  Foresight (at the time) told you NetBurst was a dead end though. AMD made a lot of sales from people avoiding NetBurst, ignoring clock speeds and looking at actual performance numbers. NetBurst looked good on benchmarks; code with few/no branches that fit in the L2 cache if not the L1 cache. On real world code consisting almost entirely of branches and pointer chasing the NetBurst chips performed horribly compared to lower clocked Athlons. Intel's promises of 5+ GHz chips got more laughable as the line went on because they were already straining cooling and power supply options at less than 3GHz.
  - wbl 2y ago
    Netburst's branch predictor choices survived. It was the penalties that were a bad idea.
- Earw0rm 2y ago
  The problem with Netburst was the clock speed wall. They designed it with a view to continued doubling which has been a trend up until then. It turns out once you go past 3GHz improvements are much, much slower. We hit 3GHz in 2003. If you go back ten years from that, the top speed available was 66MHz, ten years before that and it was 8MHz. Fast forward 20 years and we're just barely scraping 6GHz.
  - Earw0rm 2y ago
    Doing the math - even a conservative estimate for 1983 to 2003 is eight doublings. That would give us a hypothetical Pentium 4 at 768GHz today. Which, Netburst or no, would wipe the floor with the fastest available multi-core chip. While also putting out enough heat energy to keep a small town in Northern Canada warm all winter long.

tgma 2y ago

> I'd say that good engineers becoming good managers (esp. upper managers) is the exception, not the rule. Good managers are exceptions, period. Still, good engineers are leaps and bounds more likely to be effective as managers, even if they make managerial mistakes. This is probably even more true for high level executives than line managers. There's a common bigco school of thought that does not say this explicitly, but believes "nerds are bad managers," so if you are good at engineering you're less likely to be good at management, so let's go hire pro managers (that end up being schmoozers and less technical). In my experience, the less technical managers have been bozos AND bad at management.

packetlost 2y ago
I had a conversation today about that topic sorta. I find the abstract tradeoffs of writing software (ie. efficiency vs flexibility) to be inherent to company social structures as well. I suspect the intuition that engineers build up of knowing when to favor either side is applicable, just with different error signals.
- YZF 2y ago
  There are a lot of similarities between software and organizations. But being a CEO also requires people skills. Many of us software folks have good intuition about how to make technical projects successful but the way to get there often involves getting other people to cooperate. AKA leadership. That's the tough one. That said I agree that a CEO of a company like Intel has to be technical. I mean we saw what happened to Apple when the CEO came from Pepsi. But you need someone technical, in the domain, who is also a strong leader and a visionary and those people are not that common.
  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    Reminds me a lot of Conway's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
bjarneh 2y ago
> the less technical managers have been bozos AND bad at management The golden combo.
lnsru 2y ago
Technical founder sold a company (where I currently work) to a big corp. Big corp sends here regularly directors with MBA to fix things, but things are worse and worse every year. People ask me why I joined a company in free fall every week. The thing is that technical understanding of MBAs is close to zero. Result will not improve throwing away 15% of the employees (the guy before current director did this). It’s obvious to me as an engineer with experience in operations - the products are not designed for easy production and manual testing takes too long and has bad error coverage. I have experience to fix obvious technical problems. No MBA will see them in first place. No MBA with their arrogance will listen to an engineer. Let’s wait for recession to end and look for new jobs.
- oneshtein 2y ago
  Talk to your manager manager. Talk in manager's language. Be rich. :-/
silvestrov 2y ago
It's a very common business school line of thought that managers are always smarter than the people they manage. Employees are seen as "resources", not as talents. So by definition nerds (and other non-business school people) cannot be as good.

ethbr1 2y ago

The difference between immediate pre-P4 and now Intel problems is stark though. Immediately pre-P4, Intel need a better architecture than K6-* or AMD-next (revealed as Athlon). That's not a process problem. Now, Intel needs their leading node to work. That's a process problem. Arguably, none of Intel's business model works if their process is substantially behind TSMC. Consequently, the CEO and board should be 100% focused on returning to process parity. Gelsinger at least had an economically viable plan for that. Without him? No strategic plan: the board sure as shit isn't going to come up with one.

YZF 2y ago
Intel historically was the best at semiconductor manufacturing processes. That's what got it where it got to. I bought some Intel shares when it crashed last time but the latest events are changing my mind on the prospects of this company. Intel getting to be the best at process happened over years or decades of people and culture. If that's gone there's no way to reproduce it. Looking from the outside it looks like through offshoring, layoffs and culture issues they've basically lost what they had. I think AMD managed to make it through tough times (and Intel way back then as well) because even when the company was struggling financially it managed to maintain people and culture that enabled it to overcome the challenges. But now the times have changed and executives don't see people or culture as leverage, and are happy to get rid of those. You better not need any amazing execution from that point on.
- tgma 2y ago
  > Intel historically was the best at semiconductor manufacturing processes. That's what got it where it got to. Exactly. AMD has been executing perfectly on the CPU side, but they also happened to be a key beneficiary in an unprecedented event in the past few decades: TSMC overtaking Intel in their process which would likely not have happened without Apple betting on them. Intel did not benefit from the stagnation they had which was enabled by their success and monopoly. Internet Explorer 6-level stagnation: from Haswell to ~2018 they successfully shipped the same product over and over again and when AMD pressure started to mount, they basically trickled down higher core counts into cheaper SKUs. It would have worked, except at the highest end, they needed the process to be competitive and it wasn't, which messed up everything.

wbl 2y ago

Hindsight is 20/20. If higher clocks won out because extractable IPC was lower Netburst was the right design.

giantrobot 2y ago
Foresight (at the time) told you NetBurst was a dead end though. AMD made a lot of sales from people avoiding NetBurst, ignoring clock speeds and looking at actual performance numbers. NetBurst looked good on benchmarks; code with few/no branches that fit in the L2 cache if not the L1 cache. On real world code consisting almost entirely of branches and pointer chasing the NetBurst chips performed horribly compared to lower clocked Athlons. Intel's promises of 5+ GHz chips got more laughable as the line went on because they were already straining cooling and power supply options at less than 3GHz.
- wbl 2y ago
  Netburst's branch predictor choices survived. It was the penalties that were a bad idea.
Earw0rm 2y ago
The problem with Netburst was the clock speed wall. They designed it with a view to continued doubling which has been a trend up until then. It turns out once you go past 3GHz improvements are much, much slower. We hit 3GHz in 2003. If you go back ten years from that, the top speed available was 66MHz, ten years before that and it was 8MHz. Fast forward 20 years and we're just barely scraping 6GHz.
- Earw0rm 2y ago
  Doing the math - even a conservative estimate for 1983 to 2003 is eight doublings. That would give us a hypothetical Pentium 4 at 768GHz today. Which, Netburst or no, would wipe the floor with the fastest available multi-core chip. While also putting out enough heat energy to keep a small town in Northern Canada warm all winter long.