5 ms·

Intel dropped the ball, and it was the biggest bullet I ever dodged. Even 20 years ago, I felt there was something wrong about the internal culture there, so I

Intel dropped the ball, and it was the biggest bullet I ever dodged. Even 20 years ago, I felt there was something wrong about the internal culture there, so I turned down the post-internship job offer. There's a bunch of teams there with three-letter acronyms whose origins have been totally forgotten. Like, nobody knows what LTQ or ASR stands for, or what purpose they have. When you're an intern, you tend to think that the higher-ups know what they're doing, but if you ask for an explanation, you will soon conclude that they don't know either. People were not working hard enough. At the time Intel's dominance was supreme. They should have been picking up on niche ideas like GPUs and mobile chips, it would have been cheap and adjacent to what they had. Instead, all I heard at the meetings was laughing at the little guys who are now all bigger than Intel. Even my friend in the VC division couldn't get the bosses to see what was happening. People would spend their whole day just having coffee with random colleagues, and making a couple of slides. It's nice to relax sometimes, but when I was there it was way too much of that. There was just way too much fat in the business. I still have friends there who stayed on. They tell me not to come, and are now wondering how to do the first job search of their professional lives. A couple have moved very recently. It's very odd that the guy who was famous for saying what upper management should do (set culture) ended up building a culture that has completely failed.

smallmancontrov 1y ago
Same. I started down the semiconductor path about 15 years ago (physics student, loved my EE classes, loved nanofab class, wanted more) and got warned away by an astonishing number of independent postdocs, interns, and seemingly successful industry contacts who all agreed on one point: the pay was such utter dogshit that one should consider it a passion career like art or music. Some of them saw consulting for the Chinese as their "big ticket light at the end of the tunnel" -- but that got shut down soon enough. I changed directions before getting first hand experience but the R&D job listings tended to support this view. "They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" seemed to be in the advanced stages at that point. At least in R&D, from the angle I saw it. Clearly, being stingy wasn't a universal problem: heavy buybacks, ludicrous M&A (in foresight and hindsight), and that $180k average salary in the article sounds completely divorced from the snapshot impression that I got. I don't know what gives, was R&D "salary optimized" to a degree that other parts of the business weren't? Did the numbers change at some point but the culture was already rotten and cynical? Or did I see noise and mistake it for signal? Dunno. In another world I'd love to have been part of the fight to make 10nm work (or whatever needed doing) rather than working on something that doesn't fully use my skills or in my private opinion contribute as much to humanity, but my employer pays me and respects my time and doesn't steer their business into every iceberg in the ocean, and in the end those things are more important.
- HPsquared 1y ago
  The problem with R&D as a career (in a "large organised company/institute" context at least, where you don't own and control the results) is the limitless supply of impoverished students and postdocs willing to work for exposure.
  - smallmancontrov 1y ago
    Right, but cheaping out on the foundation of your building has consequences -- which have come home to roost orders of magnitude in excess of the money saved. In R&D management, this is an extremely well-known problem with an extremely well-known solution: use the oversupply to be selective rather than cheap. The fact that they chose to be cheap rather than selective is managerial incompetence of the highest order. They had one job, and they blew it. "Selective" doesn't even mean that the rating system has to be perfect or even good, it just has to equilibrate supply and demand without shredding morale. Even a lottery would suffice for this purpose.
- sgerenser 1y ago
  Interesting, is this specifically on the fab side? I work at Arm and the engineers working on design and validation are paid quite well. Not quite as well as NVidia but most non-juniors are well above the $180k mark quoted above for Intel.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
pjc50 1y ago
> At the time Intel's dominance was supreme They are the poster child for "we have a monopoly so we don't have to innovate or even maintain competence". Mind you, how much worse must things be at AMD that they're not winning the x64 war? Eventually the "PC" market is going to get run over by ARM like everything else. Especially now there's a Windows on ARM with proper backwards compatibility. (although something is very odd with drivers on Windows-ARM, if anyone knows the full story on how to get .inf based 'drivers' working it would be genuinely helpful)
- smallmancontrov 1y ago
  It sure seems like AMD is winning the x64 war? https://www.alltechnerd.com/amd-captures-17-more-cpu-market-share-in-2025-as-intel-declines-by-10/ https://www.alltechnerd.com/amd-captures-17-more-cpu-market-...
  - neogodless 1y ago
    Maybe a semantic argument, but I'd say they are "on their way to winning", but once they have a higher market share than Intel, "they are winning". > Despite Intel still holding the lead with 56.3% of systems validated through CPU-Z, AMD is closing in, now claiming 43.7% of the market.
    - Aardwolf 1y ago
      I do hope intel comes back, while I prefer AMD currently (due to no avx512 on intel consumer cpus and me not being interested in having things scheduled on efficiency cores in my desktop pc), if there's no competition anymore who knows what AMD might become...
      - Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
        I'm a gamer, and for Intel to make a comeback for me, they need something that competes with AMD's X3D chips, which absolutely dominate all the gaming benchmarks. The Core Ultra CPUs are an absolute joke for gaming, often being beaten even by the 14th gen CPUs. The Core Ultras had a major performance regression in L3 cache speed which destroyed gaming performance. Games love large cache sizes. The Ryzen 9700X has the same number of cores, but a slower clock than a 9800X3D, yet the 9800X3D comes out on top purely because it has 96 MB of L3 cache compared to 32 MB. If Intel would have put out an i9-14900K with 96 MB of L3 cache, it'd probably come out on top.
ponector 1y ago
>>It's very odd that the guy who was famous for saying what upper management should do (set culture) ended up building a culture that has completely failed Is it? Everywhere I worked upper management is taking big about the culture but their taking points are rarely applied to the company. Like when Facebook says something like "we value your privacy"
- dreamcompiler 1y ago
  Facebook does value your privacy, because it's a commodity they can sell for a high price. Sort of like that Twilight Zone episode. The aliens come and convince us they are here to serve man. "Here, if you don't believe us look at our book called 'To Serve Man.'" Finally one of the humans translates it and discovers it's a cookbook. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zone) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Z...
  - sitkack 1y ago
    FB invades your privacy so that they sell access to you. Your privacy is important to them, so that they can continue to be the intermediary.
    - sellmesoap 1y ago
      Humm time to put my life story and my product and lifestyle preferences in an easy to read format behind a small paywall, there's gold in them there hills!
  - lokar 1y ago
    And they have internal modeling to exactly value each persons privacy in $
- michaelcampbell 1y ago
  > Everywhere I worked upper management is taking[sic] big about the culture but their taking[sic] points are rarely applied to the company. Or worse, where I am their talking points about the culture they want ONLY applies to the company and not themselves. (In-office requirements, how the office is laid out, etc.)
gwbas1c 1y ago
I spent ~2 years at Intel 20 years ago. My experience was kind of similar, although I didn't see the "People would spend their whole day just having coffee with random colleagues" aspect. I left because I was working on a machine learning project that was a "solution in search of a problem;" and I spent too much time working alone. I was very early in my career and felt like I just wasn't learning enough from my peers. Overall, I felt like Intel was a positive experience. I do think their biggest problem was that they had to many lifers and didn't have enough "healthy turnover." Almost everyone there started at the beginning of their career, and thus everyone who was mid-late career didn't understand what the rest of the industry was doing.
ksec 1y ago
You only need to look at total employees of AMD + TSMC, either AMD and TSMC are extremely efficiency or Intel is bloated. Monopoly and Bureaucracy. That is basically what government is. It is kind of sad reading Intel was like that even in 2005.
no_wizard 1y ago
I firmly believe intel went from decline (which you can reverse) to terminal (which in a business sense, can be reversed, but it usually isn't) as soon as AMD was able to successfully erode some of their server business, and ARM is now doing the same. The mountain of money for intel has always been with server chips, as its their high margin chipsets. While they make alot of money on consumer laptops and desktops, its no where near the amount of money they traditionally have made on their server oriented chipsets. I don't think Intel is likely to come out of this state without something extremely radical happening, and every time they try to do something that could be radical it never has enough time to gestate to work, it always ends up abandoned.
- tootie 1y ago
  Can't vouch for this site but it has a breakdown of cpu market share by device type and the graph for servers is shocking https://www.cpubenchmark.net/market_share.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/market_share.html
  - momojo 1y ago
    Is this mainly because of the delays with the newest Xeon?
Aurornis 1y ago
> People would spend their whole day just having coffee with random colleagues, and making a couple of slides. It's nice to relax sometimes, but when I was there it was way too much of that. I knew a lot of people who got jobs like this after college. I was so very jealous at the time. I was working in a company that was nice, but also wasn’t afraid to tell people when they weren’t meeting expectations. Some of my friends were at companies where they weren’t expected to “ramp up” for the first year. One person I know read “The Four Hour Work Week” and talked his company into letting him work remote, then started traveling the world. He would brag that his entire job was “telling the engineers what to do” and it took him an hour a day because he did it all through email in one sitting. Years pass, economies evolved, and now it’s harder to get a job. Companies start looking for dead weight and discover people doing jobs that barely contribute, if at all. A tech company near me looked at their VPN logs (required to interact with their internal services and do any dev work) and discovered a lot of engineers who were only connecting a couple times per month. By then it’s hard to turn it around. It’s not easy to take people who have become so comfortable not working that the entire idea of urgency is a foreign concept. Ask for some task that should only take an hour or two and they’ll say they’ll have it by early next week. Any request turns into a series of meetings, which have to be scheduled with all participants, which means they can’t start discussing it until Bob is back from vacation next week, so they might have an idea of what’s required by end of month. At some point you can’t turn it around without making big changes to the people involved. There’s too much accumulated inertia and habit. You have to reorg at minimum and bring in new management, while also making it clear to everyone that their performance is now actually being noticed. It’s hard. With Intel, I’ve also heard from some ex-employees who left because pay was lagging. Companies with low expectations can feel like they’re getting away with low pay because many people will keep an easy job despite the low pay. It masks the problem, for a while.
- nineplay 1y ago
  One of my background voices is constantly saying "How will you describe your current project in a job interview?". Maybe I add a little spin, maybe I highlight certain aspects, but I always have an idea of how I'd introduce it and how I would answer detailed 'star' style questions about my contributions and results. I think some people with 'cushy' jobs don't take on this same mentality, perhaps overestimating the security of their current job. “telling the engineers what to do” is not a good starting point and the answers to follow-up questions had better be pretty detailed and convincing.
michaelcampbell 1y ago
> Like, nobody knows what LTQ or ASR stands for, Arithmetic Shift Right? (I kid, of course, but seeing a team name that _might_ correspond to an assembly instruction, in an post about Intel amused me.)
reactordev 1y ago
I can attest to this. 16 or so years ago I walked into one of their offices to talk Intel GPU’s and shaders with folks. They knew enough to build hardware but their software stack was 10% of what a GeForce 4 MX could do. I didn’t end up taking the job. I never really knew what happened to that division.
sellmesoap 1y ago
I remember early on in the clone wars hearing that Intel was strong arming motherboard manufacturers with delayed chipset availably if you also happened to make compatible kit for competitors. Now at the time I was funding my computer purchases with a paper route so it was always going to be AMD (cost/performance) but the scuttlebutt made buying AMD seem like the rebel/moral move.

smallmancontrov 1y ago

Same. I started down the semiconductor path about 15 years ago (physics student, loved my EE classes, loved nanofab class, wanted more) and got warned away by an astonishing number of independent postdocs, interns, and seemingly successful industry contacts who all agreed on one point: the pay was such utter dogshit that one should consider it a passion career like art or music. Some of them saw consulting for the Chinese as their "big ticket light at the end of the tunnel" -- but that got shut down soon enough. I changed directions before getting first hand experience but the R&D job listings tended to support this view. "They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" seemed to be in the advanced stages at that point. At least in R&D, from the angle I saw it. Clearly, being stingy wasn't a universal problem: heavy buybacks, ludicrous M&A (in foresight and hindsight), and that $180k average salary in the article sounds completely divorced from the snapshot impression that I got. I don't know what gives, was R&D "salary optimized" to a degree that other parts of the business weren't? Did the numbers change at some point but the culture was already rotten and cynical? Or did I see noise and mistake it for signal? Dunno. In another world I'd love to have been part of the fight to make 10nm work (or whatever needed doing) rather than working on something that doesn't fully use my skills or in my private opinion contribute as much to humanity, but my employer pays me and respects my time and doesn't steer their business into every iceberg in the ocean, and in the end those things are more important.

HPsquared 1y ago
The problem with R&D as a career (in a "large organised company/institute" context at least, where you don't own and control the results) is the limitless supply of impoverished students and postdocs willing to work for exposure.
- smallmancontrov 1y ago
  Right, but cheaping out on the foundation of your building has consequences -- which have come home to roost orders of magnitude in excess of the money saved. In R&D management, this is an extremely well-known problem with an extremely well-known solution: use the oversupply to be selective rather than cheap. The fact that they chose to be cheap rather than selective is managerial incompetence of the highest order. They had one job, and they blew it. "Selective" doesn't even mean that the rating system has to be perfect or even good, it just has to equilibrate supply and demand without shredding morale. Even a lottery would suffice for this purpose.
sgerenser 1y ago
Interesting, is this specifically on the fab side? I work at Arm and the engineers working on design and validation are paid quite well. Not quite as well as NVidia but most non-juniors are well above the $180k mark quoted above for Intel.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

pjc50 1y ago

> At the time Intel's dominance was supreme They are the poster child for "we have a monopoly so we don't have to innovate or even maintain competence". Mind you, how much worse must things be at AMD that they're not winning the x64 war? Eventually the "PC" market is going to get run over by ARM like everything else. Especially now there's a Windows on ARM with proper backwards compatibility. (although something is very odd with drivers on Windows-ARM, if anyone knows the full story on how to get .inf based 'drivers' working it would be genuinely helpful)

smallmancontrov 1y ago
It sure seems like AMD is winning the x64 war? https://www.alltechnerd.com/amd-captures-17-more-cpu-market-share-in-2025-as-intel-declines-by-10/ https://www.alltechnerd.com/amd-captures-17-more-cpu-market-...
- neogodless 1y ago
  Maybe a semantic argument, but I'd say they are "on their way to winning", but once they have a higher market share than Intel, "they are winning". > Despite Intel still holding the lead with 56.3% of systems validated through CPU-Z, AMD is closing in, now claiming 43.7% of the market.
  - Aardwolf 1y ago
    I do hope intel comes back, while I prefer AMD currently (due to no avx512 on intel consumer cpus and me not being interested in having things scheduled on efficiency cores in my desktop pc), if there's no competition anymore who knows what AMD might become...
    - Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
      I'm a gamer, and for Intel to make a comeback for me, they need something that competes with AMD's X3D chips, which absolutely dominate all the gaming benchmarks. The Core Ultra CPUs are an absolute joke for gaming, often being beaten even by the 14th gen CPUs. The Core Ultras had a major performance regression in L3 cache speed which destroyed gaming performance. Games love large cache sizes. The Ryzen 9700X has the same number of cores, but a slower clock than a 9800X3D, yet the 9800X3D comes out on top purely because it has 96 MB of L3 cache compared to 32 MB. If Intel would have put out an i9-14900K with 96 MB of L3 cache, it'd probably come out on top.

ponector 1y ago

>>It's very odd that the guy who was famous for saying what upper management should do (set culture) ended up building a culture that has completely failed Is it? Everywhere I worked upper management is taking big about the culture but their taking points are rarely applied to the company. Like when Facebook says something like "we value your privacy"

dreamcompiler 1y ago
Facebook does value your privacy, because it's a commodity they can sell for a high price. Sort of like that Twilight Zone episode. The aliens come and convince us they are here to serve man. "Here, if you don't believe us look at our book called 'To Serve Man.'" Finally one of the humans translates it and discovers it's a cookbook. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zone) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Z...
- sitkack 1y ago
  FB invades your privacy so that they sell access to you. Your privacy is important to them, so that they can continue to be the intermediary.
  - sellmesoap 1y ago
    Humm time to put my life story and my product and lifestyle preferences in an easy to read format behind a small paywall, there's gold in them there hills!
- lokar 1y ago
  And they have internal modeling to exactly value each persons privacy in $
michaelcampbell 1y ago
> Everywhere I worked upper management is taking[sic] big about the culture but their taking[sic] points are rarely applied to the company. Or worse, where I am their talking points about the culture they want ONLY applies to the company and not themselves. (In-office requirements, how the office is laid out, etc.)

gwbas1c 1y ago

I spent ~2 years at Intel 20 years ago. My experience was kind of similar, although I didn't see the "People would spend their whole day just having coffee with random colleagues" aspect. I left because I was working on a machine learning project that was a "solution in search of a problem;" and I spent too much time working alone. I was very early in my career and felt like I just wasn't learning enough from my peers. Overall, I felt like Intel was a positive experience. I do think their biggest problem was that they had to many lifers and didn't have enough "healthy turnover." Almost everyone there started at the beginning of their career, and thus everyone who was mid-late career didn't understand what the rest of the industry was doing.

ksec 1y ago

You only need to look at total employees of AMD + TSMC, either AMD and TSMC are extremely efficiency or Intel is bloated. Monopoly and Bureaucracy. That is basically what government is. It is kind of sad reading Intel was like that even in 2005.

no_wizard 1y ago

I firmly believe intel went from decline (which you can reverse) to terminal (which in a business sense, can be reversed, but it usually isn't) as soon as AMD was able to successfully erode some of their server business, and ARM is now doing the same. The mountain of money for intel has always been with server chips, as its their high margin chipsets. While they make alot of money on consumer laptops and desktops, its no where near the amount of money they traditionally have made on their server oriented chipsets. I don't think Intel is likely to come out of this state without something extremely radical happening, and every time they try to do something that could be radical it never has enough time to gestate to work, it always ends up abandoned.

tootie 1y ago
Can't vouch for this site but it has a breakdown of cpu market share by device type and the graph for servers is shocking https://www.cpubenchmark.net/market_share.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/market_share.html
- momojo 1y ago
  Is this mainly because of the delays with the newest Xeon?

Aurornis 1y ago

> People would spend their whole day just having coffee with random colleagues, and making a couple of slides. It's nice to relax sometimes, but when I was there it was way too much of that. I knew a lot of people who got jobs like this after college. I was so very jealous at the time. I was working in a company that was nice, but also wasn’t afraid to tell people when they weren’t meeting expectations. Some of my friends were at companies where they weren’t expected to “ramp up” for the first year. One person I know read “The Four Hour Work Week” and talked his company into letting him work remote, then started traveling the world. He would brag that his entire job was “telling the engineers what to do” and it took him an hour a day because he did it all through email in one sitting. Years pass, economies evolved, and now it’s harder to get a job. Companies start looking for dead weight and discover people doing jobs that barely contribute, if at all. A tech company near me looked at their VPN logs (required to interact with their internal services and do any dev work) and discovered a lot of engineers who were only connecting a couple times per month. By then it’s hard to turn it around. It’s not easy to take people who have become so comfortable not working that the entire idea of urgency is a foreign concept. Ask for some task that should only take an hour or two and they’ll say they’ll have it by early next week. Any request turns into a series of meetings, which have to be scheduled with all participants, which means they can’t start discussing it until Bob is back from vacation next week, so they might have an idea of what’s required by end of month. At some point you can’t turn it around without making big changes to the people involved. There’s too much accumulated inertia and habit. You have to reorg at minimum and bring in new management, while also making it clear to everyone that their performance is now actually being noticed. It’s hard. With Intel, I’ve also heard from some ex-employees who left because pay was lagging. Companies with low expectations can feel like they’re getting away with low pay because many people will keep an easy job despite the low pay. It masks the problem, for a while.

nineplay 1y ago
One of my background voices is constantly saying "How will you describe your current project in a job interview?". Maybe I add a little spin, maybe I highlight certain aspects, but I always have an idea of how I'd introduce it and how I would answer detailed 'star' style questions about my contributions and results. I think some people with 'cushy' jobs don't take on this same mentality, perhaps overestimating the security of their current job. “telling the engineers what to do” is not a good starting point and the answers to follow-up questions had better be pretty detailed and convincing.

michaelcampbell 1y ago

> Like, nobody knows what LTQ or ASR stands for, Arithmetic Shift Right? (I kid, of course, but seeing a team name that _might_ correspond to an assembly instruction, in an post about Intel amused me.)

reactordev 1y ago

I can attest to this. 16 or so years ago I walked into one of their offices to talk Intel GPU’s and shaders with folks. They knew enough to build hardware but their software stack was 10% of what a GeForce 4 MX could do. I didn’t end up taking the job. I never really knew what happened to that division.

sellmesoap 1y ago

I remember early on in the clone wars hearing that Intel was strong arming motherboard manufacturers with delayed chipset availably if you also happened to make compatible kit for competitors. Now at the time I was funding my computer purchases with a paper route so it was always going to be AMD (cost/performance) but the scuttlebutt made buying AMD seem like the rebel/moral move.