20 ms·
Leaving Intel
- xer0x 11mo agoHats off to Brendan!
- lopmkoihl 11mo ago[flagged]
- ChrisArchitect 11mo agoExtra slash in the url
- muragekibicho 11mo agoYou made me look 'blog//2025-12-05/leaving-intel.html'
- brcmthrowaway 11mo agoTerrible news from Intel, this guy seems like the best performance engineer on the planet
- nightshift1 11mo agoWhere do you think he's going next? OpenAI? Google? Just saving 1% on inference could probably justify his salary 100fold
- cowsandmilk 11mo agoDefinitely feels like someplace with GPUs that will let him work remotely.
- anonymoushn 11mo agoThis is true economically but in reality if you have much larger cost savings than that for sale then these companies mostly say "we would be happy to buy that for $0 while we pay you a million a year to move to the united states"
- boguscoder 11mo agoNot being sarcastic here, a million a year is not a target compensation for engineer like him, 5-7 is probably where it starts and goes to the stars
- astrange 11mo agoHis bio says he was an Intel Fellow, which is like a VP-level individual role, and yes that's what I expected too… but apparently not? These are kinda low. https://www.levels.fyi/companies/intel/salaries/software-engineer/levels/grade-12 https://www.levels.fyi/companies/intel/salaries/software-eng...
- boguscoder 11mo agoId expect his comp even before Intel to be way above that (he came from Netflix), perhaps levels info is not entirely correct for Intel or doesn’t apply to exceptional hires, fellow level compensation at FAANG seems to be more accurate there though
- oldpersonintx2 11mo ago[dead]
- benwills 11mo agoIn the photo of him on his last day [0], there's a cassette deck on his desk. That could be something mundane, but I'd like to believe something crazy happens if you yell at it [1]... [0] https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/images/2025/brendanoffice2025dec.jpg https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/images/2025/brendanoffice2... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
- avtar 11mo ago> cassette deck on his desk Greybeard reporting for duty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette
- bingo-bongo 11mo agoLooks like the C64 is behind it (underneath a..?) and there’s a small corner of 5.25” diskette station further back. Probably not his daily drivers.. :)
- Keyframe 11mo agoYeah, behind datasette it looks like there's C64 C parked, and above is a laser 300 (which makes sense if guy is australian) and we can also see 1541-ii behind that, on the top.
- brendangregg 11mo agoRight, laser 300 was called the VZ300 here. I'm out of desk space so I had to put the VZ300 on a stand above my C64C. Maybe AI can finally help me code some C64 and VZ games. :-)
- Keyframe 11mo agoIf only! It's kind of a blessing and a curse for us who still code for c64 (demo scene). It looks like llm may help you, but it's usually gibberish 6502 asm. I've seen similar with z80 but on spectrum.
- bfrog 11mo agoIntel losing great people at high speed. Not the first, not the last.
- markus_zhang 11mo agoCongratulations. A fulfilling life.
- cebert 11mo agoI’m wonder how much longer Intel will be around. It seems to be dying a slow death like Kodak or IBM at this point.
- ks2048 11mo ago"death" can be pretty slow - IBM has $60B in revenue and 270K employees.
- quotemstr 11mo agoWhen Shakespeare wrote "cowards die many times before their deaths", he had Intel in mind.
- blinding-streak 11mo agoUsername checks out
- ghaff 11mo agoAnd their financial/stock performance has been pretty good the past couple of years.
- seanmcdirmid 11mo agoI really have no idea how IBM is still in business, or the other big toxic techs like Oracle and Salesforce. Just goes to show I don’t know as much about the industry as I think.
- seabrookmx 11mo agoThey bought Red Hat, which has OpenShift and all their other "DIY Cloud" bits. This stuff is popular in government or old businesses that may have been slow to (or unable to for regulatory reasons) jump to AWS/GCP etc. To say nothing of the banks and others still using the IBM big iron.
- 11mo ago
- seneca 11mo agoI'm guessing he'll land at one of the big frontier model companies. I'm surprised he stayed at Intel as long as he did, they are dying fast.
- bigiain 11mo agoAnd it seems there's only one of them that's gonna have any new hardware that needs GPU flamegraphs to optimise...
- seanmcdirmid 11mo agoAMD, Apple, or NVIDIA?
- dramm 11mo agoA periodic reminder Intel is still in business.
- Aissen 11mo agoYou want something fun? Intel still has more than 50% market share in all segments (data center, desktops, laptops).
- dramm 11mo agoYes that's a great stat. It's amazing how slowly large companies can die. Intel has serious problems in all those segments. Maybe they can recover but I'm pretty pessimistic about their chances.
- fn-mote 11mo agoA "goodbye" post after only 3.5 years. Hard to relate. In my world it's hard to imagine an impact after that short of a time. And in fact, reading the list of accomplishments ("interviewed by the Wall Street Journal") makes it clear it's a good PR piece. I'm perfectly willing to believe he's fabulous, but this didn't move the needle for me.
- rossjudson 11mo agoIt didn't move the needle for you. For other people, they're going to be thinking "some other company is going to get one of the most effective and impactful performance engineers on the planet".
- stingraycharles 11mo agoYeah, I understand the responses, but this guy legit has a great track record. And if you read between the lines (especially the last few), it seems like he had problems pushing certain initiatives of his forward within Intel.
- caspar 11mo agoCertainly if you take it in combination with his earlier "Intel is listening" blog post: https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2025-11-22/intel-is-listening.html https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2025-11-22/intel-is-listen...
- candeira 11mo agoDude shipped flamegraphs (which he also created in 2011) for cloud GPU loads and persuaded internal stakeholders to release the code as open source. The "interviewed by the WSJ" line is for managers. Reading between the lines, I'd say he did really well and, if he didn't do better, it's because the organisation didn't let him.
- smelendez 11mo ago> The "interviewed by the WSJ" line is for managers. It’s a green flag for hiring managers for sure. Even a lot of valued employees wouldn’t be allowed to represent a big company to the WSJ for various reasons, even with a PR person sitting next to them.
- gyomu 11mo ago> "I also supported cloud computing, participating in 110 customer meetings, and created a company-wide strategy to win back the cloud with 33 specific recommendations, in collaboration with others across 6 organizations." Man people keep count of this stuff?! Maybe I should too, it does make flexing easier.
- _ea1k 11mo agoA lot of people consider score keeping like this to be more important than the job itself. I can't even say that they are wrong.
- cowsandmilk 11mo agoIf you look at many of his recent blog entries, it is clear he has felt the need to quantify his impact to prove he isn’t less effective as a remote employee in Australia working for a company in the US.
- chanux 11mo ago"Count your meetings" Wouldn't hurt to try!
- nunez 11mo agoUse gcalcli to search for meetings with customer invited. That's it! Also, for an engineer that isn't in sales, 110 customer meetings is A LOT.
- bibimsz 11mo ago[flagged]
- wferrell 11mo agoSo...oai or google?
- acheron 11mo agoHey, maybe he has morals.
- johncolanduoni 11mo agoYahoo. They're due for a comeback
- al_be_back 11mo agoLeaving intel? That’s one case where an employee won’t get chastised for
- foobarian 11mo agoWow is it me or is the self promotion strong in this one.
- boguscoder 11mo agoDoes he need it though? His name is literally a brand in many tech circles and very good brand at that
- forrestthewoods 11mo agoAlways valuable to announce your availability and celebrate recent successes.
- boguscoder 11mo agoAnd how did I contradict that? My point was that he is not looking for vanity
- forrestthewoods 11mo agoYou: does he need it? He’s famous! Me: it’s always valuable! That’s it.
- lopmkoihl 11mo ago[flagged]
- astrange 11mo agoThat is a regular self-review. Companies make their employees do that. In this case Intel needs him more than the other way around, as far as I know. I do know people keep asking me if they can see flamegraphs of things.
- maliker 11mo agoMasterclass in turning a goodbye email into a hire me after my next gig ends. I’m not being sarcastic, this is a great example of highlighting the value they added.
- ohhellnawman 11mo ago[flagged]
- senkora 11mo agoHe doesn’t mention it in this post, but in another post he talked about the toll of needing to frequently attend meetings in the middle of the night in his time zone. Whatever his reasons for leaving, I hope that he finds a better balance in his new role.
- solatic 11mo agoThis was the takeaway I had taking to a colleague about his time at Intel - they're a genuinely global company with engineering teams in practically all time zones who are still expected to collaborate with each other. No matter what time of day the meeting was scheduled for, it was the middle of the night for somebody, and no, just working on written docs async for everything didn't cut it, and they couldn't just fly people out all the time. So that's apparently just part of what it means to take a job at Intel these days.
- shrubble 11mo agoIf my back of the envelope math is right, in the last 6 months he’s been attending more meetings at possibly odd hours; he lives in Australia and Intel is based in the USA. See https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2025-05-22/3-years-of-extremely-remote-work.html https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2025-05-22/3-years-of-extr... 77 meetings then, but 110 meetings in his resignation blog post…
- 0x0000000 11mo agoTwo different numbers, no? The resignation posts specifies 110 customer meetings, the blog post you linked to about meetings during odd hours does not.
- brendangregg 11mo agoYeah, different numbers, 110 customer meetings, the other post tracked 1-6am meetings. I'm glad I tracked 1-6am meetings since I've shared that number when people think that remote workers aren't making an effort.
- fipar 11mo agoThose 1-6am meetings are crazy. I’ve been fully remote for over 16 years now and my only 1-6am meetings are incident response, if I’m on call. And I’m a nobody; that you have to do that makes it feel even crazier to me. I admit I was a bit more flexible with that in the past, but once I had a heart attack at 40 it dawned on me any company would just replace me and keep on going while my family was going to have a much tougher time (and no help from whatever company would be employing me at the time).
- asdfjoe 11mo agoOut of curiosity, do you still hold the same views as you did in the past?https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-03-25/is-silicon-valleys-long-tech-boom-finally-over-mass-layoffs/102124712 https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-03-25/is-silicon-va...
- javaunsafe2019 11mo agoI mean I understand if someone like Keller writes such posts but some dude claiming to have hosted conference events and some kind of process flame graph which could have been done by anyone…
- krior 11mo ago> some dude Maybe you should read something about him before you call him that. I recommend the "Contributions"-section on his Wikipedia-article. And if it is of any relevance to your work: his "Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud" is a comprehensive and excellent guide.
- badmonster 11mo ago[dead]
- motbus3 11mo agoI see some mean comments. I suppose maybe people doesn't know Brendan Gregg's work, this guy reserve some respect.
- elric 11mo agoWhat's going on with these comments? So much ridiculous and unwarranted bashing. Is someone feeding the trolls? Is 4chan down? Yikes.
- solatic 11mo agoBrendan Gregg deserves respect. Intel? Their reputation had been in the gutter for a few years now. The classic way to offend a nerd is to have a leading market position, tons of cash and resources, then squander it on politics and bullshit.
- dotemacs 11mo agoWhat's with the retro gear on the desk? Do you use it much and what for? In particular Commodore tape player.
- mort96 11mo agoLeading the article with AI stuff is certainly a choice. If that's what they've ben spending their time on lately, maybe this is good for Intel.
- aardvark179 11mo agoCalling them AI flamegraphs is really naming them after the workload they are likely to be used on. If you want to make workloads more efficient it’s useful to know where they are spending their time.
- mort96 11mo agoFlamegraphs are great, GPU flamegraphs are an obvious good idea. But his choice to work on "AI" instead of general GPU compute, and advertise this "AI" work at the very top of the list of things he's done of note, tells me what I need to know.
- atxtosh 11mo ago[flagged]
- nialv7 11mo agohey, he's not boring. he shouted at a bunch of JBODs!
- torginus 11mo agoI think this is a good opportunity to guerilla-ask a question about cloud performance: We've been running some compute heavy workloads on AWS, with some running on metal instances, and some running on virtualized instances of equal size. Both were intel 192 core machines. Virtualized instances tended to perform 20-25% worse in terms of CPU throughput, which is quite significant, and more than I'd have assumed. Where does the performance go? Is this an AWS thing, does the performance get lost in the software stack, or is it a CPU-level issue? I haven't tried with other vendors tbh, but would it be possible to mitigate this by switching to another architecture/vendor like AMD or Graviton?
- arcanus 11mo agoThat's a surprisingly large overhead. I've not measured that large an impact on AMD, particularly for compute heavy. Did you profile at all? And have you observed if it's not compute-bound? If it's memory or IO bound it can be due to other virtualization overheads, such as memory encryption.
- torginus 11mo agoI will try to profile, but how do you suggest going about it, what to measure? Maybe running some synthethics stressing CPU or memory? The workload is pure memory/CPU, with very little IO so it's 100% compute bound, with much more emphasis on CPU.
- everfrustrated 11mo agoOn modern AWS instance types so much is offloaded to dedicated hardware that the only shared (noisy) components between VMs is memory bandwidth and higher levels of CPU cache (and I think graviton doesn't even share CPU cache now) I would suspect your performance difference is mostly likely showing that on metal you are sharing the same software wider so not polluting caches as much as a vm neighbour running unrelated software.
- kundi 11mo ago[flagged]
- mgrat 11mo agoGlad this made HN. Just wanted to thank you for writing, and I've ordered one of your books.
- munchler 11mo ago> My next few years at Intel would have focused on execution of those 33 recommendations [for a “company-wide strategy to win back the cloud”], which Intel can continue to do in my absence. The idea that people are going to execute your arduous, detailed plan for world domination while you’re off doing something else seems a bit… unrealistic, to say the least.
- rbancroft 11mo agoIf it works, he gets credit. If it fails or never happens, someone else gets the blame. pretty classic.
- snapdeficit 11mo agoYou’re dead on. This kind of knee-deep gluey “advice” is the cult of personality that intel now thinks is effective planning. The head’s-down hard work of the 80’s and 90’s vanished when the media turned Grove into a reluctant folk hero and the bubble burst. I was there for 21 years, this guy is symptom of a much larger problem that is self-sustaining. Too many people trying to hide, do the bare minimum, and collect a fat paycheck, while people like this wave around grand plans that will never be touched. Yep I’m a cynic, two decades there fried my compassion circuits.
- tacker2000 11mo agoYea I found that weird. Who is going to execute your gradiose plan once you leave? Why would anyone else care so much as to see this through? Seems a bit arrogant and short sighted. He would be the only one that cares about this in the end.
- sundayqtrbk 11mo agoRead this blog post from the same author https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2025-11-22/intel-is-listening.html https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2025-11-22/intel-is-listen.... I'm surprised that this narcissist Fellow wasn't shown the door by the company for 3.5 years. Good luck to whichever team he now joins and get ready to be shoved with his accomplishments reports.