I've been reading "Measure What Matters" by John Doerr, which outlines Objectives and Key Results, a concept heavily influenced (invented?) by Andy Grove.
Would be interesting to hear from someone who knows if Intel still uses OKRs, and if their long-term usage contributed to the current "toxic culture". I really like OKRs as a concept, just wondering what long-term usage looks like, and what the downsides are.
Or maybe it's sensationalism, and the culture isn't that toxic?
I think it's really funny that OKR grades are public but ostensibly not used for promotions... Everything associated with you gets entered in to people's brains, and they draw from it when evaluating you whether it's in the policy to do so or not.
It's a bit of an odd system and I wouldn't ascribe too much weight to it. It was never taken very seriously and there was a lot of gaming going on.
That said, it boils down to just writing down your goals and coming up with metrics to decide how close you got. That's not exactly revolutionary but not a bad idea either and most companies don't systematise it to the level that the OKR system does.
People game OKRs, but it doesn't matter. Planning work a quarter out for your team is very valuable, no matter what you call it.
I was the TL of a very small team at Google. My manager and nearby senior engineers were very good at forcing me to plan my team's work for the quarter in the form of OKRs, and the results were quite surprising. I would say something like "I'll add that to next quarter's OKRs" and people trusted that it was actually going to get done. There were no weekly status meetings, or nag emails, or anything like that... people assumed that if my team said we were going to do something, it was going to be done. And they were right, because we actually focused on exactly what we said we were going to focus on. We had to prioritize, and so we spent a little more time on features than on system stability than I would have without any plan ("just one more day to automate this part of the release that only saves 5 seconds once a month!"). It was quite good.
Meanwhile, when I first joined Google, I went to the company OKR scoring meeting. There was a KR like "have one billion active foobar users" and the score presented was .7, the minimum "passing" score. They did not have 700,000,000 users though. I distrusted company OKRs ever since. I can do multiplication; you lied.
TL;DR: planning is valuable. Making up a number to make yourself feel good is pointless. The key is to not tie self-directed and self-graded OKRs to anything important, just look at it like a reasonable todo list for the next 3 months.
I'm not sure if the author understands the word's context or usage; the article also links to "Intel's toxic fixation on margins" but nowhere on the target page does the word toxic appear.
WTF does "toxic culture" even mean, other than clickbait?
Some people seems to use this as meaning "anti-social" or "excessively aggressive" but the word only appears in the article as "toxic fixation on margins" where it's equivalent to "harmful".
The gist of the article seems to be that Intel lost in the mobile space because it refused to chase opportunities with lower margins. But decisions regarding such deals are made by a small handful of people at the top, the "culture" of the rest of the organization is irrelevant.
"Toxic" is one of those terms like "problematic" that rely on in-group knowledge to understand. I've often heard it in reference to masculinity; often used by feminists who have a more concrete definition in mind. And, sure you can look at any violent crime stats to see masculinity has its problems, but instead of the more reasonable claim they're making a very nasty one that's indefensible.
Allusions to people being poisonous are particularly destructive. This was very common in the military, if a soldier didn't fit in, he was labeled as something similar to toxic so that others knew not to associate with him. Even then, when the military does it, there's a practical solution: the soldiers get out of the military.
If you claim a larger group is toxic, you have to ask: these are our neighbors, what do we do with them?
> But decisions regarding such deals are made by a small handful of people at the top
Yeah, that really blew the article for me. Something like not-invented-here syndrome is a cultural issue, not bad corporate strategy.
To clarify: when I said "you can look at any violent crime stats to see masculinity has its problems" I'm acknowledging that the issue the feminists are trying to address is a real one. And that's an olive branch to avoid derailing the discussion into politics.
To say that masculinity has a problem because of violent crime statistics is identical to say that femininity has a problem because of eat disorder statistics.
Correlating statistics is useful when looking for potential causes in a large space of unknowns, but horrible when misused as evidence to justify a negative label on a category of people. Its not an olive branch for peace.
I'd describe it more as a palpable malaise. Teams feel like they're on islands 1000 miles apart from one another. You can feel it in the air the moment you enter any organization like this (if you know what the other side feels like).
A massive organization that has gone stagnant tends to exhibit the same mechanics. You're on a team solving a problem for a stakeholder. You might not know who the stake holder is or where they are. You might meet your real stakeholder once every month or never. If your company is process minded they'll create proxy stakeholders to create the illusion of task identity.
Proxy stakeholders are the worst. Since the gizmo you're working on isn't for them, any enthusiasm for your work is feigned. They're your only line to the person(s) that actually care(s). The human connection between you, your labor and its consumer is severed, isolating you further. This puts the employee on a slalom to resentment and alienation. The better your proxy is, the shallower the grade, but you'll end up there eventually.
Despite the fact I've seen quite a few successful techniques to obviate this eventuality, 99% of companies don't have a symbol in their minds for the trajectory and it happens anyways. The flat org chart thing is an interesting cudgel to solve the problem, I'm convinced it's not the best solution.
The term 'toxic culture' is mostly used to describe widespread harassment and bullying. 'Ossified' or 'stagnant' are more apt terms for a company that can't seem to seize new opportunities.
The thing about margins is that it's a lot more fun to work in a division with high margins. Low margin businesses are grim, because every cost matters. When you can charge $5000 for the latest Xeon, you can pay high salaries and have fat travel budgets. So it's hard to get people used to working on high-margin divisions to move into a new low-margin division, even if it might eventually be bigger.
If you google 'toxic culture', all the top results (other than this article) refer to harassment and bullying rather than slowness to adapt to change. Same with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_workplace. So a descriptive linguist would agree with me.
That's not how language works. Words and terms have meaning, you can't just make stuff up and say "languages evolve/everything is subjective/use whatever phrase you want whenever you want."
All words and phrases are made up. None of them have an “inherent concrete meaning”. Commonly-accepted deifnitions today may have been entirely foreign a few decades ago.
Words and phrases can have a de facto inherent meaning when they are in a language shared by the speaker and listener (including a shared knowledge domain).
When in spite of this shared language/domain situation, a phrase is gobbledygook, it is fair to say it has "no inherent concrete meaning".
So if you think all these things, why do you feel a need to convince us we're wrong? I mean, does your blarf just not embiggen the point yule's trying to make? I mean, depending on what you might think I instoll with a breem like 'your blarf'.
I do agree that it all glarps like slofting ar a six year old.
Communication is a two-way street. A word becomes meaningful when the recipient is able to understand the author through it; if there is no such consensus, then the word can't be said to mean anything.
A word is simply a shared reference to a concept. The consensus is around whether or not that reference is valid anymore.
Here’s a concrete example: “citizen” meant something completely different 100 years ago. At that time it meant “member of the set of landowners”, which resolved to “white male landowner”. Now the concept of citizen is much different and a lot more contentious.
"citizen" is meaningful because people do have a shared understanding of its meaning - people who are arguing about who is and isn't a citizen are still agreeing about what a citizen is. This article doesn't seem to be claiming that the culture at Intel has the aspects that people normally refer to when they say "toxic culture", it's trying to express something different - there's no factual disagreement, only a semantic one, which means the word has failed to convey meaning.
I'd add to this that, among the changes that happen to language, there are those that are true, organic, and grass-roots, but also there are those that are forced, manipulative, and agenda-driven. :-)
> You can't prescribe how language is used. Toxic culture now means this.
Seriously? You can't prescribe how language is used either.
Meaning in language is constructed around conversations about how words should or should not be used. No single person can prescribe language, but discussions about what words mean in their context is how language evolves.
There are certainly some people[1] alleging that Intel has what most would agree is a toxic culture, but yeah this article really didn't illustrate that.
I worked with a guy who contracted with them in the 90s — he laughed that they flew him cross country every two weeks as a contractor to attend a staff meeting
> The term 'toxic culture' is mostly used to describe widespread harassment and bullying.
I guess it's a continuous spectrum. What you describe is the worst possible end. Maybe next to it you have people which just don't care about people and take advantage of them by all means. Well and then there are places were people get burned out, managers loose their shit and yell at employees etc.
Seen it all, in fact it's like a domino effect. People involve in this, then they also involve in similar stupid activities.
I work for Intel. I agree that "toxic culture" is a term I would reserve for work environments where harassment is tolerated, which doesn't describe my experience.
There does seem to be a lot of dissatisfaction with leadership, though, and it's related to those high margins. In theory one would expect that those high margins would trickle down to compensation, but it seems to all be going to dividends, stock buybacks, and acquisitions. When it comes to employees, "we haven't budgeted for that".
I worked at Intel 2005-2007. I read the article hoping to see an independent description of the culture I observed. I hoped to see someone use words to explain something that I can't explain.
The thing about Intel's culture that I observed was that it wasn't toxic at all. The worst thing that I could say about it was that it was boring, which was why I left so quickly.
If anything was "toxic," it could be that some managers and co-workers had very bad people skills... But that happens at all large companies. HR can't witness and guide every interaction between employees. In reality, when I was there, Intel's HR made every effort to create a culture where, if something "toxic" happened, they could fix the situation as quickly as possible.
Granted, things did happen. The "toxic" situations were more of ordinary human nature, and can happen anywhere, even in non work situations.
At a big corporation, like Intel, we cannot really talk about just one culture. I would say that your experience can vary quite a lot based on the team you’re in and to a certain degree the org you’re in.
Various people assign the ‘toxic’ label to various things. What may be ‘meh’ for one person could be ‘toxic’ to another.
Also: Mandatory HR is not your friend reminder. HR is there and it’s trained to protect the corporation.
> At a big corporation, like Intel, we cannot really talk about just one culture. I would say that your experience can vary quite a lot based on the team you’re in and to a certain degree the org you’re in.
Slightly. Ultimately, the high-level culture is set by the execs.
> Various people assign the ‘toxic’ label to various things. What may be ‘meh’ for one person could be ‘toxic’ to another.
No, definitions are important. The word "toxic culture" has a very clear meaning; and the article does not use it correctly.
Specifically, toxic culture means an environment that leads to high stress and poormentalhealth. That's not what the article discussed, and it's completely appropriate to criticize. A "toxic culture" is a very serious accusation, so incorrectly using the term isn't something that falls under the "I say toe-may-toe, you say toe-mah-toe" attitude.
Yes and no. Some of the biggest conflicts I’ve seen started because of misunderstanding ‘basic words’. So definitions matter in the sense that they help clarify intent. But they also can make things harder if you insisting on a certain definition comes across as condescending.
Possibly true but irrelevant here, since the OP does not come across as condescending, and their distinction between Intel’s culture and a toxic culture is making it easier to understand Intel.
And yes, the high level execs do have to shape the culture, but it’s far from the formal “we want things to happen like X” and it’s usually a live/evolving process that happens over years, and it’s usually tailored at org and team level.
Sometimes the high level directives are great but the culture sucks, sometimes (less offen) the culture is great in spite of high-level.
>Slightly. Ultimately, the high-level culture is set by the execs.
Depends on the size and the structure under which the institution operates. If there's autonomy within an institution execs might attempt to set a culture, but they can obviously not control it and the result will be a mix of organic bottom-up developments that diverge from section to section, and top-down guidelines.
At a company the size of Intel, with over 100k employees, it is almost impossible to have an iron grip on the entire workforce.
HR can be your friend, when the interest of the company, and your interest happen to align, which in my experience is more often than not.
But its important to recognize, that HR is only to your benefit, when interests align, the OP is right, that HR is not there to protect you, but to protect the company, sometimes protecting you however, is protecting the company as well.
>HR can be your friend, when the interest of the company, and your interest happen to align, which in my experience is more often than not.
I think that very much depends on how HR decides to view things.
Someone complains about another coworker's behavior.
"Oh man we better protect the company by addressing that person's behavior."
"Oh man we better protect the company by addressing the person who complained."
Just about every HR situation can go in a lot of directions, it just depends on what HR decides their best choice is. The problem as an employee is that you DON'T KNOW what HR thinks or will do, pretty much ever.
HR as an organization has all your personal information, and HR groups expect / requires you share that with them .... but generally you have no relationship with them and no reason to trust them. It's a weird situation.
>Also: Mandatory HR is not your friend reminder. HR is there and it’s trained to protect the corporation
That I will not dispute. However, I would also say that _everyone_ is there for the progress of the company. We’re all hired to do what’s good for the company, not the boss, manager, subordinate, colleague, etc. Now, yes, HR has a special direct role to execute that goal.
Not always. I once worked for a company that had an ombudsperson who reported only to the CEO. The ombuds' job was to investigate employees' complaints without fear of being fired him/herself. In that company, the system worked well.
Agree with this, Intel is as boring as big bureaucratic government contractors, much to my dismay (and quite different from 90's software giants, which seem to move at a faster pace). Their processing and manufacturing lead can only keep them going for so long until they find some visionary leadership that can revitalize the company from the bottom up.
I never worked for Intel but they were clients for a number of years and I wrote an in-depth strategic analysis of them at one point.
"Toxic" seems a poor choice of phrase based on everything I've seen. Boring--which is to say very heavily into process in all things--is perhaps apropos.
Their biggest issue was projecting x86 into everything. Either by assuming they had the ability to push ecosystems into existence by dint of being Intel (see WiMax) or by inventing essentially non-reasons why x86 would succeed in areas like mobile (Flash will run better if it's the same architecture as desktop).
Was it obvious back then that Flash would be dead by now, Microsoft gives up on phones, x86 fails at gaining any foothold in the phone business and intel fails at performing the next structure shrink?
It wasn't obvious that Flash would be dead. But it still seemed an odd hook (at least to me at the time) on which to hang mobile needing to be on the same architecture as desktop.
I get why Intel was pushing x86. OTOH, they also pushed on other architectures for networking which also didn't pan out for other reasons.
Interesting discussion here on the toxic culture reference. As I understand it, especially given the food analogy, Jean Gassee believes that the culture that Intel has evolved over time, prevents them from taking the steps that are necessary to continue to move forward. This culture is 'toxic' in that it is weakening the company rather than strengthening it.
Gassee also makes the point that the culture of the company is more influential on its success or failure than its financial position.
I found his argument fairly persuasive. Of course I worked at Intel during the Andy Grove years and understood that Intel is addicted to the high margins the x86 processors commanded. So when Gassee describes it as a cultural aversion to anything that might impact margins negatively, I can see that as a valid way of looking at it.
I'm surprised Jean-Louis didn't highlight the similarity between Intel's refusal to focus on mobile and his own push-back on licensing MacOS a decade earlier. Both decisions (cultures) have to do with switching from a high-margin product to a low-margin product, with no guarantee that you'll make up the difference in volume.
Intel has an insane treasure trove of technology that they don't seem to know what to do with because they have confused profit with market domination (related ideas, but not equivalent, and one often leads to the other in both directions).
Example: Intel obsesses over x86 in a very weird and unhealthy way. Intel has repeatedly developed new CPU architectures that did not suffer from the burden of the technical debt that has accrued.
A lot of money was sank into, for example, the XScale ARM series. What killed it off was not because there was something technologically inferior with the product (it was rather popular for the time, the Snapdragon of it's age): what killed it was upper management thinking ARM sales could harm x86 sales, instead of just focusing on making sales happen.
The result? Marvell bought it, and turned merely took the breaks off the product line and let it naturally evolve. Marvell didn't really do anything other than that; Intel intentionally strangled the project and that's why it was sold.
That made no financial or logical sense no matter how much Intel apologists try to spin it. Intel cannot change the reality that their x86 designs are not for low power (which they finally admitted when they killed off the Atom SoC line for phones and tablets, which was drank power like it was going out of style), and Intel has locked itself out of one of the largest markets in the world.
Another Example: I have two Haswell-era machines in my house. Both of them are intended to be used with CPUs that have iGPUs. They both have mini-Displayport plugs. Neither have Thunderbolt controllers.
My Ivy Bridge-era MBP? Has a Thunderbolt controller, and it is the only machine in my house that would never benefit from it. The inclusion of said Thunderbolt controller was at the behest of Apple, not because of Intel.
What could have happened? Every Intel machine since Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge should have had a Thunderbolt controller baked into iGPU, and Intel's sales of Thunderbolt controllers would have gone through the roof. Instead, Intel has to compete with USB 3.x, produces controllers intended for TB-over-Type-C, and does not produce USB 3.x device SoCs (essentially losing money on every sale since Intel should be doing this), only integrated host controllers for existing Intel platforms.
The job of the CEO is to promote a culture inside of management where such decisions happen regularly. As CEO, I wouldn't be the one making decisions such as, say, making onboard Thunderbolt the default: I'd be making it possible for such decisions to happen naturally, to make sure the proper behavior is rewarded and diagnose issues in the corporate policy on why Intel isn't promoting the desired outcome internally.
From everything I have seen, Intel doesn't particularly have a toxic culture internally, not in a way that compares to the posterchildren of that particular disease. What Intel has is a weird obsession with the past, and an absolutely immense treasure trove of technology that just sits there and isn't sold or marketed meaningfully.
I think people have written entire books about the missteps of Intel. The problem is, all of us here know they were missteps, but Intel management glorifies them as the right choice and what lead to Intel's greatness.
I just see a company that doesn't understand how to profit in the right ways, and instead has lead to a public perception that Intel doesn't care about customers, hides ticking time bombs in their products intentionally (Meltdown et al.), and has lead to the term "Intel Tax".
AMD doens't sell a better CPU, nor a faster one. What they sell is a CPU that is fit correctly for the market, and have a public perception of actually caring about customers, caring about the long term support of their products, and try to leverage their technology in ways that benefit both the customer AND the shareholder.
If I was tossed in as the CEO today? I'd try fix the public perception, try to figure out why Intel just sits on endless technology and isn't part of the right markets (even though they have or had technology that fits those markets), and try to figure out why good ideas (and the people that make them) are not promoted from with in.
Intel is pretty much no different than Broadcom or Qualcomm, yet Intel can't sell the stuff they need to in a way that makes sense. Yet, every cell phone has Qualcomm parts in it, tons of IoC and network and NAS stuff has Broadcom parts in it (due to their huge family of ARM and MIPS SoCs), Broadcom also sells more Ethernet controllers than Intel.
So, what the hell. If I become CEO today, I am delivering disruption to the management culture that prevents Intel from thriving the way it should.
Sounds good to me. However I don't think you could pull it off - you could start but I think that you would be fired for non-performance before your efforts can actually make a difference.
Six months of doing my best but failing miserably because I have no idea how to run a massive company, followed by a multi-million-dollar golden parachute? Sign me up!
I worked at Intel for two years. They don't have a "toxic" culture. They are just like any other big company. Believe it or not, Google and Facebook will end up like that in 25 years too.
Big organizations get like that. There's a generation that's raised on the company Kool-Aid and they live and breathe the company slogans and they forget that reality is a different place. That's not TOXIC ... that's just the nature of human organizations.
And I mean all organizations that are large. If you ever hang out with DNC or GOP people who work for the party you'll see the same blinders. Same goes for people that work at NASA ... or in certain academic fields. They all believe certain myths internally that no experts outside their group believe.
The point about Intel being addicted to narratives that aligned with its profits is true. And Microsoft was addicted to Windows and Office narratives too before Satya Nadella.
It certainly makes you admire IBM as a company a lot more, doesn't it? They have weathered so many changes in the landscape, and they are still around.
"Around" is relative. The last thing IBM innovated was Watson and they're downsizing that division because they can't figure out how to market it. IBM is mostly just a body shop for cheap overseas code monkeys now, isn't it?
Bit of an ignorant statement even if it is IBM. What’s wrong with developers “overseas” (a completely relative term but forgivable in the YC context) why call them monkeys (not an sjw so not even going to go down that words rabbit hole). Having worked with many a yank their quality is just as variable and I’ve seen better output standard maintained by some European teams even if scale is limited.
Often it's the culture and education system. Many cultures are very top down and everyone just says yes to whatever the boss wants and then tries to make it happen. The educations systems are often very focused on rote memorization. These translate to extremely poor software (among other things).
> why call them monkeys
It's a long standing term for people that write code but do little else. There has never been any racial undertone to the term.
No one going to point out that Diane Bryant mysteriously left Google recently? Long experience at Intel, expert in cloud, female face fits into the progressive culture they're trying to chase? Left Google at the perfect time?
I worked at Intel for 15 years in IT, and Diane, was by far, the best CIO Intel ever had.
I am conflicted about whether I would want her to return as the culture (as pointed out by others), is very stagnant (one of the reasons I left), and the classic good ole boys network (which is how Intel was really toxic) was still there and stronger than ever when I left in 2013.
The article is mentioning they missed the mobile revolution. How many mobile chip manufacturers are making that much money on mobile chips. If you look at QCOM's earnings a majority of it is licensing its patents. QCOM chip business net income is 15%. INTC net is almost 30%. In its data center business its 50%.
This is exactly the logic that led Intel down this path. They thought they were avoiding a field with low margins and could deepen their manufacturing advantage by remaining focused on the high-margin data center business. Meanwhile, the growth in mobile/GPU/SOC chips was so massive that it enabled Intel's competitors to actually catch up on manufacturing. Those competitors are going to eventually compete in the high end, and it's an uphill battle for Intel to become competitive in the fields they've ignored to date.
If Intel does survive, it will be as a company with far lower margins in a brutally competitive environment.
Which of intel's competitors that make mobile chips are doing as well as intel? Please give me an example. I gave you numbers for QCT which makes mobile chips.
TMSC and Samsung are going to spend money on R+D on chips irrespective of what intel does. Intel has a moat in the x86 market it has none in the ARM world. Read porters 5 forces and you will see why going into the mobile world made no sense for them.
In my opinion Intel throwing money at lower margin business would not make sense to me. I guess we will find out what happens in the future.
Before I left Intel in 2013, they had recognized that the money was really in the value added chain of the mobile segment (i.e. iTunes).
But the same stagnant culture that prevented them from seeing and embracing the mobile revolution also prevented them from making things like the Intel AppStore work.
At this point, Intel really is just a vertical implementation of a company like TSMC.
The problem is we are forecasting the future. Today Intel makes better product that their mobile competitors. However those competitors are making their product better and better all the time. Already companies are starting to look at those cheaper mobile CPUs and ask if they are good enough, some are answering yes, and there are signs that more will in the future.
For a long time intel could hold all this off - sure competitors were cheaper, but intel was enough faster that they were worth it just because you could get more done with them (time is money). However intel has been facing issues with the laws of physics that limit their ability to get better. As their competition catches up intel has nowhere to go.
If they did go make mobile chips what is their value proposition? How are they any different than any other chip maker. Qcom has its modem what does Intel have?
They have generated 50 billion in cash over the last 5 years. Let the shareholders pick who they want to invest in.
If they don't make mobile chips what is their value proposition? They used to be on the forefront of what manufacturing could do and thus the fastest. However everyone is running into limits of physics, meaning their competitors are catching up.
Can they find a next step? I don't know. I'd benefit if they do (faster CPUs would help me), but if they can't I benefit as well (I switch to cheaper mobile chips that are just as fast)
Intel PR was always too much addicted to Moore's Law. The Moore's Law is almost dead and so is Intel (Most semiconductor industry forecasters, including Gordon Moore, expect Moore's law will end by around 2025)
I mean, in the strict formulation of "transistor counts doubling every 2 years" it's been dead since like 2015 if not earlier.
That said, the "death of Moore's law" is kind of this memetic doomsday device that doesn't really mean anything. We haven't had significantly faster single-threaded performance for years and we're developing ways to cope with that.
Intel's real problem is that they keep missing the boat on new markets for chips. ARM got smartphones. Nvidia got machine learning. (Xeon Phi is cool. Maybe someone will notice. Maybe they'll fix the instruction decoder so it can actually operate at full speed. Who knows.) Intel killed off Itanium and then we discovered that every modern CPU design except Itanium is horrifically vulnerable. IBM is rapidly encroaching on the server market with innovations like CAPI/BlueLink.
If Intel is "dead", it's not because of the death of Moore's Law, it's because they let everyone else eat their lunch.
I worked at Intel for several years. I really enjoyed myself most of the time and got to work on interesting things.
Because I was not serious about staying at Intel for a long time, I took a lot of risks that made my experience more fun. Most people probably wouldn’t do so.
There was significant beaurecratic bloat and overhead, the whole organization felt stodgy and a lot of the people simply weren’t doing their jobs. This caused me to feel like I constantly had to cross lines I didn’t want to cross in order to execute at a decent pace. I come from a startup background and couldn’t tolerate the endless delays and lack of responsiveness I saw there.
From my part of the company I mostly had a good time but I did see that I would not have a good time at many other parts of the organization. There are a lot of dead product lines with no future that need to get cut. No two ways about it. Cutting those products won’t be fun.
Ossified is a good word for many parts of the company.
I feel like the cultural harm caused by some of the layoffs left many people disenchanted. I heard one ex Intel employee say something like: “I got laid off because I am just another old white man.” That sentiment really is corrosive, I heard of that several times.
Unfortunately, I think the successor to BK is going to be saddled with some ugly clean up work. Or they could be cowards and continue to turn the same crank for wall street. BK cleaned some of the mess (and created several new ones), there are many more to clean.
It’s easy to be too pessimistic.
Intel has unbelievable engineering skills under the hood. They are incredibly dangerous if they are able to shake this off and re-energize.
I hope they find a truly progressive leader and don’t continue their descent into mediocrity.
Intel is so big that they need 3 CEOs and one of them has to be a silicon genius. That a company with so much talent can't bring dynamic products to market is a tragedy for the American economy. x86 doesn't need to die it just doesn't HAVE to be the only future.
In an organisation like Intel, how much fight is needed for a new CEO to break the Company into three, Intel Foundry, Intel Silicon, and Intel IP, along with Intel Holding being the holding company?
Intel Silicon will continue to produce the best in class x86 chip, from Desktop, Server, Notebook to Modem, FPGA, GPGPU and Network processor. And Storage like Optane and SSD.
Intel Foundry will focus to be the best Foundry on the planet. Not only just tech and yield, but also the ecosystem around it; from tools to libraries.
Intel IP will allow customers to use Intel's IP to fab their custom solution in Intel Foundry. x86 Core, 5G Modem, WiFi, Bluetooth, Network Processor, Memory controller, GPU, every building block Intel uses for Intel silicon. To be make to anything from SoC for PS5, Xbox with CPU and GPU, to Mobile SoC using ARM CPU + Intel Modem.
Would be interesting to hear from someone who knows if Intel still uses OKRs, and if their long-term usage contributed to the current "toxic culture". I really like OKRs as a concept, just wondering what long-term usage looks like, and what the downsides are.
Or maybe it's sensationalism, and the culture isn't that toxic?
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