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.
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).
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.
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
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".
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.
> 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 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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] gwbas1c|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mirceal|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lend000|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|7 years ago|reply
"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).
[+] [-] ericnyamu|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tlb|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Spooky23|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elihu|7 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] Symmetry|7 years ago|reply
[1]https://semiaccurate.com/2018/06/29/intels-firing-of-ceo-bri...
[+] [-] blablabla123|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] danmg|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheMagicHorsey|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dreamcompiler|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] alain94040|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wiremine|7 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] hammock|7 years ago|reply
http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-ranking-system-okr-20...
[+] [-] repolfx|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] taeric|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slivym|7 years ago|reply
Seems like a super obvious move to me.
[+] [-] eatbitseveryday|7 years ago|reply
I agree this is really the most suggestive next step. I posit she left as a result of the CEO position opening up, not by mere coincidence.
[+] [-] medunham97123|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] frmintel|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] samfisher83|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shimon|7 years ago|reply
If Intel does survive, it will be as a company with far lower margins in a brutally competitive environment.
Read Ben Thompson on this: https://stratechery.com/2018/intel-and-the-danger-of-integra...
[+] [-] excalibur|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] known|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] novaRom|7 years ago|reply
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Near-term_limits
[+] [-] PeCaN|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] colinprince|7 years ago|reply
iow, the symptom should not be confused with the cause.
[+] [-] ashishb|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpao79|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DiabloD3|7 years ago|reply
No one else really seems to have the vision that a CEO needs to step up to that particular plate.
[+] [-] tlb|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kanox|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ben509|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MrLeap|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pohl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] izzydata|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbuder|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sergiolchan|7 years ago|reply