[thunder-blue-3]

Speaking from personal experience, many director-level and above positions at Intel, especially in growth related areas are filled through nepotism and professional connections. I've never seen a headline about Intel’s decline and thought, 'Wow, how could that happen?'

[PaulHoule]

I had a business partner that I agreed on a lot of things with but not about Intel. My assumption was that any small software package from Intel, such as a graph processing toolkit, was trash. He thought they could do no wrong.

Intel really is good at certain kinds of software like compilers or MKL but my belief is that organizations like that have a belief in their "number oneness" that gets in their way of doing anything that it outside what they're good at. Maybe it is the people, processes, organization, values, etc. that gets in the way. Or maybe not having the flexibility to know that what is good at task A is not good at task B.

[f1shy]

I saw always intel as a HW company making terribly bad SW. Anywhere I saw intel SW I would run away. Lately I used a big open source library from them, which is standard in the embedded space. Work great, but if you look the code you will be puking for a week.

[throwaway2037]

    > such as a graph processing toolkit

This is oddly specific. Can you share the exact Intel software toolkit?

    > "number oneness"

Why does this not affect NVidia, Amazon, Apple, or TSMC?

[tharkun__]

See the funny thing is, even with all of this stuff about Intel that I hear about (and agree with as reported), I also just committed a cardinal sin just recently.

I'm old, i.e. "never buy ATI" is something that I've stuck to since the very early Nvidia days. I.e. switched from Matrox and Voodoo to Nvidia while commiserating and witnessing friend's and colleagues ATI woes for years.

The high end gaming days are long gone, even had a time of laptops where 3D graphics was of no concern whatsoever. I happened to have Intel chips and integrated graphics. Could even start up some gaming I missed out on during the years or replay old favourites just fine as even a business laptop Intel integrated graphics chip was fine for it.

And then I bought an AMD based laptop with integrated Radeon graphics because of all that negative stuff you hear about Intel and AMD itself is fine, sometimes even better, so I thought it was fair to give it a try.

Oh my was that a mistake. AMD Radeon graphics is still the old ATI in full blown problem glory. I guess it's going to be another 25 years until I might make that mistake again.

[vishnugupta]

That’s not specific to Intel though. That’s how Directors and above are recruited in any big company.

For example, Uber hired a VP from Amazon. And the first thing he did was to hire most of his immediate reports at Amazon to Director/Senior Director positions at Uber.

At that level of management work gets done mostly through connections, favors and networking.

[pointyfence]

I tell people that if they get a new boss who is at Director or above, assume that you are re-interviewing for your job for the first 6 months with the new boss.

[AtlasBarfed]

Major companies like that become infected with large hierarchies of scum sucking middle management that eat revenue with bonuses.

Of course they are obsessed with shrinking labor costs and resisting all downsizing until it reaches comical levels.

Take a company like health insurance that can't show a large dividend because it would be a public relations disaster. Filled to the gills with vice presidents to suck up extra earnings. Or medical devices.

Software is also very difficult for these hierarchies of overpaid management, because you need to pay labor well to get good software, and the only raison d'etre of these guys is wage suppression.

Leadership is hard for these managers because the primary thing rewarded is middle management machiavellianism, turf wars, and domain building, and any visionary leadership or inspiration is quashed.

It almost fascinates me that large company organizations basically are like Soviet style communism, Even though there are opportunities for internal competition. Like data centers and hosting and it groups. They always need to be centralized for" efficiency".

Meanwhile, they are like 20 data centers and if you had each of them compete for the company's internal business, they'd all run more efficiently.

[andrekandre]

  > It almost fascinates me that large company organizations basically are like Soviet style communism, Even though there are opportunities for internal competition. 

probably because continuous competition is inefficient within an organization and can cause division/animosity between teams?