[AMDAnon]

AMD pays the bare minimum in software to get a product out the door. The company does not even have working performance testing and regressions routinely get shipped to customers. Benchmarks the executives see are ad hoc and not meaningful.

HipKittens is an improvement but AMD does not have the ability to understand or track kernel performance so it'll be ignored.

This isn't fixable overnight. Company-wide DevOps and infrastructure is outsourced to TCS in India who have no idea what they're doing. Teams with good leadership maintain their own shadow IT teams. ROCm didn't have such a team until hyperscalers lost their shit over our visibly poor development practices.

Even if AMD did extend an offer to hire all the people in the article, it would be below-market since the company benchmarks against Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Walmart, instead of Google, Nvidia, or Meta.

We haven't had a fully funded bonus in the past 4+ years.

[schainks]

> We haven't had a fully funded bonus in the past 4+ years.

This is WILD to hear considering how well it appears AMD is executing from the outside.

[AMDAnon]

> considering how well it appears AMD is executing from the outside.

The party line is that the stock price is up because the market expects us to perform well in the future, and we won't get a bonus until we actually perform well.

[BNE]

> Teams with good leadership maintain their own shadow IT teams.

Yes, this is true. Painfully true.

[JonChesterfield]

This doesn't sound right. I definitely got yelled at over trivial performance regressions which looked like noise so people were measuring performance.

They've paid serious amounts in RSUs over the last six years. Not top of market by any stretch but firmly in the category of engineers don't care what the steak costs. Bonus might be team dependent, I remember being annoyed and nicely surprised by it in different years.

The aql profiler confuses me quite a lot but it's definitely a tool for measuring performance.

[slavik81]

I don't think anon is correct, but I can understand how they'd come to their conclusions. I certainly didn't choose AMD to maximize my pay, though it's always been a comfortable salary.

With regards to performance, there are some things tracked carefully and other things that are not tracked at all. I suspect that is why some folks think we're really good at it and others think we're terrible. There's lots of room for improvement, though. Excitement over trivial performance regressions is more a sign of immaturity than of good tracking.

[AMDAnon]

> I definitely got yelled at over trivial performance regressions which looked like noise so people were measuring performance.

It depends on team, we have some testing, and progress is being made. But it's not "working" or comprehensive as we get complaints from our big customers. We should be replicating their setup internally and not have them catch problems.

> Not top of market by any stretch but firmly in the category of engineers don't care what the steak costs.

We need to pay top of market to steal people from our competitors. We can't pay less than Nvidia and outcompete them. Paying less is a signal we're aiming for second and to copy the market leader.

[observationist]

The MBAs are in charge, and now AMD is the new Intel?

It's not only not fixable overnight, but it's not fixable at all if the leadership thinks they can coast on simply being not as bad as Intel, and Intel has a helluva lot of inertia and ability to simply sell OEM units on autopilot.

Sounds like the AMD board needs to get their heads out of their asses and shake up leadership.

[AMDAnon]

The MBAs have always been in charge to an extent.

But the real issue is we don't want to invest in beating Nvidia on quality. Otherwise we wouldn't be doing stock buybacks and instead use the money on poaching engineers.

The mindset is that we maintain a comfortable second place by creating a shittier but cheaper product. That is how AMD has operated since 1959 as a second source to Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. It's going to remain the strategy of the company indefinitely with Nvidia. Attempting to become better would cost too much.

> Sounds like the AMD board needs to get their heads out of their asses and shake up leadership.

Knocking out Lisa Su would be stupid, since she has the loyalty of the whole company and is generally competent.

What they should do is bump TC by 60-70% and simultaneously lay off 50% of the engineers. Or phase in the same over a longer period of time. The company is full of people that do nothing because we've paid under market for so long. That's fine when competing against Intel, it's not acceptable when competing against Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, Google, and Nvidia.

Lisa Su is the only CEO in the S&P500 who can get away with mass layoffs and still have the loyalty of the rest of the employees.

[FuckButtons]

Madness. I see the accountants are in charge then.