
Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO? - redial
https://mondaynote.com/intels-toxic-culture-1b79905adf45
======
gwbas1c
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.

~~~
mirceal
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.

~~~
gwbas1c
> 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
_poor_ _mental_ _health_. 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.

~~~
mirceal
Re: definitions are important

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.

~~~
1123581321
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.

------
tlb
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.

~~~
danmg
You can't prescribe how language is used. Toxic culture now means this.
Changes in usage happen over time.

~~~
tlb
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_workplace).
So a descriptive linguist would agree with me.

~~~
danmg
Maybe the phrase 'toxic culture' was imprecise and lazy to begin with. Now
people are adapting it in a more precise way.

That wiki page was started in 2011 and it's based on a pop-management book.
It's hardly an established term.

~~~
EpicEng
>It's hardly an established term

Yet you said...

>You can't prescribe how language is used. Toxic culture now means this.

So apparently you can.

~~~
danmg
For this author it does mean this. Feel free to use this phrase however you
want though.

~~~
ihsw2
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."

~~~
privacypoller
and then in the same breath state this is "adopting a more precise definition
of the term". These comments are like arguing with my six year old.

------
TheMagicHorsey
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.

~~~
dreamcompiler
"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?

~~~
shindog
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.

~~~
flukus
> What’s wrong with developers “overseas”

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.

~~~
shindog
Fair points in some places yeah!

------
ChuckMcM
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.

~~~
alain94040
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.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I agree that it would have been a good example of where Apple could have
encroached on the Windows market more effectively.

That said, the margins Apple has continued to make on its hardware suggest
that not licensing MacOS was the right choice for the company.

------
wiremine
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?

~~~
hammock
Google uses OKRs (they took it from Intel). Not sure why I'm being downvoted

[http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-ranking-system-
okr-20...](http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-ranking-system-okr-2014-1)

~~~
whatshisface
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.

------
slivym
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?

Seems like a super obvious move to me.

~~~
eatbitseveryday
> Left Google at the perfect time?

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.

------
frmintel
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.

------
samfisher83
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%.

~~~
shimon
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.

Read Ben Thompson on this: [https://stratechery.com/2018/intel-and-the-danger-
of-integra...](https://stratechery.com/2018/intel-and-the-danger-of-
integration/)

~~~
samfisher83
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.

~~~
bluGill
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.

~~~
samfisher83
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.

~~~
bluGill
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)

------
excalibur
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!

------
ksec
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.

------
known
Firms with greater market power may innovate less
[https://www.economist.com/finance-and-
economics/2018/07/07/c...](https://www.economist.com/finance-and-
economics/2018/07/07/companies-appear-to-be-gaining-market-power)

------
novaRom
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)

Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Near-
term_limits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Near-term_limits)

~~~
PeCaN
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.

------
colinprince
>Money, or its lack, doesn’t cause a financial collapse, human folly does; the
numbers simply follow

iow, the symptom should not be confused with the cause.

------
ashishb
I feel that their hegemony in the server market might be lost even faster:
[https://ashishb.net/tech/three-reasons-why-intel-might-
lose-...](https://ashishb.net/tech/three-reasons-why-intel-might-lose-server-
market-even-faster-than-consumer/)

------
jpao79
Saw this the other day. Seems like it would make sense.
[https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/03/google-clouds-coo-
departs-...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/03/google-clouds-coo-departs-
after-7-months/)

------
DiabloD3
I'd do it.

No one else really seems to have the vision that a CEO needs to step up to
that particular plate.

~~~
tlb
Could you articulate your vision here?

~~~
DiabloD3
Sure.

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.

~~~
bluGill
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.

------
kanox
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.

~~~
ben509
"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.

~~~
magic_beans
> Allusions to people being poisonous are particularly destructive.

The phrase "toxic masculinity" isn't directed at one SPECIFIC man, so you can
dry your tears.

~~~
dang
Please don't post ideological swipes or personally nasty remarks ("you can dry
your tears") to HN. It only makes things worse.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
izzydata
I volunteer myself. I promise to make only the best decisions. Forever.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
Can you break the laws of physics and help us get Moore's Law back on track?

~~~
redial
He can promise to :)

------
sergiolchan
me

------
baybal2
>Who wants to be Intel’s new CEO?

I do

------
mesozoic
I volunteer. Gimme that golden parachute.

------
delbel
Missing an opportunity isn't a Toxic Culture problem, eh? I disagree with this
narrative.

~~~
politelemon
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.

