First, to be absolutely clear, there were lots of great people at Intel and specifically in Intel’s compiler team. There were plenty of good engineers doing good work, perfectly nice people who wanted to do the right thing. By numbers, they were by far the majority.
The problem was that just a few jerks, especially in positions of power or influence, could fu-k you up real good.
Intel had more than its share of them and therefore, everyone at Intel balanced some amount of technical work with some amount of politics work. You had to. Politics was more than the standard “advocate for yourself” stuff; at minimum it was periodically defending yourself against attacks from others who wanted your territory and would try to get your project shut down so they could take it.
Some people there approached their work with little in way of technological contributions, but a lot of politics. It turned out that that could be a perfectly successful career strategy—undermining others as necessary to maintain and advance your position without ever actually delivering much of substance yourself. Those were the jerks.
One thing that made it easier for them was the fact that software career path at Intel was all about getting away from coding ASAP—writing code was for new grads and less expensive engineers in foreign countries. The glory was being in an architect, never coding yourself, but setting direction. In that role, one could go far without producing anything more than slide decks, I mean foils.
Because there were the jerks out there, you always had to be aware of them. Even if you didn’t want to pursue that model for your own career, you had to defend against them or you’d be wiped out.
I never understood why Intel upper management didn’t seem bothered by their presence. I suppose that once that mode of success takes root, it’s cancerous to the organization and would be hard to root out. Perhaps they figured that Intel was doing pretty well as a company, so why fix what ain’t broke? Maybe they saw it as a good kind of aggressiveness and were happy with the idea of everyone fighting it out, gladiators in the Colosseum fighting each other to win, all for the glory of Intel.
Sometimes the management enablers of the jerks would encourage you to “assume best intentions” in your interactions with them. You’d quickly be out-maneuvered if you did; they didn’t play that game, and knew to take advantage of any opening they were given.
From https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/20/ispc-volta-going-all-in