Intel's new SVP hire from Qualcomm Raheel is shocked at the "amateurish" design and "school project" architecture. He has been asked to make recommendation by Murthy on way forward.
14 replies (most recent on top)
100% my experience: "No incentive for groups to work together to provide real commercial-based solution. Just manage up and collect paycheck for another year and get rid of anyone who knows what they are talking about."
And don't be the guy who asks, "So what's the business model for this?"
Intel modem is ARM-based. Intel had the chance to make best-in-class embedded processor using Intel SOC for both LTE Advanced and 5G products . Aicha and Intel big core dogma did not understand the difference between modem performance requirements and server/PC requirements. They would not listen to those who did. Mobile market moves fast, Intel totally missed the boat here and wasted a lot of money. Of course Infineon guys love ARM, because it works for modem. Sofia was a disaster.
5G group only interested in short-term demos, not commercial based 5G modem solution. Intel will miss the boat here as well. No incentive for groups to work together to provide real commercial-based solution. Just manage up and collect paycheck for another year and get rid of anyone who knows what they are talking about.
If you are not shocked by how amateurish and crappy everything at Intel is, you must be really bad employee yourself
Well not surprised by new SVP comments, after all he has to create work for himself just like the rest that joined from QC.
Another overpaid useless VP coming in to cash a big check.
If the comments were true, he sounded like someone full of hot air.
Even if there is truth to the criticism, a senior VP should never engage in that kind of condescending speech. Anything along the lines of "We can do better" might have a better motivational impact. Part of the problem is that highly-paid newbies need to justify their hiring by spotting deficiencies and implying that only they can see them and their significance. Then work gets yanked in yet another direction, in the end resulting in unproductive thrash.
"talking about upen. did anyone actually ever see him in cupertino? or tom? or aicha for that matter? yossi? thilo? or any other of those great top managers? i was there for four months and didn't see any of them. ever. i would have expected some of them to be there for at least a week at a time. sitting together with the team."
Management and "leadership" at Intel spend their time and energy managing up (not down).
really surprised after seeing the engineers. Just mere runners and politicians , micromanagement
freedom should be there to innovate. but all the engineers are in layoff fever.
Management is the main problem inside Intel not only in iCDG. The layoff is mostly on talent engineers especially in 2015. These engineers are not good at politics, therefore they are the low performer in focal. Recent years, promotion to PE and Sr. PE is also very political, not based on technical skills.
that things are good enough quote must have come from upen. his mantra was always: change is for others.
talking about upen. did anyone actually ever see him in cupertino? or tom? or aicha for that matter? yossi? thilo? or any other of those great top managers? i was there for four months and didn't see any of them. ever. i would have expected some of them to be there for at least a week at a time. sitting together with the team. socializing. sympathizing. but nope. nothing. heck even kailash was often basically invisible (i think he preferred his santa clara office over the cramped customer offices) except when he tried to give one of his speeches to the team (he actually thinks he is a great motivator - quite funny). so it is not just incompetence. there is also a huge attitude problem in the icdg management.
fire them all and replace them with qualcomm managers. problem solved.
I am sure if Intel system engineers join Qualcomm, their first reaction will also be a huge facepalm.
Always the same b---s---. "I don't get it. It's different from what I have known before. So it s---s."
Just shows that they hired the wrong guy.
The problem with the Intel modem is not the architecture. Before Intel bought the business unit from Infineon, it was actually making money and only had the disadvantage of having started too late on LTE. The product is in a hundred million phones, so it can't be all that terrible. The problem are middle and upper middle managers who are incompetent, who don't realize that the development processes are extremely inefficient and who are incapable of imagining a way of doing things differently.
The business unit doesn't have major technical problems. It has cultural problems. It's a mix of German conservative Siemens culture plus American cluelessness and micromanagement plus Indian drama and backstabbing. Aicha couldn't change that. Heck, she didn't even realize it. She actually thought G5 was a success, while it had hardly any real impact.
I remember being in a conf call with Tom and Yossi where they said they had just come out of a 5G demo, and they were surprised that 5G was not about higher bandwidths but about enabling new services. Well, duh. That was at a time when Qualcomm had already announced a 5G solution and Aicha had given about a hundred speeches about how "The machines are coming". Imagine that. The general manager is preaching about the new age, and her staff doesn't get it and doesn't know what 5G is. The general manager is talking about urgent process improvements and her staff is saying "Actually, the way we are doing things is good enough!" (I am serious, I have heard this near-exact phrase from several middle and upper middle managers in iCDG when G5 began).
So the fact that some Qualcomm guy comes in and once again recognizes only supposed technical problems at the expense of understanding the HUGE cultural problems doesn't give me a lot of hope. It means there will be just another bunch or reorgs that won't do anything.
I really don't understand why Intel can keep hiring upper managers from other companies, but the incompetent middle management is basically the same as 5 years ago.
Who's your source? Is it the other troll next to you who also does not work for Intel?
This is actually good news. Maybe there is hope if intel management is willing to be honost with themselves vs. playing the internal all is well game.
It isn't intel modem it is Infineon with intel micromanagement what could be worse?