[HN Gopher] Intel restructures and creates new business units an...
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Intel restructures and creates new business units and leadership
roles
Author : mroche
Score : 63 points
Date : 2021-06-22 21:16 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.intel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.intel.com)
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| This is basically an update on ways Intel is executing the
| strategy new CEO Pat Gelsinger layed out a few months ago [1].
|
| [1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26568598
| foobarbazetc wrote:
| This'll be the restructuring that fixes it...
| dijit wrote:
| I guess this is because they got a new CEO recently, which makes
| total sense as a shakeup is needed.
|
| But; has anyone else ever experienced the "swell" of middle
| management and "restructuring" which always seems to result in
| more people in management positions?
|
| I've now worked in three companies where this is extremely
| apparent. In the latest company I've gone from 3-degrees from the
| CEO to 6 in little over ten months.
|
| I think I understand why this happens: you need to promote
| people, but:
|
| 1) Is it bad, I suspect it is because there's usually not _more_
| managerial work than there is individual contributor work- but
| then more managers tend to need more managers to talk to/make
| powerpoints for/make decisions without involving the team
|
| 2) If it's bad, is there any way to stop it?
| pram wrote:
| Last company I was at did a reorg which switched from product
| to functional based orgs (I guess) ... and I went from 4
| managers to the CEO, to like an almost incomprehensible web of
| directors. Then a manager was added to my team which sent us a
| level down even further. This was ostensibly done to
| 'streamline' the orgs which seems deeply hilarious
| EricBurnett wrote:
| > 1) Is it bad?
|
| Yes and no. It's hard for any given manager to support a large
| team - managing too many often results in either burning out,
| or being very hands-off with the team... limited career
| coaching, limited knowledge of the individual context, etc. And
| it's somewhat worse at higher levels of middle management,
| where the individual is responsible for aggregating the needs
| of between say 2 and 25x that of the managers below them.
|
| Of course, it's not that simple. avg 5 reports vs 10 is only 1
| or 2 on org chart depth, but almost 2x on the number of middle
| managers. (And so 3 sounds particularly bad, if you're
| 'average').
|
| If middle management is growing because the company is growing,
| that's probably fine, including resetting after large growth in
| the lower levels. If it's growing because fan-in is reducing,
| that's more of a concern... possibly managers are becoming
| lower quality, or there's a lot more top-down burden, or
| individuals are becoming harder to manage (for many reasons).
| None of those are great signs.
| EricBurnett wrote:
| Relatedly, I'd love to see an experiment in segregating
| "people managers" from "organizational managers". Imagine
| having one manager who is responsible for coaching your
| career growth, helping ensure you have the right
| opportunities, etc; and another manager who is responsible
| for the product you work on. You could have lots of people
| managers for support, and few organizational managers for
| minimizing org chart depth between products and the CEO.
|
| Of course, in some places this approximates the split between
| PM and eng. I don't have great breadth of experience, but I
| haven't seen that work amazingly... though admittedly, more
| from PM churn issues than necessarily fundamental
| infeasibility. But still, it might not be as simple as that.
| m-ee wrote:
| What your describing is a matrix org. I've only seen
| managers praise it and every IC I know hates it, including
| myself. But maybe it's done right somewhere.
| lupire wrote:
| "And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different
| bosses right now."
| foota wrote:
| This is roughly how some places do it with distinct
| management chains and technical leaders along the chain. So
| nominally leadership is the management, but the technical
| people under your directors are responsible for technical
| direction.
| EricBurnett wrote:
| I'm (at Google) one of those "technical leaders" - peer
| to a manager of ~50 with an informal title of "Uber TL",
| and no reports of my own. Though for us at least,
| responsibility still accrues to the manager - I'm a
| consultant in some sense, with impact through my ability
| to influence rather than any direct authority.
|
| I'd love to see the end of this road, if other companies
| have taken it further. I personally offer guidance to the
| TLs in my scope (and that of my director, to a lesser
| extent), but have no technical leadership above me. And I
| think that's where it gets really hard - finding folk
| capable of being TLs for say 500 to 1000 people is hard.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The biggest argument I've heard in favor of TLs (or
| _shudder_ architects) is that it keeps a company from
| hemorhaging technical experts who have little interest in
| people managing.
|
| When it's done right, it seems to work well.
|
| People who are interested in managing people become
| managers.
|
| People who are interested in deepening technical
| expertise become TLs.
|
| I think the often unvoiced key expectation that needs to
| be set that TL skillsets include (a) evangelism, (b)
| consensus building, & (c) flexibility.
|
| I.e. If you're an unrepentant asshole who can't work with
| your colleagues and "lose" decisions in a graceful way
| that leaves everyone feeling okay, the company probably
| shouldn't make you an architect.
| mdorazio wrote:
| I've personally seen it go both ways, depending on the type of
| restructuring, the type of company, and the direction of the
| new leadership team. Sometimes you end up with more managers,
| other times managers are gutted to make the company leaner.
| Promotions rarely come into play unless there's a strong fear
| that good people will leave en masse if they don't get
| promoted.
|
| I would say that whether it is good or bad depends on the goals
| of the restructuring and how well the result matches those
| goals. More middle management is neither good nor bad on its
| own - sometimes very flat organizations need more management to
| enforce processes and policies that let the company grow
| efficiently, other times very hierarchical organizations need
| less management between decision makers and ICs to move faster.
| th-miracle-257 wrote:
| If this is what they mean by shakeup then it's just the regular
| stuff in recent Intel past.
|
| When I was at Intel in 2 years I saw at least 6 reorgs and had
| 4 managers. You can imagine my career growth or the lack of it.
| Unfortunately it needs a real deep clean of non technical power
| pint happy management and clueless engineers.
|
| And the politicking is so deeply entrenched in culture now that
| the new CEO himself might be a victim of it if he is under
| false illusion that restoring Intel to past glory is just about
| turning a few knobs.
|
| Thankfully I left for a FAANG before it was too late with a
| wonderful hike, better colleagues and working conditions. The
| most irsksome thing for Intel to attract back those who have
| left is almost no one of those I know and in touch with who
| have left wants to be back and it's not the money but the poor
| experience of working there.
|
| If anyone can give Amazon a run for its money in treating its
| employees badly, my bet is on Intel.
| reedjosh wrote:
| > If anyone can give Amazon a run for its money in treating
| its employees badly, my bet is on Intel.
|
| For sure this, but for me it is the money. In the last year I
| was promoted and gained 11% at Intel. I left for a startup,
| and gained 40% more.
|
| I'm pending an offer from a FAANG now and I anticipate that
| within a year I will have 2.5x my previous total comp at
| Intel.
|
| Further, Intel markets to its own employees in an extremely
| disgusting manner. Great Place to Work, Overpriced food
| branded as healthy, Programs for meditation and whatnot,
| which all sound nice, but mean next to nothing.
|
| Just provide some decent comp and remove non-technical
| managers from managing technical people and processes.
| Pitching a project was always a nightmare of whether the non-
| technical manager would get the idea (or understand the
| possibilities) or not.
| User23 wrote:
| This is a well known phenomenon that was described by C.
| Northcote Parkinson[1]. While Parkinson's law is often
| misunderstood by readers, including Wikipedia editors, who
| can't make it past the first paragraph of a work, the actual
| law is a formula describing the growth of bureaucracies: x =
| (2k^m + p)/n, "where k is the number of staff seeking promotion
| through the appointment of subordinates; p represents the
| difference between the ages of appointment and retirement; m is
| the number of man hours devoted to answering minutes within the
| department; and n is the number of effective units being
| administered. Then x will be the number of new staff required
| each year." In this context "minutes" are basically printed out
| emails.
|
| There's much more to it and it's a great read.
|
| And to answer your second question, in virtually all cases the
| only thing that can be done is to wait for the organization to
| fail. There's a reason there aren't many 100 year companies.
|
| [1] http://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf
| fallingknife wrote:
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
| Afforess wrote:
| Highly hierarchical, "top-down" organizations end up requiring
| a lot of managers in order to "enact" the top down policy
| decisions. The more decisions are imposed top-down instead of
| bottom up, the more management and administrative overhead you
| incur. Management is needed for top-down decisions because you
| need someone to "convince" teams to do something for you.
| Ideally, it's obvious to employees that the change is good and
| necessary, but if it's not, then this coercement requires
| enforcement - hence more management.
|
| The opposite end of the spectrum is "flat" orgs, like Valve
| software, who have few/no managers. In a flat org, all
| decisions are bottom up.
| Guthur wrote:
| I can pretty much guarantee Valve has hierarchy it just maybe
| more implicit than an overt org chart. There will be leaders
| and there will be followers, almost guaranteed.
|
| Hierarchy will naturally appear in some form as we try to
| achieve something that requires more than handful, I'm sure
| there is some sort of inflexion point but not sure exactly
| what that is.
| Galxeagle wrote:
| And just to defend top-down orgs a bit, the corollary is that
| because different teams might make different decisions,
| flat/bottom-up organizations tend to be less standardized -
| more flexible at the cost of some chaos. A tendency for
| launching and killing products in quick succession is one
| possible implication. For Valve launching different games
| that works, at Google launching/killing chat apps is starting
| to hurt their reputation.
|
| An ideal company is a mix of both, but which policies are
| 'imposed from above' and which are allowed to 'boil up from
| the bottom' is usually an endless source of discussion - I
| wonder which way Intel is going
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _An ideal company is a mix of both_
|
| The best company I've ever worked at (retail, surprisingly)
| squared the circle thusly:
|
| _Strategy_ (i.e. goals, culture, priorities) flowed top-
| down. And the company spent serious time doing it
| pervasively and well.
|
| _Solutions_ (i.e. implementations, features, products)
| flowed bottom-up.
|
| Part of their corporate culture was that a manager above
| team level should never suggest _how_ to do something. You
| could bounce ideas off them, but they were pretty serious
| about it being the person doing the implementation work 's
| decision.
| varjag wrote:
| What is "bottom up" exactly if as you say there is no
| hierarchy?
| geofft wrote:
| I used to work for a flat organization, with few formal
| managers. I now work for a much "taller" organization, with
| four levels of management between myself and the owner.
|
| In practice, at the flat organization, there were ways that
| the people at the top were able to impose their views and
| preferences on the company. Most obviously, the folks who had
| been at the company for a long time were friends with the
| owners, and they had a lot of unofficial influence over
| things went, even if there was no org chart putting them over
| other people. If a change seemed good and necessary to the
| in-group, then they were in a position to enforce it. If it
| did not, there was no way to get them to go along with it.
|
| Also, in practice, at the taller organization, there are a
| lot of bottom-up decisions anyway. It's just that those
| decisions get to be in fact bottom _up_ - I go to my manager,
| who talks to some other manager while I keep hacking on
| something else, and either that manager agrees, or more
| likely they point out something else and my manager comes
| back to me with a more balanced alternative. At the flat
| organization, decisions were bottom _sideways_. I had to go
| to a bunch of ICs from different teams and try to convince
| them of the merits of some idea, and if they had conflicting
| goals, I had to mediate that myself.
|
| I'm _much_ happier at the taller organization which has a
| paperwork-heavy performance review and promotion process
| (compared to the flat organization, which also had no titles
| and where performance reviews were a brief closed-door
| meeting with the one manager between you and the owners). I
| find it works better for me: I understand better other people
| 's expectations of me and I am better able to communicate
| what I want to change too. It's extra time, but it's well
| worth it for the predictability, and I feel much more
| supported trying to make difficult cross-team changes.
|
| It doesn't work for everyone, of course; different people
| have different personalities.
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