[HN Gopher] Leaving Intel
___________________________________________________________________
Leaving Intel
Author : speckx
Score : 326 points
Date : 2025-12-05 21:27 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.brendangregg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.brendangregg.com)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Extra slash in the url
| muragekibicho wrote:
| You made me look 'blog//2025-12-05/leaving-intel.html'
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Terrible news from Intel, this guy seems like the best
| performance engineer on the planet
| nightshift1 wrote:
| Where do you think he's going next? OpenAI? Google? Just saving
| 1% on inference could probably justify his salary 100fold
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| Definitely feels like someplace with GPUs that will let him
| work remotely.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| This is true economically but in reality if you have much
| larger cost savings than that for sale then these companies
| mostly say "we would be happy to buy that for $0 while we pay
| you a million a year to move to the united states"
| boguscoder wrote:
| Not being sarcastic here, a million a year is not a target
| compensation for engineer like him, 5-7 is probably where
| it starts and goes to the stars
| astrange wrote:
| His bio says he was an Intel Fellow, which is like a VP-
| level individual role, and yes that's what I expected
| too... but apparently not? These are kinda low.
|
| https://www.levels.fyi/companies/intel/salaries/software-
| eng...
| boguscoder wrote:
| Id expect his comp even before Intel to be way above that
| (he came from Netflix), perhaps levels info is not
| entirely correct for Intel or doesn't apply to
| exceptional hires, fellow level compensation at FAANG
| seems to be more accurate there though
| xer0x wrote:
| Hats off to Brendan!
| benwills wrote:
| In the photo of him on his last day [0], there's a cassette deck
| on his desk.
|
| That could be something mundane, but I'd like to believe
| something crazy happens if you yell at it [1]...
|
| [0]
| https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/images/2025/brendanoffice2...
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
| avtar wrote:
| > cassette deck on his desk
|
| Greybeard reporting for duty:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette
| bingo-bongo wrote:
| Looks like the C64 is behind it (underneath a..?) and there's
| a small corner of 5.25" diskette station further back.
|
| Probably not his daily drivers.. :)
| Keyframe wrote:
| Yeah, behind datasette it looks like there's C64 C parked,
| and above is a laser 300 (which makes sense if guy is
| australian) and we can also see 1541-ii behind that, on the
| top.
| brendangregg wrote:
| Right, laser 300 was called the VZ300 here. I'm out of
| desk space so I had to put the VZ300 on a stand above my
| C64C. Maybe AI can finally help me code some C64 and VZ
| games. :-)
| Keyframe wrote:
| If only! It's kind of a blessing and a curse for us who
| still code for c64 (demo scene). It looks like llm may
| help you, but it's usually gibberish 6502 asm. I've seen
| similar with z80 but on spectrum.
| the_af wrote:
| I think generating assembly with an LLM would be like
| copying from a magazine back then: nothing learned.
|
| But I wonder, do LLMs help _explain_ chunks of 6502
| assembly code, in your experience? Say, if one was
| learning.
| Keyframe wrote:
| yeah that certainly does happen. Especially if you give
| it the context of the machine since 6502 itself and
| opcodes do you no good unless you know the memory layout/
| map which is in a sense what machine you're on. NES and
| C64 are 6502, heck even SNES is but 6502 opcodes are
| nothing since action is in memory you're interacting
| with.
|
| When you provide context and the memory map, it does help
| explaining what algos you're looking at and what's going
| on. I've had a bit more luck with gemini rather than
| claude on this vs in general claude codes better. ChatGPT
| is for the most part lost in hallucinations.
| leetrout wrote:
| A.B.K. Always Be Knolling.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-CTkbHnpNQ
| bfrog wrote:
| Intel losing great people at high speed. Not the first, not the
| last.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Congratulations. A fulfilling life.
| cebert wrote:
| I'm wonder how much longer Intel will be around. It seems to be
| dying a slow death like Kodak or IBM at this point.
| ks2048 wrote:
| "death" can be pretty slow - IBM has $60B in revenue and 270K
| employees.
| quotemstr wrote:
| When Shakespeare wrote "cowards die many times before their
| deaths", he had Intel in mind.
| blinding-streak wrote:
| Username checks out
| ghaff wrote:
| And their financial/stock performance has been pretty good
| the past couple of years.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I really have no idea how IBM is still in business, or the
| other big toxic techs like Oracle and Salesforce. Just goes
| to show I don't know as much about the industry as I think.
| seabrookmx wrote:
| They bought Red Hat, which has OpenShift and all their
| other "DIY Cloud" bits. This stuff is popular in government
| or old businesses that may have been slow to (or unable to
| for regulatory reasons) jump to AWS/GCP etc.
|
| To say nothing of the banks and others still using the IBM
| big iron.
| i_am_a_peasant wrote:
| they've been partnering with nvidia to build large ML
| training clusters iirc last time i was in their building
| at a meetup a few weeks ago
| hbogert wrote:
| The American hyper scalers are not necessarily the place
| to be. Modern can mean Non-hyper scalar as well. Can this
| sentiment just die please? Great that its working out for
| you and you replaced good sysadmins with aws admins, but
| it should not be the default strategy perse.
| zipy124 wrote:
| Oracle basically runs HR and finance services for like
| every large company in Europe. They also run a scary amount
| of healthcare stuff and other government tech type stuff.
|
| It sucks but I see why they do it. If you don't have the
| technical/managerial talent to handle procurement then it's
| the safest bet.
| toast0 wrote:
| IBM still sells mainframes and similar. And has a giant
| consulting and service business.
|
| Their purchse of RedHat flows into consulting. Their
| purchase of Softlayer (rebranded into IBM Cloud) is more
| IBM owned, customer operated computing, a business IBM has
| been in since forever.
| chanux wrote:
| Lindy[1] will make sure it stays around for a while.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
| kqr wrote:
| Although you're correct that it would be too soon to
| prophesize their death, I want to clarify that Lindy ensures
| correlation, not causation.
| roboror wrote:
| Intel still sells a ton of silicon.
| hearsathought wrote:
| > I'm wonder how much longer Intel will be around.
|
| The government took an ownership stake in the company. Nvidia
| invested a few billion in the company. It's not going anywhere.
| voganmother42 wrote:
| Intel is going nowhere.
|
| They are a gov chosen winner, so it is a safe bet they will
| exist for as long as they are a useful political puppet. Why
| or how would they become more competitive?
| seneca wrote:
| I'm guessing he'll land at one of the big frontier model
| companies. I'm surprised he stayed at Intel as long as he did,
| they are dying fast.
| bigiain wrote:
| And it seems there's only one of them that's gonna have any new
| hardware that needs GPU flamegraphs to optimise...
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| AMD, Apple, or NVIDIA?
| grosswait wrote:
| Or Amazon, Google, Cerberus?
| dramm wrote:
| A periodic reminder Intel is still in business.
| Aissen wrote:
| You want something fun? Intel still has more than 50% market
| share in all segments (data center, desktops, laptops).
| fn-mote wrote:
| A "goodbye" post after only 3.5 years. Hard to relate.
|
| In my world it's hard to imagine an impact after that short of a
| time. And in fact, reading the list of accomplishments
| ("interviewed by the Wall Street Journal") makes it clear it's a
| good PR piece.
|
| I'm perfectly willing to believe he's fabulous, but this didn't
| move the needle for me.
| rossjudson wrote:
| It didn't move the needle for you.
|
| For other people, they're going to be thinking "some other
| company is going to get one of the most effective and impactful
| performance engineers on the planet".
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Yeah, I understand the responses, but this guy legit has a
| great track record.
|
| And if you read between the lines (especially the last few),
| it seems like he had problems pushing certain initiatives of
| his forward within Intel.
| candeira wrote:
| Dude shipped flamegraphs (which he also created in 2011) for
| cloud GPU loads and persuaded internal stakeholders to release
| the code as open source.
|
| The "interviewed by the WSJ" line is for managers. Reading
| between the lines, I'd say he did really well and, if he didn't
| do better, it's because the organisation didn't let him.
| smelendez wrote:
| > The "interviewed by the WSJ" line is for managers.
|
| It's a green flag for hiring managers for sure. Even a lot of
| valued employees wouldn't be allowed to represent a big
| company to the WSJ for various reasons, even with a PR person
| sitting next to them.
| bigiain wrote:
| > if he didn't do better, it's because the organisation
| didn't let him.
|
| The last few sentences to me read like he knows for sure that
| the organisation is actively working against what he sees as
| his important goals. Carefully worded (and likely personal
| lawyer approved) to avoid burning the bridges as he mic-drops
| and deftly avoids having the door hit him in the arse as he
| struts out.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I felt like he avoided saying anything negative about Intel
| just in case it would be taken that way. Intel doesn't have
| the best reputation so we are all interpolating a much more
| negative message than he actually said.
| pm90 wrote:
| Agreed. He also mentioned these years being "some of the
| toughest at intel". To me it read as 1) Amazing that he
| managed to get anything done at all with this kind of
| turmoil and 2) A not so subtle hint that things aren't
| all good at Intel.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I can't tell if he is just good at self promotion or he is
| just good. But that's always the case at bigcorp.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Good at self-promotion == just good in most cases for most
| practical purposes whether it's factual or not, arguably.
| His books seem substantial though, I don't know many people
| who've read or written 800 pages on system performance
| 59nadir wrote:
| > Good at self-promotion == just good in most cases for
| most practical purposes whether it's factual or not,
| arguably.
|
| This does not seem true to me. Most popular programming
| YouTubers are demonstrably great at self-promotion but
| tend to be mediocre or bad programmers who know very
| little, even about the topics they talk about.
|
| If anything we have plenty of examples of where being
| good at self-promotion correlates inversely with actual
| skill and knowledge.
|
| With that said, I wouldn't classify Brendan Gregg as
| being good at self-promotion.
| brailsafe wrote:
| In terms of their compensation though, it functionally
| doesn't really matter, and that's somewhat true for being
| a professional as well, it's usually only important how
| many people think you're good _enough_. A job is often as
| or more political as it is technical
| menaerus wrote:
| Flamegraph is literally just a perl script that visualizes
| the stack traces collected by perf/dtrace (kernel). It's a
| good tool though but it doesn't need to be oversold for its
| capabilities, the hard work is done by the kernel. And
| honestly, many times it is not that useful at all and can be
| quite misleading, and not because of the bug in the tool but
| because how CPUs are inherently designed to work.
| tclancy wrote:
| Everything is just a script with some visualization once
| you come up with the concept.
| bibimsz wrote:
| ive been at my company 16 years and still haven't had an
| impact, so... yeah.
| ivanbalepin wrote:
| that is some brutal self-honesty right there
| tclancy wrote:
| Especially since they mention being a surgeon in some other
| comments.
| bibimsz wrote:
| um, no i didn't
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| If you've been there 16 years, I'm sure you employer feels
| your impact has been worth the investment. Are you really
| saying that you don't feel you have made the impact you would
| have liked to make? Do you feel under-utilized?
| bombcar wrote:
| You can work your entire career and have "no impact"
| depending on how you define it.
|
| A factory worker may be one of the best assembling doodads,
| but have no real impact on the job over their career, for
| example.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| That is because these days what used to be high impact is now
| table stakes.
| 59nadir wrote:
| That's interesting; I feel like like it's the opposite:
| What used to be great work is basically unfathomable today
| and what used to be regular productivity is seen as almost
| superhuman. People get almost nothing done nowadays and
| I've never felt like expectations were ever really at the
| level they ought to be at, especially with how much money
| people are getting.
| newsclues wrote:
| Some people are more productive. Others less so.
|
| There is a tension between the two groups.
|
| Some workers think meetings are great. Others hate them.
| komali2 wrote:
| Clicking through his links to various posts about e.g. stack
| pointers or flame graphs, my takeaway is he's an outlier in
| productivity, and got a lot done in 3.5 years at a monstrously
| large organization.
|
| I'm pretty envious of his capabilities, in 3.5 years I can ship
| a couple webapps, I would never personally get JVM compilation
| flags added.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Brendan Gregg is somewhat of a systems engineering legend and
| contributed more to the field than most people could dream
| of.
|
| Is his post self promotion? Yeah, probably.
|
| Does it matter and do the top 3 comments on HN be salty about
| that? Probably not that useful.
| astrange wrote:
| Conversely, I made HotSpot commits as an intern, but I never
| shipped a web app.
| bjourne wrote:
| If you're talking about the HotSpot VM then that is a work
| of art. You learn a lot studying its codebase.
| astrange wrote:
| Yes, you can learn "they should have added value types to
| this language".
| hiddencost wrote:
| He's arguably the most famous performance engineer. I've
| followed his work for 15 years.
| almosthere wrote:
| People should try to remember that people post this on their
| blogs, the way it gets in HN is not always their own doing.
| gyomu wrote:
| > "I also supported cloud computing, participating in 110
| customer meetings, and created a company-wide strategy to win
| back the cloud with 33 specific recommendations, in collaboration
| with others across 6 organizations."
|
| Man people keep count of this stuff?! Maybe I should too, it does
| make flexing easier.
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| If you look at many of his recent blog entries, it is clear he
| has felt the need to quantify his impact to prove he isn't less
| effective as a remote employee in Australia working for a
| company in the US.
| fantod wrote:
| I'm surprised someone with his reputation would need to do
| this.
| pas wrote:
| Intel's management did not appreciate (as likely did not
| understand) tech skills/talent lately, which likely
| contributed to them squandering their lead.
| chanux wrote:
| "Count your meetings"
|
| Wouldn't hurt to try!
| nunez wrote:
| Use gcalcli to search for meetings with customer invited.
| That's it! Also, for an engineer that isn't in sales, 110
| customer meetings is A LOT.
| jcelerier wrote:
| ... is it? I had 14 meetings with externals this week only
| lol
| gct wrote:
| At big tech you have to quantify your value like this
| regularly, so yeah everyone keeps track of the minutiae.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I guess they don't know how or don't bother to evaluate
| people on what they actually contribute? Just number of
| meetings attended, number of tickets closed?
| brailsafe wrote:
| Keeping track of actual value would require actually
| rewarding people proportionally; all jobs ever only really
| care about how often you're on time or your meeting
| attendance record.
| komali2 wrote:
| Rewarding people proportionally is a macro-level unsolved
| problem. Kropotkin wrote it about it and his solution was
| to throw his hands in the air and say fuck it, labor
| value is impossible to accurately evaluate, and thus he
| invented anarchist communism.
|
| Just look at all the weird quirks our world does to labor
| value: the same exact job in two different locations for
| a global employer (say, Google), selling to a global
| market, pays differently depending on "local labor market
| prices." In 2025 for engineering what on earth is a
| "local labor market?" An optimization coming from an
| engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it
| comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x
| the reward for doing the work. Luxury goods and
| electronics cost the same in both places. Buying property
| is only slightly cheaper in Taipei vs sf (yes really),
| vehicles cost more in Taiwan. Food and healthcare is
| cheaper in Taiwan, and that alone I guess means the
| Taiwanese engineer is worth 1/8th the SF engineer, to
| make sure the sf engineer can afford 16$ burritos?
|
| Many other quirks. You point out another one: labor often
| isn't rewarded based on real value to a company, for many
| reasons but one of which is that managers often don't
| understand the job of the people they're managing and so
| apply management relevant KPIs to disciplines where those
| KPIs don't make any sense. Engineering, for example,
| doesn't correlate actual value add to the company via
| meetings attended or customers met, but that won't stop
| management from applying those KPIs and thinking it does!
|
| I'm torn between thinking we keep things this way out of
| ignorance vs we keep it this way maliciously so the
| management class (which sets the rates) doesn't get
| written out of labor agreements altogether because
| they're often useless vs if we didn't keep up this
| charade, capitalism would just collapse entirely.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Agreed. There's the additional point that I think many
| people don't appreciate, which is that those managers and
| many people lower down in the org chart merely exist
| because somebody else needs to be responsible for a
| system or a liability regardless of whether they do
| anything measurably profitable, and aren't necessarily
| incentivized to do anything more productively; they're
| just there to take care of it or be blamed if it's not,
| and have a low ceiling for what that job can possibly be
| worth with no measurable way to argue for more, and so in
| the case of managers, try to invent clout-generators at
| any cost and with no connection to how the assignees
| might accomplish it.
| astrange wrote:
| > An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves
| you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF
| but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the
| work.
|
| An underappreciated difference is that it's hard to
| schedule meetings between people in SF and Taiwan,
| because of time zones.
| rwmj wrote:
| How much you are paid is based on your power over the
| organization, which is why useless senior executives are
| paid far more than everyone else.
| davnn wrote:
| Why would you say useless? They hopefully make a couple
| of good decisions. Three good decisions a day [1], maybe?
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfY3uRCvEMo
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves
| you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF
| but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the
| work.
|
| Suppose you have a thousand engineers and those thousand
| engineers generate ten billion dollars in annual profit.
| How much do they each get paid? They amount they're
| worth? Nope, the amount they'll _accept_.
|
| If you live in the US and you have the wherewithal to be
| an engineer then you could also have been a doctor or a
| lawyer or some other high paying occupation. And many of
| those can't be fully remote because they have to see
| domestic patients or interact in person with local courts
| or clients. Which means that if you want someone in the
| US to be your engineer, you need to pay them an amount
| that makes them want to do that instead of choosing one
| of those other occupations. Whereas the one in Taiwan
| doesn't have the option to become a doctor in San
| Francisco and is therefore willing to accept less money.
|
| So why don't companies just hire exclusively the people
| in Taiwan? There are all the usual reasons (time zones,
| language barriers, etc.), but a big one is that they need
| a thousand engineers. So they and their competitors hire
| every qualified engineer in Taiwan until Taiwanese
| engineers reach full employment, at which point the
| companies still don't have all the engineers they want.
| And when the average engineer is making the company ten
| million dollars, paying San Francisco salaries is better
| than not having enough talent.
|
| So then why doesn't every smart person in Taiwan become
| an engineer? Because the companies hiring engineers there
| are only paying Taiwanese wages, and then they're not any
| better off to do that than to become a doctor or a lawyer
| in Taiwan. And if they would pay higher wages there, the
| local economy would have to start paying local doctors
| and engineers more to keep them all from becoming
| engineers, and then you would only get a modest increase
| in the number of engineers for a significant increase in
| compensation. Which is still what happens, but only
| slowly over time, until the wages in Taiwan ultimately
| increase enough to no longer be a competitive advantage.
| And companies don't _want_ to make that happen faster
| because then they 'd have to pay higher salaries in
| Taiwan.
| jack_tripper wrote:
| Not everyone who can be an engineer can also become a
| doctor or a lawyer. Different requirements and tolls on
| your mind and work style that aren't interchangeable for
| everyone.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| There are two reasons that doesn't matter. The first is
| that it's untrue more often than not; plenty of people
| could do both. And the second is that "doctors and
| lawyers" are just arbitrary stand ins for high paying
| domestic jobs. They could also become physicists,
| commercial airline pilots, Wall St. quants, actuaries,
| etc.
| jack_tripper wrote:
| _> plenty of people could do both_
|
| Citation heavily needed.
|
| Because here in the real world the barrier to entry in SW
| engineering jobs is significantly lower than the law bar
| or med school. Not to mention cheaper.
|
| And yes of course, Americans have the highest salaries in
| the world for white collar professions, what other new
| information do you have that we don't already know?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Citation heavily needed.
|
| Have a look at the scatter plot for math and verbal SAT
| scores:
|
| https://www.statcrunch.com/reports/view?reportid=21828&ta
| b=p...
|
| There is a significant correlation between higher scores
| on one and higher scores on the other.
|
| > Because here in the real world the barrier to entry in
| SW engineering jobs is significantly lower than the law
| bar or med school. Not to mention cheaper.
|
| The barrier to either of those professions is getting
| good grades and then scoring well enough on a
| standardized test, and the entire premise is that the
| professions pay well which is how people pay back the
| loans.
| jack_tripper wrote:
| _> There is a significant correlation between higher
| scores on one and higher scores on the other._
|
| That really doesn't mean SW engineers could be good
| lawyers or doctors. It's a very superficial evidence.
|
| Your high sat scores won't prevent you from puking at the
| sight of corpses or diseases.
|
| There's way more to performing in medicine that sat
| scores.
| brailsafe wrote:
| I can become a SW engineer without a degree of any kind,
| it's only helpful, but becoming a doctor _requires_
| everything you mentioned
| iberator wrote:
| You are wrong. The price of luxuries and everything is
| different around the world. Plus purchase power diffrnce
| gct wrote:
| Managers can be lazy just like anyone.
| Arainach wrote:
| What does "actually contributed" mean?
|
| Joe implemented feature A. Sandra implemented feature B.
| Raj implemented C. All launched in July. Since then metric
| X is up 20%. Who gets credit, and what does that credit
| really mean?
|
| Now say all 3 did that in 3 different products. One
| produced a 200% improvement in an internal product, one a
| 40% improvement in a product with thousands of users, one a
| 1% improvement in a product with a billion users? Compare
| *that*.
| devsda wrote:
| Still it is a faulty metric.
|
| 200% improvement may just be the result of feature A and
| 40% may just be the max performance gain from feature B.
| Comparing developers over the effectiveness of features
| they implement is mostly rating the PMs or the leadership
| they work with. Its a dice roll and its a measure of
| one's luck to be at the right place & right time to work
| on the right task.
| Arainach wrote:
| Then what's your proposal?
|
| People complain about using metrics. People complain
| about rating performance based on what your manager or
| coworkers say about you. Performance reviews are an
| unsolved hard problem.
| palata wrote:
| > Then what's your proposal?
|
| Not the OP, but my proposal is to acknowledge that
| unsolved hard problems are... unsolved. Instead of
| inventing bullshit and pretending it's constructive. Some
| people make a career out of that bullshitting, others
| complain about it because it actually has a negative
| impact on them.
|
| "What's your proposal", in my experience, is often used
| as a defense against someone calling bullshit. My
| proposal when I'm calling bullshit is that the
| bullshitter start being professional, but it's not
| exactly something I can say.
| Arainach wrote:
| "What's your proposal" is a response to unhelpful
| griping.
|
| Performance management does have to happen. If you aren't
| rewarding good performers with money and growth most of
| them will leave. Losing them is expensive. Hiring is
| expensive. To reward your high performers you need to be
| able to identify them.
|
| "All of these options are bad" isn't useful if you don't
| have a better option.
| ipdashc wrote:
| > People complain about rating performance based on what
| your manager or coworkers say about you.
|
| Do they? This definitely seems better to me, and I don't
| think I've really heard complaints about it. Not without
| flaws, of course, but preferable to chasing a made-up
| metric. It's arguably the entire point of a manager, to
| know what their employees are doing at a high level. We
| managed to do this for hundreds of years without needing
| shiny dashboards and counting every meeting attended.
|
| Metrics have their place as well, of course, but they
| should be one data point, and should not be chased after
| so religiously that recording the metrics becomes
| significant work on its own.
| Arainach wrote:
| >Do they? This definitely seems better to me, and I don't
| think I've really heard complaints about it
|
| "My manager hates me, how do I get promoted?"
|
| "My manager looks down on me because I'm a member of a
| different caste, what do I do?"
|
| "My manager keeps hiring only people of their race and
| playing favorites with them, what do I do?"
|
| "Coworker X gave me a bad review because I wouldn't go on
| a date with them"
|
| Even in the best case it biases heavily towards the
| people most enthusiastic about selling an image of
| themselves rather than those who are necessarily
| contributing.
|
| Relying on someone's perception/vouching for you rather
| than performance metrics can be an absolute disaster -
| for the people involved and for the company if it turns
| into a lawsuit.
| devsda wrote:
| > My manager hates me, how do I get promoted?
|
| > My manager looks down on me because I'm a member of a
| different caste, what do I do?"
|
| There may be legitimate cases but if someone runs into
| these issues often, may be its just excuses for bad
| performance. If the issue is genuine, find out what your
| specific organization can do about the situation and
| resolve it within that framework or find a better
| manager.
|
| No amount of metrics are gonna help if you are going
| against a hostile manager, team or leadership.
| tester756 wrote:
| >Its a dice roll and its a measure of one's luck to be at
| the right place & right time to work on the right task.
|
| In general you pick companies, products, teams,
| initiatives, tasks that you're interested about, so it's
| not like it is purely dependent on luck
|
| If you have skills and see opportunity then going for
| that may result in nice outcomes :)
| tester756 wrote:
| > One produced a 200% improvement in an internal product,
| one a 40% improvement in a product with thousands of
| users, one a 1% improvement in a product with a billion
| users? Compare _that_.
|
| Try to assign money/revenue/PR to that and you'll have
| decent proxy for impact.
| Arainach wrote:
| Again: what money is attributable to each feature? Are
| subscriptions up 2% because of the new payment flow or
| because it's tax refund season? Are they down because of
| the new UI or because of tariffs? It's not realistic to
| tell them apart most of the time.
| izacus wrote:
| Those meetings were the authors actual contributions. Any
| really senior person isn't going to be coding.
| jackling wrote:
| Meetings by themselves are worthless. Similar to how
| having an idea for something isn't intrinsically
| valuable. I argue, meetings can't be actual contributions
| because the real state, the code/hardware/etc, of your
| project hasn't change. The result of the meeting, what
| people actually do afterwards due to what was discussed,
| is all that matters. In which case, it isn't the meeting
| that was the contribution, it was the artifacts that were
| created afterwards (documents, jira project tasks, code,
| etc) that are the contribution.
|
| When we view meetings as actual contribution, we're
| really just valuing people doing effectively nothing. For
| example, anyone who's job is just to take meetings, and
| nothing else, is worthless IMO. You need to tangibly
| create something afterwards. This is a problem with big
| tech (which the company I work for is one of), it rewards
| people shuffling papers around, especially senior+
| engineers, instead of valuing real work they should be
| doing.
|
| Senior+ engineers have also deluded themselves into
| thinking that they shouldn't be coding, and rather their
| real work is creating endless amount of superfluous
| documents and creating as many cross team meetings as
| possible, rather than doing the hard work of creating an
| actual product.
| auggierose wrote:
| Hehe, no wonder big tech doesn't get anything done.
| taurath wrote:
| It's more that it takes so long to get anything done, the
| effort and results need to be recorded because it most
| often won't be obvious from the impact. It's hard to make a
| splash on a production system maintained by 30 other
| people, but you can usually make things better, but it
| won't always be obvious.
| yvdriess wrote:
| It's the overhead cost caused by trust breakdown. (tbf
| sometimes the timesheets are there for legal/tax reasons)
| tester756 wrote:
| whats ur point, there's countless of examples to counter
| your statement
|
| from Windows, Linux, Chromium, VS Code, programming
| langugages, tools like k8s, AI to revenue! :D
| Insanity wrote:
| I've been working in FAANG for some years in a senior
| position. Never had to track or speak to things like this
| lol.
| astrange wrote:
| I know some of them do this, but ours doesn't. There is a
| once yearly self-review, and as far as I can tell it has
| literally no impact on your actual performance review and
| compensation, which are basically entirely up to your
| manager's observations of you.
|
| So it is important to keep your manager informally up to
| date on what you're doing, at least during the weeks
| they're thinking about performance.
| lrem wrote:
| No I don't.
| jsight wrote:
| A lot of people consider score keeping like this to be more
| important than the job itself.
|
| I can't even say that they are wrong.
| Neywiny wrote:
| I mean maybe. We often have weekly customer meetings. One of my
| programs has 2 customers, we meet with both weekly. So do I put
| idk 200+ customer meetings? That seems like a weird metric
| because it's like "compiled code 400 times." I've seen resumes
| that have the same vibe. We did not hire them. Sometimes it's
| very telling what people think are accomplishments.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| All startups in due course turn into Byzantine labyrinths of
| bureaucracy. Only the record keepers survive.
| methuselah_in wrote:
| Isn't that show-off? I mean you have achieved is good but feels
| like bragging about it ! Just a thought
| brendangregg wrote:
| I like to measure things. In real life and on computers. But I
| also have a couple of work reasons for it:
|
| As a remote worker, I'm under extra pressure to prove that
| remoteness works.
|
| As a senior employee, I'm also under pressure to regularly
| report where my time is spent.
| mi_lk wrote:
| It's your personal blog though. But again nothing wrong with
| turning that into a form of LinkedIn post
| lopmkoihl wrote:
| > I'm under extra pressure to prove that remoteness works.
|
| Did keeping track and reporting that number help prove this?
| yvdriess wrote:
| It doesn't need to prove that. It needs to produce
| plausible data that appeases either your direct or +1
| manager.
| zx8080 wrote:
| Yeah, it's how everywhere is measured. But I like to remember
| Joel Spolsky's takes on measuring everything, including his
| famous book and blog:
|
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/09/the-
| econ-101-manag...
| graemep wrote:
| Contrary to the usual opinion on HN, this provides a good
| reason to do an MBA!
|
| You should learn enough economics that if you are even a
| bit insightful you will avoid Econ 101 thinking, you will
| learn about things like intrinsic and extrinsic motivation,
| and a lot of other things relevant to management.
| jama211 wrote:
| This is great, thank you for sharing
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| >As a remote worker, I'm under extra pressure to prove that
| remoteness works.
|
| You were delegated a manager's job?
|
| >As a senior employee, I'm also under pressure to regularly
| report where my time is spent.
|
| Normally, this is stored in the time tracker, not in your
| memory.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| In corps tracking hours is only for the grunts...
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Exactly, I can't imagine that a "senior" developer needs
| to track everything that carefully. Hell I work at a
| consulting company full time as a staff consultant where
| we do have to record hours and I don't go into any detail
| whether I'm on or off a project.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| We like that you like to measure things. That's why I bought
| your book.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| If only I had known that in the past, I even once received
| the completely wrong advice to "not stand out, since your
| work will speak for itself and you will get recognition".
| pas wrote:
| It depends on the company culture.
|
| (Fancy US tech companies like to be very selective, have a
| competitive mindset, hire "the best" according to their
| filters, and then want people to show how amazing they are,
| uu, so much impact, woah... and in effect people need to
| constantly manage upwards.
|
| While in many other companies, or "orgs", having a good
| team cohesion is more important. To blend in a bit, get
| accepted even if it means foregoing some ambition.)
|
| That said it's always good to have receipts.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Having good team cohesion is all well and good. But when
| it's time to get promoted, what are you going to say "I
| pulled well defined Jira tickets off the board"?
|
| When you get ready to interview for your n+1 job, and you
| spent months grinding leetCode and practicing reversing a
| btree on the white board, get to the behavioral interview
| and I ask "what accomplishment are you most proud of?",
| what are you going to say "I worked with my team and we
| together closed 20 story points a week"?
|
| I have given the thumbs down to a lot of candidates this
| year alone who couldn't discuss something that they took
| ownership of or where they stood out.
| kmarc wrote:
| Damned is this industry, when even _you_ say you have to show
| that "remoteness works".
|
| I also measure meetings (counts, lengths, and mostly meeting
| minutes/outine jotted down by myself) and keep track of other
| metrics, exactly for this reason. However, I also don't
| happen to have written best selling books and stuff, so I
| really must do this, and you really shouldn't have to :-)
| pm90 wrote:
| I have more respect for him because he chose to do this.
| It's probably clear that he doesn't have to, at all. But
| he's choosing not to rely on his (somewhat) tech celebrity
| status and deliver on measurable outcomes.
| ghaff wrote:
| Not that I've ever been especially religious about it but
| it's probably a good thing to keep track of activities,
| especially those that directly affect customers. It's
| pretty easy/low-effort and is useful to be able to pull
| out.
| boringg wrote:
| Do you have a particularly easy way to track or are you kind
| of doing the same thing as consultant and logging your
| dailies? Always drove me a bit crazy having to do that admin
| piece every day.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| As a senior employee. This is just the opposite of what I
| would expect.
|
| (I'm not the author of this)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46146451
|
| As a senior employee first at a startup from 2018-2020 and
| then as a staff engineer at a consulting company for the last
| year (with a 4 year at BigTech detour between), no one really
| micromanages me.
|
| Even at the consulting company, when I am on a project, I
| just put 40 hours in Salesforce with the project I'm assigned
| to - with no details - or put "bench" - again with no
| details.
|
| Why would my company care? The customer is happy, the project
| is managed through Jira (where I as the lead create the
| tasks) and my company gets paid when the project is done.
|
| I am sure I ask for feedback after every project in our peer
| review system.
| izacus wrote:
| Note how the author doesn't work for tiny little companies
| like you.
| lokar wrote:
| As a principal at big tech I has essentially full
| autonomy to do what I thought was highest value with very
| little need to report anything.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Exactly this. I'm still friends with my former manager at
| AWS who is now an L7 "very important person" over a
| service there and another former coworker who is a tech
| lead over another service. He's an L6. I can guarantee
| you neither of them are being micromanaged and have
| mostly autonomy. I'm sure they have to deal with OP1
| goals (? It's been awhile I think that's the term).
|
| Hell I was a lowly L5 consultant who they only entrusted
| to small projects and slices over larger projects (fair I
| only had 2 years of AWS experience at the time) and no
| one micromanaged me as long as I was doing my job. I flew
| out to customers sites by myself to lead work and my
| manager rarely knew what I was doing. I would go weeks
| without talking to him.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| You did see the part about the four year stint at BigTech
| in between? Unless you think the second largest employee
| in the US is a "small little company".
|
| I also added an HN submission that made the front page a
| couple of days ago by a staff engineer at Google, did you
| notice the difference between how he didn't really seem
| to need to prove his "impact"?
|
| Finally, this isn't r/cscareerquestions where you have a
| bunch of 22 year olds needing to prove themselves by
| mentioning "they work for a FAANG" (been there done that.
| Got the t-shirt. Didn't like it)
| hyperpape wrote:
| I think you're misreading that article.
|
| > In an infrastructure organization, you need to impress
| your customers' managers.
|
| > I call this the Shadow Hierarchy. You don't need your
| VP to understand the intricacies of your code. You need
| the Staff+ Engineers in other critical organizations to
| need your tools.
|
| > When a Senior Staff Engineer in Pixel tells their VP,
| "We literally cannot debug the next Pixel phone without
| Perfetto", that statement carries immense weight. It
| travels up their reporting chain, crosses over at the
| Director/VP level, and comes back down to your manager.
|
| Visibility is important, it's just not the same kind of
| visibility.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| The question I'm trying to answer is why are keeping
| metrics important at all?
|
| From my experience working on and being the third highest
| contributor to what was a very popular open source "AWS
| Solution" in its niche, we kept metrics because we had to
| justify why it should it exist and why should we keep
| getting resources for it. This is the same reason that
| the Google Staff engineer that was in the linked article
| did it for his project.
|
| The next reason is that to get promoted and to have
| something to put on your promo doc, you need to show
| "impact".
|
| But when you are at a staff level and no longer chasing
| promotions, it becomes perfunctory. You do it just
| because you are suppose to and do the bare minimum to
| check it off the list and stay in compliance. But
| everyone if any importance knows you.
|
| That's true at BigTech to my 1000+ company. No one from
| the C suite is wondering who employees #13545 is or what
| I have accomplished whether or not I go into details.
|
| However I do make sure I get peer feedback from everyone
| that I work with officially or if I go the extra mile for
| them. I asked my manager do I need to record my goals for
| the year. He kind of shrugged and asked me was I trying
| to get promoted to a director or something (a manager
| role would be a horizontal move). I said "no". he said
| not really.
|
| I keep a personal career document just in case I need to
| prepare to interview because I stay ready to interview -
| I have for almost 20 years. I have been working for 30.
|
| Then back to my minor criticism. It's not like at a staff
| level once you have accomplished a lot and built up a
| network, you are going to be blindly submitting your
| resume to a job you found on Indeed. At that point your
| resume is just something to put in the ATS as part of the
| hiring process. But no one in the hiring prices is going
| to look at it. They are already targeting you to work
| there.
|
| I had a director who was a former coworker at a well
| known non tech company basically offer to create a job
| just for me because he needed someone who he could trust.
| I'm not special, I just have a decent network and made a
| positive impression on a few people
| djoldman wrote:
| In my experience "just put 40 hours in Salesforce with the
| project I'm assigned to" matches folks expectations.
|
| However.
|
| If you're ever on a project that doesn't turn out so well,
| it may suddenly become critical to account for all work
| done during every billed hour in detail.
|
| I would advise all consultants to track their time
| diligently and completely.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| That's part of the project management tracking but that's
| not strictly hours.
|
| Those traceability artifacts are in order
|
| 1. the signed statement of work - this is the contract
| that is legally binding.
|
| 2. The project kick off meeting where we agree on the
| mechanics of the project and a high level understanding
| of the expectations
|
| 3. Recorded, transcribed and these days using Gong to
| summarize the meetings, deep dive discovery sessions.
|
| 4. A video recorded approvals of the design proposals as
| I am walking through it.
|
| 5. A shared Jira backlog that I create and walk through
| them with it throughout the project
|
| 6. A shared decision log recording what decisions were
| made and who on the client side made them.
|
| 7. A handoff - also video recorded where the client says
| they are good going forward.
|
| I lead 2-7 or do it all myself depending on the size of
| the project.
|
| At no point am I going to say or expect anyone on my
| project to say they spent 4 hours on Tuesday writing
| Terraform.
|
| But then again, my number one rule about consulting that
| I refuse to break is that I don't do staff augmentation.
| I want to work on a contract with requirements and a
| "definition of done". I control the execution of the
| project and the "how" within limits.
|
| I want to be judged on outcomes not how many jira tickets
| I closed.
|
| When I was at AWS I worked with a client that directly
| hired a former laid off ProServe L6 consultant. He was
| very much forced into staff augmentation where he did
| have to track everything he did by the hour.
|
| You could tell he thought that was the fifth level of
| hell going from strategy consulting to staff
| augmentation. It paid decently. But he was definitely
| looking and I recommended him as a staff consultant at my
| current company (full time direct hire)
|
| FWIW: I specialize in cloud + app dev - "application
| modernization"
| spjt wrote:
| In my experience, having to track my hours absolutely
| destroys my performance. Thinking about how I need to pay
| attention to how long I spend on everything is a constant
| distraction in the back of my head while I try to do
| anything useful, and then I spend the rest of the day
| procrastinating having to fill out the paperwork. I know
| I'm not the only one because the entire dev staff was ready
| to mutiny the last time I was at a company that tried to
| get devs to start tracking their hours.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Exactly. For consulting company, you have to track how
| much time you spent on a project. I am allocated for a
| project for 100% for a week, sure we are going to bill
| for that week. But we don't get paid until the project
| requirements are met. The client isn't going to audit
| every hour. They are going to sign off based on results.
|
| I'll keep Jira updated at the end of the day because the
| PMO organization needs that for tracking and even we need
| that for coordination. But I am going to put in 40 hours
| at the end of the week.
|
| No I'm not going to track hours I spent on internal
| meetings, conducting interviews and the other internal
| minutiae that takes up my day.
|
| The company only makes money when I'm billing a client -
| that's what I'm tracking - my results. Is the company
| making money on me and am I getting positive feedback
| from sales, my teammates and the customer.
| kappi wrote:
| measuring number of meetings seems deflection of actual
| output!
| lopmkoihl wrote:
| The fact that they were busy keeping count during those 110
| occasions and for every other activity clearly tells that they
| nothing better to do. You have to be loud about such numbers
| when you have very little meaningful work to show for.
| utopiah wrote:
| Parse your calendar export (.ics) file and count events of a
| certain name and voila?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Of course, always take notes, they will help when doing
| escalations, or justify oneself in review meetings.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| While I have a personal career document and have had one for
| years where I have all of my major accomplishments in STAR
| format. This seems a bit much.
|
| When I was at BigTech, there was an internal system where you
| recorded your major accomplishments and the impact they had.
|
| But I would _never_ write it up on a public blog post like
| this. I am assuming the author of the post must be someone well
| known in the industry for it to make it to the front page of
| Hacker News. If his intent was to promote himself so he could
| get another job, I'm sure that he has a network where a few
| messages would lead him to one.
|
| Even in my little niche of the world where in the grand scheme
| of things I'm a nobody, I was able to lean on my network at 50
| after being Amazoned in 2023 and have three offers that were at
| least a lateral move within two weeks.
|
| I had one fall into my lap last year too that I accepted based
| on my network.
| wferrell wrote:
| So...oai or google?
| johncolanduoni wrote:
| Yahoo. They're due for a comeback
| acheron wrote:
| Hey, maybe he has morals.
| al_be_back wrote:
| Leaving intel? That's one case where an employee won't get
| chastised for
| foobarian wrote:
| Wow is it me or is the self promotion strong in this one.
| boguscoder wrote:
| Does he need it though? His name is literally a brand in many
| tech circles and very good brand at that
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| Always valuable to announce your availability and celebrate
| recent successes.
| boguscoder wrote:
| And how did I contradict that? My point was that he is not
| looking for vanity
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| You: does he need it? He's famous!
|
| Me: it's always valuable!
|
| That's it.
| maliker wrote:
| Masterclass in turning a goodbye email into a hire me after my
| next gig ends. I'm not being sarcastic, this is a great example
| of highlighting the value they added.
| senkora wrote:
| He doesn't mention it in this post, but in another post he talked
| about the toll of needing to frequently attend meetings in the
| middle of the night in his time zone.
|
| Whatever his reasons for leaving, I hope that he finds a better
| balance in his new role.
| solatic wrote:
| This was the takeaway I had taking to a colleague about his
| time at Intel - they're a genuinely global company with
| engineering teams in practically all time zones who are still
| expected to collaborate with each other. No matter what time of
| day the meeting was scheduled for, it was the middle of the
| night for _somebody_ , and no, just working on written docs
| async for everything didn't cut it, and they couldn't just fly
| people out all the time. So that's apparently just part of what
| it means to take a job at Intel these days.
| shrubble wrote:
| If my back of the envelope math is right, in the last 6 months
| he's been attending more meetings at possibly odd hours; he lives
| in Australia and Intel is based in the USA.
|
| See https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2025-05-22/3-years-of-
| extr...
|
| 77 meetings then, but 110 meetings in his resignation blog
| post...
| 0x0000000 wrote:
| Two different numbers, no? The resignation posts specifies 110
| _customer_ meetings, the blog post you linked to about meetings
| during odd hours does not.
| brendangregg wrote:
| Yeah, different numbers, 110 customer meetings, the other
| post tracked 1-6am meetings. I'm glad I tracked 1-6am
| meetings since I've shared that number when people think that
| remote workers aren't making an effort.
| fipar wrote:
| Those 1-6am meetings are crazy. I've been fully remote for
| over 16 years now and my only 1-6am meetings are incident
| response, if I'm on call.
|
| And I'm a nobody; that you have to do that makes it feel
| even crazier to me.
|
| I admit I was a bit more flexible with that in the past,
| but once I had a heart attack at 40 it dawned on me any
| company would just replace me and keep on going while my
| family was going to have a much tougher time (and no help
| from whatever company would be employing me at the time).
| javaunsafe2019 wrote:
| I mean I understand if someone like Keller writes such posts but
| some dude claiming to have hosted conference events and some kind
| of process flame graph which could have been done by anyone...
| krior wrote:
| > some dude
|
| Maybe you should read something about him before you call him
| that. I recommend the "Contributions"-section on his Wikipedia-
| article. And if it is of any relevance to your work: his
| "Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud" is a
| comprehensive and excellent guide.
| motbus3 wrote:
| I see some mean comments. I suppose maybe people doesn't know
| Brendan Gregg's work, this guy reserve some respect.
| elric wrote:
| What's going on with these comments? So much ridiculous and
| unwarranted bashing. Is someone feeding the trolls? Is 4chan
| down? Yikes.
| solatic wrote:
| Brendan Gregg deserves respect. Intel? Their reputation had
| been in the gutter for a few years now. The classic way to
| offend a nerd is to have a leading market position, tons of
| cash and resources, then _squander_ it on politics and
| bullshit.
| dotemacs wrote:
| What's with the retro gear on the desk?
|
| Do you use it much and what for?
|
| In particular Commodore tape player.
| mort96 wrote:
| Leading the article with AI stuff is certainly a choice. If
| that's what they've ben spending their time on lately, maybe this
| is good for Intel.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| Calling them AI flamegraphs is really naming them after the
| workload they are likely to be used on. If you want to make
| workloads more efficient it's useful to know where they are
| spending their time.
| mort96 wrote:
| Flamegraphs are great, GPU flamegraphs are an obvious good
| idea. But his choice to work on "AI" instead of general GPU
| compute, and advertise this "AI" work at the very top of the
| list of things he's done of note, tells me what I need to
| know.
| torginus wrote:
| I think this is a good opportunity to guerilla-ask a question
| about cloud performance:
|
| We've been running some compute heavy workloads on AWS, with some
| running on metal instances, and some running on virtualized
| instances of equal size.
|
| Both were intel 192 core machines.
|
| Virtualized instances tended to perform 20-25% worse in terms of
| CPU throughput, which is quite significant, and more than I'd
| have assumed.
|
| Where does the performance go? Is this an AWS thing, does the
| performance get lost in the software stack, or is it a CPU-level
| issue?
|
| I haven't tried with other vendors tbh, but would it be possible
| to mitigate this by switching to another architecture/vendor like
| AMD or Graviton?
| arcanus wrote:
| That's a surprisingly large overhead. I've not measured that
| large an impact on AMD, particularly for compute heavy.
|
| Did you profile at all? And have you observed if it's not
| compute-bound? If it's memory or IO bound it can be due to
| other virtualization overheads, such as memory encryption.
| torginus wrote:
| I will try to profile, but how do you suggest going about it,
| what to measure? Maybe running some synthethics stressing CPU
| or memory?
|
| The workload is pure memory/CPU, with very little IO so it's
| 100% compute bound, with much more emphasis on CPU.
| kqr wrote:
| There's a lot of I/O hidden in CPU-bound loads related to
| fetching, prefetching, caching, etc.
| tayo42 wrote:
| The guys post were commenting on has alot of info on this
| topic lol
| everfrustrated wrote:
| On modern AWS instance types so much is offloaded to dedicated
| hardware that the only shared (noisy) components between VMs is
| memory bandwidth and higher levels of CPU cache (and I think
| graviton doesn't even share CPU cache now)
|
| I would suspect your performance difference is mostly likely
| showing that on metal you are sharing the same software wider
| so not polluting caches as much as a vm neighbour running
| unrelated software.
| torginus wrote:
| The virtual instance is the exact same size as the metal one,
| which covers an entire physical machine - I guess this is
| pure overhead rather than noisy neighbors.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Could you share parts of /proc/cupinfo?
| benbenolson wrote:
| Try the relatively new top-down microarchitectural analysis in
| perf:
|
| https://perfwiki.github.io/main/top-down-analysis/
| mgrat wrote:
| Glad this made HN. Just wanted to thank you for writing, and I've
| ordered one of your books.
| munchler wrote:
| > My next few years at Intel would have focused on execution of
| those 33 recommendations [for a "company-wide strategy to win
| back the cloud"], which Intel can continue to do in my absence.
|
| The idea that people are going to execute your arduous, detailed
| plan for world domination while you're off doing something else
| seems a bit... unrealistic, to say the least.
| rbancroft wrote:
| If it works, he gets credit. If it fails or never happens,
| someone else gets the blame. pretty classic.
| snapdeficit wrote:
| You're dead on. This kind of knee-deep gluey "advice" is the
| cult of personality that intel now thinks is effective
| planning. The head's-down hard work of the 80's and 90's
| vanished when the media turned Grove into a reluctant folk hero
| and the bubble burst. I was there for 21 years, this guy is
| symptom of a much larger problem that is self-sustaining. Too
| many people trying to hide, do the bare minimum, and collect a
| fat paycheck, while people like this wave around grand plans
| that will never be touched. Yep I'm a cynic, two decades there
| fried my compassion circuits.
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