I went to lunch the other day with a friend. We had both worked at Intel during our early careers, and we still know people who are there over 20 years later.
Of course the topic arose of our old workplace. We had a great time there it should be said. But neither of us stayed on, and it was vibes.
Even at that time, as a young guy in university, I thought something was wrong. I couldn't tell what, since I was a young guy who barely knew anything about the business. But I knew that I felt uncomfortable about potentially spending decades at a place where everyone was so relaxed. There was no urgency. People would come in, find a colleague to have coffee with, and that was their day. I checked with the other interns as well, it was really chill.
I was working on my thesis, and my team was working on rolling out what would later be called WiFi. Amazingly, part of the strategy was to slow down certain standards, because we were behind in some of the fabs. That didn't seem like what you would do as a cutting-edge technology company. People at the all-hands would ask things like "should we keep AMD around just for show? So that we aren't a monopoly?". Well, that problem has been solved now.
I got offered a permanent role but never even considered it.
I recently left a big company exactly for this reason. And the sibling post is probably right, the Dead Sea affect probably plays a huge role. I didn’t see very many people that were ambitious and it was way too “relaxed”.
I went to lunch the other day with a friend. We had both worked at Intel during our early careers, and we still know people who are there over 20 years later.
Of course the topic arose of our old workplace. We had a great time there it should be said. But neither of us stayed on, and it was vibes.
Even at that time, as a young guy in university, I thought something was wrong. I couldn't tell what, since I was a young guy who barely knew anything about the business. But I knew that I felt uncomfortable about potentially spending decades at a place where everyone was so relaxed. There was no urgency. People would come in, find a colleague to have coffee with, and that was their day. I checked with the other interns as well, it was really chill.
I was working on my thesis, and my team was working on rolling out what would later be called WiFi. Amazingly, part of the strategy was to slow down certain standards, because we were behind in some of the fabs. That didn't seem like what you would do as a cutting-edge technology company. People at the all-hands would ask things like "should we keep AMD around just for show? So that we aren't a monopoly?". Well, that problem has been solved now.
I got offered a permanent role but never even considered it.