Re:Has Intel lost its mojo?
by lordnacho on Saturday September 05, 2020 @05:19AM
(#24382415)
Having worked there a long time ago, I hadn't quite put the pieces together until recently.
My university background actually straddles engineering and management, but I ended up working on the business side of the firm. While I was there I kinda thought it was amazing how much of the business was powerpoint slides about market positioning, rather than making stuff, which seemed like a fixed roadmap provided from above. I was an intern, so I kinda figured it was just a thing about a firm of that scale, and besides I had friends in more technical roles so someone was doing the chip-making. Remarkably some are still with the firm.
Anyway the thing that tied up the ends for me has been some recent work. I'm helping a friend at a B2B startup in the financial space, ostensibly in a technical capacity. A huge amount of the work is everything other than coding. Colleagues were brought in with sales/marketing experience, and it's been made clear how these sales work: there's an awful lot of box-checking. You need docs about everything imaginable to even have a chance to sell to some of these firms. GDPR, ISO standards, and so on.
And it turns out there's a disconnect between how things work technically and how they work on paper. When did you last do a GDPR training session? Where is the updated registry with the serial numbers of every device in your firm? It goes on an on with things that work on paper but in practice probably have a bit of an implementation gap. The ones I mentioned are mostly just time consuming, but give it enough complexity and you have documents that say we'll be ready with the next feature in 3 months, but techies that say that's not what they meant.
Guess what, there's always business people involved, and they know that they don't know how code works, but they can read docs. It's important to cater to them. And who does that better than MBAs? And once you make the sale, who gets credit?
So you have a two tribes issue eventually, when the firm is so big that there are business people who don't talk to the tech people and vice versa. In a small firm the interface people are people like me who can do both and have very few steps to anyone else. In a large firm, there are entire halls full of people who think the other side is doing X when they're actually doing Y. You have Chinese whispers at the interface, because in a large firm the tech+biz people are too far away from the tech end to understand what the techies want to offer and what they think is a stretch.
My university background actually straddles engineering and management, but I ended up working on the business side of the firm. While I was there I kinda thought it was amazing how much of the business was powerpoint slides about market positioning, rather than making stuff, which seemed like a fixed roadmap provided from above. I was an intern, so I kinda figured it was just a thing about a firm of that scale, and besides I had friends in more technical roles so someone was doing the chip-making. Remarkably some are still with the firm.
Anyway the thing that tied up the ends for me has been some recent work. I'm helping a friend at a B2B startup in the financial space, ostensibly in a technical capacity. A huge amount of the work is everything other than coding. Colleagues were brought in with sales/marketing experience, and it's been made clear how these sales work: there's an awful lot of box-checking. You need docs about everything imaginable to even have a chance to sell to some of these firms. GDPR, ISO standards, and so on.
And it turns out there's a disconnect between how things work technically and how they work on paper. When did you last do a GDPR training session? Where is the updated registry with the serial numbers of every device in your firm? It goes on an on with things that work on paper but in practice probably have a bit of an implementation gap. The ones I mentioned are mostly just time consuming, but give it enough complexity and you have documents that say we'll be ready with the next feature in 3 months, but techies that say that's not what they meant.
Guess what, there's always business people involved, and they know that they don't know how code works, but they can read docs. It's important to cater to them. And who does that better than MBAs? And once you make the sale, who gets credit?
So you have a two tribes issue eventually, when the firm is so big that there are business people who don't talk to the tech people and vice versa. In a small firm the interface people are people like me who can do both and have very few steps to anyone else. In a large firm, there are entire halls full of people who think the other side is doing X when they're actually doing Y. You have Chinese whispers at the interface, because in a large firm the tech+biz people are too far away from the tech end to understand what the techies want to offer and what they think is a stretch.