In a small growth org, despite severe rank differences, you're likely to have some impact on direction if you disagree. In a big org, there is no impact. You either are the wavemaker or those gleefully riding the waves. It doesn't matter how many "we listen to everybody's opinion" there are in these big orgs, wavemakers simply keep a lot of key information to themselves which puts everyone else within at a huge disadvantage. This also causes innovative thinkers to propose ideas less, because they got burned that one time when a wavemaker shut them down with previously hidden information.

At the organization's level it's "don't fuck up" since you're already making a lot of money and a lot of people's livelihoods are depending on that - the trick, if you're managing in a big org, is how to avoid that turning to a "don't disagree" culture before "not changing" turns into a bad thing instead of a good thing.

I haven't figured out how to do that - or to work under people who also haven't - so I prefer small orgs.

So perhaps the fear of fucking up plays an integral role in creating this atmosphere of unchanging. When you're fearful, you're less likely to take risks in general, even if that fear is subconscious rather than active.

Basically it's as if Intel bought AMD and switched, but AMD had some visionary CEO that could lead Intel to victory.

The days of Moore are over. Still I used to hate Intel, but now root for them. I guess I like underdogs.

Intel is still the primary CPU on most laptops produced today; and only in the last 6-12 months I've started seeing some options to buy AMD powered laptops.

Even ignoring that Intel's vPRO/ME implementation is still scarier (potentially more invasive) than the somewhat equivalent AMD "feature".

The Lenovo X395 was released in 2019 w/2nd gen ryzen.

Then their X13 in 2020 w/3rd gen ryzen, meaning you could have been using an 8-core X13 for years by now.

This market segmentation introduced by Intel has broken the tradition created by IBM, who had taken care from the beginning to provide the IBM PC with error-detecting memory.

It is true that the Intel wafers might be fabricated in USA, besides a few other places in Israel or Europe.

However, it is likely that the assembly employs more workers than the wafer fabrication plants.

I have heard this repeated for almost 30 years. Are they really?

Or are they one discovery away from continuing?

If you go read what his article said, it's very clear and incontestable ended. Still, that doesn't stop a bunch of people that have no idea what Moore's Law was about from claiming whatever they want to.

Anyway, where did you hear Moore's Law ended 30 years ago? That one doesn't make sense.

You are thinking of denard scaling. Transistors have been shrinking and counts have been increasing.

Anyway, where did you hear Moore's Law ended 30 years ago?

People were saying it was going to end, not that it already ended.

Not only has the number of transistors on the largest package not followed an exponential for a decade (a good hint is that people denying it repeats the law with X changed on every single iteration), but as fabs adopt more and more complex processes, the number of transistors on the most economical package has been growing very slowly, with no perspective of a doubling any soon.

On a deeper reading, the Moore's paper is all about the economics of semiconductor fabrication. And not only companies that aren't on the most advanced process are not failing as they used to, but nobody is using the law anymore to size investments.

There is just no way to read Moore's Law and interpret it into something that still exists.

> People were saying it was going to end, not that it already ended.

Oh, so you meant to say that they were correct?

We know for years that carbon nanotubes can make great, very compact, very fast transistors. There's nothing close to a practical application of this discovery, because we barely know how to make nanotubes in tiny amounts, a handful of labs, at a great expense.

Dennard scaling broke down around 2005 or 2006.

Are we one discovery away? No, probably not. Leakage current isn't a "one trick" problem, especially as the features continue to get smaller. It's a fundamentally hard problem, and as you go to smaller feature sizes, it keeps getting harder. As we go to 3D approaches, thermal issues probably aren't "one trick" away either.

(Unless you use an extremely strict definition of it, of course. I don’t think that’s reasonable, though, given, reading https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220166914_The_Lives..., that even Moore changed the definition a few times)

http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm

Do you put your one best performing manager at the top or at your most impactful project? (I'm not sure about the answer, but I'm not sure it a real option exists either.)

That yields a very different organization.

I just noticed that a due to a small error (misconfigured caching), a popular government's website is taking 4+ seconds to load its most used page.

There are three teams responsible for this thing. The team that "owns" it are scientists, not programmers, so they literally don't understand anything I'm saying. Their manager is 60 years old an probably still has his emails printed out for him by his secretary.

The database was done by a "information" team, and they don't care about the poor performance of downstream apps.

The downstream app was written by a "web" team, and they're (somewhat correctly) blaming the database team and their schema.

Everyone points fingers at each other. Years go past, the site is rewritten at great expense, but that doesn't help. Meanwhile the contractor that wrote the database has left to go back to India. The scientists upgrade the performance of their bit... because that's what they understand, but that has no bearing on the performance of a system three steps removed from their systems.

All attempts at fixing any of this in a meaningful way get rejected because "they're waiting on Big Name Consultancy to provide a report", or because "the next release 2-3 years from now will fix it", or... whatever.

It's just incredible to watch how fantastically inept these big orgs can get.

The fix for this issue is one line of code, but after years of trying they've failed to apply it, because despite dozens of people across multiple teams being involved, nobody actually writes code. The DB coder quit, remember? The website development was outsourced. And so on.

I suspect much of the same thing is happening at Twitter, and also at Intel.

These orgs become fantastically disfunctional, because it's just meetings and paperwork, but no action. The action people get outnumbered 10-to-1, then 100-to-1, and even worse. They just get told no, they get "priorities" assigned to them, asked to justify everything they do, and so on.

PS: Here's a fun example: https://nitter.it/CaseyNewton/status/1595818243620380672#m

> One of the people fired Musk’s latest purge was Ikuhiro Ihara, a highly respected senior software engineer who helped lead the push to expand tweets to 280 characters.

> Ihara fought relentlessly for 280 in the face of strong skepticism from top executives, I’m told. He co-authored the blog post explaining the value of 280 characters when it launched

I mean... holy cow. Some poor guy wasted a decent chunk of his adult life fighting internal politics for something that ought to have been an obvious upgrade. Crazy.

It's super hard and I've thought about it for years (even though I can't imagine working for a big company -- even with my own companies I leave when the headcount gets to about 200). But I've wondered if there's a kind of "hayflick limit" for corporations too.

Consider Intel. One way to get the old spark back would be to simply start a new company. Takes a lot of capital and involves a lot of risk. The only tech company I know that does this well is Cisco; it's also emerged less intensively in pharma. Other than that, no.

Second: Aggressively prune the product line, milk what cash cows you have, use the savings to invest heavily (including increasing compensation for those who remain, so they feel it's worth staying to be part of something growing). The advantage of this is that you ignore the deadweight problem you describe: it's too hard to root it out when you have a crisis, so just do it at a macro level. I've never seen this really be pulled off; the closet is late 90s Apple when everybody knew they were in an existential crisis and they had enough emotional commitment to keep enough people on board (since they couldn't afford to do the "raise compensation" path right away).

Actually a not bad example is a company called Intel when Grove cut away the cash cow, memory, replacing it with the unproven CPU business because he could see memory rapidly becoming a commodity boat anchor. But that Intel was a much smaller company, with the founders still around, in a immature market. And it was a bet the company manoevre.

The prune-and-milk (mixed metaphor) requires a compelling vision that includes an extreme sense of urgency. Elop's "burning platform" memo at Nokia tried to give the sense of urgency but had no compelling vision beyond "the company needs to make money in order to survive". Gelsinger did a good job of setting out a coherent vision, but is it compelling enough to get good people to join & stay? I doubt it.

(The reason for the "milk" part of the approach is because while you're in the shit, even if you are digging your way out, most of the public articles will be like the submission we are discussing, which makes execution harder).

But in general, apart from a big pool of money and a legacy customer base, why would you try this with a big, cumbersome company when you could just do a startup? That's what Cisco honed in the 90s and still does: I think the company needs to invest in new tech X using approach Y, but that would threaten the revenues of some existing product line. You think tech X is great but approach Z is better. We both quit and start companies (sometimes Cisco even invests in later rounds). Eventually it turns out that one of us was right. That company gets bought (big bonus for the founders, who rejoin Cisco) and the founders of the one that didn't win also can get their jobs back (maybe through a small acquisition so they get a small bonus for their risk taking).

This allows them to compensate innovators outside the normal process (which doesn't piss off the MBA VPs), allow some competing technological developments, and keeps them big. I don't know if that process is as big and institutionalized as it was in the Chambers/Volpe days, but it was super smart.

I keep hearing Intel management saying the right things about what they're trying to do, but I think it will be a long slow process if it can work at all.