AMDAnon
It's pretty funny watching the stock, collapse by 25% over the past week or so. Now is a great time to recruit people from AMD since they feel burned AND they lost the golden handcuffs leadership was relying on.
The party line is that the stock price is up because the market expects us to perform well in the future, and we won't get a bonus until we actually perform well.
It depends on team, we have some testing, and progress is being made. But it's not "working" or comprehensive as we get complaints from our big customers. We should be replicating their setup internally and not have them catch problems.
> Not top of market by any stretch but firmly in the category of engineers don't care what the steak costs.
We need to pay top of market to steal people from our competitors. We can't pay less than Nvidia and outcompete them. Paying less is a signal we're aiming for second and to copy the market leader.
It's also just a basic cmake monorepo with features like end-to-end testing. Most big tech companies have had that for years.
AMD hires talented people at below-market and doesn't promote them or give raises. This causes employees to aim at resume-driven development by reinventing the wheel so they can get a job somewhere else.
It's a similar problem to Google, except at Google it's because promotions are explicitly for people that ship new products.
But the real issue is we don't want to invest in beating Nvidia on quality. Otherwise we wouldn't be doing stock buybacks and instead use the money on poaching engineers.
The mindset is that we maintain a comfortable second place by creating a shittier but cheaper product. That is how AMD has operated since 1959 as a second source to Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. It's going to remain the strategy of the company indefinitely with Nvidia. Attempting to become better would cost too much.
> Sounds like the AMD board needs to get their heads out of their asses and shake up leadership.
Knocking out Lisa Su would be stupid, since she has the loyalty of the whole company and is generally competent.
What they should do is bump TC by 60-70% and simultaneously lay off 50% of the engineers. Or phase in the same over a longer period of time. The company is full of people that do nothing because we've paid under market for so long. That's fine when competing against Intel, it's not acceptable when competing against Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, Google, and Nvidia.
Lisa Su is the only CEO in the S&P500 who can get away with mass layoffs and still have the loyalty of the rest of the employees.
HipKittens is an improvement but AMD does not have the ability to understand or track kernel performance so it'll be ignored.
This isn't fixable overnight. Company-wide DevOps and infrastructure is outsourced to TCS in India who have no idea what they're doing. Teams with good leadership maintain their own shadow IT teams. ROCm didn't have such a team until hyperscalers lost their shit over our visibly poor development practices.
Even if AMD did extend an offer to hire all the people in the article, it would be below-market since the company benchmarks against Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Walmart, instead of Google, Nvidia, or Meta.
We haven't had a fully funded bonus in the past 4+ years.