For those who are interested in knowing more about Andy Grove and the early days of Intel, I highly recommend Tedlow's biography. Of all the biographies or business histories I've read, I can't think of one which does a better job of making you feel like you're hanging out with him, hearing his war stories, and getting a real feel for what kind of guy he was and what drove him and his company to success.
Just wanted to mention that in the last several hours, the price of a used hardcover copy of the book on Amazon has gone from $0.01 to $2.93 (which probably represents about 30 copies sold).
Actually kind of incredible to see this sort of inventory change happen in real time.
(I bought the cheapest "very good" condition item for $0.41 + shipping)
What a loss. High Output Management remains one of the finest books on our industry that I have read, and I'm glad we have that to help carry his torch forward.
>Grove's office was an 8-ft by 9-ft cubicle like the other employees, as he disliked separate "mahogany-paneled corner offices." He states, "I've been living in cubicles since 1978 — and it hasn't hurt a whole lot." Preferring this egalitarian atmosphere, he thereby made his work area accessible to anyone who walked by. There were no reserved parking spaces, and Grove parked wherever there was a space.
It seems like early Intel and HP higher ups were more in tune with egalitarianism as well not being aloof or unapproachable. The Moore foundation has been an amazing charity. Here in Santa Cruz, Andy Grove built a house out on one of the streets near the beach between Santa Cruz and Capitola. He worked with neighbors (according to local press) to not be out of place in the design, etc.
Contrast that with Zuckerberg and his recent building issues, or how many modern C-levels want their out of the way offices, etc.
There was much fan fare over all the technology Bill Gates put into his house. It was interesting to read, especially in the context of home automation these days.
I worked with people who helped Jim Clark with some of his home automation in the early/mid 2000s.
My point in general was I think the Silicon Valley elders of old, Grove, Moore, Packards (I know multiple individuals who benefitted from the Packard Children's fund w/ pre-mes. (sp?), etc. were much more community and outward focused than that which we see today.
There are people here and there, but a lot of what gets glamorized or talked about tend to be more selfishly oriented individuals.
Gates, early on, stated his kids weren't getting a huge part of his fortune, I consider his works on par (via the Gates Foundation) as those of the Packards. That said, the Packards have been very local vs. Gates more international (maybe it's need, size of endowment, etc).
I'm being selective about comparisons, but it's a matter or proportion, and things then were way more subdued.
Ellison, Jobs (mainly on the woodside mansion and not being charity oriented), Clark, etc certainly contrast with those I mentioned.
I think 80s-90s had seriously strong personalities emerge that get to the core of what you mention. Yet around that was much more down to earth philanthropy, etc.
>My point in general was I think the Silicon Valley elders of old, Grove, Moore, Packards (I know multiple individuals who benefitted from the Packard Children's fund w/ pre-mes. (sp?), etc. were much more community and outward focused than that which we see today.
That is a fascinating observation. I was alive and in the biz back then, but I've burned an awful lot of brain cells between then and now and don't have a particularly objectiv eview of things.
Why do you think folks then were outward focused? Was there less competition so more focus on "doing something really cool", or leftover 60's 'free love' culture, or less shitty traffic in Silicon Valley, or...?
In 1994 when I lived in Seattle I recall hearing how gates place in Medina was reviled by craftsman as he had hired some of the top of their field to do various things but was too picky. I recall that his entry way to the house was built by some master wood crafter, but gates was not happy with this mans work on several iterations; the guy was basically doing "once-in-a-lifetime" work and gates would have him tear it out and restart... More than twice.
I don't know how true that is, but that was the story at the time.
Other than that, I got a speeding ticket for going 26 in a 25 mph zone very near his house and was super upset at how lame that was.
Hah yeah my buddy David who built his yachts said to me that Ellison decided that his $220mm yacht wasn't big enough, so he wanted to sell it for a $400mm yacht...
Now he has a 600mm fucking island of the STATE of Hawaii!!
I didn't say all. Ellison likes to engage in public endeavors like the America's Cup. One reason Jim Clark wanted Netscape to go public was to cover the cost of his Yacht being built at the time.
There are certainly those that benefitted from the 90s boom that aren't particularly ... humble... in the sense as I mentioned Moore, Grove, Packards, etc.
You still can find big execs that control billions of dollars sitting in cubes next to engineers, planners, and admins at Intel. One of my favorite things about working here is how they don't even seem to know it is different. (Intel employee)
Can confirm, once worked next to one of those high ranking execs. He wasn't there often (mostly traveling) but his cube was the same size as mine, a lowly engineer.
Read his book "Only the Paranoid Survive" many years ago, he fought for cancer before I think, also remember his cubicle and no-reserved parking as mentioned here. What a great man.
It may just be a function of my own middle-age, but we seem to be losing more of the old Giants - in politics, arts and commerce, and looking ahead, everyone seems, well, smaller in comparison.
Just as software without silicon to run on is, well, smaller, the software moguls of today can only run on hardware because people like Andy put it underneath them a generation before.
"I strode among giants, friends tell me now, though at the time I felt like a misfit associating with oddballs." - Steve Roper, Camp 4: Recollections of a Yosemite Rockclimber.
Perhaps that is less true of Groves, who came from the lineage of Bell and Shockley. I'm sure it applies to the great technologists of our future.
After reading Only the Paranoid Survive and High Output Management, I have a deep respect for Andy Grove and the work he did to make Intel an enduring company. He'll be missed.
What an unfortunate attitude for him to take, promoting a poor quality working environment merely because it anecdotally didn't create problems for him, thereby damaging others who may have physiological conditions (such as misophonia) or who may be more strongly introverted and need privacy for productivity.
And how bad for us now that we laud such poor anecdotes and allow words like "egalitarian" to be associated with such dysfunctional, unhealthy, and productivity-damaging workspace. It's similar to hearing a 1950s endorsement for cigarettes and finding it endearing, instead of realizing that while it may have been a product of its time, the full light of data and progressive analysis has shown how horrible it really is.
Paul Graham expressed this much more strongly than I have, and he wrote about it over 10 years ago:
"After software, the most important tool to a hacker is probably his office. Big companies think the function of office space is to express rank. But hackers use their offices for more than that: they use their office as a place to think in. And if you're a technology company, their thoughts are your product. So making hackers work in a noisy, distracting environment is like having a paint factory where the air is full of soot.
The cartoon strip Dilbert has a lot to say about cubicles, and with good reason. All the hackers I know despise them. The mere prospect of being interrupted is enough to prevent hackers from working on hard problems. If you want to get real work done in an office with cubicles, you have two options: work at home, or come in early or late or on a weekend, when no one else is there. Don't companies realize this is a sign that something is broken? An office environment is supposed to be something that helps you work, not something you work despite.
Companies like Cisco are proud that everyone there has a cubicle, even the CEO. But they're not so advanced as they think; obviously they still view office space as a badge of rank. Note too that Cisco is famous for doing very little product development in house. They get new technology by buying the startups that created it-- where presumably the hackers did have somewhere quiet to work.
One big company that understands what hackers need is Microsoft. I once saw a recruiting ad for Microsoft with a big picture of a door. Work for us, the premise was, and we'll give you a place to work where you can actually get work done. And you know, Microsoft is remarkable among big companies in that they are able to develop software in house. Not well, perhaps, but well enough."
from Great Hackers section called "The Final Frontier"
I agree that open plan is the worst, but cubes are a close second, and both types of space are not as cost effective as private offices (even in dense urban areas).
If the executives want to be "egalitarian" about it, then raise the conditions of everyone up. Don't act like a proud martyr and lower your own conditions. It's patronizing and solves none of the problems. Plus, executives who do this will always find other status games to play if they want to feel superior, so it's never really egalitarian anyway.
We never delete comments outright unless the author asks us to. We do kill comments as part of banning a user (killed comments aren't deleted because anyone with 'showdead' turned on can read them), but going offtopic and getting a bit overheated isn't something we ban people for.
Bunking with the troops sounds a hell of a lot nicer as a gesture than what the usual exec in a company would have done: give himself a corner office with a nice view while the rest of the company spends their time in windowless cubicles.
He wasn't promoting it per se, he was merely using it. Also, I think it is in poor taste to use this moment to attempt to draw attention away from the matter at hand to make it seem like he purposefully did something negative.
I don't see how it's a nice gesture. Not only does it fail to improve what is bad about the conditions, but also it creates an unspoken rule that you're not even allowed to complain, not even allowed to hope, for something better.
Wearing tattered shoes and claiming they are "good enough" isn't a nice gesture nor is it helpful for the person who badly needs better shoes. Instead it's a message: deal with the bad stuff because I am dealing with it.
As for whether it's poor taste, I guess, I don't know. I'm responding to a comment on an internet thread, a comment that could be misinterpreted as supportive of open-plan offices, and I see the effect of that as socially bad. I mean no disrespect, but I'm also going to speak up for what I believe matters.
You're taking a sympathetic act and you're twisting it out of proportion just so you can promote your hobby horse. I don't personally like cubicles either but I'd far prefer the managers of the company to dogfood what they believe is best for their employees rather than that they create a better situation for themselves. If you don't understand why if every manager did that you might actually achieve your goal then that's just too bad.
Bloomberg, a company famous for an executive who expressed this same "down in the trenches" preference for cubicles, famously does not have offices.
Far from their "egalitarian" culture leading to acceptable working conditions over time, it has only enshrined the idea that no one, ever, may have an office.
It is much better that some people have offices even if not all do, for then at least there can be a path to earning the chance to work in one. Some hope. When they are all taken away under the guise of egalitarian conditions, you can bet they are not coming back.
Then go work for a company that provides offices. As an employee, that's your choice and you are welcome to subjectively value egalitarianism exemplified in this way versus hierarchical "perks" that manifest in personal offices.
My goal is to lobby for broad social change, not merely to locate one single private workspace for just me. Complaining about what is wrong with it is a good way to help others, who might not have even considered that workspace should be treated as a negotiable option for them and reflect their personal work style and needs, and potentially create more momentum among the crowd that reads HN, to help set the trend that it ought to be considered unreasonable when an employer whitewashes over human variation when it's actually more cost-effective to provide offices to any knowledge worker who prefers one.
I think you're missing the point with Bloomberg. The whole idea with that place is that they don't like offices: they don't want anyone to have one because they think offices are a bad thing. They think people work better in one big giant, open, noisy room. A bunch of companies these days have bought into this philosophy, and a bunch of young hipsters think it's great.
So Blooomberg hasn't eliminated offices to try to oppress people as you're implying, or because of any egalitarian ideals, they've done it because they genuinely think it improves productivity. You and I probably agree that this is incorrect, but we're not Michael Bloomberg. I know that I would hate working in that environment, but I know about it so I don't apply for any jobs at Bloomberg. Many of the people who work there probably actually like it that way; extroverted people like very different environments than introverts.
I used to work at Intel back when we had 8x9 cubicles, and now, after various different jobs and different working conditions, I now think it was one of the best work environments I've ever had. I briefly had a walled office at one place and that was nice too. But the 8x9 cubicles were pretty good; we had "do not disturb" signs we could hang across the entrance to keep people from bothering us, and things were generally pretty quiet and I could concentrate and work and not have to see people all the time. After that, things went downhill: cubicles got smaller, then the walls got shorter, they went away altogether, as companies jumped on the "open plan work space" concept to various degrees.
I agree with your description of Bloomberg's beliefs and motivation for it, and I agree that many other organizations, especially start-ups, cargo cult on the back of this.
Since the belief that offices are bad in terms of cost or productivity (e.g. Bloomberg's belief that people work better in noisy, open spaces) is demonstrably and quantitatively incorrect, and inflicts undeniable mental and physical health problems, it's all the more important to vocally argue for private working conditions as a social issues.
This isn't about my specific preference. It's about what the data says, and has said for decades.
By comparison, if some company said that workers worked better in a room filled with second-hand smoke, we wouldn't care whether or not they believed this. It's simply a wrong and harmful belief that ought to be stopped. In other words, we should not allow Bloomberg's management to impose a demonstrably unhealthy working condition (violent lack of privacy) regardless of whatever incorrect fictions they happen to use to justify it.
There's a problem with your analysis: you're assuming that people are all the same, and that work is all the same. Do you have any evidence to support your assertion that noisy, open spaces inflict "undeniable mental and physical health problems", or is that just your personal belief? This isn't like smoking: there is zero evidence that smoking is good for your health, and all kinds of evidence that it causes health problems, because our shared basic biology is consistent enough that this is true.
For one example of a work environment where noisy, open spaces seem to work well, just look at stock traders at NYSE on the trading floor. That whole environment works by people being close to each other and able to turn around and talk to each other at a moment's notice. I sure as hell wouldn't want to work there, but there are people who seem to like that environment.
I don't like open-plan offices either, but I'm not going to assume that what works for me works for everyone else. From what I've seen, the type of people getting involved in programming in recent years are not the same type of people who got involved in it back in the 70s and 80s, so it's quite possible these offices really do improve productivity overall. It's also possible that certain personality types gravitate toward certain industries, so certain workplaces work better in those industries than in others. The people interested in finance are probably not the same kind of people interested in, say, programming Arduinos. Maybe Bloomberg's office really does work out well for them. I don't have any data to disprove their beliefs, other than my own personal bias, but I can't claim to speak for all programmers.
I'm hardly assuming people are all the same -- that's the very thing that places like Bloomberg, which standardize on a one-size-fits-all model for the sake of cheapness yet come up with political stories to plausibly defend it, are doing.
I'm saying don't make all seating open-plan. Don't allow mandates for one-size-fits-all seating. For those who require privacy to be productive, spend the money required to give it to them. For those who thrive in a constant communication stream, spend the money to give it to them.
I'm not going to Google the pile of evidence mounting against open plan offices for you.
But I will say that I worked in quant finance for a while and the idea that an open trading floor is needed, even at the exchange, is a big lie. It's about status and showmanship, and functions as nothing but a hindrance to completing actual job duties.
Open-plan fire-drill quant finance was the first work environment that actually showed me how much of a lie it is. Every single person hated it, and at least in part the bonuses and inflated compensation was required just to get people to engage in the Sisyphean task of trying to get their work done in that environment. It was like hiring Usain Bolt and asking him to break the world record for a 100m sprint -- but to do it in your swimming pool.
There are many high frequency shops and quant hedge funds where they need real-time audio links between traders, and yet they still organize into private offices and use teleconferencing and workplace chat, and it ends up being far more effective than having them physically colocated. In one case, I even remember one of the primary researchers was given special permission to live in San Francisco even though the entire rest of trading team worked on the East Coast, simply because he had family reasons that required him to be on the West Coast. It didn't degrade communication or knowledge sharing, even in rapid trading situations, at all.
That all sounds great, except that if every single person hates these environments, and there are "many" shops that have private offices, why aren't the places like Bloomberg failing because they can't find qualified people to work there (and/or their productivity is lousy compared to their competitors with private offices)?
This is a fallacy of presuming the market (in this case labor) has to be efficient, and that any irrationalities would be arbitraged away (better employer swoops in and eats Bloomberg's lunch by providing better workspace) and so therefore whatever we do happen to observe must be the rational, efficient, market clearing condition.
This is absurd of course. If true, then literally every aspect of employment in every company would be the 100% optimal condition as expressed via preference negotiation between employers and candidates and there would be no components of working life that are systematically worse off for the employee. Surely you can't be claiming that? If employment is efficient, why are there things like Occupy Wall St? Not that Occupy is right or wrong, but why would it exist? Why wouldn't those companies, with policies people find socially toxic, fail to find enough applicants and be forced to change policies in response to the market?
Their ability to find workers and make money is not very related to whether their practices are unhealthy or destructive, as is the case with open-plan nonsense too.
Why do any market irrationalities persist? Often there is an aspect of market manipulation. In the labor market this can occur by focusing on hiring visa-based workers and using their visa status as discreet leverage to force them to never complain about conditions. Many companies also do actively illegal things, like threaten employees with retaliation if they discuss their salary, in efforts to prevent collective bargaining and depress employee negotiation power over attributes like workspace.
The more disconcerting thing is the way that younger generations of programmers, basically my generation and younger, have been psychologically manipulated into believing that "dynamic" and "collaborative" are synonymous with open-plan, and they are afraid to express any dissatisfaction lest they are downgraded to "not a team player." It breeds what Michael O. Church described as "macho subordination" -- a desire to compete to be seen as most "loyal" by making a public display of willingness to bottomlessly compromise even basic dignity in the work place, so that anyone who stands up for realistic, humanity-affirming conditions is immediately labeled "toxic" and exiled. The workers enacting this don't even know any better, and few of them have had to take a phone call during the work day about a family tragedy, or discuss an awkward medical condition as they schedule a doctor's appointment, or something, and they place low value on such privacy mostly from a position of naïveté.
Anyway, the circular logic of saying markets must be efficient, therefore whatever we observe in markets must be proving their efficiency is patently ridiculous.
You're right that markets are not 100% efficient. However you have some faulty logic here.
>If employment is efficient, why are there things like Occupy Wall St? Not that Occupy is right or wrong, but why would it exist? Why wouldn't those companies, with policies people find socially toxic, fail to find enough applicants and be forced to change policies in response to the market?
Your assumption here is that the entire population agrees with OWS. They don't. The people who work at those companies are perfectly happy to work there, and are not the same people who were in OWS. OWS wasn't even about employment, it was about Wall Street doing things which wrecked the economy, and getting away with it, and with the economy as a whole not working for many sectors of the population.
The economy is working just fine for people on Wall Street. Why would they complain about it? People working on Wall Street are getting paid well. They're not complaining. The complainers at OWS were people who were not working on Wall Street, and they certainly weren't protesting work environments in Wall Street companies.
You do have good points about H1-B visa abuse and prevention of collective bargaining. But this is still orthogonal to open-plan offices. Right now, the employment market for software developers is very strong, probably one of the healthiest employment markets in the American economy right now. Companies are competing with each other to hire talented employees in this market. If a work environment were really that bad, they'd have a hard time keeping people around. This is, in fact, exactly what the US government is complaining about right now with IT workers; they can't keep good one around because the pay is so much better in industry and you don't have to wait around for months for a background check.
>The more disconcerting thing is the way that younger generations of programmers, basically my generation and younger, have been psychologically manipulated into believing that "dynamic" and "collaborative" are synonymous with open-plan
Now this is hitting the nail on the head. Younger people actually believe this kind of environment is better, more "fun", etc. So employees are willingly signing up to work in these places because they're drunk the Kool-Aid.
> Your assumption here is that the entire population agrees with OWS. They don't. The people who work at those companies are perfectly happy to work there, and are not the same people who were in OWS.
This is inaccurate. Most of the people I know who work in quant finance, for example, actively despise their employer but have extreme fear about ever expressing it. Some others even have expressed it and participated openly in OWS.
The trouble is really that there is no industry in which you can work where your labor accomplishes anything other than servicing some vertical scam to protect and enhance the lifestyle of certain executives. So while people are very right to point out the ethical problems of the finance industry, the choice to quit finance for something else doesn't make much sense either because everything else is equally as fucked with unethical behavior. Leaving finance generally just means dealing with exactly the same unethical side effects but receiving less pay for doing so.
> Right now, the employment market for software developers is very strong, probably one of the healthiest employment markets in the American economy right now. Companies are competing with each other to hire talented employees in this market. If a work environment were really that bad, they'd have a hard time keeping people around. This is, in fact, exactly what the US government is complaining about right now with IT workers; they can't keep good one around because the pay is so much better in industry and you don't have to wait around for months for a background check.
I disagree with this very much. On one hand, there are all sorts of puff pieces and seeded media articles about the so-called tech shortage. On the other hand, recruiters are resorting to bullshit like HackerRank and telling candidates that there is such a tsunami of qualified candidate applications pouring in, that they have to use dumb commodity shit like online quizzes about data structures to weed out 90% of applicants before they can even start assessing who to interview.
The tech job market is in a period right now where it is heavily focused on suppressing wages relative to the actual market value of these types of employees. There are a handful of boutique financial firms (certainly not the large banks) and the big 6 tech firms that still pay competitive market wages. Most of the rest of the industry, and especially the start-up world which far and away counts for the most job openings, deeply suppress wages and use all kinds of underhanded tactics to make sure they don't have to pay what developers are worth.
Most of all, they simply do not seek talented or productive people. Those people are expensive to hire and they know their way around negotiation. If you are one of these people, most often you get instantly rejected for not being cheap enough and/or for not agreeing to do silly things like immediately share your salary history in the very first HR phone screen. The company is absolutely happier to reject all such candidates and wait until they find someone who is plausibly talented enough to do the job, or looks good on paper, but who is a total dummy when it comes to salary negotiation or even just knowing what they are worth.
Companies hire developers for the purpose of office decoration. They build out some lifestyle-masturbation open-plan office with a cafe, a roofdeck, etc., and then they make the actual working space look like an Apple store had sex with a sweatshop. Because that's what investors want to look at when they walk through. They want to see rows and rows of hoodie-clad, hipster-glasses-wearing nerds with gourmet coffee typing on Macbooks with less than 2 lateral feet of personal space per person. That's what "software" looks like in their head, and they don't give a shit about productivity or about extracting value from the creative talent of these workers. Their value is likely for an acqui-hire, so on-paper credential + how you look in the sexy...
This is unfortunate. I think it could not be more on-topic. It is as much about the legacy impact of his choices as the parent comment onto which I made it, and it seems exceedingly hypocritical to detach it.
But nonetheless I accept your choice. What other option do I have.
High Output Management has dramatically improved the culture, communication and output of our company. I live a better life because of what this man learned and passed on. Thanks Mr. Grove, you are a giant.
Yes, we definitely need a black bar here. Grove set the tone of a lot of what we take for granted in Silicon Valley, like a meritocracy, no offices for execs, the best idea wins regardless of who suggested it, etc.
Highly recommend Swimming Across - Andy's autobiography of his childhood. The biography Life and Times of an American picks up from there with the first ~50-75 pages recounting the story Andy told in his own words in Swimming Across. Remarkable story - a life well-lived in the face of incredible early challenges to be sure.
Andy was brilliant and driven. After he retired from Intel, he worked to help find a cure for Parkinson's, from which he suffered. I wish that story had a happier ending but it does demonstrate the fight in him.
I am in the middle of reading HPM, sad to hear. Andy Grove's writing has a lot of the same flavors of Paul Graham, but for a more corporate setting. The no-nonsense attitude towards meetings, and also understanding the challenges of decision making through meetings resonate with me.
I just learned about it and Andy Grove a couple of days ago, which really puts the "oh, this person would be cool to talk to" and the "oh, that's not happening" awkwardly close.
But some view books as a receptacle of the authors mind, a time capsule that allows them to share thoughts with you even centuries after they have passed. Guess I'll have 2 more to look forward to.
I was going through a difficult period at work last year and picked up High Output Management on the recommendation of a thread I came across somewhere here on HN. It didn't help save my job. But it did help me see what competent management looks like and helped me preserve a bit of my sanity.
One thing that struck me as emblematic of Grove's generous and effective management style is that nowhere in the book does he have a section addressing the difficult task of letting people go. I kept waiting for it. Instead, he focuses on the challenge of retaining talent stating that's the toughest job management confronts.
The book made me really wish I worked for an organization he was in charge of.
I'm sorry to hear of his passing. My first job in the Bay Area was working for Intel in Santa Clara, and I worked in the same building that Andy did at the time (Santa Clara 4). It amazed me that he had a cubical (well it had slightly higher walls but was still just a cube.) I have two very influential memories of my time at Intel, the first was when I went to a design update meeting on the 80386 and Andy locked the door to the room at the time the meeting started, a couple of people who should have attended in person were stuck waiting in the hall. The second was that when we had one of our "business update meetings" (which really was a layoff was happening to the people who weren't in the meeting so we called them "BUMmer" meetings sometimes). Andy said that because Intel was losing money the slowest of all semiconductor companies we were by definition the best semiconductor company in the world.
Both of those experiences left me deeply impressed with how focused he was on the path forward. What ever was happening around you didn't matter, it was "Put one foot in front of the other and make progress against the goal now." kind of focus.
Thinking about it and "second sourcing", it is funny how not that long afterwards they used marketing tactics like the 486SX/487SX fiasco to compete with AMD's 386DX. I wonder what would have happened if for example Intel bought Compaq instead back in 1991 (instead of Compaq having to cut R&D for example).
Compaq also made x86 server equipment, which is one of the reasons they were assimilated by Hewlett Packard. Compaq developed the initial versions of the Smart Array RAID controllers, and were working with Intel (amongst others) on the thankfully defunct Intelligent I/O Architecture (I2O) on which the Smart Arrays appear to have been based.
One of the reasons I left Intel for Sun was that Intel had just realized that "lots of people" making x86 chips was a bad thing for their control of the market. There were no less than 6 suppliers of 8086 chips. But with the 80286 and the 80386 it became clear that "owning the processor" so that they could claim a big chunk of the profit on every PC sold was very very important to the company. That strategy, while unpopular with the technical community, worked out very well for Intel.
Andy was a driving force behind that shift, his view that "only the paranoid survive" was that you had to believe everyone was out to get you in order to avoid surprises from your "friends." And as much as I hate to admit it, he was correct in that view.
Yea, I know the history. The point being that Intel buying say Compaq would obviously allow them to claim Compaq's profits instead, and maybe eventually driving all other PC makers out of business (by the low margins) instead of making the same undifferentiable "beige boxes".
I was thinking he meant buying x86 competitors or burying them via patents. Intel both patents and buys patents on plenty of CPU-related tech, esp for x86 compatibility. Alpha and Transmeta CPU's come to mind immediately. Things just kept disappearing until we were down to basically three companies: Intel, AMD, and VIA. AMD had to pay Intel for I.P. with VIA being a niche player running losses despite some good tech.
So, I.P. control from purchases or threats could keep Intel on top of competition for a long time. Worst case was they end up in an oligopoly position where they can still pull huge profits.
Everyone else (ARM etc.) has a monopoly on the ISA or they don't even publish it (NVIDIA etc.) Intel actually makes perhaps the most open commercially significant platform.
Not really. Unlike Intel, ARM licenses their ISA to anyone who's willing to pay. Every single modern iPhone has an entirely in-house Apple implementation of the ARM ISA and they're definitely not the only ones
That's far from true. We've been able to license ARM and MIPS ISA's plus implementations for a long time. They and Intel defend theirs with patents. SPARC, the most open of old ones, could be used without license fees or patent risk at all. You just had to make it ISA compatible then pay a $99 fee. Gaisler has a SPARC CPU and pile of SOC HW under GPL that ASIC proven even on radhard, space applications. Enterprise versions selling for a premium exist from Oracle and Fujitsu.
I'd say Intel is not that open at all given the secrets remaining, patent protections, and lack of competition. POWER is slightly more open with PowerPC embedded implementations. ARM and MIPS are more open since they actively license implementations. The most open is SPARC ISA hands down given every aspect is usable with source available for several CPU's.
I put it between Intel and ARM because I still didnt know what I got at what price after reading OpenPOWER website. I have that data for ARM, MIPS, and SPARC.
So, what's an OpenPOWER license cost, the royalties if any, and does that come with ASIC-ready implementation?
Well, currently shipped SPARC's volumes are relatively low AFAIK, and ARM and MIPS (now IMG) are in fact monopolies, they just happen to license the ISA & the implementation because they choose to do this. Intel does not choose to let AMD and VIA ship x86 CPUs and in this sense it's less of a monopoly. Of course you could argue that ARM is more open than x86 in some other significant sense; here I think that the PC is a more open platform than perhaps any widely shipped ARM-based system, in terms of the variety of available operating systems and software and the ease of developing such software, especially if said software is to have reasonably wide applicability and long shelf life, and also in terms of the degree of control that any single entity has over the platform.
In general I think that the "vertical disintegration" where you have fabs which are open to everyone making chips integrating cheap IPs, instead of companies with their own fabs, has destroyed "openness" - it used to be the case that you knew exactly what the hardware was doing, and it is now the case that you need to sign a draconian NDA to program most of the components in most chips, and this option is only available to select "partners." x86 is an older product and hence more open than most successful newer products; it was perhaps less open than its competitors at the time, which in part explains why it was more successful than those competitors... (A closed platform is a kind of a high-risk, high-reward game.)
OK. Well, we have to consider that. There's companies making money on the ISA's and implementations. Intel's main business is the ISA and implementation of x86. By that standard, they have quite a huge chunk of a oligiopoly with only 1 real competitor and a niche competitor in low-power space. For ARM, there are at least 10 companies that fully licensed and extended the I.P. plus academics doing their own. Additionally, Intel and AMD extend their own stuff in their semi-custom business whereas I can extend ARM or MIPS myself after licensing it. The PC builds on blackboxes from Intel and AMD plus a few others that differentiate at the board level. Barely a comparison to ARM, MIPS, etc differentiating at SOC and transistor level.
So, Intel is dominant in their ISA, its implementation, and in a profitable way. ARM and MIPS don't come close despite their monopolies on the ISA's themselves.
"x86 is an older product and hence more open than most successful newer products; it was perhaps less open than its competitors at the time, which in part explains why it was more successful than those competitors... "
This is news to me. Far as I knew, it dominated desktop due to backward compatibility and other strategies. It wasn't open in many ways. SPARC and PPC even adopted OpenFirmware while Intel still had closed microcode updates. It's still the least open ISA of the high-sellers.
"In general I think that the "vertical disintegration" where you have fabs which are open to everyone making chips integrating cheap IPs, instead of companies with their own fabs, has destroyed "openness" - it used to be the case that you knew exactly what the hardware was doing, and it is now the case that you need to sign a draconian NDA to program most of the components in most chips"
That I agree with. Fortunately, there's work from companies and academics to change that with actual silicon being prototyped. This will be an uphill battle but is becoming feasible. The main drawback is that the cost of EDA and prototyping means closed I.P. might stay the norm. Only exception is if we can get academics to put key I.P. in public domain as they develop stuff. PCI or USB here, analog stuff there at 45-90nm at least. Make it cheaper.
"Far as I knew, it dominated desktop due to backward compatibility and other strategies. It wasn't open in many ways." - we're agreeing here, I said "it was less open than competitors at the time, which was perhaps one reason for its success." The only part we're disagreeing about is, I think it's more open than newer products (as a part of the general trend of hardware getting more closed.)
I worked on chips which included both ARM and MIPS CPUs; I don't think it makes ARM or MIPS "open" in many of the ways that matter, because, for one, programming those chips without the consent of the company that made them is very problematic both technically and legally. So ARM and MIPS in practice are "open" to select partners who make chips which are in turn "open" to select partners, unlike the PC where you have not only Windows, Linux, BSD etc. but things like MenuetOS and TempleOS and it's both legal and technically feasible to do this kind of thing. Of course this isn't due to Intel or anyone else behind the PC being more benevolent than other vendors, it's just an older platform and closeness wasn't or at least didn't seem as important for profitability as it is today. Here BTW Intel's focus on backward compatibility is very helpful - low-level software for the ARM or MIPS becomes obsolete more quickly and developing working low-level software for newer version of these in a timely manner might require partnering with the vendor, AFAIK. Basically ARM and MIPS are way more open than x86 to me as a chip architect (although an ARM architecture license AFAIK costs $30M or so... meaning that a lot of chip makers ought to take whichever implementation ARM provides and you're at their mercy to a much greater extent than you'd often desire), but they are far from fully open and then they're way less open than x86 to the users.
And then both MIPS and ARM are pretty old... the trend of really closing everything, where you can't get any spec without partnering with the vendor, didn't take off until maybe the 2000s.
I wonder what it'd take for open IPs to gain significant traction in hardware. It's easy to come up with reasons for them to fail or succeed but it's not easy to predict which reasons will end up more dominant.
"I worked on chips which included both ARM and MIPS CPUs"
That's really neat. Especially as I work a little on methods for secure HW/SW design. Mostly done with digital side of ASIC methodology but still custom digital and analog stuff to figure out. Appreciate any tips you have on such threads where I'm exploring.
"So ARM and MIPS in practice are "open" to select partners who make chips which are in turn "open" to select partners, unlike the PC where you have not only Windows, Linux, BSD etc. but things like MenuetOS and TempleOS and it's both legal and technically feasible to do this kind of thing. "
So, back then, ARM and MIPS I.P. holders didn't allow a PC-like product to be built with their chips? It was custom negotiated for every product with no platforms available? I could see you calling that less open and the ecosystem hit it would have.
"I wonder what it'd take for open IPs to gain significant traction in hardware. It's easy to come up with reasons for them to fail or succeed but it's not easy to predict which reasons will end up more dominant."
Inherently safer or language-specific ISA's like jop-design.com or crash-safe.org. Microcontrollers where any royalties are eliminated to further lower costs. OEM's targetting hobbyists and/or idealists that want maximum freedom. Anti-subversion efforts where multinational pride kicks in with an ISA like RISC-V being remixed allows everyone to feel like the owner. Tools or projects for processor design in academia where they just want something to work with and build rather than screwing around with I.P. and legal risk. Wait, that last one already happened and I already named it. ;)
So, given you've done hardware, what do you think of my recommendation that market wanting OSS hardware just build on Gaisler's SPARC products? There's a configurable CPU (Leon3) and substantial I.P. library already GPL'd or licensable. Probably closer to MIPS than ARM in price. There's also a 4-core version. One could put them right in an ASIC with Pi- or Novena-style boards w/ SPARC ecosystem (esp BSD/Linux) leveraged immediately. Alternatively, really my touch, is swapping out SPARC-specific stuff (eg instruction handling) for RISC-V so all the I.P. just magically supports a RISC-V solution. Open I.P. can gradually be developed to replace it, maybe keep using Gaisler's proprietary source where compelling, stuff is 90+% ASIC-proven from start, people can inspect, paid get paid, everyone is happy.
Nowadays there is ARM SBSA which aims to resolve the problems and allow a PC-like product to be built (the main reason such a thing didn't exist before is lack of interest). In the meantime the GPL helps to ensure at least the source code for the drivers for the Linux kernel are revealed.
Regarding the PC ecosystem vs the ARM and MIPS ecosystem - I'm not sure what happened back when MIPS and ARM made chips, just that most of their volume came when they were IPs, and at that point chip makers were keeping things rather closed. I'm pretty sure both Intel and say MS do not see the PC as the ideal model for their business, they just happen to profit more from it than they would from an attempt to kill it.
Generally, today ARM will sometimes break OS-level code between releases - something Intel would never do - and I think ARM does this because it sells an IP, not chips, and so in any case the only way to sell a CPU to a consumer is through a chip maker licensing ARM and then porting OSes to the new chip - and the chip maker can handle ARM-related breakage while they're at it. But it does not follow that ARM is to blame for most chips being closed and/or hard for an OS unsupported by the chip maker to work on the chip across its various generations; I'd guess that most of the difficulty comes from the chip-level breakage and lack of documentation, not CPU-level issues of this sort.
So IMO it's not that ARM or MIPS actively prevent(ed) the emergence of an open platform like the PC while Intel was pushing for open platforms; it's that Intel happens to have succeeded mainly selling chips for an open platform, while ARM and MIPS happen to have succeeded mainly selling CPU IP for various closed platforms.
Regarding the SPARC IP that you mentioned - I'd have to look at it more deeply to have an informed opinion. Generally for a chip vendor who wants source code, as opposed to wanting an open source IP, MIPS is just fine, they'll give you the source. Otherwise what you want from your CPU vendor varies (ARM for instance gives you not just the CPU but everything you need to build say a cellphone application processor - probably not the best one on the market, but a completely functional one. At the level of the CPU itself, you might want a bunch of things - like hardware virtualization support, or cache coherence with other processors, etc. etc. - that different vendors support differently, if at all.) So as I said, I don't think I have a serious opinion about the product you mention.
I really find it hard to understand what drives these people. Let's say he cornered the entire market and sold 100% of CPUs. What then? Why?
Don't they want the best for the world, and isn't that clearly going to come through competition? I just cannot fathom their motives. Same for any line - fast food chains? Do they want everyone in the world to eat their burger every meal? Why?
I guess I need to buy one of his books to try and find out!
One of the chief arguments for ARM and other MIPS-like ecosystems: they are much more diverse, therefore evolve better on the long run than a tied-down monopoly (Amd used to push Intel on many fronts, ie 64 bits, SIMD, RISC core etc)
btw: Intel isn't a CPU manufacturer. It is a factory for manufacturing processor factories: they are one level of abstraction higher.
isn't that clearly going to come through competition?
Not if you think you're the best! Consider that: if you are in the position where you think you have by far the best product, then wouldn't you want to share it with everyone? In that case, the competition is working against the world's best interests.
If Intel bought out Compaq in 1991 history would be different. I used Compaqs around that time. They had small pizza boxes with 386 and 486 CPUs in them.
I'd imagine Intel would make Compaq PCs with their other chips like the 80980 and other chips.
Maybe make Unix workstations with RISC chips using HP-UX.
Wow.same, I worked in building 5 in 1997 - I recall "going pee next to Andy many times" - other than this interaction with him I didn't really talk to him much.
I recall asking the question then "why can't we stack cores on top of each other" and being told by very senior engineers how stupid that idea was...
Working at Intel was actually the golden age of my gaming experience; I worked in the game development lab and played video games to test SIMD extensions 18 hours a day.
I recall going out to a balcony in SC5 and having a cigarette, there was some person from finance there, and after chatting with him for a bit I asked why he was working so late; he was trying to figure out how to recode the finance system to add additional spaces to the finance DB to allow for the many billions they had in the bank. Apparently the fields were initially set too short to handle the numbers as large as they were dealing with...
As for "going pee next to Andy many times", Szilard was trying to switch from physics to biology and was housing for ideas at Karolinska.
He visited Klein, who happened to follow him to the bathroom and saw blood in the pot after him. As a non practicing doctor, but avid observer, he quickly diagnosed him with cancer. Szilard then signed up for one of the highest doses of radiotherapy in humans. He survived both the therapy and the cancer and lobbied afterwards to set up EMBL (with Viki Weisskopf, patterned after CERN).
ChuckMcM, with apologies for veering off-topic, you've got so many interesting stories re Intel, Sun, etc. Have you considered writing a book about your experiences? I'd buy it.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadhttp://www.amazon.com/Andy-Grove-Life-Times-American/dp/1591...
http://www.amazon.com/Andy-Grove-Times-American-Business/dp/...
http://www.amazon.com/Andy-Grove-Life-Times-American/dp/1591...
There doesn't seem to be a Kindle / ePub version, unfortunately.
https://www.amazon.ca/Inside-Intel-Worlds-Powerful-Company/d...
Actually kind of incredible to see this sort of inventory change happen in real time.
(I bought the cheapest "very good" condition item for $0.41 + shipping)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7yqwOI0-SQ
>Grove's office was an 8-ft by 9-ft cubicle like the other employees, as he disliked separate "mahogany-paneled corner offices." He states, "I've been living in cubicles since 1978 — and it hasn't hurt a whole lot." Preferring this egalitarian atmosphere, he thereby made his work area accessible to anyone who walked by. There were no reserved parking spaces, and Grove parked wherever there was a space.
Contrast that with Zuckerberg and his recent building issues, or how many modern C-levels want their out of the way offices, etc.
Maybe it was just a different time.
I worked with people who helped Jim Clark with some of his home automation in the early/mid 2000s.
My point in general was I think the Silicon Valley elders of old, Grove, Moore, Packards (I know multiple individuals who benefitted from the Packard Children's fund w/ pre-mes. (sp?), etc. were much more community and outward focused than that which we see today.
There are people here and there, but a lot of what gets glamorized or talked about tend to be more selfishly oriented individuals.
Gates, early on, stated his kids weren't getting a huge part of his fortune, I consider his works on par (via the Gates Foundation) as those of the Packards. That said, the Packards have been very local vs. Gates more international (maybe it's need, size of endowment, etc).
Ellison, Jobs (mainly on the woodside mansion and not being charity oriented), Clark, etc certainly contrast with those I mentioned.
I think 80s-90s had seriously strong personalities emerge that get to the core of what you mention. Yet around that was much more down to earth philanthropy, etc.
I don't see that same balance today.
The shortcut takers are generally more insecure and that manifests in different behavior once they reach the top.
That is a fascinating observation. I was alive and in the biz back then, but I've burned an awful lot of brain cells between then and now and don't have a particularly objectiv eview of things.
Why do you think folks then were outward focused? Was there less competition so more focus on "doing something really cool", or leftover 60's 'free love' culture, or less shitty traffic in Silicon Valley, or...?
Given the international needs are fare more pressing, I'd say the Gates have the right objective.
I don't know how true that is, but that was the story at the time.
Other than that, I got a speeding ticket for going 26 in a 25 mph zone very near his house and was super upset at how lame that was.
Ellison's 200 million dollar house set on 23 acres, suggests that selective memory might be playing a role.
Now he has a 600mm fucking island of the STATE of Hawaii!!
There are certainly those that benefitted from the 90s boom that aren't particularly ... humble... in the sense as I mentioned Moore, Grove, Packards, etc.
Grove was a generation older than Gates, never mind Zuckerberg. His early years were also in wartorn Europe, not USA.
Read his book "Only the Paranoid Survive" many years ago, he fought for cancer before I think, also remember his cubicle and no-reserved parking as mentioned here. What a great man.
Thank you for everything you did.
Just as software without silicon to run on is, well, smaller, the software moguls of today can only run on hardware because people like Andy put it underneath them a generation before.
Perhaps that is less true of Groves, who came from the lineage of Bell and Shockley. I'm sure it applies to the great technologists of our future.
Loved this book http://www.amazon.com/Only-Paranoid-Survive-Exploit-Challeng...
And how bad for us now that we laud such poor anecdotes and allow words like "egalitarian" to be associated with such dysfunctional, unhealthy, and productivity-damaging workspace. It's similar to hearing a 1950s endorsement for cigarettes and finding it endearing, instead of realizing that while it may have been a product of its time, the full light of data and progressive analysis has shown how horrible it really is.
I prefer working at home, but individual offices were a nice touch if I had to be in the office, the worst of all worlds was "open offices".
A senior executive not using his role to be away from the other employees is incredibly rare these days.
"After software, the most important tool to a hacker is probably his office. Big companies think the function of office space is to express rank. But hackers use their offices for more than that: they use their office as a place to think in. And if you're a technology company, their thoughts are your product. So making hackers work in a noisy, distracting environment is like having a paint factory where the air is full of soot.
The cartoon strip Dilbert has a lot to say about cubicles, and with good reason. All the hackers I know despise them. The mere prospect of being interrupted is enough to prevent hackers from working on hard problems. If you want to get real work done in an office with cubicles, you have two options: work at home, or come in early or late or on a weekend, when no one else is there. Don't companies realize this is a sign that something is broken? An office environment is supposed to be something that helps you work, not something you work despite.
Companies like Cisco are proud that everyone there has a cubicle, even the CEO. But they're not so advanced as they think; obviously they still view office space as a badge of rank. Note too that Cisco is famous for doing very little product development in house. They get new technology by buying the startups that created it-- where presumably the hackers did have somewhere quiet to work.
One big company that understands what hackers need is Microsoft. I once saw a recruiting ad for Microsoft with a big picture of a door. Work for us, the premise was, and we'll give you a place to work where you can actually get work done. And you know, Microsoft is remarkable among big companies in that they are able to develop software in house. Not well, perhaps, but well enough."
from Great Hackers section called "The Final Frontier"
http://paulgraham.com/gh.html
I agree that open plan is the worst, but cubes are a close second, and both types of space are not as cost effective as private offices (even in dense urban areas).
If the executives want to be "egalitarian" about it, then raise the conditions of everyone up. Don't act like a proud martyr and lower your own conditions. It's patronizing and solves none of the problems. Plus, executives who do this will always find other status games to play if they want to feel superior, so it's never really egalitarian anyway.
He wasn't promoting it per se, he was merely using it. Also, I think it is in poor taste to use this moment to attempt to draw attention away from the matter at hand to make it seem like he purposefully did something negative.
Wearing tattered shoes and claiming they are "good enough" isn't a nice gesture nor is it helpful for the person who badly needs better shoes. Instead it's a message: deal with the bad stuff because I am dealing with it.
As for whether it's poor taste, I guess, I don't know. I'm responding to a comment on an internet thread, a comment that could be misinterpreted as supportive of open-plan offices, and I see the effect of that as socially bad. I mean no disrespect, but I'm also going to speak up for what I believe matters.
Far from their "egalitarian" culture leading to acceptable working conditions over time, it has only enshrined the idea that no one, ever, may have an office.
It is much better that some people have offices even if not all do, for then at least there can be a path to earning the chance to work in one. Some hope. When they are all taken away under the guise of egalitarian conditions, you can bet they are not coming back.
So Blooomberg hasn't eliminated offices to try to oppress people as you're implying, or because of any egalitarian ideals, they've done it because they genuinely think it improves productivity. You and I probably agree that this is incorrect, but we're not Michael Bloomberg. I know that I would hate working in that environment, but I know about it so I don't apply for any jobs at Bloomberg. Many of the people who work there probably actually like it that way; extroverted people like very different environments than introverts.
I used to work at Intel back when we had 8x9 cubicles, and now, after various different jobs and different working conditions, I now think it was one of the best work environments I've ever had. I briefly had a walled office at one place and that was nice too. But the 8x9 cubicles were pretty good; we had "do not disturb" signs we could hang across the entrance to keep people from bothering us, and things were generally pretty quiet and I could concentrate and work and not have to see people all the time. After that, things went downhill: cubicles got smaller, then the walls got shorter, they went away altogether, as companies jumped on the "open plan work space" concept to various degrees.
Since the belief that offices are bad in terms of cost or productivity (e.g. Bloomberg's belief that people work better in noisy, open spaces) is demonstrably and quantitatively incorrect, and inflicts undeniable mental and physical health problems, it's all the more important to vocally argue for private working conditions as a social issues.
This isn't about my specific preference. It's about what the data says, and has said for decades.
By comparison, if some company said that workers worked better in a room filled with second-hand smoke, we wouldn't care whether or not they believed this. It's simply a wrong and harmful belief that ought to be stopped. In other words, we should not allow Bloomberg's management to impose a demonstrably unhealthy working condition (violent lack of privacy) regardless of whatever incorrect fictions they happen to use to justify it.
For one example of a work environment where noisy, open spaces seem to work well, just look at stock traders at NYSE on the trading floor. That whole environment works by people being close to each other and able to turn around and talk to each other at a moment's notice. I sure as hell wouldn't want to work there, but there are people who seem to like that environment.
I don't like open-plan offices either, but I'm not going to assume that what works for me works for everyone else. From what I've seen, the type of people getting involved in programming in recent years are not the same type of people who got involved in it back in the 70s and 80s, so it's quite possible these offices really do improve productivity overall. It's also possible that certain personality types gravitate toward certain industries, so certain workplaces work better in those industries than in others. The people interested in finance are probably not the same kind of people interested in, say, programming Arduinos. Maybe Bloomberg's office really does work out well for them. I don't have any data to disprove their beliefs, other than my own personal bias, but I can't claim to speak for all programmers.
I'm saying don't make all seating open-plan. Don't allow mandates for one-size-fits-all seating. For those who require privacy to be productive, spend the money required to give it to them. For those who thrive in a constant communication stream, spend the money to give it to them.
I'm not going to Google the pile of evidence mounting against open plan offices for you.
But I will say that I worked in quant finance for a while and the idea that an open trading floor is needed, even at the exchange, is a big lie. It's about status and showmanship, and functions as nothing but a hindrance to completing actual job duties.
Open-plan fire-drill quant finance was the first work environment that actually showed me how much of a lie it is. Every single person hated it, and at least in part the bonuses and inflated compensation was required just to get people to engage in the Sisyphean task of trying to get their work done in that environment. It was like hiring Usain Bolt and asking him to break the world record for a 100m sprint -- but to do it in your swimming pool.
There are many high frequency shops and quant hedge funds where they need real-time audio links between traders, and yet they still organize into private offices and use teleconferencing and workplace chat, and it ends up being far more effective than having them physically colocated. In one case, I even remember one of the primary researchers was given special permission to live in San Francisco even though the entire rest of trading team worked on the East Coast, simply because he had family reasons that required him to be on the West Coast. It didn't degrade communication or knowledge sharing, even in rapid trading situations, at all.
This is absurd of course. If true, then literally every aspect of employment in every company would be the 100% optimal condition as expressed via preference negotiation between employers and candidates and there would be no components of working life that are systematically worse off for the employee. Surely you can't be claiming that? If employment is efficient, why are there things like Occupy Wall St? Not that Occupy is right or wrong, but why would it exist? Why wouldn't those companies, with policies people find socially toxic, fail to find enough applicants and be forced to change policies in response to the market?
Their ability to find workers and make money is not very related to whether their practices are unhealthy or destructive, as is the case with open-plan nonsense too.
Why do any market irrationalities persist? Often there is an aspect of market manipulation. In the labor market this can occur by focusing on hiring visa-based workers and using their visa status as discreet leverage to force them to never complain about conditions. Many companies also do actively illegal things, like threaten employees with retaliation if they discuss their salary, in efforts to prevent collective bargaining and depress employee negotiation power over attributes like workspace.
The more disconcerting thing is the way that younger generations of programmers, basically my generation and younger, have been psychologically manipulated into believing that "dynamic" and "collaborative" are synonymous with open-plan, and they are afraid to express any dissatisfaction lest they are downgraded to "not a team player." It breeds what Michael O. Church described as "macho subordination" -- a desire to compete to be seen as most "loyal" by making a public display of willingness to bottomlessly compromise even basic dignity in the work place, so that anyone who stands up for realistic, humanity-affirming conditions is immediately labeled "toxic" and exiled. The workers enacting this don't even know any better, and few of them have had to take a phone call during the work day about a family tragedy, or discuss an awkward medical condition as they schedule a doctor's appointment, or something, and they place low value on such privacy mostly from a position of naïveté.
Anyway, the circular logic of saying markets must be efficient, therefore whatever we observe in markets must be proving their efficiency is patently ridiculous.
>If employment is efficient, why are there things like Occupy Wall St? Not that Occupy is right or wrong, but why would it exist? Why wouldn't those companies, with policies people find socially toxic, fail to find enough applicants and be forced to change policies in response to the market?
Your assumption here is that the entire population agrees with OWS. They don't. The people who work at those companies are perfectly happy to work there, and are not the same people who were in OWS. OWS wasn't even about employment, it was about Wall Street doing things which wrecked the economy, and getting away with it, and with the economy as a whole not working for many sectors of the population.
The economy is working just fine for people on Wall Street. Why would they complain about it? People working on Wall Street are getting paid well. They're not complaining. The complainers at OWS were people who were not working on Wall Street, and they certainly weren't protesting work environments in Wall Street companies.
You do have good points about H1-B visa abuse and prevention of collective bargaining. But this is still orthogonal to open-plan offices. Right now, the employment market for software developers is very strong, probably one of the healthiest employment markets in the American economy right now. Companies are competing with each other to hire talented employees in this market. If a work environment were really that bad, they'd have a hard time keeping people around. This is, in fact, exactly what the US government is complaining about right now with IT workers; they can't keep good one around because the pay is so much better in industry and you don't have to wait around for months for a background check.
>The more disconcerting thing is the way that younger generations of programmers, basically my generation and younger, have been psychologically manipulated into believing that "dynamic" and "collaborative" are synonymous with open-plan
Now this is hitting the nail on the head. Younger people actually believe this kind of environment is better, more "fun", etc. So employees are willingly signing up to work in these places because they're drunk the Kool-Aid.
This is inaccurate. Most of the people I know who work in quant finance, for example, actively despise their employer but have extreme fear about ever expressing it. Some others even have expressed it and participated openly in OWS.
The trouble is really that there is no industry in which you can work where your labor accomplishes anything other than servicing some vertical scam to protect and enhance the lifestyle of certain executives. So while people are very right to point out the ethical problems of the finance industry, the choice to quit finance for something else doesn't make much sense either because everything else is equally as fucked with unethical behavior. Leaving finance generally just means dealing with exactly the same unethical side effects but receiving less pay for doing so.
> Right now, the employment market for software developers is very strong, probably one of the healthiest employment markets in the American economy right now. Companies are competing with each other to hire talented employees in this market. If a work environment were really that bad, they'd have a hard time keeping people around. This is, in fact, exactly what the US government is complaining about right now with IT workers; they can't keep good one around because the pay is so much better in industry and you don't have to wait around for months for a background check.
I disagree with this very much. On one hand, there are all sorts of puff pieces and seeded media articles about the so-called tech shortage. On the other hand, recruiters are resorting to bullshit like HackerRank and telling candidates that there is such a tsunami of qualified candidate applications pouring in, that they have to use dumb commodity shit like online quizzes about data structures to weed out 90% of applicants before they can even start assessing who to interview.
The tech job market is in a period right now where it is heavily focused on suppressing wages relative to the actual market value of these types of employees. There are a handful of boutique financial firms (certainly not the large banks) and the big 6 tech firms that still pay competitive market wages. Most of the rest of the industry, and especially the start-up world which far and away counts for the most job openings, deeply suppress wages and use all kinds of underhanded tactics to make sure they don't have to pay what developers are worth.
Most of all, they simply do not seek talented or productive people. Those people are expensive to hire and they know their way around negotiation. If you are one of these people, most often you get instantly rejected for not being cheap enough and/or for not agreeing to do silly things like immediately share your salary history in the very first HR phone screen. The company is absolutely happier to reject all such candidates and wait until they find someone who is plausibly talented enough to do the job, or looks good on paper, but who is a total dummy when it comes to salary negotiation or even just knowing what they are worth.
Companies hire developers for the purpose of office decoration. They build out some lifestyle-masturbation open-plan office with a cafe, a roofdeck, etc., and then they make the actual working space look like an Apple store had sex with a sweatshop. Because that's what investors want to look at when they walk through. They want to see rows and rows of hoodie-clad, hipster-glasses-wearing nerds with gourmet coffee typing on Macbooks with less than 2 lateral feet of personal space per person. That's what "software" looks like in their head, and they don't give a shit about productivity or about extracting value from the creative talent of these workers. Their value is likely for an acqui-hire, so on-paper credential + how you look in the sexy...
But nonetheless I accept your choice. What other option do I have.
RIP
http://a16z.com/2015/09/28/the-man-who-built-silicon-valley-...
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/0128/070.html
http://www.amazon.com/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove/dp...
But some view books as a receptacle of the authors mind, a time capsule that allows them to share thoughts with you even centuries after they have passed. Guess I'll have 2 more to look forward to.
One thing that struck me as emblematic of Grove's generous and effective management style is that nowhere in the book does he have a section addressing the difficult task of letting people go. I kept waiting for it. Instead, he focuses on the challenge of retaining talent stating that's the toughest job management confronts.
The book made me really wish I worked for an organization he was in charge of.
http://www.bhorowitz.com/high-output-management
Both of those experiences left me deeply impressed with how focused he was on the path forward. What ever was happening around you didn't matter, it was "Put one foot in front of the other and make progress against the goal now." kind of focus.
Andy was a driving force behind that shift, his view that "only the paranoid survive" was that you had to believe everyone was out to get you in order to avoid surprises from your "friends." And as much as I hate to admit it, he was correct in that view.
So, I.P. control from purchases or threats could keep Intel on top of competition for a long time. Worst case was they end up in an oligopoly position where they can still pull huge profits.
I'd say Intel is not that open at all given the secrets remaining, patent protections, and lack of competition. POWER is slightly more open with PowerPC embedded implementations. ARM and MIPS are more open since they actively license implementations. The most open is SPARC ISA hands down given every aspect is usable with source available for several CPU's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPOWER_Foundation
So, what's an OpenPOWER license cost, the royalties if any, and does that come with ASIC-ready implementation?
In general I think that the "vertical disintegration" where you have fabs which are open to everyone making chips integrating cheap IPs, instead of companies with their own fabs, has destroyed "openness" - it used to be the case that you knew exactly what the hardware was doing, and it is now the case that you need to sign a draconian NDA to program most of the components in most chips, and this option is only available to select "partners." x86 is an older product and hence more open than most successful newer products; it was perhaps less open than its competitors at the time, which in part explains why it was more successful than those competitors... (A closed platform is a kind of a high-risk, high-reward game.)
So, Intel is dominant in their ISA, its implementation, and in a profitable way. ARM and MIPS don't come close despite their monopolies on the ISA's themselves.
"x86 is an older product and hence more open than most successful newer products; it was perhaps less open than its competitors at the time, which in part explains why it was more successful than those competitors... "
This is news to me. Far as I knew, it dominated desktop due to backward compatibility and other strategies. It wasn't open in many ways. SPARC and PPC even adopted OpenFirmware while Intel still had closed microcode updates. It's still the least open ISA of the high-sellers.
"In general I think that the "vertical disintegration" where you have fabs which are open to everyone making chips integrating cheap IPs, instead of companies with their own fabs, has destroyed "openness" - it used to be the case that you knew exactly what the hardware was doing, and it is now the case that you need to sign a draconian NDA to program most of the components in most chips"
That I agree with. Fortunately, there's work from companies and academics to change that with actual silicon being prototyped. This will be an uphill battle but is becoming feasible. The main drawback is that the cost of EDA and prototyping means closed I.P. might stay the norm. Only exception is if we can get academics to put key I.P. in public domain as they develop stuff. PCI or USB here, analog stuff there at 45-90nm at least. Make it cheaper.
I worked on chips which included both ARM and MIPS CPUs; I don't think it makes ARM or MIPS "open" in many of the ways that matter, because, for one, programming those chips without the consent of the company that made them is very problematic both technically and legally. So ARM and MIPS in practice are "open" to select partners who make chips which are in turn "open" to select partners, unlike the PC where you have not only Windows, Linux, BSD etc. but things like MenuetOS and TempleOS and it's both legal and technically feasible to do this kind of thing. Of course this isn't due to Intel or anyone else behind the PC being more benevolent than other vendors, it's just an older platform and closeness wasn't or at least didn't seem as important for profitability as it is today. Here BTW Intel's focus on backward compatibility is very helpful - low-level software for the ARM or MIPS becomes obsolete more quickly and developing working low-level software for newer version of these in a timely manner might require partnering with the vendor, AFAIK. Basically ARM and MIPS are way more open than x86 to me as a chip architect (although an ARM architecture license AFAIK costs $30M or so... meaning that a lot of chip makers ought to take whichever implementation ARM provides and you're at their mercy to a much greater extent than you'd often desire), but they are far from fully open and then they're way less open than x86 to the users.
And then both MIPS and ARM are pretty old... the trend of really closing everything, where you can't get any spec without partnering with the vendor, didn't take off until maybe the 2000s.
I wonder what it'd take for open IPs to gain significant traction in hardware. It's easy to come up with reasons for them to fail or succeed but it's not easy to predict which reasons will end up more dominant.
That's really neat. Especially as I work a little on methods for secure HW/SW design. Mostly done with digital side of ASIC methodology but still custom digital and analog stuff to figure out. Appreciate any tips you have on such threads where I'm exploring.
"So ARM and MIPS in practice are "open" to select partners who make chips which are in turn "open" to select partners, unlike the PC where you have not only Windows, Linux, BSD etc. but things like MenuetOS and TempleOS and it's both legal and technically feasible to do this kind of thing. "
So, back then, ARM and MIPS I.P. holders didn't allow a PC-like product to be built with their chips? It was custom negotiated for every product with no platforms available? I could see you calling that less open and the ecosystem hit it would have.
"I wonder what it'd take for open IPs to gain significant traction in hardware. It's easy to come up with reasons for them to fail or succeed but it's not easy to predict which reasons will end up more dominant."
Inherently safer or language-specific ISA's like jop-design.com or crash-safe.org. Microcontrollers where any royalties are eliminated to further lower costs. OEM's targetting hobbyists and/or idealists that want maximum freedom. Anti-subversion efforts where multinational pride kicks in with an ISA like RISC-V being remixed allows everyone to feel like the owner. Tools or projects for processor design in academia where they just want something to work with and build rather than screwing around with I.P. and legal risk. Wait, that last one already happened and I already named it. ;)
So, given you've done hardware, what do you think of my recommendation that market wanting OSS hardware just build on Gaisler's SPARC products? There's a configurable CPU (Leon3) and substantial I.P. library already GPL'd or licensable. Probably closer to MIPS than ARM in price. There's also a 4-core version. One could put them right in an ASIC with Pi- or Novena-style boards w/ SPARC ecosystem (esp BSD/Linux) leveraged immediately. Alternatively, really my touch, is swapping out SPARC-specific stuff (eg instruction handling) for RISC-V so all the I.P. just magically supports a RISC-V solution. Open I.P. can gradually be developed to replace it, maybe keep using Gaisler's proprietary source where compelling, stuff is 90+% ASIC-proven from start, people can inspect, paid get paid, everyone is happy.
BTW, notice the "server" in the ARM SBSA name.
Generally, today ARM will sometimes break OS-level code between releases - something Intel would never do - and I think ARM does this because it sells an IP, not chips, and so in any case the only way to sell a CPU to a consumer is through a chip maker licensing ARM and then porting OSes to the new chip - and the chip maker can handle ARM-related breakage while they're at it. But it does not follow that ARM is to blame for most chips being closed and/or hard for an OS unsupported by the chip maker to work on the chip across its various generations; I'd guess that most of the difficulty comes from the chip-level breakage and lack of documentation, not CPU-level issues of this sort.
So IMO it's not that ARM or MIPS actively prevent(ed) the emergence of an open platform like the PC while Intel was pushing for open platforms; it's that Intel happens to have succeeded mainly selling chips for an open platform, while ARM and MIPS happen to have succeeded mainly selling CPU IP for various closed platforms.
Regarding the SPARC IP that you mentioned - I'd have to look at it more deeply to have an informed opinion. Generally for a chip vendor who wants source code, as opposed to wanting an open source IP, MIPS is just fine, they'll give you the source. Otherwise what you want from your CPU vendor varies (ARM for instance gives you not just the CPU but everything you need to build say a cellphone application processor - probably not the best one on the market, but a completely functional one. At the level of the CPU itself, you might want a bunch of things - like hardware virtualization support, or cache coherence with other processors, etc. etc. - that different vendors support differently, if at all.) So as I said, I don't think I have a serious opinion about the product you mention.
Don't they want the best for the world, and isn't that clearly going to come through competition? I just cannot fathom their motives. Same for any line - fast food chains? Do they want everyone in the world to eat their burger every meal? Why?
I guess I need to buy one of his books to try and find out!
btw: Intel isn't a CPU manufacturer. It is a factory for manufacturing processor factories: they are one level of abstraction higher.
Can you elaborate that a bit? I mean I'm completely ignorant about CPU manufacturing, your statement is very intriguing.
What exactly do they manufacture when you say they manufacture factory of CPUs? Design?
Maybe start with "swimming in your vault full of money like Scrooge McDuck".
Not if you think you're the best! Consider that: if you are in the position where you think you have by far the best product, then wouldn't you want to share it with everyone? In that case, the competition is working against the world's best interests.
I'd imagine Intel would make Compaq PCs with their other chips like the 80980 and other chips.
Maybe make Unix workstations with RISC chips using HP-UX.
i am finding in my own startup that this is the only way progress is made. you just keep going, if at all possible.
I recall asking the question then "why can't we stack cores on top of each other" and being told by very senior engineers how stupid that idea was...
Working at Intel was actually the golden age of my gaming experience; I worked in the game development lab and played video games to test SIMD extensions 18 hours a day.
I recall going out to a balcony in SC5 and having a cigarette, there was some person from finance there, and after chatting with him for a bit I asked why he was working so late; he was trying to figure out how to recode the finance system to add additional spaces to the finance DB to allow for the many billions they had in the bank. Apparently the fields were initially set too short to handle the numbers as large as they were dealing with...
Andy was an incredible person.
He visited Klein, who happened to follow him to the bathroom and saw blood in the pot after him. As a non practicing doctor, but avid observer, he quickly diagnosed him with cancer. Szilard then signed up for one of the highest doses of radiotherapy in humans. He survived both the therapy and the cancer and lobbied afterwards to set up EMBL (with Viki Weisskopf, patterned after CERN).
I remember dreaming about a 386 back in the day when I was a kid using a soviet 8086 clone..
It seems so incredible that these things were created by real people.
I always kind of thought that aliens were building these chips .. Still do sometimes.