Posts tagged intel
Intel-speak during out-of-office hours
Aug 8th
There is no denying that the corporate work culture has a big impact on our off-office life. For example, if you are a SW development manager by profession, you automatically tend to map many of the things learnt in the office on to normal house activities – ‘Lets put a detailed requirements list for the the new entertainment unit we are going to buy this weekend”, “Hmm…this seems too risky. We need to think of the mitigation plans now before going on with this!”. If your partner is not from IT background, God help you! 
How many times have we checked ourselves after looking at the blank / quizzical stares from others?! It has happened more than once in my case! Today, during lunch time, I decided to watch out for Intel lingo that people use. Kinda funny to notice so many of the corporate terms becoming a part of our day-to-day vocabulary.
A story of WMDs and patents
May 10th
It has been a pretty tight week so far. Luckily my hotel is closer to my office, at least I don’t have to worry about getting lost. Talking about getting lost, people here use GPS heavily. The cab driver, when I came from the airport to the hotel, didn’t know where Holiday Inn was in Hillsboro. He asked me the address, entered that in to his Nuvi..bingo…he took the shortest possible route to my hotel. Pretty impressive!
Unfortunately, Hertz guys didn’t give me a GPS unit. Instead, they gave me 836 WMDs. Don’t believe me? Look at the picture of my car.
I am planning to make a fortune selling these to North Korea. 
BTW, this is the route I take daily to my office. It looks far, but is actually only ~3 miles.
Since the group I have come here to meet/work with is one of those *pure* Research groups in Intel, every body here holds on an average 15 patents. Kinda overwhelming! But, it is quite fun to see all those great guys I have only heard of. Knut Grimsrud, the person sitting in my opposite cube is the director of Intel Storage Architecture group — he looks so laid back and cool that you won’t believe he holds such a high and important position! He has written one of the best sellers in Amazon on SATA. He is also one of the Intel fellows, which is a very high position in Intel’s technical ladder. In Intel, if you want to grow technically, you become a Principle Engineer, a Sr. PE, a Fellow and then a senior Fellow in that order. Pretty impressive accomplishment, but still I saw Knut to be a down-to-earth guy; Couldn’t stop thinking about some of the so-called TLs in Intel India.
Yahoo vs Google: why Yahoo lags behind?
Mar 7th
You wanna know why Yahoo lags behind Google? Look at the image below that I took from Yahoo’s careers site today (WW10.4). It shows all open reqs, sorted by date (descending).
As you probably noticed (follow the arrows please! 
), the sort hasn’t happened properly. How did the coder miss this? No unit tests funda in Yahoo engineering?? How did the QA team allow this page to go online?
Conan O’Brien visits Intel head quarters in Santa Clara
May 14th
This is a funny video of Conan O’Brien visiting Intel HQ at Santa Clara. I have never been to SC, but I can relate to what he says very well. In fact, the saying inside Intel is “If you have seen one, you have seen them all!”, this is very true for the buildings Intel builds. In Bangalore, Intel has a building at Outer ring road, which looks more or less similar to the SC building shown in the video, though I’d say not as lifeless and dull! The one at Airport road (where I am currently sitting) is not that bad, actually.
Performance appraisals – Should they be so complex?
Mar 21st
We went through the performance appraisal phase in my company last quarter. As we had come to expect, it was one of the stressful periods, so much that we literally threw a party when 360degree feedbacks were prepared and sent (ok, am just kidding. But, you get the point!). We call this process FOCAL; when I joined 3 years back, I asked one of the managers why the perfomance appraisal was called FOCAL. My luck, that manager was forced to quit in our last round of “leaning”/”increasing efficiency” process, before he got a chance to reply me
FOCAL is more of a ritual for us; focal FAQs and training mails get sent to everyone by November of every year. The newbies are forced to take an half-a-day instructor-led course. Then one fine day, we start getting lots of requests for feedbacks on our peers and stakeholders, we spend 60-70% on filling up all these. Except a few, I have seen most of my colleagues just copy/pasting the content from one feedback to another person’s feedback. Bad, I know, but if you look from their perspective, who would want to be original in their 24th feedback form? After this the managers come in to the focus, they need to collate all the feedbacks on a person, along with that person’s own (check this out for some good points on writing one’s own strenghts/weaknesses) in to one report.The “ritual book” states that the managers need to present this to other peers, convincing everyone that the person under scrutiny deserves something better or gets screwed. Fair enough, right? Wrong! As far as I’veseen, people tend to take shortcuts everywhere, and as Kelvin claimed “there is always thins thing called POLITICS“. The main problem, at least the employess are stating is that nothing is transparent! Most of the times they don’t understand why they got what they got.
The period after focal report delivery is again a “fun” filled phase. Disgruntled employees leave, promoted / well-compensated ones put in more time/effort, new people are brought in and the cycle starts afresh! Does this process need to be replaced? I don’t think so. Does this need to be made fool proof? Oh yeah! Should intel get away with this complex process for something simple, like Microsoft? May be a good idea!!
I know there are couple of other pages like this and this, but at least I don’t believe things are so bad in India.
