Intel Continues to Rehire Veterans: At Some Point They’ll Run Out
by Dr. Ian Cutress on July 7, 2021 4:13 AM EST
News on the wire today is that Intel has rehired 28-year veteran Shlomit Weiss into the position of Senior VP and Co-General Manager of Intel’s Design Engineering Group (DEG), a position recently vacated by Uri Frank who left to head up Google’s SoC development. As reported in Tom’s Hardware and confirmed in her own LinkedIn announcement, Weiss will be working at Intel’s Israel design center alongside Sunil Shenoy and is ‘committed to ensuring that the company continues to lead in developing chips’. Weiss is the latest in an ever-growing list of ‘re-hiring’ Intel veterans, which leads to the problem that at some point Intel will run out of ex-employees to rehire and instead nurture internal talent for those roles.
In her first 28-year stint at Intel, Weiss is reported to have lead the team that developed both Intel Sandy Bridge and Intel Skylake, arguably two of the company’s most important processor families over the last decade: Sandy Bridge reaffirmed Intel’s lead in the market with a new base microarchitecture and continues in its 6+th generation in Comet Lake today, while Skylake has been Intel’s most profitable microarchitecture ever. Weiss also received Intel’s Achievement Award, the company’s highest offer, but is not listed as an Intel Fellow, while CRN reports that Weiss also founded the Intel Israel Women Forum in 2014. Weiss left Intel in September 2017 to join Mellanox/NVIDIA, where she held the role of Senior VP Silicon Engineering and ran the company’s networking chip design group.
In her new role at Intel, Tom’s is reporting that Weiss will lead all of Intel’s consumer chip development and design, while the other Co-GM of Intel DEG Sunil Shenoy will lead the data center design initiatives.
If you’ve been following the news of Intel’s personnel of late, you might start to learn a pattern:
- Dec 20: Intel hires Masooma Bhaiwala (16-year AMD veteran)
- Jan 21: Intel rehires Glenn Hinton (35-year Intel veteran, Senior Fellow)
- Jan 27: Intel rehires Sunil Shenoy (33-year Intel veteran)
- Jan 27: Intel hires Guido Appenzeller (various)
- Feb 15: Intel rehires Pat Gelsinger (30-year Intel veteran)
- Mar 17: Intel rehires Sanjay Natarajan (22-year veteran)
- May 28: Intel hires Ali Ibrahim (13-year AMD veteran, Senior Fellow)
- June 7: Intel hires Hong Hao (13-year Samsung veteran)
- June 8: Intel rehires Stuart Pann (33-year Intel veteran)
- June 8: Intel rehires Bob Brennan (22-year Intel veteran)
- June 8: Intel hires Nick McKeown (27-year Stanford professor)
- June 8: Intel hires Greg Lavender (35-year Sun/Citi/VMWare)
- July 6: Intel rehires Shlomit Weiss (28-year Intel veteran)
Of these named hires (plenty of other people hired below the role of VP), seven are listed as ex-Intel employees being rehired into the company, mostly into engineering-focused positions. These ex-Intel engineers have a long line of accolades at the company, having worked on and built the fundamental technologies that power Intel today. The exact reasons why they left Intel in the first place are varied, with some peers are keen to cite brain drain during CEO Brian Krzanich’s tenure, however it would appear that the promise of working on fundamental next-generation hardware, along with popular CEO Pat Gelsinger, is enough of an allure to get them to return.
It should be noted however that number of engineers that Intel could rehire is limited – going after key personnel critical to Intel’s growth in the last few decades, despite their lists of successful products and accolades, can’t be the be-all and end-all of Intel’s next decade of growth. If we’re strictly adhering to typical retirement ages as well, a number of them will soon be at that level within the next ten years. Intel can’t keep rehiring veteran talent into key positions to get to the next phase in its product evolution – at some level it has to reignite the initial passion from within.
Intel’s key personnel are often home-grown, or what we call ‘lifers’, who spend 20+ years of the company typically straight out of university or college – every rehire on this list fits into this image, especially CEO Pat Gelsinger, and a number of contacts I have within the company are identical. However if Intel is having to rehire those who enabled former glory for the company, one has to wonder exactly what is going on such that talent already within the company isn’t stepping up. At some point these veterans will retire, and Intel will be at a crossroads. In a recent interview with former Intel SVP Jim Keller, he stated that (paraphrased) ‘building a chip design team at a company depends on volume – you hire in if you don’t have the right people, but if you have a team of 1000, then there are people there and it’s a case of finding the right ones’. In a company of 110000 employees, it seems odd that Intel feels it has to rehire to fill those key roles. Some might question if those rehires would have left in the first place if Intel’s brain drain had never occurred, but it poses an interesting question nonetheless.
Source: Tom’s Hardware, CRN
Image: LinkedIn
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vladx - Sunday, July 11, 2021 - link
Comparing China with Nazi Germany? Look at you, trying to act witty. Can you show me some of these Chinese propaganda films? Or are you just assuming this based on what Western mainstream media narrative says?Regardless, China has proven throughout history that it doesn't try to conquer or control the entire world so it's unlikely any supposed propaganda of theirs will spread worldwide.
GeoffreyA - Sunday, July 11, 2021 - link
I'll admit, I haven't seen any of these Chinese propaganda films, and was basing my view of it on the media, which says they're playing two a week. It was wrong of me to compare that with Triumph without watching them. But totalitarianism has a similar root, even if the fruits are different, and I'm understandably suspicious of a country that has treated the Uyghurs the way they've done.vladx - Sunday, July 11, 2021 - link
I don't consider China government as totalitarianism, there are 3 separate interest groups that are part of the Politburo which would be similar to classic parties. The fact that these groups can work together and compromise to pick only a single leader goes to show that it's not as centralized as people outside China think.I consider China to be experimenting on a hybrid system between communism and democracy which should not be outright disregarded. As for the Uighur situation, there's also no real proof at the moment and in fact some of those Uighur testimonials were proven to have ties to NSA agents who have infiltrated China.
GeoffreyA - Sunday, July 11, 2021 - link
I don't know much about China's government. But some reading this afternoon shows that they're not at the extreme end of the scale. Still, I suspect those "democratic" offerings are little more than words. Bottom line, the state is the boss, whether it's split into groups or not, and runs the show. That's how I see it. Also, I'm going to guess here that it's all tied down to the Party and not the leaders. The leaders can come and go---they don't matter---but the Party will always persist.mode_13h - Sunday, July 11, 2021 - link
> there are 3 separate interest groups that are part of the PolitburoExcept Xi purged key members, in his anti-corruption campaign. His new anti-corruption agency isn't even accountable to China's Supreme Court. He also "centralised his power and created working groups with himself at the head to subvert government bureaucracy." That's how he was able to change the change the Constitution to eliminate term limits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping
> it's not as centralized as people outside China think.
If the citizens have no vote, then it's already too centralized. There's no check on power.
> I consider China to be experimenting on a hybrid system between communism and democracy
How is it even remotely a hybrid? Even before Xi seized absolute control and made himself leader for life, it was not a democracy in any way.
And their empty promises and subsequent backsliding on promises for Hong Kong to have their own democratic form of self-governance just shows they have no interest in *any* sort of democracy.
> As for the Uighur situation, there's also no real proof at the moment
Okay, I think we're done here. Basically everyone except China & their closest allies is saying that China is committing genocide in Xinjiang. It's not just many testimonials, but also satellite photos, leaked government documents, and other evidence. If you're buying China's propaganda on this, then I think we have nothing left to discuss.
mode_13h - Sunday, July 11, 2021 - link
> Can you show me some of these Chinese propaganda films?China has explicit censorship of film, TV, and news media. They also *do* create pro-government propaganda, though I'm far from an expert on this subject.
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-china-uses-...
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/20/915060788/motherlan...
I'm sure this hole goes deeper than we probably want to dig. Just check out this Soviet-style anthem for China's Internet Censorship Agency:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbBKPqOh6DU
Which brings us into the era of social media: the modern form of propaganda. China has something called the 50 Cent Army, because they pay millions of people about $0.50 per day to troll social media platforms in various ways. Most of this is domestic, but there's no shortage of China's meddling in foreign social media.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
mode_13h - Sunday, July 11, 2021 - link
> All film is state propaganda. Some of it is just better-disguised.> Television is even more obvious.
I don't even know where you get this. The US government has no say in what goes into movies or TV, nor do they have any hand in funding the vast majority of it (there are some grants for mostly noncommercial art, but that's very tiny, by comparison with the overall entertainment industry).
You can argue against this or that cultural value, or the corrosive effect of commercialism on the arts, but it's definitely not propaganda in the sense that some government body is telling writers/directors/producers what to put in their films and shows.
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, July 13, 2021 - link
'The US government has no say in what goes into movies or TV'I don't know where you get that! It's patently, obviously, false.
GeoffreyA - Tuesday, July 13, 2021 - link
You mean the rating system?mode_13h - Tuesday, July 13, 2021 - link
> I don't know where you get that! It's patently, obviously, false.Citation needed.