Your boss was a wimp. He didn't like taking risks. Over the past 2 years I've saved over $200k at my current employer just by throwing convention to the winds and changing up vendors, software applications and so on. And that's just the savings anyone has bothered tracking there's tons more stuff I could list project after project. The latest one being pitching the PBX and going with Asterisk.
Has it been disruptive? Oh yeah. OOOO YEEAAAHHH Lots and lots of reassuring, handholding, and so on needed to guide these projects through. The secret is DO YOUR DAMN HOMEWORK to make them successful. But - fundamentally - in a healthy business organization - money talks, bullshit walks. Your story is why Tek is where it is today, it's why Intel is where it is today, and it's why Motorola is where it is today. They might still be alive - barely - but it's a cultural thing that comes from the CEO where people are rewarded for playing it safe and knocked for taking risks, and nobody gives a tinker's damn if you do something that saves money, and everyone is supposed to toe the line and buy into the CEO's vision even if it's obvious that vision is going to run the ship into the rocks. Intel has had SCORES of engineers who spoke out against Pat Gerslinger's "vision" and have been slapped down, or just fired because they "weren't team players" The current CEO at Intel is just desperately trying to stop the bleeding. Frankly, I think the only salvation now would be for Intel to cut a deal with TSMC - if they could. Hand over all their fabs to TSMC with the stipulation that TSMC makes as many CPU's as Intel needs and but can then use the fabs for whatever else they want to make. Ted -----Original Message----- From: Keith Lofstrom <kei...@keithl.com> Sent: Monday, July 28, 2025 3:06 PM To: Ted Mittelstaedt <t...@portlandia-it.com> Cc: 'Portland Linux/Unix Group' <plug@lists.pdxlinux.org> Subject: Re: [PLUG] Ghosted? (posted payscale) On Mon, Jul 28, 2025 at 07:53:35AM -0700, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > But today, there's a whole list of states that require disclosed pay scales by law. And trust me, ANY employer in any of those states who lists a job and does NOT do that - they WILL get reported - by hundreds of job seekers. And the state employment divisions just LOVE fining employers for this kind of stuff. 90% good idea, 10% bad idea. Agreed, most jobs are "cogs in the machine". Such jobs are quantifiable, and their worth and costs to employer and employee can calculated. Better jobs are defined collaboratively between "boss" and "underling", and evolve into teamwork and fluidly delegated responsibilities in both directions. It took half my life to figure this out. Decades ago at Tektronix, my Motorola-trained manager was preparing his annual budget for his manager. One of the tasks on his list for the team was to prepare a test program and a probe card and a mask pattern for the new "depletion gate NMOS process". The task he delegated to me was to figure out how many weeks and tens of thousands of dollars that design time and purchases this would take. I came back the next day with "done" and "zero dollars". Not the answer he (or his bosses) were expecting. Looking at the problem, I quickly realized that the probe card for the existing CMOS process was perfectly usable for a new NMOS proces. Juggling the process layers for the CMOS test pattern yielded a usable NMOS pattern (adding a few details for the production workers to tell them apart). Changing a few lines of code in the CMOS test program created a new program that could test both NMOS and CMOS circuits, and route results to the appropriate production database. Indeed, the production workers wouldn't need to tell the test station software which process it was measuring and which database to add it to; the workers would follow the very same steps for either process, and the program would tell them "CMOS or NMOS" and route the data to the correct database. An opportunity to dispel confusion rather than create it. However ... my manager (and his manager) was not expecting a rapid "zero cost" solution to the problem. As a newbie engineer, I did not anticipate how much trouble this would cause as it rippled through the rigid management structure. A mal-adaptive structure that was brilliantly fluid when Jack Murdock and Howard Vollum created and grew Tektronix, but suffered from rigor mortis after both Jack and Howard died. I observe similar rigor mortis in 2025 Intel, now that Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce and Andy Grove are all dead. Still many excellent minds working there, but not allowed to tinker with a formerly-winning formula. Constrained by HR and federal employment regulations to select new hires and replacement management using standard measures of worth (mediocrity), rather than unhinged mavericks who will shatter and rebuild a past-focused company. Hell, some of those deviants might cause lawsuits, while they create vast new opportunity for employees, stockholders, customers, and the entire world. Meanwhile, I read about crazy new products that just might blow mosfets and von Neumann architectures out of the water: https://spectrum.ieee.org/negative-capacitance-schottky-limit https://spectrum.ieee.org/efficient-computer-dataflow-architecture 90% chance these two examples will fail, as most new ideas do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law - Luckily, we have more thousands of new ideas in 2025 than any past year. Companies and nations willing to take the risks to ride these waves may wipe out - or they might be the next Intel. Or even the "next" United States, where OUR wretched huddled masses, yearning to breath free, will escape TO, FROM our teeming shores. "Whenever I run into a problem I can't solve, I always make it bigger" - attributed to Dwight Eisenhower. H.R. and "safe hiring" is not the best way, but is better than the blind bigotry that plagues many companies. How do we enable "best", without enabling occasional "worst?" Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
