What a jump, I'd be curious to hear first why anyone would prefer Intel above pretty much anything else, but also secondly how the actual experience difference between the two after working at both, must be a very strong contrast between them.
On her website it says she is working on GPU drivers there - I wouldn't be surprised if that's something she greatly enjoys and Intel gave her then opportunity to work on official, production shipping drivers instead of reverse engineered third party drivers.
Maybe she was given a huge signing bonus to avoid her working on making X86 irrelevant? Combined with perhaps some interesting project to work on for real.
I imagine there's also some challenging work that would be fun to dig into. Being the person who can clean up Intel's problems would be quite a reputation to have.
There’s a real limit on what level of problem one engineer can fix, regardless of how strong they are. Carmack at Meta is an example of this, but there are many. Woz couldn’t fix Apple’s issues, etc.
A company sufficiently scaled can largely only be fixed by the CEO, and often not even then.
I'm sure most would stay at valve if they could. The just do so much contract work, and I'm sure a stable job at intel is better pay, benefits and stability.
Would it shock you to hear that famous engineers with their own personal brand power have different opportunities and motivations than many/most engineers?
What a jump, I'd be curious to hear first why anyone would prefer Intel above pretty much anything else, but also secondly how the actual experience difference between the two after working at both, must be a very strong contrast between them.
On her website it says she is working on GPU drivers there - I wouldn't be surprised if that's something she greatly enjoys and Intel gave her then opportunity to work on official, production shipping drivers instead of reverse engineered third party drivers.
If I were Intel, this sounds like a great person to give an R&D skunkworks dream job.
Potential lottery ticket win, they are available for consulting internally anywhere that can add value, and they're not working for anyone else.
Maybe she was given a huge signing bonus to avoid her working on making X86 irrelevant? Combined with perhaps some interesting project to work on for real.
Personally I don't think ARM can make x86 irrelevant.
I believe low wattage SOCs can make traditional desktop hardware irrelevant (ish), but I think ARM is orthogonal to that.
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I imagine there's also some challenging work that would be fun to dig into. Being the person who can clean up Intel's problems would be quite a reputation to have.
There’s a real limit on what level of problem one engineer can fix, regardless of how strong they are. Carmack at Meta is an example of this, but there are many. Woz couldn’t fix Apple’s issues, etc.
A company sufficiently scaled can largely only be fixed by the CEO, and often not even then.
I'm sure most would stay at valve if they could. The just do so much contract work, and I'm sure a stable job at intel is better pay, benefits and stability.
Would it shock you to hear that many/most engineers don't pick an employer based on brand reputation?
Would it shock you to hear that famous engineers with their own personal brand power have different opportunities and motivations than many/most engineers?
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usually a combination of money/benefits/locale is the answer to this question
Intel has a reputation of producing relatively high quality drivers for Linux.
write up on that here: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-n.html