> "I also supported cloud computing, participating in 110 customer meetings, and created a company-wide strategy to win back the cloud with 33 specific recommendations, in collaboration with others across 6 organizations."
Man people keep count of this stuff?! Maybe I should too, it does make flexing easier.
I guess they don’t know how or don’t bother to evaluate people on what they actually contribute? Just number of meetings attended, number of tickets closed?
Joe implemented feature A. Sandra implemented feature B. Raj implemented C. All launched in July. Since then metric X is up 20%. Who gets credit, and what does that credit really mean?
Now say all 3 did that in 3 different products. One produced a 200% improvement in an internal product, one a 40% improvement in a product with thousands of users, one a 1% improvement in a product with a billion users? Compare *that*.
Keeping track of actual value would require actually rewarding people proportionally; all jobs ever only really care about how often you're on time or your meeting attendance record.
Rewarding people proportionally is a macro-level unsolved problem. Kropotkin wrote it about it and his solution was to throw his hands in the air and say fuck it, labor value is impossible to accurately evaluate, and thus he invented anarchist communism.
Just look at all the weird quirks our world does to labor value: the same exact job in two different locations for a global employer (say, Google), selling to a global market, pays differently depending on "local labor market prices." In 2025 for engineering what on earth is a "local labor market?" An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work. Luxury goods and electronics cost the same in both places. Buying property is only slightly cheaper in Taipei vs sf (yes really), vehicles cost more in Taiwan. Food and healthcare is cheaper in Taiwan, and that alone I guess means the Taiwanese engineer is worth 1/8th the SF engineer, to make sure the sf engineer can afford 16$ burritos?
Many other quirks. You point out another one: labor often isn't rewarded based on real value to a company, for many reasons but one of which is that managers often don't understand the job of the people they're managing and so apply management relevant KPIs to disciplines where those KPIs don't make any sense. Engineering, for example, doesn't correlate actual value add to the company via meetings attended or customers met, but that won't stop management from applying those KPIs and thinking it does!
I'm torn between thinking we keep things this way out of ignorance vs we keep it this way maliciously so the management class (which sets the rates) doesn't get written out of labor agreements altogether because they're often useless vs if we didn't keep up this charade, capitalism would just collapse entirely.
Agreed. There's the additional point that I think many people don't appreciate, which is that those managers and many people lower down in the org chart merely exist because somebody else needs to be responsible for a system or a liability regardless of whether they do anything measurably profitable, and aren't necessarily incentivized to do anything more productively; they're just there to take care of it or be blamed if it's not, and have a low ceiling for what that job can possibly be worth with no measurable way to argue for more, and so in the case of managers, try to invent clout-generators at any cost and with no connection to how the assignees might accomplish it.
> An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work.
Suppose you have a thousand engineers and those thousand engineers generate ten billion dollars in annual profit. How much do they each get paid? They amount they're worth? Nope, the amount they'll accept.
If you live in the US and you have the wherewithal to be an engineer then you could also have been a doctor or a lawyer or some other high paying occupation. And many of those can't be fully remote because they have to see domestic patients or interact in person with local courts or clients. Which means that if you want someone in the US to be your engineer, you need to pay them an amount that makes them want to do that instead of choosing one of those other occupations. Whereas the one in Taiwan doesn't have the option to become a doctor in San Francisco and is therefore willing to accept less money.
So why don't companies just hire exclusively the people in Taiwan? There are all the usual reasons (time zones, language barriers, etc.), but a big one is that they need a thousand engineers. So they and their competitors hire every qualified engineer in Taiwan until Taiwanese engineers reach full employment, at which point the companies still don't have all the engineers they want. And when the average engineer is making the company ten million dollars, paying San Francisco salaries is better than not having enough talent.
So then why doesn't every smart person in Taiwan become an engineer? Because the companies hiring engineers there are only paying Taiwanese wages, and then they're not any better off to do that than to become a doctor or a lawyer in Taiwan. And if they would pay higher wages there, the local economy would have to start paying local doctors and engineers more to keep them all from becoming engineers, and then you would only get a modest increase in the number of engineers for a significant increase in compensation. Which is still what happens, but only slowly over time, until the wages in Taiwan ultimately increase enough to no longer be a competitive advantage. And companies don't want to make that happen faster because then they'd have to pay higher salaries in Taiwan.
> An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work.
An underappreciated difference is that it's hard to schedule meetings between people in SF and Taiwan, because of time zones.
I know some of them do this, but ours doesn't. There is a once yearly self-review, and as far as I can tell it has literally no impact on your actual performance review and compensation, which are basically entirely up to your manager's observations of you.
So it is important to keep your manager informally up to date on what you're doing, at least during the weeks they're thinking about performance.
If you look at many of his recent blog entries, it is clear he has felt the need to quantify his impact to prove he isn’t less effective as a remote employee in Australia working for a company in the US.
I mean maybe. We often have weekly customer meetings. One of my programs has 2 customers, we meet with both weekly. So do I put idk 200+ customer meetings? That seems like a weird metric because it's like "compiled code 400 times." I've seen resumes that have the same vibe. We did not hire them. Sometimes it's very telling what people think are accomplishments.
The fact that they were busy keeping count during those 110 occasions and for every other activity clearly tells that they nothing better to do. You have to be loud about such numbers when you have very little meaningful work to show for.
A "goodbye" post after only 3.5 years. Hard to relate.
In my world it's hard to imagine an impact after that short of a time. And in fact, reading the list of accomplishments ("interviewed by the Wall Street Journal") makes it clear it's a good PR piece.
I'm perfectly willing to believe he's fabulous, but this didn't move the needle for me.
Clicking through his links to various posts about e.g. stack pointers or flame graphs, my takeaway is he's an outlier in productivity, and got a lot done in 3.5 years at a monstrously large organization.
I'm pretty envious of his capabilities, in 3.5 years I can ship a couple webapps, I would never personally get JVM compilation flags added.
For other people, they're going to be thinking "some other company is going to get one of the most effective and impactful performance engineers on the planet".
Dude shipped flamegraphs (which he also created in 2011) for cloud GPU loads and persuaded internal stakeholders to release the code as open source.
The "interviewed by the WSJ" line is for managers. Reading between the lines, I'd say he did really well and, if he didn't do better, it's because the organisation didn't let him.
> The "interviewed by the WSJ" line is for managers.
It’s a green flag for hiring managers for sure. Even a lot of valued employees wouldn’t be allowed to represent a big company to the WSJ for various reasons, even with a PR person sitting next to them.
> if he didn't do better, it's because the organisation didn't let him.
The last few sentences to me read like he knows for sure that the organisation is actively working against what he sees as his important goals. Carefully worded (and likely personal lawyer approved) to avoid burning the bridges as he mic-drops and deftly avoids having the door hit him in the arse as he struts out.
I felt like he avoided saying anything negative about Intel just in case it would be taken that way. Intel doesn’t have the best reputation so we are all interpolating a much more negative message than he actually said.
Good at self-promotion == just good in most cases for most practical purposes whether it's factual or not, arguably. His books seem substantial though, I don't know many people who've read or written 800 pages on system performance
If you've been there 16 years, I'm sure you employer feels your impact has been worth the investment. Are you really saying that you don't feel you have made the impact you would have liked to make? Do you feel under-utilized?
He doesn’t mention it in this post, but in another post he talked about the toll of needing to frequently attend meetings in the middle of the night in his time zone.
Whatever his reasons for leaving, I hope that he finds a better balance in his new role.
This was the takeaway I had taking to a colleague about his time at Intel - they're a genuinely global company with engineering teams in practically all time zones who are still expected to collaborate with each other. No matter what time of day the meeting was scheduled for, it was the middle of the night for somebody, and no, just working on written docs async for everything didn't cut it, and they couldn't just fly people out all the time. So that's apparently just part of what it means to take a job at Intel these days.
Masterclass in turning a goodbye email into a hire me after my next gig ends. I’m not being sarcastic, this is a great example of highlighting the value they added.
If my back of the envelope math is right, in the last 6 months he’s been attending more meetings at possibly odd hours; he lives in Australia and Intel is based in the USA.
Two different numbers, no? The resignation posts specifies 110 customer meetings, the blog post you linked to about meetings during odd hours does not.
Yeah, different numbers, 110 customer meetings, the other post tracked 1-6am meetings. I'm glad I tracked 1-6am meetings since I've shared that number when people think that remote workers aren't making an effort.
I really have no idea how IBM is still in business, or the other big toxic techs like Oracle and Salesforce. Just goes to show I don’t know as much about the industry as I think.
They bought Red Hat, which has OpenShift and all their other "DIY Cloud" bits. This stuff is popular in government or old businesses that may have been slow to (or unable to for regulatory reasons) jump to AWS/GCP etc.
To say nothing of the banks and others still using the IBM big iron.
The American hyper scalers are not necessarily the place to be. Modern can mean Non-hyper scalar as well. Can this sentiment just die please? Great that its working out for you and you replaced good sysadmins with aws admins, but it should not be the default strategy perse.
I mean I understand if someone like Keller writes such posts but some dude claiming to have hosted conference events and some kind of process flame graph which could have been done by anyone…
This is true economically but in reality if you have much larger cost savings than that for sale then these companies mostly say "we would be happy to buy that for $0 while we pay you a million a year to move to the united states"
His bio says he was an Intel Fellow, which is like a VP-level individual role, and yes that's what I expected too… but apparently not? These are kinda low.
Id expect his comp even before Intel to be way above that (he came from Netflix), perhaps levels info is not entirely correct for Intel or doesn’t apply to exceptional hires, fellow level compensation at FAANG seems to be more accurate there though
Yeah, behind datasette it looks like there's C64 C parked, and above is a laser 300 (which makes sense if guy is australian) and we can also see 1541-ii behind that, on the top.
Right, laser 300 was called the VZ300 here. I'm out of desk space so I had to put the VZ300 on a stand above my C64C. Maybe AI can finally help me code some C64 and VZ games. :-)
If only! It's kind of a blessing and a curse for us who still code for c64 (demo scene). It looks like llm may help you, but it's usually gibberish 6502 asm. I've seen similar with z80 but on spectrum.
> "I also supported cloud computing, participating in 110 customer meetings, and created a company-wide strategy to win back the cloud with 33 specific recommendations, in collaboration with others across 6 organizations."
Man people keep count of this stuff?! Maybe I should too, it does make flexing easier.
I like to measure things. In real life and on computers. But I also have a couple of work reasons for it:
As a remote worker, I'm under extra pressure to prove that remoteness works.
As a senior employee, I'm also under pressure to regularly report where my time is spent.
Yeah, it's how everywhere is measured. But I like to remember Joel Spolsky's takes on measuring everything, including his famous book and blog:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/09/the-econ-101-manag...
It's your personal blog though. But again nothing wrong with turning that into a form of LinkedIn post
> I'm under extra pressure to prove that remoteness works.
Did keeping track and reporting that number help prove this?
At big tech you have to quantify your value like this regularly, so yeah everyone keeps track of the minutiae.
Hehe, no wonder big tech doesn't get anything done.
I guess they don’t know how or don’t bother to evaluate people on what they actually contribute? Just number of meetings attended, number of tickets closed?
What does "actually contributed" mean?
Joe implemented feature A. Sandra implemented feature B. Raj implemented C. All launched in July. Since then metric X is up 20%. Who gets credit, and what does that credit really mean?
Now say all 3 did that in 3 different products. One produced a 200% improvement in an internal product, one a 40% improvement in a product with thousands of users, one a 1% improvement in a product with a billion users? Compare *that*.
Managers can be lazy just like anyone.
Keeping track of actual value would require actually rewarding people proportionally; all jobs ever only really care about how often you're on time or your meeting attendance record.
Rewarding people proportionally is a macro-level unsolved problem. Kropotkin wrote it about it and his solution was to throw his hands in the air and say fuck it, labor value is impossible to accurately evaluate, and thus he invented anarchist communism.
Just look at all the weird quirks our world does to labor value: the same exact job in two different locations for a global employer (say, Google), selling to a global market, pays differently depending on "local labor market prices." In 2025 for engineering what on earth is a "local labor market?" An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work. Luxury goods and electronics cost the same in both places. Buying property is only slightly cheaper in Taipei vs sf (yes really), vehicles cost more in Taiwan. Food and healthcare is cheaper in Taiwan, and that alone I guess means the Taiwanese engineer is worth 1/8th the SF engineer, to make sure the sf engineer can afford 16$ burritos?
Many other quirks. You point out another one: labor often isn't rewarded based on real value to a company, for many reasons but one of which is that managers often don't understand the job of the people they're managing and so apply management relevant KPIs to disciplines where those KPIs don't make any sense. Engineering, for example, doesn't correlate actual value add to the company via meetings attended or customers met, but that won't stop management from applying those KPIs and thinking it does!
I'm torn between thinking we keep things this way out of ignorance vs we keep it this way maliciously so the management class (which sets the rates) doesn't get written out of labor agreements altogether because they're often useless vs if we didn't keep up this charade, capitalism would just collapse entirely.
Agreed. There's the additional point that I think many people don't appreciate, which is that those managers and many people lower down in the org chart merely exist because somebody else needs to be responsible for a system or a liability regardless of whether they do anything measurably profitable, and aren't necessarily incentivized to do anything more productively; they're just there to take care of it or be blamed if it's not, and have a low ceiling for what that job can possibly be worth with no measurable way to argue for more, and so in the case of managers, try to invent clout-generators at any cost and with no connection to how the assignees might accomplish it.
> An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work.
Suppose you have a thousand engineers and those thousand engineers generate ten billion dollars in annual profit. How much do they each get paid? They amount they're worth? Nope, the amount they'll accept.
If you live in the US and you have the wherewithal to be an engineer then you could also have been a doctor or a lawyer or some other high paying occupation. And many of those can't be fully remote because they have to see domestic patients or interact in person with local courts or clients. Which means that if you want someone in the US to be your engineer, you need to pay them an amount that makes them want to do that instead of choosing one of those other occupations. Whereas the one in Taiwan doesn't have the option to become a doctor in San Francisco and is therefore willing to accept less money.
So why don't companies just hire exclusively the people in Taiwan? There are all the usual reasons (time zones, language barriers, etc.), but a big one is that they need a thousand engineers. So they and their competitors hire every qualified engineer in Taiwan until Taiwanese engineers reach full employment, at which point the companies still don't have all the engineers they want. And when the average engineer is making the company ten million dollars, paying San Francisco salaries is better than not having enough talent.
So then why doesn't every smart person in Taiwan become an engineer? Because the companies hiring engineers there are only paying Taiwanese wages, and then they're not any better off to do that than to become a doctor or a lawyer in Taiwan. And if they would pay higher wages there, the local economy would have to start paying local doctors and engineers more to keep them all from becoming engineers, and then you would only get a modest increase in the number of engineers for a significant increase in compensation. Which is still what happens, but only slowly over time, until the wages in Taiwan ultimately increase enough to no longer be a competitive advantage. And companies don't want to make that happen faster because then they'd have to pay higher salaries in Taiwan.
How much you are paid is based on your power over the organization, which is why useless senior executives are paid far more than everyone else.
> An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work.
An underappreciated difference is that it's hard to schedule meetings between people in SF and Taiwan, because of time zones.
I’ve been working in FAANG for some years in a senior position. Never had to track or speak to things like this lol.
I know some of them do this, but ours doesn't. There is a once yearly self-review, and as far as I can tell it has literally no impact on your actual performance review and compensation, which are basically entirely up to your manager's observations of you.
So it is important to keep your manager informally up to date on what you're doing, at least during the weeks they're thinking about performance.
If you look at many of his recent blog entries, it is clear he has felt the need to quantify his impact to prove he isn’t less effective as a remote employee in Australia working for a company in the US.
I'm surprised someone with his reputation would need to do this.
Use gcalcli to search for meetings with customer invited. That's it! Also, for an engineer that isn't in sales, 110 customer meetings is A LOT.
... is it? I had 14 meetings with externals this week only lol
A lot of people consider score keeping like this to be more important than the job itself.
I can't even say that they are wrong.
Of course, always take notes, they will help when doing escalations, or justify oneself in review meetings.
Parse your calendar export (.ics) file and count events of a certain name and voila?
Isn't that show-off? I mean you have achieved is good but feels like bragging about it ! Just a thought
I mean maybe. We often have weekly customer meetings. One of my programs has 2 customers, we meet with both weekly. So do I put idk 200+ customer meetings? That seems like a weird metric because it's like "compiled code 400 times." I've seen resumes that have the same vibe. We did not hire them. Sometimes it's very telling what people think are accomplishments.
All startups in due course turn into Byzantine labyrinths of bureaucracy. Only the record keepers survive.
"Count your meetings"
Wouldn't hurt to try!
The fact that they were busy keeping count during those 110 occasions and for every other activity clearly tells that they nothing better to do. You have to be loud about such numbers when you have very little meaningful work to show for.
A "goodbye" post after only 3.5 years. Hard to relate.
In my world it's hard to imagine an impact after that short of a time. And in fact, reading the list of accomplishments ("interviewed by the Wall Street Journal") makes it clear it's a good PR piece.
I'm perfectly willing to believe he's fabulous, but this didn't move the needle for me.
Clicking through his links to various posts about e.g. stack pointers or flame graphs, my takeaway is he's an outlier in productivity, and got a lot done in 3.5 years at a monstrously large organization.
I'm pretty envious of his capabilities, in 3.5 years I can ship a couple webapps, I would never personally get JVM compilation flags added.
Brendan Gregg is somewhat of a systems engineering legend and contributed more to the field than most people could dream of.
Is his post self promotion? Yeah, probably.
Does it matter and do the top 3 comments on HN be salty about that? Probably not that useful.
Conversely, I made HotSpot commits as an intern, but I never shipped a web app.
It didn't move the needle for you.
For other people, they're going to be thinking "some other company is going to get one of the most effective and impactful performance engineers on the planet".
Yeah, I understand the responses, but this guy legit has a great track record.
And if you read between the lines (especially the last few), it seems like he had problems pushing certain initiatives of his forward within Intel.
Dude shipped flamegraphs (which he also created in 2011) for cloud GPU loads and persuaded internal stakeholders to release the code as open source.
The "interviewed by the WSJ" line is for managers. Reading between the lines, I'd say he did really well and, if he didn't do better, it's because the organisation didn't let him.
> The "interviewed by the WSJ" line is for managers.
It’s a green flag for hiring managers for sure. Even a lot of valued employees wouldn’t be allowed to represent a big company to the WSJ for various reasons, even with a PR person sitting next to them.
> if he didn't do better, it's because the organisation didn't let him.
The last few sentences to me read like he knows for sure that the organisation is actively working against what he sees as his important goals. Carefully worded (and likely personal lawyer approved) to avoid burning the bridges as he mic-drops and deftly avoids having the door hit him in the arse as he struts out.
I felt like he avoided saying anything negative about Intel just in case it would be taken that way. Intel doesn’t have the best reputation so we are all interpolating a much more negative message than he actually said.
I can’t tell if he is just good at self promotion or he is just good. But that’s always the case at bigcorp.
Good at self-promotion == just good in most cases for most practical purposes whether it's factual or not, arguably. His books seem substantial though, I don't know many people who've read or written 800 pages on system performance
ive been at my company 16 years and still haven't had an impact, so... yeah.
If you've been there 16 years, I'm sure you employer feels your impact has been worth the investment. Are you really saying that you don't feel you have made the impact you would have liked to make? Do you feel under-utilized?
You can work your entire career and have "no impact" depending on how you define it.
A factory worker may be one of the best assembling doodads, but have no real impact on the job over their career, for example.
That is because these days what used to be high impact is now table stakes.
that is some brutal self-honesty right there
He doesn’t mention it in this post, but in another post he talked about the toll of needing to frequently attend meetings in the middle of the night in his time zone.
Whatever his reasons for leaving, I hope that he finds a better balance in his new role.
This was the takeaway I had taking to a colleague about his time at Intel - they're a genuinely global company with engineering teams in practically all time zones who are still expected to collaborate with each other. No matter what time of day the meeting was scheduled for, it was the middle of the night for somebody, and no, just working on written docs async for everything didn't cut it, and they couldn't just fly people out all the time. So that's apparently just part of what it means to take a job at Intel these days.
Wow is it me or is the self promotion strong in this one.
Does he need it though? His name is literally a brand in many tech circles and very good brand at that
Always valuable to announce your availability and celebrate recent successes.
And how did I contradict that? My point was that he is not looking for vanity
You: does he need it? He’s famous!
Me: it’s always valuable!
That’s it.
It's complete self promotion. Very likely that's what they have been during their 3.5 years there and the company had enough of it.
That is a regular self-review. Companies make their employees do that.
In this case Intel needs him more than the other way around, as far as I know. I do know people keep asking me if they can see flamegraphs of things.
I see some mean comments. I suppose maybe people doesn't know Brendan Gregg's work, this guy reserve some respect.
Masterclass in turning a goodbye email into a hire me after my next gig ends. I’m not being sarcastic, this is a great example of highlighting the value they added.
Intel losing great people at high speed. Not the first, not the last.
If my back of the envelope math is right, in the last 6 months he’s been attending more meetings at possibly odd hours; he lives in Australia and Intel is based in the USA.
See https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2025-05-22/3-years-of-extr...
77 meetings then, but 110 meetings in his resignation blog post…
Two different numbers, no? The resignation posts specifies 110 customer meetings, the blog post you linked to about meetings during odd hours does not.
Yeah, different numbers, 110 customer meetings, the other post tracked 1-6am meetings. I'm glad I tracked 1-6am meetings since I've shared that number when people think that remote workers aren't making an effort.
A periodic reminder Intel is still in business.
Hats off to Brendan!
[flagged]
Leaving intel? That’s one case where an employee won’t get chastised for
I’m wonder how much longer Intel will be around. It seems to be dying a slow death like Kodak or IBM at this point.
"death" can be pretty slow - IBM has $60B in revenue and 270K employees.
I really have no idea how IBM is still in business, or the other big toxic techs like Oracle and Salesforce. Just goes to show I don’t know as much about the industry as I think.
They bought Red Hat, which has OpenShift and all their other "DIY Cloud" bits. This stuff is popular in government or old businesses that may have been slow to (or unable to for regulatory reasons) jump to AWS/GCP etc.
To say nothing of the banks and others still using the IBM big iron.
The American hyper scalers are not necessarily the place to be. Modern can mean Non-hyper scalar as well. Can this sentiment just die please? Great that its working out for you and you replaced good sysadmins with aws admins, but it should not be the default strategy perse.
they’ve been partnering with nvidia to build large ML training clusters iirc last time i was in their building at a meetup a few weeks ago
And their financial/stock performance has been pretty good the past couple of years.
When Shakespeare wrote "cowards die many times before their deaths", he had Intel in mind.
> I’m wonder how much longer Intel will be around.
The government took an ownership stake in the company. Nvidia invested a few billion in the company. It's not going anywhere.
Lindy[1] will make sure it stays around for a while.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
Intel still sells a ton of silicon.
Congratulations. A fulfilling life.
So...oai or google?
Yahoo. They're due for a comeback
Hey, maybe he has morals.
I mean I understand if someone like Keller writes such posts but some dude claiming to have hosted conference events and some kind of process flame graph which could have been done by anyone…
I'm guessing he'll land at one of the big frontier model companies. I'm surprised he stayed at Intel as long as he did, they are dying fast.
And it seems there's only one of them that's gonna have any new hardware that needs GPU flamegraphs to optimise...
AMD, Apple, or NVIDIA?
Terrible news from Intel, this guy seems like the best performance engineer on the planet
Where do you think he's going next? OpenAI? Google? Just saving 1% on inference could probably justify his salary 100fold
This is true economically but in reality if you have much larger cost savings than that for sale then these companies mostly say "we would be happy to buy that for $0 while we pay you a million a year to move to the united states"
Not being sarcastic here, a million a year is not a target compensation for engineer like him, 5-7 is probably where it starts and goes to the stars
His bio says he was an Intel Fellow, which is like a VP-level individual role, and yes that's what I expected too… but apparently not? These are kinda low.
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/intel/salaries/software-eng...
Id expect his comp even before Intel to be way above that (he came from Netflix), perhaps levels info is not entirely correct for Intel or doesn’t apply to exceptional hires, fellow level compensation at FAANG seems to be more accurate there though
Definitely feels like someplace with GPUs that will let him work remotely.
In the photo of him on his last day [0], there's a cassette deck on his desk.
That could be something mundane, but I'd like to believe something crazy happens if you yell at it [1]...
[0] https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/images/2025/brendanoffice2...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
> cassette deck on his desk
Greybeard reporting for duty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette
Looks like the C64 is behind it (underneath a..?) and there’s a small corner of 5.25” diskette station further back.
Probably not his daily drivers.. :)
Yeah, behind datasette it looks like there's C64 C parked, and above is a laser 300 (which makes sense if guy is australian) and we can also see 1541-ii behind that, on the top.
Right, laser 300 was called the VZ300 here. I'm out of desk space so I had to put the VZ300 on a stand above my C64C. Maybe AI can finally help me code some C64 and VZ games. :-)
If only! It's kind of a blessing and a curse for us who still code for c64 (demo scene). It looks like llm may help you, but it's usually gibberish 6502 asm. I've seen similar with z80 but on spectrum.
A.B.K. Always Be Knolling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-CTkbHnpNQ
Extra slash in the url
You made me look 'blog//2025-12-05/leaving-intel.html'
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[dead]
dude loves the color salmon