Leaving Intel (brendangregg.com)
121 points by speckx 6 hours ago
> "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 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.
At big tech you have to quantify your value like this regularly, so yeah everyone keeps track of the minutiae.
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.
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.
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
"Count your meetings"
Wouldn't hurt to try!
So...oai or google?
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.
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".
ive been at my company 16 years and still haven't had an impact, so... yeah.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
A periodic reminder Intel is still in business.
Hats off to Brendan!
Intel losing great people at high speed. Not the first, not the last.
Congratulations. A fulfilling life.
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...
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.
> 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.
"death" can be pretty slow - IBM has $60B in revenue and 270K employees.
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.
Lindy[1] will make sure it stays around for a while.
Intel still sells a ton of silicon.
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
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...
> 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.. :)
dude loves the color salmon
Extra slash in the url
