> "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.
brendangregg 10 hours ago [-]
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.
raw_anon_1111 2 hours ago [-]
As a senior employee. This is just the opposite of what I would expect.
As a senior employee first at a startup from 2018-2020 and then as a staff engineer at a consulting company for the last year (with a 4 year at BigTech detour between), no one really micromanages me.
Even at the consulting company, when I am on a project, I just put 40 hours in Salesforce with the project I’m assigned to - with no details - or put “bench” - again with no details.
Why would my company care? The customer is happy, the project is managed through Jira (where I as the lead create the tasks) and my company gets paid when the project is done.
I am sure I ask for feedback after every project in our peer review system.
izacus 16 minutes ago [-]
Note how the author doesn't work for tiny little companies like you.
raw_anon_1111 4 minutes ago [-]
You did see the part about the four year stint at BigTech in between? Unless you think the second largest employee in the US is a “small little company”.
I also added an HN submission that made the front page a couple of days ago by a staff engineer at Google, did you notice the difference.
Finally, this isn’t r/cscareerquestions where you have a bunch of 22 year olds needing to prove themselves by mentioning “they work for a FAANG” (been there done that. Got the t-shirt. Didn’t like it)
lokar 6 minutes ago [-]
As a principal at big tech I has essentially full autonomy to do what I thought was highest value with very little need to report anything.
zx8080 8 hours ago [-]
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:
Contrary to the usual opinion on HN, this provides a good reason to do an MBA!
You should learn enough economics that if you are even a bit insightful you will avoid Econ 101 thinking, you will learn about things like intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and a lot of other things relevant to management.
kmarc 3 hours ago [-]
Damned is this industry, when even _you_ say you have to show that "remoteness works".
I also measure meetings (counts, lengths, and mostly meeting minutes/outine jotted down by myself) and keep track of other metrics, exactly for this reason. However, I also don't happen to have written best selling books and stuff, so I really must do this, and you really shouldn't have to :-)
pm90 58 minutes ago [-]
I have more respect for him because he chose to do this. It’s probably clear that he doesn’t have to, at all. But he’s choosing not to rely on his (somewhat) tech celebrity status and deliver on measurable outcomes.
ghaff 5 minutes ago [-]
Not that I've ever been especially religious about it but it's probably a good thing to keep track of activities, especially those that directly affect customers. It's pretty easy/low-effort and is useful to be able to pull out.
hodgesrm 5 hours ago [-]
We like that you like to measure things. That's why I bought your book.
boringg 2 hours ago [-]
Do you have a particularly easy way to track or are you kind of doing the same thing as consultant and logging your dailies? Always drove me a bit crazy having to do that admin piece every day.
rjzzleep 4 hours ago [-]
If only I had known that in the past, I even once received the completely wrong advice to "not stand out, since your work will speak for itself and you will get recognition".
pas 3 hours ago [-]
It depends on the company culture.
(Fancy US tech companies like to be very selective, have a competitive mindset, hire "the best" according to their filters, and then want people to show how amazing they are, uu, so much impact, woah... and in effect people need to constantly manage upwards.
While in many other companies, or "orgs", having a good team cohesion is more important. To blend in a bit, get accepted even if it means foregoing some ambition.)
That said it's always good to have receipts.
lopmkoihl 9 hours ago [-]
> I'm under extra pressure to prove that remoteness works.
Did keeping track and reporting that number help prove this?
yvdriess 4 hours ago [-]
It doesn't need to prove that. It needs to produce plausible data that appeases either your direct or +1 manager.
kappi 37 minutes ago [-]
measuring number of meetings seems deflection of actual output!
mi_lk 9 hours ago [-]
It's your personal blog though. But again nothing wrong with turning that into a form of LinkedIn post
GoblinSlayer 6 hours ago [-]
>As a remote worker, I'm under extra pressure to prove that remoteness works.
You were delegated a manager's job?
>As a senior employee, I'm also under pressure to regularly report where my time is spent.
Normally, this is stored in the time tracker, not in your memory.
BoredPositron 6 hours ago [-]
In corps tracking hours is only for the grunts...
raw_anon_1111 2 hours ago [-]
Exactly, I can’t imagine that a “senior” developer needs to track everything that carefully. Hell I work at a consulting company full time as a staff consultant where we do have to record hours and I don’t go into any detail whether I’m on or off a project.
gct 13 hours ago [-]
At big tech you have to quantify your value like this regularly, so yeah everyone keeps track of the minutiae.
auggierose 10 hours ago [-]
Hehe, no wonder big tech doesn't get anything done.
taurath 5 hours ago [-]
It’s more that it takes so long to get anything done, the effort and results need to be recorded because it most often won’t be obvious from the impact. It’s hard to make a splash on a production system maintained by 30 other people, but you can usually make things better, but it won’t always be obvious.
yvdriess 4 hours ago [-]
It's the overhead cost caused by trust breakdown. (tbf sometimes the timesheets are there for legal/tax reasons)
tester756 4 hours ago [-]
whats ur point, there's countless of examples to counter your statement
from Windows, Linux, Chromium, VS Code, programming langugages, tools like k8s, AI to revenue! :D
SoftTalker 12 hours ago [-]
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?
izacus 15 minutes ago [-]
Those meetings were the authors actual contributions. Any really senior person isn't going to be coding.
Arainach 12 hours ago [-]
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*.
devsda 6 hours ago [-]
Still it is a faulty metric.
200% improvement may just be the result of feature A and 40% may just be the max performance gain from feature B. Comparing developers over the effectiveness of features they implement is mostly rating the PMs or the leadership they work with. Its a dice roll and its a measure of one's luck to be at the right place & right time to work on the right task.
Arainach 5 hours ago [-]
Then what's your proposal?
People complain about using metrics. People complain about rating performance based on what your manager or coworkers say about you. Performance reviews are an unsolved hard problem.
palata 5 hours ago [-]
> Then what's your proposal?
Not the OP, but my proposal is to acknowledge that unsolved hard problems are... unsolved. Instead of inventing bullshit and pretending it's constructive. Some people make a career out of that bullshitting, others complain about it because it actually has a negative impact on them.
"What's your proposal", in my experience, is often used as a defense against someone calling bullshit. My proposal when I'm calling bullshit is that the bullshitter start being professional, but it's not exactly something I can say.
oatmealcookie 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
gct 12 hours ago [-]
Managers can be lazy just like anyone.
brailsafe 12 hours ago [-]
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.
komali2 12 hours ago [-]
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.
brailsafe 12 hours ago [-]
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.
AnthonyMouse 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
rwmj 8 hours ago [-]
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.
davnn 4 hours ago [-]
Why would you say useless? They hopefully make a couple of good decisions. Three good decisions a day [1], maybe?
You are wrong. The price of luxuries and everything is different around the world. Plus purchase power diffrnce
astrange 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Insanity 9 hours ago [-]
I’ve been working in FAANG for some years in a senior position. Never had to track or speak to things like this lol.
astrange 9 hours ago [-]
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.
lrem 5 hours ago [-]
No I don’t.
cowsandmilk 14 hours ago [-]
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.
fantod 8 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised someone with his reputation would need to do this.
pas 3 hours ago [-]
Intel's management did not appreciate (as likely did not understand) tech skills/talent lately, which likely contributed to them squandering their lead.
9 hours ago [-]
nunez 14 hours ago [-]
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.
jcelerier 13 hours ago [-]
... is it? I had 14 meetings with externals this week only lol
raw_anon_1111 2 hours ago [-]
While I have a personal career document and have had one for years where I have all of my major accomplishments in STAR format. This seems a bit much.
When I was at BigTech, there was an internal system where you recorded your major accomplishments and the impact they had.
But I would never write it up on a public blog post like this. I am assuming the author of the post must be someone well known in the industry for it to make it to the front page of Hacker News. If his intent was to promote himself so he could get another job, I’m sure that he has a network where a few messages would lead him to one.
Even in my little niche of the world where in the grand scheme of things I’m a nobody, I was able to lean on my network at 50 after being Amazoned in 2023 and have three offers that were at least a lateral move within two weeks.
I had one fall into my lap last year too that I accepted based on my network.
pjmlp 8 hours ago [-]
Of course, always take notes, they will help when doing escalations, or justify oneself in review meetings.
jsight 13 hours ago [-]
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.
utopiah 9 hours ago [-]
Parse your calendar export (.ics) file and count events of a certain name and voila?
methuselah_in 12 hours ago [-]
Isn't that show-off? I mean you have achieved is good but feels like bragging about it ! Just a thought
Neywiny 13 hours ago [-]
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.
SanjayMehta 12 hours ago [-]
All startups in due course turn into Byzantine labyrinths of bureaucracy. Only the record keepers survive.
chanux 14 hours ago [-]
"Count your meetings"
Wouldn't hurt to try!
lopmkoihl 9 hours ago [-]
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.
fn-mote 14 hours ago [-]
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.
komali2 12 hours ago [-]
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.
stingraycharles 12 hours ago [-]
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.
brazukadev 5 hours ago [-]
Nah thanks, some of us are tired of corporate BS.
signatoremo 2 hours ago [-]
You are tired, but you still read, still commented (or worse, commented but didn’t read).
I always give people benefits of the doubt. He posted it on his personal blog, going back so many years. Most of his content are technical in nature, the kind of things that would never be on the front page of HN.
brazukadev 1 hours ago [-]
the fact that he posted in his personal blog doesn't change the fact that for many of us this is corporate BS and should not be in the top of HN first page. If you disagree, upvote comments you like, don't try to be a moderator.
> Most of his content are technical in nature, the kind of things that would never be on the front page of HN.
That is exactly what many of us prefer to see, actually. The hacker part of hackernews, remember?
astrange 9 hours ago [-]
Conversely, I made HotSpot commits as an intern, but I never shipped a web app.
bjourne 2 hours ago [-]
If you're talking about the HotSpot VM then that is a work of art. You learn a lot studying its codebase.
rossjudson 14 hours ago [-]
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".
stingraycharles 12 hours ago [-]
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.
candeira 14 hours ago [-]
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.
bigiain 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
seanmcdirmid 12 hours ago [-]
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.
pm90 51 minutes ago [-]
Agreed. He also mentioned these years being “some of the toughest at intel”. To me it read as 1) Amazing that he managed to get anything done at all with this kind of turmoil and 2) A not so subtle hint that things aren’t all good at Intel.
12 hours ago [-]
smelendez 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
seanmcdirmid 12 hours ago [-]
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.
brailsafe 12 hours ago [-]
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
59nadir 5 hours ago [-]
> Good at self-promotion == just good in most cases for most practical purposes whether it's factual or not, arguably.
This does not seem true to me. Most popular programming YouTubers are demonstrably great at self-promotion but tend to be mediocre or bad programmers who know very little, even about the topics they talk about.
If anything we have plenty of examples of where being good at self-promotion correlates inversely with actual skill and knowledge.
With that said, I wouldn't classify Brendan Gregg as being good at self-promotion.
menaerus 6 hours ago [-]
Flamegraph is literally just a perl script that visualizes the stack traces collected by perf/dtrace (kernel). It's a good tool though but it doesn't need to be oversold for its capabilities, the hard work is done by the kernel. And honestly, many times it is not that useful at all and can be quite misleading, and not because of the bug in the tool but because how CPUs are inherently designed to work.
tclancy 5 hours ago [-]
Everything is just a script with some visualization once you come up with the concept.
bibimsz 13 hours ago [-]
ive been at my company 16 years and still haven't had an impact, so... yeah.
stevenjgarner 10 hours ago [-]
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?
bombcar 10 hours ago [-]
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.
ivanbalepin 11 hours ago [-]
that is some brutal self-honesty right there
tclancy 5 hours ago [-]
Especially since they mention being a surgeon in some other comments.
nrhrjrjrjtntbt 8 hours ago [-]
That is because these days what used to be high impact is now table stakes.
59nadir 5 hours ago [-]
That's interesting; I feel like like it's the opposite: What used to be great work is basically unfathomable today and what used to be regular productivity is seen as almost superhuman. People get almost nothing done nowadays and I've never felt like expectations were ever really at the level they ought to be at, especially with how much money people are getting.
newsclues 4 hours ago [-]
Some people are more productive. Others less so.
There is a tension between the two groups.
Some workers think meetings are great. Others hate them.
hiddencost 1 hours ago [-]
He's arguably the most famous performance engineer. I've followed his work for 15 years.
oldpersonintx2 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
senkora 11 hours ago [-]
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.
solatic 9 hours ago [-]
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.
motbus3 7 hours ago [-]
I see some mean comments. I suppose maybe people doesn't know Brendan Gregg's work, this guy reserve some respect.
elric 5 hours ago [-]
What's going on with these comments? So much ridiculous and unwarranted bashing. Is someone feeding the trolls? Is 4chan down? Yikes.
foobarian 12 hours ago [-]
Wow is it me or is the self promotion strong in this one.
boguscoder 11 hours ago [-]
Does he need it though? His name is literally a brand in many tech circles and very good brand at that
forrestthewoods 11 hours ago [-]
Always valuable to announce your availability and celebrate recent successes.
boguscoder 11 hours ago [-]
And how did I contradict that? My point was that he is not looking for vanity
forrestthewoods 9 hours ago [-]
You: does he need it? He’s famous!
Me: it’s always valuable!
That’s it.
lopmkoihl 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
astrange 8 hours ago [-]
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.
torginus 3 hours ago [-]
I think this is a good opportunity to guerilla-ask a question about cloud performance:
We've been running some compute heavy workloads on AWS, with some running on metal instances, and some running on virtualized instances of equal size.
Both were intel 192 core machines.
Virtualized instances tended to perform 20-25% worse in terms of CPU throughput, which is quite significant, and more than I'd have assumed.
Where does the performance go? Is this an AWS thing, does the performance get lost in the software stack, or is it a CPU-level issue?
I haven't tried with other vendors tbh, but would it be possible to mitigate this by switching to another architecture/vendor like AMD or Graviton?
everfrustrated 2 hours ago [-]
On modern AWS instance types so much is offloaded to dedicated hardware that the only shared (noisy) components between VMs is memory bandwidth and higher levels of CPU cache (and I think graviton doesn't even share CPU cache now)
I would suspect your performance difference is mostly likely showing that on metal you are sharing the same software wider so not polluting caches as much as a vm neighbour running unrelated software.
torginus 2 hours ago [-]
The virtual instance is the exact same size as the metal one, which covers an entire physical machine - I guess this is pure overhead rather than noisy neighbors.
arcanus 3 hours ago [-]
That's a surprisingly large overhead. I've not measured that large an impact on AMD, particularly for compute heavy.
Did you profile at all? And have you observed if it's not compute-bound? If it's memory or IO bound it can be due to other virtualization overheads, such as memory encryption.
torginus 2 hours ago [-]
I will try to profile, but how do you suggest going about it, what to measure? Maybe running some synthethics stressing CPU or memory?
The workload is pure memory/CPU, with very little IO so it's 100% compute bound, with much more emphasis on CPU.
kqr 10 minutes ago [-]
There's a lot of I/O hidden in CPU-bound loads related to fetching, prefetching, caching, etc.
mort96 5 hours ago [-]
Leading the article with AI stuff is certainly a choice. If that's what they've ben spending their time on lately, maybe this is good for Intel.
aardvark179 4 hours ago [-]
Calling them AI flamegraphs is really naming them after the workload they are likely to be used on. If you want to make workloads more efficient it’s useful to know where they are spending their time.
mort96 2 hours ago [-]
Flamegraphs are great, GPU flamegraphs are an obvious good idea. But his choice to work on "AI" instead of general GPU compute, and advertise this "AI" work at the very top of the list of things he's done of note, tells me what I need to know.
maliker 12 hours ago [-]
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.
bfrog 15 hours ago [-]
Intel losing great people at high speed. Not the first, not the last.
shrubble 11 hours ago [-]
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.
77 meetings then, but 110 meetings in his resignation blog post…
0x0000000 10 hours ago [-]
Two different numbers, no? The resignation posts specifies 110 customer meetings, the blog post you linked to about meetings during odd hours does not.
brendangregg 10 hours ago [-]
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.
fipar 8 minutes ago [-]
Those 1-6am meetings are crazy. I’ve been fully remote for over 16 years now and my only 1-6am meetings are incident response, if I’m on call.
And I’m a nobody; that you have to do that makes it feel even crazier to me.
I admit I was a bit more flexible with that in the past, but once I had a heart attack at 40 it dawned on me any company would just replace me and keep on going while my family was going to have a much tougher time (and no help from whatever company would be employing me at the time).
dotemacs 6 hours ago [-]
What's with the retro gear on the desk?
Do you use it much and what for?
In particular Commodore tape player.
kundi 59 minutes ago [-]
Who cares?
dramm 14 hours ago [-]
A periodic reminder Intel is still in business.
xer0x 16 hours ago [-]
Hats off to Brendan!
lopmkoihl 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cebert 15 hours ago [-]
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.
ks2048 14 hours ago [-]
"death" can be pretty slow - IBM has $60B in revenue and 270K employees.
seanmcdirmid 12 hours ago [-]
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.
zipy124 3 hours ago [-]
Oracle basically runs HR and finance services for like every large company in Europe. They also run a scary amount of healthcare stuff and other government tech type stuff.
It sucks but I see why they do it. If you don't have the technical/managerial talent to handle procurement then it's the safest bet.
seabrookmx 11 hours ago [-]
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.
hbogert 8 hours ago [-]
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_am_a_peasant 10 hours ago [-]
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
ghaff 14 hours ago [-]
And their financial/stock performance has been pretty good the past couple of years.
12 hours ago [-]
quotemstr 14 hours ago [-]
When Shakespeare wrote "cowards die many times before their deaths", he had Intel in mind.
blinding-streak 4 hours ago [-]
Username checks out
hearsathought 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
chanux 14 hours ago [-]
Lindy[1] will make sure it stays around for a while.
Although you're correct that it would be too soon to prophesize their death, I want to clarify that Lindy ensures correlation, not causation.
13 hours ago [-]
roboror 13 hours ago [-]
Intel still sells a ton of silicon.
al_be_back 12 hours ago [-]
Leaving intel? That’s one case where an employee won’t get chastised for
markus_zhang 15 hours ago [-]
Congratulations. A fulfilling life.
wferrell 13 hours ago [-]
So...oai or google?
johncolanduoni 12 hours ago [-]
Yahoo. They're due for a comeback
acheron 11 hours ago [-]
Hey, maybe he has morals.
brcmthrowaway 16 hours ago [-]
Terrible news from Intel, this guy seems like the best performance engineer on the planet
nightshift1 15 hours ago [-]
Where do you think he's going next? OpenAI? Google? Just saving 1% on inference could probably justify his salary 100fold
anonymoushn 12 hours ago [-]
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"
boguscoder 11 hours ago [-]
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
astrange 8 hours ago [-]
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
cowsandmilk 14 hours ago [-]
Definitely feels like someplace with GPUs that will let him work remotely.
oldpersonintx2 6 hours ago [-]
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seneca 14 hours ago [-]
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.
bigiain 13 hours ago [-]
And it seems there's only one of them that's gonna have any new hardware that needs GPU flamegraphs to optimise...
seanmcdirmid 12 hours ago [-]
AMD, Apple, or NVIDIA?
grosswait 30 minutes ago [-]
Or Amazon, Google, Cerberus?
benwills 16 hours ago [-]
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]...
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.. :)
Keyframe 13 hours ago [-]
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.
brendangregg 10 hours ago [-]
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. :-)
Keyframe 8 hours ago [-]
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.
You made me look 'blog//2025-12-05/leaving-intel.html'
javaunsafe2019 9 hours ago [-]
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…
krior 6 hours ago [-]
> some dude
Maybe you should read something about him before you call him that. I recommend the "Contributions"-section on his Wikipedia-article. And if it is of any relevance to your work: his "Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud" is a comprehensive and excellent guide.
ohhellnawman 11 hours ago [-]
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badmonster 7 hours ago [-]
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atxtosh 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nialv7 4 hours ago [-]
hey, he's not boring. he shouted at a bunch of JBODs!
bibimsz 13 hours ago [-]
dude loves the color salmon
Rendered at 15:38:18 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Man people keep count of this stuff?! Maybe I should too, it does make flexing easier.
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.
(I’m not the author of this)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46146451
As a senior employee first at a startup from 2018-2020 and then as a staff engineer at a consulting company for the last year (with a 4 year at BigTech detour between), no one really micromanages me.
Even at the consulting company, when I am on a project, I just put 40 hours in Salesforce with the project I’m assigned to - with no details - or put “bench” - again with no details.
Why would my company care? The customer is happy, the project is managed through Jira (where I as the lead create the tasks) and my company gets paid when the project is done.
I am sure I ask for feedback after every project in our peer review system.
I also added an HN submission that made the front page a couple of days ago by a staff engineer at Google, did you notice the difference.
Finally, this isn’t r/cscareerquestions where you have a bunch of 22 year olds needing to prove themselves by mentioning “they work for a FAANG” (been there done that. Got the t-shirt. Didn’t like it)
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/09/the-econ-101-manag...
You should learn enough economics that if you are even a bit insightful you will avoid Econ 101 thinking, you will learn about things like intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and a lot of other things relevant to management.
I also measure meetings (counts, lengths, and mostly meeting minutes/outine jotted down by myself) and keep track of other metrics, exactly for this reason. However, I also don't happen to have written best selling books and stuff, so I really must do this, and you really shouldn't have to :-)
(Fancy US tech companies like to be very selective, have a competitive mindset, hire "the best" according to their filters, and then want people to show how amazing they are, uu, so much impact, woah... and in effect people need to constantly manage upwards.
While in many other companies, or "orgs", having a good team cohesion is more important. To blend in a bit, get accepted even if it means foregoing some ambition.)
That said it's always good to have receipts.
Did keeping track and reporting that number help prove this?
You were delegated a manager's job?
>As a senior employee, I'm also under pressure to regularly report where my time is spent.
Normally, this is stored in the time tracker, not in your memory.
from Windows, Linux, Chromium, VS Code, programming langugages, tools like k8s, AI to revenue! :D
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*.
200% improvement may just be the result of feature A and 40% may just be the max performance gain from feature B. Comparing developers over the effectiveness of features they implement is mostly rating the PMs or the leadership they work with. Its a dice roll and its a measure of one's luck to be at the right place & right time to work on the right task.
People complain about using metrics. People complain about rating performance based on what your manager or coworkers say about you. Performance reviews are an unsolved hard problem.
Not the OP, but my proposal is to acknowledge that unsolved hard problems are... unsolved. Instead of inventing bullshit and pretending it's constructive. Some people make a career out of that bullshitting, others complain about it because it actually has a negative impact on them.
"What's your proposal", in my experience, is often used as a defense against someone calling bullshit. My proposal when I'm calling bullshit is that the bullshitter start being professional, but it's not exactly something I can say.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfY3uRCvEMo
An underappreciated difference is that it's hard to schedule meetings between people in SF and Taiwan, because of time zones.
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.
When I was at BigTech, there was an internal system where you recorded your major accomplishments and the impact they had.
But I would never write it up on a public blog post like this. I am assuming the author of the post must be someone well known in the industry for it to make it to the front page of Hacker News. If his intent was to promote himself so he could get another job, I’m sure that he has a network where a few messages would lead him to one.
Even in my little niche of the world where in the grand scheme of things I’m a nobody, I was able to lean on my network at 50 after being Amazoned in 2023 and have three offers that were at least a lateral move within two weeks.
I had one fall into my lap last year too that I accepted based on my network.
I can't even say that they are wrong.
Wouldn't hurt to try!
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.
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.
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.
I always give people benefits of the doubt. He posted it on his personal blog, going back so many years. Most of his content are technical in nature, the kind of things that would never be on the front page of HN.
> Most of his content are technical in nature, the kind of things that would never be on the front page of HN.
That is exactly what many of us prefer to see, actually. The hacker part of hackernews, remember?
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".
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.
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 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.
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.
This does not seem true to me. Most popular programming YouTubers are demonstrably great at self-promotion but tend to be mediocre or bad programmers who know very little, even about the topics they talk about.
If anything we have plenty of examples of where being good at self-promotion correlates inversely with actual skill and knowledge.
With that said, I wouldn't classify Brendan Gregg as being good at self-promotion.
A factory worker may be one of the best assembling doodads, but have no real impact on the job over their career, for example.
There is a tension between the two groups.
Some workers think meetings are great. Others hate them.
Whatever his reasons for leaving, I hope that he finds a better balance in his new role.
Me: it’s always valuable!
That’s it.
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.
We've been running some compute heavy workloads on AWS, with some running on metal instances, and some running on virtualized instances of equal size.
Both were intel 192 core machines.
Virtualized instances tended to perform 20-25% worse in terms of CPU throughput, which is quite significant, and more than I'd have assumed.
Where does the performance go? Is this an AWS thing, does the performance get lost in the software stack, or is it a CPU-level issue?
I haven't tried with other vendors tbh, but would it be possible to mitigate this by switching to another architecture/vendor like AMD or Graviton?
I would suspect your performance difference is mostly likely showing that on metal you are sharing the same software wider so not polluting caches as much as a vm neighbour running unrelated software.
Did you profile at all? And have you observed if it's not compute-bound? If it's memory or IO bound it can be due to other virtualization overheads, such as memory encryption.
The workload is pure memory/CPU, with very little IO so it's 100% compute bound, with much more emphasis on CPU.
See https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2025-05-22/3-years-of-extr...
77 meetings then, but 110 meetings in his resignation blog post…
And I’m a nobody; that you have to do that makes it feel even crazier to me.
I admit I was a bit more flexible with that in the past, but once I had a heart attack at 40 it dawned on me any company would just replace me and keep on going while my family was going to have a much tougher time (and no help from whatever company would be employing me at the time).
Do you use it much and what for?
In particular Commodore tape player.
It sucks but I see why they do it. If you don't have the technical/managerial talent to handle procurement then it's the safest bet.
To say nothing of the banks and others still using the IBM big iron.
The government took an ownership stake in the company. Nvidia invested a few billion in the company. It's not going anywhere.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/intel/salaries/software-eng...
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
Greybeard reporting for duty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette
Probably not his daily drivers.. :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-CTkbHnpNQ
Maybe you should read something about him before you call him that. I recommend the "Contributions"-section on his Wikipedia-article. And if it is of any relevance to your work: his "Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud" is a comprehensive and excellent guide.