Reflecting on my time at a tech company (aka 'Retiring from Intel')

I've queued up some blog drafts over the last couple of months but I haven't been able to generate the energy to finish them. They just didn't seem to have enough bulk to them.

So why posting now and with this 'new' content?  

Well, I want to share that I have elected to retire from Intel after 27.5 years. My last day will be September 30. While I'm moving on to the next chapter of life, I'll always cherish the time I spent at Intel. 

And in fact it is with no small amount of temerity I write this message, especially after receiving so many soulful and impactful farewell messages recently from Intel colleagues also opting into this retirement package.  I'm somewhat 'late' in penning my message, I'm afraid (at this point in time I haven't sent out the broad bcc'd "I'm leaving" email).  And then there's my all-time favorite parting message I captured from Sham at the end of the https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2023/05/open-platforms-snapshot-may-2023.html posting that I could never hope to emulate. 

But emulate I won't. In fact, I'll write this as I do most of my postings, sort of a rambling message to myself; on this sentiment I'm apparently not alone given quote of another 1.5 decade blogger "I keep this blog for me to write, not necessarily for others to read." https://www.jonashietala.se/blog/2024/09/25/why_i_still_blog_after_15_years/. For this particular post I couldn't figure out where to insert a 'TL;DR' since I sometimes think that could be the title or theme of this whole blog series :) I only regret that I won't have a reason to author a successor to https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2024/02/27-or-anniversarynext12-ai-runtime.html. 

So for more of the TL 'too long," rewind the clock 32.5 years to my first five years post-undergrad in industry prior to Intel.  In those early days of 1992 back in Houston I was introduced to BIOS and embedded firmware development using Intel technology, from the i8051 through i80186 … and culminating with the P6. Beyond the data sheets, I also immersed myself deeply in Intel driven specifications like PCI and I2O (although forgotten by PCI SIG and intel.com, many still live on at https://bitsavers.org/pdf/intel/). These experiences ranged from poring over the black cover data public tomes of data books to the yellow-cover NDA documents, while continually being intrigued by what was happening at Intel via reading reports on the company in print periodicals like EE Times; this was the early 90’s prior to the internet going big.

Who knows? Maybe some of the work I contributed to at Intel, whether papers or books or specifications such as mentioned in https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2021/01/books-and-computers.html, might end up at bitsavers some day, say Beyond BIOS https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Bios-Implementing-Extensible-Interface/dp/0974364908 will have a URL like the RMX book http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/intel/iRMX/iRMX_III/Real-Time_and_Systems_Programming_for_PCs_1993.pdf?

Given my early exposure to Intel, imagine my delight in getting recruited by Intel to lead the development of Itanium firmware for the Merced CPU in late 1996 and joining the Intel High-End Server Division (HESD) in February 1997 in DuPont WA. The Intel recruiter told me that I could ‘go to Hillsboro for Xeon or Dupont for Itanium.’ I wasn’t familiar w/ any place in the PNW so the obvious choice was to join the Intel 64-bit wave! Prior to joining Intel, I still recall my Compaq manager saying when I served notice “I guess you’re going to Portland Oregon” when in fact I was heading to Washington state. Commencing in ’97 I was now part of the mission to help create the technology behind those great products and standards I’d admired so much.  

Since then, I truly realized the saying of Steve Jobs 'The only way to do great work is to love what you do,' and I've truly loved working alongside such talented and dedicated individuals in this work. That was the missing link from my pre-Intel days, namely the broad experience with Intel employees.

Speaking of people and technology and standards, now more than half my life, or these last 27.5 years at Intel, have more than exceeded my hopes, but it’s the people with whom I’ve collaborated, learned, and grown I appreciate the most.  Thank you all for creating a positive and inspiring work environment. From co-creators of the SAL+NuBiOS & SAL+AMI ‘Salami’ firmware for Merced in HESD, the Workstation Product Group (WPG) Kittyhawk native C code that booted Intel P3 on 840 Rambus and Merced 460GX w/ either the AMI 630 ‘furball’ or the EFI sample as the late-stage payloads. Then off to Microcomputer Software Lab (MSL) in MD6 to work on the hit series of scaling EFI from 0.92 to today’s UEFI 2.11, along with “Tiano” that yielded EDK->EDKII and the Intel Platform innovation Framework for the Extensible Firmware Interface (e.g., “Framework”) specifications that have become the UEFI Platform Initialization (PI) specifications of today. This latter work spanned orgs from MSL to EPG to SEG to SSG to SATG to DEG to my final home here in CCG. I guess the only platform group I missed was embedded, although I enjoyed collaborating with those folks from ACSFL in the late 90’s to today’s slim bootloader.

I suppose I can date the badges by BDE or ADE ('Before drop-e' or 'After drop-e') https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2014/01/advances-in-platform-firmware-beyond.html.

It’s open source platform code like slim bootloader, coreboot, and EDKII features/platforms that have occupied the last 10 years of scaling the Firmware Support Package (FSP), ….. along with the primary mission of FSP to have a clear business boundary between Intel owned versus customer codes. With this last decade also including contributing to NIST 800-193 platform firmware resiliency and recovery.  And and and ….

...and booting.  Measured boot, UEFI Secure boot, ipv6 boot/netboot6, HTTP boot, boot-from-Wifi.....Sometimes I'd use 'booting from a sneaker' as a variant of the Toaster or Fabrikam sort of pedagogic fake device, but given Bluetooth and smart accessories/shoes I suspect this one will fall into the 'life imitates art.'

And I could take a whole detour on security and friends long past. Someone said I was the final member of the below bench to exit. John of PSIRT, Yuriy of threat research, Kirk of all-things-SMM security, ... Zimmer as the UEFI security guy. I still recall a colleague saying 'bring boxes of the Intel Press Beyond BIOS and Shell books. The visitors will love them.' Given the muscle ache from both lugging them down to Portland and back to Seattle I couldn't help but think of the Harold Ramis quote in Ghostbusters that 'print is dead.'  Even those many years ago no one wanted those bulky dead-tree texts.

Beyond the tech milestones, I still recall a few words of wisdom from a now-retired colleague. One was ‘the best architecture is sometimes knowing what to leave out’ (I heard it but didn’t necessarily always practice it) and the other was ‘I don’t know why people don’t get it, but BIOS can be a great career.’  And a great Intel career it has been. Another was ‘the higher leadership ascends you’ll find the more impactful decisions they have to make with successively less information.’  So my take away is that you should take it easy on the bosses, especially in tough times.

And there is my 3-tuple of advice I sometimes give others and myself:  ‘business first, team second, and career third.’  To me this means focus on the business priorities first, even if they transcend your team’s charter. Next help develop and foster a strong team environment for the mission to collaborate on these business challenges.  And a distant third is your career.  I don’t mean to imply career growth is unimportant but more that if you focus on the business priorities and the team, a well-managed company will acknowledge your efforts.  

Also, observe where the interesting problems are being worked and good team cultures exist. Given that insight, when given the opportunity to engage in such focus areas and collaborators it may help your career long term.  And 'keep learning.' This may sound a bit strange coming from me since a boss recently said ‘...and if you don’t want to keep learning then just “retire”.  I personally hope to do both, but the exhortation to 'keep learning' is golden irrespective of one's employer or employment state or age or.....

And given this is a wrap-up sort of blog, I've probably repeated a few themes mentioned before. Some are quite important, though, such as 'it's the people that matter.' Projects and tech come and go. The people are the key invariant of value. For example, sometimes folks think I get excited by books and patents, but it's the co-authors and co-inventors that thrill me. I may forget a book chapter or set of independent claims, but I'll never forget the rich set of colleagues with whom I toiled shoulder-to-shoulder on these endeavors. And these endeavors match my triad of biz/team/career in that they were all done to help further a business strategy, secondarily they entailed team collaboration (sometimes co-authors outside of team or company), and at the end of the day, they may have helped (or hindered) my career arc. As long as I hit #1 and #2, though, I'm at peace.

Other wisdom? Don't bash other technology. I still regret writing 

twenty years ago in  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377810413_TechnologyIntel_Magazine_-_Advances_in_Platform_Firmware_Beyond_BIOS_and_Across_all_Intel_R_Silicon. You win by being good, not by belittling the competition. And the fact that the PC industry for 20+ years had shipped on this 'monolithic', 'space constrained' BIOS rebutted my argument And to be honest, Tiano in 2004 wasn't the exemplar of software quality and stability.

I find a kindred soul in Prof G's advice that 'work life balance is a myth' https://www.raconteur.net/talent-culture/scott-galloway-work-life-balance-work-from-home but the part I perhaps erred on is ignoring the qualifier 'when you are young.' I have kept this unbalance through 3+ decades :) But it has been a great trip and I can see doing more when there are opportunities to dent some more https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/950437-we-re-here-to-put-a-dent-in-the-universe-otherwise.

I not sure what the next phase of the journey will be, but I couldn't help but laugh when reading this cartoon from the New Yorker recently. I sort of put my own spin on it, although some may say it reads well in its original.

And I sure have quite a reading backlog to attack (see background of posts like https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2021/11/books-old-age.html). 

Regarding timing of this event, my Fidelity advisor said 'you can retire but there is the risk of you getting bored.' And a retiring Intel security Fellow opined 'you are too young to retire.' In retrospect I realize that I may be a bit junior to many of the 'retirement' cohort I see exiting since I dove head-first into tech w/o MS+PhD or military or ...et al hang-time. But given the exponential arcs of so much happening in tech and the richness of the world, I suspect I can find many a palliative to the specter of boredom (more 'dent' opportunities - see above).

Speaking of 'fellow,' that was definitely a milestone I had hoped to achieve in my quarter-century tenure at Intel. I try not to be sour grapes and think of the externally-hired-in fellows who only had to align with Professor Galloway's 'it's easy to fall in love with someone for an hour' when comparing external versus internal promotions. Instead I'd say Intel offered many open doors for me and perhaps I simply stumbled into the door jam? It was never aspiring toward the fellow role just for the sake of the title. Instead, I view achieving a fellow promotion as both an acknowledgement of the observed fellow-level impact plus the ability to have more insight into and ability to help advise the business (i.e., a bigger platform to help make those 'dents in the universe').

Regarding that out-of-reach cohort, I did have a chance to leave a small mark for system software next to the Fellows and Senior Fellows, as chronicled in https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2021/07/patents-and-co-inventors.html and https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2022/09/new-milestones.html. Recall the century-milestones I related of:

• Sr. Fellow (13) Glenn Hinton in architecture https://www.anandtech.com/show/16438/new-intel-ceo-making-waves-rehiring-retired-cpu-architects  on 11/06 reached 100 issued US Patents
• Sr. Fellow Robert Chau (13) in process technology https://medium.com/performance-at-intel/a-bright-future-for-moores-law-9adc7d4bd39d  on 3/10 reached 200 issued US Patents
• Sr. Principal Engineer (11) Vincent Zimmer in system firmware on 7/14 reached 300 issued US Patents

From https://levels.fyi

If not fellow, I have at least tried to level up to my 'Senior' taxonomy this year, though, by applying for senior member status of the ACM https://awards.acm.org/senior-members/award-recipients?year=2024&award=159&region=&submit=Submit&isSpecialCategory= 

and the IEEE, respectively

I just made it into 'senior member' under the 30 year milestone of my time with IEEE, for example. So I'm exiting this tech company as a pure-play 'senior' (e.g., Intel Sr. PE, Sr. member ACM, Sr. member IEEE), it seems. What's next on the 'senior' theme?  More senior moments undoubtedly, sliding into senior citizen-hood, ....?

So now to prepare for the next months. One colleague who left from another tech company years ago into Intel told me it took him 2 years to get over leaving his last shop. And another colleague who left Intel for a FAANG company a couple of years ago told me that you fade away quickly from people's memories at Intel, easily within 2 years (2 mos., 2 days, 2 hrs?). So I guess the overlap is 'getting over' job.last and being forgotten by colleagues.last :)

Time.  Time.  As I sit on 12 weeks of accumulated sabbatical (closing in on 16) & a vacation free recent couple of years, I suppose the universe with this 'enhanced retirement package' has finally figured out a way to make me close my Intel laptop lid. And close it I shall. 

In closing, my personal tell is that once I’m done with the meat of a conversation I start philosophizing too much.  And on that note it’s time to end this conversation since my philosophizing has eaten the word budget on this post more than usual.

Thank you all and good-bye,

Vincent

PS if you ever need to contact me, my info is at the top of https://sites.google.com/site/vincentzimmer/cv