I worked for Albert Yu. Getting out the long knives for him is unwarranted, in my opinion.
"Though I never new Yu, I agree that the view of him within Intel wasn't that positive. I might be mistaken, but I believe he was given a lateral move a year or two ago that basically got him out of the way. It's probably not a positive or negative for Intel, other than that a large executive salary will go away."
Well, I did know Albert. I worked for him in the early 80s, and then had some contact with him in the mid-80s, as I was leaving Intel. Just so there's no confusion, I was one level removed from working for him.
Clearly he had several major successes when he ran the micro program...and then a couple of failures. This tends to be the way business works, especially at Intel: managers get reassigned after a couple of screw-ups, whether it was their "fault" or not. Captain of the ship and all that.
As a lot of these managers, the ones I knew, are at or near normal retirement age...and are worth a hundred million bucks or more....their retirements are predictable.
The Albert Yu I knew was a solid technical guy who had pretty good vision. He briefly left Intel in the late 70s to start one of the first microcomputer stores. He returned to Intel around 1980, which is when I was one level removed from working directly for him. I interacted with him on almost a daily basis.
(Just for general interest, I had closer contacts with Craig Barrett. He hired me into Intel in 1974 and I shared an office with him and with another engineer in Santa Clara 1. I had daily nearly daily dealings with him until I moved to Oregon in 1980. When I returned to California in 1982, he was off doing Telecom and Automotive. Only in 1984 when he took over all of Manufacturing, including Technology Development, was I back reporting to him. Two levels removed, however.)
--Tim May |
