> "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 23 minutes 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.
gct 3 hours ago [-]
At big tech you have to quantify your value like this regularly, so yeah everyone keeps track of the minutiae.
SoftTalker 2 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?
brailsafe 2 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 2 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 1 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.
gct 2 hours ago [-]
Managers can be lazy just like anyone.
Arainach 2 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*.
cowsandmilk 4 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.
nunez 4 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 3 hours ago [-]
... is it? I had 14 meetings with externals this week only lol
methuselah_in 2 hours ago [-]
Isn't that show-off? I mean you have achieved is good but feels like bragging about it ! Just a thought
jsight 3 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.
Neywiny 3 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 2 hours ago [-]
All startups in due course turn into Byzantine labyrinths of bureaucracy. Only the record keepers survive.
chanux 4 hours ago [-]
"Count your meetings"
Wouldn't hurt to try!
fn-mote 4 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.
rossjudson 4 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 2 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.
komali2 2 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 2 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.
bibimsz 3 hours ago [-]
ive been at my company 16 years and still haven't had an impact, so... yeah.
ivanbalepin 56 minutes ago [-]
that is some brutal self-honesty right there
candeira 4 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 3 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 2 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.
2 hours ago [-]
smelendez 3 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 2 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 2 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
shrubble 28 minutes 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 24 minutes 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 11 minutes 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.
foobarian 2 hours ago [-]
Wow is it me or is the self promotion strong in this one.
boguscoder 42 minutes ago [-]
Does he need it though? His name is literally a brand in many tech circles and very good brand at that
forrestthewoods 28 minutes ago [-]
Always valuable to announce your availability and celebrate recent successes.
boguscoder 27 minutes ago [-]
And how did I contradict that? My point was that he is not looking for vanity
senkora 51 minutes 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.
maliker 2 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 5 hours ago [-]
Intel losing great people at high speed. Not the first, not the last.
dramm 4 hours ago [-]
A periodic reminder Intel is still in business.
xer0x 6 hours ago [-]
Hats off to Brendan!
al_be_back 2 hours ago [-]
Leaving intel? That’s one case where an employee won’t get chastised for
cebert 4 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 4 hours ago [-]
"death" can be pretty slow - IBM has $60B in revenue and 270K employees.
2 hours ago [-]
ghaff 4 hours ago [-]
And their financial/stock performance has been pretty good the past couple of years.
seanmcdirmid 2 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.
seabrookmx 44 minutes 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.
quotemstr 4 hours ago [-]
When Shakespeare wrote "cowards die many times before their deaths", he had Intel in mind.
hearsathought 3 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 3 hours ago [-]
Lindy[1] will make sure it stays around for a while.
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 2 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 21 minutes 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. :-)
Terrible news from Intel, this guy seems like the best performance engineer on the planet
nightshift1 5 hours ago [-]
Where do you think he's going next? OpenAI? Google? Just saving 1% on inference could probably justify his salary 100fold
anonymoushn 2 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 $0 while we pay you a million a year to move to the united states"
boguscoder 39 minutes ago [-]
Not being sarcastic here, a million a year is not a target compensation for engineer like him, 5-7 is probably where it starts and goes to the stars
cowsandmilk 4 hours ago [-]
Definitely feels like someplace with GPUs that will let him work remotely.
ChrisArchitect 8 hours ago [-]
Extra slash in the url
muragekibicho 1 hours ago [-]
You made me look 'blog//2025-12-05/leaving-intel.html'
bibimsz 3 hours ago [-]
dude loves the color salmon
ohhellnawman 58 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 05:33:34 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Man people keep count of this stuff?! Maybe I should too, it does make flexing easier.
As a remote worker, I'm under extra pressure to prove that remoteness works.
As a senior employee, I'm also under pressure to regularly report where my time is spent.
Just look at all the weird quirks our world does to labor value: the same exact job in two different locations for a global employer (say, Google), selling to a global market, pays differently depending on "local labor market prices." In 2025 for engineering what on earth is a "local labor market?" An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work. Luxury goods and electronics cost the same in both places. Buying property is only slightly cheaper in Taipei vs sf (yes really), vehicles cost more in Taiwan. Food and healthcare is cheaper in Taiwan, and that alone I guess means the Taiwanese engineer is worth 1/8th the SF engineer, to make sure the sf engineer can afford 16$ 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.
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*.
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.
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.
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.
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.
See https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2025-05-22/3-years-of-extr...
77 meetings then, but 110 meetings in his resignation blog post…
Whatever his reasons for leaving, I hope that he finds a better balance in his new role.
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
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