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AMD CEO Dirk Meyer Resigns
angry tapir writes "Advanced Micro Devices has announced that Dirk Meyer has resigned from the post of CEO, and that the company is beginning to search for a new chief executive. Meyer resigned in a mutual agreement with the board of directors, and the company has appointed Thomas Seifert, the company's chief financial officer, as the interim CEO. Meyer was installed as CEO in 2008 as a replacement to Hector Ruiz, just as the company was making its way out of rough financial times. In October, AMD posted a third-quarter net loss of US$118 million."
As someone who was able to compare salaries when AMD bought ATI, I've got to take issue with that comment... AMD actually paid *very* handsomely compared to ATI (and that pay disparity still exists, and causes some resentment... but that's a separate issue). And of course, there are tons of highly competent, skilled, and creative engineers still in the company.
A lot of "top" ex-ATI talent has gone elsewhere (also starts with 'A'), but that phenomenon is almost exclusively limited to Silicon Valley. In general, the hop from job-to-job culture is far less practical when there are only a handful of ASIC jobs to be had in certain areas. Many "top" CPU guys are still around too, so far as I can tell (not my department).
The thing that I notice from all of these moves is that ex-ATI people are on the move upwards, largely displacing the CPU side. The poor execution of the latter group is a large part of that, no question. The trouble is, most of the moves upwards are being made by people in (you guessed it), Silicon Valley. The headquarters is still in Austin, but it's becoming little San Fransisco. The reason this is a problem? Well, it's building resentment in almost the entire remainder of the company, which is a rather large organization. The CPU guys are annoyed that everything is moving under formerly-graphics ownership (add that to the irritated sentiment that AMD overpaid for ATI...), and two-thirds of the GPU guys are annoyed that everything is moving under Silicon Valley ownership. Some changes are viewed as being unfair (such is life) and some are clearly undeserved (ATI had some big screw-ups too). The politics is actually pretty bad; it's much worse than any other place I've ever worked.
We've got a group meeting about this announcement this afternoon. I wonder what the spin will be...
captcha: tantrum
haha...