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.
Two different numbers, no? The resignation posts specifies 110 customer meetings, the blog post you linked to about meetings during odd hours does not.
> "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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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*.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
See https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2025-05-22/3-years-of-extr...
77 meetings then, but 110 meetings in his resignation blog post…
Two different numbers, no? The resignation posts specifies 110 customer meetings, the blog post you linked to about meetings during odd hours does not.
> "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.
At big tech you have to quantify your value like this regularly, so yeah everyone keeps track of the minutiae.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Managers can be lazy just like anyone.
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*.
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.
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.
... is it? I had 14 meetings with externals this week only lol
Isn't that show-off? I mean you have achieved is good but feels like bragging about it ! Just a thought
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.
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.
All startups in due course turn into Byzantine labyrinths of bureaucracy. Only the record keepers survive.
"Count your meetings"
Wouldn't hurt to try!
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
ive been at my company 16 years and still haven't had an impact, so... yeah.
that is some brutal self-honesty right there
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
Wow is it me or is the self promotion strong in this one.
Does he need it though? His name is literally a brand in many tech circles and very good brand at that
Always valuable to announce your availability and celebrate recent successes.
And how did I contradict that? My point was that he is not looking for vanity
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.
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.
A periodic reminder Intel is still in business.
Intel losing great people at high speed. Not the first, not the last.
Hats off to Brendan!
Leaving intel? That’s one case where an employee won’t get chastised for
So...oai or google?
Hey, maybe he has morals.
Yahoo. They're due for a comeback
Congratulations. A fulfilling life.
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.
"death" can be pretty slow - IBM has $60B in revenue and 270K employees.
And their financial/stock performance has been pretty good the past couple of years.
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.
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.
When Shakespeare wrote "cowards die many times before their deaths", he had Intel in mind.
> 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.
Lindy[1] will make sure it stays around for a while.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
Intel still sells a ton of silicon.
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.
And it seems there's only one of them that's gonna have any new hardware that needs GPU flamegraphs to optimise...
AMD, Apple, or NVIDIA?
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]...
[0] https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/images/2025/brendanoffice2...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
> cassette deck on his desk
Greybeard reporting for duty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette
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.. :)
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.
A.B.K. Always Be Knolling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-CTkbHnpNQ
Extra slash in the url
You made me look 'blog//2025-12-05/leaving-intel.html'
Terrible news from Intel, this guy seems like the best performance engineer on the planet
Where do you think he's going next? OpenAI? Google? Just saving 1% on inference could probably justify his salary 100fold
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"
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
Definitely feels like someplace with GPUs that will let him work remotely.
dude loves the color salmon