Here is a video of Conan O’ Brian paying a visit to the Intel campus in Santa Clara. This video is seeing some heavy rotation on Intel campuses worldwide right now, judging from the fact that I have by now received a link to it from at least four different people at Intel (and it looks like it got some play on digg as well yesterday).
The result is about 8 minutes of video that will make you laugh, and if you are, or are related to, an Intel employee, possibly cry a little, too.
Indeed, that’s exactly what I did…
I am not sure how interesting this video is for outsiders, but anybody who has every been at an Intel fab will instantly recognize a million things here. It is one of those videos that are funny simply because they tell the truth.
Just this weekend, Intel held an open house here at its Hillsboro, Oregon (Ronler Acres) location (I was kind of hoping to bump into Josh Bancroft at the UMPC table, but that didn’t happen). One of the tour routes to the development fab lead right through the floors full of identical cubicles (full disclosure - I have friends and family that works at Intel, so I have gotten more than one private tour through the building). Indeed, these places look beyond frightening. And like every cult, Intel has a good explanation for it: everybody is the same - even the big bosses just work in a cubicle.
One thing to keep in mind about this is that the people that work in the cubicles are some of the world’s brightest minds from the most prestigious engineering schools (Hillsboro is the development fab, which prides itself to do more than all the others with less people). One can only wonder how much better Intel’s products could be if its corporate culture would emphasize more creativity.
Intel’s Oregon fab is a technological marvel. The sheer size of it makes you appreciate those little chips in your computer just a bit more (and in Hillsboro, they are now working on the chips you will buy in two years…). The engineers there push some of the worlds most sophisticated equipment to and beyond its limits.
Maybe that explains the emphasis on conformity: when you work around margins of error that make nanometers look large, how creativity do you really want?
Sorry I missed you - I didn’t even know about the Ronler open house until I saw some photos from it on Flickr (I’m subscribed to the photos tagged “intel”).
I’m in Jones Farm, and we weren’t really part of the event. But if there was a UMPC table, I would have loved to be there!
We should go to lunch sometime. I’ll show you my UMPC, MBP, HDV camera, and all kinds of cool acronym toys.
Josh - I might just take you up on that lunch, but I will be on the East Coast for the next three weeks. Maybe we can set something up after that?
By the way, I hope you don’t carry all that gear around with you every day…