All in all, Fellows historically had a very specific organizational and status value at Intel, as in many cases they have been the key people to solve Intel's strategic and tactical technical challenges while not being in a formal management role. From now on, Intel wants its Distinguished Engineers to be accountable for business decisions and essentially become managers.
The biggest question about renaming Fellows to Distinguished Engineers is whether this is done in a bid to further flatten the organization (after all, Intel got rid of 250 VPs out of 450, according to Intel's CFO), or is it a deliberate move away from the old research lab model, where Fellow signified scientific stature and long-horizon research, toward engineers whose status depends on products, execution and measurable business impact. For now, we do not have any answers to this question.
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Anton Shilov Social Links Navigation Contributing Writer Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
usertests AMD should adopt "Fellow". Too late: https://newsroom.amd.com/news/amd-appoints-alan-smith-as-newest-corporate-fellow/ Reply
JamesJones44 usertests said: AMD should adopt "Fellow". Too late: https://newsroom.amd.com/news/amd-appoints-alan-smith-as-newest-corporate-fellow/ Fellow has been used by a lot of companies for a long time to denote top of the individual ladder. Google, Apple, AMD, Intel (used to), Lockheed Martin, etc. Some even use Distinguished Engineer as the tier just before Fellow (Google, or at least they used to). I'm not 100% sure why Intel is calling the new version standard, because as far as I know Fellow/Distinguished Engineer are both fairly standard unless I missed an announcement somewhere. Reply
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