I was part of company with a similar problem. If AMD’s situation is similar to what I dealt with, it’s more complicated. When you start doing deep cut layoffs at the IC level combined with expectations of big salary increases for those who remain, the office politics escalate to a level I didn’t know was possible.

All of those people who do nothing find a way to join forces with those people who are showing those inflated benchmarks to execs and before you know it the layoffs are about as accurate as random chance when it comes to cutting the dead weight from the company.

In my experience, the change needs to start closer to the top: Upper layers of management need to be shaken up. Middle management audited by new upper management hires who have fresh eyes and aren’t afraid to make honest evaluations. High performing teams who are stuck under management hell need to be identified and rotated into other projects that are critical for the company but have become occupied by fiefdom-building managers. Hiring needs to ramp up to bring in new talent that was previously priced out by the low comp.

It’s hard. I wish there was an easy way to cut the low performers, but they have an amazing way of teaming up with the bad managers. Maybe because they have so much free time to do office politics because they’re not doing much work.

> What they should do is bump TC by 60-70% and simultaneously lay off 50% of the engineers.

Tell me you're an engineer without telling me you're an engineer. The problem is they don't know which half and they can't know. It's an issue of legibility and transparency - put yourself into the shoes of the C-suite. You're staring down a complete black box of, what, 5,000 people. How can you possibly know who's good and who's not? Think of the information they have at hand - what the chain of command tells them. What if the chain of command itself is the problem? Think about how you yourself could protect a bad employee if you were a manager. You could! How can they possibly find the truth?

People rightly hate stack ranking, but you can see why ideas like that exist - attempts to come up with organizational pruning algorithms that are resistant to the managers themselves being the problem.

And this is also why CEOs incoming with a turnaround mission often do a clean sweep and stack the c-suite with all their friends. Not because they're giving jobs to their mates - although sure, that does happen - but because they're trying to establish at least a single layer of trust, which can then in time hopefully be extended downwards. But it all takes time, and for some organizations, they never do manage it. When unlimited orgs all compete for the same limited number of good managers - well, some of them are going to lose.

Ironically I'm bullish on AI being able to greatly help with all of this. Maybe running on AMD GPUs...