I've long stopped expecting anything from the people above us. They don't have a plan, they don't have a vision, and they don't have any idea how to fix the problems they've created. It's been years of the same chaos.
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Act accordingly
Our resident genius CEO proudly highlighted during the quarterly meeting that Elliott Investment Management has secured a seat on the Synopsys board of directors.
Anyone with a pulse can guess what Jesse Cohn is likely to push for next: aggressive operational efficiency and boosted profit margins. And how? Before the last juice of long‑term growth potential is squeezed, layoffs are the direct choice. It’s the same playbook we watched unfold at Boeing.
@aq I completely agree. This dynamic in the top management also creates a very discouraging engineering culture for individual contributors. Your ability to solve complex technical problems that others cannot and your unique insights to improve the product are no longer necessary conditions for bonuses and promotions. Instead, you have to constantly 'manage up' through your direct manager, skip-manager, and even your skip's manager just to get a chance to grow. I know office politics are common in every industry, but at Synopsys, this issue is so prevalent that many real talent goes completely underutilized.
With these said, it feels like that we are rapidly becoming Boeing of EDA.
Yes, exactly.
I think that is a huge issue for SNPS: So much of our upper mgt comes from sales/marketing. They have no direct knowledge of what matters, what's easy/hard, etc... Then there is the problem that upper mgt is so far removed in the (deep) hierarchy from the actual Stuff That Matters, they only talk to other people who are similarly clueless about the real issues that need addressing (and those that don't).
Conversely our main competitor is led, at the upper levels, by very technically knowledgeable people, and they know when to leave the technical, scientific, engineering decisions (which do need to be make), to people qualified to do so.
@OP People with strong technical backgrounds tend to have larger egos and a passion for solving challenging problems, such as making tools twelve times faster. On the other hand, people with sales backgrounds are often more focused on driving profits into their own pockets. This management from the top to the next 5 layers are corrupted.