Intel ends half-century tradition – Leading experts will be forced to prove their benefit to business

Intel informed employees that the corporate titles of “Fellow” and “Senior Fellow” awarded to the company’s best scientists and engineers for nearly half a century are becoming a thing of the past. They will be replaced by the titles of Distinguished Engineer and Senior Distinguished Engineer respectively. Pushkar Ranade, Intel’s chief technology officer, said that this is not just a renaming, but the creation of “A new standard in technology leadership».

“Intel’s future will be defined by leaders who combine deep domain knowledge with exceptional problem solving, creative innovation with disciplined execution, and ambitious strategic vision with measurable tactical progress,” Ranade said. The name change will not affect employee salaries, but there is a deeper meaning behind Intel. For the holder of the new title, the company expects not only technical expertise and authority among colleagues, but also tangible business results, a combination of deep knowledge and strategic vision, and “Measurable tactical progress».

However, academician titles are still common in the semiconductor industry. It is used by at least a dozen major companies, including AMD, ASML, Applied Materials, Arm, Broadcom, IBM, Nvidia, Micron, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm and TSMC. Some technology companies have both academician and distinguished engineer titles, with the former being at a higher technical level. Ranade, however, believes Intel’s new system is more in line with terminology used in other areas of the technology industry.

Intel established the title of “Chief Expert” in 1980 to recognize employees with outstanding technical achievements. The term fellow itself has academic roots: scientific societies and later engineering organizations have traditionally used it to designate the most authoritative representatives of their fields. As IBM, Texas Instruments, Intel and other technology companies began to create separate career paths for technology specialists, Fellows took on a unique corporate meaning—an engineer recognized by his peers as one of the leading authorities in his field.

In semiconductor companies, the title “Principal Specialist” typically has comparable pay, resources, and influence to that of a Vice President (VP) or Senior Vice President (SVP), but allows the individual to develop a technical career path without moving into a management position. It’s unclear whether Intel’s new distinguished engineers will retain a similar amount of resources and organizational influence. The issue is particularly relevant amid a major reorganization of the company’s management structure, during which Intel eliminated 250 of approximately 450 vice president positions.

Over the years, Intel’s “principal expert” title has been awarded to many of the company’s famous engineers. These include Marcian Hoff, one of the creators of the Intel 4004, the first commercial microprocessor, supercomputer developer Justin Rattner, Mark Bohr, one of Intel’s key process experts, Yan Borodovsky, an expert in implementing new lithography technologies, and Ajay Bhatt, one of the creators of USB (who also participated in the development of AGP and PCI Express). Boris Babayan, one of the founders of the Soviet Elbrus architecture and who came to Intel in 2004, was also awarded the title of Fellow.

Historically, Intel research scientists have had very specific organizational and positional value because, in many cases, they have been key players in solving Intel’s strategic and tactical technical problems but have not held formal leadership positions. From now on, Intel wants its best engineers to take responsibility for business decisions and essentially become managers. This may mean an intentional shift away from the old research laboratory model, which valued scientific authority and long-term research, toward engineers whose status was determined by the product, its implementation, and measurable business impact.