> "I also supported cloud computing, participating in 110 customer meetings, and created a company-wide strategy to win back the cloud with 33 specific recommendations, in collaboration with others across 6 organizations."
Man people keep count of this stuff?! Maybe I should too, it does make flexing easier.
If you look at many of his recent blog entries, it is clear he has felt the need to quantify his impact to prove he isn’t less effective as a remote employee in Australia working for a company in the US.
A "goodbye" post after only 3.5 years. Hard to relate.
In my world it's hard to imagine an impact after that short of a time. And in fact, reading the list of accomplishments ("interviewed by the Wall Street Journal") makes it clear it's a good PR piece.
I'm perfectly willing to believe he's fabulous, but this didn't move the needle for me.
For other people, they're going to be thinking "some other company is going to get one of the most effective and impactful performance engineers on the planet".
Dude shipped flamegraphs (which he also created in 2011) for cloud GPU loads and persuaded internal stakeholders to release the code as open source.
The "interviewed by the WSJ" line is for managers. Reading between the lines, I'd say he did really well and, if he didn't do better, it's because the organisation didn't let him.
> "I also supported cloud computing, participating in 110 customer meetings, and created a company-wide strategy to win back the cloud with 33 specific recommendations, in collaboration with others across 6 organizations."
Man people keep count of this stuff?! Maybe I should too, it does make flexing easier.
If you look at many of his recent blog entries, it is clear he has felt the need to quantify his impact to prove he isn’t less effective as a remote employee in Australia working for a company in the US.
Use gcalcli to search for meetings with customer invited. That's it! Also, for an engineer that isn't in sales, 110 customer meetings is A LOT.
"Count your meetings"
Wouldn't hurt to try!
A "goodbye" post after only 3.5 years. Hard to relate.
In my world it's hard to imagine an impact after that short of a time. And in fact, reading the list of accomplishments ("interviewed by the Wall Street Journal") makes it clear it's a good PR piece.
I'm perfectly willing to believe he's fabulous, but this didn't move the needle for me.
It didn't move the needle for you.
For other people, they're going to be thinking "some other company is going to get one of the most effective and impactful performance engineers on the planet".
Dude shipped flamegraphs (which he also created in 2011) for cloud GPU loads and persuaded internal stakeholders to release the code as open source.
The "interviewed by the WSJ" line is for managers. Reading between the lines, I'd say he did really well and, if he didn't do better, it's because the organisation didn't let him.
Hats off to Brendan!
A periodic reminder Intel is still in business.
Congratulations. A fulfilling life.
Intel losing great people at high speed. Not the first, not the last.
I'm guessing he'll land at one of the big frontier model companies. I'm surprised he stayed at Intel as long as he did, they are dying fast.
In the photo of him on his last day [0], there's a cassette deck on his desk.
That could be something mundane, but I'd like to believe something crazy happens if you yell at it [1]...
[0] https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/images/2025/brendanoffice2...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
> cassette deck on his desk
Greybeard reporting for duty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette
Terrible news from Intel, this guy seems like the best performance engineer on the planet
Where do you think he's going next? OpenAI? Google? Just saving 1% on inference could probably justify his salary 100fold
Definitely feels like someplace with GPUs that will let him work remotely.
Extra slash in the url
I’m wonder how much longer Intel will be around. It seems to be dying a slow death like Kodak or IBM at this point.
Intel still sells a ton of silicon.
Lindy[1] will make sure it stays around for a while.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
"death" can be pretty slow - IBM has $60B in revenue and 270K employees.
And their financial/stock performance has been pretty good the past couple of years.
When Shakespeare wrote "cowards die many times before their deaths", he had Intel in mind.