Samsung Electronics cultural issues causing disasters in foundry, LSI, DRAM
semianalysis.substack.comAs a Samsung employee, I've been continuously being disappointed by the company culture. Recently, the company introduced a new policy that prohibits phone usage while walking inside the company building, due to "safety concerns". Samsung employed ~20 safety guards to supervise and monitor phone usage throughout the campus and if you're caught by them, you will be warned. If you are caughted twice, your team lead will be notifed of the incident. If you are caught three times or more, you are required to watch an educational video and submit a written apology. I could not believe such a policy could emerge from the very company that makes smartphones. Samsung even had a TV commercial highlighting phone usage on the road!
Under such a restrictive and top-down culture like this, I believe nothing interesting can emerge. I can only expect the downfall of the company. Nowadays I'm trying to work as little as possible and desperately searching for other jobs.
I’ve worked at a company Samsung ended up buying. Exactly as you describe: humiliating, alienating, and infantilizing. Never ever again. And I won’t buy Samsung anything if I can help it because I saw how the software is made… it’s appalling in quality. No thanks.
After giving up on Nokia and friends complaining about Moto and Pixel, its brothers in stock Android, I switched to Samsung and felt it was a massive improvement. If I'm refusing to buy Chinese brands and iPhone and stuck to models available in India, what are my choices?
If any apps work on the Samsung phone, it's because of the app developers' sweat, tears and cursing when they work around the phone-specific bugs that seem to be different for each model. Even Huawei and Xiaomi are better than that.
Source: I work an audio-related mobile app. The audio engine code is littered with comments that read like "On phone X, Y happens and we do Z to work around it". In about 75% of the cases X is some Samsung model. And before you ask, X is the phone it was discovered on so there's no guarantee that the same issues don't occur on other phones but somehow Samsung is the name that always pops up.
I've not really had issues with the Pixel. This is anecdata, but I've had the 2 and currently have the 4a. My wife has the 5. We've had zero issues with them (except for stuff we did ourselves, like cracking the screens) over the past 4-ish years.
I had the 1. The battery died after 2 years but it had already stopped receiving Android updates at that point. The 4a has been good so far but around here the 4a and 5a had really poor availability.
Yeah I guess I should have added in the caveat that I've never owned a phone in 15 years that has lasted more than 2 years due to some kind of mishap. Usually a broken screen or water damage.
On a side note, My favorite phone I've ever had was an LG Envy 3. It was about the size of the palm of my hand and, closed, had a 1.25" screen and a standard 9-key keypad. It could also flip open to reveal a full qwerty keyboard and a 3" screen with some respectable stereo speakers.
Have you heard of Purism or Fairphone? Not sure if they work in India though. Maybe this is an angle for India to enter the market.
Sony?
What makes you think that it is any different elsewhere?
I've worked elsewhere. Samsung is in the bottom tier for every dimension that matters to quality (of life and of products).
As a data point: Sony, Panasonic, LG, etc… all try to have calibrated TVs that match the director’s intent. As in, the colours and contrast are defined in the standards, and they strive to show them accurately. They do cheat a little bit and have a “demo” mode the cranks up the saturation and brightness in store to compensate for the overhead lighting.
Samsung takes that cheating to 11 and there is no way to turn it off. It’s not “store mode”. It’s permanently “enhanced” to the point of absurdity.
They just don’t care enough to have two modes.
>the colours and contrast are defined in the standards, and they strive to show them accurately
Not to defend Samsung, but this isn't such an objectively straightforward task as you make it sound. It's impossible, in the general case, to convert colors from one colorspace to another without information loss. So there's an element of subjectivity and judgement in selecting the algorithm used. In other words, they're all "enhanced", and your complaint is simply that Samsung has poor taste.
Of course this all assumes that the display is doing its own color management. This is exactly what you want with a standalone TV, but for a computer display you really want to just provide the computer with the ICC profile and give it the lowest-level access to the pixel values possible, so that the user can assume control over the rendering intent - for that you'd want some kind of "direct mode". It's quite right to criticize Samsung if they do not offer such a mode, but are the other brands any better? The trend for TVs seems to lead away from being good general purpose displays, and towards being standalone devices.
> the general case, to convert colors from one colorspace to another without information loss.
Even in the general case that's not true for new televisions: These typically convert from a smaller space to a large one, which can be done 100% losslessly and accurately as intended.
This is quite common, because as TV panel capabilities have largely outstripped the distribution and encoding standards. For example, Rec.709 (the HD standard) is smaller than what any modern 4K TV can display.
The 4K Rec.2020 standard is huge, but it only exceeds typical panel capabilities along the green axis. This may seem like conversion would be lossy, but if you look carefully at video metadata, it ofen specifies that the "content gamut" is smaller. That is, most modern 4K HDR content is mastered on a display that "merely" has a gamut like Display P3, so that's all you need to reproduce it 1:1.
None of this is done by Samsung. They always stretch colours up to the maximum capability of the panel. These days, that's very close to the full Rec.2020 gamut and looks downright garish. Even if "AI enhanced" or whatever, it's wrong. Colours are distorted and nowhere near the original intent.
You can definitely turn off the "enhance" on the Samsungs...
If the feature is there, it's better hidden than others. Some time ago when I was shopping for a TV, it looked like every brand's demo mode hurt my eyes (Samsung was the worst but not only one). On Sony I was able to find the "Cinema Pro" mode that looks quite nice under a minute. And no, I couldn't figure out how to disable microphone or SambaTV so the Sony will never be connected to Internet.
Using it? Samsung software (see e.g smart TV) is incredibly unreliable.
I know this anecdotal and related but directly on-point, but here I go anyway...
About 12 years ago, I consulted, on-site, for about a year with a Japanese company with a very very very untrusting corporate culture. (I was consulting on electronics and firmware.)
Every USB port on every computer was super-glued shut (yes, I know...) And literally 100% of the internet traffic went over a T1 (for those of you just out of diapers, that is a 1.5 Mbps line) to Tokyo and back. Corporate saw every bit of internet activity.
This company, when I talked with the VP of engineering, told me "we have flexible work hours; you can take lunch 12:00-12:30, or 12:30-1:00pm. As long as you're back at your desk within 5 minutes of lunch end, we will not be required to make note of it"
Man that was a horrible gig. But I made enough $$$ to overcome the agony. I have so many consulting stories... my daughters keep telling me I need to write a book.
"When Bill and Michelle ruined a conference room table"
"When Jayanthi [no I'm not changing her name] had a meltdown and threw a sharp object at the head of a subordinate"
"When Tom impregnated his secretary during his divorce, and was basically forced to marry her the day after his divorce was finalized"
"When I put a choke hold on a corporate security guard who incorrectly identified a computer peripheral in my backpack as confidential company property"
I think the 100 people who bought the book would really enjoy it
That would probably be a popular book given how well A.G. Martinez's Chaos Monkeys has sold.
> … submit a written apology.
What the hell kind of mentality is this?
I’ve been in a workplace that cracked down on phone use. Everyone was pissed. I considered carrying a small block of wood painted black in act of subversion.
I had to do worse than that when I worked for a Japanese company (with a Korean-Japanese president). I was forced by him to apologize to the entire assembled staff for a 'big mistake that I had made'. Except it wasn't really my mistake it was a foundry change which caused a timing change that affected the code in a vendor's startup for a chip we were using. I was so burned out from crunching on the project (14 hour days) to reverse engineer and fix it fast enough for the president to be happy...
I really won't be working in japan I think LOL
> What the hell kind of mentality is this?
sighs Traditional Asian mentality. I, and definitely many others, hate it, but it's definitely not just Samsung.
people getting a slight glimpse of korean work culture, top-down old school butts in the seat type stuff. it's changing but there's a long way to go.
But they had to get to where they are now somehow. It's hard to believe this exact company culture could habe achieved anything more involved than cloning overseas electrical devices like toasters and microwaves. So was the culture different in the past in some way at least? Like, at least having more technically knowledgeable people in upper management, if not more creative freedom for engineers et al?
I'd like to believe the process has to be at least a little bit similar to how agile, innovative and leading companies in the West can within a decade or two turn into stiff, burocratic slow moving behemoths that at best manage to buy any upcoming competition instead of innovating on its own.
if you have a good leader at the helm then the top down approach can be beneficial because you can cut through a lot of the BS. IMO it's like how democracies aren't really about the best leadership but being able to remove a bad apple.
i'd say that how SK was structured after the war allowed them to flourish, basically a dictator appointing diff people into diff industries and having a state-sponsored acceleration. add to that a drive to succeed and fight and you can somewhat see the building blocks of their success. how SK has progressed is a miracle story.
now that they are seeing the fruits of their labor my guess is you have the "parasites" coming up trying to jockey for position. or with chaebols (these big family dynasties that own a lot of industry in SK) they have their kids/family members who may or may not be competent taking over. essentially what made something like samsung takes a lot to sustain into the next generation.
Drug dealers are equally strict about their employees getting high off the supply.
Why are you so desperate to use your phone?
This is a rule in many manufacturing environments. Intel has had the same exact rule for a very long time.
Does Intel also enforce such a rule to office workers, like Samsung does? I can partly understand the desire to control accidents in manufacturing environments, but we're not exactly at such a place. Samsung's rule is applied to all workers regardless of campus, including the inside of a building consisting of mostly software engineers and office workers. It almost feels like the company wants social equality among employees or something.
Intel's rule was against corporate espionage, so probably? They eventually allowed phones with the cameras drilled out.
All Asian Fabs pretty much ban all smart phones - you have to leave them outside and/or you have to use a "dumb" phone. Laptops, USB drives, etc. are absolute verboten as a vendor or contractor and usually employees as well who have to smuggle them in to get work done. If you violate these bans as a contractor or vendor, YOUR ENTIRE COMPANY can be banned from doing business indefinitely.
A Samsung employee in one of the overseas research centers. I'm not sure about this at all. The most that is restricted is one cannot shoot pictures - either camera lens gets a cover (paper sticker) or the camera is blocked using MDM.
This is practice in many companies and I hear at Apple it is even more restrictive at certain places.
Not able to use phone I never heard or experienced. We regularly test out apps in phone, test out devices (non test ones), we test competition ones, etc. And when one can get on a Zoom or Team's call, what use is restricting phone usage.
Espionage is a very real and major risk in competitive businesses such as leading edge semiconductor or companies like Apple.
2 things here: 1. use a headphone, it is easier, it allows you to walk safer and with a better body posture and 2. my apology for such an incident is "it will not happen again, 'cause I am leaving". I understand and obey safety rules, but not random rules companies can pull any moment in time.
Stay off your damn phone while you're walking.
>In other cases, Samsung LSI executives even seem to be blaming the change in Korean labor laws. Rather than hitting crunch time and having engineers do absurd hours, employees are supposed to be limited to 52 hours a week, maximum. While we hear this is not being adhered to fully, it has cut down on the overworking of many Samsung engineers. The pushback from Samsung is so strong that there is even legislation being pushed to to relax these labor laws.
Aah yes. The sign of entirely level-headed and well-managed companies is when they blame the fact that they can't 996 their skilled workers.
This is a bit of a hot topic in Korea. I don’t agree with abolishing the 52 hour law but what the opposition is proposing is being able to crunch for a period and take the days off later which is more reasonable than 996 all the times.
For me 52 hours already sound like a crunch. Regular schedule should be more like 35-40.
I agree I do around 35… and can’t imagine doing 52 every week. This is probably why young Koreans call their country hell,“Hell-Choseon”.
Do they have a limit on how long you can crush, or how soon after a crush you need to have taken the time off?
More to the point, Korean and Japanese work cultures heavily disincentivise taking that time off. So even if workers can technically take this time off later, they'll be punished if they do.
The work culture at Samsung being toxic is something I have some familiarity with, as I used to know some folks who were working there. It’s a very top down company and the lower tier folks aren’t necessarily encouraged to question things, but more of a “do as I say”.
The legislation aspect is really concerning but not surprising as chaebols have an iron grip on the Korean economy.
Tough times for Samsung, but in a lot of ways, you yield (pun intended) what you sow.
I used to work at SAS and can corroborate the "top down" nature of the organization.
"We just need to copy Korea" is not a good narrative if you want to keep high-quality American engineers interested in a long term career path with you.
I lasted barely 3 years before the lack of volition got to me. Went to contract for a video game developer afterwards (huge pay cut) just to clear my mind and reconnect with reality.
Went to contract for a video game developer to clear my mind and reconnect with reality.
Damn, that's really saying something about your former employer.
If you wrote about your experience, I (at least) would certainly read it.
Honestly, the overall experience wasn't that bad. I did get a lot out of those 3 years.
To put things into perspective, not many people ever get to set foot inside of a leading-edge fab. I've been inside multiple, both in America & Korea. I've been able to sit in meetings with engineers across the entire spectrum and participate in multi-national system upgrade efforts.
The best way to describe the whole experience is like working inside a starship. Genuinely, it feels incredible to walk into that room and see billions of dollars of the most sophisticated hardware on earth all working together in relentless harmony. Simply sitting in the engineering offices and seeing the real-time logs scrolling gives you a sense for the monstrosity just a few firewalls over. The techniques & hardware are exotic by default everywhere. It almost never gets old.
But, just like all good things this experience fades with time. I wanted to build new amazing things and being one mere engineering pleb inside this gigantic organization makes that a difficult gambit. Perhaps if the organization was willing to explore more experimental / "internal startup" style work, I could be compelled to review future opportunities. There were plenty of problems to solve but getting a design meeting or a piece of IT infra to run something on were nearly impossible during my time there.
I too worked at SAS early in my career, for about half a decade. It was a wild time; I learned a lot, rubbed shoulders with some incredibly bright people, got to visit the Kiheung fabs. I'm not at all surprised by the story, however, especially the scapegoating and fingerpointing when things go badly. The two things that ultimately made me leave were (1) there was no path to become an advanced IC, it was pretty well accepted that you'd burn out or go into management, and if you didn't you'd eventually get laid off and (2) being constantly told that American engineers were "not diligent" and that my 60+ hours per week, 24/7/365 pager carry, and mandatory weekend coverage, were not adequate. When your co-workers joke about taking PTO to leave early at 18:00, it's not a joke.
This is where being a vendor (at a distance) tends to be as close as you want to get to some customers and their culture. Being a vendor is probably the best way to achieve that kind of "influence/innovation" in a company like Samsung.
> It’s a very top down company and the lower tier folks aren’t necessarily encouraged to question things, but more of a “do as I say”.
Asking as someone who has 0 experience with either, but this is how I’ve heard Apple works too? If so, why is Apple doing well while Samsung is not?
That’s not at all the impression I get from interviews and reports by former Apple employees (0)(1). They almost always have huge respect for the execs they worked for. Bear in mind all the Apple execs for engineering groups are themselves engineers. It’s a highly disciplined and focused organisation, but that’s not the same thing as top down and good engineering is highly prized.
Take Steve Jobs. He was infamous for his perfectionism. But on the other hand he trusted his team. When several of his execs insisted that they should build an App Store, which he initially opposed, he folded and let them do it. He once said there’s no point hiring A grade engineers and then telling them what to do and how to do it. I hire A grade engineers so they can tell me.
(0) https://donmelton.com/archives/ (1) https://youtu.be/N8Vz1BeymHE
Steve Jobs is an aberration. I wouldn’t count on anything related to him being true now that he’s gone.
I had a friend that was interviewing with Apple. Apparently the orgs are so siloed that the teams that wanted him didn’t know about each other. It appears to be a very rigid sort of organization.
Apple has had significant hardware missteps too, such as the butterfly keyboard. Presumably some executive ordered "make it thinner" and did not accept any pushback!
That executive's name was Jonathan Ive, and he should have owned his mistake.
They pushed him out(unofficially from what I heard)...the guy behind the iMac, iPod, iPhone and many other iconic devices. I'd gather that he has been forced to own the mistake.
Owning something and being forced to own it are not the same thing.
On the other hand, Apple is very good at reverting their mistakes and pretending they never happened. Who remembers the single button mouse, hockey puck mouse, iPod dock connector, emojibar without physical esc key, USB-C as the only connector and others?
Even in the Bay Area, the Samsung culture is extremely top-down and overwork focused. I’ve heard too many stories of whole departments needing to throw everything out and build something totally different at the very end of year-long projects because on an executive’s whims. On the other hand their cafeteria food is supposedly very good (especially if you like Korean and Japanese).
> ..whole departments needing to throw everything out and build something totally different..
The big reason for that is any overseas research center like SRA (Samsung Research America) works on future, whereas Korea works on current. When working on future features or tech, it is all about bets and experimentation. And these are wont to fail or be wrong quite frequently.
> the Samsung culture is extremely top-down and overwork focused
Allow me to add some context. The Samsung culture could be described as militaristic, with accompanying rank and ceremony, therefore I can see how you identified the top-down chain-of-command relationships.
[edited]
I genuinely have no idea what this appeal to ancient cultural authority is meant to convey, especially since virtually everyone was destitute and had no human rights for the overwhelming majority of human history.
That a preindustrial society existed for 5,000 years with very little change has no bearing at all on how a multinational business ought to be run in a modern society. In fact, I would argue that technological advances became possible precisely because we blew apart many of these entrenched power structures.
As someone who grew up overseas, I can tell you that most of the world does not feel as you do. Cultural differences and identities go far in explaining the reason why things are the way they are. And the rest of the world doesn't shy away from it.
I am sure that what you wrote is true from your perspective and have therefor edited my comment so as to not produce discomfort.
Of course as American employees of the American branch office you might draw comparisons between the work culture there and other, similar tech companies in America and factor this into your valuation of the employer in question.
i feel like you’ve made a point here that, if you phrased a little differently, would’ve been an interesting addition to the conversation.
This (top level story) is a reflection of _SAMSUNG_ (particularly SEC-SLSI) culture. There are certainly elements of Korean culture, but it is for example VERY different from LG culture. I don't understand why there's a reason to jump to 5000 years of history for criticism of a part of a company that's having problems... apparently with truthful internal communication.
I think most people would accept that Intel has/had similar problems based in financial optimization, but that doesn't directly reflect on 5000 years of western culture.
but that doesn't directly reflect on 5000 years of western culture.
There hasn't even been 5000 years of western culture...
I believe the Classical Greek era is usually considered the roots of Western Civilization, so roughly 2500 years.
But if you go back to the Early Greek era of the Minoan civilizations then it is about 5000 years.
It's all slow, gradual accretion though, so you can draw the line in lots of places.
Wouldn’t you have to go back to Mesopotamia to get 5000 years? And I’m not sure if that is really considered western.
No, Minoan gets you close to 5000, again depending on where you draw line. 5500 if you go back to its roots, hard to call that a civilization, maybe around 4500 if you're looking for something like precursor to cities in the form of small centers of trade. 4000 for examples of writing. Although with remains like that you never know if they simply used less durable materials before hand, or if none have been found yet.
Either way, on any of those benchmarks Mesopotamia precedes it by at least a few centuries or more, though Minoan does get you back pretty far. I don't know the migration patterns, but I think there was influence from Mesopotamia.
Classical Greece ~2500 years is probably often where the line is drawn because that's where some of the foundational works of culture, philosophy, and math had their start and became founding members of the "Western Canon". For millenia, students were trained in Greek and Latin and read the great works of those time periods. But there was a civilization that gradually evolved into that time period, complete with it's own Dark Ages before things climbed back up to what became Classical.
There hasn’t been 5000 years of any culture tbh
Australian aborigines have over 50000 years of culture behind them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indigenous_Australi...
Very off-topic, but it's one of the most shameful episodes in Western, British, and Australian history. Almost 200 years of racism, persecution, forced assimilation, kidnapping children and putting them into religious institutions, and a lot more - and it was only in 2008 that the Australian govt cared to apologize. Incredible cultures, incredible wealth of lifestyles, ideas, beliefs - almost destroyed in the name of "making [Aboriginal people] more civilized and industrious".
Yes, the glorious Western civilization did the same pretty much everywhere, but Australian Aboriginal people's culture is unique due to their very long period of isolation - it's a gem and wonder worth studying and learning from. Yet, the Western instinct was to trample on and destroy it, systematically, irreversibly, just for the sake of it. Reading the Wiki page you linked some time back literally left me in tears. How could we. I don't even.
Even further off topic, but you may be surprised to learn how much culture the imperial powers erased within their own countries. Take a country like France: it's hard to believe that French wasn't the majority language until almost the 20th century. Now look at it - many of the regional languages are extinct or endangered with French overwhelmingly dominant. Think that this was a peaceful and consensual process? Think again!
Yes, that's very true, thanks for making that point.
I'd like to add that it's never too late to try to preserve these cultures, traditions and languages. Getting interested to the ones of your place of residence, even if you're not from there originally, can be a great experience.
One of the best ways to do it is through singing and dancing (they go great together), and more generally, there are often chorals and various groups dedicated to these cultures, traditions and languages.
And indeed when you get into this kind of thing, you realize how much culture has been erased (in my case, the Occitan culture), but also you can see how much is left, and how important it is to preserve it.
It also helps a lot when reflecting on our own modern, imposed, culture, and realize that some of the things we think have always been there, have not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egypt
Co-opted first by Alexander, then Caesar. Later Napoleon also dropped by ...
Seems to have slipped everybody's mind here, strangely.
The implication here is that Modern Egypt and Ancient Egypt are the same culture, which isn’t true by any real definition since as you mentioned Egyptian culture was Hellenized centuries before the Romans showed up (and semi-Persianized centuries prior to that.)
This is like claiming the Islamic Republic of Iran is the same culture as ancient Persia.
Stonehenge dates from 3000BC
And we have little idea who build it and for what. I expect at least those basics down for anything to be called part of our culture. At least for back-dating purposes.
Some would say there haven't been any.
You work for a shitty boss but the cafetería is nice!
Yep, food is nice where I work too, but it's not what keeps me around. A great workplace except for bad/no food is worth brown bagging it, going off-site to a random franchise, ordering delivery, etc.
The SRA caf was super nice, and extremely subsidized... It was a nice trip out there.
Samsung losing out to Mediatek is pretty hilarious on its own, given that Mediatek was once known for ultra-cheap, piss poor performing crap [1] and copyright issues [2]. Back some years when I had one of the first CAT rugged phones, which was based on Mediatek, I happened to look at a kernel code dump from them on Github and had I known back then what I know today I could have easily netted me some decent payout for local root exploits.
I don't really know what's more absurd, that Samsung managed to fall behind these guys or that MediaTek actually managed to get a grip on quality well enough to rival and surpass Samsung, a multi billion dollar conglomerate.
MediaTek is killing it. They hired a lot of people from TSMC's process development kit teams which vastly improved their capabilities in integrating IP. They were the first to develop AV1 decode, their modems are pretty decent. They even have leading teams in wifi.
It won't take much to be better to work with than brcm so let's hope they keep going.
Didn't Mediatek also hire open source developers (or at least one very notable one) to work on their wifi drivers in the mainline kernel?
In [2], I'm seeing sensors (not made by Mediatek), GPU drivers (Mali, ask arm on that one), and RF (usually regulatory; legalism?), and whatever else is in that textdump. Is there anything that actually does an analysis? Even the blog source eventually just said they didn't know.
MediaTek Dimensity 9000 uses TSMC 4nm process that is significantly superior than Samsung 4nm/5nm that Qualcomm/Samsung uses. Since everyone except Apple uses Cortex core, it can't lose for perf/watt on CPU. Maybe MediaTek's highend SoC won't be sold much so they can use TSMC process.
While Samsung's culture could be considered toxic, blaming their recent issues on culture would need more backing. Samsung has seen good growth and has been one of the top semiconductor companies for the past decade. It's not like their culture drastically changed in the recent years. It's the same "toxic" culture that got them here and blaming the culture for their recent hiccups just seem like a sensationalist writing.
Intel had toxic culture since Brian Krzanich took the lead in 2013, around the switch to 14nm.
His mistakes weren't seen clearly until almost 2019, when it became obvious 10nm was a disaster, and 14nm++++++++ was their only workable product.
We're still seeing it today as Intel has 250w TDP products competing with AMD 140w TDP products.
Semiconductors is a space where mistakes take a while to bit you.
Former Samsung head Lee Kun-hee had a heart attack in 2014, and his son Jay Y. Lee took over. I don't know if that had any effect on the alleged culture problems the article talks about.
Semiconductors is a space where mistakes take a while to bit you.
Although as we've seen with AMD, it is possible to come back from them. With the right course correction, Samsung is diversified enough to tough things out. Didn't they have a massive turnaround sometime in the 80's too?
It's interesting. I read about how Samsung learned and followed a lot of processes from Boeing and lately Boeing has been faltering quite a bit and Samsung seems to be following suit.
AMD completely left the semiconductor manufacturing space and it took them like a decade to get their chip designs in a good place.
You can also read that as trying to do both might be too broad for a smaller company to tackle. Apple is a clear example of how chip design and chip manufacturing don't need to be linked and may in fact hinder.
Most folks blame the culture shift on Paul actually. He was the cause of it all. Brian being a horrible symptom of what he created, and Brian definitely propagated it far.
This is an odd stance to take. Just look at Boeing. Unless you were directly involved with Boeing, you likely weren't aware of the cultural issues in the company. Up until the Max crisis, it looked like a successful, well-run business. Cultural issues can fester for a long time and get worse and worse before they finally reveal themselves in poor performance, accidents or other issues later on. In Boeing's case, it's been a growing issue since the late 90s.
Seems not that far-fetched for Samsung to be facing cultural issues as well and that a company can be successful despite them for a long time. It seems like it's finally catching up to them as their competition becomes stronger.
Al Jazeera did an investigation into Boeing ages ago (I think pre 2013) that convinced me there were problems.
My memory is fairly poor, but I'm confident I'd heard complaints about management's move out of Seattle and the resulting disconnect with engineering causing problems for many years.
I've heard about issues coming out of Samsung for years too. I don't think these are things nobody knows about, but often they're not exactly common knowledge. Often it's hearsay and rumours from unconfirmed sources with the occasional article that goes under in all the noise or is otherwise brushed aside by the larger public. It's very hard to judge how accurate or relevant a certain news report is, or how biased or misinformed it might be, so it's easier to dismiss it.
Success can cover a lot of failures. But once there is a hiccup or competition catches up the true scale of the problems can suddenly become apparent.
See: Pentium 4
Companies have employee turnovers. Maybe it wasn't toxic to previous employees, but is toxic to current employees.
It has been clear to us for years that Samsung has baaad internal communication issues. When you're at the forefront of technology, you're bound to trip up as bets and explorations don't pan out. Humans being humans, mistakes will happen, but they must be recognized to be corrected and prevented in the future.
It's clear that Samsung culture prevents people from admitting mistakes, which of course only leads to more of them as stress builds up.
I remember the Samsung Galaxy Note battery problems, and how apparently it was clear to people outside Samsung what the problem was (too tight a clearance a the corners in the case for the batteries, causing bending of the internal electrodes, leading to short-circuits) before Samsung themselves recognized it.
You can't always be at the top, a sign of good culture is what happens when you slip.
Samsung keeps slipping.
> It has been clear to us for years that Samsung has baaad internal communication issues... It's clear that Samsung culture prevents people from admitting mistakes...
Jesus H. Christ on a fucking hockey stick. I doubt I've ever read such a breathless hit piece with so many unsupported assertions summarily presented as fact.
I worked for Samsung Semiconductor for ten years and left as a software engineering manager. None of these assertions and accusations in the comments here or below leveled at the people with whom I used to work ring true from my perspective.
Communication issues? Not admitting mistakes? Please... enlighten me. Tell me how we worked.
> Communication issues? Not admitting mistakes? Please... enlighten me. Tell me how we worked.
I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a satire or not. The forcefull and quite frankly agressive way you denied ever having a problem with admiting mistakes makes me think that there might be something to this allegiation.
Every company I ever worked with had occasional issues with communication, and even rarer issues with admiting mistakes. Large companies are also very uneven. Maybe the parts you worked in were great while the parts these other folks talk about were not so great? Either way swearing and writing in an unprofessional way is not the right way to go if you want to convince people about what you are saying.
> frankly agressive way you denied ever having a problem with admiting mistakes...
Respectfully, that is a straw man. I never made that claim.
I am saying that GGP's claim is unsupported and therefore baseless. Knowing myself exactly how things really work there, I read it as ignorant hyperbole.
To answer your questions, are there problems in Samsung? Samsung has the same problems with communication and admitting mistakes as other companies for whom I've worked of similar size. I've actually seen much worse at small companies, i.e. startups.
I personally never had issues at Samsung. I could directly communicate with anyone in the company and did so, often. When necessary, we coordinated work ahead of time, even after hours. It wasn't a problem.
I don't want to make it sound like working at Samsung was a walk in the park, because it wasn't. Samsung was by far the hardest job I've ever had. But working there taught me that with the right team and good teamwork, you can accomplish anything. We did some amazing things there.
It's an outright lie that disseminates. I bet you parent has never set foot in Samsung or has even interviewed for them. I bet you that they haven't even read past the headline seeing they are unable to actually cite the actual content or work experience at Samsung. How does someone on HN know more about Samsung from an article than somebody who has worked there?
Responding with swearing to unsubstantiated allegations about people you’ve worked with for decades is fine. It’s not even worthy of any response in my opinion and it’s a little sad that the armchair analysis has received so many upvotes.
> people you’ve worked with for decades
It's more an instance of "place where one has worked". Someone in that position at SAS simply doesn't have the experience to confirm or deny the sorts of things the article gets into. Not to equate being a software engineering manager with being a janitor, but it is, on some level, like asking a janitor what was really going on at Enron just because they were in the same building.
> The forcefull and quite frankly agressive way you denied ever having a problem with admiting mistakes makes me think that there might be something to this allegiation.
This is some amazing mental gymnastics! You should get into politics!
Maybe Samsung does not have a problem about admitting mistakes. But a problem about admitting mistakes in their problem admitting mistakes procedures. It's always the meta-problems that get you!
Again, this above comment shows people can twist anything into anything and will just stick to what confirms their bias.
I've worked with Samsung Semiconductor as a partner/customer and it did seem to me from the outside that there was a culture of not admitting mistakes/failings, and poor communication between different parts of the company (i.e. foundry to silicon engineering). Granted, you could say the same thing re: communication about many large companies -- I'm sure the same phenomenon occurs at Intel or IBM (back before they went fabless). Things may have been different on software teams vs. silicon/hardware teams.
I agree that the article is very lacking in substance and as you said, a hit piece. Yet there really seem to be a problem with Samsung's chips, especially their SoCs. They have underperformed for years now, and have always been inferior even in the high end (except maybe for the galaxy s6). That's despite repeated performance promises and a complete control over the entire production process (from design to fab to assembly). So what gives? I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on that especially since it's hard to find any legitimate information beyond rumors.
I was a software engineer and did not work in LSI, so I cannot comment on that in a way which would be most informative, but I will try from a different perspective. An accurate answer would be incredibly complex, obviously.
Samsung, from my perspective, mostly focuses on this year's production and developing next year's model. Yes, there is work done planning for new fabs and global supply chain systems, but 98% of cycles are spent on this year's production and designing next year's model.
Samsung accounts for a huge percentage of South Korea's GDP, about 20%. Therefore, Samsung needs to favor stability over taking risks associated with living at the bleeding-edge of innovation. Samsung always did play the safe game when I worked there (and for good reason when you're babysitting a $20 billion factory with $100 million of product that could be scrapped at any time).
Again, I wasn't in LSI but this is my perception overall having worked there, traveled to Korea and learned Korean culture.
Good thing the article even says Samsung is a well oiled machine in many areas outside of the ones with issues discussed in this article. Almost like large companies can have varrying success and culture.
Absolutely. It's a very complicated subject.
In many ways this is still true of Intel today. Like Samsung, their chips draw more power (even with "Intel 7" supposedly drawing parity to TSMC 7N) and are often slower than their competition's chips.
Maybe it's an IDM mindset issue? It seems the market has moved on to pure play foundries. For example, Nvidia's first fab partner was STMicro, an IDM, and Nvidia noted STMicro was unable to focus on being a fab partner. After that, Nvidia moved onto TSMC, also working with IBM, UMC, and Samsung at later points in time.
NB: Jason is referring to "S2" aka Samsung Austin Semiconductor. I'm familiar with Jason's previous comments in threads about Samsung, but outside of that I don't know him (even, say, by name). This makes sense, given the separation between the work of an SE manager and the actual day-to-day operations that are involved with getting wafers fabbed and shipped.
I worked at SAS in lots of different areas—Metro, Photo, and PIE (process integration).
The emotional defense above notwithstanding (which I'd characterize as not actually being supported, either...), SAS indeed has very, very deep cultural problems that make for a shockingly bad example of how to do engineering in a large organization. There are several factors contributing to this.
SAS doesn't treat information systems, or things IT-related generally, as an engineering concern. If it doesn't look like a materials science problem, SAS doesn't have the capacity to critically evaluate its impact on rates of production and yield.
Problems, though, range from lots of things, like:
- far too many things in-fab being handled with pen and paper
- reports that have to be tediously assembled manually, so they get sent out once a day, while realistically they should be available to an engineer at any given time (behind a button that generates them on the fly instead of throwing $45k/year technicians at the problem like a 1960s-era secretary pool)
- workers committed to this state of affairs remaining so indefinitely
- Conway-style balkanization and groups who have no idea what their role is ("are they asking me or are they telling me?")
- a bunch of dumb macho shit that is used to prevent critical productivity problems from being addressed because being lazy and not addressing it is somehow virtuous and not lazy—it's the application of basic engineering principles to eliminate a problem that's lazy!
- an effect that I have no way to describe except as the proliferation of mid-40s to 50s men of mediocre talent (to a degree that's even worse than what you can expect to see elsewhere, generally)
- an overreliance on the labor pool of people with military experience / government work for no reason other than they've been conditioned to survive in the kind of bureaucratic senselessness that SAS exemplifies
- unabashed credentialism, which gets people hired who shouldn't be
- Microsoft Office products being abused for everything—including areas where a different Microsoft Office product would be the most appropriate tool for the job (reaching for PowerPoint when the problem calls for Word—or any word processor)
- work showstoppers caused by truly ridiculous problems, like Windows crashing a half a dozen times a day; Caps Lock on a fab tool keeping people from remoting in from within the office, so they have to suit up, go into the fab, press the Caps Lock key, and return to their desk and resume work; lots of monkeying around just to share a file with someone, because everything has to be ferried through a proprietary document sharing system that amounts to a crippled, quasi-web-based thing that wants to be Windows Explorer-cum-Google Drive
- unit parts (i.e. manufacturing divisions) basically re-discovering/re-inventing the value version of control and implementing it in an ad hoc way for the tools that they ineract with, poorly—not to mention all opportunities for human error (which does happen regularly but no one does anything about it because 40% of the job is CYA and the CYA approach tends to be "don't let anyone find out this happened")
- tons of janky-ass software from S1, like "Simax", which is written in a proprietary Lisp-ish(?) that uses ActiveX to run in an IE9-10-11 window and that re-invents its own window management and basic form controls, was never fully localized into English (so you're clicking buttons with terse messages in Hangul that still don't make sense even if understanding the language is no problem), and times out and ends your session if you look away from it for 10 minutes (or whatever)
- overall just really bad engineering discipline; people putting wafers on hold and not being clear about they're expecting to do with them next or what they need someone else to do; people inventing new acronyms all over the place (because job security and also "mediocre talents") and using them liberally in the notes they do leave for others; people not documenting why something happened, which also happens to help when covering something up and hoping that no one has the time budget to untangle things to the point where it's obvious/incontrovertible that something did go wrong; also lots of people not having a dedicated workstation of their own, so when shifts change they have to be out of their seat so it can be ready—no putting in a little extra time to make sure that the kinds of fires that were put out that day won't just happen again tomorrow and the day after, ad infinitum
> - tons of janky-ass software from S1, like "Simax", which is written in a proprietary Lisp-ish(?) that uses ActiveX to run in an IE9-10-11 window and that re-invents window management and basic form controls, was never fully localized into English (so you're clicking buttons with terse messages in Hangul that still don't make sense even if understanding the language is no problem), and times out and ends your session if you look away from it for 10 minutes
I've always been surprised when I see things like this, from websites with all the controls reinvented to MDI-based Windows apps. Where do they get the _time_ and designer resources to waste all their time doing this?
Maybe I just learned programming in a different way, since one of the first things I learned was "laziness is a virtue".
These browser apps are relatively common inside Korean companies. The IE base dates to the pre-crypto-export days, when the Korean government mandated crypto be provided as an ActiveX module. This requires specialized secure input forms within the browser and within-browser error popups, so why not build a within-browser windowing system...
As a user, interfacing with these systems was always hell. Setting up online banking on a new computer would take the better part of a day, and would fail if you didn't have IE security exceptions set, if you were missing Korean font packs, or if your name was too long. And different ActiveX controls installs were required by every webapp. Our company (healthcare) finally rolled out a native Windows app in 2019. It includes its own floating tile manager, and for tasks like viewing PDFs, browser frames are now embedded in a tile...
I don't know the lineage of this particular system. But I have worked on janky systems in the past. In one instance, an intern built a language during a summer project. It was an expedient solution to a problem that a team was having, so they began using it. Then they put work into making it faster and integrating it to other systems. Eventually they wrapped a service interface around it and reexported it to other teams. But there were serious semantic problems with the language as a concept and with the technical implementation of the language. Once it had users who came to depend on its bugs, it became very hard to fix, and the whole mess became more convoluted as people tried to build sensible extensions on the rotten core.
It's finally gotten to the point where there is the action potential to fix it in my case, but for a lot of systems with a complex and expedient lineage like this, it never gets there. So garden well, I guess, is the takeaway.
Almost every instance of this I've come across can be described by repeated localized, short-term optimization.
No one ever sat down and said "How can I design a terrible system that's a pain in the ass to work with and unable to be extended?"
Everyone sat down and said "How can I make that one thing that's actually my job faster?"
sometimes people also sit down and ask "how can I build a platform to do this kind of thing so expanding and maintaining that platform can be my new job here?"
Sometimes that's the end result, but I'd question if that's frequently the actual goal.
Never ascribe to malice, that which can be described by laziness, etc.
It seems like it would take more work to specifically design a system to ensure job security than to just haphazardly design without coherent architecture, and consequently be the only one who understands it.
Your experience closely matches what I’ve seen in another Korean company, in a different industry. Tedious manual reports (for cover your ass reasons), PowerPoint used for everything, crap internal tools because of a strong ‘not invented here’ culture, mid 40s to 50s guys of mediocre talent but often inflated egos, and so on. Thanks for typing it up.
I've personally known a number of SAS employees and even more secondhand. My general impression was that it was dysfunctional.
One guy I know works 6 days a week, Monday-Saturday. He goes in on work around 2pm Sunday to get caught up. This isn't the 'crunch' schedule. It's just his regular work schedule.
I hear what you're saying and I totally get your frustration. Many of my co-workers also shared similar frustrations.
In a massive operation running 24/7 that never stops to catch its breath, it's chaotic. There are certain techniques I adopted that helped me be successful there, but I definitely understand your frustrations.
> In a massive operation running 24/7 that never stops to catch its breath, it's going to be chaotic.
No, it isn't. Describing it like this is needless apologetics.
The "chaos" is not even necessarily the worst part of the problem. It's these kinds of just-so dismissals that have the effect of framing the chaos as somehow unavoidable—the response that goes, roughly, you'll learn; this a natural consequence of what we're doing; it's a big operation, and this is what it looks like when you play with the big boys. I can tell you: I am a big boy. I have too much experience to the contrary for these casting couch excuses to work. Much of the day-to-day toil at Samsung is inexcusable and entirely avoidable. There is no excuse, for example, for dealing with version control in a billion dollar manufacturing operation like we're living in 1995 or a neverending sophomore-level group project.
I liked your framing of version control requiring a culture of encouraging admission of failure.
I'd never looked at it that way, and it succinctly describes why the least devops-mature organizations I've worked with have been those that heavily penalize any admission of failure. And vice versus.
Cultures where failure is punished are just the worst. It’s not just the vain pursuit of something unachievable (systems will break) but all the effort involved in covering up rather than simply admitting the problem and then coming up with solutions to fix it/not repeat it. It’s a lost opportunity to improve the system.
Unfortunately, without active checks and balances, orgs will tend to the blame game. Avoiding it requires an org-wide commitment to openness around failures.
I genuinely hope you can appreciate how funny this exchange was, in which you asserted there were no problems, someone pointed out a bunch of specific problems, and then you said "sure, I knew about all those problems".
Ok, so what's the origin of the problem? Over the last ten years I've seen Samsung's reputation absolutely plummet. In many areas such as home appliances it's now a joke, and people tell each other to avoid it. A decade ago it seemed to have the same feeling as Sony and now people say "Samsung" with a sigh.
> unsupported assertions
What else could there be?? Do you think the company will release this information in a press release??? Do you think people will put their names to these criticisms??
Could you tell us how you worked?
Just to clarify, is this with or without Aaron Franklin brisket for lunch?
This has shot right over my head, but as a google suggests the place is well regarded, I’m going to say ‘with’…
We worked hard and we worked well together. We did whatever it took to succeed. Sometimes that meant working 20 hours days on some global supply chain project. I worked with a lot of really great people and a lot of terrific engineers. Best users I've ever had.
Given what I know about Samsung in Austin, I'm pretty sure you're not paying nearly enough to justify anything close to 20 hours a day. Just because you work with "great people" on "a global supply chain project" doesn't sound like anywhere I'd ever want to work, and it seems like the attrition numbers I've seen agree with that.
> doesn't sound like anywhere I'd ever want to work
What if I threw in a brisket from Franklin's and told you I would be your pal
Imagine looking back at 20 hour days fondly. And you were an engineering manager. Nobody does good work 10+ hours into a shift. 20 hour days are good for one thing, allowing your boss to understaff teams with no consequence.
>too tight a clearance a the corners in the case for the batteries, causing bending of the internal electrodes, leading to short-circuits
That turned out not to be the cause. https://news.samsung.com/global/infographic-galaxy-note7-wha...
The page you linked says this:
> The negative electrode was deflected within the upper-right corner of the battery
Maybe better clearance would have prevented that from causing a short?
I've heard Samsung gives new VP level heads of divisions a year to be a success, or they are canned. So if a division isn't a success when the leader comes in, a year probably isn't enough in high technology, so a VP/director churn happens.
Is this true? That model would NOT work for semiconductors, where each fab generation is a bit of a hit or miss, but the game requires that you gamble.
I have written something similar on Semiwiki in 2016 arguing against Daniel how Samsung had problems. And my bet in ~2018 that Samsung wont be able to compete against TSMC turns out to be completely right. It wasn't because I had any technical or insider information. It was only because I knew Samsung, the company, its character and its culture far too well. Unfortunately Google and the internal search function doesn't show up and I can't quote myself back.
But the problem isn't internal communication though. It was Samsung Foundry's "sales and marketing" over promise and under deliver. To give them credit they were throwing insane amount of money trying to compete with TSMC. People on HN / Reddit / SemiWiki or whatever forum keep asking why TSMC isn't raising price. Well you should thank Samsung for that. ( But they are also the ones who HN / Reddit / Internet accuse them of NAND / DRAM cartel, guess where those profits went? ).
I also think the DRAM and NAND concern are overblown. It has been well known Samsung took the bet to move forward with EUV earlier than other industry vendors aka SK Hynix and Micron. It is not like Micron is going to go straight to EUV and enjoy the advantage over Samsung. Samsung are also not moving forward with EUV on their NAND product. The only concern would be if Micron decided to increase their capacity and build new Fabs. Otherwise, just like any other commodities ( Corn, Steel, Lumber, whatever ), they are Supply and Demand limited. So from a technical perspective they may be losing, from a business perspective things are still within control. In case anyone wants to compare this to Intel's 14nm, the two are extremely different and their market operate in a completely different manner. Hence why TSMC's founder and ex-CEO Morris Cheung famously said he will never enter NAND and DRAM market.
There is a Facebook group with 100k+ members dedicated solely to the poor engineering, design, and fabrication of their refrigerators - [SAMSUNG REFRIGERATOR RECALL U.S.A. NOW] - https://www.facebook.com/groups/1520337151601316/
I bought a Samsung Frame TV for my parents for a Christmas present. Dear lord what a mistake. So much software shit on that TV. After two hours of playing with it and Googling it, I still can't figure out how TO TURN IT OFF. WTF. Their customer support is worthless.
I would really think twice before I bought another Samsung consumer product.
Hopefully you'll see this, my daughter has a frame TV.
You need to keep your finger pressing the off button on the remote until the whole thing turns off.
You turn it off with the power button? Good lord, how arcane.
You need to hold it
Yes, I read the comment I replied to. You turn it off with the power button. By holding it.
Yeah, I'd recommend you stick to things with simple mechanical buttons or something.
When you press the power button and it goes to art mode (effectively a screensaver) instead of turning off, most people's next step would be to try holding the power button. Barring that, the manual clearly describes these two different operations if the power button.
> most people's next step would be to try holding the power button
You would do well to work in tech support for a few months because this claim is absolutely a complete fantasy.
As an experienced developer who has done way too much networking and home automation for my own good, it never would occur to me to hold the power button on a remote.
And now I just discovered my Apple TV actually has a control panel. You don't need to go two layers deep in Settings to put it to sleep. It never occurred to me to a long press on the home button would do anything. (Despite knowing long pressing on the menu taking you to the main menu.)
99% of which most likely don't even own one, and also partake in the other peculiar groups spreading the notion that dirty, foreign brands are dangerous and unreliable.
I have a Samsung fridge. It singlehandedly convinced me never to buy another Samsung appliance. The reputation is legit.
I had a Samsung washer that made me thankful that I don't own a sledgehammer, because if I did I knew I would have taken that useless thing outside and smashed it to bits with extraordinary glee, which would have caused concern in my neighborhood. The happiest day I had with it was when they took it away after installing the new Whirlpool I bought instead. Edit: it came with the house and in the 6 months that I put up with it, 90%+ of the time it never completed a wash on the first try.
I have had a Samsung TV, phone and washing machine. All of them were awful and unreliable despite winning wonderful praise from reviewers. I can't help but feel they were reviewing a different device to me.
Nowadays it's a running joke among my friends about how much I advocate against buying any Samsung devices to anyone who will listen. I've probably saved 5 people from buying a Samsung TV - instead convincing them to get one of LGs excellent TVs.
In Korea Samsung's whiteware business is considered vastly inferior to LG. It's not an area they excel in, and never have
Consumer Reports rankings tell a similar story. In several appliance categories, you have to scroll past at least a screenfull of LG models to get to other brands.
I have a Dacor (Samsung owned high end brand) fridge. It works as advertised, but they forgot to advertise that a sociopath had a hand in some of the design decisions (deep learning spyware hooked to cameras that will p2p tunnel with samsung TVs; the metal front is incompatible with refrigerator magnets).
Anyway, we also have a samsung washer dryer pair. We had some issues during initial installation, and had to deal with samsung support. It was so bad that we now regret the fridge purchase (it’s probably a different division, but for how long?), and will never buy samsung again. Not sure what brand of SSD to use moving forward.
In related news, I read yesterday that they’re being sued because the tech support chat people (calling them is completely futile) are paid $0 + sales commissions.
This one fact explains more about my interaction with samsung tech support than any article about corporate culture ever could.
(I also know people that worked there. It sounds horrible from the inside too. On top of that, appliance parts suppliers in my area confirm that samsung is one of the worst possible choices for after sales support).
the p2p samsung fridge thing sounds like something from silicon valley
What kind of issues are you seeing? Naively, a fridge seems like such a simple device that I'm curious how they screwed it up so badly that it's developed an anti-following.
The biggest consistent problem mine has is the display panel burns out LEDs in a matter of weeks. Yes, burning out LEDs. If I put in a new panel (which thankfully is fairly easy, just a ribbon cable and a couple screws) it works for a few weeks, then the LEDs start to burn out again. So it becomes a guessing game of whether you're going to get water, crushed ice, or cubed ice.
There is basically no warranty on replacement parts. We stopped replacing that panel, and now we just play the guessing game. Fortunately the fridge does remain functional as a cold box, at least. There are a few other problems, like accumulating ice in the tray at the bottom, but this is not really a Samsung-specific problem, lots of fridges develop this issue.
> There are a few other problems, like accumulating ice in the tray at the bottom, but this is not really a Samsung-specific problem, lots of fridges develop this issue.
I have a totally different fridge, and it has a heater at the bottom... but I needed to physically bend the heater a smidge so it was close enough to the drain to keep the drain clear and prevent ice build up. Might help if there's something similar.
It's easy to design LED circuits that look like they're working for a little while but if you pump too much current through them or otherwise overheat them their lifetime decreases from 30,000 hours to a few minutes. This is a common amateur EE mistake; the question is why Samsung allows amateurs to design these systems.
I have a samsung fridge, the ice maker does not work. I've tried a lot of things to get it to work, none of which worked. This is not an isolated issue, if you read online it's just accepted that the ice maker will at some point cease the function and will never work again.
Search "Samsung fridge" on HN to find a bunch of comments on what they've done wrong. It seems they're very eager to overengineer and add technology either just because they can, or possibly to aggressively pursue environmental regulations on energy usage and such (so they can claim to be at the top of efficiency rankings.)
I got rid of a Samsung fridge freezer recently because the front door rusts. The integrated water/ice dispenser sits atop a piece of door metal folded over, and the edge must not be protected as any spills not IMMEDIATELY cleaned up caused creeping rust.
I have a samsung fridge and it makes loud cracking noises, sometimes it even wakes me up at night. They told me the noises were normal, funny thing that fridge is advertised as being really quiet
Oh yeah, I forgot. At least half the Dacor warranty document is an explanation that they will charge you money and refuse to fix the problem if you file a warranty claim because the fridge is being unreasonably noisy.
(Our fridge is quiet, for what it’s worth.)
We built a new house, and I had a blanket ban on Samsung products. Unfortunately, the only fridge that looked nice was a Samsung so we reluctantly went with it.
Strangely, it's actually a really good fridge and it's one of the only items in our house that DOESN'T connect to the internet.
The LG we already had would occasionally freeze vegetables, the Fisher & Paykel had an internal light which stopped working... and the Samsung seems to be a simple fridge that works well (so far).
I own Samsung kitchen appliances. I will never make that mistake again.
Fridge: the coils in the fridge compartment freeze up, which is expected because, hey, thermodynamic laws. Hence the heater coil to melt the ice. Which would be fine, except that the little metal tab that is supposed to conduct heat into the drainpipe is too short, so the ice doesn’t melt, thus leaving the drain all plugged up, causing the ice water to overflow, eventually spilling out the fridge door and destroying your cork floor.
Dishwasher: fffuuuuuu… P.o.S. Piss-poor job of cleaning. Does a shit job of filtering food particles out, so they end up in the rinse water, and so end up crudding-up any contact points between dishes. I end up washing “clean” dishes by hand Every. GD. Time.
Oven: self-clean feature cooks the convection fan to death. Should be called self-destructive, not self-cleaning. Thankfully, the induction stovetop continues to work… for the time being.
I will never, ever purchase a Samsung product again.
I had the same problem with my Samsung fridge and while trying to fix it I stumbled upon the world of third party "samsung defroster clip" that you can find on online stores. Which suggests that the problem is so widespread to spin up a whole new industry for a 5 bucks piece of metal.
And shows that Samsung, despite hearing about this defect from every po’d owner, doesn’t care to change its manufacturing process to resolve the issue. Nope, they just keep on producing defective fridges.
How can you tell if they own one or not and, if so, what their motives are?
Genuinely curious here how you were not only able to verify Samsung refrigerator ownership status for 100K people on Facebook but also that 99% of them were slandering Samsung's good name purely for racist/nationalist reasons.
With all the fake reviews and flame wars of a few in current times I see this point as very valid and would at least take everything stated or claimed on such forum with a big grain of salt. Small vocal and organised groups are able to give the impression of a minor issue to be major. In top of that are many people who jump onto such topics. A good example is the recent vote for a vaccination mandate in Germany. Representative polls show a clean pro law attitude in the population yet the politicians have been flooded by anti vaccination 'activists' on all channels.
Samsung makes enough refrigerators that if you told me 100,000+ people were pissed off enough about theirs to complain on Facebook I really wouldn't doubt it. Also what would you gain from complaining on Facebook? Are these people being paid by LG to trash Samsung products? Does Samsung pay people to trash LG refrigerators on Facebook in return?
Unless there's some kind of evidence to the contrary, I would just assume these people are unhappy with the refrigerator they bought.
I was hoping to get some insider scoop on the Samsungs culture problem. But looks like it’s just a round up of Samsungs bad results rather than specific tales of toxicity or culture issues. I don’t doubt it for one second that there are toxicity issues but I also found some of the sources don’t support what they are alledging.
> These various units are allegedly playing the blame game with each other. Samsung LSI (design) is blaming Samsung Foundry, while Samsung Mobile is blaming S.LSI.
The link in this paragraph doesn’t actually have anything about them blaming each other.
> that the foundry is even allegedly lying about the yields
The link here also doesn’t say anything about “lying”. It says they will do a diagnosis/audit around the low yield problem.
I didn’t bother clicking on all the links. But some links are right but kinda erodes the trust in the article when this is happening.
My suspicion also, they outright quoted a rumor mill forum post here: https://meeco.kr/mini/34835643
Someone reading that article might have walked away with the impression that Samsung's collapse is imminent, which seems to be the narrative often touted on the internet circles by people with some type of stake in TSMC or its allied subsidiaries.
"Clients and employees of SemiAnalysis may hold positions in companies referenced in this article."
I mean from the authors disclaimer here we can see why the article reads like some Zerohedge article. I hope the author can afford expensive lawyers because there's just no way Samsung is going to let the author off the hook, they've gone after journalists for way less.
Why do foundry insider articles always hurt my brain? It's like good writing and proximity to the industry are antithetical.
Guessing, but possibly because almost all foundries are run by people who don’t speak English, at least not natively.
You have a longer chain of communication between you and them, so things get muddied.
I imagine that foundry news written in Chinese/Korean/Cantonese is much more well written and in depth.
There also seems a propensity for packing the maximum amount of information into every sentence.
Which leads to the narrative equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation where every slide is just plastered with numbers from corner to corner.
I confirm semiconductor writings in Chinese/Korean are much better than those in English. (Not Cantonese: Cantonese is pretty weak as a written language.)
Somewhat surprisingly, best writings, at least at popular level, come from Japan. Japan is the highest literacy society on Earth (if you look at OECD PIAAC, there's just no comparison with anyone else) and Japanese publishing industry is extremely strong, such that real experts can write somewhat technical books on semiconductor industry and you can expect it to sell if it's any good.
It's a fairly secretive/competitive industry, right? And with only a few major players, people who work in the industry generally don't want to burn bridges, at least if they ever plan on working in the industry again.
So nearly all of the "insider news" is going to be anonymous and read like rumor mill gossip. Especially in the English-speaking press, where there is an extra level of cultural and linguistic indirection.
That doesn't directly explain the poor quality of writing, but my guess is that the above factors dissuade a lot of talented journalists from even attempting to cover it.
(this is all speculation, of course)
Disasters in foundry, LSI, and DRAM? Is the writer sponsored by the U.S. chip manufacturing sector or other pro-American interests?
What a weird hit-piece filled with assertions that could never be reliably backed up by other than Samsung themselves conducting a massive internal investigation.
A good example is the Ampere generation of GPU's.
The data centre parts were fabbed on TSMC 7, the consumer on Samsung 8
The consumer parts hit their performance envelope but use about 30% more energy than the data center parts, for the same performance envelope.
If anything I am making the case that TSMC is reigning supreme but okay, believe your conspiracy
Yes they are, but it's not about TSMC's superior quality, but the unsubstantiated BS that Samsung's chip manufacturing is a disaster.
And if you think that the U.S. is not using every tool in the box to win markets, including bad-mouthing foreign competitors and lying to win customers over, then you're just lying to yourself. Have you been living offline for the last 20 years? The Internet is a battlefield and no-one plays more dirty than the U.S.
> the unsubstantiated BS that Samsung's chip manufacturing is a disaster.
They lost Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Cisco for the next generation. Are you disputing this fact?
They did not fully ramp 1Z or 1 Alpha dram nodes. Are you disputing this fact?
the sources the article cited are at best unverifiable, even quoting rumor mill directly to support their claims so it does feel quite strange and we can see why from the author's disclaimer:
"Clients and employees of SemiAnalysis may hold positions in companies referenced in this article."
So somebody seeks to benefit financially from selling the perception that Samsung is in trouble but feels an online disclaimer can shield them litigious Samsung lawyers.
This won't end well.
It's at the end of every article lol
Avoid their SSD's now too. With the the 980 PRO, Samsung has just changed the components but kept the same model number.
Samsung have removed the Elpis controller from the 980 PRO SSD and replaced it with an unknown one.
Take a look here for what's changed on the 980 PRO: https://i.imgur.com/YJShyLR.jpg
Several (most?) brands do this. Do you know of a brand that definitely does not?
It's an almost universal practice now for consumer SSDs. Intel's consumer SSD product line was the last one where I was pretty sure they weren't doing this.
Companies want to build product identities that can last for more than a year, but also want to be able to react to changes in the supply chain. Fixed BOM guarantees really aren't viable in this product segment, but you can often get such assurances in the enterprise, industrial or client OEM SSD markets.
Most of the time, swapping in a newer generation of NAND flash memory is a net improvement for a drive's performance and power efficiency, but when the newer generation increases the capacity per die there will almost always be a downside in some corner-case benchmark. Those swaps aren't worth worrying about, unless you're trying to abuse a consumer SSD for the kind of workloads enterprise SSDs are designed for.
Likewise, controller swaps are usually nothing to worry about—aside from some instances where performance downgrades stemming from NAND downgrades have been misattributed to a controller change, the most harmful examples in recent years have been when the amount of DRAM is reduced from the usual 1GB per 1TB ratio down to something more like 256MB per 1TB. The consequences of such a change are easy to demonstrate with synthetic benchmarks, but almost impossible to measure let alone notice for real-world usage patterns. Other times, a controller "downgrade" simply swaps in a cheaper controller that is still more than fast enough for the NAND to be the bottleneck.
It would be nice if we could universally get more detailed spec sheets and a guarantee of a new consumer-visible model number when the major components change, but the consumer SSD market has proven too price-sensitive and the technology and supply chain too dynamic for that to be a competitive business strategy. For the most part, you do get what you pay for, except that a few of the top brands also command an undeserved price premium.
Not really true. ADATA pretty much demonstrated that you could get away with swapping the controller at least 3 times and slowly shaving off performance so that people won't notice until they actually did. And the performance was down by 25%-40% in the third swap. This sets a precedent and sooner or later other manufacturers will follow.
My pet peeve with the whole debacle is that words and promises no longer matter especially when marketing ends up using words like "upto."
Give me a minimum, maximum and specs written in stone and I won't care if you change out components. As it is now, the entire thing has become a game of whack-a-mole, SSD reviews are loosing their relevance and given enough time (+current trajectory) we could easily end up in SSD market which is more like fast fashion than anything else.
> Companies want to build product identities that can last for more than a year, but also want to be able to react to changes in the supply chain.
A fixed product identity for something that materially changes would best be described as a form of fraud, and it is unfortunate that sort of deception is business as usual in too many places.
> A fixed product identity for something that materially changes
For the most part, these changes are not "material" in the sense of having a significant impact on the overall performance of the product or its suitability for the intended use cases.
It's mostly the tech enthusiast audience that cares about these changes. That audience is highly susceptible to fixating on "objective" criteria or benchmarks that aren't actually relevant to any of their real-world usage. If you exclude the differences that only show up in synthetic benchmarks specifically crafted to reveal subtle differences in SSD performance, the scope of this issue and the potential instances of fraud are vastly smaller.
Clients and employees of SemiAnalysis may hold positions in companies referenced in this article.
This article lacks the evidence to warrant the boldness of its arguments. And after reading through the paragraphs of poorly based assertions, I see this at the bottom of the article. Why am I not surprised?
It's at the bottom of every article. I have to disclose given my relationship with various funds.
I am under no impression that my articles can move fucking Samsung's stock. That's hilarious you think I could profit off the market by writing this.
There's plenty of evidence though. Be an industry insider and you'd recognize it all.
I do know that my reports have moved smaller companies stocks by 20% in a single day, and have been verified true in the past. - https://semianalysis.com/short-report-nvidia-supplier-cut-ou...
If I thought I could move the stock, I'd make the position in the morning alongside my clients, and publish shortly after, like I did with the article I just linked.
> no impression that my articles can move fucking Samsung's stock
> I do know that my reports have moved smaller companies stocks by 20% in a single day
seems like a weird contradiction. you really think a disclaimer can protect you here? Like many of us pointed out, you've made quite a bold, unsubstantiated claims with poorly cited evidence. You've admitted that your writing in the past have moved the targeted company's stock.
> If I thought I could move the stock, I'd make the position in the morning alongside my clients
I'm sure you could but writing a piece like this, without substantial evidence, I think could influence investors opinions and you've admitted that your writings in the past have moved stocks negatively.
> There's plenty of evidence though. Be an industry insider and you'd recognize it all.
so where are the evidence that support your claims?
If you don't want to believe it. Go ahead. The major claims are true, Qualcomm moving away. Nvidia moving away. DRAM node ramps being pitiful. DRAM engineering efforts come directly from a source there.
The cultural issues being the cause of these issues is the substantial claim.
It might be construed as defamation in Samsung's view, as they've repeatedly shown to be quite intolerant and litigious in the past, I have to warn that the author is treading on the deep end here.
A big part of Samsung's success is because of their insanely powerful and effective legal department. There's just no way their attorneys aren't reading semianalysis.
I have been sent C&D letters in the past by Arm, and even sued by others. I have resources.
Interestingly South Korea is much more accepting of a greater power distance than say the UK [0]. In such situations having a clear line of communication from the bottom to the top on actionable items can be difficult.
[0] https://www.hofstede-insights.com/fi/product/compare-countri...
After reading this lengthy article, was anyone able to comprehend, what exactly are the "cultural issues"?
Does anyone know some good reading material regarding the evolution of microchip design and fabrication? I found the article quite interesting, however many of the more technical terms flew over my head.
For Samsung semi process part, it's just only TSMC is too good, isn't it? Intel, Samsung, and others can't catch up now.
I’m sure toxic culture is one of the reasons for Samsung falling behind. But I don’t think that can be a sufficient cause. If toxic culture is the reason for the recent slip up, how has Samsung grown before the slip up when it was arguably even more toxic?
I recently ran into political science term "pockets of efficiency", which is used to explain why some part of a large corrupt organization (originally state, but I don't see why a giant corporation would be different) can work efficiently. I suspect Samsung used to have a lot of these, because they have manufactured a lot of terrible consumer products but still somehow they have had financial success and their components can be found in decent products too.
Interesting. I’ll look that up! My theory is that toxic culture worked when Samsung was mostly playing catch up (before 2010 ish) to existing products/ technologies. But now they need to innovate, and toxicity is crushing and driving away creative people.
Now that you mentioned early 2000s, at the time I was shopping for a LCD display. At the time Eizo was the go-to brand for good screens, and they used Samsung panels. As a poor just graduated programmer I bought the Samsung with the same VA panel that Eizo used, and it was awful in ways I would never expect a display could be.
> Samsung also had a GPU team that they canned.
That feels… counterintuitive, if true.
A non-trivial factor in this:
• Samsung: conglomerate Chaebol that includes of 50% revenue from shipping and ship-building, and then insurance, finance, travel, consume appliances, and finally smart phones and semiconductors which are minority revenue source
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol
https://www.slashgear.com/831286/10-rare-samsung-products-yo...
• TSMC: single product company - foundry only
• Apple: "single product" company (compared to Samsung)
There is the Asian cultural side of it even for TSMC so it has many of the same top-down management issues. But the key difference is focus.
Taiwanese businesses are pretty much never Chaebol/Kieretsu-like - it's far more atomized, independent and interdependent, and focused on a narrow(er) market. There's also more "bottom-up" in terms of origins and this remains to some extent in many of them
(I work for a Taiwanese firm that bought my most recent company - and we work with direct competitors when it makes sense market-wise - that pretty much never happens with between Chaebols/Kieretsus. We also have a pretty selective market niche).
Compare this to Japanese kieretsu companies such as NEC - which is similarly broad but you also don't think of them anymore when it comes to semiconductor and especially DRAM.
Chaebols and Kieretsus are very similar in that they are conglomerates so they are broad with many unrelated businesses and not very agile especially since decision making is top-down. A key difference is Kieretsus are more likely to be top-down BEFORE and AFTER bottom-up consensus cycle - though that's a predilection based on organizational structure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu
The example the article gives of Hynix proves that it's possible to be a Chaebol yet give enough free rein to business units to make good decisions. But it can work against as well.
Another factor with Samsung: their shipping business has taken major hits in the last 5-7 years. Which given that is 50% of their revenue, probably still diverts proper executive attentions away from semiconductor and cell phones resulting is fiat decisions not based on good data.
https://thediplomat.com/2016/06/south-koreas-shipbuilding-cr...