AMD has been going through something of a renaissance the last few years.
It was just in 2015 that analysts predicted thecompany would go bankrupt.
This is part of the charge Bergman had been leading.
A global pandemic was something altogether different.
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I thought there is no way we can do that because of confidentiality and so forth.
We cant have 400 engineers with these things sitting at home.
But it soon became apparent the company wouldhaveto find a way to make it work.
And part of that was simply a matter of fostering trust.
And then we realized this isnt going to be a few weeks were talking months.
And of course, people did amazing things.
And we managed to do it.
Bergman said if there was a mantra at AMD, it was flexibility.
If the problem happened in firmware, the hardware engineer can look at it and have peer-to-peer immediate communication.
Obviously, that went out the door, but we had to replace it with different kinds of communication.
The adversity, in some ways, made AMD better.
Now we are going 24 hours a day.
Now we have remote employees, and some of them kind of like it.
How do we manage that going forward?
We just have to accept we dont know the answer.
Rick Bergman will be speaking at TNW Conference 2021,taking place September 30th and October 1st.
