Intel scraps 44-year-old ‘Fellow’ title for top scientists, changes ‘standard of technical leadership’ — technical luminaries must now deliver measurable business results, combine deep expertise with strategic vision and ‘measurable tactical progress’

Intel notified its employees last week that it would no longer title its top scientists, researchers, and developers as ‘Fellows,’ but will call them ‘distinguished engineers,’ a change that will not affect their compensation but which means a lot more than a simple formality. The new designation reflects the company’s new ‘standard of technical leadership’ that combines deep expertise with strategic vision and ‘measurable tactical progress,’ reports OregonLive.

Under the new hierarchy, Fellows become Distinguished Engineers, while Senior Fellows become Senior Distinguished Engineers. Intel CTO Pushkar Ranade told employees that the move represents more than a simple renaming and establishes a new standard for technical leadership.

“The future of Intel will be determined by leaders who combine deep domain expertise with outstanding problem-solving ability, creative innovation with disciplined execution, and an expansive and strategic vision with measurable tactical progress,” the Intel CTO reportedly wrote.

Interestingly, despite the fact that at least a dozen semiconductor companies — including AMD, ASML, Applied Materials, Arm, Broadcom, IBM, Nvidia, Micron, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, and TSMC — have Fellows, Ranade told Intel employees that the new titles are more consistent with terminology used elsewhere in the technology industry. While Apple, Google, IBM, and Microsoft have Distinguished Engineers, at Google, IBM, and Microsoft, Fellows are above Distinguished Engineers.

Intel established the Fellow title in 1980 to recognize employees with a sustained record of exceptional technical accomplishments. The designation had deliberately academic roots because scientific societies and then engineering organizations have long used ‘Fellow‘ for distinguished members, for example, the Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) or IEEE Fellow. So, by the time semiconductor companies, such as IBM, TI, or Intel, were developing formal technical career ladders, Fellow already carried a very specific implication: an engineer recognized by their peers as one of the leading authorities in the field.

Across semiconductor companies, the Fellow rank typically carries compensation, resources, and influence equivalent to a vice president (VP) or senior vice president (SVP), so that top architects and device physicists can shape company strategy without moving into people management (yet, Fellows did not work alone for obvious reasons). It is unclear whether Distinguished Engineers will now have similar resources and influence as Intel’s VPs and SVPs that report to the CEO. Furthermore, at Intel, the Fellow (or senior Fellow) title reflected Intel’s position as a semiconductor research powerhouse as well as its emphasis on long-term technology development.

The most notable people to hold the Intel Fellow rank title include distinguished specialists in microprocessor architecture, process scaling, high-speed interconnects, and silicon physics, including Marcian ‘Ted’ Hoff (the inventor of the Intel 4004 processor), Justin Rattner (for his work on massively parallel supercomputers), Mark Bohr (for leading Intel process technology development and fundamental work on things like strained silicon, hafnium, high-K metal gate, FinFET, etc.), Yan Borodovsky (for leading development and adoption of optical lithography extensions, immersion 193nm ArF lithography, and multi-patterning, just to name a few), and Ajay Bhatt (for leading development of USB, AGP, and PCIe). Perhaps the most unexpected Intel Fellow is Boris Babayan, who is primarily known as the father of Soviet supercomputing and the creator of the Elbrus VLIW CPU architecture. He became an Intel Fellow focused on optimizing binary translation and advanced compilers in November 2004, months after joining Intel.

All in all, Fellows historically had a very specific organizational and status value at Intel, as in many cases they have been the key people to solve Intel’s strategic and tactical technical challenges while not being in a formal management role. From now on, Intel wants its Distinguished Engineers to be accountable for business decisions and essentially become managers.

The biggest question about renaming Fellows to Distinguished Engineers is whether this is done in a bid to further flatten the organization (after all, Intel got rid of 250 VPs out of 450, according to Intel’s CFO), or is it a deliberate move away from the old research lab model, where Fellow signified scientific stature and long-horizon research, toward engineers whose status depends on products, execution and measurable business impact. For now, we do not have any answers to this question.