HW strategy/culture has been burning tier1 talent since forever. I remember in the 90s When HW and other domestic PRC telco started poaching from Nortel, Siemens, Lucent etc... the talent (most Chinese diaspora used to comfy western office culture) did not have a good time fitting into an actual Chinese company with Chinese culture (but got paid lots). Many burned out too... yet HW, a particularly extreme outlier of militant work culture, has become dominant..
LBH, both HW post sanctions, is a strategic company, overlapping with semi fabrication, domestic chips, and AI is cubing their strategic value. They can get away with doing anything under the current geopolitical environment to stay dominant. The worthwhile take away from this farewell letter is HW threw enough talent at Ascend that it kind of works now, and potentially can throw enough talent at it to be competitive with Nvidia. AKA how it has always operated, like massive wankers. The intuition from the author and most of us is... you need to reward employees right, cultivate proper workplace environment blah blah blah... but look at HW for the past 30 years. They pay a lot of smart people (including patriotic suckers) A LOT of money, throw them at problems until they break. And win.