Mannerisms

On top of these I would like to add something I
experimented in a semi-conductor company owned
now by a hedge fund:

The company tends to emphasize honoric prizes
of flagship ICs (instead of design wins):
design of the year, software quality
achievements,...

My experience is that all these hounoured ICs
finally were late and disappointing with
regards to sales.

For the rest, I acknowledge most of the points:
professional insight is in some companies
sacrificed. Now what counts is the hability
to divide the full project in workpackages,
spread all over the world, and leading at the
end to something that is not manage-able,
responsability being un-clear: "not my
workpackage's responsability".

That's very interesting and rather surprising. You'd think a hedge fund would be:
1. Focussed on design-wins rather than prizes because they're always hought of as being money-driven, and
2. Good at managing projects efficiently, because the core expertise of hedge funds is, I always assumed, management.
So, to hear that cash is not king, and that management is sloppy, is a real surprise.

How about this one for Tsuyoshi's list, departmental targets are set on patent submissions? Not so much because there is enough new development to justify, rather it is a "corporate goal". Then everybody has to spend time trying to find ideas that can be patented, rather than the patent flowing naturally out of inovative work that is being done (lets face it, as engineers a lot of time is trying to do what has already been done but faster, smaller, cheaper, etc....)