And nothing you listed has any specific affect on driver quality. You're firing the coach of a sports team because the star player decided to have a terrible season. You can be the greatest strategist in the world, but in the end it is up to the players/engineers to actually do the work successfully.
Not a great analogy. In sports, you can play well but lose because the other team plays better. In the case of GPU drivers, it should be reasonably clear what it takes for them to be competitive, and so it's more a straight-forward problem of execution. And that comes down to having a team with the right resources and competent management. That falls entirely in the remit of senior management.
Decades of experience. Jensen Huang said years ago that Nvidia was a software company, not a hardware company.
He wasn't only talking about drivers, though. He was talking about things like deep learning software, the CUDA ecosystem, and even their self-driving stuff. I'm sure the driver engineers at Nvidia are outnumbered by the hardware engineers.
ATi's were terrible when AMD bought them and they remained terrible for the years before Raja got there. They were terrible when he was there, and they were terrible for years after he left.
Even that much is enough to appreciate the problem and its significance.
I actually asked you what the direct impact of a Senior VP has on driver development.
Obviously, they don't. Nor do they go around telling the hardware designers how to design GPU register files.
the higher you get up in management above the actual developers, the less blame I would put on the person.
Okay, so essentially what you're saying is the executives at the top of a failing company deserve no blame? You have sure some interesting ideas about how to run a business.
Like I said above, no amount of strategy and cheer leading and synergy meetings is going to make up for incompetency by the actual coders.
The main thing senior management does is to set a strategy and make sure the resources are in place to execute it. And if it's not going to plan, they make whatever changes are needed to fix it.
Talking about synergy and cheerleading tells me most of what you know about business is from watching TV and movies.