9 ms·

Chipmakers Rally in Talent War

66 points by bcaulfield 9y ago

fnbr 9y ago
What's missing here is a discussion of compensation. I've seen at conferences how proud senior Google employees (ie Jeff Dean) are of the TPU work that their teams are doing, and I suspect that compensation is following accordingly. I doubt that Intel or similar companies are compensating their people at the same level. Whenever I see people talking about a talent war, I'm always suspicious that they're getting outspent and are unwilling to compete.
- WWLink 9y ago
  At my university, the word on the street was to not waste your time with chip design or device physics, because most of that work was heavily outsourced and the employers didn't pay well. I thought that was a real shame, because our device physics professor was brilliant and his research sounded fascinating. Sadly, the people I met from a very popular microchip manufacturer (they don't make CPUs though?) suggested that they had to work long hours and didn't like their jobs. They were actually.. surprisingly transparent about that. I appreciated it, of course!
  - deepnotderp 9y ago
    Also if you do make a device physics breakthrough then people will promptly ignore you. Doubly so if you're young.
    - andars 9y ago
      Last I heard, you had big claims and have yet to test your ideas in physical hardware. People will probably be less likely to ignore you if you have something that you can demonstrate being able to manufacture reliably and that you aren't just exploiting some simulation artifact.
      - deepnotderp 9y ago
        It's relatively hard to fool TCAD. SPICE simulations at least I can believe there can be scoping artifacts, but even those are generally in a certain pattern. In any case, I'd be okay with a "this is great if it works in hardware, but until then idc", but the response is more "you're a young idiot who shouldn't bother with memory cell innovation". A lot of this is superstition due to SRAM being finicky. I could go on about this, but let's take it offline in that case.
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    I worked at a facility with a lot of these guys. They seems to work long hours, got laid off a lot, and the cars in the lot were not fancy at all. The managers looked well rested and well paid though.
chiyc 9y ago
I'm not surprised to hear that traditional chipmakers are having trouble with their talent pool. I just recently left semiconductors to get into software. Getting into software is much more accessible, especially with the abundance of learning material online. It's also easier for people to imagine how software can make a difference in people's lives, which is a common motivator. We're more aware of how we use software on a daily basis. And it's often software that goes viral in a consumer market, not hardware - Apple and phones aside. Silicon fabrication and chip design are at a level of abstraction that's harder to grasp. How much accessible information is out there on hardware design? Neither is it easy to start fabricating your own chips. > “A big part of the challenge is in awareness — we need to help them see the path.” > That shouldn’t be difficult. “We make air travel safer, healthcare more predictable, we have an easy story to tell,” said Durn. I agree that there needs to be more awareness. It's not, however, as easy as you might think to sell a student on this story. Sure, it might sound great at first. It sounds convincing. Almost everything is based on the hardware these companies produce, right? Even if you convince them and get these new engineers in, you have to find out how to keep them. The scale of engineering that needs to happen at these companies is massive. It takes many moving parts. Many of these companies start by allocating new undergraduate engineers to grunt work that's required at any company of this size. > As our industry matured, operational efficiencies and a whole set of different DNA took hold Good luck convincing your new engineers that being inserted into your company as a cog and dealing with your business procedures for “operational efficiencies” is making the world a better place. > About 85% of chip vendors need new kinds of talent to keep pace with the rise of digital operations powered by automated systems, big data, and machine learning. However, 77% of them report a shortage of talent, particularly for EEs, according to studies by Deloitte Consulting done for the SEMI trade group. Sure, there’s going to be a shortage of talent when you often demand graduate degrees at a minimum. Even more so when you don’t pay as much as the software giants are. There is a good point in here though. These companies do need these new kinds of talent. And to be clear, it’s not the talent that needs to keep up with the new age, it’s these companies that need to keep pace. They need new processes and reorganization. And by reorganization, I mean something beyond just shuffling around managers and fattening up middle management. You have to somehow replace the processes that worked just ten years ago but are slowing you down now. IT and your software departments can’t be seen as a cost center anymore. Don’t hire bright young engineers to do things you should be automating. Hire people to automate those things instead.
slashink 9y ago
Really what has to happen is that the chip companies have to wake up to the fact that levels of compensation at software companies has outpaced them. If you want to hire top talent for half of what GOOGLE/FB/AMZN would pay the talent then yes there will be a shortage. Trying to convince engineers with these fluff pieces how they are important will not make a difference. Pay up.
- kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
  Where I work we have both embedded firmware and software developers. The firmware devs are largely EEs and get paid less due to lack of demand and market competition. If they paid the software devs the same there would be a mass exodus.
  - ngsayjoe 9y ago
    So sad to hear this, as it is much harder to study EE and embedded programming is much much harder than software programming.
    - user5994461 9y ago
      They are both equally difficult.
      - aetherspawn 9y ago
        Dunning-Kruger effect applies here. The levels of confidence/validation are completely different. Good luck fixing a software bug on a toaster after-the-fact. Also, performance is regularly an annoyance, especially if you have to do something non-trivial like process ethernet frames or talk on USB. Sub 8-Mhz processors for embedded processors still extremely popular and the flash size constraint leaves no room for huge libraries or ROM waste. Completely different.
        user5994461 9y ago
        Hardware and software are two deep domains that can be incredibly complex and challenging. You're doing a disservice to both by taking a toaster without QA as an argument.
georgeburdell 9y ago
Maybe if they paid competitively they would be able to attract new grads. Many of my Berkeley and Stanford EE acquaintances are joining Apple, Facebook, and Google as hardware engineers and getting 6 figure initial RSU grants and $140k starting salaries (this is at the PhD level). Even Intel, which has among the best pay in the traditional semi industry, pays about 20-30 percent less total comp, and so they are only attracting either the people still intensely interested in their specialty (and willing to forego pay) or those who couldn't pass an interview at the aforementioned other companies
- jarjoura 9y ago
  My friend who works in Apple Hardware had a competing offer from Nvidia. They both offered the same pay and an expectation that you will work nights and weekends, but apparently a followup team lunch at Nvidia didn't go well and he took the offer at Apple. I don't know what the dollar amount was, I didn't ask, but I think it's fair to say that Nvidia is at least interested in paying whatever the market rate for EE is.
deepnotderp 9y ago
As a "young" person in the semiconductor industry, I can whole heartedly guarantee that no young person will ever want to go into this field ( nvidia is the one exception but only for DL software) The field is essentially "no matter what the data says, the person with more experience is right", looks down upon young talent, essentially refuses to innovate and has too many clueless people making decisions. Don't believe me? Ask your ex-Intel friend. EDIT: this turned into a rant. Naturally, this is one view, there's another perspective as well. E.g. ASML is extraordinarily innovative and Intel's TMG was an absolute engine.
- Uhhrrr 9y ago
  Isn't the preference for experience due to the cost of respins?
- twtw 9y ago
  The hubris is strong with this one. > Looks down on young talent Are you certain this "young talent" is looked down upon for youth, not in response to their criticism of people who have actually consistently made chips that work and work reliably? fyi, people are more likely to listen if you don't call them clueless.
  - deepnotderp 9y ago
    > fyi, people are more likely to listen if you don't call them clueless. They outsourced their chip and now are unable to ship it. I think it's fair to call them clueless.
    - twtw 9y ago
      You seem to have switched from a general statement about the semiconductor industry to a specific occurrence. If your experience is only with this specific occurrence, you should not make general statements about the competence of thousands of people in the field. Perhaps a more accurate statement would have been: "some clueless people exist in every field." But that is not as exciting.
kikoreis 9y ago
If Meltdown and Spectre do end up causing industry wide redesign of CPU internals and issuing of new generations of chips I expect competition for silicon design, verification and enablement expertise to heat up to the point of being red hot.
wsxcde 9y ago
The unfortunate thing is that the hardware guys do all the hard work but the software guys make all the money. And that's the real reason why Google pays way more than Intel. It's the likes of who Intel figure out how you can put a billion little things each with a few tens of atoms on a chip that somehow work together to produce a useful computing device. And then Apple finds a way to create a really pretty GUI and walk away with 90% of the profit in the Industry. As a hardware guy, I always feel like this is somehow unfair.
- mattnewton 9y ago
  The Apple guys and gals solve a problem that more people understand they have and less people offer good solutions to /shrug
- roymurdock 9y ago
  Processor hardware is technically as close to magic as I’ve found in the modern world. The science and logic required to make chips is simply breathtaking. That said, processor hardware is a mature market, one that is so mature that it is starting to consolidate in major ways. Until a startup comes up with a chip that can solve current problems not solve able by a CPU/GPU/FPGA, profits will continue to accrue further up the stack to the software companies that are adding differentiated value.
- x0x0 9y ago
  Nah, the hardware guys are cheap and treat employees, on average, worse. Intel has 60% profit margins. If only there were a way to use money to induce people you desire to have work for you to do so!
- nopinsight 9y ago
  It is partly due to the capital investment required to first achieve a competitive scale. Since microprocessor companies require such enormous investment, there are fewer large companies and startups to compete for talent. In other words, the hardware labor market is closer to monopsony than the software one. In addition, other things being equal, the closer one is to customers, the more leverage one has on pricing and terms. This is a major reason why Amazon, Google, and Apple are focusing on developing voice assistants and home devices.
godelmachine 9y ago
Engineer from India here, let me tell you my story. In my final year of engineering, I dreamt of being an Integrated Circuit Design Engineer. While the rest of the folks from my class took up microcontrollers based project, my team was the only one to take up a FPGA based project, because that was as close as I could get to VLSI (Obviously at my insistence, I'd to fight with my partners over FPGA vs Microcontroller) After engineering, I searched for a job in VLSI in Pune & Bangalore for 6 months, but in vain. Got to know they don't hire freshers. So, I did a 6 month Post Graduate Diploma in VLSI Design from CDAC (Center for Development of Advanced Computing - makers of India's supercomputers) (Its like finishing school) . Agtee the course got over, interviews began. While folks who did their course in .NET/ Java got 20-30 interview calls, we got an average of only 5 calls. All 5 were very selective in interviews. Tried for a job in VLSI for another 1 year, and then finally took up a job in IT in Enterprise Automation. One year after my IT job, spoke with a few classmates. Some people were really doing well making 70k INR/ month while my lab partner was stuck on 12k/ month. I was making 35k/ month. Lab partner said - "IT folks make much better than we do. What was the point of getting into VLSI?" This was one point. Another point for me is immigration. I am planning to immigrate to Canada (Starting my PR process soon - am 28, unmarried). My father (GC holder) has filed for my GC abut my priority date is 10 years away) So US gonna be tough. But even if I had made it in VLSI, how many jobs are there in Canada for Chip Designers / RTL Design Engineers or maybe FPGA Engineers ? If I stay in IT doing my BMC Software stuff, I know I may get a job in some ITSM company. There aren't many VLSI jobs in every book and corner of earth. Whereas IT ensures that jobs are available in plenty everywhere. Comments / feedback would be highly appreciated.
- pkaye 9y ago
  I'll be honest I think even in US getting a good chip engineering job is tough. I've a firmware engineering background so I straddle between hardware and software. I see lots of EE students come into the workforce and realize the software is where the action is and struggle to switch over. As a hiring manager, I feel for them and try to help their transition but many are not prepared in their coursework even for firmware. Even some chip designers I worked with were asking me how to transition over. A few were taking courses on the side. Even I switched over the general software side though I try to keep my foot in the door should it even improve.
peterburkimsher 9y ago
"Today, kids dream about Google, Facebook, and Apple; they don’t dream about us... his father brought home an early chip made at Western Electric as the brains for a U.S. missile." Right there is my reason for not working for them. I don't want to be involved in military technology. I'm an immigrant, and building weapons to kill foreigners is a conflict of interest.
- sgift 9y ago
  Good luck working in anything software or hardware which isn't somehow involved with military technology.
deepaksurti 9y ago
Based on all the responses in the thread, I am now hardly surprised that my Ask HN to switch to hardware received 0 responses. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16054742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16054742) May be @madengr, could answer it as I am of the exact same opinion, that hardware is way more fun that software. And even in software, I am not doing the usual boring things, still it has had me. Any feedback highly appreciated.
kev009 9y ago
I believe the fundamental issue in all of the technology industry is tying people that know how to take money and turn it into new technology that begets more money. There is tremendous room in semiconductors to do so. In terms of selecting winners, it's no harder than software, but software cycle times (and profit taking) are much shorter so it's faster to wash the wins and losses. It also makes it easier to appear to know what you are doing (VCs) when you don't. A semiconductor upstart as a new entity or within an existing company is a minimum of several years of investment before you can even gague long term success. People (VCs, governance boards, executives, GMs etc) are no better at picking winners in software than hardware, but you spin the wheel more often and therefore it's more lucrative.
curiouscat321 9y ago
The issue of compensation extends far beyond just chipmakers. The large tech companies (FB/GOOG et al.) pay top compensation for most technical fields and have the ability to suck up talent worldwide. Chipmakers, automotive, media...the question is how long incumbent companies are going to continue poor compensation practices before they figure out how far behind they are.

66 points by bcaulfield 9y ago

fnbr 9y ago

What's missing here is a discussion of compensation. I've seen at conferences how proud senior Google employees (ie Jeff Dean) are of the TPU work that their teams are doing, and I suspect that compensation is following accordingly. I doubt that Intel or similar companies are compensating their people at the same level. Whenever I see people talking about a talent war, I'm always suspicious that they're getting outspent and are unwilling to compete.

WWLink 9y ago
At my university, the word on the street was to not waste your time with chip design or device physics, because most of that work was heavily outsourced and the employers didn't pay well. I thought that was a real shame, because our device physics professor was brilliant and his research sounded fascinating. Sadly, the people I met from a very popular microchip manufacturer (they don't make CPUs though?) suggested that they had to work long hours and didn't like their jobs. They were actually.. surprisingly transparent about that. I appreciated it, of course!
- deepnotderp 9y ago
  Also if you do make a device physics breakthrough then people will promptly ignore you. Doubly so if you're young.
  - andars 9y ago
    Last I heard, you had big claims and have yet to test your ideas in physical hardware. People will probably be less likely to ignore you if you have something that you can demonstrate being able to manufacture reliably and that you aren't just exploiting some simulation artifact.
    - deepnotderp 9y ago
      It's relatively hard to fool TCAD. SPICE simulations at least I can believe there can be scoping artifacts, but even those are generally in a certain pattern. In any case, I'd be okay with a "this is great if it works in hardware, but until then idc", but the response is more "you're a young idiot who shouldn't bother with memory cell innovation". A lot of this is superstition due to SRAM being finicky. I could go on about this, but let's take it offline in that case.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  I worked at a facility with a lot of these guys. They seems to work long hours, got laid off a lot, and the cars in the lot were not fancy at all. The managers looked well rested and well paid though.

chiyc 9y ago

I'm not surprised to hear that traditional chipmakers are having trouble with their talent pool. I just recently left semiconductors to get into software. Getting into software is much more accessible, especially with the abundance of learning material online. It's also easier for people to imagine how software can make a difference in people's lives, which is a common motivator. We're more aware of how we use software on a daily basis. And it's often software that goes viral in a consumer market, not hardware - Apple and phones aside. Silicon fabrication and chip design are at a level of abstraction that's harder to grasp. How much accessible information is out there on hardware design? Neither is it easy to start fabricating your own chips. > “A big part of the challenge is in awareness — we need to help them see the path.” > That shouldn’t be difficult. “We make air travel safer, healthcare more predictable, we have an easy story to tell,” said Durn. I agree that there needs to be more awareness. It's not, however, as easy as you might think to sell a student on this story. Sure, it might sound great at first. It sounds convincing. Almost everything is based on the hardware these companies produce, right? Even if you convince them and get these new engineers in, you have to find out how to keep them. The scale of engineering that needs to happen at these companies is massive. It takes many moving parts. Many of these companies start by allocating new undergraduate engineers to grunt work that's required at any company of this size. > As our industry matured, operational efficiencies and a whole set of different DNA took hold Good luck convincing your new engineers that being inserted into your company as a cog and dealing with your business procedures for “operational efficiencies” is making the world a better place. > About 85% of chip vendors need new kinds of talent to keep pace with the rise of digital operations powered by automated systems, big data, and machine learning. However, 77% of them report a shortage of talent, particularly for EEs, according to studies by Deloitte Consulting done for the SEMI trade group. Sure, there’s going to be a shortage of talent when you often demand graduate degrees at a minimum. Even more so when you don’t pay as much as the software giants are. There is a good point in here though. These companies do need these new kinds of talent. And to be clear, it’s not the talent that needs to keep up with the new age, it’s these companies that need to keep pace. They need new processes and reorganization. And by reorganization, I mean something beyond just shuffling around managers and fattening up middle management. You have to somehow replace the processes that worked just ten years ago but are slowing you down now. IT and your software departments can’t be seen as a cost center anymore. Don’t hire bright young engineers to do things you should be automating. Hire people to automate those things instead.

slashink 9y ago

Really what has to happen is that the chip companies have to wake up to the fact that levels of compensation at software companies has outpaced them. If you want to hire top talent for half of what GOOGLE/FB/AMZN would pay the talent then yes there will be a shortage. Trying to convince engineers with these fluff pieces how they are important will not make a difference. Pay up.

kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
Where I work we have both embedded firmware and software developers. The firmware devs are largely EEs and get paid less due to lack of demand and market competition. If they paid the software devs the same there would be a mass exodus.
- ngsayjoe 9y ago
  So sad to hear this, as it is much harder to study EE and embedded programming is much much harder than software programming.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    They are both equally difficult.
    - aetherspawn 9y ago
      Dunning-Kruger effect applies here. The levels of confidence/validation are completely different. Good luck fixing a software bug on a toaster after-the-fact. Also, performance is regularly an annoyance, especially if you have to do something non-trivial like process ethernet frames or talk on USB. Sub 8-Mhz processors for embedded processors still extremely popular and the flash size constraint leaves no room for huge libraries or ROM waste. Completely different.
      - user5994461 9y ago
        Hardware and software are two deep domains that can be incredibly complex and challenging. You're doing a disservice to both by taking a toaster without QA as an argument.

georgeburdell 9y ago

Maybe if they paid competitively they would be able to attract new grads. Many of my Berkeley and Stanford EE acquaintances are joining Apple, Facebook, and Google as hardware engineers and getting 6 figure initial RSU grants and $140k starting salaries (this is at the PhD level). Even Intel, which has among the best pay in the traditional semi industry, pays about 20-30 percent less total comp, and so they are only attracting either the people still intensely interested in their specialty (and willing to forego pay) or those who couldn't pass an interview at the aforementioned other companies

jarjoura 9y ago
My friend who works in Apple Hardware had a competing offer from Nvidia. They both offered the same pay and an expectation that you will work nights and weekends, but apparently a followup team lunch at Nvidia didn't go well and he took the offer at Apple. I don't know what the dollar amount was, I didn't ask, but I think it's fair to say that Nvidia is at least interested in paying whatever the market rate for EE is.

deepnotderp 9y ago

As a "young" person in the semiconductor industry, I can whole heartedly guarantee that no young person will ever want to go into this field ( nvidia is the one exception but only for DL software) The field is essentially "no matter what the data says, the person with more experience is right", looks down upon young talent, essentially refuses to innovate and has too many clueless people making decisions. Don't believe me? Ask your ex-Intel friend. EDIT: this turned into a rant. Naturally, this is one view, there's another perspective as well. E.g. ASML is extraordinarily innovative and Intel's TMG was an absolute engine.

Uhhrrr 9y ago
Isn't the preference for experience due to the cost of respins?
twtw 9y ago
The hubris is strong with this one. > Looks down on young talent Are you certain this "young talent" is looked down upon for youth, not in response to their criticism of people who have actually consistently made chips that work and work reliably? fyi, people are more likely to listen if you don't call them clueless.
- deepnotderp 9y ago
  > fyi, people are more likely to listen if you don't call them clueless. They outsourced their chip and now are unable to ship it. I think it's fair to call them clueless.
  - twtw 9y ago
    You seem to have switched from a general statement about the semiconductor industry to a specific occurrence. If your experience is only with this specific occurrence, you should not make general statements about the competence of thousands of people in the field. Perhaps a more accurate statement would have been: "some clueless people exist in every field." But that is not as exciting.

kikoreis 9y ago

If Meltdown and Spectre do end up causing industry wide redesign of CPU internals and issuing of new generations of chips I expect competition for silicon design, verification and enablement expertise to heat up to the point of being red hot.

wsxcde 9y ago

The unfortunate thing is that the hardware guys do all the hard work but the software guys make all the money. And that's the real reason why Google pays way more than Intel. It's the likes of who Intel figure out how you can put a billion little things each with a few tens of atoms on a chip that somehow work together to produce a useful computing device. And then Apple finds a way to create a really pretty GUI and walk away with 90% of the profit in the Industry. As a hardware guy, I always feel like this is somehow unfair.

mattnewton 9y ago
The Apple guys and gals solve a problem that more people understand they have and less people offer good solutions to /shrug
roymurdock 9y ago
Processor hardware is technically as close to magic as I’ve found in the modern world. The science and logic required to make chips is simply breathtaking. That said, processor hardware is a mature market, one that is so mature that it is starting to consolidate in major ways. Until a startup comes up with a chip that can solve current problems not solve able by a CPU/GPU/FPGA, profits will continue to accrue further up the stack to the software companies that are adding differentiated value.
x0x0 9y ago
Nah, the hardware guys are cheap and treat employees, on average, worse. Intel has 60% profit margins. If only there were a way to use money to induce people you desire to have work for you to do so!
nopinsight 9y ago
It is partly due to the capital investment required to first achieve a competitive scale. Since microprocessor companies require such enormous investment, there are fewer large companies and startups to compete for talent. In other words, the hardware labor market is closer to monopsony than the software one. In addition, other things being equal, the closer one is to customers, the more leverage one has on pricing and terms. This is a major reason why Amazon, Google, and Apple are focusing on developing voice assistants and home devices.

godelmachine 9y ago

Engineer from India here, let me tell you my story. In my final year of engineering, I dreamt of being an Integrated Circuit Design Engineer. While the rest of the folks from my class took up microcontrollers based project, my team was the only one to take up a FPGA based project, because that was as close as I could get to VLSI (Obviously at my insistence, I'd to fight with my partners over FPGA vs Microcontroller) After engineering, I searched for a job in VLSI in Pune & Bangalore for 6 months, but in vain. Got to know they don't hire freshers. So, I did a 6 month Post Graduate Diploma in VLSI Design from CDAC (Center for Development of Advanced Computing - makers of India's supercomputers) (Its like finishing school) . Agtee the course got over, interviews began. While folks who did their course in .NET/ Java got 20-30 interview calls, we got an average of only 5 calls. All 5 were very selective in interviews. Tried for a job in VLSI for another 1 year, and then finally took up a job in IT in Enterprise Automation. One year after my IT job, spoke with a few classmates. Some people were really doing well making 70k INR/ month while my lab partner was stuck on 12k/ month. I was making 35k/ month. Lab partner said - "IT folks make much better than we do. What was the point of getting into VLSI?" This was one point. Another point for me is immigration. I am planning to immigrate to Canada (Starting my PR process soon - am 28, unmarried). My father (GC holder) has filed for my GC abut my priority date is 10 years away) So US gonna be tough. But even if I had made it in VLSI, how many jobs are there in Canada for Chip Designers / RTL Design Engineers or maybe FPGA Engineers ? If I stay in IT doing my BMC Software stuff, I know I may get a job in some ITSM company. There aren't many VLSI jobs in every book and corner of earth. Whereas IT ensures that jobs are available in plenty everywhere. Comments / feedback would be highly appreciated.

pkaye 9y ago
I'll be honest I think even in US getting a good chip engineering job is tough. I've a firmware engineering background so I straddle between hardware and software. I see lots of EE students come into the workforce and realize the software is where the action is and struggle to switch over. As a hiring manager, I feel for them and try to help their transition but many are not prepared in their coursework even for firmware. Even some chip designers I worked with were asking me how to transition over. A few were taking courses on the side. Even I switched over the general software side though I try to keep my foot in the door should it even improve.

peterburkimsher 9y ago

"Today, kids dream about Google, Facebook, and Apple; they don’t dream about us... his father brought home an early chip made at Western Electric as the brains for a U.S. missile." Right there is my reason for not working for them. I don't want to be involved in military technology. I'm an immigrant, and building weapons to kill foreigners is a conflict of interest.

sgift 9y ago
Good luck working in anything software or hardware which isn't somehow involved with military technology.

deepaksurti 9y ago

Based on all the responses in the thread, I am now hardly surprised that my Ask HN to switch to hardware received 0 responses. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16054742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16054742) May be @madengr, could answer it as I am of the exact same opinion, that hardware is way more fun that software. And even in software, I am not doing the usual boring things, still it has had me. Any feedback highly appreciated.

kev009 9y ago

I believe the fundamental issue in all of the technology industry is tying people that know how to take money and turn it into new technology that begets more money. There is tremendous room in semiconductors to do so. In terms of selecting winners, it's no harder than software, but software cycle times (and profit taking) are much shorter so it's faster to wash the wins and losses. It also makes it easier to appear to know what you are doing (VCs) when you don't. A semiconductor upstart as a new entity or within an existing company is a minimum of several years of investment before you can even gague long term success. People (VCs, governance boards, executives, GMs etc) are no better at picking winners in software than hardware, but you spin the wheel more often and therefore it's more lucrative.

curiouscat321 9y ago

The issue of compensation extends far beyond just chipmakers. The large tech companies (FB/GOOG et al.) pay top compensation for most technical fields and have the ability to suck up talent worldwide. Chipmakers, automotive, media...the question is how long incumbent companies are going to continue poor compensation practices before they figure out how far behind they are.