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I left Intel years ago to get almost 3x the salary as a software developer at... a bank. At Intel engineers are paid supposedly similar rates at similar levels

I left Intel years ago to get almost 3x the salary as a software developer at... a bank. At Intel engineers are paid supposedly similar rates at similar levels and similar locations. And given my level (two levels above Senior Developer) I estimate I was paid better than at least 90% engineers. Where I worked in R&D the doors were constantly revolving and many people admitted they wait to register enough of prestigious time at Intel on their CV to get hired at a much better rate for another company. -- I don't see these moves as encouraging, more like signs of complete and utter panic. You go to these moves when whatever you do isn't working and you don't have strategy to do something new so you try to default on what has worked in the past (this both for the choice of CEO as well as bringing retired people). This doesn't necessarily mean it is a wrong move (see Steve Jobs coming back to save Apple as a proof it doesn't have to be bad) but I wouldn't call it encouraging. Rehiring retired people to me signals the new CEO has no trust in people that already are there. And that is usually bad news. Add to it outsourcing CORE competency to competitor (https://www.eenewseurope.com/news/intel-TSMC-5nm https://www.eenewseurope.com/news/intel-TSMC-5nm) and it seems that if there is a plan it is to keep the ship afloat for a little while longer. Hopefully the ship is going to be afloat for as long is necessary to reshape the organization, but I think we haven't yet seen any concrete moves to see what is the strategy.

aidenn0 6y ago
I recall hearing from friends that Intel paid more for higher levels of education; having a PhD was more conducive to a high salary than years of experience. Do you know if that was true?
- lmilcin 6y ago
  It is likely your friend was paid better because they were assigned higher grade. Just for being PhD I think you are automatically bumped to something like senior engineer or higher. Intel has grading system which you can try to google. You are paid according to your grade (+ benefits based on performance, etc.) Also, you are evaluated against your grade and you can gain or loose a grade based on performance (but more likely than loosing a grade is that you will be let go). I have been given a grade that was over my head at the time and would require me to technically advise and coordinate multiple projects, have outside presence (ie present at tech conferences, take part in opensource projects, etc.) and basically work at a level that I have not been ready for. And yet I was not able to make ends meet. I guess when I was hired I got absolutely excited about what I am going to work on and plans for bright future, that I have completely ignored the possibility that I may be over my head and that I may not be able to advance so quickly.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    I've known people from towns with one or even two big industries, grew up in several, and the town always gets weird after a while. One in particular I'm thinking of that was almost healthy had a state and an art university pulling in money, and people who lived in the school districts but commuted to heavy industry in an exurb of the next big town. Someone tried building a factory on the edge of town to poach those people but it didn't stick. But that one company still overshadowed everything. Your one company gentrifies the hell out of some things, not everything, and ultimately all fates are tied to their fortunes. They do a layoff, hiring freeze or even a salary squeeze and eight months later a few restaurants and one of your favorite stores shut down. You find out they've been late on payments to people and vendors for the past 6 months. I recall the first time I heard someone interviewing at Intel and I asked why they were, 'in the middle of nowhere in Oregon' and nobody had a good answer to that. What I've learned about manufacturing since then makes me think, "lax environmental rules and watchdogs".
    - selimthegrim 6y ago
      Tektronix was there and Oregon State was a source of cheap engineers.
    - bee_rider 6y ago
      Intel in Oregon is probably like an hour from downtown Portland, and there are a ton of apartment complexes about halfway between the two (and there's nice public transit to Portland, so you don't have to deal with the drivers). Nike also has a big building nearby. Also, I imagine Intel would gain very little from being located in, for example, the Bay Area or NYC. It isn't like they are some little startup that needs to go out to bars to find new developers or whatever.
      - vsef 6y ago
        Intel employs 5,900 people in Santa Clara county and that is their corporate headquarters so obviously they think they gain something from a large Bay Area footprint. The idea that Bay Area hiring is primarily "little startups that need to go out to bars" is also very odd.
UncleOxidant 6y ago
I've been approached by headhunters for contract work at Intel. They want all kinds of machine learning knowledge & experience and the pay is.... $45/hr. I kid you not. I just sort of laugh and tell them that that's about 1/3 of market rate for that kind of thing.
- mc32 6y ago
  Sometimes recruiters get things wrong, mix things up. That might have been for a different position that got redefined without commensurate pay adjustment. That said, 45 is really low for any position in an engineering company, unless it’s ancillary support services that get farmed out. Something like ‘Lab Admin’ type of thing.
  - UncleOxidant 6y ago
    This happened more than once over the last few years. If it was a mistake I could see it happening once. But not three times.
  - pvarangot 6y ago
    I don't think it is. I got approached by consulting companies and recruiters to work on embedded development for Intel, including on-site work in Santa Clara, CA and travel to Asia. The hourly rate was 60 and days in Asia were 250 each plus accommodations. I've never done a trip to Asia were I was working less than 10 hours per day.
    - MaxLeiter 6y ago
      Amazon software development interns (undergrad) in SF get $65/hr + a housing stipend. 60/hr seems far too low
      - giantg2 6y ago
        I have 9 years experience, an MSIS, and make a salary that works out to less than $45/hr, but of course there are benefits.
hinkley 6y ago
I left NCSA (University of Illinois) to join the dot-com boom like everyone else. Curious thing about their pay scale: I made 15% more on day one than any of my friends who had been working 18 months at the same place, which was a giant relief because I did not have the spoons to work as much as they did and still keep up with classes. I got more per hour and working a full 40 hours a week was just assumed, instead of something I had to fight for. The reason I made more money than them was Marc Andreesen. Someone got wind of how much they had been compensating him not to leave and they put the kibosh on it, but they were smart about it. They sugar coated the change by compressing the pay scale toward the middle, instead of squashing it down. If you weren't Marc Andreesen (and he'd been gone for over a year and the people he had poached gone for ~8 months at this point), then your pay didn't change. If you were new, like me, you were better off with the change. You can keep top end people by giving them autonomy instead of more money, but I don't know if, in the long term, that's in Intel's best interests either. People generally trust that my heart is in the right place, but I'm human. Some of my decisions are wrong, and some are just so abstruse that they appear wrong, so I get push-back on both. I've worked at places that are 'top-heavy', where enough people have been Peter Principal-ed into MAX_RANK and there's no room in the org chart to dilute them with more promising people. In fact I work at one of these now. To a first order approximation, I'm just collecting the pay while I convince myself what I want to do next, which is proving to be more difficult than it ever has before, so I'm just here.
marcosdumay 6y ago
> I don't see these moves as encouraging, more like signs of complete and utter panic. I read the GP more in the lines of since everything is on fire and most of the house has already turned into coal, they demonstrating some panic is a much better behavior than the previous indifference about the fire, and a signal that they may decide to do something about it. Thus, expectations on Intel improved.
SkyMarshal 6y ago
>Where I worked in R&D the doors were constantly revolving and many people admitted they wait to register enough of prestigious time at Intel on their CV to get hired at a much better rate for another company. >Rehiring retired people to me signals the new CEO has no trust in people that are already there. And why should he, given the conditions you just outlined? I certainly wouldn’t. They’ve demonstrated they can’t advance either the process tech or the chip architecture in any meaningful way. And I don’t even fault the engineers, but rather a finance-oriented CEO who managed for the bottom line, to goose stock prices and executive comp, while cannibalizing the engineering corps of the high-output talent and experienced technical leadership and mentoring necessary to advance one of the most complex, difficult technologies. One possibility here is that Gelsinger is reversing that, rebuilding the original proven team from the top down, starting with the people who both know how that works, and have the connections to and respect from additional top technical talent to bring them on as well. If Gelsinger also restructures compensation for these folks to ensure they’re appropriately compensated (way above “market rate”) then that’s confirmation that this isn’t panic but the right strategy of rebuilding Intel’s talent base. And that report you linked was discussed yesterday, unclear how reliable it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25844959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25844959
amalantony06 6y ago
This is an excellent counter perspective.
cccc4all 6y ago
The best way to get a raise or a promotion is to find a new job at another company. Look for a company that actually values the tech stack skillset and are willing to pay actual competitive salary. It is much easier now with remote work being prevalent.
908B64B197 6y ago
> Intel engineers are paid supposedly similar rates at similar levels and similar locations. Again with this location based compensation trend. Maybe it works for flipping burgers but it seriously break down when you are a global player hiring from a pool of global talent. You can play CoL games and count beans as much as you want, but the engineering talent Intel is after are also pursued by companies like Apple that are wat above market rate.
- astrange 6y ago
  I've been told by CPU engineers at Apple that they're not paid very well, especially compared to software, but that competitors just pay slightly less.
  - BeetleB 6y ago
    I have a friend at Intel who was offered a job at Apple. He's a manufacturing guy (not circuits/CPU, but still HW). He lives in Portland. They wanted him to move to Cupertino, and offered him 15% more than what he currently makes. Taking COL into account that's a demotion. So I can believe Apple doesn't pay non-SW folks that much.
  - systemBuilder 6y ago
    It's a problem of overproduction of electrical engineers by academia. I have met graduates of top-30 EE schools who work at quickie marts in North America. I'm not joking about this I was a professor at that top-30 department when I met this graduate.
    - 908B64B197 6y ago
      I was told a lot of EE majors nowadays move to software as soon as they graduate.
phendrenad2 6y ago
Somehow the salaries for PhDs in electrical engineering capable of making chips from scratch became normalized with software developers churning out CRUD apps.
- ivalm 6y ago
  SWE often make more
- obstacle1 6y ago
  That's because CRUD people can do work that is far more leveraged than a hardware engineer, from the business' perspective. So the CRUD people produce more economic value. One dev can spend 2 weeks automating some process or building a prototype web app that goes on to generate tens of millions for the company with no overhead. Your hypothetical EE can spend 2 years designing a chip. The chip will then require 100s of millions of dollars to be spent on testing, manufacturing, and sales in order to be economically useful to the company (note that none of those functions involve the EE who designed the chip). Sad? I dunno, maybe. True, yep. Nonsensical? Definitely not, there's clear logic to why certain kinds of work pay what they do.
  - SJC_Hacker 6y ago
    But its a question not of how much value the employee generates, but how rare is that employees work that they deserve to be compensated highly. i.e, could you get someone of the same ability for less. Consider the reality shows The Voice, America's Got Talent, game shows etc., that generate millions of dollars of revenue for the studios. But the people who are performing the acts, aren't compensated highly (unless they "win"). Frankly I think that many of these highly paid SWEs are really not worth what they are paid, and that many people could be doing their jobs. I think this is part of the reason of my struggles in the job market since being laid off in June. There has become an obsession that if you're not in the "top 1% of SDEs", you are in essence, worthless and shouldn't be hired.
pointyfence 6y ago
"Rehiring retired people to me signals the new CEO has no trust in people that already are there. And that is usually bad news." That's right. Any time an organization goes with "let's bring back the band," I become a little more skeptical than before. Not just because of what it implies on the quality of the bench, but I'm also wary of this halo effect of the good old days masking what's really needed today instead of living in yesteryear. Gelsinger seems like a pretty good pick for Intel given how disastrous their last CEO search went, but in the earnings call today, there was a lot of invoking the Old Gods and Intel history. I get why they're doing it, but it's a different competitive landscape and Intel today.
- perfopt 6y ago
  Perhaps the people that are already there are (part of) the reason Intel is where it is. I was at Intel many years ago, quit mainly because the work got boring, the pay stagnant, and competitors offered me more. I was pleasantly surprise to land at a place where internal politics was lower, work more fun, and pay better. I have switched since to yet another great place to work. I will probably never go back to Intel again.
exintelhere 6y ago
I was at Intel. Everyone I know who was good was systematically Assassinated or otherwise undermined by the career mediocre. The spectacularly good moved on to Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook etc. At this point, suspect it’s nothing but dregs. Would not hire any of the people I left behind who are still there. Period.
simonh 6y ago
They're a sign that things are bad, for sure, but I think they are signs that Intel and the CEO know that and are taking it seriously. By themselves these moves will not save the company, but if they do have a decent chance of healing some of the internal damage. Yes they're bandages and ointment moves, they're not going to win any fights, but when your broken down and bleeding sometimes what you need right now is bandages and ointment.
moron4hire 6y ago
> I left Intel years ago to get almost 3x the salary as a software developer at... a bank. That is... downright absurd. God, it's enough to make one wonder where we'd all be if Intel weren't asleep at the wheel.

aidenn0 6y ago

I recall hearing from friends that Intel paid more for higher levels of education; having a PhD was more conducive to a high salary than years of experience. Do you know if that was true?

lmilcin 6y ago
It is likely your friend was paid better because they were assigned higher grade. Just for being PhD I think you are automatically bumped to something like senior engineer or higher. Intel has grading system which you can try to google. You are paid according to your grade (+ benefits based on performance, etc.) Also, you are evaluated against your grade and you can gain or loose a grade based on performance (but more likely than loosing a grade is that you will be let go). I have been given a grade that was over my head at the time and would require me to technically advise and coordinate multiple projects, have outside presence (ie present at tech conferences, take part in opensource projects, etc.) and basically work at a level that I have not been ready for. And yet I was not able to make ends meet. I guess when I was hired I got absolutely excited about what I am going to work on and plans for bright future, that I have completely ignored the possibility that I may be over my head and that I may not be able to advance so quickly.
- hinkley 6y ago
  I've known people from towns with one or even two big industries, grew up in several, and the town always gets weird after a while. One in particular I'm thinking of that was almost healthy had a state and an art university pulling in money, and people who lived in the school districts but commuted to heavy industry in an exurb of the next big town. Someone tried building a factory on the edge of town to poach those people but it didn't stick. But that one company still overshadowed everything. Your one company gentrifies the hell out of some things, not everything, and ultimately all fates are tied to their fortunes. They do a layoff, hiring freeze or even a salary squeeze and eight months later a few restaurants and one of your favorite stores shut down. You find out they've been late on payments to people and vendors for the past 6 months. I recall the first time I heard someone interviewing at Intel and I asked why they were, 'in the middle of nowhere in Oregon' and nobody had a good answer to that. What I've learned about manufacturing since then makes me think, "lax environmental rules and watchdogs".
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    Tektronix was there and Oregon State was a source of cheap engineers.
  - bee_rider 6y ago
    Intel in Oregon is probably like an hour from downtown Portland, and there are a ton of apartment complexes about halfway between the two (and there's nice public transit to Portland, so you don't have to deal with the drivers). Nike also has a big building nearby. Also, I imagine Intel would gain very little from being located in, for example, the Bay Area or NYC. It isn't like they are some little startup that needs to go out to bars to find new developers or whatever.
    - vsef 6y ago
      Intel employs 5,900 people in Santa Clara county and that is their corporate headquarters so obviously they think they gain something from a large Bay Area footprint. The idea that Bay Area hiring is primarily "little startups that need to go out to bars" is also very odd.

UncleOxidant 6y ago

I've been approached by headhunters for contract work at Intel. They want all kinds of machine learning knowledge & experience and the pay is.... $45/hr. I kid you not. I just sort of laugh and tell them that that's about 1/3 of market rate for that kind of thing.

mc32 6y ago
Sometimes recruiters get things wrong, mix things up. That might have been for a different position that got redefined without commensurate pay adjustment. That said, 45 is really low for any position in an engineering company, unless it’s ancillary support services that get farmed out. Something like ‘Lab Admin’ type of thing.
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  This happened more than once over the last few years. If it was a mistake I could see it happening once. But not three times.
- pvarangot 6y ago
  I don't think it is. I got approached by consulting companies and recruiters to work on embedded development for Intel, including on-site work in Santa Clara, CA and travel to Asia. The hourly rate was 60 and days in Asia were 250 each plus accommodations. I've never done a trip to Asia were I was working less than 10 hours per day.
  - MaxLeiter 6y ago
    Amazon software development interns (undergrad) in SF get $65/hr + a housing stipend. 60/hr seems far too low
    - giantg2 6y ago
      I have 9 years experience, an MSIS, and make a salary that works out to less than $45/hr, but of course there are benefits.

hinkley 6y ago

I left NCSA (University of Illinois) to join the dot-com boom like everyone else. Curious thing about their pay scale: I made 15% more on day one than any of my friends who had been working 18 months at the same place, which was a giant relief because I did not have the spoons to work as much as they did and still keep up with classes. I got more per hour and working a full 40 hours a week was just assumed, instead of something I had to fight for. The reason I made more money than them was Marc Andreesen. Someone got wind of how much they had been compensating him not to leave and they put the kibosh on it, but they were smart about it. They sugar coated the change by compressing the pay scale toward the middle, instead of squashing it down. If you weren't Marc Andreesen (and he'd been gone for over a year and the people he had poached gone for ~8 months at this point), then your pay didn't change. If you were new, like me, you were better off with the change. You can keep top end people by giving them autonomy instead of more money, but I don't know if, in the long term, that's in Intel's best interests either. People generally trust that my heart is in the right place, but I'm human. Some of my decisions are wrong, and some are just so abstruse that they appear wrong, so I get push-back on both. I've worked at places that are 'top-heavy', where enough people have been Peter Principal-ed into MAX_RANK and there's no room in the org chart to dilute them with more promising people. In fact I work at one of these now. To a first order approximation, I'm just collecting the pay while I convince myself what I want to do next, which is proving to be more difficult than it ever has before, so I'm just here.

marcosdumay 6y ago

> I don't see these moves as encouraging, more like signs of complete and utter panic. I read the GP more in the lines of since everything is on fire and most of the house has already turned into coal, they demonstrating some panic is a much better behavior than the previous indifference about the fire, and a signal that they may decide to do something about it. Thus, expectations on Intel improved.

SkyMarshal 6y ago

>Where I worked in R&D the doors were constantly revolving and many people admitted they wait to register enough of prestigious time at Intel on their CV to get hired at a much better rate for another company. >Rehiring retired people to me signals the new CEO has no trust in people that are already there. And why should he, given the conditions you just outlined? I certainly wouldn’t. They’ve demonstrated they can’t advance either the process tech or the chip architecture in any meaningful way. And I don’t even fault the engineers, but rather a finance-oriented CEO who managed for the bottom line, to goose stock prices and executive comp, while cannibalizing the engineering corps of the high-output talent and experienced technical leadership and mentoring necessary to advance one of the most complex, difficult technologies. One possibility here is that Gelsinger is reversing that, rebuilding the original proven team from the top down, starting with the people who both know how that works, and have the connections to and respect from additional top technical talent to bring them on as well. If Gelsinger also restructures compensation for these folks to ensure they’re appropriately compensated (way above “market rate”) then that’s confirmation that this isn’t panic but the right strategy of rebuilding Intel’s talent base. And that report you linked was discussed yesterday, unclear how reliable it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25844959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25844959

amalantony06 6y ago

This is an excellent counter perspective.

cccc4all 6y ago

The best way to get a raise or a promotion is to find a new job at another company. Look for a company that actually values the tech stack skillset and are willing to pay actual competitive salary. It is much easier now with remote work being prevalent.

908B64B197 6y ago

> Intel engineers are paid supposedly similar rates at similar levels and similar locations. Again with this location based compensation trend. Maybe it works for flipping burgers but it seriously break down when you are a global player hiring from a pool of global talent. You can play CoL games and count beans as much as you want, but the engineering talent Intel is after are also pursued by companies like Apple that are wat above market rate.

astrange 6y ago
I've been told by CPU engineers at Apple that they're not paid very well, especially compared to software, but that competitors just pay slightly less.
- BeetleB 6y ago
  I have a friend at Intel who was offered a job at Apple. He's a manufacturing guy (not circuits/CPU, but still HW). He lives in Portland. They wanted him to move to Cupertino, and offered him 15% more than what he currently makes. Taking COL into account that's a demotion. So I can believe Apple doesn't pay non-SW folks that much.
- systemBuilder 6y ago
  It's a problem of overproduction of electrical engineers by academia. I have met graduates of top-30 EE schools who work at quickie marts in North America. I'm not joking about this I was a professor at that top-30 department when I met this graduate.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    I was told a lot of EE majors nowadays move to software as soon as they graduate.

phendrenad2 6y ago

Somehow the salaries for PhDs in electrical engineering capable of making chips from scratch became normalized with software developers churning out CRUD apps.

ivalm 6y ago
SWE often make more
obstacle1 6y ago
That's because CRUD people can do work that is far more leveraged than a hardware engineer, from the business' perspective. So the CRUD people produce more economic value. One dev can spend 2 weeks automating some process or building a prototype web app that goes on to generate tens of millions for the company with no overhead. Your hypothetical EE can spend 2 years designing a chip. The chip will then require 100s of millions of dollars to be spent on testing, manufacturing, and sales in order to be economically useful to the company (note that none of those functions involve the EE who designed the chip). Sad? I dunno, maybe. True, yep. Nonsensical? Definitely not, there's clear logic to why certain kinds of work pay what they do.
- SJC_Hacker 6y ago
  But its a question not of how much value the employee generates, but how rare is that employees work that they deserve to be compensated highly. i.e, could you get someone of the same ability for less. Consider the reality shows The Voice, America's Got Talent, game shows etc., that generate millions of dollars of revenue for the studios. But the people who are performing the acts, aren't compensated highly (unless they "win"). Frankly I think that many of these highly paid SWEs are really not worth what they are paid, and that many people could be doing their jobs. I think this is part of the reason of my struggles in the job market since being laid off in June. There has become an obsession that if you're not in the "top 1% of SDEs", you are in essence, worthless and shouldn't be hired.

pointyfence 6y ago

"Rehiring retired people to me signals the new CEO has no trust in people that already are there. And that is usually bad news." That's right. Any time an organization goes with "let's bring back the band," I become a little more skeptical than before. Not just because of what it implies on the quality of the bench, but I'm also wary of this halo effect of the good old days masking what's really needed today instead of living in yesteryear. Gelsinger seems like a pretty good pick for Intel given how disastrous their last CEO search went, but in the earnings call today, there was a lot of invoking the Old Gods and Intel history. I get why they're doing it, but it's a different competitive landscape and Intel today.

perfopt 6y ago
Perhaps the people that are already there are (part of) the reason Intel is where it is. I was at Intel many years ago, quit mainly because the work got boring, the pay stagnant, and competitors offered me more. I was pleasantly surprise to land at a place where internal politics was lower, work more fun, and pay better. I have switched since to yet another great place to work. I will probably never go back to Intel again.

exintelhere 6y ago

I was at Intel. Everyone I know who was good was systematically Assassinated or otherwise undermined by the career mediocre. The spectacularly good moved on to Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook etc. At this point, suspect it’s nothing but dregs. Would not hire any of the people I left behind who are still there. Period.

simonh 6y ago

They're a sign that things are bad, for sure, but I think they are signs that Intel and the CEO know that and are taking it seriously. By themselves these moves will not save the company, but if they do have a decent chance of healing some of the internal damage. Yes they're bandages and ointment moves, they're not going to win any fights, but when your broken down and bleeding sometimes what you need right now is bandages and ointment.

moron4hire 6y ago

> I left Intel years ago to get almost 3x the salary as a software developer at... a bank. That is... downright absurd. God, it's enough to make one wonder where we'd all be if Intel weren't asleep at the wheel.