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There's a lot of claims of poached talent in the article, basically claiming [paraphrasing] "Apple, maintaining their stressful work env and not paying to shore

There's a lot of claims of poached talent in the article, basically claiming [paraphrasing] "Apple, maintaining their stressful work env and not paying to shore that up lost some rockstars" How true is this? If they're on the money it's an excellent example of a talent retention miss leading to a demonstrable mediocrity in delivery.

bombcar 4y ago
I suspect we're looking at Apple implementing tick/tock, whether because they're forced to or because they want to - they've already been doing something similar on the iPhones, and supply constraint may make them do it on the chips, too. Few people are going to upgrade from the M1 to the M2 anyway, so it makes sense to keep powder dry for the M3.
- innocenat 4y ago
  Intel tick-tock was alternating microarchitecture change with process optimization every other year. It looks like M2 is neither of those, and it's already 2 year.
dhanna 4y ago
The youngest, strongest RTL engineer I know jumped from Apple to Rivos.
- exhilaration 4y ago
  I'm still amazed at how jumping to a rival firm like this is possible in California, those of us in pretty much the rest of the country are locked behind non-competes.
  - wbl 4y ago
    Horace Greely had the answer 150 years ago.
    - krasin 4y ago
      I am curious. Would it be possible to provide a more direct reference?
      - wbl 4y ago
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_West,_young_man https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_West,_young_man
        krasin 4y ago
        Thanks! Apparently, I knew the quote, but not the author of it.
  - happyopossum 4y ago
    That’s quite an exaggeration - many states disallow or severely limit non-competes, and in many of the states that allow them, they are often unenforced, or easy to get around. So yeah - some people in some parts of the country are locked behind non-competes (if they aren’t willing to move), but it’s hardly everyone.
    - wikibob 4y ago
      That is a gross exaggeration of the situation. California has a total ban on non-competes. A very small handful of other states put restrictions on non-competes, but even those generally allow non-competition agreements if time limited, and the employee makes over ~$100k. It’s widely accepted that prohibiting non-competes has been a significant factor in the tech industry success in California. As one example, it is well known that Amazon aggressively enforces non-competes, even against line engineers.
      - matwood 4y ago
        Non-competes without a monetary attachment are hard to enforce from the employer side. Judges don't look kindly to preventing someone from making a living. Of course companies hope the threat of going to court makes people back down - like Amazon who is known bully in this area. But yes, I wish all states would just ban them outright. Or at least make them require compensation. If an employee is important enough to require a non-compete, then they are important enough to pay during the non-compete time period. Does CA also ban them as part of an acquisition? I've seen them as part of the sale so everyone doesn't quit the day after the acquisition and start a competitor.
        astrange 4y ago
        There are no non-competes of any kind in California, at all, ever.
- ksec 4y ago
  >Rivos [1], I hope that is not him. [1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/apple-lawsuit-says-stealth-startup-rivos-poached-engineers-steal-secrets-2022-05-02/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/apple-lawsuit-says-...
InvaderFizz 4y ago
Looking at another article from the same author[0], we'll have a pretty solid answer to the impact in September with the release of the A16. Apparently the A15 had very minimal CPU gains clock-for-clock over the A14. To quote from that article: "SemiAnalysis believes that the next generation core was delayed out of 2021 into 2022 due to CPU engineer resource problems. In 2019, Nuvia was founded and later acquired by Qualcomm for $1.4B. Apple’s Chief CPU Architect, Gerard Williams, as well as over a 100 other Apple engineers left to join this firm. More recently, SemiAnalysis broke the news about Rivos Inc, a new high performance RISC V startup which includes many senior Apple engineers. The brain drain continues and impacts will be more apparent as time moves on. As Apple once drained resources out of Intel and others through the industry, the reverse seems to be happening now." I was very optimistic on Apple on the CPU front until I read this today. Now I'm waiting to see how the A16 pans out for them to see if it's a two generation loss of progress, or just a single generation stumble. 0: https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-halt-and?s=r https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to...
- skohan 4y ago
  Reads like FUD to me
- AgentOrange1234 4y ago
  I don’t know Apple’s turnaround, but processors are released in products only long after their design is completed. Think at least several months, even likely a year+ between design and release. Nuvia started early enough to be a factor here. But Rivos wasn’t even founded until June 2021. To release now, M2 would already have been at finished with design by then.
- dijonman2 4y ago
  Chip manufacturing is difficult, this reminds me of the Japanese entry into the semiconductor market. There is an excellent video on this for anyone interested in Japanese culture and the war against USA via semiconductors: https://youtu.be/bwhU9goCiaI https://youtu.be/bwhU9goCiaI
dagmx 4y ago
The author has been pushing this conjecture for a year over the past year or so, and has been repeatedly called out on the Hardware reddit. I would recommend not taking their business conjecture without a giant pinch of salt. Just today they were claiming Apple has lost hundreds of engineers in the chip division. The idea that a single division somehow lost hundreds without the industry noticing is ridiculous.
- wmf 4y ago
  Why do you think the industry hasn't noticed? If it's not hundreds, how many Apple employees have moved to Nuvia and Rivos?
  - dagmx 4y ago
    In multiples of tens, I would believe it. Upto a hundred over a couple years? That's a stretch but possible if you count a very wide range of roles. Multiple hundreds as they imply on Reddit? That would be catastrophic to any company, even one as large as Apple. You would certainly see it reflected in their job postings after even a few, let alone hundred+
  - dylan522p 4y ago
    It has noticed. Look at Apple architects, validation, layout, etc engineers moving to Nuvia + Rivos + Google + Amazon + Microsoft + Meta + Intel + Nvidia + AMD + Apple + Qualcomm. It's there.
- Josteniok 4y ago
  I wondered about this too and I like your advice about salt but apparently Apple is suing Rivos about this very thing: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/apple-lawsuit-says-stealth-startup-rivos-poached-engineers-steal-secrets-2022-05-02/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/apple-lawsuit-says-...
  - drawingthesun 4y ago
    The article says 40 employees not hundreds, but I imagine that 40 of Apple's top chip talent is going to hurt, that is a lot of brain power to lose! Seems some employees took more than themselves to Rivos. "at least two former Apple engineers took gigabytes of confidential information with them to Rivos."
somethoughts 4y ago
Likely its a bit of hyperbole to get views. I think there's always a desire to work at a startup in SV and in a low/zero interest rate environment - VCs could probably fund something in the chip design space. But now that interest rates are going up, I think that will be a lot tougher and Apple will be a better position due to their direct access to free cashflow - to either compete or acquire them at a later date. Its also an observation that w.r.t. chip design and consumer electronics, the pay is general lower than say Google, Facebook, Salesforce, Web 2.0 based startups (i.e. AirBnb, Uber, DoorDash), etc. My presumption is that this is because as a chip designer or embedded software/hardware engineer, the capital costs to do anything interesting on your own as a startup (i.e. tape out a chip, mass production in Asia, etc.) are very very high and very fixed and very up-front. Even fabless semiconductors and factory-less product design companies that outsource manufacturing to Asia would need to go find outside capital for IC masks or HW prototypes. You also need a cadre of supply chain, biz dev, marketing, ad spend, channel sales distribution. Compare that to AirBnb, Dropbox where you need a good idea, a handful of 10x SW engineers and an AWS account that can scale as you grown and a free tier for onboarding customers. Therefore, Google/FB etc. need to pay more to prevent these folks from going off and starting their disruptor (i.e. Insta, WhatsApp, SalesForce).
- Sirened 4y ago
  ++, totally. I think a lot of people are linking CPU engineering with SW engineering because they both work with the same product at the end of the day, but the industries are radically different both from a business and culture standpoint. The "go fast and break things" mentality that pervades the SV software startup scene is, in my experience, no where to be found in hardware because it's both incredibly costly to make any mistakes and because most CPU divisions are lead by people with decades of experience (rather than the mishmash that is startups). The author's argument here about talent leaving after having "gotten Apple off x64" is such an odd take. It's not as if Apple started designing these chips after the M1 launched—the pipeline for even small SoCs is often five or more years. The bit about Rivos is especially bizarre because that company was founded in 2021, well after this chip must have been taped out.
  - 4y ago
modeless 4y ago
Seems silly to me. CPU designs are important, but these companies have more than enough engineers to make competent designs even with some people leaving. There's another factor that completely dominates. It's all about the fabs. Intel lost the performance lead, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they lost the lead in fabs. AMD passed Intel, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they use TSMC's fabs and TSMC passed Intel. Apple blew everyone away with M1, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they paid TSMC boatloads of money for exclusivity on their latest fabs. Apple M2 disappoints on CPU performance, is it because of their designs? No, it's because TSMC's next fab isn't ready yet so they're still using the same fabs as M1. These days I care more about which TSMC process node my chips came from than which company designed them. I need a new computer but I'm waiting until next year because there will be a wave of new CPUs and GPUs coming out with much better performance. Better designs? Maybe a little, but it's really because they're all moving to TSMC N4. I really hope Pat Gelsinger can save Intel's fab business because we really need another company that can compete in fabs and Samsung isn't doing too hot either.
- iosystem 4y ago
  I thought AMD succeeded because they managed to get Jim Keller and other great engineers? Unsure why you're placing your hope on a CEO.
  - wmf 4y ago
    No one person deserves the credit for a processor and if Intel had delivered on their roadmap (Ice Lake in 2017 and Alder Lake in 2019) AMD would be dead today.
    - BackBlast 4y ago
      AMD survived bulldozer. They survived not because of the quality of their chips, but because there exists a sizable x86 market that is literally anything except Intel.
      - 4y ago
matwood 4y ago
Work culture can mean a couple of things though. Building and delivering the M1 was probably a great experience. Maybe like the hardware equivalent of greenfield development. The M1 is out, and now it's about continual refinements. The people who love going from 0->1 are not always the same people who enjoy going from 1->100. And while Apple isn't the max payer in SV, I'm sure they pay fine compared to other big tech. The issue is, chips are big right now and no existing big tech can compete compensation wise with shares in a growth chip startup. With VC drying up, I expect this to change back in Apple (and other big techs) favor.

bombcar 4y ago

I suspect we're looking at Apple implementing tick/tock, whether because they're forced to or because they want to - they've already been doing something similar on the iPhones, and supply constraint may make them do it on the chips, too. Few people are going to upgrade from the M1 to the M2 anyway, so it makes sense to keep powder dry for the M3.

innocenat 4y ago
Intel tick-tock was alternating microarchitecture change with process optimization every other year. It looks like M2 is neither of those, and it's already 2 year.

dhanna 4y ago

The youngest, strongest RTL engineer I know jumped from Apple to Rivos.

exhilaration 4y ago
I'm still amazed at how jumping to a rival firm like this is possible in California, those of us in pretty much the rest of the country are locked behind non-competes.
- wbl 4y ago
  Horace Greely had the answer 150 years ago.
  - krasin 4y ago
    I am curious. Would it be possible to provide a more direct reference?
    - wbl 4y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_West,_young_man https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_West,_young_man
      - krasin 4y ago
        Thanks! Apparently, I knew the quote, but not the author of it.
- happyopossum 4y ago
  That’s quite an exaggeration - many states disallow or severely limit non-competes, and in many of the states that allow them, they are often unenforced, or easy to get around. So yeah - some people in some parts of the country are locked behind non-competes (if they aren’t willing to move), but it’s hardly everyone.
  - wikibob 4y ago
    That is a gross exaggeration of the situation. California has a total ban on non-competes. A very small handful of other states put restrictions on non-competes, but even those generally allow non-competition agreements if time limited, and the employee makes over ~$100k. It’s widely accepted that prohibiting non-competes has been a significant factor in the tech industry success in California. As one example, it is well known that Amazon aggressively enforces non-competes, even against line engineers.
    - matwood 4y ago
      Non-competes without a monetary attachment are hard to enforce from the employer side. Judges don't look kindly to preventing someone from making a living. Of course companies hope the threat of going to court makes people back down - like Amazon who is known bully in this area. But yes, I wish all states would just ban them outright. Or at least make them require compensation. If an employee is important enough to require a non-compete, then they are important enough to pay during the non-compete time period. Does CA also ban them as part of an acquisition? I've seen them as part of the sale so everyone doesn't quit the day after the acquisition and start a competitor.
      - astrange 4y ago
        There are no non-competes of any kind in California, at all, ever.
ksec 4y ago
>Rivos [1], I hope that is not him. [1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/apple-lawsuit-says-stealth-startup-rivos-poached-engineers-steal-secrets-2022-05-02/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/apple-lawsuit-says-...

InvaderFizz 4y ago

Looking at another article from the same author[0], we'll have a pretty solid answer to the impact in September with the release of the A16. Apparently the A15 had very minimal CPU gains clock-for-clock over the A14. To quote from that article: "SemiAnalysis believes that the next generation core was delayed out of 2021 into 2022 due to CPU engineer resource problems. In 2019, Nuvia was founded and later acquired by Qualcomm for $1.4B. Apple’s Chief CPU Architect, Gerard Williams, as well as over a 100 other Apple engineers left to join this firm. More recently, SemiAnalysis broke the news about Rivos Inc, a new high performance RISC V startup which includes many senior Apple engineers. The brain drain continues and impacts will be more apparent as time moves on. As Apple once drained resources out of Intel and others through the industry, the reverse seems to be happening now." I was very optimistic on Apple on the CPU front until I read this today. Now I'm waiting to see how the A16 pans out for them to see if it's a two generation loss of progress, or just a single generation stumble. 0: https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-halt-and?s=r https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to...

skohan 4y ago
Reads like FUD to me
AgentOrange1234 4y ago
I don’t know Apple’s turnaround, but processors are released in products only long after their design is completed. Think at least several months, even likely a year+ between design and release. Nuvia started early enough to be a factor here. But Rivos wasn’t even founded until June 2021. To release now, M2 would already have been at finished with design by then.
dijonman2 4y ago
Chip manufacturing is difficult, this reminds me of the Japanese entry into the semiconductor market. There is an excellent video on this for anyone interested in Japanese culture and the war against USA via semiconductors: https://youtu.be/bwhU9goCiaI https://youtu.be/bwhU9goCiaI

dagmx 4y ago

The author has been pushing this conjecture for a year over the past year or so, and has been repeatedly called out on the Hardware reddit. I would recommend not taking their business conjecture without a giant pinch of salt. Just today they were claiming Apple has lost hundreds of engineers in the chip division. The idea that a single division somehow lost hundreds without the industry noticing is ridiculous.

wmf 4y ago
Why do you think the industry hasn't noticed? If it's not hundreds, how many Apple employees have moved to Nuvia and Rivos?
- dagmx 4y ago
  In multiples of tens, I would believe it. Upto a hundred over a couple years? That's a stretch but possible if you count a very wide range of roles. Multiple hundreds as they imply on Reddit? That would be catastrophic to any company, even one as large as Apple. You would certainly see it reflected in their job postings after even a few, let alone hundred+
- dylan522p 4y ago
  It has noticed. Look at Apple architects, validation, layout, etc engineers moving to Nuvia + Rivos + Google + Amazon + Microsoft + Meta + Intel + Nvidia + AMD + Apple + Qualcomm. It's there.
Josteniok 4y ago
I wondered about this too and I like your advice about salt but apparently Apple is suing Rivos about this very thing: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/apple-lawsuit-says-stealth-startup-rivos-poached-engineers-steal-secrets-2022-05-02/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/apple-lawsuit-says-...
- drawingthesun 4y ago
  The article says 40 employees not hundreds, but I imagine that 40 of Apple's top chip talent is going to hurt, that is a lot of brain power to lose! Seems some employees took more than themselves to Rivos. "at least two former Apple engineers took gigabytes of confidential information with them to Rivos."

somethoughts 4y ago

Likely its a bit of hyperbole to get views. I think there's always a desire to work at a startup in SV and in a low/zero interest rate environment - VCs could probably fund something in the chip design space. But now that interest rates are going up, I think that will be a lot tougher and Apple will be a better position due to their direct access to free cashflow - to either compete or acquire them at a later date. Its also an observation that w.r.t. chip design and consumer electronics, the pay is general lower than say Google, Facebook, Salesforce, Web 2.0 based startups (i.e. AirBnb, Uber, DoorDash), etc. My presumption is that this is because as a chip designer or embedded software/hardware engineer, the capital costs to do anything interesting on your own as a startup (i.e. tape out a chip, mass production in Asia, etc.) are very very high and very fixed and very up-front. Even fabless semiconductors and factory-less product design companies that outsource manufacturing to Asia would need to go find outside capital for IC masks or HW prototypes. You also need a cadre of supply chain, biz dev, marketing, ad spend, channel sales distribution. Compare that to AirBnb, Dropbox where you need a good idea, a handful of 10x SW engineers and an AWS account that can scale as you grown and a free tier for onboarding customers. Therefore, Google/FB etc. need to pay more to prevent these folks from going off and starting their disruptor (i.e. Insta, WhatsApp, SalesForce).

Sirened 4y ago
++, totally. I think a lot of people are linking CPU engineering with SW engineering because they both work with the same product at the end of the day, but the industries are radically different both from a business and culture standpoint. The "go fast and break things" mentality that pervades the SV software startup scene is, in my experience, no where to be found in hardware because it's both incredibly costly to make any mistakes and because most CPU divisions are lead by people with decades of experience (rather than the mishmash that is startups). The author's argument here about talent leaving after having "gotten Apple off x64" is such an odd take. It's not as if Apple started designing these chips after the M1 launched—the pipeline for even small SoCs is often five or more years. The bit about Rivos is especially bizarre because that company was founded in 2021, well after this chip must have been taped out.
- 4y ago

modeless 4y ago

Seems silly to me. CPU designs are important, but these companies have more than enough engineers to make competent designs even with some people leaving. There's another factor that completely dominates. It's all about the fabs. Intel lost the performance lead, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they lost the lead in fabs. AMD passed Intel, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they use TSMC's fabs and TSMC passed Intel. Apple blew everyone away with M1, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they paid TSMC boatloads of money for exclusivity on their latest fabs. Apple M2 disappoints on CPU performance, is it because of their designs? No, it's because TSMC's next fab isn't ready yet so they're still using the same fabs as M1. These days I care more about which TSMC process node my chips came from than which company designed them. I need a new computer but I'm waiting until next year because there will be a wave of new CPUs and GPUs coming out with much better performance. Better designs? Maybe a little, but it's really because they're all moving to TSMC N4. I really hope Pat Gelsinger can save Intel's fab business because we really need another company that can compete in fabs and Samsung isn't doing too hot either.

iosystem 4y ago
I thought AMD succeeded because they managed to get Jim Keller and other great engineers? Unsure why you're placing your hope on a CEO.
- wmf 4y ago
  No one person deserves the credit for a processor and if Intel had delivered on their roadmap (Ice Lake in 2017 and Alder Lake in 2019) AMD would be dead today.
  - BackBlast 4y ago
    AMD survived bulldozer. They survived not because of the quality of their chips, but because there exists a sizable x86 market that is literally anything except Intel.
    - 4y ago

matwood 4y ago

Work culture can mean a couple of things though. Building and delivering the M1 was probably a great experience. Maybe like the hardware equivalent of greenfield development. The M1 is out, and now it's about continual refinements. The people who love going from 0->1 are not always the same people who enjoy going from 1->100. And while Apple isn't the max payer in SV, I'm sure they pay fine compared to other big tech. The issue is, chips are big right now and no existing big tech can compete compensation wise with shares in a growth chip startup. With VC drying up, I expect this to change back in Apple (and other big techs) favor.