7 ms·

I can't corroborate this at all. I come from a CS background. If you leave school and enter the workforce at SAS, you will be at a disadvantage insofar as you

by cxr 4y ago

I can't corroborate this at all. I come from a CS background. If you leave school and enter the workforce at SAS, you will be at a disadvantage insofar as you are looking for a workplace that you hope to learn something from or one that you hope reinforces good engineering practices. The semiconductor industry, from the vantage point of an experienced systems thinker, reinforces awful engineering practices. All the things that SE folks take for granted—version control, e.g, as a discipline/tool to name one example, for regression analysis—say goodbye to any of these things, along with any expectation of competence from your colleagues. The semiconductor industry sources heavily from the defense sector, and this has deleterious, catastrophic effects. A close friend (from a non-CS engineering background) I know to still be at SAS. We don't talk about finances, but at around 8 years in, I estimate that he just recently (since COVID) crossed the six figure threshold. He's in a fairly senior role. Meanwhile: "What's x86?" — a direct quote from a conversation not too long ago. He has no real professional experience outside of SAS, was not set up in an environment that rewards "extracurricular" experience, so he doesn't have any of that, either, and he's effectively stuck as a result of the "golden" handcuffs that the path at SAS has led him on. Don't work in the semiconductor industry, folks. What you can expect to be is a monkey pressing buttons on a machine (that your supervisor—and their supervisor—doesn't understand, and nor will you; you pass butter). Make no mistake: there's an abundance of low-hanging fruit. But you won't have, as Gerry Weinberg put it, "permission" to pick it. By all means, if your prospects/ambitions look to be something like working for the state/federal government, learning nothing over your career, and cashing mediocre checks for doing mediocre work along the way, then by all means go for it. Otherwise, it is likelier that you'll be hobbled by your time in the industry. And not for no good reason. If I'm evaluating someone and it came up that they'd done any significant time in the world of semiconductors, the net impression it'd have on me (having hash an insider's view of it) would be one worse than if they said that they'd just gotten their degree and had spent the last N years flipping burgers, cf Dan Luu. Don't do semiconductors, folks. PS: sorry, drunk.

verall 4y ago
Not every semicon is SAS, I've heard similar things as what your friend has said about them though. No offense but your post comes off as someone who has spent their whole life in software and has no experience in semicon.
- cxr 4y ago
  Maybe I didn't succeed at getting it across, but my anecdotes about SAS are not only by proxy. (I.e. my friend's experience and that alone.) I worked there.
  - throwaway5959 4y ago
    So you’re critical of others for working at a place you have worked at? How does that work?
    - throwaway5959 4y ago
      I’m talking about the hypocrisy of holding it against someone for having worked somewhere that you yourself have worked at, not the industry itself.
      - pts_ 4y ago
        This person should be flagged for bias in interviews.
      - lmz 4y ago
        > for having worked somewhere that you yourself have worked at Their friend also stayed there for 8 years while the poster presumably quit sooner.
    - lostlogin 4y ago
      Surely this is the best way to review a workplace? What method is better?
mensetmanusman 4y ago
This is like saying don’t go into medicine because you have to be a resident nurse along the way. Semiconductor fabrication is the most advanced engineering humanity has ever attempted, so you will reach your threshold eventually solving problems that might not have answers (depending on your role). Not everyone wants to do that though, and the world needs implementers and those focused on details. Pay? Could be higher for sure.
- e63f67dd-065b 4y ago
  I’ve heard it describes as a nerd trap: salaries are low and working conditions meh precisely because nerds want to work on the most advanced engineering humanity has ever attempted.
  - galangalalgol 4y ago
    Its only a trap if you walk in unaware. If you acknowledge part of your pay is being excited by your work, then it's a choice. We don't expect game development to pay the same as writing payment portals for a faang, even if it's harder, because we understand the task itself is part of the exchange. Jobs people enjoy will always pay less than those they enjoy less, given they both have the same qualifications.
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  They were giving anecdotes of "fairly senior people" and talking about the incompetence expected of managers, which is not analogous to a resident nurse.
jason-phillips 4y ago
sxr's posts about Samsung Semiconductor always strike me as being particularly bitter. The thing about chronically bitter people is that they're implacable.
- cxr 4y ago
  The nice thing about the trick used in this comment is that it basically allows the person making it to just decide to believe whatever they want—and you hardly even notice it doesn't contain anything substantive about the real topic at hand or that it carries a personal attack as its payload, right there in the open but under the radar.
  - jason-phillips 4y ago
    I'm full of tricks, cxr. You'll get used to it.
    - cxr 4y ago
      I know and I am.
assttoasstmgr 4y ago
You're right, we should encourage the new generation to all strive to become overpaid mediocre SWEs only in it for the quick cash, because the world doesn't have enough shitty food delivery apps. Hopefully I've painted this with a broad enough brush. There is more to a fulfilling career than money. In fact, an entire generation of SWEs who forgot the concepts of simplicity and efficiency, coding a never-ending avalanche of rubbish bloated apps is why we continually need new silicon.
- runnerup 4y ago
  https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death... Recent front page submission comes to mind XD
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  It's not really about quick cash. The truth is just that additional SWEs are right now more useful than additional fab engineers, in the US. It sucks to hear but it's true. There just aren't that many fab engineers necessary. Even TSMC employs a large part of SWE and IC designers, probably close to or more than process engineers. Fab engineers in the US are fairly disposable because their existence isn't based on market needs but really as a hedge by the US to be independent. That's going to suck for you because TSMC isn't going to value you that much because you're not really business critical, you're just there to get government subsidies. In Taiwan it's another story and it's almost competitive with good SWE jobs.
  - galangalalgol 4y ago
    This seems obviously true. It only seems unjust because we have this idea that tasks that are more intellectually challenging should pay more. That isn't how supply and demand work. If you need twice as many typists as are graduating, but only need a quarter of the radiologists that complete residency, well then typists will be paid far more than radiologists. We have an excess of people who want to work hardware, specifically because it is challenging, and that draws interest. So the interesting work is part of the compensation. We accept this as true for game development, it shouldn't surprise us for hardware, or embedded software. It doesn't matter that what you are doing is "harder", we need more bodies slinging fullstack generic buisiness logic than we can possibly educate it seems, so that is what will pay best. As for why we need that many people? I don't have any clue. It really seems like low-code should eventually replace the need for most SWE and drive down wages, but that has been a dream for decades and it hasn't happened yet.
nixass 4y ago
Drunk is not an excuse for such a crappy view on the world
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  Why? Maybe the world really is that bad.
jimbokun 4y ago
> but at around 8 years in, I estimate that he just recently (since COVID) crossed the six figure threshold. Better than most people.
Der_Einzige 4y ago
All this because Intel couldn't pay market rate for SWEs. Lol
imgabe 4y ago
I think you’re looking at this from the wrong perspective. If your other option is to be a FAANG software engineer, sure, do that instead. For the vast swathes of the country where the available jobs are some mix of retail/warehouse low wage drudgery, long haul trucking, drug dealing / fraud / other crime, or welfare, working in semiconductors might be a welcome and attractive option.
- californical 4y ago
  “Better than welfare or crime” doesn’t really sell me that it’s a great option
  - jprd 4y ago
    You're replying from a place where you have OTHER options.
  - nickff 4y ago
    We should compare people's actual options, and not fall victim to the nirvana fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
    - sudosysgen 4y ago
      Sure but people able to be process engineers on the caliber of those at TSMC are likely to be able to get good SWE jobs if they really wanted to. We're talking about highly qualified jobs here, un Taiwan a lot of those are gonna have PhDs+.
      - ekianjo 4y ago
        phD are not what they used to be
        sudosysgen 4y ago
        If you can get a STEM PhD you can probably get into FAANG. Sure they're not what they used to be, they're still difficult to get. And they require many of the same skills as modern programming interviews.
manimino 4y ago
Ahh, "SAS" here refers to Samsung Austin Semiconductor.
sgarland 4y ago
Source: I was a supervisor in Cleans at SAS for two years, with my only qualification being I was a submarine nuclear operator previously, which is what that hiring manager was looking for. There are a lot of ex-nukes at SAS. Anyway. You're correct that their software practices, by and large, are absolutely atrocious. In general, I found that if a team had people who could code, they'd just write their own programs and stay in the Shadow IT realm. I taught myself JS/PHP/SQL while I was there, and built a shitty CRUD app to replace some even worse Excel sheets others were using. However, from SAS' perspective, they aren't making software. All of the machines have their own control systems (which are usually running XP and are terrible), and they need tools that can connect to those, retrieve data, dump it into a DB, and run queries on it. It never needs to leave the site, you don't have to worry about surprise traffic, and scaling issues are never going to get to the point of needing thousand-node clusters or the like. What they have works. Re: pay, IME engineers of any kind would start at ~$80K fresh out of college, which in 2017 wasn't that bad for Austin. Engineers also got promoted very quickly. Yes, pure software jobs rapidly outpace SAS salaries. Hell, I went from a supervisor role making $86K to an Associate SRE role (I have 20 years of hobbyist Linux experience, I just never did anything with it - also I got a Master's in SWE while I was at SAS) elsewhere, and immediately went past $100K. It's a fascinating company that is also incredibly stressful, the pay isn't as good/fast as others, and to my knowledge remote work doesn't exist. Still, someone has to do it, else we wouldn't have chips. Also, they employ some _crazy_ intelligent PHds. They just exude brilliance. It's awe-inspiring watching them talk through problems.
derefr 4y ago
> The semiconductor industry sources heavily from the defense sector What does this part mean, exactly? Are photolithography lasers just repurposed Naval anti-aircraft lasers or something?
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  The skillset is fairly similar and people move from one industry to the other
formerkrogemp 4y ago
-> A close friend (from a non-CS engineering background) I know to still be at SAS. We don't talk about finances, but at around 8 years in, I estimate that he just recently (since COVID) crossed the six figure threshold. He's in a fairly senior role. Meanwhile: "What's x86?" — a direct quote from a conversation not too long ago. -> He has no real professional experience outside of SAS, was not set up in an environment that rewards "extracurricular" experience, so he doesn't have any of that, either, and he's effectively stuck as a result of the "golden" handcuffs that the path at SAS has led him on. -> Don't work in the semiconductor industry, folks. What you can expect to be is a monkey pressing buttons on a machine (that your supervisor—and their supervisor—doesn't understand, and nor will you; you pass butter). Make no mistake: there's an abundance of low-hanging fruit. But you won't have, as Gerry Weinberg put it, "permission" to pick it. -> By all means, if your prospects/ambitions look to be something like working for the state/federal government, learning nothing over your career, and cashing mediocre checks for doing mediocre work along the way, then by all means go for it. Otherwise, it is likelier that you'll be hobbled by your time in the industry. And not for no good reason. If I'm evaluating someone and it came up that they'd done any significant time in the world of semiconductors, the net impression it'd have on me (having hash an insider's view of it) would be one worse than if they said that they'd just gotten their degree and had spent the last N years flipping burgers, cf Dan Luu All I'm understanding from this is not "don't go into the semiconductor industry" but rather that you're an awful friend to be trash talking your friend. It seems like you just called their career a waste of time and implied your friend to be more poor (since when was 6 figures not a decent amount of money?) than you and less knowledgeable ('what is x86'). I'm sure you'll agree that your friend is neither poor nor stupid, as you seem to imply here for their working in the semiconductor industry. I'm sure your friend would be delighted to know that they're a monkey pressing buttons without any knowledge of what's going on or that you estimate a fast food worker has a better background for transitioning to software engineering. You haven't talked to your friend about finances, but you can magically estimate their savings? I understand that you might be able estimate within an order of magnitude based on context, but you don't know how much this person has saved nor do you seem to consider that they might spend their money on personal emergencies, sick family members, or kids. That your estimation of your friend's savings should be taken as evidence for poor compensation in the semiconductor industry is laughable, honestly. But, hey, I at least appreciate your earnest opinion.
klooney 4y ago
Dan Luu worked in semiconductors and spoke quite highly of his time there.
- cxr 4y ago
  Dan Luu worked for one of the semiconductor industry's customers. He didn't work at S2 or another chipmaker. (He also explicitly mentions that he was lucky to work at Centaur starting out, but that's besides the point—since, again, Centaur is not a chipmaker.) When I mentioned Dan Luu, I was specifically referring to the recent thunderstorm on Twitter where he mentioned the uncanny valleyness of doing work for unsexy companies and that it's actually more like a blemish on your résumé than a non-zero positive contribution.
md2020 4y ago
To offer a different point of view, I'm a software engineer at ASML in the US. I can only offer the experience I've had on my specific team, and I've heard that this does vary between teams, but we do follow normal software industry practices. We have version control. We have automated regression testing, and unit tests for everything we write. We do Agile and use Jira (with all the same gripes that everyone else has about those). I made $90k here right out of my undergrad, and got a raise one year later (this year) to be over $100k. Could the tooling be better? Sure. Our version control system is pretty old, but the company has made a massive push over the last few years to modernize all of it, and when we transition to that at the end of this year I think we'll be in a pretty great spot. Some teams are already using the new tooling and it has gotten very positive reviews. I have a great relationship with my team and my manager. I get to work on interesting stuff (mostly embedded systems), and I've had the opportunity to learn a small part of one of the most advanced machines humans have ever built. I'll say the thing about getting people from defense is true, but not so much in software. If anyone has other questions feel free to just ask.
- cxr 4y ago
  I'm talking about making chips, not being a software engineer that happens to work in the same building as people making chips (or the building where people work on making machines that make chips). SEs showing up and saying things were fine at their SE job doesn't move the needle on this topic. Purdue's semiconductor degree program for EEs is only incidentally relevant in that case.
  - mysticpimp 4y ago
    For the most part, Fab engineering is beyond boring and exploitative. I quit my PhD because it was excruciatingly boring, all you do is click ON/OFF on a big machine that deposits metal, and I realized, that this was what I'd be doing for 100K a year. On paper it sounds like you're doing some genius work manipulating atoms, but really it's actually quite mindless and boring, which is part of the reason the physics departments don't do this work anymore, only EE, since physics does the actual cool stuff. I think it's somewhat related to the fact that these degrees have almost no americans, and are full of foreigners that really need a visa. As an american, it made no sense to do this work, given that there are much more interesting and lucrative options. But going back to your point, there are certain areas within semiconductor manufacturing that are software engineering jobs. They tend to be closely related to what's called physical design in the design part of making a chip. Or EDA coders. It's a cool area. But the bigger part of semiconductor manufacturing is working in a fab, which is atrocious grueling work, which is quite boring and dangerous.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by cxr 4y ago

verall 4y ago

Not every semicon is SAS, I've heard similar things as what your friend has said about them though. No offense but your post comes off as someone who has spent their whole life in software and has no experience in semicon.

cxr 4y ago
Maybe I didn't succeed at getting it across, but my anecdotes about SAS are not only by proxy. (I.e. my friend's experience and that alone.) I worked there.
- throwaway5959 4y ago
  So you’re critical of others for working at a place you have worked at? How does that work?
  - throwaway5959 4y ago
    I’m talking about the hypocrisy of holding it against someone for having worked somewhere that you yourself have worked at, not the industry itself.
    - pts_ 4y ago
      This person should be flagged for bias in interviews.
    - lmz 4y ago
      > for having worked somewhere that you yourself have worked at Their friend also stayed there for 8 years while the poster presumably quit sooner.
  - lostlogin 4y ago
    Surely this is the best way to review a workplace? What method is better?

mensetmanusman 4y ago

This is like saying don’t go into medicine because you have to be a resident nurse along the way. Semiconductor fabrication is the most advanced engineering humanity has ever attempted, so you will reach your threshold eventually solving problems that might not have answers (depending on your role). Not everyone wants to do that though, and the world needs implementers and those focused on details. Pay? Could be higher for sure.

e63f67dd-065b 4y ago
I’ve heard it describes as a nerd trap: salaries are low and working conditions meh precisely because nerds want to work on the most advanced engineering humanity has ever attempted.
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  Its only a trap if you walk in unaware. If you acknowledge part of your pay is being excited by your work, then it's a choice. We don't expect game development to pay the same as writing payment portals for a faang, even if it's harder, because we understand the task itself is part of the exchange. Jobs people enjoy will always pay less than those they enjoy less, given they both have the same qualifications.
sudosysgen 4y ago
They were giving anecdotes of "fairly senior people" and talking about the incompetence expected of managers, which is not analogous to a resident nurse.

jason-phillips 4y ago

sxr's posts about Samsung Semiconductor always strike me as being particularly bitter. The thing about chronically bitter people is that they're implacable.

cxr 4y ago
The nice thing about the trick used in this comment is that it basically allows the person making it to just decide to believe whatever they want—and you hardly even notice it doesn't contain anything substantive about the real topic at hand or that it carries a personal attack as its payload, right there in the open but under the radar.
- jason-phillips 4y ago
  I'm full of tricks, cxr. You'll get used to it.
  - cxr 4y ago
    I know and I am.

assttoasstmgr 4y ago

You're right, we should encourage the new generation to all strive to become overpaid mediocre SWEs only in it for the quick cash, because the world doesn't have enough shitty food delivery apps. Hopefully I've painted this with a broad enough brush. There is more to a fulfilling career than money. In fact, an entire generation of SWEs who forgot the concepts of simplicity and efficiency, coding a never-ending avalanche of rubbish bloated apps is why we continually need new silicon.

runnerup 4y ago
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death... Recent front page submission comes to mind XD
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sudosysgen 4y ago
It's not really about quick cash. The truth is just that additional SWEs are right now more useful than additional fab engineers, in the US. It sucks to hear but it's true. There just aren't that many fab engineers necessary. Even TSMC employs a large part of SWE and IC designers, probably close to or more than process engineers. Fab engineers in the US are fairly disposable because their existence isn't based on market needs but really as a hedge by the US to be independent. That's going to suck for you because TSMC isn't going to value you that much because you're not really business critical, you're just there to get government subsidies. In Taiwan it's another story and it's almost competitive with good SWE jobs.
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  This seems obviously true. It only seems unjust because we have this idea that tasks that are more intellectually challenging should pay more. That isn't how supply and demand work. If you need twice as many typists as are graduating, but only need a quarter of the radiologists that complete residency, well then typists will be paid far more than radiologists. We have an excess of people who want to work hardware, specifically because it is challenging, and that draws interest. So the interesting work is part of the compensation. We accept this as true for game development, it shouldn't surprise us for hardware, or embedded software. It doesn't matter that what you are doing is "harder", we need more bodies slinging fullstack generic buisiness logic than we can possibly educate it seems, so that is what will pay best. As for why we need that many people? I don't have any clue. It really seems like low-code should eventually replace the need for most SWE and drive down wages, but that has been a dream for decades and it hasn't happened yet.

nixass 4y ago

Drunk is not an excuse for such a crappy view on the world

matheusmoreira 4y ago
Why? Maybe the world really is that bad.

jimbokun 4y ago

> but at around 8 years in, I estimate that he just recently (since COVID) crossed the six figure threshold. Better than most people.

Der_Einzige 4y ago

All this because Intel couldn't pay market rate for SWEs. Lol

imgabe 4y ago

I think you’re looking at this from the wrong perspective. If your other option is to be a FAANG software engineer, sure, do that instead. For the vast swathes of the country where the available jobs are some mix of retail/warehouse low wage drudgery, long haul trucking, drug dealing / fraud / other crime, or welfare, working in semiconductors might be a welcome and attractive option.

californical 4y ago
“Better than welfare or crime” doesn’t really sell me that it’s a great option
- jprd 4y ago
  You're replying from a place where you have OTHER options.
- nickff 4y ago
  We should compare people's actual options, and not fall victim to the nirvana fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
  - sudosysgen 4y ago
    Sure but people able to be process engineers on the caliber of those at TSMC are likely to be able to get good SWE jobs if they really wanted to. We're talking about highly qualified jobs here, un Taiwan a lot of those are gonna have PhDs+.
    - ekianjo 4y ago
      phD are not what they used to be
      - sudosysgen 4y ago
        If you can get a STEM PhD you can probably get into FAANG. Sure they're not what they used to be, they're still difficult to get. And they require many of the same skills as modern programming interviews.

manimino 4y ago

Ahh, "SAS" here refers to Samsung Austin Semiconductor.

sgarland 4y ago

Source: I was a supervisor in Cleans at SAS for two years, with my only qualification being I was a submarine nuclear operator previously, which is what that hiring manager was looking for. There are a lot of ex-nukes at SAS. Anyway. You're correct that their software practices, by and large, are absolutely atrocious. In general, I found that if a team had people who could code, they'd just write their own programs and stay in the Shadow IT realm. I taught myself JS/PHP/SQL while I was there, and built a shitty CRUD app to replace some even worse Excel sheets others were using. However, from SAS' perspective, they aren't making software. All of the machines have their own control systems (which are usually running XP and are terrible), and they need tools that can connect to those, retrieve data, dump it into a DB, and run queries on it. It never needs to leave the site, you don't have to worry about surprise traffic, and scaling issues are never going to get to the point of needing thousand-node clusters or the like. What they have works. Re: pay, IME engineers of any kind would start at ~$80K fresh out of college, which in 2017 wasn't that bad for Austin. Engineers also got promoted very quickly. Yes, pure software jobs rapidly outpace SAS salaries. Hell, I went from a supervisor role making $86K to an Associate SRE role (I have 20 years of hobbyist Linux experience, I just never did anything with it - also I got a Master's in SWE while I was at SAS) elsewhere, and immediately went past $100K. It's a fascinating company that is also incredibly stressful, the pay isn't as good/fast as others, and to my knowledge remote work doesn't exist. Still, someone has to do it, else we wouldn't have chips. Also, they employ some _crazy_ intelligent PHds. They just exude brilliance. It's awe-inspiring watching them talk through problems.

derefr 4y ago

> The semiconductor industry sources heavily from the defense sector What does this part mean, exactly? Are photolithography lasers just repurposed Naval anti-aircraft lasers or something?

sudosysgen 4y ago
The skillset is fairly similar and people move from one industry to the other

formerkrogemp 4y ago

-> A close friend (from a non-CS engineering background) I know to still be at SAS. We don't talk about finances, but at around 8 years in, I estimate that he just recently (since COVID) crossed the six figure threshold. He's in a fairly senior role. Meanwhile: "What's x86?" — a direct quote from a conversation not too long ago. -> He has no real professional experience outside of SAS, was not set up in an environment that rewards "extracurricular" experience, so he doesn't have any of that, either, and he's effectively stuck as a result of the "golden" handcuffs that the path at SAS has led him on. -> Don't work in the semiconductor industry, folks. What you can expect to be is a monkey pressing buttons on a machine (that your supervisor—and their supervisor—doesn't understand, and nor will you; you pass butter). Make no mistake: there's an abundance of low-hanging fruit. But you won't have, as Gerry Weinberg put it, "permission" to pick it. -> By all means, if your prospects/ambitions look to be something like working for the state/federal government, learning nothing over your career, and cashing mediocre checks for doing mediocre work along the way, then by all means go for it. Otherwise, it is likelier that you'll be hobbled by your time in the industry. And not for no good reason. If I'm evaluating someone and it came up that they'd done any significant time in the world of semiconductors, the net impression it'd have on me (having hash an insider's view of it) would be one worse than if they said that they'd just gotten their degree and had spent the last N years flipping burgers, cf Dan Luu All I'm understanding from this is not "don't go into the semiconductor industry" but rather that you're an awful friend to be trash talking your friend. It seems like you just called their career a waste of time and implied your friend to be more poor (since when was 6 figures not a decent amount of money?) than you and less knowledgeable ('what is x86'). I'm sure you'll agree that your friend is neither poor nor stupid, as you seem to imply here for their working in the semiconductor industry. I'm sure your friend would be delighted to know that they're a monkey pressing buttons without any knowledge of what's going on or that you estimate a fast food worker has a better background for transitioning to software engineering. You haven't talked to your friend about finances, but you can magically estimate their savings? I understand that you might be able estimate within an order of magnitude based on context, but you don't know how much this person has saved nor do you seem to consider that they might spend their money on personal emergencies, sick family members, or kids. That your estimation of your friend's savings should be taken as evidence for poor compensation in the semiconductor industry is laughable, honestly. But, hey, I at least appreciate your earnest opinion.

klooney 4y ago

Dan Luu worked in semiconductors and spoke quite highly of his time there.

cxr 4y ago
Dan Luu worked for one of the semiconductor industry's customers. He didn't work at S2 or another chipmaker. (He also explicitly mentions that he was lucky to work at Centaur starting out, but that's besides the point—since, again, Centaur is not a chipmaker.) When I mentioned Dan Luu, I was specifically referring to the recent thunderstorm on Twitter where he mentioned the uncanny valleyness of doing work for unsexy companies and that it's actually more like a blemish on your résumé than a non-zero positive contribution.

md2020 4y ago

To offer a different point of view, I'm a software engineer at ASML in the US. I can only offer the experience I've had on my specific team, and I've heard that this does vary between teams, but we do follow normal software industry practices. We have version control. We have automated regression testing, and unit tests for everything we write. We do Agile and use Jira (with all the same gripes that everyone else has about those). I made $90k here right out of my undergrad, and got a raise one year later (this year) to be over $100k. Could the tooling be better? Sure. Our version control system is pretty old, but the company has made a massive push over the last few years to modernize all of it, and when we transition to that at the end of this year I think we'll be in a pretty great spot. Some teams are already using the new tooling and it has gotten very positive reviews. I have a great relationship with my team and my manager. I get to work on interesting stuff (mostly embedded systems), and I've had the opportunity to learn a small part of one of the most advanced machines humans have ever built. I'll say the thing about getting people from defense is true, but not so much in software. If anyone has other questions feel free to just ask.

cxr 4y ago
I'm talking about making chips, not being a software engineer that happens to work in the same building as people making chips (or the building where people work on making machines that make chips). SEs showing up and saying things were fine at their SE job doesn't move the needle on this topic. Purdue's semiconductor degree program for EEs is only incidentally relevant in that case.
- mysticpimp 4y ago
  For the most part, Fab engineering is beyond boring and exploitative. I quit my PhD because it was excruciatingly boring, all you do is click ON/OFF on a big machine that deposits metal, and I realized, that this was what I'd be doing for 100K a year. On paper it sounds like you're doing some genius work manipulating atoms, but really it's actually quite mindless and boring, which is part of the reason the physics departments don't do this work anymore, only EE, since physics does the actual cool stuff. I think it's somewhat related to the fact that these degrees have almost no americans, and are full of foreigners that really need a visa. As an american, it made no sense to do this work, given that there are much more interesting and lucrative options. But going back to your point, there are certain areas within semiconductor manufacturing that are software engineering jobs. They tend to be closely related to what's called physical design in the design part of making a chip. Or EDA coders. It's a cool area. But the bigger part of semiconductor manufacturing is working in a fab, which is atrocious grueling work, which is quite boring and dangerous.

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