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Really interesting. I don't know how many people they will be able to hire given descriptions like this: https://atomicsemi.com/careers/?ashby_jid=c991fb4d-e63

Really interesting. I don't know how many people they will be able to hire given descriptions like this: https://atomicsemi.com/careers/?ashby_jid=c991fb4d-e634-42f2-b392-798117326b88 https://atomicsemi.com/careers/?ashby_jid=c991fb4d-e634-42f2... That can actually successfully perform that work. All for 100k-170k in SV. The Lab tech again has a very high skill requirement and quite low pay: https://atomicsemi.com/careers/?ashby_jid=bb2112f2-914a-4ee0-920c-574162ffeda1 https://atomicsemi.com/careers/?ashby_jid=bb2112f2-914a-4ee0... In all honesty I think working for this would be fun but also insanely stressful and note worth if for the employees.

Hendrikto 4y ago
Completely ridiculous that 130k is considered low in SV.
- deleted 4y ago
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- haneefmubarak 4y ago
  For the skillset being asked, if you ignore the equity component (as I'm guessing GP did), $130k is absurdly low anywhere in the US. Folks in many metro areas (Portland, Austin, Phoenix, etc) with the desired XP and skillset can easily make $250k cash salary + $50k highly liquid public equity at major companies (Intel, Samsung, Globalfoundries, etc). Anyone with that XP concretely applying those skills at most commercial fabs is easily creating millions of dollars of value (as a portion attributable to their contribution to the overall fab's value creation); if at all, it's absolutely insane that they get compensated so little on average.
Keyframe 4y ago
Hell I'd join if I wasn't too dumb for that group.
tromp 4y ago
> Our total compensation package also includes generous equity in Atomic Semi. That could well turn out to exceed the regular wages. Besides, working with a small world-class team is a great learning experience and big reward in itself.
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nsteel 4y ago
I'm glad to see the day has come where I see an advert for a "full-stack" hardware engineer. I don't know anything about wages in SF but the requirements are niche to say the least, and all wrapped in "2+ years of industry experience". Good luck to them.
cushychicken 4y ago
Everything I know about Sam suggests to me he’s never been in this for the money. He just thinks chip fabbing is fun. I think he’s got enough of a twitter following that he might be able to attract a crew who has the same recreational attitude towards semiconductor fabrication.
AdamH12113 4y ago
That jumped out at me too. They want an experienced "full-stack" ME/EE with strong knowledge in multiple areas of physics for a very speculative attempt to essentially create a new kind of manufacturing by custom-building all the hardware, and their salary range starts is $100k-170k in San Francisco? That seems a bit low for a unicorn candidate, especially given what they're going to have to spend on the hardware itself.
- burnished 4y ago
  Hardware jobs tend to pay poorly, I would not be surprised if that was very competitive for the type of person they are looking for.
  - AdamH12113 4y ago
    I've had two jobs at pre-Series A startups in Houston with salaries near the low end of that range. A higher-profile, more capital-intensive SV startup looking for someone with a very broad skillset ought to be able to pay more, shouldn't it?
    - burnished 4y ago
      Thats a better and more nuanced opinion than my own - I went from EE to CE because I wanted an easier path to working as a SWE after I heard about my prospects at Intel or Boeing or really as a hardware engineer in general. Question though - if your salary was at the low end of that range why does this seem too low? What would seem like enough? Im assuming those jobs were in related fields and that you would have a stronger impression of what would be attractive for a person in that position than I would
      - AdamH12113 4y ago
        I'm more of a firmware guy, myself, although I've done some PCB design and a fair bit of hardware debugging. My startup experience has been in the oil industry at companies with fewer than 5 people. I don't have actual data backing me up. It seems low to me because I have gotten the following impressions, some of which may be wrong: * San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the world. * Startups in Silicon Valley routinely receive tens of millions of dollars in funding despite having questionable business plans, conflicts of interest, and mentally-unstable founders. * Even SWEs who just graduated from college can get upwards of $150k/year at major tech companies, even if they spend most of their time just copying and pasting from Stack Overflow. * Good electronics engineers are rarer than good SWEs. Good electronics engineers who can also design high-precision machines are extremely rare, and the ones with semiconductor experience are probably earning big salaries at large companies. * Hardware development is much more expensive than software development. In particular, hardware design errors can be much more expensive to fix. * Getting a new manufacturing process up and running is a lengthy and capital-intensive task. Creating a totally new kind of manufacturing process to "disrupt" an established, competitive industry could charitably be described as "high-risk". * Hardware startups rarely make it big, and the ones that do seem to be associated with trendy software stuff like crypto, AI, and quantum computing. To summarize, a startup that's going to be spending a lot of money on hardware development in a very expensive city wants an experienced engineer with a specific and unusually-large skillset, and they're offering a salary that barely competes with an entry-level SWE job along with some high-risk stock options. As another comment said, it sounds like they want someone who will treat this as more of a hobby than a job. Which is fine, but I feel like the proper job title for that is "independently-wealthy cofounder", not "hardware engineer". (Alternately, I've heard that highly-specific job offers can be used as an excuse to get an H-1B visa -- maybe they're looking to hire someone from Taiwan. Or maybe I'm just being cynical.)

Hendrikto 4y ago

Completely ridiculous that 130k is considered low in SV.

deleted 4y ago
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haneefmubarak 4y ago
For the skillset being asked, if you ignore the equity component (as I'm guessing GP did), $130k is absurdly low anywhere in the US. Folks in many metro areas (Portland, Austin, Phoenix, etc) with the desired XP and skillset can easily make $250k cash salary + $50k highly liquid public equity at major companies (Intel, Samsung, Globalfoundries, etc). Anyone with that XP concretely applying those skills at most commercial fabs is easily creating millions of dollars of value (as a portion attributable to their contribution to the overall fab's value creation); if at all, it's absolutely insane that they get compensated so little on average.

Keyframe 4y ago

Hell I'd join if I wasn't too dumb for that group.

tromp 4y ago

> Our total compensation package also includes generous equity in Atomic Semi. That could well turn out to exceed the regular wages. Besides, working with a small world-class team is a great learning experience and big reward in itself.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

nsteel 4y ago

I'm glad to see the day has come where I see an advert for a "full-stack" hardware engineer. I don't know anything about wages in SF but the requirements are niche to say the least, and all wrapped in "2+ years of industry experience". Good luck to them.

cushychicken 4y ago

Everything I know about Sam suggests to me he’s never been in this for the money. He just thinks chip fabbing is fun. I think he’s got enough of a twitter following that he might be able to attract a crew who has the same recreational attitude towards semiconductor fabrication.

AdamH12113 4y ago

That jumped out at me too. They want an experienced "full-stack" ME/EE with strong knowledge in multiple areas of physics for a very speculative attempt to essentially create a new kind of manufacturing by custom-building all the hardware, and their salary range starts is $100k-170k in San Francisco? That seems a bit low for a unicorn candidate, especially given what they're going to have to spend on the hardware itself.

burnished 4y ago
Hardware jobs tend to pay poorly, I would not be surprised if that was very competitive for the type of person they are looking for.
- AdamH12113 4y ago
  I've had two jobs at pre-Series A startups in Houston with salaries near the low end of that range. A higher-profile, more capital-intensive SV startup looking for someone with a very broad skillset ought to be able to pay more, shouldn't it?
  - burnished 4y ago
    Thats a better and more nuanced opinion than my own - I went from EE to CE because I wanted an easier path to working as a SWE after I heard about my prospects at Intel or Boeing or really as a hardware engineer in general. Question though - if your salary was at the low end of that range why does this seem too low? What would seem like enough? Im assuming those jobs were in related fields and that you would have a stronger impression of what would be attractive for a person in that position than I would
    - AdamH12113 4y ago
      I'm more of a firmware guy, myself, although I've done some PCB design and a fair bit of hardware debugging. My startup experience has been in the oil industry at companies with fewer than 5 people. I don't have actual data backing me up. It seems low to me because I have gotten the following impressions, some of which may be wrong: * San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the world. * Startups in Silicon Valley routinely receive tens of millions of dollars in funding despite having questionable business plans, conflicts of interest, and mentally-unstable founders. * Even SWEs who just graduated from college can get upwards of $150k/year at major tech companies, even if they spend most of their time just copying and pasting from Stack Overflow. * Good electronics engineers are rarer than good SWEs. Good electronics engineers who can also design high-precision machines are extremely rare, and the ones with semiconductor experience are probably earning big salaries at large companies. * Hardware development is much more expensive than software development. In particular, hardware design errors can be much more expensive to fix. * Getting a new manufacturing process up and running is a lengthy and capital-intensive task. Creating a totally new kind of manufacturing process to "disrupt" an established, competitive industry could charitably be described as "high-risk". * Hardware startups rarely make it big, and the ones that do seem to be associated with trendy software stuff like crypto, AI, and quantum computing. To summarize, a startup that's going to be spending a lot of money on hardware development in a very expensive city wants an experienced engineer with a specific and unusually-large skillset, and they're offering a salary that barely competes with an entry-level SWE job along with some high-risk stock options. As another comment said, it sounds like they want someone who will treat this as more of a hobby than a job. Which is fine, but I feel like the proper job title for that is "independently-wealthy cofounder", not "hardware engineer". (Alternately, I've heard that highly-specific job offers can be used as an excuse to get an H-1B visa -- maybe they're looking to hire someone from Taiwan. Or maybe I'm just being cynical.)