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U.S. universities are building a new semiconductor workforce
- hardware2win 3y agoJust gimme visa and i'll take those fancy jobs :>
- bsder 3y agoFAANG jobs still require less schooling, less knowledge, pay more and don't require you live in awful places. Lots of us left the field or retired. Call us when semiconductor companies start paying real money.
- esalman 3y agoThis is probably a reason STEM graduate level classes and PhDs are prominently international students, willing to go on to the industry and toil under immigration limbo.
- NeverFade 3y agoInternational STEM graduates are also targeting FAANG and similar jobs in droves.
- MisterSandman 3y agoYes, and no. International grads in the US also want stability, and FAANG has proven to not offer that anymore. Many Stanford grads I know are targeting pharma-tech and health tech companies which still pay well, but have a way more stability at the cost of being boring as fuck.
- esalman 3y agoFAANGs are especially brutal right now. Because many of them had layoffs, they are not even allowed to process perm certification for the time being, so green card hopefuls are stuck.
- goethes_kind 3y agoWhen I was being recruited by ASML this is what I thought. Investing all the time, money and energy, to then be at the mercy of one employer, and have to live in a very specific locations, and the salary is not even that great.
- bboygravity 3y agoSIdenote: ASML, Philips and other Dutch "big tech" are also known to make (illegal) cartel agreements on how much they will pay for labor. Source: their (outsourced) recruiters admitting this to me.
- ChuckNorris89 3y agoSidenote: most companies in most countries do this. They tend to align on a standard set of salary grills for the region, that are more or less the same between each other, to keep competition, wage increases and employee churn to the minimum. This is of course illegal in most places, but to counter this in court you need a whistleblower willing to go public and expose them with hard evidence, but since the workers actively involved in these wage fixing schemes are very well compensated along with NDAs, they have no reason to throw all that away in exchange for no other company hiring them ever again and your ex employer suing your for breaching your NDA. Sure, you might eventually win in court, but do you really want to drag your family through expensive lawsuits against mega-corporations who spend more on toilet paper than you can on a lawyer?
- ghaff 3y agoIs there any company anywhere that doesn't research the market rate for jobs to at least some degree? What you decide to do with that information is another matter of course but I'm well within my rights to decide not to pay anyone more than what I've determined to be the market rate no matter what other offers they claim to have in hand.
- Firmwarrior 3y ago
- nologic01 3y agothe catch is that you can't have FAANG jobs if you don't have semiconductors. Greedy short-termism, grab what you can now and forget about the future is always what kills the golden goose. unfortunately you can't expect people as individuals to make those calls. You need mechanisms that properly value long-term sustainability
- NeverFade 3y agoThe fact FAANG jobs pay better means the supply/demand ratio for talent that can do semiconductor jobs is higher than for talent that can do FAANG job. GP is right, so rationally everyone who could - would rather live in Mountain View and work a FAANG job than live in some factory town in the Arizona desert. Apparently there just aren't enough such people, so FAANG will keep paying more and those who can't get these jobs will have to take the worse paying position that requires harder work, more dependency on a single employer, under far worse working and living conditions.
- nsplayer 3y ago[flagged]
- bigbillheck 3y agoWay too many confederate flags in the southwest for my taste.
- nwatson 3y agoTempe, AZ is an awesome place. I wish I lived there again, I'd be biking close-by South Mountain all the time.
- alephnerd 3y ago> some factory town in the Arizona desert Phoenix isn't some "factory town". But your general point is true - wages in the electronics sector are stuck at the same amount that they were in the 2000s. That's why companies like Andruil and Tesla can poach electronics and MechE talent with still low but not as low wages (110-130k with a bunch of stock versus 70-100k with almost no stock).
- AlchemistCamp 3y ago> and don't require you live in awful places. Last I checked, they generally do require you to live in SF, Seattle or similarly "awful places". If anything, rampant homelessness and crime seem to be highly correlated with cities that have "FAANG" HQs.
- zamnos 3y agoGiven that four of the FAANG companies are headquartered, not in San Francisco, but in suburbs south of it (Menlo Park, Mountain View, Cupertino, and Los Gatos), I'm not sure what you're on about. Los Gatos isn't perfect, but it's not some haven of homelessness and crime.
- AlchemistCamp 3y agoI lived in the bay area for years, in the city, in Oakland and in Moutain View for a year. I agree the south bay is less chaotic than SF. It's still a lot more chaotic than either Colorado, where I was born, or Taiwan, where I've spent most my life. To me, the US west coast was always a sacrifice of quality of life for career growth. If you need a code to enter the bathroom at your local coffee shop, you might want to consider moving somewhere with a bit higher baseline for public spaces.
- bombcar 3y agoHow easy it is to access a clean restroom is a good barometer of something.
- vkou 3y agoIf you think Seattle, outside of ~18 square blocks is an "awful place" by the definition of even the most dyed-in-the-wool WASP, you've either never been to the city, never been outside Pioneer Square, or have been eating way too much political propaganda.
- MisterSandman 3y agoSan Francisco is still an incredible city to live and work in if you're young and don't have a family (which is a huge part of the workforce). The homelessness problem is blown out of proportion in terms of everyday living (it's still ridiculous from a societal point of view, but still)
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago> FAANG jobs still require less schooling, less knowledge, pay more and don't require you live in awful places. > Lots of us left the field or retired. Call us when semiconductor companies start paying real money. The future will rather be that FAANG jobs will pay much less, thus the salaries in the semiconductor industry will become somewhat competitive again.
- Firmwarrior 3y agoThey'll pay less when they stop making $2 million per year per engineer
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago> They'll pay less when they stop making $2 million per year per engineer When a company makes 2 million USD per engineer and year and can afford to pay less, it will. :-)
- grumple 3y agoWhen that happens, people will just go back into finance and other high pay fields that require less education and effort.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago> When that happens, people will just go back into finance and other high pay fields that require less education and effort. Straight from the horse's mouth I know that quite some very intelligent, insanely well-educated (in a relevant direction, say, doctoral degree in mathematics, physics, stochastics, ...) and hard-working people don't have the personality traits that finance is looking for. I know quite some insanely talented people who could not, for example, get a permanent position in research (for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of their research) who would, as mentioned, rather stand no chance of becoming hired in finance (if I had a startup, I would seriously consider hiring them). So the whole advice of "go into finance" is in my opinion divorced from the reality.
- analog31 3y agoIn my view FAANG jobs are beside the point. I've puzzled about this a lot, because I'm technically a "hardware person" with a degree in physics yet I'm also a good programmer. Many of my physics classmates became programmers. I could hypothetically bring myself up to speed on the latest software development practices and make myself employable at it. Maybe not at FAANG, but probably somewhere decent. But I've never made that jump. I work in an office that has a sizable software development department, so I'm quite familiar with what they do, and what their work environment is like. It's not some distant mysterious place. They're my lunch buddies. There are also lots of people who are quite bright, and do difficult mental work at lower pay, yet don't learn to program for whatever reason. Those of us who program know that it's actually quite easy, yet is an impenetrable barrier for most people, and we just don't know why. There will always be somebody who makes more than you do, but it doesn't explain why people aren't all leaving their jobs for higher paying ones. Part of it may be psychological inertia -- I might be guilty of that myself. But I think another part is that we don't actually know the recipe for success.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoAwful places? I believe Arizona is one of the fastest growing populations of all the states ( too hot for me personally )
- alephnerd 3y agoA lot of that is Californians in skilled trades and back office roles who got priced out of NorCal and SoCal. A lot of my HS teachers for example moved to AZ to become teachers because they could at least afford a home in the Phoenix Metro, along with friends of mine who ended up working in Sales, Accounting, and Back Office Administrative Staff work.
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoEverything I hear about semiconductor technology sounds like you need two PhDs minimum and then you have to work in horrible environments with horrible management (either personally or just due to stressful deadlines). Like this kind of comment seems par for the course (though not the PhD bit, that's more for the "science" end of things): https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/kdzs4t/any_advice_on_working_in_the_semiconductor/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/kdzs4t/any_ad...
- HPsquared 3y agoI think prestige is a big factor (and kind of a trap): people want to work in a prestigious field regardless of lower salary, worse working conditions etc. That's why there is so much competition. Kind of like how academic positions are so competitive despite low pay. EDIT: Also an oversupply of graduates who feel they need to work in their fields of study. Actually I think "graduate oversupply" is the main issue. Feels like such a waste to work elsewhere if you've dedicated years to studying something, it's a major sunk cost.
- ghaff 3y agoMaybe it's less common today, but I would say the overwhelming majority of people I went to undergrad with ended up doing things that were only tangentially related (or not related at all) to what their degree was in.
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoYep, 50% of graduates from my course went into finance, after spending 4 years learning about electrons. Joke's on me, they probably started at more than what I make now.
- thebigwinning 3y agoIt sounds like you went to an ivy league?
- flanked-evergl 3y agoLet's not count our chickens before they hatch. I have serious doubts that US universities are capable of building anything except nepotism networks for upper-class Americans. I hope they prove me wrong, but you can't build a semiconductor industry on nepotism.
- xadhominemx 3y agoAmerica is home to Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Micron, Broadcom, Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, Apple, Applied Materials, Lam Research, KLA, Cymer, and most of the other most important fabless houses and IDMs outside of Korea. TSMC and Samsung are both building large foundry fabs in the US. Why don’t you stick with opining in what you know.
- NeverFade 3y agoNot to mention, Silicon Valley is called that because the first major chip companies all resided there.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoUS tech moved up the chain just like most US businesses during globalization. Why have a extremely intricate and expensive to run fab when you can just have a warehouse full of coders making better profits
- Congeec 3y agoFairychild, which incubated many of these semiconductor companies above
- dudeinjapan 3y agoYeah but do these semiconductor students understand anything about the post-structalist analysis of the capitalist hegemony of their labor?
- say_it_as_it_is 3y agoI don't think that Ohio State University is sufficiently preparing students to work on semiconductors
- qbasic_forever 3y agoIntel is planning to build an enormous billions of dollars fab just miles away. It makes total sense to build up the semiconductor education there. OSU is a fine state school with a well regarded CS and EE department.
- bombcar 3y agoThey can also go the old “company town” style where they train up people for factory work with the promise of a good life. Are they willing to pay what would be needed, however?
- coffeebeqn 3y agoIn Ohio, sure
- alephnerd 3y agoLmao what? OSU has a solid MatSE and MechE program thanks to automotive, defense, and aerospace industry hiring practices.
- lizknope 3y agoI've been designing semiconductor chips for 25 years in the US. For the last 20 years all the companies I have worked at have been fabless. We send the mask data to TSMC or Samsung to manufacture. I sit in front of a computer at a desk all day and get to work from home 3 days a week. We get plenty of new grad design engineers from college. But do young people want to work in manufacturing plants being on call when the production line goes down? There are thousands of technician jobs that are more 2 year associate degree types needed as well. I've also seen stories that because of the small number of fabs it is difficult to switch jobs because there are not many options. This pushes down salaries as well. In contrast to design where there are hundreds of companies which you can leave and go to and get significant salary increases. As with most jobs, more pay and better working conditions will attract more people.
- bombcar 3y agoPerhaps the government needs to step in and declare certain “important national security jobs” except from taxation or something. Probably would just drop the salaries to minimum wage :(
- thebigwinning 3y ago> do young people want to work in manufacturing plants being on call when the production line goes down They do if the jobs pay enough to live. There are a lot more classes of young people than recent grads from big universities. See Amazon warehouse and airports.
- alephnerd 3y agoI'm one of those young people. If I attended Oregon State, why would I want to earn $70k base with almost no stock and bonus to work at Intel or Micron as a New College Grad Process Engineer in Beaverton or Boise where I have income tax when I can make $110-140k base with a 10% bonus and stock at Amazon, Google, or Microsoft in Seattle (let alone smaller startups or non-name brand companies like UIPath) while paying no income tax. The classes you study in EE/CE are extremely similar (and often the same) to those in CS so I may as well earn more with a better quality of life. Salaries in the Semiconductor industry in the United States are stuck at 2000s levels, which lead to the massive outsourcing of electronics talent to Taiwan, South Korea, PRC, Israel, India, and Malaysia because you could pay $50-70k salaries and still get top of the barrel talent in the EE space (though Israel is seeing the same shift to software - sad days for Haifa).
- dumpster_fire 3y agoI majored in semiconductors out of genuine interest. It was fascinating to me how miniature components can be turned into digital and analog devices. It turned out to be one of the most boring things I've ever touched. Cadence was an endless loop of crashing and losing progress. Anything you designed was called worthless because there's already a library of capacitors, amplifiers and DAC ADC components for you to drag and drop in. It was so incredibly dry. During our final semester in school, or professor walked in and said, "All of you but X needs to know that you're going to be unemployed." He said that to a class of 4 people, the only ones left after most of the original class of 20+ had quit. "The industry only hires the exceptional, you are all inept. Except for X, my favorite student." X ended up being the only person to go on to work in a semicon company. The rest of us ended up in software, earning 5x the pay X was making. The barrier of entry to software engineering is so so much lower than semicon, which still makes no sense to me.
- CrampusDestrus 3y agoHow does it not make sense? As a software person you are completely relying on the hardware to do its job. You are putting your blind faith into the work of semiconductor engineers in order for you to get your paycheck
- dumpster_fire 3y agoIt makes no sense because if the semiconductor industry only hires the absolute best student of the cohort, that's a way higher barrier of entry than software where 90% of the students in my coding class is now working in MANGA. That should guarantee an insanely high pay for the semiconductor engineer. Instead he's currently making less than what fresh grad MANGA hires are paid.
- plonk 3y agoBut you said they hired 1 person out of a class of 20? Obviously the few who get in can't ask for a high salary with that many candidates per position.
- sylware 3y agoGoing to be tough for them: jobs are in EU (ASML) and Taiwan (TSMC). Heard some other critical tool are from Japanese companies (masks and others). The silicium industry is critical for any modern society and it seems it has no economic meaning if not at worldwide scale: then it requires significant out-of-free-market financing. The state administration has to organise and maintain this "out-of-free-market" financing. Only bleeding-edge performant silicium must be tolerated there.
- mkoubaa 3y agoThere is no shortage of chip design in the US (I'm in Austin and I constantly bump into these folks), only chip _fabrication_. What little I know about fab is that extremely bright physicists do rote tasks with horrible schedules. I don't think the solution to that is more education
- bombcar 3y agoSounds like a perfect fit for a union or an employee-owned coop.
- mkoubaa 3y agoTbh That's the last thing I'd say
- tinglymintyfrsh 3y agoWaves from a perch overlooking AUS and Giga Texas. I've run into enough NVIDIA and AMD engineers at The Domain to surmise this is true. We need a funnel towards training highly-skilled blue-/light-blue-collar workers to feed the strategic needs of said fab industry if the US were serious about building domestic capabilities and competitive independence. Right now, I don't think the current state of the US education system from national to local levels is promoting the fundamentals needed to attain this goal.
- 3y ago
- rossdavidh 3y agoSo, it's been a while since I worked in semiconductor manufacturing, but I know a little bit about this from personal experience. The community colleges, yes maybe; the universities, no not particularly. Once upon a time every fab needed lots of engineers, because they were designing the manufacturing process (because each company had only one fab, or at least only one modern one). As they grew, they kept hiring engineers for each fab, mostly out of habit and custom. Then they put huge bureaucratic obstacles in the way of changing anything, because the manufacturing process was already designed (at another fab), and you didn't want every engineer who wanted to make his mark on things to screw it up. The thing is that if you make a change in step 87 out of 450, and that change turns out to screw things up, you can have (450-87)/450 = 80% of your factory is full of dud semiconductors. It takes a few months for a wafer to get from the beginning to the end of the line, so that's a couple months of production from your multi-billion dollar fab, that you can throw in the trash. So mostly, they don't want the engineers to do any design, because there's way more downside than upside. Only at the R&D fab is anything like real design done. Now, to run the (rather complex) equipment, you probably want a lot of community college graduates, although frankly a smart high-school graduate could do it well with a few days training. But the only reason they "require" so many engineers at production fabs, is that they don't realize it's not necessary. It's a bunch of people who worked for years to get an engineering degree, put in a place where they are very nearly forbidden to change anything. If the multi-billion dollar fab is made, they will run it. If there are not enough college graduates to staff it, they will miraculously discover that smart high school graduates will do just as well, as long as there are engineers at the R&D fab.
- bunnie 3y agoIt's also been a while since I stepped foot in a fab, but my impression is that for modern processes there are no people in the fab proper. It is fully automated, people sit outside the fab or they service machines in drop-down bays underneath the fab floor, accessible only through airlocks. What the technicians are there for isn't to operate the robots...they're supposed to analyze the performance of the robots constantly and summarize anomalies and flag them to the next shift. So a work shift might involve metrology, statistics, and communication skills; I wouldn't expect that skill set from any but the most exceptional US high school graduates, and those folks are bound for the university, not a job with 12-hour days wearing clean room suits and limited bathroom breaks. Some of the more fussy processes like EUV require regular cleaning of excess tin in the machine as well to keep yield up. afaik it's a trade secret as to how this process works, but I know one of the big delays in rolling out EUV is that the cleaning process was hard, and that lead to a lot of downtime on the line. People on both side of the Pacific were able to make chips with EUV for a while, but they just couldn't make money while making them. TSMC cracked that nut, but I haven't read any articles describing exactly what their magic was to get the uptime so high. However, I suspect it might involve a platoon of PhD-level experts that also work like an F1 pit crew. Anyways, the days of carrying boxes of wafers from machine to machine and pressing buttons are long gone. Everything that can be automated has been, what's left is debugging and servicing robots, and searching for early signs of degradation in an otherwise fully automated machine. So, the real value of a highly trained technician in this case is they can look at bumps in the data and go "huh..." and flag it to management so that you don't have 80% of the fab full of trash wafers. In this situation, you want someone who actually understand the physics of the process going on inside the machine, and not just someone who is following an SOP. Any analysis that could be easily automated probably already has been. Of course, you need even more highly skilled people to set up the robots in the first place, and that process also consumes hundreds if not thousands of engineers, depending on your schedule, scale and the complexity of the machines. A lot of that can be pushed back onto vendors, but you still need an on-site team who actually understands the physics to get your process yields up to several nines and hold it there with almost no downtime.
- georgeburdell 3y agoMost semiconductor workers can make 20% more working as a software engineer, without laboring in a factory. That needs to be “fixed” first
- q1w2 3y agoThe vast majority of semiconductor employees work at a desk - not in a factory.
- jakeinspace 3y agoI graduated 5 years ago with a degree in computer engineering, and have been working since then in embedded systems for satellites/aerospace. Currently I’m finishing a masters in CS with a thesis in cache prefetching. I started the masters because I decided aerospace is probably not the place for me (salary is okay but not stellar, very high inertia, hardest problems are not control systems and signal processing rather than software). I loved computer architecture in undergrad, and I think getting a job at a newer fabless chip company like SiFive or Tenstorrent would be amazing, but I am wary of all the warnings I read from people in the field. Is there anybody here with industry experience who has something good to say about working on the fabless side of things?
- cushychicken 3y agoThere’s an absolute shedload of opportunity, for one thing. I run a job board for people who design chips and RTL for FPGAs. The pay is good and all companies are hiring RTL designers. For another, plenty of people who do it love it. This probably isn’t the place to connect with them. I’d recommend /r/fpga or /r/chipdesign on Reddit. (That job board is www.fpgajobs.com if you're curious.)
- jakeinspace 3y agoThanks for the suggestion! As someone with little job experience doing FPGA work (just a single internship and university research), is it that hard to get an offer that’s not extremely junior level? I’m hoping to leverage my embedded experience for a role that involves firmware or OS work.
- cushychicken 3y agoLots of folks are starting to leverage hybrid FPGA/ARM chips, like the Xilinx Zynq series. Folks who work with these typically get pretty involved in both embedded development and RTL, as part of the challenge is figuring out what segment of compute lives where in those types of systems. There are plenty of places who'd take a decent firmware engineer and then allow them to learn the gateware portion through absorption. A master's in this area also is a good way to break in. Defense companies tend to value it pretty highly.
- jasmer 3y agoIs this article from 1985? Memba' then? Industry has to follow suit and compete with those 'other places' or this will be all for naught.