5 ms·

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 wh

by bsder 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.

esalman 3y ago
This 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 ago
  International STEM graduates are also targeting FAANG and similar jobs in droves.
  - MisterSandman 3y ago
    Yes, 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 ago
      FAANGs 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 ago
When 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 ago
  SIdenote: 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 ago
    Sidenote: 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 ago
      Is 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
        If you're the one setting the market rate, and there are no market forces to stop you, it becomes a big problem As we can see from the current situation where the USA is completely reliant on foreign fabs and unable to make its own partly due to a shortage of skilled and willing labor
      - frede 3y ago
nologic01 3y ago
the 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 ago
  The 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 ago
      Way too many confederate flags in the southwest for my taste.
    - nwatson 3y ago
      Tempe, 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 ago
  Given 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 ago
    I 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 ago
      How easy it is to access a clean restroom is a good barometer of something.
- vkou 3y ago
  If 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 ago
  San 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 ago
  They'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 ago
  When 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 ago
In 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 ago
Awful places? I believe Arizona is one of the fastest growing populations of all the states ( too hot for me personally )
- alephnerd 3y ago
  A 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.

by bsder 3y ago

esalman 3y ago

This 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 ago
International STEM graduates are also targeting FAANG and similar jobs in droves.
- MisterSandman 3y ago
  Yes, 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 ago
    FAANGs 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 ago

When 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 ago
SIdenote: 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 ago
  Sidenote: 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 ago
    Is 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
      If you're the one setting the market rate, and there are no market forces to stop you, it becomes a big problem As we can see from the current situation where the USA is completely reliant on foreign fabs and unable to make its own partly due to a shortage of skilled and willing labor
    - frede 3y ago

nologic01 3y ago

the 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 ago
The 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 ago
    Way too many confederate flags in the southwest for my taste.
  - nwatson 3y ago
    Tempe, 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 ago
Given 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    How easy it is to access a clean restroom is a good barometer of something.
vkou 3y ago
If 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 ago
San 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 ago
They'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 ago
When 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 ago

In 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 ago

Awful places? I believe Arizona is one of the fastest growing populations of all the states ( too hot for me personally )

alephnerd 3y ago
A 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.