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I 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

I 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 ago
How 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 ago
  It 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 ago
    But 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.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      >But 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. Obviosly they can, assuming that these companies hire "only the best". That means that in the demand/supply calculations, the demand is not for "graduates of semiconducting programs" but "only top top graduates of semiconducating programs, ignore the rest". That's in much shorter supply, and means that 95% of the "class of 20" aren't even considered worthy as candidates, and aren't competition for those top semicon jobs. They'll need to find work in another field (like switching to software), or low level semicon jobs.
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- bncmark 3y ago
  It does not make sense because software could be written using the same quality standards that CPUs use, which would involve a lot of formal reasoning and proofs. This work style, however, is not valued at all and is actively suppressed by "flat", non-expert hierarchies that reward people for being popular and sloppy. It works for web companies because errors have no consequences for them and the web has turned into a gigantic tabloid anyway.
  - CrampusDestrus 3y ago
    Abstraction layers become simpler, more rigid and more robust as you peel them. A painter uses rules of thumb all of the time, yet his work is entirely dependent on chemical engineers getting their science and formulas right. Artistic painting is just one of many uses of paint (and probably its most approximate), but both the painter and the industrial product engineer need the same quality assurances regarding their colors. Hardware needs to be solid to allow all kinds of software the freedom to be built.
  - ajmurmann 3y ago
    In my experience what trade-off is the correct one depends on your ability to iterate and where your risk comes from. Can you ship infrequently, but you know with high confidence what product/market-fit looks like (extreme example Mars mission)? In that case you want all the planning and verification you can get. Can you ship often, but have little confidence in what your users/customers want and what will grow your business (extreme example social media app)? In this case you probably want to prioritize speed of iteration and rework technical aspects once you know it's what's needed. I've had a very angry product manager because a feature took almost a second to load. I told him that we could make it load much faster but it would be almost a week of work and he should validate the feature with customers before we invest in that. "Of course we need this feature! It's core to the product!". So we spent a week. It worked realty nicely and scaled pretty well. In the next 12 months the feature changed completely twice because customers didn't find it useful. Then it was removed entirely and then we had to bring it back because the sales team liked it for demos. All that iteration was required to find what the market needed, not fit technical reasons, except for the performance work which was entirely wasted because it all got redone after the first user feedback.
- pjc50 3y ago
  More often in startup land, you are relying on the investors for your paycheck. The place where the value is is not at all related to where the difficulties are or the bottlenecks are. The universe does not have that kind of sense of distributive justice.
- austhrow743 3y ago
  You could write the same thing about the concrete slab the office or data centre is on. The barrier to being a concreter is very close to "applied for a job as a concreter".
  - CrampusDestrus 3y ago
    Yes, and civil engineers have to follow a lot of regulations and have to plan things carefully
lizknope 3y ago
What kind of job is X doing and at what company? Are they working at a fab? Working in the manufacturing portion of the fab? Doing process design work on a computer? There are so many different types of jobs within the semiconductor industry and some are going to pay far higher than others. As I said in my other comment in the thread I have worked at many fabless semiconductor companies. The different between software and hardware salaries at companies like Nvidia and Apple is around 10% or so, not 5X.
- dumpster_fire 3y ago
  Last I heard it was Micron. Not too sure what X got into. He was definitely a genius though. [Edit] Just checked. He has left the industry a few years back, and is now a software engineering manager. Even the brightest student has given up. Someone on this post said it best, they need to have salaries matching the amount of skill required.
  - lizknope 3y ago
    If X works in something low level like device physics then there are a limited number of companies doing cutting edge fab stuff like that. Intel, TSMC, Samsung. The small number of companies limits your salary potential. It's the same with being a maintenance technician for a piece of ASML 3nm semiconductor manufacturing equipment. You may be highly skilled but if there are only 3 companies in the world that will hire you then your salary potential is limited. I know about 30 people developing hardware at Apple (writing Verilog, custom analog serdes design) and you can see that their software and hardware salaries are similar. In some cases hardware is higher although I suspect that is because of the limited sample size of salary data at the ICT6 level. https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/software-engineer https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/software-eng... https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/hardware-engineer https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/hardware-eng... There is more to life than money but people who care about money need to look into the companies and salaries before they commit themselves to 4 to 10 years of college.
    - 3y ago
weinzierl 3y ago
I had a similar experience in Germany. Studied Engineering Physics with a major in semiconductor technology. At university we learned everything from high level programming, VHDL, electronics down to semiconductor chemistry. I didn't find it boring at all. Judging from our industry partnerships the semiconductor industry seemed to do well at the time. At least that was my impression. When I graduated in 2001 the signs of impeding death were already there however, so I worked in aerospace for a couple of years, went back to university for a computer science degree and ended up in software anyways. Not the worst thing to happen for me personally, but honestly I still don't really understand how a promising industry could die like that.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  > in 2001 the signs of impeding death were already there What were those signs?
  - weinzierl 3y ago
    For me specifically Siemens divesting or spinning-off its semiconductor assets. Before that my study program was almost a free ticket into Siemens. Working for Infineon, EPCOS or (a little later) Qimonda did not seem attractive to me, specifically because it was well known at the time that these divisions were spun-off because Siemens wanted to reduce the risk from the quote "highly volatile semiconductor business" for the parent company.
    - ilyt 3y ago
      MBAs, investors, and stock market ruining stuff again...
bob1029 3y ago
Here's what I learned working at Samsung: At the end of the day, the stakes are way too high to allow everyone a chance to play cowboy with the tools. You want your best possible champions to bring a design to bear. Then, the other 99% of the army is responsible for implementing the design in as repeatable & standardized a fashion as physically possible so that there is even the remotest chance of yield+profit. Software is the antithesis of this. The cost of playing around with your tools is not even worth accounting for. Due to certain cultural effects, you probably don't want to do software in semiconductor industry unless you really, really like the problem domain. Even if you don't get to play around with the billion dollar tools, you still get to help troubleshoot some of the most intensely complicated problems on earth. Solving these riddles is very rewarding and the experience will stick with you forever. Hard to package those 2 sentences up into a PR campaign for the young generation, but I'm sure we can spin it if the DoD can still find ways to recruit.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  >Solving these riddles is very rewarding and the experience will stick with you forever. That was also my experience working in the semi field (in Europe). People working there weren't in it for obscene compensation, they were into it for the hands on puzzle solving of uniquely complex HW problems with cool and rare expensive machinery. Some were quite significantly underpaid and while they knew it they never felt the need to complain too badly about it. I guess it's kind of like arts, which is a shame, because here some publicly traded corporation is abusing you for your passion. Also, the fact that most of Europe doesn't have many FAANGs and big SW companies paying orders of magnitude more to un-balance the jobs market, surely help to not discourage people from this industry.
- throwawaybbq1 3y ago
  I'm a hobbyist in this area, and think the field is somewhat early in its development. MCUs and cyber-physical systems was like this until the Arduino happened. Arduino may not have been the first to do exactly that but it was just good enough to cause an (re?)explosion in electronics as a hobby. During its hayday, I would say Arduino was a core element of the Maker movement. So what needs to happen to make this a reality for semi-con? First off, we need cheap, cheap fabrication. I actually looked at public funding in Canada and how that was going to the big name Universities who had their own in-house fab labs (at older process nodes). The costs of someone not in the inside was nuts. The actual cost should be in the 100s of dollars to fabricate a design (considering the marginal costs). There are people that do this at home but it doesn't work either due to chemicals being pretty dangerous and the need for a bunch of equipment. I bet the amount of money the EU spent on its first metaverse townhall (or whatever it was called .. the thing very few people attended) or a tiny fraction Canada wastes on silly things promoting youth culture or whatever, they could fund a lab that is actually open to the public, with the express mission of promoting hobbyists and education. This will NEVER happen because (a) it needs a professor who is on the inside with a kid-like passion in this tech and a commitment to bringing it to the masses (I see some profs like this at schools like MIT but it is so rare at large, competitive schools like the big ones in Canada), and (b) it does not have an instant payoff for the govt. They don't want dabblers and vague educational outcomes. They want workers with degrees. I am convinced before I am dead, advances in robotics and fabrication will simply the process (or use home equipment such as future laser printers for printing stencils). I'd love to spend my retirement fabricating my own CPUs :D Edit: Let me add: I don't mean the cutting edge process node. I mean the kind of process node that was used to make the very first chips (but less toxic, repeatable, cheaper equipment). If it is possible for synthetic biology, it must be doable for semicon :D
throwaway2990 3y ago
In Taiwan working in semicon will earn you more than software engineering. It’s insane that majority of software jobs in Taiwan earn less than monthly rent costs.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  Why don't they work remotely or outsource to the West?
Spooky23 3y ago
I worked on a campus with alot of semiconductor investment and education for a somewhat affiliated entity. The thing I noticed was that the crunch work was brutal, parking lots were full till 11pm half the year. The parking lot told the story - the execs had Teslas and BMWs in their gated lot. The troops were in 7-10 year old Hyundais and couldn’t afford to buy lunch in the cafe. If you want to be in the semiconductor industry, the real winners are the tradesmen. They were all driving $70k pickups. Pipe fitters, electricians, operating engineers, etc make bank. If you know how to build the supporting infrastructure around some ASML tool, your income is limited by your desire to work. I can think of a dozen serious contracting companies in those lines of work that spun out of building that place.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  Unfortunately, this is how Soviet engineering was operating until it all tanked. Engineers with university degrees getting paid peanuts as an official policy. It's sad seeing this practice repeated. And people falling for that.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    Official policy sounds like the Soviet Union was the only employer and they were deciding to pay peanuts unilaterally. Is this the case with modern hardware engineers? No one is forcing them to accept low pay, or learn how to write software and earn more. Sounds like they are getting paid market price, and it has been decades since it is known that pay for hardware engineers is low, indicating that people should stay away unless they want relatively low pay.
    - badpun 3y ago
      > Official policy sounds like the Soviet Union was the only employer and they were deciding to pay peanuts unilaterally. The official doctrine was that it was a Laborer's Republic, and so physical labor very often paid more than mental one. It was all about making the common man feel as if the state is really organized for the benefit of people like him, and not some narrow elites. Of course, it was BS.
bombcar 3y ago
Reminds me of talking to brewers and winemakers. The brewers said they could experiment as much as they want because the worst case was you get some different beer. The winemakers had to follow things exceptionally carefully because you basically couldn’t improve anything, but you had innumerable ways to destroy the wine and end up with vinegar.
ianai 3y ago
How many years ago was your experience? There’s definitely an increase in interest and demand for semis. Your experience might be very different from graduates looking today and in the future as demand increases. Having said that, the vitriol and toxicity in colleges and towards one another needs to cease. I see that being more naturally achieved in an economy that is growing and seeing things getting cheaper generally. That would look like vast investments in small, big, and mega projects. Imagine how much different the US today would be had it never built a highway system and stayed to only where the trains/horses went. I think it’s 80-90%+ of US GDP transports via truck over a highway at some point.
spacemadness 3y ago
Somewhat related but anecdotal—there was so much analog gatekeeping during my EE degree it really turned me off of analog electronics design. Some professors acted like nobody was worthy and delighted in ridiculous trick problems on tests to weed everyone out. Many also had the favorite student syndrome that you mentioned where everyone but X was an imposter. The industry also seemed to not want anyone in analog and semi manufacturing anyway or had very high entry requirements, although kept complaining about a lack of candidates publicly. I bet it’s somewhat different today with the resurgence of modular synths and hobby electronics, but I can only imagine that it might make some professors double down on the hazing mentality. All that is to say, in some areas STEM educators have serious cultural issues to work out before just blasting away with funding expecting results.
- ttymck 3y ago
  Is this in the US? I suspect (am hopefully) there may be a different culture elsewhere.
  - spacemadness 3y ago
    Yes, the US which is what this article is focusing on.
- dumpster_fire 3y ago
  > The industry also seemed to not want anyone in analog and semi manufacturing anyway or had very high entry requirements, although kept complaining about a lack of candidates publicly. Didn't take EE in the US, but your statement here seems to be universal. Especially true about Analog professors being gatekeeping jerks.
  - analognoise 3y ago
    This thread is so cathartic for me.
  - CorrectHorseBat 3y ago
    Completely the opposite here (not in the US either), my analog professors were some of the most passionate and caring professors I had. Didn't end going in to analog design because although I think it's interesting I don't think it's actually fun to do the design. I feel like digital design has much more variety.
ttymck 3y ago
Is in the US?
iancmceachern 3y ago
And the industry is so brutally cyclical. They'll hire thousands, work them into the ground to get some machine or line done, then let them all go, then hire them all in a flurry next time they need to build something. It's also very toxic in my experience, lots of mean people.
chongli 3y ago
The way that toxic prof treated the class makes no sense, but the barrier to entry in industry makes a lot of sense, even if we don't like it. Semiconductor is just insanely capital-intensive. Now that it's become a major issue of strategic concern for the USG there is finally some capital available for it. People have finally begun to realize that if all you do is build software, you're completely dependent on your hardware suppliers. It's like being a commuter society that doesn't make their own cars.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  Then pay up. If the industry is so important and a ruined batch costs $30M, it's a disgrace if you can't pay the people six digits.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    They do, for the 1 in a thousand engineer. For example the vast majority of TSMC engineers aren't making that much, but a select few easily earn 10x FAANG compensation.
grepLeigh 3y ago
Came here just to say your professor's attitude is infuriatingly toxic, sorry you had to go through that. I'm curious if your experience of crashing/losing progress is still the norm. Do we have better CAD programs and PCB simulators now? My partner is an EE but I just learned how electricity works (beyond a middle school level) a few years ago.
- pjc50 3y ago
  There are basically only two firms which produce chip CAD software, and they get to be a conservative duopoly of "enterprise grade" (i.e. user hostile) software.
- oscillonoscope 3y ago
  A lot of the simulation software for PCB design is stuck in the 90s. The core of the simulation hasn't changed so it's not too big of a deal from a results perspective. However, it integrates terribly into the workflow so designers only simulate a small portion of a design and there's little automatic checks and things.
  - mumblingdrunk 3y ago
    This is just true for a whole lot of the industry tooling. Xilinx Vivado is a bloated piece of crap that'll crash all the time unless you have half a terabyte of RAM. Same goes for lots of other EE-tooling in general. The L and B in MATLAB stand for Legacy and Bloat. People still write programs for PLCs in Ladder, where programs still cannot be portable between vendors, or even different products from the same vendor. All the companies that produce anything invent their own language for the thing and write their own compiler for it. These compilers are clearly not written by compiler experts. I don't blame EEs for building bad software. They weren't trained to do it and aren't paid to do it. I blame the "if it works, it works" culture that the industry seems to have. Never go back to refine anything, just keep pushing more plugins, more software; create a patchwork of programs until you get the job done.
    - oscillonoscope 3y ago
thebigwinning 3y ago
> Anything you designed was called worthless because there's already a library This attitude (also in software) indicates to me someone who isn't very interested in a subject academically. There is so much to learn from prior solved problems and reinventing the wheel yourself.
- dumpster_fire 3y ago
  Are you my prof? If we weren't interested, we would have quit during the first semester. Our very first assignment was to design a modified Miller. After nights of struggling with the software and connecting transistors, we were then told psyche! You could've imported from the library that we've never told you about! The rest of the assignments were essentially just importing circuits and moving stuff around and hitting the simulator run. Over and over and over again. It takes a certain grit to stare at the Cadence UI for 10 hours running the simulator button to yield a random result. There's no Stack Overflow, the TA was of no help. Just learning the software alone was hell. The instructions were on printed paper that didn't work half the time. Then you have the crashes that wipe out hours of work. We didn't dare to save our work sometimes because it'd crash the software. Loading the software took forever. I genuinely hated Cadence with a passion. I'll admit I don't have that grit. My best memory from the course was still being able to design and fabricate my own chip and PCB to go with it, and successfully converting an analog signal to digital and back. The ENOB took longer than needed to solve and it was rewarding. But I'm not doing that as a career. Only 3 out of the original 20+ people graduated. Only one bothered to apply to semicon. The barrier of entry is high, but the educators were of abysmal quality.
  - thebigwinning 3y ago
    I'm not endorsing bad professor games (which are real). But from my time in academia a lot of students have similar experiences about courses that just aren't for them. For example, in a state school analysis course, almost half the class decides they just need to squeeze by to graduate and maybe 5 students will enjoy it and do graduate school.
    - 3y ago
hammock 3y ago
That’s an hilarious story because the asshole professor ends up being right, a naive optimist (the supposed reader) gets a dark surprise, and all students involved get reasonably happy endings. Could be a Hollywood movie, if you fill in the gap between the penultimate and ultimate paragraphs with some interesting action
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  The professor told them after they already invested years, they will end up unemployed. They did not, because their skillset was valuable somewhere else.
  - hammock 3y ago
    Unemployed as a semicon guy. I doubt the professor meant they wouldn’t get a job as a fry cook
    - hutzlibu 3y ago
      The way op told the story, the professor meant what he said to humiliate the students (despite he likely knew, they would be wanted in other professions). And a fry cook is not quite comparable to a software engineer.
uoaei 3y ago
I worked in process monitoring and supply chain departments at a couple semiconductor companies. There's an impenetrable culture of "best practices" that keeps the tech from catching up with the times. I eventually left because my career stagnated being on teams who couldn't update any of the internal tools because of this or that exec who was too scared to explore beyond the tiny niche they carved for themselves the past 10-30 years. The last team I was on was using JDK 8 and Postgres 8. Vendor lock-in on downstream dependents, I guess. We finally managed to convince leadership after 3 years that if they wanted any ML in their systems at all they'd need to update their stack or make room in their fabs for a Python server on the intranet at the very least. So they gave us a Windows box with 2 cores and 1GB of memory because "that's all that will fit" and "we aren't a security company".
analognoise 3y ago
Almost exactly my experience, plus all the other bad experience mentioned in this thread. I wish I could have seen this when I was in school.
ilyt 3y ago
> The barrier of entry to software engineering is so so much lower than semicon, which still makes no sense to me. Why ? So much software is far less complex to design than semiconductor stuff
- andersa 3y ago
  The confusing part is that working on the simple software will likely get you a much higher salary.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    For me it's more of sad realization that what's very hard and requires either skill, talent or both just isn't that well correlated with what earns most money. Gotta have enough demand so other competent people interested in same thing won't drive the value down. And I do feel lucky that my set of skills correlates with stuff that pays decently.
  - shjake 3y ago
    Just demand/supply I guess. Semi-conductor companies need just a few (even if extremely talented) engineers compared to software. The industry is also very concentrated and not growing that so not that much competition for employees.
    - andersa 3y ago
      I wonder if it's because of the nature of the companies involved. The semiconductor one is actually producing something tangible with huge costs associated with that. Most of the "tech" companies with the crazy salaries are just in the business of seeking rents from an entire market by collecting royalties or subscriptions for automated things, so they have way more money per person to give away.
pyinstallwoes 3y ago
How many people do you think exist on earth that could build a usable but most minimal form of computer/computation from scratch? Roughly same utility just lowered expectations on horsepower with also the assumption the software would be better optimized.
electroagenda 3y ago
In other countries, with less technical jobs, this effect applies to all kind to technical fields. You go to an electronics engineering class. There are a few superbrilliant people. The rest are quite clever though. As there are a few jobs available for the technical skills that you learn at class, only the superbrilliant get those jobs. It turns out that the companies say to these superbrilliant guys: "I am giving you a unique opportunity to work in this top field in this country. So your salary is not about money, but motivation". End of the story: the rest of the guys, not the super brilliant, end up working in more generic stuff like management, consultancy, generic simple software.... And they make way more money that the superbrilliant guys. These examples are taken from Spain. Althoug I have seen similar in other European countries with more technical jobs.
raverbashing 3y ago
> 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 Sounds like a great way of nurturing talent... not. Apparently they will only look at your CV if you have a PhD or a very specialized MsC And all this for what again? "The privilege of working with hard problems?!" I've done enough C already and that makes my head hurt now. Thanks but I think I'll take it easier with "higher level software" while making more money and having less stress Top engineering school hazing, creating underpaid and not quite mentally balanced people

CrampusDestrus 3y ago

How 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 ago
It 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 ago
  But 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.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >But 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. Obviosly they can, assuming that these companies hire "only the best". That means that in the demand/supply calculations, the demand is not for "graduates of semiconducting programs" but "only top top graduates of semiconducating programs, ignore the rest". That's in much shorter supply, and means that 95% of the "class of 20" aren't even considered worthy as candidates, and aren't competition for those top semicon jobs. They'll need to find work in another field (like switching to software), or low level semicon jobs.
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bncmark 3y ago
It does not make sense because software could be written using the same quality standards that CPUs use, which would involve a lot of formal reasoning and proofs. This work style, however, is not valued at all and is actively suppressed by "flat", non-expert hierarchies that reward people for being popular and sloppy. It works for web companies because errors have no consequences for them and the web has turned into a gigantic tabloid anyway.
- CrampusDestrus 3y ago
  Abstraction layers become simpler, more rigid and more robust as you peel them. A painter uses rules of thumb all of the time, yet his work is entirely dependent on chemical engineers getting their science and formulas right. Artistic painting is just one of many uses of paint (and probably its most approximate), but both the painter and the industrial product engineer need the same quality assurances regarding their colors. Hardware needs to be solid to allow all kinds of software the freedom to be built.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  In my experience what trade-off is the correct one depends on your ability to iterate and where your risk comes from. Can you ship infrequently, but you know with high confidence what product/market-fit looks like (extreme example Mars mission)? In that case you want all the planning and verification you can get. Can you ship often, but have little confidence in what your users/customers want and what will grow your business (extreme example social media app)? In this case you probably want to prioritize speed of iteration and rework technical aspects once you know it's what's needed. I've had a very angry product manager because a feature took almost a second to load. I told him that we could make it load much faster but it would be almost a week of work and he should validate the feature with customers before we invest in that. "Of course we need this feature! It's core to the product!". So we spent a week. It worked realty nicely and scaled pretty well. In the next 12 months the feature changed completely twice because customers didn't find it useful. Then it was removed entirely and then we had to bring it back because the sales team liked it for demos. All that iteration was required to find what the market needed, not fit technical reasons, except for the performance work which was entirely wasted because it all got redone after the first user feedback.
pjc50 3y ago
More often in startup land, you are relying on the investors for your paycheck. The place where the value is is not at all related to where the difficulties are or the bottlenecks are. The universe does not have that kind of sense of distributive justice.
austhrow743 3y ago
You could write the same thing about the concrete slab the office or data centre is on. The barrier to being a concreter is very close to "applied for a job as a concreter".
- CrampusDestrus 3y ago
  Yes, and civil engineers have to follow a lot of regulations and have to plan things carefully

lizknope 3y ago

What kind of job is X doing and at what company? Are they working at a fab? Working in the manufacturing portion of the fab? Doing process design work on a computer? There are so many different types of jobs within the semiconductor industry and some are going to pay far higher than others. As I said in my other comment in the thread I have worked at many fabless semiconductor companies. The different between software and hardware salaries at companies like Nvidia and Apple is around 10% or so, not 5X.

dumpster_fire 3y ago
Last I heard it was Micron. Not too sure what X got into. He was definitely a genius though. [Edit] Just checked. He has left the industry a few years back, and is now a software engineering manager. Even the brightest student has given up. Someone on this post said it best, they need to have salaries matching the amount of skill required.
- lizknope 3y ago
  If X works in something low level like device physics then there are a limited number of companies doing cutting edge fab stuff like that. Intel, TSMC, Samsung. The small number of companies limits your salary potential. It's the same with being a maintenance technician for a piece of ASML 3nm semiconductor manufacturing equipment. You may be highly skilled but if there are only 3 companies in the world that will hire you then your salary potential is limited. I know about 30 people developing hardware at Apple (writing Verilog, custom analog serdes design) and you can see that their software and hardware salaries are similar. In some cases hardware is higher although I suspect that is because of the limited sample size of salary data at the ICT6 level. https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/software-engineer https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/software-eng... https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/hardware-engineer https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/hardware-eng... There is more to life than money but people who care about money need to look into the companies and salaries before they commit themselves to 4 to 10 years of college.
  - 3y ago

weinzierl 3y ago

I had a similar experience in Germany. Studied Engineering Physics with a major in semiconductor technology. At university we learned everything from high level programming, VHDL, electronics down to semiconductor chemistry. I didn't find it boring at all. Judging from our industry partnerships the semiconductor industry seemed to do well at the time. At least that was my impression. When I graduated in 2001 the signs of impeding death were already there however, so I worked in aerospace for a couple of years, went back to university for a computer science degree and ended up in software anyways. Not the worst thing to happen for me personally, but honestly I still don't really understand how a promising industry could die like that.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
> in 2001 the signs of impeding death were already there What were those signs?
- weinzierl 3y ago
  For me specifically Siemens divesting or spinning-off its semiconductor assets. Before that my study program was almost a free ticket into Siemens. Working for Infineon, EPCOS or (a little later) Qimonda did not seem attractive to me, specifically because it was well known at the time that these divisions were spun-off because Siemens wanted to reduce the risk from the quote "highly volatile semiconductor business" for the parent company.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    MBAs, investors, and stock market ruining stuff again...

bob1029 3y ago

Here's what I learned working at Samsung: At the end of the day, the stakes are way too high to allow everyone a chance to play cowboy with the tools. You want your best possible champions to bring a design to bear. Then, the other 99% of the army is responsible for implementing the design in as repeatable & standardized a fashion as physically possible so that there is even the remotest chance of yield+profit. Software is the antithesis of this. The cost of playing around with your tools is not even worth accounting for. Due to certain cultural effects, you probably don't want to do software in semiconductor industry unless you really, really like the problem domain. Even if you don't get to play around with the billion dollar tools, you still get to help troubleshoot some of the most intensely complicated problems on earth. Solving these riddles is very rewarding and the experience will stick with you forever. Hard to package those 2 sentences up into a PR campaign for the young generation, but I'm sure we can spin it if the DoD can still find ways to recruit.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
>Solving these riddles is very rewarding and the experience will stick with you forever. That was also my experience working in the semi field (in Europe). People working there weren't in it for obscene compensation, they were into it for the hands on puzzle solving of uniquely complex HW problems with cool and rare expensive machinery. Some were quite significantly underpaid and while they knew it they never felt the need to complain too badly about it. I guess it's kind of like arts, which is a shame, because here some publicly traded corporation is abusing you for your passion. Also, the fact that most of Europe doesn't have many FAANGs and big SW companies paying orders of magnitude more to un-balance the jobs market, surely help to not discourage people from this industry.
throwawaybbq1 3y ago
I'm a hobbyist in this area, and think the field is somewhat early in its development. MCUs and cyber-physical systems was like this until the Arduino happened. Arduino may not have been the first to do exactly that but it was just good enough to cause an (re?)explosion in electronics as a hobby. During its hayday, I would say Arduino was a core element of the Maker movement. So what needs to happen to make this a reality for semi-con? First off, we need cheap, cheap fabrication. I actually looked at public funding in Canada and how that was going to the big name Universities who had their own in-house fab labs (at older process nodes). The costs of someone not in the inside was nuts. The actual cost should be in the 100s of dollars to fabricate a design (considering the marginal costs). There are people that do this at home but it doesn't work either due to chemicals being pretty dangerous and the need for a bunch of equipment. I bet the amount of money the EU spent on its first metaverse townhall (or whatever it was called .. the thing very few people attended) or a tiny fraction Canada wastes on silly things promoting youth culture or whatever, they could fund a lab that is actually open to the public, with the express mission of promoting hobbyists and education. This will NEVER happen because (a) it needs a professor who is on the inside with a kid-like passion in this tech and a commitment to bringing it to the masses (I see some profs like this at schools like MIT but it is so rare at large, competitive schools like the big ones in Canada), and (b) it does not have an instant payoff for the govt. They don't want dabblers and vague educational outcomes. They want workers with degrees. I am convinced before I am dead, advances in robotics and fabrication will simply the process (or use home equipment such as future laser printers for printing stencils). I'd love to spend my retirement fabricating my own CPUs :D Edit: Let me add: I don't mean the cutting edge process node. I mean the kind of process node that was used to make the very first chips (but less toxic, repeatable, cheaper equipment). If it is possible for synthetic biology, it must be doable for semicon :D

throwaway2990 3y ago

In Taiwan working in semicon will earn you more than software engineering. It’s insane that majority of software jobs in Taiwan earn less than monthly rent costs.

thriftwy 3y ago
Why don't they work remotely or outsource to the West?

Spooky23 3y ago

I worked on a campus with alot of semiconductor investment and education for a somewhat affiliated entity. The thing I noticed was that the crunch work was brutal, parking lots were full till 11pm half the year. The parking lot told the story - the execs had Teslas and BMWs in their gated lot. The troops were in 7-10 year old Hyundais and couldn’t afford to buy lunch in the cafe. If you want to be in the semiconductor industry, the real winners are the tradesmen. They were all driving $70k pickups. Pipe fitters, electricians, operating engineers, etc make bank. If you know how to build the supporting infrastructure around some ASML tool, your income is limited by your desire to work. I can think of a dozen serious contracting companies in those lines of work that spun out of building that place.

thriftwy 3y ago
Unfortunately, this is how Soviet engineering was operating until it all tanked. Engineers with university degrees getting paid peanuts as an official policy. It's sad seeing this practice repeated. And people falling for that.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  Official policy sounds like the Soviet Union was the only employer and they were deciding to pay peanuts unilaterally. Is this the case with modern hardware engineers? No one is forcing them to accept low pay, or learn how to write software and earn more. Sounds like they are getting paid market price, and it has been decades since it is known that pay for hardware engineers is low, indicating that people should stay away unless they want relatively low pay.
  - badpun 3y ago
    > Official policy sounds like the Soviet Union was the only employer and they were deciding to pay peanuts unilaterally. The official doctrine was that it was a Laborer's Republic, and so physical labor very often paid more than mental one. It was all about making the common man feel as if the state is really organized for the benefit of people like him, and not some narrow elites. Of course, it was BS.

bombcar 3y ago

Reminds me of talking to brewers and winemakers. The brewers said they could experiment as much as they want because the worst case was you get some different beer. The winemakers had to follow things exceptionally carefully because you basically couldn’t improve anything, but you had innumerable ways to destroy the wine and end up with vinegar.

ianai 3y ago

How many years ago was your experience? There’s definitely an increase in interest and demand for semis. Your experience might be very different from graduates looking today and in the future as demand increases. Having said that, the vitriol and toxicity in colleges and towards one another needs to cease. I see that being more naturally achieved in an economy that is growing and seeing things getting cheaper generally. That would look like vast investments in small, big, and mega projects. Imagine how much different the US today would be had it never built a highway system and stayed to only where the trains/horses went. I think it’s 80-90%+ of US GDP transports via truck over a highway at some point.

spacemadness 3y ago

Somewhat related but anecdotal—there was so much analog gatekeeping during my EE degree it really turned me off of analog electronics design. Some professors acted like nobody was worthy and delighted in ridiculous trick problems on tests to weed everyone out. Many also had the favorite student syndrome that you mentioned where everyone but X was an imposter. The industry also seemed to not want anyone in analog and semi manufacturing anyway or had very high entry requirements, although kept complaining about a lack of candidates publicly. I bet it’s somewhat different today with the resurgence of modular synths and hobby electronics, but I can only imagine that it might make some professors double down on the hazing mentality. All that is to say, in some areas STEM educators have serious cultural issues to work out before just blasting away with funding expecting results.

ttymck 3y ago
Is this in the US? I suspect (am hopefully) there may be a different culture elsewhere.
- spacemadness 3y ago
  Yes, the US which is what this article is focusing on.
dumpster_fire 3y ago
> The industry also seemed to not want anyone in analog and semi manufacturing anyway or had very high entry requirements, although kept complaining about a lack of candidates publicly. Didn't take EE in the US, but your statement here seems to be universal. Especially true about Analog professors being gatekeeping jerks.
- analognoise 3y ago
  This thread is so cathartic for me.
- CorrectHorseBat 3y ago
  Completely the opposite here (not in the US either), my analog professors were some of the most passionate and caring professors I had. Didn't end going in to analog design because although I think it's interesting I don't think it's actually fun to do the design. I feel like digital design has much more variety.

ttymck 3y ago

Is in the US?

iancmceachern 3y ago

And the industry is so brutally cyclical. They'll hire thousands, work them into the ground to get some machine or line done, then let them all go, then hire them all in a flurry next time they need to build something. It's also very toxic in my experience, lots of mean people.

chongli 3y ago

The way that toxic prof treated the class makes no sense, but the barrier to entry in industry makes a lot of sense, even if we don't like it. Semiconductor is just insanely capital-intensive. Now that it's become a major issue of strategic concern for the USG there is finally some capital available for it. People have finally begun to realize that if all you do is build software, you're completely dependent on your hardware suppliers. It's like being a commuter society that doesn't make their own cars.

thriftwy 3y ago
Then pay up. If the industry is so important and a ruined batch costs $30M, it's a disgrace if you can't pay the people six digits.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  They do, for the 1 in a thousand engineer. For example the vast majority of TSMC engineers aren't making that much, but a select few easily earn 10x FAANG compensation.

grepLeigh 3y ago

Came here just to say your professor's attitude is infuriatingly toxic, sorry you had to go through that. I'm curious if your experience of crashing/losing progress is still the norm. Do we have better CAD programs and PCB simulators now? My partner is an EE but I just learned how electricity works (beyond a middle school level) a few years ago.

pjc50 3y ago
There are basically only two firms which produce chip CAD software, and they get to be a conservative duopoly of "enterprise grade" (i.e. user hostile) software.
oscillonoscope 3y ago
A lot of the simulation software for PCB design is stuck in the 90s. The core of the simulation hasn't changed so it's not too big of a deal from a results perspective. However, it integrates terribly into the workflow so designers only simulate a small portion of a design and there's little automatic checks and things.
- mumblingdrunk 3y ago
  This is just true for a whole lot of the industry tooling. Xilinx Vivado is a bloated piece of crap that'll crash all the time unless you have half a terabyte of RAM. Same goes for lots of other EE-tooling in general. The L and B in MATLAB stand for Legacy and Bloat. People still write programs for PLCs in Ladder, where programs still cannot be portable between vendors, or even different products from the same vendor. All the companies that produce anything invent their own language for the thing and write their own compiler for it. These compilers are clearly not written by compiler experts. I don't blame EEs for building bad software. They weren't trained to do it and aren't paid to do it. I blame the "if it works, it works" culture that the industry seems to have. Never go back to refine anything, just keep pushing more plugins, more software; create a patchwork of programs until you get the job done.
  - oscillonoscope 3y ago

thebigwinning 3y ago

> Anything you designed was called worthless because there's already a library This attitude (also in software) indicates to me someone who isn't very interested in a subject academically. There is so much to learn from prior solved problems and reinventing the wheel yourself.

dumpster_fire 3y ago
Are you my prof? If we weren't interested, we would have quit during the first semester. Our very first assignment was to design a modified Miller. After nights of struggling with the software and connecting transistors, we were then told psyche! You could've imported from the library that we've never told you about! The rest of the assignments were essentially just importing circuits and moving stuff around and hitting the simulator run. Over and over and over again. It takes a certain grit to stare at the Cadence UI for 10 hours running the simulator button to yield a random result. There's no Stack Overflow, the TA was of no help. Just learning the software alone was hell. The instructions were on printed paper that didn't work half the time. Then you have the crashes that wipe out hours of work. We didn't dare to save our work sometimes because it'd crash the software. Loading the software took forever. I genuinely hated Cadence with a passion. I'll admit I don't have that grit. My best memory from the course was still being able to design and fabricate my own chip and PCB to go with it, and successfully converting an analog signal to digital and back. The ENOB took longer than needed to solve and it was rewarding. But I'm not doing that as a career. Only 3 out of the original 20+ people graduated. Only one bothered to apply to semicon. The barrier of entry is high, but the educators were of abysmal quality.
- thebigwinning 3y ago
  I'm not endorsing bad professor games (which are real). But from my time in academia a lot of students have similar experiences about courses that just aren't for them. For example, in a state school analysis course, almost half the class decides they just need to squeeze by to graduate and maybe 5 students will enjoy it and do graduate school.
  - 3y ago

hammock 3y ago

That’s an hilarious story because the asshole professor ends up being right, a naive optimist (the supposed reader) gets a dark surprise, and all students involved get reasonably happy endings. Could be a Hollywood movie, if you fill in the gap between the penultimate and ultimate paragraphs with some interesting action

hutzlibu 3y ago
The professor told them after they already invested years, they will end up unemployed. They did not, because their skillset was valuable somewhere else.
- hammock 3y ago
  Unemployed as a semicon guy. I doubt the professor meant they wouldn’t get a job as a fry cook
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    The way op told the story, the professor meant what he said to humiliate the students (despite he likely knew, they would be wanted in other professions). And a fry cook is not quite comparable to a software engineer.

uoaei 3y ago

I worked in process monitoring and supply chain departments at a couple semiconductor companies. There's an impenetrable culture of "best practices" that keeps the tech from catching up with the times. I eventually left because my career stagnated being on teams who couldn't update any of the internal tools because of this or that exec who was too scared to explore beyond the tiny niche they carved for themselves the past 10-30 years. The last team I was on was using JDK 8 and Postgres 8. Vendor lock-in on downstream dependents, I guess. We finally managed to convince leadership after 3 years that if they wanted any ML in their systems at all they'd need to update their stack or make room in their fabs for a Python server on the intranet at the very least. So they gave us a Windows box with 2 cores and 1GB of memory because "that's all that will fit" and "we aren't a security company".

analognoise 3y ago

Almost exactly my experience, plus all the other bad experience mentioned in this thread. I wish I could have seen this when I was in school.

ilyt 3y ago

> The barrier of entry to software engineering is so so much lower than semicon, which still makes no sense to me. Why ? So much software is far less complex to design than semiconductor stuff

andersa 3y ago
The confusing part is that working on the simple software will likely get you a much higher salary.
- ilyt 3y ago
  For me it's more of sad realization that what's very hard and requires either skill, talent or both just isn't that well correlated with what earns most money. Gotta have enough demand so other competent people interested in same thing won't drive the value down. And I do feel lucky that my set of skills correlates with stuff that pays decently.
- shjake 3y ago
  Just demand/supply I guess. Semi-conductor companies need just a few (even if extremely talented) engineers compared to software. The industry is also very concentrated and not growing that so not that much competition for employees.
  - andersa 3y ago
    I wonder if it's because of the nature of the companies involved. The semiconductor one is actually producing something tangible with huge costs associated with that. Most of the "tech" companies with the crazy salaries are just in the business of seeking rents from an entire market by collecting royalties or subscriptions for automated things, so they have way more money per person to give away.

pyinstallwoes 3y ago

How many people do you think exist on earth that could build a usable but most minimal form of computer/computation from scratch? Roughly same utility just lowered expectations on horsepower with also the assumption the software would be better optimized.

electroagenda 3y ago

In other countries, with less technical jobs, this effect applies to all kind to technical fields. You go to an electronics engineering class. There are a few superbrilliant people. The rest are quite clever though. As there are a few jobs available for the technical skills that you learn at class, only the superbrilliant get those jobs. It turns out that the companies say to these superbrilliant guys: "I am giving you a unique opportunity to work in this top field in this country. So your salary is not about money, but motivation". End of the story: the rest of the guys, not the super brilliant, end up working in more generic stuff like management, consultancy, generic simple software.... And they make way more money that the superbrilliant guys. These examples are taken from Spain. Althoug I have seen similar in other European countries with more technical jobs.

raverbashing 3y ago

> 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 Sounds like a great way of nurturing talent... not. Apparently they will only look at your CV if you have a PhD or a very specialized MsC And all this for what again? "The privilege of working with hard problems?!" I've done enough C already and that makes my head hurt now. Thanks but I think I'll take it easier with "higher level software" while making more money and having less stress Top engineering school hazing, creating underpaid and not quite mentally balanced people