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When I finished my phd in materials science I interviewed and got an offer at applied for $120k/yr in 2019. No thanks. Throughout my time in grad school I saw

When I finished my phd in materials science I interviewed and got an offer at applied for $120k/yr in 2019. No thanks. Throughout my time in grad school I saw leaders in the semiconductor industry talk to professors and complain about how they can no longer get the best talent and that every one is going to software. Well, have you looked at what you're paying and what you're asking to get for that money? And then they complain about nobody wanting to work anymore. So yeah when I see these bs pr pieces about how important they are, how come they're not valued higher and pay better salaries? The talk and the reality don't match.

no-mana 3y ago
120k? I've had 60-80k offers. Friends with PhD and several post-doc accepted <80k. I accepted the only offer I had at 65k, and quit several months in the job. Understaffed, underfunded, engineer covering operators quitting on the spot. Noped out and never looked back. Such a shame, the science is awesome, but the career outlook just bleak.
paxys 3y ago
This is the sad truth about the industry. The EE/CE department at my university was world renowned. Groundbreaking research being done. Professors who defined industry trends. Everyone I knew in the program was a genius and truly wanted to move the world forward. Upon graduation the smartest in the class got $70K offers from Intel. If you had a PhD then maybe $80K. Today they are all working at FAANG or enterprise SaaS companies.
j7ake 3y ago
Do you think it is the difference between hardware vs software? The competition for hardware is fierce, so margins and profits are low.
4gotunameagain 3y ago
Is it their fault that VC goes to SaaS and pointless startups as fast as flies go to shit ? $120k/yr is a very good amount of money. The problem is the inflation of the tech sector because the second dot com boom we are experiencing
hnfong 3y ago
As I see it, it's not so much the fault of research institutions and hardware companies that salaries are not competitive with software. It's that the software industry has too much money. The economies of scale of the software industry allows excess central bank printed money to flow predominantly towards software companies and VC backed mega startups. You can be speculative in software startups with the standard VC formula: pump a couple billion into a company, get a couple hundred million users (just scale with AWS, no problem!), and then dump shares on the stock market full of investors holding free stimulus cash and looking for an alternative to their (used to be) <1% savings interest rate. Hardware companies just can't scale that way. (How's the Arizona plant going, TSMC?) The salaries in software are abhorrently inflated (and I'm speaking as a beneficiary to this phenomenon). It's "unfortunate" that most people with technical degrees have a relatively easy career option to switch to software, if we take that out of the equation, $120k/year doesn't sound really that bad TBH.
- imtringued 3y ago
  >. The economies of scale of the software industry allows excess central bank printed money to flow predominantly towards software companies and VC backed mega startups. I don't know why people keep saying this. The central bank doesn't do this. It doesn't hand over money to investors. I don't like saying it but this sounds too much like a conspiracy theory to me. I mean, the pathway for why exactly this is supposed to happen is not explained at all. In reality commercial banks create the money and they don't give a damn about small or medium sized companies. The central bank is just there to make sure the money system doesn't collapse in either direction. This means they do tend to support commercial banks with excess reserves but those banks make the decisions based on the expectation of getting that money back, which is in stark contrast to the free money rethoric. If someone is doing something it's not the central banks. Have you tried working with hardware by the way? Anything related to hardware has a huge capital intensitivity and this means more of the money is going into paying interest or capital returns to investors instead of employees. If the earning potential of a software and hardware developer are the same but each hardware job requires $400k in capital then just the usual 8% return expectation would cut the hardware developer's salary by $32k. Meanwhile the software guy needs a laptop and monitors on a desk in an office. None of this has anything to do with central banks. If anything cheap central bank money would disproportionately benefit the hardware guy.
sgarland 3y ago
Anecdotally, when I worked at Samsung Austin Semiconductor (2017-2019), the top PhD engineers were paid lavishly. I don't know exact numbers, but I was told well north of $200K, plus hefty bonuses. Since mid-level engineers without a PhD could comfortably be in the mid-100s, that sounds about right to me. My guess is they wouldn't offer the $200K+ range to start, though. I definitely don't blame anyone for not wanting to go there. Hell, that's where I pivoted into tech - I was a Shift Supervisor, realized I had no appetite for management and didn't want to be a technician, so I got a M.S. in SWE from UT Austin and then jumped ship. Instant salary boost, even though I had to start over on the career rung. Software does in fact pay massively well.

no-mana 3y ago

120k? I've had 60-80k offers. Friends with PhD and several post-doc accepted <80k. I accepted the only offer I had at 65k, and quit several months in the job. Understaffed, underfunded, engineer covering operators quitting on the spot. Noped out and never looked back. Such a shame, the science is awesome, but the career outlook just bleak.

paxys 3y ago

This is the sad truth about the industry. The EE/CE department at my university was world renowned. Groundbreaking research being done. Professors who defined industry trends. Everyone I knew in the program was a genius and truly wanted to move the world forward. Upon graduation the smartest in the class got $70K offers from Intel. If you had a PhD then maybe $80K. Today they are all working at FAANG or enterprise SaaS companies.

j7ake 3y ago

Do you think it is the difference between hardware vs software? The competition for hardware is fierce, so margins and profits are low.

4gotunameagain 3y ago

Is it their fault that VC goes to SaaS and pointless startups as fast as flies go to shit ? $120k/yr is a very good amount of money. The problem is the inflation of the tech sector because the second dot com boom we are experiencing

hnfong 3y ago

As I see it, it's not so much the fault of research institutions and hardware companies that salaries are not competitive with software. It's that the software industry has too much money. The economies of scale of the software industry allows excess central bank printed money to flow predominantly towards software companies and VC backed mega startups. You can be speculative in software startups with the standard VC formula: pump a couple billion into a company, get a couple hundred million users (just scale with AWS, no problem!), and then dump shares on the stock market full of investors holding free stimulus cash and looking for an alternative to their (used to be) <1% savings interest rate. Hardware companies just can't scale that way. (How's the Arizona plant going, TSMC?) The salaries in software are abhorrently inflated (and I'm speaking as a beneficiary to this phenomenon). It's "unfortunate" that most people with technical degrees have a relatively easy career option to switch to software, if we take that out of the equation, $120k/year doesn't sound really that bad TBH.

imtringued 3y ago
>. The economies of scale of the software industry allows excess central bank printed money to flow predominantly towards software companies and VC backed mega startups. I don't know why people keep saying this. The central bank doesn't do this. It doesn't hand over money to investors. I don't like saying it but this sounds too much like a conspiracy theory to me. I mean, the pathway for why exactly this is supposed to happen is not explained at all. In reality commercial banks create the money and they don't give a damn about small or medium sized companies. The central bank is just there to make sure the money system doesn't collapse in either direction. This means they do tend to support commercial banks with excess reserves but those banks make the decisions based on the expectation of getting that money back, which is in stark contrast to the free money rethoric. If someone is doing something it's not the central banks. Have you tried working with hardware by the way? Anything related to hardware has a huge capital intensitivity and this means more of the money is going into paying interest or capital returns to investors instead of employees. If the earning potential of a software and hardware developer are the same but each hardware job requires $400k in capital then just the usual 8% return expectation would cut the hardware developer's salary by $32k. Meanwhile the software guy needs a laptop and monitors on a desk in an office. None of this has anything to do with central banks. If anything cheap central bank money would disproportionately benefit the hardware guy.

sgarland 3y ago

Anecdotally, when I worked at Samsung Austin Semiconductor (2017-2019), the top PhD engineers were paid lavishly. I don't know exact numbers, but I was told well north of $200K, plus hefty bonuses. Since mid-level engineers without a PhD could comfortably be in the mid-100s, that sounds about right to me. My guess is they wouldn't offer the $200K+ range to start, though. I definitely don't blame anyone for not wanting to go there. Hell, that's where I pivoted into tech - I was a Shift Supervisor, realized I had no appetite for management and didn't want to be a technician, so I got a M.S. in SWE from UT Austin and then jumped ship. Instant salary boost, even though I had to start over on the career rung. Software does in fact pay massively well.