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If I may add my view as a formerly high-achieving semiconductor worker that Intel would benefit greatly from having right now, a lot of us pivoted to software a
by georgeburdell 1y ago
If I may add my view as a formerly high-achieving semiconductor worker that Intel would benefit greatly from having right now, a lot of us pivoted to software and machine learning to earn more money. My first 2 years as a software engineer earned me more RSUs than a decade in semiconductors. Semiconductors is not prestigious work in the U.S., despite the strategic importance. By contrast, it is highly respected and relatively well remunerated in the countries doing well in it.
From this lens, the silver lining of the software layoffs going on may be to stem the bleeding of semiconductor workers to the field. If Intel were really smart, they’d be hiring more right now the people they couldn’t get or retain 3-5 years ago
- packetlost 1y agoIf Intel were well managed they would purge like 2/3rs of the managers and anyone in the bottom 50th percentile and then pay whatever it takes to get people skilled in their core industry back, training the remaining people as necessary to fill in gaps for the future. They literally cannot have a culture that encourages the now-traditional job hopping that is so pervasive in American business culture. They can't afford it.
- freeopinion 1y agoWho gets to determine the bottom 50th percentile?
- packetlost 1y agoit doesn't really matter as long as you retain the top 10% who do 90% of the work.
- willhslade 1y agoI think you glossed over the question
- packetlost 1y agoGenerally, the answer is management via performance reviews.
- willhslade 1y agoSo current management, who had proven incapable of running a business, will be trusted to ignore past political games and just retain talent? That's certainly a take
- freeopinion 1y agoPresumably the same management that is proposed to be axed en masse with the 50% they are now tasked with selecting...
- jazzyjackson 1y agoLet's flip it. Direct reports get to vote on whether they would be better off without their manager.
- BeetleB 1y ago> it doesn't really matter as long as you retain the top 10% who do 90% of the work. This isn't SW. Those ratios don't exist in the HW world. (And to be frank, it's a myth in SW too).
- SlowTao 1y agoAnd welcome to the "fun" world of Stack Ranking.
- blitzar 1y agoI am yet to see a round of "cut the bottom 10%" that didn't end up also cutting a bunch of top 5% staff.
- _carbyau_ 1y agoIn every workplace I've been, I end up thinking 50% of people here could be gone tomorrow and nothing would change. But the real trick is filtering precisely the 50% you want.
- dboreham 1y agoAlso moved from the semiconductor industry to software, 30 years ago. Much more money.
- troad 1y agoWe have developed an economy oriented around selling one another websites, and we are only belatedly noticing that none of our enemies seem to have followed.
- bix6 1y agoIt’s ridiculous. It’s so easy to find VC funding for software but heaven forbid you try and make agricultural innovations. Biotech is slightly better but still a struggle. Hardware only counts right now if it’s defense tech but even then people would rather have another SaaS.
- makestuff 1y agoYeah seeing the innovations DJI is making in agriculture makes me wonder why VCs do not want to fund other startups like it. I know the margins are worse and it takes way more capital to fund hardware companies, but that has to be better than funding another chat-gpt wrapper. I guess that is why I am not a VC though lol.
- RealityVoid 1y agoThey're just hard. What is the US robotics startup that you would use as an example of success? iRobot? It barely broke even.
- raziel2701 1y agoHow is boston dynamics doing? They do very cool stuff but it feels like they struggle commercializing their technology. I remember they were once bought by google I think? And then spat out...
- evrimoztamur 1y agoSouth Korea got to it: https://www.hyundai.com/worldwide/en/brand-journal/mobility-solution/hyundai-boston-dynamics https://www.hyundai.com/worldwide/en/brand-journal/mobility-...
- headcanon 1y agoSimilar, My major in university was computer engineering (as opposed to pure CS or EE) because I wasn't sure if I wanted to go into a hardware or software profession. I ended up going with software since all the interesting opportunities were there, whereas most jobs in hardware seemed to be working for stodgy old companies barely making six figures if I was lucky.
- kridsdale3 1y agoExactly the same for me. It's made me one of the only leaders in my Software Org that actually knows what happens below the level of the instruction set. I can talk about the power and heat implications of algorithmic decisions. But mostly nobody cares, theres always enough money to buy more servers.
- esafak 1y agoThat's the thing with knowing thing other people don't; they might not be able to appreciate it.
- deepsquirrelnet 1y agoHistorically Intel has engaged in illegal wage suppression. Now we bail them out for their crimes. This was a poor business decision for exactly the reasons you’re pointing out. The market is dictating their failure and we’re now undermining it.
- unethical_ban 1y agoI see your point, but isn't it fair to say Intel is too big to fail? Not in the "lots of people would lose jobs" or "ripple effects would cause economic disruption" but in the true national security sense. What allied semiconductor manufacturers have significant cutting edge fabs in Europe?
- deepsquirrelnet 1y agoIMO the company can fail. It’s the people, facilities and equipment that matter. Those can get picked up by a company or companies that know how to use them. Secondarily, a TSMC fab on US soil seems like a better investment. In the catastrophic event that Taiwan were invaded — it’s still people, facilities and equipment that remain here.
- BeetleB 1y ago> It’s the people, facilities and equipment that matter. Those can get picked up by a company or companies that know how to use them. This trope keeps getting repeated on HN. No, the point of the top level comment and article is that no US based company will replace Intel's fabs, nor will they form a "better" Intel. This stuff is intensely capital intensive, and nothing short of a government mandate will make any other company spend so much money on such a big risk. Trust me - if they could have, they would have. Intel's fabs have pretty much been up for sale since Pat was ousted. The only companies that know how to use the people and the equipment are not US based. TSMC already had an opportunity to buy much of Intel's fabs, and they concluded that shifting their process to match TSMCs would be cost prohibitive.
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- raziel2701 1y agoAmen brother! And the work-life conditions are also much better in software. I remember in grad school an executive from a big semiconductor company (I think it was ON semi) was complaining to the EE department that most students are now pursuing EE as a CS degree and very few went into hardware so they claimed the talent pool was small. How about paying more then? Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. When I interviewed at intel the position they were offering was to be the "owner" of a tool and I'd be on call.... Yeah no thanks, I get a PhD just to be owned by some company?
- avs733 1y agosame - left the industry after 2 years. Made more as a startup founder while working better hours. It's not just the pay, a fab operates 24x7x365 and how management turns that into work practices and life for employees. I once interviewed at a fab that offered 'better work life balance'...and what they meant was you weren't allowed to access any email or information off site so they couldn't bug you as much. In reality, it just meant you had to actually go in to the plant if anythign went wrong.
- Workaccount2 1y agoAmen, software sucked all the talent out of the hardware room. When you write the pros and cons of software vs hardware, pretty much the only positive on the hardware side is a subjective "it's more fun".
- kridsdale3 1y agoSometimes, there's lasers.
- lumost 1y agoHonestly, I don’t think US wages make sense any longer. We have extraordinarily profitable semi companies that don’t pay more than a third of what non profitable startups are paying software engineers. The issue seems to be one of negotiation power as the determinate of wages taken to an extreme - leading to companies taking a monopoly position, paying poorly, then falling to foreign competition due to lack of talent.
- Henchman21 1y agoGreed. You’re describing greed. The folks at the top of the pile in the US seemingly all have hoarding disorder. Very little of what they do appears rational… unless you concede their actions are meant to harm the general wellbeing of the US. population, while themselves being nicely insulated from all that.
- jollyllama 1y agoBillions for fast food delivery apps, not a dime for defense or sustainable agriculture.
- Aurornis 1y ago> Billions for fast food delivery apps, not a dime for defense or sustainable agriculture Defense venture capital funding is literally in the billions and has resilient even in a broader VC pullback: https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/news-insights/articles/2024/9/rise-in-defense-sector-funding-defies-broader-venture-capital-slump-83265012 https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/news-insight...
- jollyllama 1y agoFair enough, I suppose I was being hyperbolic, but nevertheless... It would be interesting to see the graph before 2019. For a decade, all of the investment money, talent following behind it, piled into Uber, etc. > has resilient even in a broader VC pullback Yes, people are starting to catch on now. Even so, investment is at best a leading indicator. In terms of existing on-the-ground domestic infrastructure, we're sorely lagging in real-world capabilities, but the better part of the last fifteen years was spent creating a vast Grubhub-type delivery infrastructure across the US while the amount of resources dedicated to peer or near-peer conflict logistics and long term agricultural production were relatively ignored.
- Fade_Dance 1y agoBeyond Meat also hit 15 billion market cap at peak.
- jollyllama 1y agoI don't consider synthetic nutrition agriculture; what I'm talking about is regenerative farming practices or high tech alternatives to pesticides i.e. Carbon Robotics.
- Aurornis 1y agoThe gap between hardware and software salaries has been strangely stubborn. I started in hardware and pivoted to software for the same reason: It's easier to find higher paying jobs. It's been strange to see the gap persist at companies that cling to salary data for compensation decisions. Incredible to see companies complain about not being able to find good hardware talent but then also refuse to pay hardware hires at the same level as software hires.
- throwaway173738 1y agoIt mirrors the 8-10x multiple that you can command in your valuation for ARR.
- phendrenad2 1y ago"I saw the best minds of my generation writing spam filters" - Neal Stephenson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE0n_5qPmRM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE0n_5qPmRM
- logicchains 1y agoIt's only be a short term thing, because fundamentally software is more profitable because it's much less costly to scale. And individual developers have more bargaining power, because they can own the "means of production", while the means of production for hardware is much more expensive.
- AlphaSite 1y agoThere are extraordinarily highly paying semi firms in the US, but neither Intel nor AMD fit that mould unfortunately. I’ve never understood why that’s the case; they are also high leverage jobs where a few can do extraordinary work and be rewarded thus. Look at Nvidia. Their employees are well compensated and they stay and the company does fantastically.
- BeetleB 1y ago> There are extraordinarily highly paying semi firms in the US, but neither Intel nor AMD fit that mould unfortunately. Who pays more than Intel? In this context, semiconductor jobs is referring to people actually involved with developing the fab - so Nvidia/Apple/AMD don't count.
- yibg 1y agoSame for me except I never started. Graduated EE and went straight into software. Not just higher pay, but also a hell of a lot more jobs available, especially to new grads.
- sgerenser 1y agoI think this is more of an Intel problem than a general semi industry problem. I work for Arm and I’m compensated better than when I worked at Microsoft (although it’s partly due to stock appreciation after the IPO). But I’ve also heard that Broadcom has top-teir RSU grants as well, and even AMD is more competitive than Intel.
- osnium123 1y agoDoesn’t Broadcom work their people like dogs though?
- sevensor 1y agoSame boat. The pay was mediocre, the hours were bad and far too many, and the company used cyclical demand to keep us in perpetual fear of layoffs. Mandatory pager carry 24/7/365 unless I was on vacation out of town. Rotating weekend coverage. Rotating holiday coverage. First couple of years were 12 hour shifts on my feet, then I went to process integration and did endless meetings instead. I loved, still love, the actual technology of semiconductor fabrication, but you’d have to pay me 8x what I was making for me to go back to the business of semiconductor fabrication.
- frognumber 1y agoAs a former EE, it's not just pay. The cog-in-a-machine corporate culture is not fun. Tech culture is much healthier. There's no upside to big electronics companies here.