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Layoffs just seem to be part of life in the US tech industry. Qualcomm announced laying off 66 people in San Diego today. And hundreds more at Meta and Oracle.

Layoffs just seem to be part of life in the US tech industry. Qualcomm announced laying off 66 people in San Diego today. And hundreds more at Meta and Oracle. Qualcomm laid off 260 or so in San Diego a year and a half ago in September 2024. I got laid off from SiFive in February 2020 (one of 80). My boss and my boss's boss (who was the one who called me in for the good news) were themselves gonzo three months later. It seemed to be a pivot away from doing so much general infrastructure software development in-house. Palmer had moved on to Google two months earlier (and Rivos/Meta since) ... had he seen the writing on the wall? It didn't seem to be personal. The founders seemed to not know the details in advance, only the "professional" management.

OhMeadhbh 6mo ago
They laid off 80 people in the same time frame that everyone else was hiring because the cost of capital had fallen to zero (and in some industries below zero with government subsidies.) I don't think that's just "life in the tech industry," that's people who don't know what they're doing. When I interviewed with Yunsup in 2017, the vision he was spinning was "we're going to make it very easy for people to produce application specific ICs with a toolbox of accelerators and a core ISA." That's where the whole "Moore's Law Only Ends Once" phrase came from... They wanted SiFive to be the "go to" fabless design bureau for when you wanted more performance than what you could squeeze out of the flattening performance curve. It turns out that was hard. Harder than anyone in San Mateo or Milpitas could anticipate.
- brucehoult 6mo ago
  It didn't look to me like everyone else was hiring at the start of COVID. That's one reason I left the country after only 11 months of my H-1B visa. > we're going to make it very easy for people to produce application specific ICs with a toolbox of accelerators and a core ISA Yes I know, I was on the SiFive stand at the Embedded Linux Conference in Portland where Yunsup gave this presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxd93jb1OAk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxd93jb1OAk > It turns out that was hard. Harder than anyone in San Mateo or Milpitas could anticipate. Was that it? My impression was that it turned out to be hard to find people who weren't already making high volume custom ASICs but wanted to (and already had the skills to know what they wanted). People who were already had an experienced team making custom chips just wanted to license a core. And then the PolarFire SoC got you 90% of the way there (and Zynq ten years earlier of course) for $36 for a chip with a 667 MHz HiFive Unleashed plus 23k LEs if you valued rapid hardware iteration over a custom $1 FE-310 variant. https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Microchip-Technology/MPFS025TC-FCSG325E?qs=CoAU%2FpHVZXwcRbUZadxWtw%3D%3D https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Microchip-Technology/MP... I could be completely wrong of course. You were the Fuel Air Explosive at the customer coal-face, I'm just a programmer.

OhMeadhbh 6mo ago

They laid off 80 people in the same time frame that everyone else was hiring because the cost of capital had fallen to zero (and in some industries below zero with government subsidies.) I don't think that's just "life in the tech industry," that's people who don't know what they're doing. When I interviewed with Yunsup in 2017, the vision he was spinning was "we're going to make it very easy for people to produce application specific ICs with a toolbox of accelerators and a core ISA." That's where the whole "Moore's Law Only Ends Once" phrase came from... They wanted SiFive to be the "go to" fabless design bureau for when you wanted more performance than what you could squeeze out of the flattening performance curve. It turns out that was hard. Harder than anyone in San Mateo or Milpitas could anticipate.

brucehoult 6mo ago
It didn't look to me like everyone else was hiring at the start of COVID. That's one reason I left the country after only 11 months of my H-1B visa. > we're going to make it very easy for people to produce application specific ICs with a toolbox of accelerators and a core ISA Yes I know, I was on the SiFive stand at the Embedded Linux Conference in Portland where Yunsup gave this presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxd93jb1OAk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxd93jb1OAk > It turns out that was hard. Harder than anyone in San Mateo or Milpitas could anticipate. Was that it? My impression was that it turned out to be hard to find people who weren't already making high volume custom ASICs but wanted to (and already had the skills to know what they wanted). People who were already had an experienced team making custom chips just wanted to license a core. And then the PolarFire SoC got you 90% of the way there (and Zynq ten years earlier of course) for $36 for a chip with a 667 MHz HiFive Unleashed plus 23k LEs if you valued rapid hardware iteration over a custom $1 FE-310 variant. https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Microchip-Technology/MPFS025TC-FCSG325E?qs=CoAU%2FpHVZXwcRbUZadxWtw%3D%3D https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Microchip-Technology/MP... I could be completely wrong of course. You were the Fuel Air Explosive at the customer coal-face, I'm just a programmer.