The industry trade organization did make a snazzy movie to try to attract young graduates into the industry.
You could use the parking lots as a proxy for employee prosperity. The chip guys drove better cars than the students, but the government and other corporate people had better cars on average. The chip bigshots made bank though. The chip people would also have crunch periods where they worked crazy hours.
The workers making bank were the tradesmen building the facilities that housed tools.
Even this would be a substantial discount for most qualified people.
$120/hr * 40 hrs/wk * 50 wks/yr = $240K before self-employment taxes and paying for insurance. Ends up being comparable to typical compensation in cities that aren't SF, Seattle, or other top-tier markets.
Now if someone was doing more typical ad-hoc freelance work on a project basis, $120/hr might be too low for typical work. However, $90-120/hr as a contractor with a long-term contract and stable pay over 12-18 months is not uncommon.
Unless someone has a lot of new, small contracts knocking at their door nonstop, it can make more financial sense to take a $120/hr long-term contract over sporadic $200+/hr work that changes month to month.
$240K/yr, minus self-employment taxes, insurance, and other overhead, not to mention the lack of other non-monetary benefits and comp, is not a lot for someone doing serious machine learning.
I'd imagine that the type of specialized talent that Intel needs to catch up to AMD have plenty of options open to them. A comp strategy based on median industry comp might work to maintain their position, but probably won't churn out new industry-leading tech needed to jump ahead.
Some professions typically require both a related degree and one or more certifications or licenses. Accounting is one of those (CPA, CMA, CFA, CISA, CIA, EA) and this ends up being reflected in the hourly rate.
That harder work seems to only get done when you can't leave (or when leaving doesn't get results).
"We've done a survey and our pay and benefits are on par for the industry" = we are proud to be a profoundly mediocre place to work in every possible way.
Can't wait for this pandemic to end and the market for my industry/region to pick up again.
Those aren't mutually exclusive.
You can have more than one priority, even though you can't have more than one TOP priority.
Doesn't help they switched from large cubes with five-foot high cubicle walls which did a good job on minimizing noise and visual distractions to having cubicle walls with a height of about 3-4 feet high and much smaller. Plus they installed sit-stand desks and you have people stand and make phone calls that can be heard 30 feet away. Doesn't help for concentrating on problems.