This is probably a reason STEM graduate level classes and PhDs are prominently international students, willing to go on to the industry and toil under immigration limbo.

International STEM graduates are also targeting FAANG and similar jobs in droves.

Yes, and no. International grads in the US also want stability, and FAANG has proven to not offer that anymore. Many Stanford grads I know are targeting pharma-tech and health tech companies which still pay well, but have a way more stability at the cost of being boring as fuck.

FAANGs are especially brutal right now. Because many of them had layoffs, they are not even allowed to process perm certification for the time being, so green card hopefuls are stuck.

When I was being recruited by ASML this is what I thought. Investing all the time, money and energy, to then be at the mercy of one employer, and have to live in a very specific locations, and the salary is not even that great.

SIdenote: ASML, Philips and other Dutch "big tech" are also known to make (illegal) cartel agreements on how much they will pay for labor.

Source: their (outsourced) recruiters admitting this to me.

Sidenote: most companies in most countries do this. They tend to align on a standard set of salary grills that are more or less the same between themselves to keep competition, wage increases and employee churn to the minimum.

This is of course illegal, but to counter this in court you need a whistleblower willing to go public, and since the workers actively involved in these wage fixing schemes are very well compensated, they have no reason to throw all that away in exchange for no other company hiring them ever again.

Is there any company anywhere that doesn't research the market rate for jobs to at least some degree? What you decide to do with that information is another matter of course but I'm well within my rights to decide not to pay anyone more than what I've determined to be the market rate no matter what other offers they claim to have in hand.

If you're the one setting the market rate, and there are no market forces to stop you, it becomes a big problem

As we can see from the current situation where the USA is completely reliant on foreign fabs and unable to make its own partly due to a shortage of skilled and willing labor

In the country I work it goes like this: the employers are members of an IT association, once a year each employer sends over the anonymous salaries for each job title. The associations aggregates them and sends back the distribution, which HR then uses as a reference. Similar result, but no direct collaboration between employers needed. You can even buy the report for each position as an employee for a fair price.

This sounds similar to what RealPage does in the U.S. with apartment rents: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r.... After the Propublica story came out, the U.S. Department of Justice started investigating it as essentially collusion-via-3rd-party.

Seems an odd argument. Essentially information transparency is bad.

Ah, that would be illegal!

What is NOT illegal is to all hire the same "outside consultants" who give you the same slide deck they give all the other employers, that "agrees" to the same wages giving them something to point at.

Isn't that grand?

There's worse, you could be making software for ASML. I've heard things worse than Oracle happen there.

the catch is that you can't have FAANG jobs if you don't have semiconductors. Greedy short-termism, grab what you can now and forget about the future is always what kills the golden goose.

unfortunately you can't expect people as individuals to make those calls. You need mechanisms that properly value long-term sustainability

The fact FAANG jobs pay better means the supply/demand ratio for talent that can do semiconductor jobs is higher than for talent that can do FAANG job.

GP is right, so rationally everyone who could - would rather live in Mountain View and work a FAANG job than live in some factory town in the Arizona desert.

Apparently there just aren't enough such people, so FAANG will keep paying more and those who can't get these jobs will have to take the worse paying position that requires harder work, more dependency on a single employer, under far worse working and living conditions.

The appalling irony of someone has to dodge homeless fecal droppings talking shit about the american southwest, one of the most beautiful biomes in the world.

Way too many confederate flags in the southwest for my taste.

Tempe, AZ is an awesome place. I wish I lived there again, I'd be biking close-by South Mountain all the time.

> some factory town in the Arizona desert

Phoenix isn't some "factory town". But your general point is true - wages in the electronics sector are stuck at the same amount that they were in the 2000s.

That's why companies like Andruil and Tesla can poach electronics and MechE talent with still low but not as low wages (110-130k with a bunch of stock versus 70-100k with almost no stock).

> and don't require you live in awful places.

Last I checked, they generally do require you to live in SF, Seattle or similarly "awful places". If anything, rampant homelessness and crime seem to be highly correlated with cities that have "FAANG" HQs.

Given that four of the FAANG companies are headquartered, not in San Francisco, but in suburbs south of it (Menlo Park, Mountain View, Cupertino, and Los Gatos), I'm not sure what you're on about. Los Gatos isn't perfect, but it's not some haven of homelessness and crime.

I lived in the bay area for years, in the city, in Oakland and in Moutain View for a year. I agree the south bay is less chaotic than SF. It's still a lot more chaotic than either Colorado (where I was born) or Taiwan, where I've spent most my life. To me, the US west coast was always a sacrifice of quality of life for career growth.

If you need a combo code to enter the bathroom at your local coffee shop, you might want to consider moving somewhere with a bit higher baseline for public spaces.

How easy it is to access a clean restroom is a good barometer of something.

If you think Seattle, outside of ~18 square blocks is an "awful place" by the definition of even the most dyed-in-the-wool WASP, you've either never been to the city, or have been eating way too much political propaganda.

San Francisco is still an incredible city to live and work in if you're young and don't have a family (which is a huge part of the workforce). The homelessness problem is blown out of proportion in terms of everyday living (it's still ridiculous from a societal point of view, but still)

To be fair, my experience there was all in 2012-2015.

It’s not just homelessness, though. Stores here in Taipei aren’t shutting down due to huge losses from shoplifting, but that’s happened to multiple places I used to go to regularly in SF. Nobody I know here has been robbed in public, either. In contrast, my friend’s mom had her purse stolen from her in broad daylight on the street in SF and several other friends had their cars broken into.

The west coast of the US has a crime problem.

Wait, you're comparing an American city to Taipei, and saying it has a crime problem?

Why not compare it to another American city? You'll quickly discover that these 'worst' cities are middle of the road when it comes to most forms of crime, the real horrible places in the US are not in the liberal coastal states. The vast majority of them are in the tough-on-crime god-fearing ones.

(I also always found it a little weird how many of the stores citing crime for closing are ones that just happened to have unionized, but maybe that's just a coincidence...)

> FAANG jobs still require less schooling, less knowledge, pay more and don't require you live in awful places.

> Lots of us left the field or retired. Call us when semiconductor companies start paying real money.

The future will rather be that FAANG jobs will pay much less, thus the salaries in the semiconductor industry will become somewhat competitive again.

They'll pay less when they stop making $2 million per year per engineer

> They'll pay less when they stop making $2 million per year per engineer

When a company makes 2 million USD per engineer and year and can afford to pay less, it will. :-)

When that happens, people will just go back into finance and other high pay fields that require less education and effort.

> When that happens, people will just go back into finance and other high pay fields that require less education and effort.

Straight from the horse's mouth I know that quite some very intelligent, insanely well-educated (in a relevant direction, say, doctoral degree in mathematics, physics, stochastics, ...) and hard-working people don't have the personality traits that finance is looking for.

I know quite some insanely talented people who could not, for example, get a permanent position in research (for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of their research) who would, as mentioned, rather stand no chance of becoming hired in finance (if I had a startup, I would seriously consider hiring them).

So the whole advice of "go into finance" is in my opinion divorced from the reality.

Isn’t it a real phenomenon that’s even been observed in pop culture?

https://youtu.be/L_VFXM0mnR8

You are being too literal here. Firstly, there's a large number of software devs that would do just fine in finance. A common refrain is that many of those who would have gone into finance over the past decade or two want into tech instead. Secondly, there's many other fields people could go into. People follow the money. They adapt their skills to those fields. This idea that "well devs will just work for peanuts" is absurd. Intelligent and talented people will just go elsewhere if the field is no longer a source of high incomes.

Of course I expect it will continue to provide high incomes for quite some time. There are few things I can think of that wouldn't be improved by software, and as long as that holds true it means there's more demand for software.

You can go into finance with the mildest of personalities, write financial middleware or support existing code bases and still earn six digits.

Do you think you need to be a trigger happy real time shark to craft that HFT backend code on top of which the actual trading will take place?

Semiconductor salaries are still very low. Intel and co pay around 70-100k with marginal stock and bonus for most engineering staff. Even seed stage startups pay more. May as well become an accountant at that point.

In my view FAANG jobs are beside the point. I've puzzled about this a lot, because I'm technically a "hardware person" with a degree in physics yet I'm also a good programmer. Many of my physics classmates became programmers. I could hypothetically bring myself up to speed on the latest software development practices and make myself employable at it. Maybe not at FAANG, but probably somewhere decent. But I've never made that jump.

I work in an office that has a sizable software development department, so I'm quite familiar with what they do, and what their work environment is like. It's not some distant mysterious place. They're my lunch buddies.

There are also lots of people who are quite bright, and do difficult mental work at lower pay, yet don't learn to program for whatever reason. Those of us who program know that it's actually quite easy, yet is an impenetrable barrier for most people, and we just don't know why.

There will always be somebody who makes more than you do, but it doesn't explain why people aren't all leaving their jobs for higher paying ones. Part of it may be psychological inertia -- I might be guilty of that myself. But I think another part is that we don't actually know the recipe for success.

Awful places? I believe Arizona is one of the fastest growing populations of all the states ( too hot for me personally )

A lot of that is Californians in skilled trades and back office roles who got priced out of NorCal and SoCal. A lot of my HS teachers for example moved to AZ to become teachers because they could at least afford a home in the Phoenix Metro, along with friends of mine who ended up working in Sales, Accounting, and Back Office Administrative Staff work.