Are they working at a fab? Working in the manufacturing portion of the fab? Doing process design work on a computer? There are so many different types of jobs within the semiconductor industry and some are going to pay far higher than others.

As I said in my other comment in the thread I have worked at many fabless semiconductor companies. The different between software and hardware salaries at companies like Nvidia and Apple is around 10% or so, not 5X.

It's the same with being a maintenance technician for a piece of ASML 3nm semiconductor manufacturing equipment. You may be highly skilled but if there are only 3 companies in the world that will hire you then your salary potential is limited.

I know about 30 people developing hardware at Apple (writing Verilog, custom analog serdes design) and you can see that their software and hardware salaries are similar. In some cases hardware is higher although I suspect that is because of the limited sample size of salary data at the ICT6 level.

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/software-eng...

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/hardware-eng...

There is more to life than money but people who care about money need to look into the companies and salaries before they commit themselves to 4 to 10 years of college.

When I worked for a computer systems company after school, my impression was that the various types of engineers at the company were on fairly similar pay scales. What I think you've seen the past couple of decades is that out-sized salaries at some mostly software-related West Coast companies have really driven up compensation for specific types of jobs. It seems more likely that will settle down to levels with comparable jobs over time than the other way around as a lot of people who are late to the game try to jump in.

You should be very careful about comparing raw salary numbers: a much better metric to compare is "'salary' minus 'cost of living at the job location'".

Unlikely you save anything significant on $400k under a relatively common scenario, and plus there's maybe only a few hundred locales on Earth with jobs that pay that much.

Also, with the US tech sanctions getting tighter and tighter around China, tons of failures are occurring. Oppo just shut down their chip design unit. Alibaba has had 20,000 layoffs. Massive semiconductor scams in China have recently brought into light, such as china's champion HSMC. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/36Kr-KrASIA/Semiconductor-f.... China has basically had no luck in semiconductor progress, while it's economy is collapsing.

And really, at this point, you would be willingly working for a dictatorship that seeks to destroy the democratic countries and enslave its own Chinese citizens. Very few immoral engineers would sign up for that.

Huh? Funny how 1/5 of the world economy can collapse and it's not even noticable.

1 in 5 Young Chinese Is Jobless, and Millions More Are About to Graduate https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/business/china-youth-unem...

China’s shipping containers pile up at overcrowded port as overseas orders dwindle https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3210870/c...

China to raise retirement age to deal with aging population https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-raise-retirement-a...

Guizhou Province may become the first provincial government to go bankrupt in China. https://twitter.com/tankman2002/status/1646905359184044032?l...

The global economy is strained. But especially in Europe because of the shock of the Ukraine war.

US government is set to default on their debt.

US banks are failing left and right.

If you just take sensationalist headlines at face value you'd conclude that the US economy has already collapsed.

Obviosly they can, assuming that these companies hire "only the best". That means that in the demand/supply calculations, the demand is not for "graduates of semiconducting programs" but "only top top graduates of semiconducating programs, ignore the rest".

That's in much shorter supply, and means that 95% of the "class of 20" aren't even considered worthy as candidates, and aren't competition for those top semicon jobs. They'll need to find work in another field (like switching to software), or low level semicon jobs.

I'm sure this works better than it should, but only because they have an infinite supply of passionate new graduates who have not yet learned just how important money is.

This work style, however, is not valued at all and is actively suppressed by "flat", non-expert hierarchies that reward people for being popular and sloppy.

It works for web companies because errors have no consequences for them and the web has turned into a gigantic tabloid anyway.

A painter uses rules of thumb all of the time, yet his work is entirely dependent on chemical engineers getting their science and formulas right. Artistic painting is just one of many uses of paint (and probably its most approximate), but both the painter and the industrial product engineer need the same quality assurances regarding their colors.

Hardware needs to be solid to allow all kinds of software the freedom to be built.

I've had a very angry product manager because a feature took almost a second to load. I told him that we could make it load much faster but it would be almost a week of work and he should validate the feature with customers before we invest in that. "Of course we need this feature! It's core to the product!". So we spent a week. It worked realty nicely and scaled pretty well. In the next 12 months the feature changed completely twice because customers didn't find it useful. Then it was removed entirely and then we had to bring it back because the sales team liked it for demos. All that iteration was required to find what the market needed, not fit technical reasons, except for the performance work which was entirely wasted because it all got redone after the first user feedback.

MRSs would enable much more of the formal verification parts to be generated.

The place where the value is is not at all related to where the difficulties are or the bottlenecks are. The universe does not have that kind of sense of distributive justice.

Judging from our industry partnerships the semiconductor industry seemed to do well at the time. At least that was my impression. When I graduated in 2001 the signs of impeding death were already there however, so I worked in aerospace for a couple of years, went back to university for a computer science degree and ended up in software anyways. Not the worst thing to happen for me personally, but honestly I still don't really understand how a promising industry could die like that.

What were those signs?

At the end of the day, the stakes are way too high to allow everyone a chance to play cowboy with the tools. You want your best possible champions to bring a design to bear. Then, the other 99% of the army is responsible for implementing the design in as repeatable & standardized a fashion as physically possible so that there is even the remotest chance of yield+profit. Software is the antithesis of this. The cost of playing around with your tools is not even worth accounting for. Due to certain cultural effects, you probably don't want to do software in semiconductor industry unless you really, really like the problem domain.

Even if you don't get to play around with the billion dollar tools, you still get to help troubleshoot some of the most intensely complicated problems on earth. Solving these riddles is very rewarding and the experience will stick with you forever. Hard to package those 2 sentences up into a PR campaign for the young generation, but I'm sure we can spin it if the DoD can still find ways to recruit.

That was also my experience working in the semi field (in Europe). People working there weren't in it for obscene compensation, they were into it for the hands on puzzle solving of uniquely complex HW problems with cool and rare expensive machinery. Some were quite significantly underpaid and while they knew it they never felt the need to complain too badly about it. I guess it's kind of like arts, which is a shame, because here some publicly traded corporation is abusing you for your passion.

Also, the fact that most of Europe doesn't have many FAANGs and big SW companies paying orders of magnitude more to un-balance the jobs market, surely help to not discourage people from this industry.

So what needs to happen to make this a reality for semi-con? First off, we need cheap, cheap fabrication. I actually looked at public funding in Canada and how that was going to the big name Universities who had their own in-house fab labs (at older process nodes). The costs of someone not in the inside was nuts. The actual cost should be in the 100s of dollars to fabricate a design (considering the marginal costs).

There are people that do this at home but it doesn't work either due to chemicals being pretty dangerous and the need for a bunch of equipment. I bet the amount of money the EU spent on its first metaverse townhall (or whatever it was called .. the thing very few people attended) or a tiny fraction Canada wastes on silly things promoting youth culture or whatever, they could fund a lab that is actually open to the public, with the express mission of promoting hobbyists and education. This will NEVER happen because (a) it needs a professor who is on the inside with a kid-like passion in this tech and a commitment to bringing it to the masses (I see some profs like this at schools like MIT but it is so rare at large, competitive schools like the big ones in Canada), and (b) it does not have an instant payoff for the govt. They don't want dabblers and vague educational outcomes. They want workers with degrees.

I am convinced before I am dead, advances in robotics and fabrication will simply the process (or use home equipment such as future laser printers for printing stencils). I'd love to spend my retirement fabricating my own CPUs :D

Edit:

Let me add: I don't mean the cutting edge process node. I mean the kind of process node that was used to make the very first chips (but less toxic, repeatable, cheaper equipment). If it is possible for synthetic biology, it must be doable for semicon :D

Google / SkyWater / eFabless have this program for 90/130nm chips. That is really old technology from the 2002-2006 time range but it is still useful for a lot of types of chips.

https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/07/SkyWater-and-Googl...

https://www.skywatertechnology.com/technology-and-design-ena...

https://efabless.com/open_shuttle_program

I am curious what kind of hobbyist chips you want to make that can't be done in an FPGA? You can't do custom analog in an FPGA but these days you can find FPGAs with multiple PCIE / USB / HDMI serdes links, DAC, ADC, etc.

I think the OP isn't even talking about 2006-level capability but rather something akin to 3D printing for semis that approached even early (i.e. somewhere in the 1960's-1980's range) level fab capability for hobbyists. Obviously it doesn't exist currently, but that's the dream for some.

https://github.com/YosysHQ/oss-cad-suite-build

OSS CAD Suite is a binary software distribution for a number of open source software used in digital logic design. You will find tools for RTL synthesis, formal hardware verification, place & route, FPGA programming, and testing with support for HDLs like Verilog, Migen and Amaranth.

Do they not have older, more stable, releases?

just lend some credence to myself here - vitis, their supposed hls offering that turns C++ into RL by magic and genius and oracles, today embeds LLVM 7.0 (released in 19 Sep 2018). gee i wonder how many perf and etc improvements have landed in LLVM since 7 since today LLVM is approach 17.

i could tell you more but it would just spike my blood pressure after 6 months of not having to deal with that mess.

I started working with a Stratix 10 GX dev kit last year, and the Intel Quartus Prime Pro software. It's been a nightmare.

1. Unless you have a direct line to an experienced support engineer inside Intel, technical support amounts to pleading with new-hire support engineers who can't do more than try to look something up and regurgitate it back to you.

2. Sample designs don't work with the tools you have. A design might be for version 18 of Quartus and you have version 23. You can try to auto-upgrade the IP, and maybe 3/4 of the time it works. The other 1/4 of the time it's some obscure error you can't track down, so you're back on the "Community Site" begging for help.

3. Doing something like programming your design into flash on the S10 board involves lots and lots of research, including watching Intel produced YouTube videos.

I could go on, but the whole process is like running in wet cement.

just quit. seriously it's not worth it. no job you have (not even low-latency work in HFT) will compensate you enough to make investing time, blood, sweat, hair, and sleep into this work worth it. there is a better, more rewarding, with an actually transferable set of skills, software job waiting for you somewhere out there.

I knew FPGA compilation could be slow, but this wasn't compilation, this was a ridiculously basic part of the GUI. I knew it had to read my file and analyse the few module dependencies, but seriously, 40 minutes? At that time I just wanted to run simple simulations of small circuits, which shouldn't be slow.

In (open source) Verilator, the same simulations ran from the same source files in just a few millliseconds with nothing precomputed or cached.

I looked into what Xilinx Vivado was really doing and found a log indicating that it was re-running a Verilog read on the changed file several thousand times, each time taking a second or so.

That was such a ridiculous bug for software Xilinx said they had spent over $500M developing. If there were good parts of the software I didn't get to see them due to this sort of nonsense. I think it was fixed in a later version, but due to (yay) enforced licensing constraints I couldn't use a fixed version targeting these FPGAs. That's when I abandoned Vivado and Xilinx (and Amazon) for the project as I didn't have that much spare time to waste on every edit.

I am under the impression the current crop of open source FPGA and especially open source ASIC tools are much better designed.

Just reading that made me nauseous, to think this forced so many trillions of CPU cycles to be spent on nothing, and nobody at Xilinx corrected it until some time later.

There was a time when I could've transitioned to FPGA development and I was pretty keen to do so. But after using (fighting with) Xilinx's tools and watching other people who were deeper into the FPGA side wage similar wars I decided it just wasn't worth it. That it would be better just to stay on the software side of things where the tools are mostly open source and so much better. In FPGA development you just don't have any control over the backend tools - fortunately there are a lot of front-end simulation tools like Verilator that are open source and some limited backend tools like Yosys are open source. Hopefully open source will continue to make inroads, but it's slow going.

I've thought for a long time now that this is an area ripe for disruption. But it's very difficult to disrupt - it hasn't been yet. EDA software is probably the easier part to disrupt. Some open source EDA tools are out there, but not so much on the physical design side.

They don't target the advanced nodes where masks cost as much as the GPs prices (though $20-30M sounds higher than I expected even at the leading edge), but they are workibg their way forward and the space in general is being disrupted at last.

The $20 million is for metal layers only for a respin.

We are moving to 3nm right now which will be even more expensive.

The open source tools can't handle the latest process nodes. Maybe in the future but this is a highly specialized area with tons of NDAs from the fabs for PDKs and DRC decks.

But I don't know how usable they are.

I'd say it technically happened when cheap flash based microcontrollers become available.

Before you had to have *at the very least* EPROM programmer and eraser (or CRT TV I guess) to even put your code onto microcontroller. Flash based microcontrollers meant all you needed is parallel port and some wires to start programming microcontrollers, dropping the barrier to entry by orders of magnitude if you already had PC to program.

Then we had first wave with Basic STAMP and similar making it even easier.

Then it was Arduino that exploded it and there were other factors on that too.

>So what needs to happen to make this a reality for semi-con? First off, we need cheap, cheap fabrication. I actually looked at public funding in Canada and how that was going to the big name Universities who had their own in-house fab labs (at older process nodes). The costs of someone not in the inside was nuts. The actual cost should be in the 100s of dollars to fabricate a design (considering the marginal costs).

Like that. Before making PCB was either doing it at home that took a bunch of time and not everyone wanted to play with chemicals, or expensive to prototype PCB.

Now we have extremely cheap low volume PCBs and even well priced low volume manufacturing options. Same thing with 3D printing, went from massively expensive to affordable.

The problem really is that it's still a bit profitable to do so for companies doing it, while doing same for chip-making would be oh so much harder unless someone put some SERIOUS R&D into making "industrial chip printer" where each wafer could have different set of chips (packaging I guess could be handled by requiring each submitted chip to have connectors in same place). So no mask but some kind of DLP or similar projector to do lithography (dunno if that even possible for anything in hundreds of nm range, just guessing)

i wish

Thinking about the design process, testing and revisions, all the way to fab and then market, we're probably talking years just to see a single design reach your test bench (I'm speculating). Oh and millions, because the major chip fabs only do things in large batches.

Compare this to software. It is, indeed, seconds in comparison.

I'd love for semiconductor fabrication to get fragmented out like it sounds like it will.

Why does it matter for lead times? If 2 fabs with a lead time of few years multiply to 5 with a lead time of few years... your still waiting.

9 women can't have a baby in 1 month, because there is series of necessary processes that has to be undergone and can't be accelerated.

I'm fairly certain the actual lead times to procure semi-custom chips are indeed in the range of a few months. And a fully custom chip is a few years.

AFAIK (but never studied the latest processes), making a mask takes weeks. That means that the minimum lead-time on making masks is weeks long, because there is no interdependence between them. But I'm sure this is one of the steps that add up to years on practice, because of production limitations.

Actually making the chips has a higher floor, because every step is interdependent. With a hundred steps, each one taking half a day, we are talking about 2 months here. There are probably more than a hundred, and a few take more than half a day (but many take less than it), so yeah, I'd easily expect a 4 months minimum. What doesn't compare to years at all.

That sounds like a mature and competitive field. I am suspicious of companies and fields where people aren't working like this. Look at the car industry, or energy, or farming, or shipping, or even aerospace. Only one of every thousand engineers at Boeing will ever decide the shape of an aircraft wing. The other 99% are there to implement and optimize its construction. Any company not spending 99% of its energies on optimization does not operate in a competitive environment and is therefore very likely on borrowed time. Eventually a competitor will appear or an IP monopoly expire and the easy times will be over.

Computers? 100 years old.

What part of any "modern" industry isn't still very very young? even industries like construction that have been around for thousands of years are still relatively young.

Computers and computing? infinitesimal.

For example, the newest gas turbine designs are already exceeding 50% of the maximum theoretically possible efficiency as allowed by thermodynamics. So it doesn't matter how many thousands or millions more years gas turbines are optimized, by us, aliens, future descendants, etc...

No future gas turbine industry in this universe can possibly double the thermodynamic efficiency of the finished product.

I was just listening to an AI podcast and they were duscussing going from the 1 second, 1 minutes, 1 day [unit of response - I cant recall the name of the measurement] -- but I assume thats the "moores law" of AI right now?

And as we get closer to the physical limits of chip production scale/die/etc - I assume they will be scaled horizontally while the GPT-X capabilities will scale volumetric-ally.

Is this a sound assumption?

For example, CNNs were largely known and discovered by the 1990s-2000s, but the compute simply didn't exist yet until GPU manufacturing became commoditized.

OpenAI's massive quantum leap is thanks to the massive corpora they were able to leverage, which until the past 5 years, simply didn't exist.

This is why we've seen massive jumps in Mandarin Machine Translation and Computer Vision from the PRC due to their massive corpora/dataset of English+Mandarin language news from CCTV/CGTN and local surveillance camera data respectively.

This compute limit is a big reason why the US Federal Govt has been working on the Exascale Computing Project for example.

Yes! thats what I mean by scaling VOLUMETRICALLY -- scaling horizontally and vertically are now replaced by volumetrically. (coining a term?)

its going to be an obloid-worping sphere-oid

Thats what I see down the pipe..?

Thoughts, anyone?

Even for training on a massive dataset, you are still limited by compute and processing time (good ole Computational Complexity), which is why HPC projects like the Exascale Compute Project were created in 2015 along with additional funding+research in efficient and alternative data structures.

I highly recommend going down the rabbit hole of High Performance/Accelerated Machine Learning.

The eminence of AI is more 'volumetric' than 'out'

Out scales "up and out like a hill or a lift"

- volumetric is spherical - it presses into the future AND the past (it already has been harvesting history, but created a fire-hosed spigot-interface for the future as well) -- and draws it into its center for eval...

They are different.

Always on the positive expressions of XYZ axis - but had ignored the negative of each, where AGI will go in all dimensions...

See the early shifts from vacuum tubes to semiconductors, from expertly-crafted BJT to crude CMOS, or the rapid march of good-enough architectures in the latest process node clobbering beautiful architectures in older nodes. As the industry has matured and course has stabilized, perfecting the design has grown in importance.

That’s how a company stagnates and eventually gets replaced. Yes operational efficiency and optimization is important, but you only do that if you have a big moat and not much growth ahead of you. You need to spend at least 30% on growth and innovation so you can stay relevant. Higher if you are the one trying to replace the 99% ones.

Not every industry is like software/tech. And the tech industry is already moving towards a "mature and competitive field" model. Otherwise why is Google and Meta cutting all their unnecessary spending and touting efficiency over growth? (besides AI tech, I suppose) Why all the layoffs?

Curious what was your experience operating in those fields.

Shit like "we did chain driven timing and it worked, but in new engine it prematurely wears", or "someone decided it is fine for belt-driven timing to take dip in oil, oh surprise, we now have parts of the belt landing in various parts of the engine".

Or my favourite, "metal, belt driven water pump is almost never replaced thru the lifetime of the engine and it's cheap, let's make propellers plastic and also drive it from separate electric engine"

I suggest there's a kind of 'cultural imperative' in Korea that is so different from the US that it doesn't even begin to factor into our equations.

My Korean grad school colleagues went to intern at Samsung for serf pay, the only way that could work is if there was some kind of culturally implied merit.

The US also needs a 'different kind of ethos' to compete in semiconductor, Cali Surfer Vibes won't cut it, neither will NY banker vibes, neither will SF Social Media AI Allbirds vibes, nor Cambridge High Intellectual Healthcare Conference vibes, nor Texas Energy Industry or DC Government Consultant etc..

And that will be impossible without a fair number of migrants who will be mostly Asian - so where is this going to happen?

Maybe they need a 'New South Valley' about 50Km south of San Jose, a cross between Orange County, Silicon Valley, Cambridge, and Seoul aka Cali, but slightly more formally regimented, a bit like the actual old-school Silicon Valley which was at the time, away from the buzz, a bit of a sleepy burb where people focused on hard stuff and economics mattered.

If someone like Netflix/HBO did a proper documentary with Samsung about their LSI fab in Texas, HR would have more applicants than they would know what to do with. This 'ethos' can be created. I saw what it could be like when I worked there. I really believe seeing the whole thing in action is the primary selling point. The draconian security makes sense once you walk that catwalk and witness with your own 2 eyeballs what is at stake. Capturing this sensation for the masses is the challenge.

Americans will not work for fractional pay unless it's a kind of a 'wartime' / 'emergency' situation.

Wait till you hear about the history of the semiconductor industry!

This is really what pushed me into just doing digital design as a hobby and making my money elsewhere. It's understandable that chips companies are so risk averse (a bad tapeout or, worse, a major escape can cost the company billions) but it is really a miserable experience to have so much passion and ambition but never being able to do anything other than extremely conservative incremental changes over a decades long career.

The thing I noticed was that the crunch work was brutal, parking lots were full till 11pm half the year. The parking lot told the story - the execs had Teslas and BMWs in their gated lot. The troops were in 7-10 year old Hyundais and couldn’t afford to buy lunch in the cafe.

If you want to be in the semiconductor industry, the real winners are the tradesmen. They were all driving $70k pickups. Pipe fitters, electricians, operating engineers, etc make bank. If you know how to build the supporting infrastructure around some ASML tool, your income is limited by your desire to work. I can think of a dozen serious contracting companies in those lines of work that spun out of building that place.

It's sad seeing this practice repeated. And people falling for that.

Is this the case with modern hardware engineers? No one is forcing them to accept low pay, or learn how to write software and earn more.

Sounds like they are getting paid market price, and it has been decades since it is known that pay for hardware engineers is low, indicating that people should stay away unless they want relatively low pay.

The official doctrine was that it was a Laborer's Republic, and so physical labor very often paid more than mental one. It was all about making the common man feel as if the state is really organized for the benefit of people like him, and not some narrow elites. Of course, it was BS.

One of my classmates in high school was a well regarded engineer that specialized in some sort of critical manufacturing process. Published papers, had patents, etc. Unfortunately, a new tech replaced that process, and he found himself laid off and kinda screwed.

He had a good network, crammed for a PMP and got into the project management racket and went back to school. Now he does cyber analysis stuff.

There is no such thing as a 'free market' really. Once people have been pulled into a specific academic program without 'true knowledge of market forces', the switching costs are high. They take an entry level job because, well, it's a job. 4 years later they find out there are only 3 employers who want their ultra niche skill, and so the employers use their power to leverage to shit wages.

This shortsighted action causes the opportunities in high wage areas to fail as devs do 'other things', while the jobs move to places where there are even more rigid systems and the 'work hierarchy' is integrated right into culture. Like Korea.

It's also why even very talented software developers outside the US are paid so little - it's hard to justify high pay in most companies, as it's not clear how to discriminate between the 'true talent' and 'regular devs' - so talent gets anchored very low. Devs languish or move or find solace in working on something interesting and intellectual, which is common.

It's why there is no real 'hardware' industry in the USA, all of the jobs are niche even if they are very hard, industry can hold them to the wall for low salary, it's more effective for them to be carpenters, while the jobs go to Asia.

All of that plus the fact that software can move much quicker and can be more profitable, the 'windfall' economic part of software makes the VC math work out better to justify more investment.

If we were to reorganize that around net value creation instead of just local barter between trades and enterprises, it'd be a different situation. Very hard to do. Government is stepping in with a big starting point, will industry follow suit? Maybe, I doubt it.

The winemakers had to follow things exceptionally carefully because you basically couldn’t improve anything, but you had innumerable ways to destroy the wine and end up with vinegar.

There’s definitely an increase in interest and demand for semis. Your experience might be very different from graduates looking today and in the future as demand increases.

Having said that, the vitriol and toxicity in colleges and towards one another needs to cease. I see that being more naturally achieved in an economy that is growing and seeing things getting cheaper generally. That would look like vast investments in small, big, and mega projects. Imagine how much different the US today would be had it never built a highway system and stayed to only where the trains/horses went. I think it’s 80-90%+ of US GDP transports via truck over a highway at some point.

Didn't take EE in the US, but your statement here seems to be universal. Especially true about Analog professors being gatekeeping jerks.

Didn't end going in to analog design because although I think it's interesting I don't think it's actually fun to do the design. I feel like digital design has much more variety.

They got that mentality from some kind of trauma themselves. I'm not sure it's even the wrong adaptation, since it's not in their power to fix the systematic issue.

People have finally begun to realize that if all you do is build software, you're completely dependent on your hardware suppliers. It's like being a commuter society that doesn't make their own cars.

I'm curious if your experience of crashing/losing progress is still the norm. Do we have better CAD programs and PCB simulators now?

My partner is an EE but I just learned how electricity works (beyond a middle school level) a few years ago.

All the companies that produce anything invent their own language for the thing and write their own compiler for it. These compilers are clearly not written by compiler experts.

I don't blame EEs for building bad software. They weren't trained to do it and aren't paid to do it. I blame the "if it works, it works" culture that the industry seems to have. Never go back to refine anything, just keep pushing more plugins, more software; create a patchwork of programs until you get the job done.

P.S Set up Vivado in scripted mode with either an in-memory project or non-project mode. It works like a champ.

In my very limited experience, most people don't learn new stuff until they're forced to; either by their employer, by their university, or by needing to learn it for something they want to accomplish. This is why you'll have self-taught developers go for years using strings as enums, linear-searching in huge sorted arrays, because it works and why would you seek out something else? I think the solution is to introduce more software development in EE education; forcibly expose them to it. My EE bachelor's degree contained a whopping ONE class that was focused entirely on Python programming. The rest just used cobbled-together C code for microcontrollers, or arcane languages with dumb IDEs for PLCs.

I'll take your hint on Vivado, thanks!

The tried and true :) It's funny seeing people complain about Vivado bugs when I haven't run into any in years. Sure, the IDE may be absolute garbage, but I've thankfully never run into any bugs in the actual synthesis and routing parts of the package, which is all that really matters.

This attitude (also in software) indicates to me someone who isn't very interested in a subject academically. There is so much to learn from prior solved problems and reinventing the wheel yourself.

If we weren't interested, we would have quit during the first semester.

Our very first assignment was to design a modified Miller. After nights of struggling with the software and connecting transistors, we were then told psyche! You could've imported from the library that we've never told you about! The rest of the assignments were essentially just importing circuits and moving stuff around and hitting the simulator run. Over and over and over again. It takes a certain grit to stare at the Cadence UI for 10 hours running the simulator button to yield a random result. There's no Stack Overflow, the TA was of no help. Just learning the software alone was hell. The instructions were on printed paper that didn't work half the time. Then you have the crashes that wipe out hours of work. We didn't dare to save our work sometimes because it'd crash the software. Loading the software took forever. I genuinely hated Cadence with a passion.

I'll admit I don't have that grit. My best memory from the course was still being able to design and fabricate my own chip and PCB to go with it, and successfully converting an analog signal to digital and back. The ENOB took longer than needed to solve and it was rewarding. But I'm not doing that as a career.

Only 3 out of the original 20+ people graduated. Only one bothered to apply to semicon. The barrier of entry is high, but the educators were of abysmal quality.

For example, in a state school analysis course, almost half the class decides they just need to squeeze by to graduate and maybe 5 students will enjoy it and do graduate school.

Then again it's difficult to figure out what you are interested in in university at 18/19yo. Maybe just a vague curiosity, maybe the paycheck. But you have to actually take the course to know. I wish there's a better way.

Could be a Hollywood movie, if you fill in the gap between the penultimate and ultimate paragraphs with some interesting action

There's an impenetrable culture of "best practices" that keeps the tech from catching up with the times. I eventually left because my career stagnated being on teams who couldn't update any of the internal tools because of this or that exec who was too scared to explore beyond the tiny niche they carved for themselves the past 10-30 years.

The last team I was on was using JDK 8 and Postgres 8. Vendor lock-in on downstream dependents, I guess. We finally managed to convince leadership after 3 years that if they wanted any ML in their systems at all they'd need to update their stack or make room in their fabs for a Python server on the intranet at the very least. So they gave us a Windows box with 2 cores and 1GB of memory because "that's all that will fit" and "we aren't a security company".

I wish I could have seen this when I was in school.

Why ? So much software is far less complex to design than semiconductor stuff

Gotta have enough demand so other competent people interested in same thing won't drive the value down.

And I do feel lucky that my set of skills correlates with stuff that pays decently.

You go to an electronics engineering class. There are a few superbrilliant people. The rest are quite clever though.

As there are a few jobs available for the technical skills that you learn at class, only the superbrilliant get those jobs.

It turns out that the companies say to these superbrilliant guys: "I am giving you a unique opportunity to work in this top field in this country. So your salary is not about money, but motivation".

End of the story: the rest of the guys, not the super brilliant, end up working in more generic stuff like management, consultancy, generic simple software.... And they make way more money that the superbrilliant guys.

These examples are taken from Spain. Althoug I have seen similar in other European countries with more technical jobs.

Sounds like a great way of nurturing talent... not. Apparently they will only look at your CV if you have a PhD or a very specialized MsC

And all this for what again? "The privilege of working with hard problems?!" I've done enough C already and that makes my head hurt now. Thanks but I think I'll take it easier with "higher level software" while making more money and having less stress

Top engineering school hazing, creating underpaid and not quite mentally balanced people