I used to work in semiconductors and transitioned to software when I realized how precarious that was.
This was years ago and not TX. I'm sure it has gotten slightly better but what I see on glassdoor still makes me very glad I listened to the job hunting postdocs in nanofab class and steered clear of this career path.
I wasn't actually suggesting that I return to my former employer, although the thought has crossed my mind...
My reasoning for a move would be about all of the higher-order consequences of having well-compensated technology enthusiasts imported by the thousands.
No worries, I was picturing a young person setting out to 'make their fortune' by moving across the country to make it. I just wanted to share the perspective I left the field with.
That doesn't mean it isn't possible to make it work!
From a North Texas perspective, the communities were already built up. The first integrated circuit was made in North Texas. DFW has some of the highest number of fabs per square mile, tons of small producers around along with some of the big behemoths.
North Texas has been a pretty big semiconductor manufacturer since semiconductor manufacturing has been a thing.
For a historical context of the history of the community of semiconductors in North Texas, JFK was shot on his way going to give a speech at what would become UT Dallas, a school whose entire history is focused on semiconductors.
You’ll work 60 hours a week for shitty pay, and be the Yoda of some tool. In 10 years there will be a new magic tool. Then you start learning the Starbucks menu.
Everyone in a tech field has to retain the ability to learn new things over time. AI might not take our jobs but it will likely change them. I guess it sucks if you have a fear of learning. Admittedly, at first learning a new thing can be kind of uncomfortable, like getting into a cold swimming pool. But once you get over the initial shock and start moving around, it's not so bad.
It's not the worker's fault they can't learn the new tool (they absolutely can learn it). It's capitalism's fault for valuing workers only for the cost of their labor and nothing else.
Sigh. The value you're talking about here is the cost of their labour. This is like a business owner saying that employees should value their jobs differently to their salary.
You're right in the sense that capitalism is fundamentally "people make agreements and decisions within what's available to them" but what's the actual issue you want capitalism to solve, that doesn't create one of the massive downsides that any of capitalism's former rivals has?
E.g. monarchy can reward loyalty, but then so can capitalism. Monarchy can just also tell you to go die on a field if you don't kill the other king's people.
What makes you think that capitalism won't do the same to you? Capitalist[1] societies engage in pointless, bloody wars all the time.
[1] And communist, and other -ist.
Unlike monarchy/communism/fuedalism etc where power and organisation are by necessity mostly centralised, capitalism can (and wants to) be divorced from power. Constant realigning it with power (e.g. regulatory capture) is what corrupts it.
The sort of (limited) power capitalism creates is by creating value in some way: labour, capital, contacts, resources. It's not derived from strength, unlike the other methods.
Of course a government, that is fundamentally derived from strength, and must be, can still fight wars. It can do it much better in fact because its economy was organised by the most efficient manner anyone's ever discovered, and so there's a surplus to tax.
It has been shown time and time again that the majority of the powerful players in a Capitalist economy inherited their wealth or opportunities.
Capitalism can only function in an economy if a government allows it by setting up the necessary structures and allowing private property ownership.
Society can certainly be Capitalist by extension of the economy being Capitalist due to policies and strucutes set up by goverments.
Seeing as it's more or less the de facto world order it should ideally solve global alignment for the long term wellbeing of Earth-borne life
That doesn't align well with efficiency or top-down world political agreements. But it has lifted more people out of poverty faster than any other system in history.
The fact that this problem pops up all over the damn place should tell you something about our relationship to u**ons.
children used to work 10 hours a day and lose hands in machinery. hell, kids are dying in factories now, and the rules just keep getting rolled back further.
miners get black lung or asbestos exposure.
dudes boiled alive in machinery that didn't have fail safes.
company towns that only paid in scrip and then charged you 3x the price of regular goods.
people had to fight and die for an 8 hour workday.
the bourgeoisie programmer types who've never had to work actually dangerous jobs tend to forget just how incredibly brutal working conditions used to be.
Basically, a big, inflexible place is a good unionization candidate. A smaller, nimble org is a lousy place for a union.
"No, we'll hire them away from our competitors. Let one of them invest in training."
Of course this accelerates the business’s desire to adopt the new tool sooner, so they best hurry!
New tool makes a different wavelength of light by shooting high energy beams at molten tin and all your PhD research isn't relevant to that.
It's not like moving from Adobe to Figma, it's like moving from physics to chemistry.
You'll see salaries of around $70-110k in very expensive metros like the Bay, Portland, Dallas, Austin, etc.
Salaries just haven't kept up in the EE space.
They'll probably have a laugh while they're out boating.
I think there might be a bimodal distribution within EE salaries where either you work at an Nvidia/Google/Apple/AMD/TI type company which pays competitively and others which pay subpar wages.
Maybe this is heavily dependent on the subset of EE as well (eg. I'd assume the profit margins for a fabless GPU company like Nvidia are much higher than a company building/desigining ASICs for Telcom usecases like KLA).
That said, you seem to be from North Texas/DFW and EE wages and cost of living seem much more managable compared to those offered in the Bay Area and Portland.
Median home price in Richardson: $478K
Median home price in Garland: $301k
Median home price in Sherman: $308k
Median home price in The Colony: $411k
Median home price in Plano: $520k
Which places are you more likely to be able to own your home with ~$100k/yr income?
I'm just pointing out that EE salaries within the US are depressed due to the (relatively) low wages within DFW (which by DFW levels are competitive).
At the end of the day, you guys are definetly being underpaid compared to SWEs as well as certain specialities of EE (take a look at Nvidia's mid-level TC in the Bay verus TI's in DFW).
DFW has always been a major EE hub in the US, but SV and Portland are similarly sized EE industry hubs and their wages have been depressed.
Since DFW represents around 30-40% of the EE industry within the US, it's a major portion but plenty of industry share is still stuck in higher CoL areas, which incentivizes talent to either switch to SWE or outsource jobs to SK, Taiwan, PRC, India, and Israel where such salaries are more competitive
The pecking order was established in the parking lot. The execs drove BMWs and Teslas, the tenants varied. We were in a special lot.
The worker bees in the fabs drove older Hyundais and Nissans. Except for the trades - fabs require a lot of plumbing and electrical contractors, and those guys were all union, all minting overtime, and all driving fancy pickup trucks.
When the cops are complaining about union-busting...
They're either smart or they're not. Which one is it?
If you're in the 1% of top performers, you have the cognitive ability to learn new things.
> If you're in the 1% of top performers, you have the cognitive ability to learn new things.
I had to stop and admire the subtle self-deprecating humour on display between those two statements. Well played!
So, ok, but anyone thinking about entering the field can see that they’ll be left in a lurch when they hit mid career.
We’ve already run this experiment for a generation or two; anyone smart enough to finish an engineering degree can just go do a programming career afterwards, where the work and career advancement is easier. Now we have imported chips and a million JavaScript frameworks.
He was laid off and unemployable in the field. He survived as a Starbucks manager and sold Herbalife for a year while getting some additional education. I was able to help him get a contract as a tech writer to get out of the retail stuff. Now he’s a director level person in a cybersecurity firm.
The one true path is obvious on message boards, but the reality is people find themselves in bad places sometimes.
I can see why a lot of people hate the idea of semiconductor manufacturing. It is the apex of "by the books" while simultaneously exhibiting the most incredible shiny technology on the face of the planet. Being forced to follow all of these rules and procedures to get at the shiny tech rubs a lot of people the wrong way. "What do you mean I can't take my smart phone into the office? Y'all make its memory here." The pay is also arguably pretty bad unless you lock in for life.
I would say you get what you want out of it, just like anything. If you walk in with an entitlement mindset and expect the knowledge to be forced into your brain, you are in for a really shitty ride just as you describe. If you walk in thinking "I'll bust my ass here for 3-5 years and learn what I can", you will have a much better experience.
I didn't even know I wanted to write software full time until I was sitting in a cubicle at Samsung's ATX office for a few years. In my opinion, if you aren't sure what you want to do but you really love all things tech, why the hell not? Try it out. It was a great stepping stone for me.
I didn’t particularly like the job, but I’m grateful for the opportunities that time and effort has given me.
I definitely don't pretend its all just roses though. It being over 100F every day for the past month or so is definitely a big negative, and a good bit of the politics here is getting ugly. We need to continue to expand the public transit in North Texas and make it more useful to reduce car dependency. More dense housing options need to be available to allow people to choose different ways to live and alleviate rising housing costs. There's a lot of stuff that needs to be addressed, but there's movement in positive directions around here.
A lot of the debate about Texas power grid make things sound way worse than it is. In reality Texas is about average when it comes to reliability in the US. Meanwhile we produce the most renewable energy in the country, we enable people to buy 100% renewable electric plans, and our cost of energy is some of the cheapest in the country. There's definitely challenges ahead for the grid and some of the market strategies we have need to be re-thought, but overall I'm not too worried about the grid long-term. Texas isn't alone with its grid challenges though, most states need to address massively aging infrastructure.
Do you have a source for this? Anecdotally, I felt the need to buy a generator when I lived north of Austin, because outages were frequent enough that it seemed warranted. Since moving to North Carolina (just north of Charlotte), I’ve had exactly one outage in a year, and that was on a mild day, just had some equipment failure.
Never once here have I received notice that I needed to reduce consumption to help the grid.
Here they rank it 30/50 in reliability and performance metrics.
If we're sharing anecdotes, I've never lost power for more than a few seconds in the past decade or so, and before that it was pretty much only because of hurricanes or tornadoes in the area.
A roommate of mine once quipped on something: 'that's like saying my crap smells better than yours'.
Feel free to correct me, I'm not an expert, but Texas runs its own state-only independent grid, it got completely pants in the ice storm a few years ago, and at the time a lot of articles said the Texas grid is fundamentally less resilient that other power companies. Is any of that wrong?
However, Texas is loaded with sun/desert and I believe a ton of wind resources, so it has that going for it for next-generation industry.
Surprisingly, you got to thank George Bush for that
He made renewable wind and solar energy a major part of his energy policy when he was Govenor of TX. [0].
In 1999, he passed a law mandating Texas to get 2,000 megawatts of electricity from renewable energy by 2009. This helped spurt the entire renewable industry in TX
[0] - https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/08/29/70295/george-w-b...
McGraw Hill was founded by the Bush family before they decamped for Dallas in the 1920s.
You can get around this with DC, and grids do interconnect with DC power, but that requires more expensive equipment.
I tried reading this IEEE article about the time the Eastern and Western Interconnections were connected into a synchronous system (1967-1975) to learn more about the difficulties with scaling interconnections. It mentioned frequency oscillations causing voltage variations close to the East-West connection (p11), which sounds like the issue you're describing. If that is the issue though, then Texas isn't the size limit for a grid because the Eastern and Western grids exist and are far larger.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=8594689