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> I don't really understand this article, or the current trend of job hopping.

The answer is in your comment: your friend who started recently at Intel is getting more than double the salary of the long-timers. What's not to understand?

Good point. I would say the confusion is due to my outdated expectations.

Is your expectation something along the lines of, "if you are loyal to the company, the company will be loyal to you"?

I like your view. The thing is people are constantly resume building these days. And that resume is never done. You get a good job? Wouldn’t it be great if you got your name on a couple of cool things in your new place? After that returns start diminishing and people are quick to leverage and move on.

I came to CA hoping to find mad coders lost in thought of their projects. All I see are career athletes

The problem is that his view has cost him millions of dollars. Not job hopping is a multi million dollar error his the part of them and their colleagues.

Eh, but I'm at the end of my career: in hindsight, what would I have done with that extra salary? Bought a new BMW every year, or owned a "premium beige" McMansion with a pool? Or two McMansions?

I'm not a status-shower, and the salary increase wouldn't have been enough to be filthy rich (e.g., buy an island). I can't complain though: I ended up about to retire a multimillionaire despite not job-hopping. But I was lucky, I guess, my first mortgage was $600/mo just outside the Bay Area and I sold for ~8x what I paid after living in it for decades. Plus early in life I was forced to pick cheap hobbies that I stuck with: reading and backpacking. :)

My only regret is not taking better care of my back cuz now I can't sleep on a Thermorest+eggshell anymore, and all the fiat currency in the world can't fix that. Feh!

> my first mortgage was $600/mo just outside the Bay Area

Is that in todays dollars or what it was at the time? If it's in today's dollars that's just incredible.

1990 dollars, $1200 in today's dollars according to this site:

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

Wow, yeah what a different market. Even with a high paying SWE job, home ownership for me (mid twenties) continually feels like an always increasingly expensive goal that grows more distant of achieving.

Cool to read though about what you posted earlier!

Is this from exertion outdoors or office chair, lack of exercise etc.

I value my time and attention. For example, right now I can work on a project that would impress my managers. Or I can work on what I think is the pressing, fundamental problem. Both are trade offs but I feel weird when I have to be blind to my own interests. What am I doing with all that money?

The hustlers are winning against those that are loyal. It's sad, but that's how it is.

I remember my first day at Intel. A guy was putting his stuff in a cardboard box, never to be seen again. It was during a downsizing, and my boss reminded me how lucky I was to be an intern. "The only guy with job security."

Remarkably he's still there, and I still have other friends there, nearly two decades later. One of them writes on FB over and over about how pointless the meetings are, and complains about the stock price.

When I left, I managed to get myself an offer for the management track, via a friend on the same track. I turned it down thinking I'd probably regret it, but I decided during the internship that there was something about this apparent elevator to the C-suite that didn't quite seem right to me. The ease of being at what at the time was an unassailable monopoly perhaps seemed both too good to be true and probably hiding issues down the line, both for the business and in terms of internal competition climbing the greasy pole.

But also changing jobs every now and again has had other liberating effects. I have a lot more confidence that it can be done (since it's been done lol) but also there's a variety in seeing various businesses and people that's hard to get if you stay put. The fact that new jobs generally means more money is a big bonus on top of that. I suppose a lot of firms get a huge saving from people who don't look around much.

There's a lot of implicit loyalty here. You're very loyal to Intel even when they didn't treat you the best. Why? What happens when you underperform, will they show you the same loyalty?

You're 100% right. I came from a long line of "work till you drop at the same job" men who never took vacation, so it was burned into me. I was loyal out of "because that's what you are supposed to do", which I now view to be an illness. Which is why I left. I was naive thinking the fun of the first decade would last indefinitely.

Regarding the story of a long-established company having to adapt to FAANG/post-dotcom pay... I've seen a different response to that.

In this case, I was the prospective new hire, at a well-regarded large company. They had a large number of software developers who'd pulled off some very impressive technical accomplishments (comparing favorably to most any tech company you could think of), and had been doing so since before FAANG... In the offer, they made the level Director, even though the role was non-management hands-on technical IC. And the comp. people had also added an additional incentive program that wasn't standard for this level. I figured that might be to work around the company's pre-FAANG pay grades for software-ish people. The team, business unit, and SVP were great, and I was actually very anxious to move. But then the offer letter came from corporate, and turned out to be laden with surprise clauses (regulatory, etc.), and corporate was unable to provide copies of documents that it referenced as things to which I'd be agreeing. My decision mostly came down to the intuitive (besides the practical costs of the surprise eleventh-hour asks): feeling that I'd be at the mercy of any Kafkaesque bureaucratic accidents of a large institution, more than I think I would be at a certain larger FAANG, while the total comp. wasn't close enough to that FAANG -- so accepting would feel more like being a scared loser, than like willfully investing towards success.

Sounds like Intel's variation of paying close to FAANG might've been the way to get that new hire (despite whatever perceived big-established-company downsides there might've been), but at the cost of demoralizing the existing engineering staff who had pre-FAANG comp. (Who then might feel like the losers.)

Has this problem been solved by any long-established company that has employed top-skilled technical people since before FAANG, without paying competitively?

Loyalty to your company went away with pensions. Also, if those numbers are right I might need to clean up my resume.

How many companies will be around in 30 years? Half the companies I've worked for in the past do not exist anymore. The idea that you could get a job and stay there until retirement is antiquated at best.

Guessing that I'm less than 10 years younger than you, I had a college professor that told my class to change jobs every 5 years to maximize income. That was in the early 90s.

I read the other replies explaining that the huge discrepancy you’ve seen should be expected. But I think it’s worth pondering if your shock & jealousy should be tempered by the ML thing. ML engineers make more than general software engineers everywhere. At least they did for a while between roughly 2015 and 2020. I don’t know what’s happening up to the minute, but ML hiring and crazy salaries seems to be cooling off a bit now as far as I can tell. Also did the ML guy have an advanced degree that your long-timer friends didn’t? That’s another way to start higher.

> ML engineers make more than general software engineers everywhere. At least they did for a while between roughly 2015 and 2020.

It's not clear if SavantIdiot is a SW person (vs HW/fab), but while what you say is correct, note that Intel significantly underpays SW as well. He was a grade 9 employee, which is fairly senior - very few employees will get to that level. Even today, looking on levels.fyi, the typical Grade 7 employee (equivalent of upper L4 in Google) gets about $163K in total compensation (salary + bonus + stocks). The grade 9 person gets about $260K total. The equivalent in Google is from $356K to $490K.

Furthermore, consider this: Intel's problems involve manufacturing - fab, etc. If you're a principal engineer, your total comp is still lower than a new ML engineer with no experience. It's very hard to become a principal engineer - only 4% of employees who get to the grade level below it will ever get to principal engineer.

That ML employee isn't going to help much with fab issues - the principal engineer is. How do you think he'll feel knowing that he's a lot more responsible for the future of the company, yet the guy just out of school will reap more financial benefits than the person who actually played a bigger role in making it happen?

> Also did the ML guy have an advanced degree that your long-timer friends didn’t?

SavantIdiot was a grade 9, which is 2 grade levels above an incoming PhD. SavantIdiot was a very senior person.

It's an in-demand skill, supply and demand.

However, lots of folks leave for a while, get some new experience, and come back with a big boost in salary and maybe title. Give it a try if still interested.

Off topic but is the 400k offer SWE? Didn’t think Intel paid that much based in Blind posts.

I thought Intel was stiffing ML people too, maybe Gelsinger kicked some butts in management.

Management doesn't get a say in this. HR does. Gelsinger is the first CEO at Intel to openly admit Intel pays below market rate and when he joined he promised an 18 month timeline to improving compensation. Most of it involves negotiating with the board.

Recently Intel paid a number of employees extra RSUs as a "first step". It does seem the ordering was ML > SW > everyone else (from anecdotes).