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Comment by Scubabear68 | Hacker News Reader

I had to double check it wasn’t April 1st.

This is a good way to lose your best employees.

If you're one of the best employees at Intel, who are you going to go work for? Choices are limited, and it's quite likely that those others are going to do roughly the same thing.

There are so many choices if you're a top talent in silicon. Apple, Amazon, AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Broadcom, one of many AI accelerator startups, Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, Microsoft, Meta, Google, ARM, TSMC, Micron, Samsung. Just off the top of my head.

Everyone is making custom CPUs or accelerators, or both nowadays. This isn't 2005.

Many new companies are also trying to jump into this space. https://www.ndtv.com/business/tata-groups-big-leap-in-the-se....

How many of those companies fall under nebulous non-compete clauses? How many of the companies have anti-poaching agreements under the table?

Probably none. It's illegal in the US and after what happened between Apple and Google's anti-poaching agreement, I think Silicon Valley has stopped. I haven't heard about any in a long time.

Sure, just move to California where non-compete agreements aren't enforced

Wouldn't the previous employer in the previous state still be able to sue you in their state (as your old employment contract specifies that any disputes will be resolved in the courts of that previous state)?

Don't let previous employer know where you're working.

Your new employer will call your current employer when they do background checks, and will receive a legal threat about poaching in response.

Your new employer will also ask whether you currently have active non-competes against you, and may think twice before extending you an offer.

> Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu

No longer an option if you’re american

I think they still have offices here in the US and employ Americans. Alibaba has been scaling back though. Lastly, I don't think there's any law that prevents an American from moving to China to work.

https://careers.tencent.com/en-us/cityinfo.html?city=401

http://research.baidu.com/

> Lastly, I don't think there's any law that prevents an American from moving to China to work.

IANAL but yes there are now

> Restricts the ability of U.S. persons to support the development, or production, of ICs at certain PRC-located semiconductor fabrication “facilities” without a license;

See: https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/documents/about-bis/newsro...

I guess it won't stop Chinese citizens working at Intel to return home though.

Only if they don’t want to keep their visas/green cards. “us persons” can have different meaning but I’m pretty sure in this case it applies at least to gc

Yes, but they are now forced to give up their American citizenship to do so. That's a very steep cost.

This is definitely true on the fab and manufacturing side of Intel. There are few other alternatives and they don’t pay that well.

Let me ask you something.

Apple is now year 2 of throwing down the M1/M2 and the shock waves it created. AMD and Intel have to respond with an ARM chip. They just have to. Apple started it, so Qualcomm is going to do it, why wouldn't Samsung do it?

Intel has to play talent defense here. At a minimum, these companies are going to need deep x86 people that know how to do fast dynamic compiling transcoding like Apple did. Where can you get those? How about disgruntled Intel workers that got their pay cut?

Intel must have known about apple silicon potential since 2015. It literally took two straight lines with time on x and performance on y to know it will happen if Intel doesn’t improve execution. It didn’t.

Qualcomm, TSMC, Apple, Nvidia

Also I think Meta and Amazon are getting in on the chips game?

Those are just the big players that I can think of too.

Intel has more software engineers than hardware engineers. Turns out there’s shit ton of drivers, firmware and validation tools to write and maintain.

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