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Comment by anonreeeeplor | Hacker News Reader

You don’t want a Silicon job because your talent is illiquid.

They can take a giant dump directly in your mouth while making steady eye contact and you can’t leave because there is nowhere to go.

In software and in startups if you have relevant skills and modern, up to date experience you can switch easily.

Don’t work in industries that are declining and have no future and require advanced technical training that is non transferable.

Oh you got a PHD in quantum silicon dick butt nanometers from MIT? That’s worth dick at 99.99% of companies.

It will happen to you. You want startups where your abilities are transferable and the hiring market is broad and deep.

And never move to a location where the only option is intel. That’s their favorite trick. Fuck that!

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On the other extreme, you don't want to do completely commodity work, or you'll be stuck competing on who can move the subscribe button for a smaller bowl of ramen.

The sweet spot is somewhere in between, where you have non-trivial skills others don't, and multiple companies willing to pay for them. In essence, supply and demand, like always.

Meanwhile ~50% of the EE PhD graduates, and ~10% of the CS PhD graduates from my university are joining Intel on a regular basis.

Intel has a steady funnel of smart international PhD grads who are usually fine with the comparatively lower pay.

Are the EE PhDs at your university better than the top undergrads? I ask this because a PhD is no guarantee of quality.

They’d be significantly better than top undergrads immediately after graduating.

Top undergrads after a few years guided by competent people and managing to keep motivated will be way better than the average PhD graduate.

I can't emphasize enough how true this is - don't invest in non-transferable skills.

The vast majority of engineers at Intel are not what you described. Most are CS/EE bachelors or masters that could go to dozens of other companies shipping hardware.

Former Intel employee here. This may be true for their design folks, but the largest portion of the company is related to the fab, and there aren't many jobs for those folks. Moreover, the alternatives (TSMC, Samsung, etc) suck as much as Intel.

I'm seeing plenty of intel folks move easily into other areas. I don't think this is true. We hired a test automation engineer who worked on the fab side at my last employer. They transitioned pretty well until a PCBA and server integration testing role.

If he was a test automation engineer, he likely had transferable skills. Many/most of the fab folks have almost no programming skills, and are PhDs in things like chemistry[1], etc.

Now some of them do take the initiative and learn SW skills, or data analysis properly, and switch due to that. But the majority of them feel stuck. They have a heavy workload and do not feel they have time to learn new skills.

[1] For a long time, and perhaps even now, the fabs only hired either technicians or PhDs. An exemption would be needed to hire someone with "just" an MS. Of course, almost none of these jobs actually need PhD level skills.

Got it. I agree now, having seen many resumes from former Intel roles that match this pattern.

I too am ex-Intel. The majority of employment opportunities are in the fab but that’s mostly manufacturing and technicians. It’s not mostly PhDs with no breadth knowledge which is what the original comment was seeming to imply.

PTD is almost entirely PhDs.

Not denying that, but you previously claimed that “the largest portion of the company is related to the fab.” If you’re saying PTD PhDs are this “largest portion of the company” in terms of engineers, that makes no sense. Intel isn’t hiring more PhDs than Masters/Bachelor – there aren’t enough PhDs out there for that to ever happen.

The majority of Intel employees are directly related to the fab, but those employees are not mostly PhDs without many other job prospects.

Moreover, those alternatives are generally located in Asia, not the US, so that's probably not a likely job change for most. Maybe they could move to one of the new Samsung/TSMC fabs being built in the US though.

> In software and in startups if you have relevant skills and modern, up to date experience you can switch easily.

I will also point out that in the current climate, 'switch easily' isn't a given in software.

Sure it is, relatively. Software is used in all kinds of industries, not just ad-tech. There's no shortage of jobs in software, though the super-high-paying FAANG jobs are diminishing.

If you work in chip design for Intel, this just isn't the case; there's only a few places you can go.

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