> At first, the group will be focused on automotive uses
Slightly ironic given how geohot has been ranting on stream non-stop for the last few days about how terrible it is to work with them for his comma.ai self-driving startup
Slightly ironic given how geohot has been ranting on stream non-stop for the last few days about how terrible it is to work with them for his comma.ai self-driving startup
You just aren't worth their time, so they except you to stick to public documentation, buy their dev kit, and figure out out on your own. Want to use a part without public documentation? Tough luck!
I certainly see Qualcomm engineers frequently leave and transition to FANG.
Same with NXP. Salaries and bonuses are very good(by European standards, ignore FAANG wages) but the overtime, work pressure and workplace toxicity makes that a difficult proposition if you can't stomach the ascension to the level where the REAL money starts to come in.
There are indeed people at these big semi companies who can slack off and collect huge paychecks but those are the exception, as some people in the trenches are burning the candle on both ends to make the deadlines of masks reaching the fabs on time.
Unfortunately the location is undesirable at the moment.
Tooling is also very specific. There are gazillions of scripts written in all possible languages for all sorts of semiconductors. Some colleagues will happily backstab you not sharing information about their tools.
Oh yeah, that sounds familiar.
The churn level is high. People are constantly fired, let go, or leave after their relocation bonus expires if they don't see any promotions after their tolls.
Lots of "Game of Thrones" backstabbing going on behind the scene inside the org between managers, each trying to get the spotlight for the successes on them to get that sweet promotion, while disregarding their team and workers as disposable commodities that can always be replaced by overseas workers if they don't fall in line and deliver on the impossible deadlines.
The difference in pay between junior and seniors/managers is huge, so they dangle that carrot in front of you so you put up with everything just for the chance of hopefully making it to that level one day.
Many companies are a lot more friendly to small customers, though.
Also automotive customers tend to stick with their long term partners. It's why Renesas, Infineon and NXP(former Freescale) own the automotive MCU market.
Once you heavily invest in the ecosystem and buy all the tooling, compilers, debuggers, JTAG trace probes, and your workforce is already accustomed to all the pitfalls and workarounds of an architecture, it's too expensive too switch to a different provider.
Chips are usually sold in reels of 1k or 3k. For quantities like 10k chip vendors will just redirect you to a distributor like Mouser or Digikey - who will be able to ship an order of 150k to you next-business-day without any issues.
The problems start when the chips you want aren't redistributed. You're a rounding error to the manufacturer. Why spend the time and effort assisting a startup with a one-off 10k order when the next email is from a large car manufacturer placing a guaranteed 15M order?
For reference https://www.linkedin.com/posts/george-hotz-b3866476_comma-3x...
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/george-hotz-b3866476_qualcomm...