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I majored in semiconductors out of genuine interest. It was fascinating to me how miniature components can be turned into digital and analog devices. It turned out to be one of the most boring things I've ever touched. Cadence was an endless loop of crashing and losing progress. Anything you designed was called worthless because there's already a library of capacitors, amplifiers and DAC ADC components for you to drag and drop in. It was so incredibly dry.

During our final semester in school, or professor walked in and said, "All of you but X needs to know that you're going to be unemployed." He said that to a class of 4 people, the only ones left after most of the original class of 20+ had quit.

"The industry only hires the exceptional, you are all inept. Except for X, my favorite student."

X ended up being the only person to go on to work in a semicon company. The rest of us ended up in software, earning 5x the pay X was making. The barrier of entry to software engineering is so so much lower than semicon, which still makes no sense to me.

Here's what I learned working at Samsung:

At the end of the day, the stakes are way too high to allow everyone a chance to play cowboy with the tools. You want your best possible champions to bring a design to bear. Then, the other 99% of the army is responsible for implementing the design in as repeatable & standardized a fashion as physically possible so that there is even the remotest chance of yield+profit. Software is the antithesis of this. The cost of playing around with your tools is not even worth accounting for. Due to certain cultural effects, you probably don't want to do software in semiconductor industry unless you really, really like the problem domain.

Even if you don't get to play around with the billion dollar tools, you still get to help troubleshoot some of the most intensely complicated problems on earth. Solving these riddles is very rewarding and the experience will stick with you forever. Hard to package those 2 sentences up into a PR campaign for the young generation, but I'm sure we can spin it if the DoD can still find ways to recruit.

I worked on a campus with alot of semiconductor investment and education for a somewhat affiliated entity.

The thing I noticed was that the crunch work was brutal, parking lots were full till 11pm half the year. The parking lot told the story - the execs had Teslas and BMWs in their gated lot. The troops were in 7-10 year old Hyundais and couldn’t afford to buy lunch in the cafe.

If you want to be in the semiconductor industry, the real winners are the tradesmen. They were all driving $70k pickups. Pipe fitters, electricians, operating engineers, etc make bank. If you know how to build the supporting infrastructure around some ASML tool, your income is limited by your desire to work. I can think of a dozen serious contracting companies in those lines of work that spun out of building that place.

Somewhat related but anecdotal—there was so much analog gatekeeping during my EE degree it really turned me off of analog electronics design. Some professors acted like nobody was worthy and delighted in ridiculous trick problems on tests to weed everyone out. Many also had the favorite student syndrome that you mentioned where everyone but X was an imposter. The industry also seemed to not want anyone in analog and semi manufacturing anyway or had very high entry requirements, although kept complaining about a lack of candidates publicly. I bet it’s somewhat different today with the resurgence of modular synths and hobby electronics, but I can only imagine that it might make some professors double down on the hazing mentality. All that is to say, in some areas STEM educators have serious cultural issues to work out before just blasting away with funding expecting results.
I had a similar experience in Germany. Studied Engineering Physics with a major in semiconductor technology. At university we learned everything from high level programming, VHDL, electronics down to semiconductor chemistry. I didn't find it boring at all.

Judging from our industry partnerships the semiconductor industry seemed to do well at the time. At least that was my impression. When I graduated in 2001 the signs of impeding death were already there however, so I worked in aerospace for a couple of years, went back to university for a computer science degree and ended up in software anyways. Not the worst thing to happen for me personally, but honestly I still don't really understand how a promising industry could die like that.

Reminds me of talking to brewers and winemakers. The brewers said they could experiment as much as they want because the worst case was you get some different beer.

The winemakers had to follow things exceptionally carefully because you basically couldn’t improve anything, but you had innumerable ways to destroy the wine and end up with vinegar.

In other countries, with less technical jobs, this effect applies to all kind to technical fields.

You go to an electronics engineering class. There are a few superbrilliant people. The rest are quite clever though.

As there are a few jobs available for the technical skills that you learn at class, only the superbrilliant get those jobs.

It turns out that the companies say to these superbrilliant guys: "I am giving you a unique opportunity to work in this top field in this country. So your salary is not about money, but motivation".

End of the story: the rest of the guys, not the super brilliant, end up working in more generic stuff like management, consultancy, generic simple software.... And they make way more money that the superbrilliant guys.

These examples are taken from Spain. Althoug I have seen similar in other European countries with more technical jobs.

The way that toxic prof treated the class makes no sense, but the barrier to entry in industry makes a lot of sense, even if we don't like it. Semiconductor is just insanely capital-intensive. Now that it's become a major issue of strategic concern for the USG there is finally some capital available for it.

People have finally begun to realize that if all you do is build software, you're completely dependent on your hardware suppliers. It's like being a commuter society that doesn't make their own cars.

In Taiwan working in semicon will earn you more than software engineering. It’s insane that majority of software jobs in Taiwan earn less than monthly rent costs.
How many years ago was your experience?

There’s definitely an increase in interest and demand for semis. Your experience might be very different from graduates looking today and in the future as demand increases.

Having said that, the vitriol and toxicity in colleges and towards one another needs to cease. I see that being more naturally achieved in an economy that is growing and seeing things getting cheaper generally. That would look like vast investments in small, big, and mega projects. Imagine how much different the US today would be had it never built a highway system and stayed to only where the trains/horses went. I think it’s 80-90%+ of US GDP transports via truck over a highway at some point.

What kind of job is X doing and at what company?

Are they working at a fab? Working in the manufacturing portion of the fab? Doing process design work on a computer? There are so many different types of jobs within the semiconductor industry and some are going to pay far higher than others.

As I said in my other comment in the thread I have worked at many fabless semiconductor companies. The different between software and hardware salaries at companies like Nvidia and Apple is around 10% or so, not 5X.

How does it not make sense? As a software person you are completely relying on the hardware to do its job. You are putting your blind faith into the work of semiconductor engineers in order for you to get your paycheck
That’s an hilarious story because the asshole professor ends up being right, a naive optimist (the supposed reader) gets a dark surprise, and all students involved get reasonably happy endings.

Could be a Hollywood movie, if you fill in the gap between the penultimate and ultimate paragraphs with some interesting action

I worked in process monitoring and supply chain departments at a couple semiconductor companies.

There's an impenetrable culture of "best practices" that keeps the tech from catching up with the times. I eventually left because my career stagnated being on teams who couldn't update any of the internal tools because of this or that exec who was too scared to explore beyond the tiny niche they carved for themselves the past 10-30 years.

The last team I was on was using JDK 8 and Postgres 8. Vendor lock-in on downstream dependents, I guess. We finally managed to convince leadership after 3 years that if they wanted any ML in their systems at all they'd need to update their stack or make room in their fabs for a Python server on the intranet at the very least. So they gave us a Windows box with 2 cores and 1GB of memory because "that's all that will fit" and "we aren't a security company".

Came here just to say your professor's attitude is infuriatingly toxic, sorry you had to go through that.

I'm curious if your experience of crashing/losing progress is still the norm. Do we have better CAD programs and PCB simulators now?

My partner is an EE but I just learned how electricity works (beyond a middle school level) a few years ago.

And the industry is so brutally cyclical. They'll hire thousands, work them into the ground to get some machine or line done, then let them all go, then hire them all in a flurry next time they need to build something. It's also very toxic in my experience, lots of mean people.
> X ended up being the only person to go on to work in a semicon company. The rest of us ended up in software, earning 5x the pay X was making

Sounds like a great way of nurturing talent... not. Apparently they will only look at your CV if you have a PhD or a very specialized MsC

And all this for what again? "The privilege of working with hard problems?!" I've done enough C already and that makes my head hurt now. Thanks but I think I'll take it easier with "higher level software" while making more money and having less stress

Top engineering school hazing, creating underpaid and not quite mentally balanced people

> The barrier of entry to software engineering is so so much lower than semicon, which still makes no sense to me.

Why ? So much software is far less complex to design than semiconductor stuff

Almost exactly my experience, plus all the other bad experience mentioned in this thread.

I wish I could have seen this when I was in school.

How many people do you think exist on earth that could build a usable but most minimal form of computer/computation from scratch? Roughly same utility just lowered expectations on horsepower with also the assumption the software would be better optimized.
Is in the US?
> Anything you designed was called worthless because there's already a library

This attitude (also in software) indicates to me someone who isn't very interested in a subject academically. There is so much to learn from prior solved problems and reinventing the wheel yourself.

I've been designing semiconductor chips for 25 years in the US. For the last 20 years all the companies I have worked at have been fabless. We send the mask data to TSMC or Samsung to manufacture.

I sit in front of a computer at a desk all day and get to work from home 3 days a week. We get plenty of new grad design engineers from college.

But do young people want to work in manufacturing plants being on call when the production line goes down? There are thousands of technician jobs that are more 2 year associate degree types needed as well.

I've also seen stories that because of the small number of fabs it is difficult to switch jobs because there are not many options. This pushes down salaries as well. In contrast to design where there are hundreds of companies which you can leave and go to and get significant salary increases.

As with most jobs, more pay and better working conditions will attract more people.

> do young people want to work in manufacturing plants being on call when the production line goes down

They do if the jobs pay enough to live. There are a lot more classes of young people than recent grads from big universities. See Amazon warehouse and airports.

Perhaps the government needs to step in and declare certain “important national security jobs” except from taxation or something.

Probably would just drop the salaries to minimum wage :(

So, it's been a while since I worked in semiconductor manufacturing, but I know a little bit about this from personal experience. The community colleges, yes maybe; the universities, no not particularly.

Once upon a time every fab needed lots of engineers, because they were designing the manufacturing process (because each company had only one fab, or at least only one modern one). As they grew, they kept hiring engineers for each fab, mostly out of habit and custom. Then they put huge bureaucratic obstacles in the way of changing anything, because the manufacturing process was already designed (at another fab), and you didn't want every engineer who wanted to make his mark on things to screw it up.

The thing is that if you make a change in step 87 out of 450, and that change turns out to screw things up, you can have (450-87)/450 = 80% of your factory is full of dud semiconductors. It takes a few months for a wafer to get from the beginning to the end of the line, so that's a couple months of production from your multi-billion dollar fab, that you can throw in the trash. So mostly, they don't want the engineers to do any design, because there's way more downside than upside. Only at the R&D fab is anything like real design done.

Now, to run the (rather complex) equipment, you probably want a lot of community college graduates, although frankly a smart high-school graduate could do it well with a few days training. But the only reason they "require" so many engineers at production fabs, is that they don't realize it's not necessary. It's a bunch of people who worked for years to get an engineering degree, put in a place where they are very nearly forbidden to change anything.

If the multi-billion dollar fab is made, they will run it. If there are not enough college graduates to staff it, they will miraculously discover that smart high school graduates will do just as well, as long as there are engineers at the R&D fab.

It's also been a while since I stepped foot in a fab, but my impression is that for modern processes there are no people in the fab proper. It is fully automated, people sit outside the fab or they service machines in drop-down bays underneath the fab floor, accessible only through airlocks.

What the technicians are there for isn't to operate the robots...they're supposed to analyze the performance of the robots constantly and summarize anomalies and flag them to the next shift. So a work shift might involve metrology, statistics, and communication skills; I wouldn't expect that skill set from any but the most exceptional US high school graduates, and those folks are bound for the university, not a job with 12-hour days wearing clean room suits and limited bathroom breaks.

Some of the more fussy processes like EUV require regular cleaning of excess tin in the machine as well to keep yield up. afaik it's a trade secret as to how this process works, but I know one of the big delays in rolling out EUV is that the cleaning process was hard, and that lead to a lot of downtime on the line. People on both side of the Pacific were able to make chips with EUV for a while, but they just couldn't make money while making them. TSMC cracked that nut, but I haven't read any articles describing exactly what their magic was to get the uptime so high. However, I suspect it might involve a platoon of PhD-level experts that also work like an F1 pit crew.

Anyways, the days of carrying boxes of wafers from machine to machine and pressing buttons are long gone. Everything that can be automated has been, what's left is debugging and servicing robots, and searching for early signs of degradation in an otherwise fully automated machine.

So, the real value of a highly trained technician in this case is they can look at bumps in the data and go "huh..." and flag it to management so that you don't have 80% of the fab full of trash wafers. In this situation, you want someone who actually understand the physics of the process going on inside the machine, and not just someone who is following an SOP. Any analysis that could be easily automated probably already has been.

Of course, you need even more highly skilled people to set up the robots in the first place, and that process also consumes hundreds if not thousands of engineers, depending on your schedule, scale and the complexity of the machines. A lot of that can be pushed back onto vendors, but you still need an on-site team who actually understands the physics to get your process yields up to several nines and hold it there with almost no downtime.

Everything I hear about semiconductor technology sounds like you need two PhDs minimum and then you have to work in horrible environments with horrible management (either personally or just due to stressful deadlines).

Like this kind of comment seems par for the course (though not the PhD bit, that's more for the "science" end of things): https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/kdzs4t/any_ad...

I think prestige is a big factor (and kind of a trap): people want to work in a prestigious field regardless of lower salary, worse working conditions etc. That's why there is so much competition. Kind of like how academic positions are so competitive despite low pay.

EDIT: Also an oversupply of graduates who feel they need to work in their fields of study. Actually I think "graduate oversupply" is the main issue. Feels like such a waste to work elsewhere if you've dedicated years to studying something, it's a major sunk cost.

FAANG jobs still require less schooling, less knowledge, pay more and don't require you live in awful places.

Lots of us left the field or retired. Call us when semiconductor companies start paying real money.

> FAANG jobs still require less schooling, less knowledge, pay more and don't require you live in awful places.

> Lots of us left the field or retired. Call us when semiconductor companies start paying real money.

The future will rather be that FAANG jobs will pay much less, thus the salaries in the semiconductor industry will become somewhat competitive again.

This is probably a reason STEM graduate level classes and PhDs are prominently international students, willing to go on to the industry and toil under immigration limbo.
In my view FAANG jobs are beside the point. I've puzzled about this a lot, because I'm technically a "hardware person" with a degree in physics yet I'm also a good programmer. Many of my physics classmates became programmers. I could hypothetically bring myself up to speed on the latest software development practices and make myself employable at it. Maybe not at FAANG, but probably somewhere decent. But I've never made that jump.

I work in an office that has a sizable software development department, so I'm quite familiar with what they do, and what their work environment is like. It's not some distant mysterious place. They're my lunch buddies.

There are also lots of people who are quite bright, and do difficult mental work at lower pay, yet don't learn to program for whatever reason. Those of us who program know that it's actually quite easy, yet is an impenetrable barrier for most people, and we just don't know why.

There will always be somebody who makes more than you do, but it doesn't explain why people aren't all leaving their jobs for higher paying ones. Part of it may be psychological inertia -- I might be guilty of that myself. But I think another part is that we don't actually know the recipe for success.

> and don't require you live in awful places.

Last I checked, they generally do require you to live in SF, Seattle or similarly "awful places". If anything, rampant homelessness and crime seem to be highly correlated with cities that have "FAANG" HQs.

When I was being recruited by ASML this is what I thought. Investing all the time, money and energy, to then be at the mercy of one employer, and have to live in a very specific locations, and the salary is not even that great.
Awful places? I believe Arizona is one of the fastest growing populations of all the states ( too hot for me personally )
the catch is that you can't have FAANG jobs if you don't have semiconductors. Greedy short-termism, grab what you can now and forget about the future is always what kills the golden goose.

unfortunately you can't expect people as individuals to make those calls. You need mechanisms that properly value long-term sustainability

There is no shortage of chip design in the US (I'm in Austin and I constantly bump into these folks), only chip _fabrication_.

What little I know about fab is that extremely bright physicists do rote tasks with horrible schedules. I don't think the solution to that is more education

Waves from a perch overlooking AUS and Giga Texas.

I've run into enough NVIDIA and AMD engineers at The Domain to surmise this is true.

We need a funnel towards training highly-skilled blue-/light-blue-collar workers to feed the strategic needs of said fab industry if the US were serious about building domestic capabilities and competitive independence.

Right now, I don't think the current state of the US education system from national to local levels is promoting the fundamentals needed to attain this goal.

Sounds like a perfect fit for a union or an employee-owned coop.
Going to be tough for them: jobs are in EU (ASML) and Taiwan (TSMC). Heard some other critical tool are from Japanese companies (masks and others).

The silicium industry is critical for any modern society and it seems it has no economic meaning if not at worldwide scale: then it requires significant out-of-free-market financing. The state administration has to organise and maintain this "out-of-free-market" financing.

Only bleeding-edge performant silicium must be tolerated there.

Most semiconductor workers can make 20% more working as a software engineer, without laboring in a factory. That needs to be “fixed” first
The vast majority of semiconductor employees work at a desk - not in a factory.
I graduated 5 years ago with a degree in computer engineering, and have been working since then in embedded systems for satellites/aerospace. Currently I’m finishing a masters in CS with a thesis in cache prefetching. I started the masters because I decided aerospace is probably not the place for me (salary is okay but not stellar, very high inertia, hardest problems are not control systems and signal processing rather than software). I loved computer architecture in undergrad, and I think getting a job at a newer fabless chip company like SiFive or Tenstorrent would be amazing, but I am wary of all the warnings I read from people in the field. Is there anybody here with industry experience who has something good to say about working on the fabless side of things?
Is this article from 1985? Memba' then? Industry has to follow suit and compete with those 'other places' or this will be all for naught.
Just gimme visa and i'll take those fancy jobs :>
Yeah but do these semiconductor students understand anything about the post-structalist analysis of the capitalist hegemony of their labor?
I don't think that Ohio State University is sufficiently preparing students to work on semiconductors
Let's not count our chickens before they hatch. I have serious doubts that US universities are capable of building anything except nepotism networks for upper-class Americans. I hope they prove me wrong, but you can't build a semiconductor industry on nepotism.