[readingnews]

"Graduate degrees" listed as a reason.

Yes, designing chips is hard, it takes a lot of knowledge. This is why medical doctors need to go through all that schooling... designing a tiny chip with more transistors running software that does amazing things is very difficult.

My Ph.D. is in computer engineering, specifically VLSI and chip design. This was from a few years ago. I _probably_ should have gone into industry, I mean, after all, it is what I went to school for and wanted to do. However, the starting salary for a chip designer (Intel / AMD / HP / IBM) was literally less than I was making at a side job (I worked my way through my Ph.D) as an IT sysadmin. Not only that, people that I knew well that graduated before me would call me up and tell me it was worse than hell itself. 80 hour weeks? Completely normal, outside of the 2 hours of commute time. Barely make rent because you live in California? Check. Pages / Calls all hours of the day outside of work? Check. 80 hours? You mean 100 hours a week leading up to a release, right? Check.

Looking back on it, it seems this was "the challenging" and if you made it past this (something like 5 years on) things calmed down for a chip designer and you moved into a more "modest" 60-80 hours a week role with less pressure and somewhat of a pay increase.

Yes, how do you attract talent under those conditions? It is not flashy work, takes a lot of schooling and the rewards are low. At least medical doctors can kind of look forward to "well, I can make _real_ money doing this", and have the satisfaction of "I helped a lot of people".

[gsf_emergency]

These truths mostly also apply when answering the eternal* question:

  Why is everybody outside music, movies, crypto & pizza struggling to attract talent?

* Snow Crash (1992) might turn out not to be so precisely prescient due to upcoming dedollarization, AI democratization/bubble burst (the exact option depends on your personality type), & the solid state battery boom:

>When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:

music

movies

microcode (software)

high-speed pizza delivery

[ferguess_k]

I have never done any chip design work, but I have seen some hobbyists going on with HDL without a degree. It's definitely not professional level but I suspect they are hireable materials at least. This leads me to ask the two questions:

1) If chip design (or X, anything) is so vital, so important to national security, why do universities insist that a degree of X include a lot of unrelated courses? You can argue that universities are not just for employment (yeah, as if most people go to university just for fun), but by the name of God, I really hate it when my university forced me to go through all those BS selective courses to reach 120. If you ask me, it's just money grabbing.

2) Why can't students go straight to a fab or whatever after bachelor and do their masters THERE? Isn't the industry a much better place to do that? Actually, why don't the industry simply hire high school students and go from there? Companies used to do that in the 50s/60s. I don't know if they still do that but I think it's rare.

[gsf_emergency]

These are horrendously difficult questions, though a partial answer to 2) is that labor (with "Baumol" training costs factored in) was so cheap up till the early 60s that high schoolers were easily competitive with college grads..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect#Education

Easier question to answer:

  Why is it so hard to scale payouts to craftspeople (designers, writers, musicians, YouTubers, actors even.)

Even easier question to answer:

  Why is the exchange rate of social status to USD so inelastic

[mint2]

Are you asking why college isn’t a vocational school or technical school? Or are you wondering why the USA doesn’t have apprenticeships in the way Germany and others have?

A college isn’t really meant to be a narrow tracked vocational school - but it’s fair to ask why aren’t their more vocational schools for high tech fieldss

[cityofdelusion]

For number 1, there really does need to be some wider reforms, but I fear that won't happen until the whole student loan paradigm crashes and burns. I had a couple of fully paid semesters that were 100% electives I had no interest in. I would have preferred to graduate a year earlier (and thus, a year richer) or take courses that were actually relevant. Problem is that universities talk out both sides of their mouth -- raking in huge amounts of cash like a corporation, feasting off guaranteed loans from 18 year olds, while espousing some nobler concept of education/enlightenment on the other hand.

[bradfa]

I know of a bunch of people, some who only have high school degrees, who are entirely self-taught and are doing tinytapeout (https://tinytapeout.com/) chip designs. Yeah, that's not nearly at the skill or scale of designing CPUs for Intel/AMD/NVIDIA/Apple/Marvell/etc but it's still chip design!

Your concerns about horribly long hours and lower than IT/software pay are the most concerning part to me. But, if there's really a shortage of engineers who know how to do chip design, hopefully the market will take care of that via supply/demand at least once things get really out of whack.

[aswanson]

Every time I read a post like this I'm thankful the market all but forced me into software.

[resonious]

It's always crazy to me that you can build crappy websites in the most flexible environment imaginable and make way more than those doing the actually deep and challenging work required for those websites to run in the first place.

[rightbyte]

Fundamentally, in programming the programmers have the means to compete with their employers if they want to. Shifts power a lot.

[AndrewThrowaway]

Looks like some kind of a gatekeeping ritual to rationalize why upper management salaries are in millions. I think we can also see in other industries too.

You hire hundreds of interns and entry level workers to let them fight in the bloodbath for 100h a week. Pay peanuts. Let them do all the work.

The ones who survive get a bit bigger salaries. Those who still persist in upper level bloodbaths are upgraded into millionaires. And paying them millions looks acceptable as it is so hard to reach the top.

While you clearly could share all those millions between entry level and paid internships, don't have 100h weeks and have a healthy industry.