At my university, the word on the street was to not waste your time with chip design or device physics, because most of that work was heavily outsourced and the employers didn't pay well. I thought that was a real shame, because our device physics professor was brilliant and his research sounded fascinating.

Sadly, the people I met from a very popular microchip manufacturer (they don't make CPUs though?) suggested that they had to work long hours and didn't like their jobs. They were actually.. surprisingly transparent about that. I appreciated it, of course!