Hacker News Reader

Comment by graton | Hacker News Reader

I think they have lost a lot of their best employees because their pay is not that great. They aimed for paying at the 50th percentile in wages and the top companies come in and can offer double or more their current pay.

Doesn't help they switched from large cubes with five-foot high cubicle walls which did a good job on minimizing noise and visual distractions to having cubicle walls with a height of about 3-4 feet high and much smaller. Plus they installed sit-stand desks and you have people stand and make phone calls that can be heard 30 feet away. Doesn't help for concentrating on problems.

View on HN

Pay at Intel is about half of FAANG, can confirm. They seem weirdly proud of this and then weirdly confused and disappointed when great people leave.

So did Apple just sashay in and poach half of the best people?

Yes. In PDX, Azure recently had a big hiring frenzy and there was a lot of attrition as well.

This is a routine issue in the semiconductor industry. Payscales haven't keep up with software across that whole industry. The trade organizations are aware of this, but I haven't seen a lot of push to level the playing field. It's unfortunate, as there are lots of really fascinating problems to solve on the materials and integration side.

The industry trade organization did make a snazzy movie to try to attract young graduates into the industry.

https://yourewelcome.org/en/

The pandemic advertising was prescient.

Pay disparity is something that you’ve gotta fix early on. If you wait until the results of losing top level talent are finally being felt by everyone, then chances are your business might not have enough cash left to rectify the problem.

This is generally true however Intel still has and makes tons of cash, especially compared to AMD. It will take them some time to recover from this though, in this industry it can easily mean 5+ years.

When I was younger I was looking into getting into this industry but was put off by low salaries. Broadly in electronics space I noticed pay is very low which I find puzzling.

Only thing I can add to this is I had an Uber driver in SF area who was a computer engineer for Intel and wasn't doing Uber as a fun aside to meet people...

Is that different at AMD?

AMD is in SV, so naturally salaries must be higher than in Oregon.

I worked for a tenant in an complex that was mostly populated by semiconductor manufacturing and research people.

You could use the parking lots as a proxy for employee prosperity. The chip guys drove better cars than the students, but the government and other corporate people had better cars on average. The chip bigshots made bank though. The chip people would also have crunch periods where they worked crazy hours.

The workers making bank were the tradesmen building the facilities that housed tools.

Yes on both counts. I was contacted a couple years back about a machine learning contracting gig. When I asked what the hourly rate was the recruiter said $45/hour. I laughed and said that the going rate for that kind of skill set is like $120+/hour. That has not been an isolated incident.

>> $120+/hour

Even this would be a substantial discount for most qualified people.

I'm not qualified and get that rate

You would be surprised what you can get just by asking.

Given the company, it's usually long-term contracts that more closely resemble full-time employment. The location is also usually outside of the biggest, most expensive cities.

$120/hr * 40 hrs/wk * 50 wks/yr = $240K before self-employment taxes and paying for insurance. Ends up being comparable to typical compensation in cities that aren't SF, Seattle, or other top-tier markets.

Now if someone was doing more typical ad-hoc freelance work on a project basis, $120/hr might be too low for typical work. However, $90-120/hr as a contractor with a long-term contract and stable pay over 12-18 months is not uncommon.

Unless someone has a lot of new, small contracts knocking at their door nonstop, it can make more financial sense to take a $120/hr long-term contract over sporadic $200+/hr work that changes month to month.

Very true, though it'll depend on the seniority of the position.

$240K/yr, minus self-employment taxes, insurance, and other overhead, not to mention the lack of other non-monetary benefits and comp, is not a lot for someone doing serious machine learning.

I'd imagine that the type of specialized talent that Intel needs to catch up to AMD have plenty of options open to them. A comp strategy based on median industry comp might work to maintain their position, but probably won't churn out new industry-leading tech needed to jump ahead.

For a contractor? You can do better than that making dashboards.

$120 is about a third of what my accountant charges per hour.

> $120 is about a third of what my accountant charges per hour.

Some professions typically require both a related degree and one or more certifications or licenses. Accounting is one of those (CPA, CMA, CFA, CISA, CIA, EA) and this ends up being reflected in the hourly rate.

This is so true. I have friends whose managers told them - "the only way to get more pay is to leave intel", "our hands are tied, we cant give more pay or promo", " to get more pay and promotion, one option is to leave intel and then come back"...all of these folks are in FAANG now.

There is another option, it's just a lot harder than leaving and rarely said out loud. Which is to organize.

> There is another option, it's just a lot harder than leaving and rarely said out loud. Which is to organize.

That harder work seems to only get done when you can't leave (or when leaving doesn't get results).

Man I hate that attitude. My company pulls that on absolutely every benefit asked about.

"We've done a survey and our pay and benefits are on par for the industry" = we are proud to be a profoundly mediocre place to work in every possible way.

Can't wait for this pandemic to end and the market for my industry/region to pick up again.

Intel employee. Can confirm all of the above.

You should be a FAANG employee!

I bet executive pay is great.

They also focused on diversity hiring vs focusing on hiring top talent.

> They also focused on diversity hiring vs focusing on hiring top talent.

Those aren't mutually exclusive.

Because you can focus on more than one thing? Focusing on one of these naturally excludes the other.

I'm interpreting 'focus' as 'prioritize' or something similar, rather than 'attend to, to the exclusion of all other concerns'.

You can have more than one priority, even though you can't have more than one TOP priority.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com