Comment by wsc981 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wsc981 | Hacker News Reader

> In 2019, Nuvia was founded and later acquired by Qualcomm for $1.4B. Apple’s Chief CPU Architect, Gerard Williams, as well as over a 100 other Apple engineers left to join this firm. More recently, SemiAnalysis broke the news about Rivos Inc, a new high performance RISC V startup which includes many senior Apple engineers. The brain drain continues and impacts will be more apparent as time moves on.

Seems very shocking, a recent turn-over of about 100 engineers. I’m gonna assume these were all related to the CPU architecture teams.

Makes one wonder why these people left. Did they feel it was too hard to make progress with ARM? Was pay bad and didn’t Apple want to increase compensation? Perhaps a bad work/life balance?

What was interesting is that Apple was recently looking for a RISC V engineer in a job posting and who knows … perhaps looking for multiple. Would Apple be looking to change architecture to RISC V in the future? Maybe Apple is also worried by a possible acquisition of ARM by Nvidea of course.

> Was pay bad and didn’t Apple want to increase compensation

A frustrating feature of large silicon valley companies is that if you leave the company and come back later you will typically have better compensation than if you had stayed.

I could also imagine that the M1 team felt they weren't adequately rewarded after hitting a huge home run.

Moreover, it's probably the best time to switch jobs, because their market value is highest and at Apple they would just be expected to repeat the same success every year. Not to mention the benefit of gaining equity in a new "startup" which is almost immediately acquired at high valuation.

> A frustrating feature of large silicon valley companies is that if you leave the company and come back later you will typically have better compensation than if you had stayed.

That’s just not true, especially with stock appreciation. Unless they were grossly underpaid. It might be the case for some L3-L4 but not senior engineers.

No. It's definitely true.

I got my 30% raises per hop by hopping OUT of a company and then back in. Raises were only 3%-8% staying inside.

> A frustrating feature of large silicon valley companies is that if you leave the company and come back later you will typically have better compensation than if you had stayed.

Unfortunately, that's true of almost all large companies. It's one of the dumbest polices out there, but virtually every big corporation does it.

This basically means workers do not have any negotiating power by themselves. They only have negotiating power when they have a competing offer.

Or rather that negotiating power only has any teeth if they know you're serious.

Yup, the first company I worked for even had a name for them “retreads”. The VP of my Org was a former director hired back as a VP. It was a well known path to get a better job.

Maybe I will be a retread one day but the other practices the company does leaves a very sour taste in my mouth.

Aka boomeranging

It's worse than that. Digital design engineers get screwed at almost every company. Basically only Google, and Facebook in their WA offices, are paying digital design engineers the same or better than software engineers categorically. This is despite there existing a global shortage of digital design engineers that is becoming worse every year as graduation rates continue to decline.

Why is this the case? Looking at the posts on Blind, even Google and Facebook seem to pay their hardware engineers a bit less than their software engineers, probably because they know they can lowball them. It doesn't make any sense, unless the global shortage of software engineers is even worse.

>Seems very shocking, a recent turn-over of about 100 engineers.

Yes, you know what is more shocking? It is BS.

I mean like for Pete sake, there were more ex Qualcomm / Intel / ARM Engineers ex Apple inside Nuvia. And many from Samsung, AMD, Broadcom, Nvidia.

Aren't there some agreements that it forbids engineers to switch to a company and work on the same problem? I mean, somethink like this: Develop a cool chip with Apple (with all the help they provide), then move to a startup and build a clone, isn't this somehow forbidden? Or is it just to hard to put that into a contract? I mean guess same is somehow true for software developement.

Well I mean, I'm certain Apple owns a lot of the design work they put in, so copy-pasting would certainly be illegal.

California banning non-competes is a, if not the, primary reason the state is an innovation hotbed: https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/2/13/14580874/google-self....

It would be good to ban them, totally, nationally: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/biden-issues-executive-...

Wow, that is cool. To be honest I don't see anything wrong with it, at least from a software-dev perspective and it may really widen the know-how and increase wealth. Just as a side note: I would see this a bit more critical if the guys would move to an other country and just take the know-how with them.

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