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Comment by justsaying12 | Hacker News Reader

Arm has been hemmoraghing talent to direct competitors for the last year. Do a search on GraphCore, SiFive, Imagination Technologies etc.

Not sure what went wrong, but people who have a clue have been bailing out left and right.

Reminds me of Amazon also - Something similar happening at AWS. When Bezos left, lot of people streaming out the door.

Steady talent exodus, and they are not the dumb people leaving. The great ones leave instantly. The trapped or mediocre (can’t leave…for some reason), too lazy, unmotivated etc stay and pay compounding interest and poison the company.

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What went wrong is that people learned how much NVIDIA pays, figured out they were significantly underpayed, Arm is not a very profitable business so couldn't compete, and the moment it started looking like the NVIDIA deal was not going to fly, top talent started jumping ship.

It may well be that ARM could pay better if they wanted to. But the culture in Cambridge, and the UK, has been to pay engineers pretty poorly. So perhaps they don't yet understand that they need to. Also, salary inversion within the company would be a huge problem.

The UK seriously underpays software engineers, if US companies want to tap into the talent pool its relatively easy to do so especially with remote work. The UK has a serious lack of management talent and a trickle up economy that is damaging everything and the economic situation is not great. Its primed for a big brain drain.

>The UK seriously underpays software engineers

You mean Europe. UK actually pays talent quite decent in comparison that's why many talents still flock to London from the mainland despite Brexit.

But that's just London.

The rest of the UK... hit or miss.

Haven't deal with UK / EU a lot since COVID, so not sure if remote has changed that game up.

Can you elaborate on the Trickle-up Economy point. What do you mean by that? Why is it damaging?

It's also easier to attract talent from London to SV than it is to attract talent from SV to London.

Arm is about 90 minutes away from London

Not even that. A 10 minute taxi to the station and a ~50 min train to KGX.

On a typical day, SV is farther than that from SF.

> The great ones leave instantly

Some of the talented ones leave instantly and maybe some of the great ones. But some really great ones stay because they are personally committed to the work and couldn't care less about their linked in or who's running the company. How much change was there at Bell Labs but the likes of Dennis Ritchie never left.

I agree, talent doesn’t always care about money: Oxide has been able to get some people to work there for a significant pay cut. Oxide computer is a mixed hardware/software play and they currently pay a flat $180k wherever you live.

Talked about in this podcast: https://soundcloud.com/user-760920229/why-your-servers-suck-...

And an older article: https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-reflection-of-...

Ok, so to be clear, paying 2-3 times what the average ARM employee in the UK is earning...

That does not compute. How can you be committed to work and not care who’s leading the company?

> Reminds me of Amazon also - Something similar happening at AWS. When Bezos left, lot of people streaming out the door.

People aren't leaving Amazon by following Bezos, people are leaving because of their terrible working conditions[0] and bad policies, including employees in corporate offices.

[0]: https://archive.ph/M2p1Z

Graphcore is just in the AI space, and Imagination is a company that ARM outcompeted to the extent that they barely exist anymore.

SiFive is a real competitor, but they are much smaller and offer only a fraction of the IP portfolio of ARM.

As someone who lurks on the internal #pay-equity Slack channel. I can guarantee you that people aren’t leaving AWS because of Bezos.

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