Where Are the Microelectronics Engineers? | Hacker News Reader

Where Are the Microelectronics Engineers?

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43 pointsnoch32 comments

Internships? Yeah, nah. TSMC doesn't hand out technology NDAs to interns, which makes them kinda useless.

All in all, the IC design field is a decade or two behind software dev in terms of ergonomics. They're not going to attract a lot of talent, if the tooling remains as kludgy and unreliable as it is. What if GCC or Clang crashed on you once in a while "just because"? That's the reality of IC design flow.

On the flip side, the world at large has just realized the importance of chips, which makes the outlook mildly positive.

Hopefully, a move towards open hardware standards will help with that problem.

SiFive probably not as worried about interns and NDAs.

Open standards means alternatives to clunky technology. I'm optimistic

I agree

SiFive isn't a foundry I don't think, and the foundry process is heavily NDA encumbered.

+1 to IC being decades behind.

I think the average programmer would be horrified if they really knew the state of modern chip design. SWEs already know how bad most software is, but imagine an entire industry of tens of thousands of people writing code (HDL/TCL), who often don't even think what they do is programming, that has evolved over the last 50 years with minimal interaction with the rest of the software engineering world.

Verilog is a nightmare. The tools are buggy. Everyone has Stockholm syndrome. Version control is considered state-of-the-art and you're lucky if your org uses it.

I've seen a lot of HDL code in my career, and there's a huge number of well respected senior engineers who think having any form of hierarchy, abstraction, or even for-loops is very advanced design practice.

The only good part is the bar is so low it's easy to standout and climb. I think the industry is in a position where it would be surprisingly easy for a startup of seasoned SWEs with a decent understanding of how to write optimized hardware to churn out competitive chips with 10x the velocity of the big players like Nvidia/AMD/Intel

Entry-level web dev interview: "Can you center things using CSS? Can you reverse a linked list? You're hired, here's 75k/yr, go write some Python"

Entry-level EE interview: "What is Ohm's law? What are sources of noise in an electronic circuit? Are you okay relocating to Guangzhou?"

This is a weird US-centric article. There are tons of microelectronic engineers in places where a low cost of living makes microelectronics a viable career. If you go looking for PCB design training online, it'll be almost exclusively from China, India, and eastern Europe.

Plot twist: the savvy entry-level web dev will relocate somewhere where COL is tiny compared to the West without even being asked.

Obviously money is a big factor, software engineers are reputed to earn large starting salaries, like medical doctors and lawyers.

Another factor is that after sports stars, the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, etc are associated with programming and that's where so much of the startup action is too.

So then why study electrical engineering, which is heavy on theory, calculus, minimal lab work and a Dilbert-like reputation?

Disclaimer: I have an EE degree, worked as a certified engineer for 10 years and then defected to the dark side, PhD in SE and 20+ years in IT. When I look at returning to EE design work & project management (which I really did enjoy) the salaries being offered immediately dash any further interest.

Similar. I have an MSEE, but started my career doing embedded software work, and eventually moved to all software (I did carry a double CS/EE major, but never finished CS). I easily make 2-3x doing software than I'd make doing hardware, plus I do enjoy software work.

“It is simply not viable for us to pay entry-level engineers on large hardware teams that kind of money.”

Then they will go to CS fields. It's not all about money but if a person is interested in two things and one pays higher, guess where they'll go?

Would not surprise me that EE is also way more offputting it due to the amount of rigor, and dedicated practice required to get anywhere with it - just to graduate is a serious undertaking.

Contrast this with bootcamps and everything else that is involved when it comes to software jobs. I've seen many people weaseling through this. Maybe it's the same with EE to some degree, but I imagine these people get filtered out at a much greater pace than their SE/Web Dev counterparts.

Making changes and recompiling is much more expensive in EE.

What's the point of these articles? We all know the answer, it's always money. We know how to solve it, but no one wants to pony up.

I'm all for passion, but I tell my (also young) friends to beware of donating your passion to 100-billion dollar (or otherwise) companies with 50% profit margins without adequate compensation. You can use your money for causes like Effective Altruism too.

> We all know the answer, it's always money.

Maybe for you. Most of the time there are other variables when choosing your job (EE here).

Not for me. For society. This isn't about individuals. People in mass choose higher paying jobs. People are not going to get into microelectronics because: pay sucks comparatively, easily outsourced, high effort, worse benefits, etc. There aren't enough "passionate" people to take advantage of to fill these roles.

The focus on money is THE cultural meme of the 21st century.

Do you ever hear of a basketball / baseball / football pro who turned down a multi-million deal? Or an actor for that matter. Nobody questions why they don't play because of their passion for their sport.

In practical terms, if you want to live where the career opportunities are, you need a sizeable income just to stay in place. They (the greedy capitalists) want you to work to live. Of course, the "leaders" don't manage because of their passion. They demand ever increasing salaries.

So true.

> Students hear about software grads getting tremendous starting salaries. Why should they choose hardware engineering?

I didn't. They shouldn't either. It's a harder job, with less perks, for less money. The real question is why do the existing hardware engineers keep doing what they are doing when they could be making double just by picking up the phone and talking to a recruiter?

Perhaps it's because there's little skill overlap between hardware engineers and software engineers? Perhaps it's because they have different career goals and desires?

> I didn't. They shouldn't either. It's a harder job, with less perks, for less money.

This is 100% correct. Stay far, far away from semiconductor companies until the salaries come up where they belong.

> The real question is why do the existing hardware engineers keep doing what they are doing when they could be making double just by picking up the phone and talking to a recruiter?

1) Because those of us who are good at hardware engineering aren't making half of what software people make--we're making the same or more.

2) Because the people in hardware probably don't have knowledge of the "modern" web stack idiocies. A remarkable amount of hardware still runs on VB6! (the last useful desktop development environment)

3) Because the super high salaries at the FAANGs are an anomaly--as we are seeing from all the layoffs.

4) Because I do things that require my in person presence in a lab, I can't be outsourced. Everybody wants to only work from home, but they forget that if you can only work from home you can be replaced by somebody cheaper.

All good reasons to stay away from software. Would be lovely to learn one "stack" and stick to it.

>when they could be making double just by picking up the phone and talking to a recruiter?

I am getting so sick of people saying things like this. Of course, their companies never happen to be hiring at the moment...

EDA drowns all the entry-level logic and placement skills, presumably.

MEMS, NEMS is out of scope, for virtually everything.

Display tech is out of scope.

Architecture was set in stone decades ago, shows obvious signs of pipeline issues, with speculative execution vulnerabilities.

Everything in hardware is either so difficult as to require a PhD from a program that doesn't exist, or it's solved already.

EE, a lot of us work as automation engineers for the controls industry. I went the cyber security route. Job opportunities for doing EE work isn't the most entry level friendly option in the US. Not to mention the pay elsewhere is more competitive.

Recently on the topic of FPGA, there are comments questioning the value for the acquisitions of Altera and Xilinx by Intel and AMD, respectively [1].

Apparently these acquisitions are inevitable and the writings are already on the wall due to some strategic reasons. One of the main reasons is that there's significant shortage of talents in the electronics industry.

[1]FPGAs in Client Compute Hardware:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=teleforce#31975094

EE is interesting for CS too. I studied technical CS and we had a lot of EE theory. But I cannot layout a board at all, just pick components and letting people do the layout and routing. I would have loved to have a module about the latter even if that may not fit university too well. I wasn't too interested in permanently exited asynchronous motors with constant stator voltages. I'll buy the next servo I find in a catalogue for all my needs anyway.

> EE is interesting for CS too.

There are a lot of SW developers who have no idea how the processor they program for, works. And most of them are also not interested. It is just sad.

I had to take analog circuit design in my (non cs/ee) eng program and might add that to the list as well

As someone who went to school for hardware design, but graduated and immediately went into software, while money is a big factor, the bigger factor was the development lifecycle of hardware. It's much slower and more cumbersome.

That being said, this is starting to change with companies like Flux.ai and Breadboard.com (Shameless plug as the CEO of Breadboard). I expect this trend to reverse course over the next 5-10 years.

I know this may come as a shock, but people are attracted to industries with good pay and job availability. People leave industries that underpay, do not have availability and burn them out.

The whole STEM push of the last 20 years has been ridiculous. Expecting debt-amassing students to suddenly change the face of industry simply by increasing degrees is expecting the tail to wag the dog.

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