Comment by md2020 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by md2020 | Hacker News Reader

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To offer a different point of view, I'm a software engineer at ASML in the US. I can only offer the experience I've had on my specific team, and I've heard that this does vary between teams, but we do follow normal software industry practices. We have version control. We have automated regression testing, and unit tests for everything we write. We do Agile and use Jira (with all the same gripes that everyone else has about those). I made $90k here right out of my undergrad, and got a raise one year later (this year) to be over $100k.

Could the tooling be better? Sure. Our version control system is pretty old, but the company has made a massive push over the last few years to modernize all of it, and when we transition to that at the end of this year I think we'll be in a pretty great spot. Some teams are already using the new tooling and it has gotten very positive reviews. I have a great relationship with my team and my manager. I get to work on interesting stuff (mostly embedded systems), and I've had the opportunity to learn a small part of one of the most advanced machines humans have ever built.

I'll say the thing about getting people from defense is true, but not so much in software. If anyone has other questions feel free to just ask.

I'm talking about making chips, not being a software engineer that happens to work in the same building as people making chips (or the building where people work on making machines that make chips). SEs showing up and saying things were fine at their SE job doesn't move the needle on this topic. Purdue's semiconductor degree program for EEs is only incidentally relevant in that case.

For the most part, Fab engineering is beyond boring and exploitative. I quit my PhD because it was excruciatingly boring, all you do is click ON/OFF on a big machine that deposits metal, and I realized, that this was what I'd be doing for 100K a year. On paper it sounds like you're doing some genius work manipulating atoms, but really it's actually quite mindless and boring, which is part of the reason the physics departments don't do this work anymore, only EE, since physics does the actual cool stuff. I think it's somewhat related to the fact that these degrees have almost no americans, and are full of foreigners that really need a visa. As an american, it made no sense to do this work, given that there are much more interesting and lucrative options.

But going back to your point, there are certain areas within semiconductor manufacturing that are software engineering jobs. They tend to be closely related to what's called physical design in the design part of making a chip. Or EDA coders. It's a cool area. But the bigger part of semiconductor manufacturing is working in a fab, which is atrocious grueling work, which is quite boring and dangerous.

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