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Comment by lizknope | Hacker News Reader

What kind of job is X doing and at what company?

Are they working at a fab? Working in the manufacturing portion of the fab? Doing process design work on a computer? There are so many different types of jobs within the semiconductor industry and some are going to pay far higher than others.

As I said in my other comment in the thread I have worked at many fabless semiconductor companies. The different between software and hardware salaries at companies like Nvidia and Apple is around 10% or so, not 5X.

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Last I heard it was Micron. Not too sure what X got into. He was definitely a genius though.

[Edit] Just checked. He has left the industry a few years back, and is now a software engineering manager. Even the brightest student has given up. Someone on this post said it best, they need to have salaries matching the amount of skill required.

If X works in something low level like device physics then there are a limited number of companies doing cutting edge fab stuff like that. Intel, TSMC, Samsung. The small number of companies limits your salary potential.

It's the same with being a maintenance technician for a piece of ASML 3nm semiconductor manufacturing equipment. You may be highly skilled but if there are only 3 companies in the world that will hire you then your salary potential is limited.

I know about 30 people developing hardware at Apple (writing Verilog, custom analog serdes design) and you can see that their software and hardware salaries are similar. In some cases hardware is higher although I suspect that is because of the limited sample size of salary data at the ICT6 level.

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/software-eng...

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/hardware-eng...

There is more to life than money but people who care about money need to look into the companies and salaries before they commit themselves to 4 to 10 years of college.

Yeah you're right. It probably really comes down to a lack of potential employers. Hopefully this push by the US can change that.

Other branches of engineering: mechanical engineering, material science, chemical engineering, certainly civil engineering tend to pay at a lower level overall as well. And the purer sciences often require advanced degrees to get "real" jobs at all.

When I worked for a computer systems company after school, my impression was that the various types of engineers at the company were on fairly similar pay scales. What I think you've seen the past couple of decades is that out-sized salaries at some mostly software-related West Coast companies have really driven up compensation for specific types of jobs. It seems more likely that will settle down to levels with comparable jobs over time than the other way around as a lot of people who are late to the game try to jump in.

That's an interesting angle I'd never considered. If the government simply creates a lot of potential employers via funding, the labor market becomes competitive, which improves working conditions, compensation, and ultimately attracts talent that would not have otherwise considered the industry. The most interesting part is that outcome is almost a certainty if the government focuses on creating that competitive labor market through their investments; it doesn't require moonshots, breakthroughs, or wild successes to work, yet it can produce them, and can become self-sustaining.

> If X works in something low level like device physics then there are a limited number of companies doing cutting edge fab stuff like that. Intel, TSMC, Samsung. The small number of companies limits your salary potential.

You should be very careful about comparing raw salary numbers: a much better metric to compare is "'salary' minus 'cost of living at the job location'".

If you're pulling in 400k USD per year, it actually doesn't matter what the cost of living is. You tie up 40% of your income in a 1-2 million dollar house and still save $50-$100k a year while buying everything you want on a daily basis, then retire after 20 years and live like a king

I think maybe in Taiwan and China semiconductor engineers are earning a good salary, especially China when government is dumping insane amount of $$ into it. But there is a lot of hype though.

Software salaries in both places are also a lot lower.

Yeah but for companies as Ali and Tencent you can have lucrative salaries.

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