The semiconductor manufacturing process is so ridiculously cool that they have to make the working conditions terrible to keep the plant from being flooded with junior engineers. I worked in ion implant, which means I was responsible for honest-to-god particle accelerators working right. But you pay for the cool factor in sweat. Pager duty isn’t a thing you take turns with. It’s your duty to carry a pager, always, from the day you sign on until the day you leave. And you will get paged. A lot. At all hours. Some of those pages will require you to go in, but you work so many hours at the plant that you’re probably already there. Did you know that “exempt” means “exempt from the 40 hour work week?” You probably have to attend at least one passdown meeting a day. Those are at 6, and whether that’s a.m. or p.m., it means you’re working a long day. The fab needs weekend coverage too, so every fifth or sixth week, you go in and work straight through, 12 days.

And then there’s the software. Part of my job was entering numbers into a system that had been designed to make it hard to enter numbers in it. This was so that you wouldn’t change them too often. But we did. A big part of the job was data analysis, but instead of actual access, certain data was only available as server rendered PNGs. Small ones.

I could go on, but I think that’s enough.

I left the industry because it is soul crushing for anyone who wants to try new ideas.

I also had a pager strapped to me 24/7/365. Finding a US backup for a UI developed in an obscure language owned by a Japanese IT company proved to be quite challenging. I bet they're still using it to this day and just managing it from Korea now. The risk of rewriting or refactoring some of this stuff is measured in 10-11 figures.