U.S. universities are building a new semiconductor workforce | Hacker News
During our final semester in school, or professor walked in and said, "All of you but X needs to know that you're going to be unemployed." He said that to a class of 4 people, the only ones left after most of the original class of 20+ had quit. "The industry only hires the exceptional, you are all inept. Except for X, my favorite student." X ended up being the only person to go on to work in a semicon company. The rest of us ended up in software, earning 5x the pay X was making. The barrier of entry to software engineering is so so much lower than semicon, which still makes no sense to me. At the end of the day, the stakes are way too high to allow everyone a chance to play cowboy with the tools. You want your best possible champions to bring a design to bear. Then, the other 99% of the army is responsible for implementing the design in as repeatable & standardized a fashion as physically possible so that there is even the remotest chance of yield+profit. Software is the antithesis of