201–210 of 547 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. I make less than $45/hr (salary with extra hours dragging it down further, but with benefits). Edit for background: I have 9 years experience, an MSIS working at a financial company.
That may be median for your area and you may be happy with it. In west coast tech hubs, that's about half of median salary alone. If you factor in bonus, stock options, etc. That's about 1/3 or 1/4 of total comp. https://www.levels.fyi/
In my estimation, Intel has four categories in which it is being outperformed by key competitors: 1. TSMC/Samsung - fabrication 2. AMD/Amazon-Graviton - Cloud Server 3. Apple-M1/AMD - Laptop 4. Nvidia/Amazon - Cloud ML/DL Accelerator Intel has made giant blunders in the past (e.g. Itanium [1], Atom [2], WiMAX [3]) but I'm not sure that any of these past challenges were equivalent to the current four-front war. I woul…
I'm kind of questioning whether it even makes sense for Intel to try to compete with Nvidia and AMD when it comes to GPUs or deep learning accelerators. They just need to really win in one area in a sense, or at least to have a product with a really compelling price/performance ratio. Though you could argue there's a certain synergy between laptops, desktops and servers (people will generally favor running the same a…
Amazon's Graviton ARM Neoverse CPUs only implement ARM NEON SIMD rather than the newer SVE2. I don't know if ARM SVE2 has Matrix math instructions like AMX does. Intel AVX++ might be an important alternative to discreet ML/DL accelerators. DL Training accelerators appear to be focused on RDMA Over Converged Ethernet [1] (RoCE) and I'm assuming that this technology is new enough for Intel to gain a foothold.
I don't know if I understand this space well enough but I think there are enough truths in this explanations to keep me from ruling out Intel.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDMA_over_Converged_Ethernet
Earlier quoted context omitted.
$45/hr is about what I was paid as a grad-student intern at Apple ... 15 years ago.
I have a salary that would work our to less than $45/hr, with extra hours dragging it down further.
A big piece of career advice I have for any folks that feel like they're in dead-ends or are just getting started is that, in modern society, you should be constantly expending time and energy to ensure you're in the most personally rewarding position - the world is a cruel place where the socially awkward and introverted have a constant uphill battle to not be exploited.
Oh and we're all super lucky to be in tech because in a lot of other fields there is just no way to advance yourself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. It would be a bit of a gamble, as it may undercut their x86 lines, but as a hedge against the success of ARM/M[1,2,...], they may do themselves a favor to attempt a project to implement RISC-V. They don't have much to lose, as AMD is already killing their x86 lines anyway.
I've been hoping Intel or AMD would try RISC-V. If the ISA is inherently more efficient (not saying it is) they should be able to prove it by having already optimized so much core and cache hardware.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Steve Jobs, already legendary for avoiding paying engineers for their contributions, organized an industry-wide cartel to hold down wages, and he never had an MBA. It's a bad leadership thing, not an MBA thing.
It's not bad leadership to hold down the costs of your key inputs. It's bad leadership to do that if doing so undermines the position of your company in the market. The handful of Apple engineers I know are incredibly happy and devoted to their work at Apple and being paid 50% more to work for Google would feel like a step backward to them. That, in combination with their business results is, to me, evidence of excel…
I think your point misses a crucial distinction.
The issue isn't whether or not "holding down the costs of your key inputs" is good or bad, all other things being equal. Rather, the issue was that Jobs formed an illegal cartel to accomplish that goal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been approached by headhunters for contract work at Intel. They want all kinds of machine learning knowledge & experience and the pay is.... $45/hr. I kid you not. I just sort of laugh and tell them that that's about 1/3 of market rate for that kind of thing.
I am 100% in the same boat. Had a recruiter reach out to me who wanted me to leave my more than comfortable six figure SV job to do cutting edge contract work in machine learning as a lead engineer for about $50/hour. I was so amused I actually spent the time listening to their pitch and eventually told them that anything less than $200/hour wouldn't even cover my current pay + benefits. Let me know if you can do bet…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For unsteady contracted project work, this doesn't sound off the mark for high-value niche skillsets at a senior or principal level. I wouldn't expect FAANGs to pay it for steady work, though. Well, Netflix might come close. I can count two principal-level architects pulling north of 700k/y, but I doubt they work just 40 hours a week.
I just have trouble wrapping my head around how someone can be that valuable. I'll never even hit $75/hr (excluding inflation).
That said, I think this is only achievable because of how relatively young and greenfield software is - the industry hasn't existed for more than a eighty years in any real sense (and arguably didn't really begin until things moved from academic to commercial in the seventies or so) and thus a lot of software can add massive value to society while doing relatively simple things. I think in a few hundred years all the low hanging fruit will be gone and software development will be extremely different from these wild-west days but right now yea - the value you can produce for a business can absolutely justify pretty ridiculous salaries.
I think the important counter point for humility here is that those folks aren't particularly special, maybe a 700k architect is a literal genius at the peak of their career, but there are other folks out there that are just as creative and making 80k. Maybe we just need to think of the strange wage imbalance in development as being as fickle and arbitrary as celebrity - could that actor at the local playhouse have been the next Jennifer Lawrence if only they'd gotten cast for the role? Quite possibly, but luck wasn't on their side and passed them over.
I'd say that people that command such high salaries are certainly worth it (in the cases I've seen at least) but they have also benefited from some fantastic luck in their career progression - they could've been someone else and be earning far less for the same set of skills.
This is an encouraging move. My secondhand understanding was that Intel was losing top talent due to pressure to pay closer to median industry compensation. Top engineers recognized they were underpaid and left the company. I've been part of a similar downhill slide at a smaller company in the billion dollar revenue range. To be blunt, once the [mediocre] MBAs start realizing that the engineers are getting paid more…
Ringing up elderly chipmakers to help shore up a company that's been run into the ground by marketing and management only confirms the same disastrous management practices are still at play
As a leader trying to resuscitate a brand, eschewing new talent for old is just going to get you handfuls of engineers familiar with corporate ladder climbing and various no wake zones that might challenge the status quo. It also sends a clear message to newly minted PhD and graduates: Intel is closed for new ideas.