[Nokinside]

Maybe it's not just the wage cap.

There is plenty of semiconductor industry in the US but it's differently specialized and they compete for the same pool of engineers. Nvidia, AMD or Broadcom don't have fabs, but they hire engineers from the same pipeline as fab companies.

It's few years since I was hiring EE majors in the US, but it felt that skilled people with EE master's are harder and harder to find every year. I think USC and CMU are the only ones that produce quantity and quality. MIT, Stanford, and Berkley produce quality but not quantity.

[bsder]

> It's few years since I was hiring EE majors in the US, but it felt that skilled people with EE master's are harder and harder to find every year.

Semiconductor pay is dogshit compared to software. And everything is going to be in the office at whatever crap city has the fab--no remote work for you.

Any EE smart enough to be good at stuff for a fab is smart enough to GTFO to software.

The solution: cough up some damn cash.

I have to use my microscope to go hunt for the world's tiniest violin when I hear companies complaining about hiring EEs.

[shiroiushi]

I got my degree in EE many years ago, and quickly came to the same conclusion, and moved from hardware to software and never went back. Hardware has long been a terrible career field in the US, and anyone smart moved into some kind of software-related job.

Also, your "crap city" bit is an important factor too. WhoTF wants to live in Phoenix AZ? The fabs are usually located in rather lousy places, whereas software jobs usually give you far more choices for places to live. There's software jobs virtually everywhere these days.

[torginus]

I wonder if these schools produce such top talent because of their excellent education, or is it merely the fact that they only accept highly conscientious geniuses who would've succeded otherwise.

[selimthegrim]

Caltech?

[Nokinside]

If I remember correctly Caltech is in the quality over quantity group as well. Something like 100 - 150 graduates per year.

Here is some data:

CHIPPING AWAY ASSESSING AND ADDRESSING THE LABOR MARKET GAP FACING THE U.S. SEMICONDUCTOR INDUSTRY https://www.semiconductors.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/SI...

>67,000, or 58%, of new jobs across manufacturing and design will risk going unfilled by 2030.

Another nugget from Fig 6: More than half of the MS graduates in semiconductor-related engineering fields are foreign and 80% of foreign Master’s leave the U.S.

People in the US keep asking "Should I go to college?" and "Who needs calculus?"