[lumost]

How hard do you think it is to find engineers who are

- Great at legacy C++ code.

- Great at new C++ code.

- Great at embedded/high performance/distributed code.

- Are experts in Linear Algebra and Calculus

- Are competent at Machine Learning and similar problems.

Now imagine, that after you find ~10-50 competent senior engineers who can each segment and train 1-5 engineers, you also need to hire 10-20 managers, PMs and directors who are smart enough to do more than "copy NVidia's offering from last year", and wise enough to still build a 1:1 compatibility layer.

Apple is likely seeing more traction on their metal API by virtue that it is reasonably well guaranteed to be around in ~5 years, and is common on multiple device platforms that students/devs use or customers deploy.

[Tiktaalik]

All this describes video game programmers to me (well 4/5 at least). Given that there's been thousands of game layoffs recently anyone looking to build their AI teams should be diving through linkedin looking for laid off video game programmers.

[lumost]

My understanding of the games industry is that a small fraction of game programmers are working on core game engines and low level graphics kernels. Is that inaccurate?

[klooney]

Even people working on the higher level stuff have more exposure to matrix multiplication than people working on CRUD apps.

[dannyw]

We're talking about trillion dollars of market cap here. If the difficulty is in hiring up to ~70 people, with somewhat but not obscure skills, perhaps the executives should be revisited.

[dotnet00]

It's kind of hilarious to be saying that Apple is more likely to be seeing traction on Metal of all things, when all but the last one of those requirements fit graphics programmers in Vulkan or DirectX, both of which have far more traction than Metal, and that last requirement is pretty easy to pick up if you're an expert in linear algebra and calculus.

It gets even stranger when considering that as major GPU makers, both AMD and Intel have lots of access to such talent.

[pjmlp]

Vulkan only has traction on Android, and a couple of Linux titles.

Metal has 20% of the desktop market, and whole of the iOS/iPad/watchOS markets combined.

Even with Android market share, many folks keep using OpenGL ES, because Vulkan tooling on Android sucks and isn't available to Java/Kotlin developers like OpenGL ES is, so only game engines like Godot/Unreal/Unity make use of Vulkan in practice.