nurspouse

As an aside, in Islam, people have to pay a 2.5% wealth tax annually for charity.[1]

This does make retiring a tad bit complicated. Say you've saved $3M and are ready to retire. That means each year you're spending $75K just to satisfy this tax.

[1] Depending on how your wealth is structured. Cash is 2.5%, but if you own, say, a business, you pay the tax on the value of the goods, not on the value of the building, hardware, etc. You don't pay Zakat on the house you live on. Agriculture is actually taxed at 10%, etc.

For context:

As a percentage of the population, Hamas's attack on Oct 7th killed 6 times as many people as Al Qaeda did on September 11. If you are an Israeli, you are 6 times more likely to know someone impacted by those attacks than Americans did in 2001. As a result of the 2001 attack, the US invaded two countries, resulting in million(s)[1] dead on the other side.

Make no mistake: For any country that has the means, losing 900 people in one day will always be seen as an act of war, and they will respond. While the Israeli response is certainly "disproportionate", it is not by any means an outlier when you compare with typical conflicts around the world.

I definitely think Israel's response should be condemned, but I will openly say: Our government(s) in the US routinely do worse. Let there be perspective.

[1] Depends on which study you look at.

I've been using xonsh professionally since around 2018 - in both Windows and Linux. Love it. Getting it to run existing bash scripts was a pain earlier on, but has gotten much better.

The one thing I don't do is make it my official shell in Linux. I keep bash/zsh as my shell, but the first thing I do in any shell is launch xonsh. Occasionally it does crash and it's nice to end up in a "backup" shell in case I need to recover anything.

Psst... xonsh!

Relatively terse, and quite readable scripts (they are mostly Python!)

PTD is almost entirely PhDs.

If he was a test automation engineer, he likely had transferable skills. Many/most of the fab folks have almost no programming skills, and are PhDs in things like chemistry[1], etc.

Now some of them do take the initiative and learn SW skills, or data analysis properly, and switch due to that. But the majority of them feel stuck. They have a heavy workload and do not feel they have time to learn new skills.

[1] For a long time, and perhaps even now, the fabs only hired either technicians or PhDs. An exemption would be needed to hire someone with "just" an MS. Of course, almost none of these jobs actually need PhD level skills.

Intel isn't a great place to work (despite their corporate value claiming it is), but by most accounts, Amazon is much worse unless you really like a place with cutthroat corporate politics.

I used to work at Intel. Some data points:

When the news about how bad Amazon's culture was (e.g. people crying at desk), my thoughts were "This sounds like Intel."

When you talk to Amazon employees, most say "Every team is different. We don't see such behavior in my team, and I don't work long hours (i.e. more than 40)." And the same can be said at Intel. If you're close to the fab, the behavior is crap. Software tends to be pretty chill. And you'll see everything in between. I recall once going in on Saturday and talking to a guy - he said he'd worked every weekend for the last 6 weeks and expects to continue doing so for a month or two more.

Everyone I know who has left Intel to join Amazon is happier at Amazon. Everyone. The most common refrains:

1. Good work/life balance at Amazon (although some had it good at Intel too).

2. Far fewer morons at Amazon. When you're in the non-core parts of Intel (e.g. software), the people around you are fairly poor in terms of talent (e.g. complaining about having to use Git, saying we're using it only because Microsoft owns Git (!), refusing to use branches in Git and insisting on just creating command line arguments for every experiment you want to try).

Intel, though, does have better PTO.

Former Intel employee here. This may be true for their design folks, but the largest portion of the company is related to the fab, and there aren't many jobs for those folks. Moreover, the alternatives (TSMC, Samsung, etc) suck as much as Intel.

Intel hired over 20,000 people this year alone (likely a record for them both in terms of absolute and relative percentage). The freeze is similar to that of other companies: Uncertainty over economic conditions.

While such people may exist at Intel, it's not at all the norm, and to be frank, doesn't improve your chances of getting a job there.

(Worked at Intel and along with fab/process folks for a bunch of years).

This falls more into the electronics domain, which I know is sometimes put under the "semiconductor" bucket, but in universities usually has its own domain ("microelectronics" in my day). It's a lot more focused on the circuit/high frequency model of the transistor, and builds up form it.

Semiconductor theory is more about the transistor and everything below it: Starting from quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, derive the equations of electron/hole transport in a doped semiconductor, how the material's band structure impacts current flow, etc. The derivation of the transistor equations is often the end point.

The industry doesn't have a talent shortage, which explains the working conditions. There will always be grad students who think "Cool! I get to do research involving quantum mechanics!"

Trust me, I've tried to talk them out of it and never succeeded.

Semiconductor theory is more interesting, but don't even consider it unless you love math and can do standard integrals without having to look up tables.

Also, the mistake I made when I went to grad school: Semiconductors seemed to be a "new" field compared to the rest of EE. One of my undergrad professors said "They still haven't figured out what a standard textbook should contain."

In reality, from a research standpoint, it's a very mature field. Don't expect low hanging fruit. If you're going to focus on theory, expect it'll take a number of years of dedicated study before you get to the frontier. You'll need to know quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, and some electromagnetics, just to begin studying semiconductor theory. Then a whole bunch of specialized solid state courses. Then you start studying the specific subtopics (reading key journal papers).

But later I'd want to work as compiler engineer

Why are you wasting time with semiconductors...?

I worked at Intel, and with process/fab people for a number of years.

Everything you're seeing in the comments is true.

Compensation is not that bad. Clearly, it'll not pay SW salaries - no engineering does. But if you're a fab person, you'll work long hours, be on call often (and you will get woken up often), and eventually will own a tool that you'll be responsible for, even when not on call.

Lots of abusive and pathological behavior, as well. And they often block internal transfers so you're basically trapped.

People with other skills (e.g. SW) get out. The rest are stuck, because they have, for example, a chemistry PhD and no other company will pay more.

See this thread from a while ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30027143

I assume that's because of pay. Working conditions for SW folks is fairly decent at most of the company, except possibly for firmware folks.

I suppose some people didn't like their status in a HW company.

There is a preference for hiring people directly out of grad school and inducting them into the cult while they are still naive, so that's just what they come to expect for work-life balance.

Heh. I once interviewed for an internal SW position that dealt with fab automation. I openly told them in the interview that I knew about their work culture and that was of great concern to me.

Interviewer: I know what you mean, and I promise the org has been working to improve the conditions. It's not as bad as it was.

Me: Great! However, for me the comparison isn't the "old you" but the rest of Intel.

<Back and forth>

Interviewer: Look, you're not going to get a 40 hour/week job anywhere in the SW industry!

Me: Umm... All my SW engineer roles at Intel were 40 hour/week jobs. I haven't worked on weekends in years. <Proceed to list friends at big name SW companies who also don't work more than 40 hours/week>

Interviewer: OK. We normally interview people straight out of college who don't know any better.

Needless to say, I didn't take that job.

Good in terms of process engineers, poor compared to FAANG SW Engineers.

Having worked at Intel, I can tell you that the process side of Intel has similar work hours. This, in particular, rings true for Intel:

Different positions may have different requirements, so work hours vary, according to the principal engineer. “An equipment engineer might start work at 8 o’clock in the morning and leave around 9 o’clock at night, but is it normal? This may happen two or three days a week. On a production line, the equipment must be maintained.

“If you are a process engineer, it will be more stable. Maybe you can start work at 8:30 a.m.and leave before 7:30 p.m. If there are some urgent matters, you may have to stay later.”

At Intel, process engineers had to attend a daily meeting at 7:40am (mandatory), and would rarely leave before 6pm (meetings scheduled at 5 or 6pm were common). I sometimes would wander around in that part of the building at 7pm and a significant fraction of cubicles would be filled.

Almost all Intel process engineers have PhDs.

The unwritten rule is that managers aren't incentivized to police this behavior.

Unless it is the manager who has to constantly do the reminding. Then there is swift policing :-)

Yes, this is actually normal "human" behavior. But this level of extreme was ridiculous, even within Intel. I quickly left the team once the project was over. Life is too short.

Wise words. In cultures that do this, you have to adapt and work more on narrative/story-telling.

Narrative/story telling is good, but is orthogonal to the issue here. The usual flow is to use narrative/story telling to explain the why (motivation, etc). However, some senior management will expect you to also talk about the details. And this is where the advice came in: "Put the details, and make sure they don't understand them." My sin was that I was presenting the details in a manner where they could understand it (without losing the nuances and details - I was mere presenting the same material "well").

A more severe example will enlighten: I once solved a challenging problem with a really simple solution. My manager had multiple sessions with me to coach me on how to present that simple solution in a much more complex way. He emphasized that senior management should not realize that the solution was simple - no matter how impactful it was.

Yes - this is also a general "human" problem, and is common in lots of places. However, when you're striving to be the best company in X, it is wise not to settle for "average".

Spent years at Intel. Definitely saw what is described here. Must also add that it is a big company with no clear culture, so many people will have been in teams for years and not have encountered what skynetv2 is describing.

My two cents: Intel is full of people who are career oriented and not product oriented. Their main goal is to get a promotion, and often find means to do so without contributing anything meaningful to Intel's products. It's also full of senior leaders who believe strongly in credentialism[1], complexity[2], and style over substance (i.e. how the message is delivered vs the content).[3]

From a SW standpoint, I have not yet been in a team where all teammembers can handle branches.[4] This is quite acceptable.

In one team I was in, I was leading the efforts for a product that required features A and B by the customer. I was a junior member of the team with no domain knowledge, but I was somewhat of an expert for that customer's domain. Everyone was on board with the technical work. In every meeting we had for about a year, there would always be some person in the team who'd suggest things that would nullify feature B. I would have to remind them that we agreed to do features A and B." The response would always be "Oh, we're also doing feature B?"

The person who would say this varied from meeting to meeting. But I was very frustrated that they couldn't remember this basic fact, and often ended up writing code that had to be undone. And then deal with their frustration as if I had never mentioned feature B to them. I can understand if this happens once or twice, but I have to remind them in every meeting.

But this was normal behavior. I was the odd person who thought this was unacceptable.

Oh, and coming to meetings unprepared is the norm. No one will read your emails briefing them about the meeting ahead of time.

[1] "Let's hire the PhD with no experience and not the internal MS employee who's already doing the job they are hiring the PhD for"

[2] "I don't care if your code sped up our workflow by 5x. It's just what, 200 lines of code? Anyone can do that."

[3] Presentations break most rules of effective communications/presentations. A senior person once told me "You explained things too well, and your slides are fairly sparse. Fill it up with jargon and lots of plots, and don't explain it as well as you did. If senior management understands your work too easily, they will believe the work you did was trivial. If they have trouble understanding it, they'll be in awe."

[4] One former manager: "Every person will get his/her own private branch. Do all your experimental work there. There will be no more branches." A senior member in another team said "Why complicate things by adding new branches for our various experiments? Let's just keep it in the main branch and enable the different algorithms via command line flags."

I was involved in the self-driving efforts at Intel. Can confirm the incompetence.

Management doesn't get a say in this. HR does. Gelsinger is the first CEO at Intel to openly admit Intel pays below market rate and when he joined he promised an 18 month timeline to improving compensation. Most of it involves negotiating with the board.

Recently Intel paid a number of employees extra RSUs as a "first step". It does seem the ordering was ML > SW > everyone else (from anecdotes).

ML engineers make more than general software engineers everywhere. At least they did for a while between roughly 2015 and 2020.

It's not clear if SavantIdiot is a SW person (vs HW/fab), but while what you say is correct, note that Intel significantly underpays SW as well. He was a grade 9 employee, which is fairly senior - very few employees will get to that level. Even today, looking on levels.fyi, the typical Grade 7 employee (equivalent of upper L4 in Google) gets about $163K in total compensation (salary + bonus + stocks). The grade 9 person gets about $260K total. The equivalent in Google is from $356K to $490K.

Furthermore, consider this: Intel's problems involve manufacturing - fab, etc. If you're a principal engineer, your total comp is still lower than a new ML engineer with no experience. It's very hard to become a principal engineer - only 4% of employees who get to the grade level below it will ever get to principal engineer.

That ML employee isn't going to help much with fab issues - the principal engineer is. How do you think he'll feel knowing that he's a lot more responsible for the future of the company, yet the guy just out of school will reap more financial benefits than the person who actually played a bigger role in making it happen?

Also did the ML guy have an advanced degree that your long-timer friends didn’t?

SavantIdiot was a grade 9, which is 2 grade levels above an incoming PhD. SavantIdiot was a very senior person.

I know some Lisp/Scheme, but never really did any projects in it. What did you use to learn Racket (both the language and the ecosystem)? If I had to read a single book/tutorial, what will give me the most bang for my time?

I tried reading the official docs, but while they're great for reference, probably not the best in terms of tutorials/learning.

I don't want my kids to be taught that there's this amorphous but pervasive "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" out to get people who look like them, but which they can't do anything about.

My local PBS station recently aired a series on Asian Americans. The first episode was all about how they were ill treated in the past, and their fight for civil liberties.

I didn't bother watching the other episodes. Certainly not a show I'll ever let my (Asian) children watch. It was a good episode if the topic was specifically about civil right struggles by Asian Americans, but deciding to start a series about a whole group of people with how they were mistreated is problematic. There's a lot more to Asian Americans than just their treatments by whites. Why not begin with their achievements and cultures, and leave this for a later episode? Is their mistreatment so important to their identity?

If I watched a series on African Americans, and it began with all the (real) systemic racism - their low graduation rates, high teen pregnancies, high unemployment, and tied it to the centuries of slavery, it would be equally problematic. Why not begin the series with things like "Every single new genre of American music in the 20th century (rap, rock n roll, etc) was pioneered by African Americans"? How many people know the negatives, and how many know this accomplishment? Ask yourself: Would a documentary series starting with their problematic statistics result in more people knowing the negatives vs the positives?

When I talk to people from my home country, you'll see this dissonance: They all sympathize with the "plight of the black man", and they'll all tell me to stay away from them. They watch documentaries like these.

I don't want my children growing up believing they are victims of society, even if there is truth to it. I grew up in a third country, and my race was definitely discriminated against in nasty ways. Yet my parents and school did not try to inculcate a sense of victimhood, and I can tell you - it's extremely beneficial not to be weighed down by that belief. And the racism there was more overt than here - often having to deal with it in stores and in school.

Of course, there will be conversations with my kids about it. But it will be somewhere in the middle of the list of important discussions to have, not on the top.

Disclaimer: I worked at Intel.

Calling them useless may be a bit of a stretch. If you said "mediocre", I'd believe it. Also, in my experience there, the ratio is not uniform - you could go to a department with lots of top notch folks, and then to another department with everyone being mediocre.

Some data points:

Asked a person in a SW interview to write a function to calculate the factorial. The candidate was repeatedly told he could use whatever language he wants. He insisted on using a language he had little experience in (C++), and not the one he was experienced in (Python). He was given latitude to use any method he wanted: Recursive, iterative, etc.

He didn't even come close to solving it.

He was still hired.

He is not an outlier when it comes to SW folks at Intel. Yes, Intel definitely has some really good SW engineers, but the 1:40 ratio easily applies in that sphere.

Up till 2014, my department insisted on using cvs for version control. They said they saw no benefit to git (or even SVN).

In another team I was in, we were stuck with SVN. The senior manager wouldn't allow us to use git because he was sure it would be over the heads of many of the employees (sadly, he may have been right). Then in 2017, when IT announced that SVN was being EOL, to avoid git they switched to MS TFS (even though TFS themselves recommend git!) I still hear from folks there about the resistance to switch to git. And the following comment I've heard from multiple folks:

"I don't want to use git because it comes from Microsoft!" (conflating github with git, and upon further discussion realizing they have no idea MS bought Github - they think Git and Github both originated from MS).

BTW, I'm not a git fan boy - I much prefer mercurial.

If you're good at SW and somewhat up to speed with current technology, Intel is a very frustrating place to work.

But then again, their compensation for SW is simply not competitive:

https://www.levels.fyi/company/Intel/salaries/Software-Engin...

I have to disagree with this as an Iranian working in Germany who moved with an offer on a Blue Card.

Reading up on it, I assume you got this offer while not in the EU? That is impressive. Over here (and often in Canada as well), few companies will give you an offer without you doing an on site interview - unless you are clearly exceptional. So it becomes a Catch-22.

(Of course, things likely changed in the age of COVID).

Regarding your other point about racism, that experience is not representative of the whole of EU. I am biased as I live in Berlin but I think you are also biased (probably) if you live in the multi cultural centers of US(SV/LA/NYC/Seattle etc.).

Well, like in the EU, it is fairly nuanced here. I've spent most of my time in the US in small towns, actually - 100K or smaller, and some time in a larger city (but not as big as Seattle, etc). I've lived in both Red and Blue states. It's extremely hard to generalize. The least diverse city I lived in was also the most welcoming (I am not white) - and in a Red state. The larger, multicultural (and liberal) city I live in only like people like ma as long as my views are in line with theirs ;-)

I may be wrong. Pre-2016, it was much easier to find very open and vocal anti-immigrant rhetoric in the EU - but perhaps it's just a very loud minority. Of course, post-2016 you see plenty of that in the US. But prior to that, people really cared mostly about illegal immigration (and amusingly, the pro-immigration folks are often only referring to illegal immigrants - they do very little for those trying to gain legal immigration).

Speaking of racism in the US, here are some comments I made a while ago with more details:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21486342

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19324589

I am an immigrant who got a GC via the H1B route, so I'll give some perspective. I work at one big company, and have heard from those at FAANG.

It depends on how you define H1B abuse. Most of the H1-B abuse I'm aware of are either from small companies, or companies like Infosys, etc where they really exploit the whole system. Most of the major companies (Microsoft, FAANG, etc) do not have systematic abuse, beyond perhaps lowering everyone's wages as a result of hiring them. At least where I worked, people with H1B's did not get paid less than those who were citizens.

Now although there's no systematic abuse, individual instances exist where managers exploit this dynamic and tend to overwork people. In the teams I saw this, it was usually the manager doing it to everyone (H1B or citizen), but they were often biased in favor of hiring H1Bs. One particular (very senior) manager was recently fired for abusive behavior, and it likely was because he became senior enough that many of the people under him were not H1Bs, and were quite vocal in not putting up with his crap. So it does exist.

As another commenter said, FAANGs and similar companies are usually very good at helping you get a green card. My company, for example, has a policy that if they hire you for a H1B, they will start your green card process as soon as they can. You just have to perform your job till you get it (1-2 years if you're not Indian or Chinese and have a MS degree). Most other companies (including established big names) do not have such a policy - a lot of them say they want to try you out for a while to see if you're good enough before putting in the financial investment to apply for your green card. With lots of companies, you often have to pay for it yourself and keep a tab on the law firm to make sure they're doing things right - not so at FAANG.

For a lot of H1Bs, they have to consider the alternatives. Quite a few come from countries with little opportunities, and much worse abuse. I can say that for my case, and it is likely true for people from India, China and Korea.

The "pipeline" is also easy in the US. Come here for a MS degree, and get hired. For many other countries, it's not that easy. Some allow you to immigrate due to your advanced degree, but with no guarantee of work, so you need to have plenty of money saved while you look for work - something many cannot afford.

For all that we hear about racism in the US, the day to day experience (outside of work) is still a lot better in the US than in many European countries. A South Asian friend of mine moved from the US to Switzerland and not long after he moved someone planted a big anti-immigrant sign right on his door. He was also made to feel unwelcome in bars. I've heard similar stories in other European countries. The experiences aren't directly comparable - some things really are worse in the US, but it's not a clear ordering where other countries are better. The only one better places I can think of is Canada (albeit with a lot lower pay), and maybe Australia. Australia was definitely considered worse than the US (from an anti-immigrant stance) in the 90's, but most people I know who've moved in the last 15 years really like it.

So as bad as you think the US is, there aren't many good alternatives if your goal is to settle down. Either you get a good environment with no path to citizenship and/or low income, or you get a poor environment (locals very unfriendly), or both.

FAANG hires them so that they can exploit them as cheap labor that can't risk leaving.

FAANG pays H1Bs more than almost all other companies pay senior American execs. I cannot call that exploitation.

I was careless with my wording. By workstation, I was emphasizing the station portion.

As an example, my current cube at Intel has walls all around (albeit short, but some buildings have walls taller than most people), 2 file storage cabinets with a fair number of drawers, a decent sized desk (enough for 2 people, not that we'd do that). Correspondingly, the cube is enough for 2 people. Also, I have a whiteboard.

Using cubicles a symptom of a sickness would mean that Google and FB are sicker. Intel has better workstations.