In the surplus and dullness, the market will eventually find a balance.
text丨Ma Hui
editing丨Huang Junjie
Five jobs in two years
Salary that a person who has been changing jobs reflects the times' valuation of the career he is engaged in.
In the past two years, Dewey (pseudonym), a chip engineer over 40, has felt the unparalleled tolerance of the job market for him and his peers: he has changed four companies in a row, and every time his career resume has risen one level; in the new company wherever he does not meet expectations and makes him feel uncomfortable, he can leave with confidence and boldness, and turn around and find a more satisfactory next home.
In 2020, Dewey left AMD, which he had worked for many years, and joined the GPU ( graphics processor ) startup company. He did not lead a team and his annual salary doubled to 800,000 yuan. Not long after he went there, he began to realize the problem. The seven technical leaders were all top in the industry, but no one was convinced by each other. "A plan is like this today, and it will be changed tomorrow, and it will not be decided for a long time." He was quite tiring.
has a comfortable working environment. It is common for the team to reward 30,000 to 50,000 yuan per month. It is also 15,000 yuan to recommend one person to join the company. "Some companies only give 5,000 yuan, which is not enough to invite colleagues to have a meal." In the past, if it were such treatment and environment, Dewey might have been able to sink into it for many years - before AMD was so poor that he could not get cash in the year-end bonus, and he stayed for four or five years.
But now it is different, and the choice is now in his hands. In less than a year, he left Biren and went to another GPU startup. There are many old AMD colleagues in the second new company, who have no factional struggles and consistent work processes, but the department leaders arranged for a meeting on Saturday night, "If you go on Saturday afternoon, are you here specifically for the meeting? He asked you openly, will you feel comfortable?" A few months later, he resigned again.
new company also makes GPUs, with a smaller scale. His goal is clear: as an ordinary worker, he will not talk about positions but only money, and will not move if he fails to meet expectations. As for how much it costs, it is a bit inconvenient for him to say, after all, "After passing the 960,000 line, the meaning of adding is not very great." - 45% of the part with an annual income of more than 960,000 yuan must be paid as personal income tax .
Not long ago, Dewey changed jobs again. This time he went to an autonomous driving chip company, one of the latest hot spots in the industry. He probably found a more comfortable place.
HR cares about frequent job changes, but Dewey's job is not qualified to question HR. He has been in the industry for more than ten years and has been conducting chip verification in the past six or seven years, checking and correcting chip design defects to ensure smooth production of chips. The more complex the chip, the more important it is. In the past, only a few companies such as AMD and Huawei HiSilicon, which were able to design complete large chips, trained engineers who could deal with complex verification work. In the past three years, new companies in the semiconductor industry have completed an average of more than 500 financings each year and absorbed more than 170 billion yuan of funds, and senior verification engineers are not enough to score.
is not that senior, and is not enough to score. An engineer with ten years of experience sighed, "Now I have worked for three or five years. Those who are more powerful or not have a job switch can start with more than 800,000 yuan." Statistics from Hudson, a talent solution company in
, show that chips are the industry with the highest increase in salary in job switches in 2022, with an average increase of more than 50%.
A headhunter joked that his job is no longer helping engineers find jobs, but helping engineers choose offers. They will distribute an engineer's resume to multiple companies, and no surprises will be able to get an offer.
and even, many engineers do not need headhunters to forward resumes. Another headhunter contacted an engineer from Huawei HiSilicon, whose annual salary was 500,000 yuan, and it was expected to increase by 50%. He recommended two companies to the candidates, with salaries ranging from 700,000 to 750,000 yuan.The candidate replied that he had obtained offers from three companies through internal massage, with salaries of RMB 920,000, RMB 950,000 and more than RMB 1 million respectively. He mainly wanted to know which one is more suitable for him.
is always too much money. An engineer concluded, "This is putting pressure on yourself. If you change a 100 square meter, you still want to change a 200 square meter, and you still want to change a large flat floor and a large villa. You will never be satisfied." There are too many opportunities for
, from traditional large chips such as CPU and GPU to DPU (data processor), and autonomous driving, which was born with new applications. According to statistics from investment bank Yunxiu Capital, there are nearly 10 companies in each of these fields, most of which have received financing of over 100 million yuan.
startups are not all. Mobile phone manufacturers Xiaomi , OPPO, vivo , Lenovo learn Apple self-developed chips to increase high-end chips. NIO and Xiaopeng need to build their own chips to make smarter cars. In order to reduce data center costs, Internet companies have also joined the core building team like Amazon and Google , from the earliest Baidu , Alibaba , to Tencent , ByteDance, and even Kuaishou.
New companies, new fields and new opportunities are so numerous that engineers are dazzled. The first thing a chip design engineer who has been in the industry for three or four years said after adding me to WeChat was, "Which one do you think is better to make NPUs or CPUs?"
frustrated for ten years
pushes forward even four years, this is a scene that chip engineers can only dream of. The gap they generally feel forms a mirror image with the growth of the Internet industry.
Si Jingxing (pseudonym) is a typical science and engineering talent. He took the college entrance examination in 2002 and got 290 points in physics, chemistry and biology - a full score of 300 points. He loves physics and especially likes to study circuit diagrams. He was admitted to the electronic information engineering major of , University of Science and Technology of China. More than 20 years ago, electronic engineering was a popular major, and all the results were good if you could get into the exam. From the school forum, Si Jingxing learned that "This is a major that is not in a hurry to find a job." He only found a job after finishing graduate school with peace of mind.
Graduates of electronic engineering can make both chips, software and the Internet. In 2009, when Si Jingxing graduated from graduate school, the Internet didn’t seem like a good choice. Smartphones are not that popular, China Mobile does not have 4G, , WeChat is not released, Taobao and Dianping mainly exist on computer screens. Alibaba It was just listed in Hong Kong in 2007, with a market value of only US$20 billion. PetroChina was listed in the same year and is worth one trillion US dollars.
He clearly remembers that when he graduated, he could get a monthly salary of about 9,000 yuan, and when he went to , Huawei and other Chinese companies to make chips, he could also get 7,000-8,000 yuan. If you can go to a foreign company to make chips, your income can be tens of thousands.
is earlier, and the contrast is more obvious. A chip designer graduated from the Department of Electronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2003. He went to Shanghai to participate in the Lucent interview, and five or six hundred people participated in this competition alone. In the end, he only recruited 6 fresh graduates nationwide, and he was one of them. Lucent is a telecom equipment company split by AT&T in the United States. At that time, the monthly salary for fresh graduates was tens of thousands of yuan, twice that of Huawei and Alibaba during the same period. The gap between
is inevitable. Not only did the chip engineers have a similar or even higher income from the Internet industry back then, but they also generally believed that they were doing a job with higher technical requirements.
"Learning software is to learn how to write programs, learn a language. To learn hardware, you must know how transistor works, quantum physics , learn how the lowest electrons flow and how electronics move. To put it bluntly, you can do programs without going to Peking University Bluebird training." A chip design engineer who has worked for ten years said.
A chip CAD (computer-aided design) engineer considered changing to the Internet early in his career, but after interviewing a second-tier Internet company, he gave up: "The other party said you should write me a code and grab this website with crawler . I wrote it out and passed it, and I didn't ask about the technical principles or algorithms. I was quite surprised at that time. It was obvious that everyone was pursuing different things. They just wanted to recruit those who came to work immediately and didn't care whether the technology was good or not."
Back more than ten years ago, it was hard for a person to predict that the iPhone and Android system that were born in 2007 would tie multiple rockets to the Internet industry. By 2014, Alibaba went public in the United States, with a market value of quickly exceeding US$270 billion, becoming the most valuable company in Asia, a full $100 billion higher than the number one Intel , which was the world's chip industry at that time.
, Si Jingxing, who has joined a foreign chip software design company, quickly felt that the salary in the chip industry and the Internet industry has gradually increased. "At the beginning, everyone was less than 10,000 yuan. But five years later, the salary of students who went to the Internet increased to 30,000 yuan, and they only increased by 3,000 yuan."
"At that time, the special chip version of Shuimu Community was discussing how to change careers." Si Jingxing recalled. That was the moment when he really felt "regret" and felt that following the interests of the past was not the best choice.
Salary is only one aspect. Engineers in foreign chip companies gradually discovered that direct leaders are the ceiling of their careers. If the leader does not leave, he will not have the opportunity to be promoted.
The world's most valuable chip company, Nvidia, was established in 1993 and currently has only more than 20,000 employees. Alibaba, which was founded a few years later, employed more than 240,000 people by the end of June this year, 80,000% more than in 2000. The total number of employees of ByteDance in the 10 years since its establishment exceeded 160,000. Rapid expansion means that a large number of middle-level personnel are needed, and veteran employees can be promoted quickly, lead the team, and be responsible for more important tasks.
An engineer with a master's degree in microelectronics joined a foreign chip company in 2011, with a monthly income of more than 10,000 yuan, which is enough to buy a new house of one square meter in Shanghai. Five years later, housing prices in Shanghai rose nearly 4 times, and his salary only increased by 5,000 yuan. The salary of engineers who went to Tencent and Alibaba during the same period was twice that of him, and the value of the stocks he had was a number that he could not earn in ten years.
colleagues have successively switched to Ctrip , iQiyi and Alibaba. He persisted until 2018 and started taking the CPA exam ( certified public accountant ), and three years later he changed his career to join an investment institution.
factors outside the market, has created a great opportunity for large chips
It is not difficult to understand why chip engineers can't see hope by 2018. This industry has been developing around the world for decades. The process used for a CPU has shrunk from 90 nanometers (personal computers, Intel Pentium 4 processors) in 2000 to 7 nanometers (mobile phones, Apple A12 processors) in 2018, and the number of transistors installed in it has increased from 125 million to 6.96 billion.
billion transistors mean extremely complex design and production. Every year, the top companies in the chip industry spend tens of billions of dollars on design, R&D, production and software ecosystems to squeeze out the market of unsized companies.
is not just a new player who started from scratch, but a company like AMD, which has been ranked second in the CPU and GPU market for a long time, was also on the verge of bankruptcy, with a market value of less than US$2 billion in 2015. Dewey worked at AMD at the time, and the company had no money to pay year-end bonuses, so he only gave stocks. He and his colleagues also didn’t think it was worth it, because AMD’s stock price has been hovering in single digits since the financial crisis, and has even been below the 1985 level for a long time.
Under a complete market economy, Chinese startups have no advantage in entering this market. An engineer who considered joining a startup company at the time recalled his hesitation, "Things are not cheap, and there are many problems. Why do I use yours? Of course I use the best one."
venture capital also has many concerns. It is willing to invest a small amount of investments to only markets that are relatively unfair in technologies such as Bluetooth and audio, which are not looked down upon by giants, or companies such as Bitmain that are accompanied by mining and AI. Huawei HiSilicon is almost the only role model in this industry.
geopolitical changes have changed everything. 2019 In the same year, the Sino-US trade conflict intensified. During the same period, Trump began to sign multiple executive orders to suppress Huawei, and began to affect the production of Huawei's high-end mobile phone chips the following year.
Affected by this, Chinese companies are willing to purchase independent research and development chips to cope with an uncertain future, and chip startups have opportunities. Dan Wang, a technology analyst at the macro analysis company Gavekal Dragonomics, commented that year that the conflict will prompt China to improve its technological infrastructure and build more solid technical capabilities in the long run. Entrepreneurs who see the opportunity immediately entered the market. Biren, Moore Thread and other GPU startups are all in 2019 Preparations began in the second half of the year.
In 2020, Cambrian and SMIC were listed, and Cambrian opened with a rise of nearly 290%. SMIC became the semiconductor company with the highest market value of A-shares with over 600 billion yuan. Venture capital saw an opportunity to exit. Biren completed three rounds of financing in one year and obtained 2 billion yuan. Moore Thread and Mu Xi raised 1 billion yuan in succession.
In order to invest in a good team, investors gave up the betting agreement that they once insisted on. More senior chip technical talents with more than 20 years of experience wrote BP, Entrepreneurship.
Internet entrepreneurship, a technology-savvy founder can make the first version of the product by leading a few people, start the road to growth, and form a larger team while making products. Zhang Yiming can make today's headlines, connotation jokes, etc. 20 Multiple applications.
chip entrepreneurship is not good. Before the first chip is designed, a team of hundreds of people is needed.
hardware from design to production is much longer than building a website or mobile application. If you think of different chips as different houses, building a house requires someone to draw drawings, construction and house inspection, and setting up a chip company requires architects, chip design engineers and verification engineers. Each ring in it is All festivals require more subdivided professional capabilities.
There were not many engineers in China who had experience in research and development of complex chips. Most foreign companies only had some links in China. Not many private enterprises have made large chips, and Huawei HiSilicon is the main choice for emerging startups.
has even less experience. The chip design engineer of Lucent believes that foreign companies must have experience in making the third chip, and a qualified engineer must at least work 5 years. Experience sometimes directly determines whether a company can design a qualified chip that can be produced and used. Software talents related to
chips are also scarce. If software engineers in Internet companies are not familiar with circuits, it is difficult to directly change careers. Even the supportive software development work of chip research and development requires some understanding and experience in chip design work.
is extremely limited in mature and easy-to-use engineers. When selecting core software engineers, the CTO of a GPU startup requires candidates to have overall solutions, manage their management capabilities, and be able to split software. AMD has 300 software engineers in China, but he thinks that no more than 15 people may meet this requirement. People. The supply and demand relationship of
has made experienced engineers chased by all companies.
Biren was the first to offer engineers double salary, while Moore pushed the salary of senior engineers to more than 1 million. A chip engineer who worked at the chip design automation giant Cadence at the time recalled, "It was difficult for chip engineers to overcome the hurdle of 1 million before, and they could be promoted to management in foreign companies. But after the Moore thread was established, they generally offered more than 1 million offers. Many people's salary has doubled to triple."
By the end of 2021, the GPU industry will complete 10 billion yuan in financing. The three startups with the highest financing have formed teams of more than 500 people and set up R&D centers across the country. When
is the most optimistic, even if the candidate gives an increase that the headhunter thinks is impossible, the chip company HR may pass. This optimistic judgment comes from the company's urgent needs at the time: it takes three days to recruit people from interviews to offer; some projects are underway to recruit suitable engineers to advance. If an important position like a compiler, engineers can give more than one million in three years. The requirements for
have also been lowered. At the earliest, GPU companies will have 3-5 years. Engineers with GPU experience later became engineers with 1-5 years of experience in developing large chips. Later, they wanted to make relatively simple MCU (single-chip microcontroller) chips. After
GPU, there were mobile phone manufacturers, car manufacturers, Internet companies, CPUs, DPUs, and autonomous driving chips... The trend of chip entrepreneurship in two or three years is difficult to distinguish.
new mobile phone products have no new ideas, and hardware manufacturers are expected to rely on their own chips to shape their technical image and enter the high-end market. In 2019, OPPO's chip subsidiary Zeku (Zeku), was established. Two years later, Zheku has expanded to 2,000 people. Some fresh graduates joined Zheku and have also won AMD 8 The salary of engineers in the year.
In the second half of 2021, NIO and Xiaopeng, who were originally in the traditional automobile park, set up an office in Zhangjiang to design their own chips. An engineer who felt that the financing of GPU companies was limited quickly decided to jump into this updated and more stable chip field.
In 2022, there are more choices for job-to-job increase: DPUs are considered to be an opportunity to be comparable to GPUs. Customers are mainly cloud computing companies and Internet companies. Yunbao Intelligence, which was recently invested by Tencent for the third time, has a valuation of 9 billion yuan. A DPU startup offers a chip verification engineer with ten years of experience to an annual salary of nearly 2 million yuan.
Server CPU required by data centers It is another big opportunity. There are 10 startups that have appeared last year so far. There are also autonomous driving chip companies, which add another 20% to the already rising market price this year Poaching people.
For individuals, how long does shelf life still last?
Chip companies that poach people through large-scale financing have encountered an invincible opponent - not Nvidia, but the next batch of companies that get money.
wave after wave of startups making different types of chips and targeting different customers, but most of the work done by engineers is universal. So the newly obtained companies raised the price to poach people from the previous batch of financing companies.
GPU launched in 2020 Companies have pushed the salary of experienced hardware engineers to more than one million, but still can't keep people. When Dewey left Biren at the end of 2020, most of the verification engineers who joined a year ago had already jumped to other places. The research and development of
GPU generally takes 2-3 years, and the first batch of highly paid engineers left before the product was completed. Many companies have encountered similar problems. The large amount of funds injected improves the situation of engineers and gives more young people the motivation to participate in core making. But too fast personnel changes have also affected R&D.
This year, even senior headhunters were tired. Customers who have served for one or two years have changed their faces. GPU companies that have grown up have begun to make careful calculations, and this year the only two head GPUs that have completed new financing this year The company Mu Xi only left a few recruitment positions on its official website, and the increase was only half of the past year.
Some chip companies split a part of their salary to make retention awards - if an engineer leaves within three years, all retention awards issued during the period will be returned. It is common for employees to sign a competition agreement for employees at
. The agreement does not write specific companies, but only similar products and similar businesses, and the statement is also vague - "You can't go to an industry with competitive relationship" to cover the entire chip industry in an attempt. This probably won't be of use, because autonomous driving companies and ARM CPU companies will not have product or business competition relationships, but they are scrambling the same group of people.
Engineers who have been there for a long time are worried about how long this fanaticism can last. The former Lucent engineer has since been involved in chip design at multiple companies and started his own DPU company in his 18th year of his career. He said that if there are relatives who are filling out their application for the college entrance examination, he would recommend applying for microelectronics. But in five years, he may not recommend reporting, as he feels that the time is so short.
does not mean that chips will not matter, but the chip business is too important. When China's chip industry matures, it will no longer require 10 GPU companies. The global market has experienced the same process. Now China's chip industry may do it again at a faster pace.
But before this day comes, engineers still have a chance. Young engineers who have worked for less than 5 years are becoming the main force in market flow. The reason for their job-changing is more direct than the predecessors who have accumulated over the years. For example, the colleagues who work together have a job-changing increase in salary by 80%. It is easier to choose a company. A headhunter talked to a young engineer about career planning . When he finally found out, it would be better to give them another 5,000 yuan per month.
chip startups, like Internet companies, also provide employees with options to get stocks and options . But headhunters say most people choose cash to stock ratios of 8:2 and 7:3. Young engineers choose more about the current cash than bet on the possible returns of listing in many years.
A senior headhunter imagines the status of this group of young people: hundreds of private messages from young headhunters are recommended by young headhunters, and they receive countless phone calls from headhunters every day, so that they post updates on Maimai: I haven't read the news recently. But the message from chip headhunter still has not stopped. Such an environment will naturally change a person's mentality.
"Before, everyone would also change jobs, but they had clear demands. For example, technology has reached a bottleneck or personal development has reached the ceiling. Now most people are purely because of money." A chip CAD engineer at an Internet company involved in recruitment said that he worked in the chip industry for 9 years before joining the Internet giant.
"There is no problem pursuing money, but you still have to pursue technical pursuits." Since candidates who only expect higher incomes are too common, he no longer asks the other party about the motivation for changing jobs, but only looks at the technical level, so as to avoid "mand killing" because of disagreement of values.
Although I was unwilling to do so during the "ten years of frustration", many engineers who have experienced this period said that it was an important accumulation. Give them the opportunity to look at problems more systematically and know what good processes and practices are.
"We have studied for 20 years and waited for this opportunity." A graphics architect who was nearly fifty and involved in the GPU entrepreneurship in 2020 described his luck in this way. They suspect that newcomers may no longer have time to complete such accumulation.
The market will eventually find a balance between surplus and dullness. The time required to find a balance will determine the fate of many people, many companies, and even an industry.
