U.S. universities are building a new semiconductor workforce
I majored in semiconductors out of genuine interest. It was fascinating to me how miniature components can be turned into digital and analog devices. It turned out to be one of the most boring things I&#x27;ve ever touched. Cadence was an endless loop of crashing and losing progress. Anything you designed was called worthless because there&#x27;s already a library of capacitors, amplifiers and DAC ADC components for you to drag and drop in. It was so incredibly dry.<p>During our final semester in school, or professor walked in and said, &quot;All of you but X needs to know that you&#x27;re going to be unemployed.&quot; He said that to a class of 4 people, the only ones left after most of the original class of 20+ had quit.<p>&quot;The industry only hires the exceptional, you are all inept. Except for X, my favorite student.&quot;<p>X ended up being the only person to go on to work in a semicon company. The rest of us ended up in software, earning 5x the pay X was making. The barrier of entry to software engineering is so so much lower than semicon, which still makes no sense to me.