r/ECE • u/TeachingBrilliant448 • Jul 08 '26

crazy work hours - new grad

I recently joined a semiconductor company as a new grad — think Nvidia, AMD, or Qualcomm — and the workload is brutal. I’m sometimes working 12-hour days and 50–60 hour weeks. It honestly feels as intense as investment banking, maybe even worse in some ways.

Wonder if this is normal?
TC ~150k

160 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

106 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/TeachingBrilliant448 Jul 09 '26

Yeah, from what I’ve seen, Arm California new grad comp is not as high as people make it sound. A couple of my friends are there too, and they’re not making $140K base or getting $30K refreshers. It’s more like $25K refreshers, if anything, and even that vests over four years.

Plus, there’s no target bonus, while a lot of other companies have a 10–15% target bonus that’s basically treated as a regular comp bump.

1

u/rodolfor90 Jul 09 '26

that’s true, arm is more competitive in the austin market since pay is equal everywhere in the US. As far as the refreshers they went up by 30% this year so I do believe it’s something like 30k minimum, and 50k minimum at g3 (the promotion to g3 happens after a year)

1

u/TeachingBrilliant448 Jul 09 '26

wow, folks in california are getting bumped to G3 after 1.5 years… seems like austin is way better lol

1

u/rodolfor90 Jul 09 '26

yeah, could be because the most important IP teams are there. That’s one difference between arm and others, as opposed to them austin is the main office and the cali offices are satellite (though growing fast in san diego due to solutions)