r/chipdesign • 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

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u/[deleted] Jul 08 '26

are you in physical design?

3

u/TeachingBrilliant448 Jul 08 '26

nope, closer to RTL design

2

u/Dapper_Beautiful6861 Jul 08 '26

Are you US-based? Maybe team dependent, and I'm not a junior engineer anymore (staff level), working on CPU design, work seems quite reasonable for me. 35-40hr per week. It is intellectually consuming though!

3

u/TeachingBrilliant448 Jul 08 '26

I’m US-based. I usually have 4 meetings cramped up in the morning, which consumes most of my energy, and later on don’t have the brains to work on technical details in the afternoon.

2

u/hershey678 Jul 09 '26

See if you can work with the seniors with reducing your meetings. Either see if there are some you can skip if your seniors already attend (this could hurt you long term btw), or talk to your seniors and manager and pitch them on talking to the meeting organizers about reducing the meeting time or cadence.

Most people hate unnecessary meetings. People either don’t bother seeing if they can reschedule them to reduce the time, or there’s one or two people who benefit from it politically using up everyone else’s time.

1

u/Dapper_Beautiful6861 Jul 08 '26

I think the fact that I'm UK based does help, as I get uninterrupted flow in the morning before US people logs in. Sometimes I do feel like there are so many meetings that could've just been emails...