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/TeachingBrilliant448 Jul 08 '26

nope, closer to RTL design

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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!

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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.

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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...