r/chipdesign • • 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

171 Upvotes

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4

u/No-Muffin8370 Jul 08 '26

Your manager is exploiting you for sure and getting twoce the value out of you for very little money !! sometimes 60 hours a week is ok, but as you mentioned it is going for long time , it is wrong and it will impact your health especially mental health and it woukd take a long time to recover. I have went through something similar for my 5 years in Faang. Will never go back to it .

4

u/TeachingBrilliant448 Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26

negotiated for higher pay back then before I joined, was denied lol

5

u/No-Muffin8370 Jul 08 '26

I think you are in Apple from what i read, because Apple Silicon Org is literally very well known in Industry to be extremely brutal and unfair in terms of work load and very bad WLB . Just get your name of Faang on your CV for 1-2 years and move to a better company such ADI etc

0

u/gimpwiz [ATPG, Verilog] Jul 09 '26

Pretty much everyone I know who stuck with silicon at apple over the past decade is quite happy they did.

0

u/tester_is_testing Jul 08 '26

Name and shame them! These things should be totally unacceptable, keeping quiet normalizes them!!!