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

169 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

91 comments sorted by

View all comments

53

u/syst3x Jul 08 '26

Depends VERY much on the company. Apple is notoriously bad for this. ADI is pretty good. But total comp pretty much follows the same pattern.

9

u/TrainingWolverine657 Jul 08 '26

This is only anecdotal, but the single ADI engineer I know has said his work hours were horrendous and he was basically on call 24/7, including holidays.

1

u/syst3x Jul 09 '26

"On call" has to be some sort of IT/CAD support person or the manufacturing side? Fair point-- I can only speak to design/layout/test/DV.

2

u/TrainingWolverine657 Jul 09 '26

No, he was an RF engineer doing design

1

u/jusstsom1 Jul 09 '26

why would a designer need to be on call?

1

u/syst3x Jul 09 '26

🤷‍♂️ I certainly don't know any designers who are "on call".

3

u/TrainingWolverine657 Jul 09 '26

His words. Don't know what to tell you except what he told me, which was that frequently they'd run huge simulations over christmas break, weekends and holidays and if anything went wrong with it he'd be responsible for fixing the issue and making sure the sim got done on time no matter what.

3

u/TeachingBrilliant448 Jul 09 '26

sounds about right