The salary of a real job hopper could get from the market could reflect more on the value of the job hopper's profession.

In the past two years, Du Wei (a pseudonym), a chip engineer over 40 years old, has never felt the job market's tolerance for him and his peers: he has changed four companies in a row, and each time his career history has gone up a notch; any place where the new company does not meet his expectations or makes him feel uncomfortable, he can boldly leave and find a more satisfying next home.

In 2020, Du Wei left AMD, where he had worked for many years, to join a GPU startup, Brientech, with an annual salary doubled to 800,000 RMB. He started to realize the problem of this company not long after his onboarding. 7 technical leaders were all top in the industry, but no one was convinced by others. The technical solution changed every day. No one could finalize the product plan. Du Wei felt that such a way of working has exausted him.

Brientech provides a very comfortable working environment for employees. It is common for teams to be rewarded with 30,000 to 50,000 yuan per month. Recommending a talent to the company will also be paid 15,000 yuan as an incentive. "Some companies only reward five thousand yuan, which is not enough to buy colleagues an exquisite meal," Du Wei said. If in the past, the company gave such treatment and environment, Du Wei may also work peacefully for many years. After all, AMD's cash flow had dried up to the point where the company can not even pay its employees' bonus in the end of the year. He still stayed at AMD for four or five years.

But today is not what it used to be, the choices are now in Du Wei's hands. Within a year, he left Brientech for another GPU startup. Du Wei has a lot of old AMD colleagues in this new company. No factional struggles, and the workflow is consistent. Everything seems perfect. But the department chief likes to arrange a night meeting at every Saturday. "If you show up at Saturday afternoon, the chief will ask you that are you here specifically for the meeting? And he just do it in front of every one. You won't like it." Du Wei said. A few months later, Du Wei hopped again.

This new company is a smaller GPU company.  Duwei's goal is clear: as an ordinary working employee, he weighed money more than the title. And he was here only because of the money. But Du Wei didn't give the exact amount of his salary. "Actually, the inscrease is more symbolic than practical. I mean, after all, if your annual income has exceeded 960,000 yuan, you will pay 45% of each more dime you earn as the personal income tax.

Not long ago, Du Wei jumped ship again, this time to an autonomous driving chip company. One of the latest hot spots in the industry. He must have found a more comfortable place again.

HR is usually concerned about frequent job hopping, but Du Wei's working background is not something that HR is qualified to challenge. Du Wei has been in the industry for more than ten years, and has been doing chip verification for the past six or seven years, checking and correcting chip design defects to ensure that chips can be produced smoothly. In the past, only a few companies such as AMD and Huawei HiSilicon, which companies are capable of designing complete large-scale chips, can  cultivated engineers who could cope with complex verification work. In the past three years, new companies in the semiconductor industry have completed an average of more than 500 financing transactions and absorbed more than 170 billion yuan of funds per year, and the number of senior verification engineers in the market simply can not satisfy these companies' appetite.

Less senior engineers are also in short supply. An engineer with ten years of experience said, "Now any engineer with three or five years of work experience, excellent or not, the salary requirements for job-hopping are basically more than 800,000 yuan.”

According to the statistics of talent solutions company Henderson China, the semiconductor and chip industry is the industry with the highest salary increase for job hopping in 2022, with an average increase of more than 50%.

From the traditional large chips such as CPUs and GPUs, to the DPUs (data processors), to the autopilot chips, which are processors born with new applications, there are too many job opportunities in the chip industry. According to statistics, there are nearly 10 companies in each of these fields, and most of them have received hundreds of millions of dollars in financing.

It's not startups that create all the chip talent hire needs. Mobile phone manufacturers like Xiaomi, OPPO, Vivo, and Lenovo have learned from Apple's self-developed chips to increase high-end chips. Car companies such as Weilai and Xiaopeng also want to make smarter cars by making their own chips. In order to reduce data center costs, Internet companies have also begun to develop their own chips like Amazon and Google, from the earliest Baidu and Ali to Tencent, ByteDance, and even Kuaishou.

New companies, new areas and new opportunities are too many for engineers to pick and choose. A chip design engineer who has been in the industry for three or four years added my WeChat, and the first thing he said to me was, "Which do you think is more promising between working in the NPU and the CPU industry?”

Perhaps now is the best time for chip practitioners.

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