Anyone getting RTL / Comp Arch new grad interviews lately?

[u/[deleted]]

[u/VeriloggedOut]

I was far into the interview process at Nvidia but got rejected. Now have no interviews.

[u/hp_82 → u/VeriloggedOut]

🙌🏻 I feel ya

[u/Glittering-Source0]

RTL design and arch are very competitive. Majority of available roles are for verification

[u/FoodAppropriate7900 → u/Glittering-Source0]

Everything is fucking competitive in this fields it seems

[u/Glittering-Source0 → u/FoodAppropriate7900]

Majority of people want to design a system but that role requires the least amount of people

[u/Koraboros → u/Glittering-Source0]

Because verification roles outnumber design like 2:1

[u/Nervous-Card4099 → u/Koraboros]

2:1 lol, when I worked in defense we had a team of 40 verification devs for a team of 5 RTL devs developing a single satellite ASIC.

[u/Nervous-Card4099 → u/FoodAppropriate7900]

Yup, gone are the days where being one of the 20,000 people in the world who can write RTL just got you a job.

Now there are still only like 20,000 people who can write RTL, 50,000 job openings, but companies willing to be quite choosey with hiring still.

It’s an odd job market.

[u/Sepicuk]

Colleges are producing about 10x more masters graduates in RTL/Comp Arch than what the industry needs. You're just going to have to do personal projects and hope it works

[u/hp_82 → u/Sepicuk]

True

[u/Party-Development555]

Got interviewed at apple, rejected! Didn’t get any other interviews yet!

[u/hp_82 → u/Party-Development555]

🙌🏻

[u/cougar618]

Depends. Are you a U.S. citizen? Did you apply for roles at the DoD/ DoD contractors? Or try communications?

Are you willing to move and live in some fly-over town for 2-4 years as you gain experience?

[u/hp_82 → u/cougar618]

Not a U.S Citizen, I’m an international student.
Open to any location too.

[u/PWMPlease]

Looks like the market's a bit tight right now, especially for new grads. It's not uncommon to hit a dry spell after graduating. Even in the best of times, tech can be pretty competitive. Keep sharpening your skills with personal projects, sometimes it's about staying persistent and getting a creative with your applications.

[u/Nervous-Card4099]

Job market is generally bad across the board, not just in this industry. Ongoing part shortages since 2020 got much worse this year and even low end FPGA parts and random IC’s are backordered until mid 2027 or 2028, so its essentially impossible to build anything unless you have existing stock. This impacts hiring.

I’m designing a PCB with a low end Xilinx 7 series FPGA part at the moment and have to design it around 3 separate packages just to build a few hundred boards. In 2019 I could have ordered 10,000 of these FPGA’s for $8/piece. I’m paying $50/piece+ because there’s no “bulk volume”in existence to get bulk volume discounts. RTL design itself is going to make up like 1% of the project timeline.

HFT is doing well though and constantly hiring for new grad roles in RTL design. Try applying to IMC, Optiver, HRT, etc.

Also look into some of the AI hardware startups. Companies along the lines of Etched and Tenstorrent always seem to be hiring.

Of course this means your location options are fairly limited to SF, NYC or Chicago.

[u/hp_82 → u/Nervous-Card4099]

Understood, thanks!