Why do Intel contracts pay so poorly?
For example, last week a couple of different recruiters contacted me about a compiler engineer contract job at Intel. They wanted compiler development experience, LLVM experience (including familiarity with backend optimization), excellent knowledge of GPU architecures, SIMD, vectorization, machine learning. When I asked what the rate of pay was I was told $65/hour.
Again today 2 different contract recruiters contact me about another job at Intel: 5 years C++, 5 years Linux development experience, 5 years of Python, 5 years of embedded development experience. The pay rate? $44/hour.
In both of these examples the rate of pay is about 1/2 of what you'd expect. And they wonder why they can't find people. What's going on at Intel - do they just figure they'll find someone in India or Eastern Europe to do these jobs? (for the first one it said you needed to be in the Pacific time zone or be willing to work on that schedule).
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 41.3 ms ] threadThat and hardware in general seems to pay poorly. I have some friends at Synopsys and it does not pay well either.
I've seen other companies offering much more competitive rates for embedded developers.
Combine that with they might have trouble filling the position, so they out source it. Each sub, sub sub, etc contractor takes more of the pie.
You wanna make bank as a contractor? Look at cloud architecture, big data, devops, java or something important but obscure like cobol.
Whereas I've done a java, scala, kafka, spark, postgres job and easily gotten $150/hr, and that work isn't anywhere as technically challenging.
I think my point is business doesn't understand how to value technology experience and they skew towards business value vs difficulty and skill.
In general, if jobs paid proportionally to technical difficulty, then theoretical astrophysicists would be making millions a year - while in reality they make much less than someone fresh out of a Javascript bootcamp.
And then I asked a 3rd degree connection on LinkedIn that worked for the purported client, and they said their company didn't use third party recruiters.
Point being, recruiters suck. I have no idea how much Intel pays, but I'd wager it is much more than 65, especially if they are asking for deep knowledge of the topics you mentioned.
If you can avoid recruiters, avoid them. Some of us can't, and that sucks.
Some of my delightful experiences with recruiters:
Changing my resume without my knowledge, I find out during the interview. Awkward silence between me and the interviewer.
Asking for referral fee a full six months after I was placed. My friend referred me, got the referral bonus. Six months later, this recruiter calls me up angry, asking for referral fee (why he called me instead of HR, I have no idea).
Lying (or not mentioning) about the end client, to get lower rate.
Asking for every single detail about the candidate, many of which makes zero sense. In other words, collecting as much data as possible, God knows what they use it for.
Yelling at me when I refused to take up a contract after the interview (I didn't like the place) because "You are ruining my relationship with my client"
And on and on. I know others have worse stories. I am yet to find a recruiter who genuinely cares about the people they place. It is all transaction to them, to hell with relationships and people.
I'm from the UK so perhaps I'm missing something here, but how would the recruiter benefit from putting you forward at a lower rate? Do they not take commission as a percentage of your rate?
Here in the UK recruiters are pretty decent imo. They've helped me negotiation higher salaries and day rates in the past. They take a decent cut, but that gives them more incentive to get the best rate possible.
Usually, no. Some claim to be commission-based, but most just sell you for X to the customer comany, while paying you Y (Y < X). The customer company usually doesn't even know what the Y is, while you don't know what the X is. In extreme cases, the recruiter's profit margin can be over 50% (i.e. they make more money on your work than you do).
Intel won't let you contract directly, you have to go through a 3rd party. I can't seem to find how to search for these contracting gigs on Intel's job site - the job ids are unrecognized.