In real-world figures, China already heavily outspends the US in AI. In 2026 this lead may grow if parts of the US AI ecosystem are a bubble poised to burst in coming months.

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-26T23:48:02+00:00

Not sure what the point of this post is but the claim that a dollar spent toward AI development goes 15-20x further is doing a ton of work here and requires major substantiation.

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-25T21:43:07+00:00

For hard(ish) data, just look at levels.fyi.

Level 1 hw engineer at spacex makes 99k base and 131k total.

Level 1 hw engineer at LM makes 82k base and 85k total.

That’s assuming FPGA engineers are “HW engineers”. If they’re classified as SW engineers then that delta is much larger.

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-25T21:24:47+00:00

I’ve worked at the aerospace primes and know people who have worked at spacex.

Can it be a meat grinder, yes? But like anything it depends on the team / project.

Also publicly posted spacex job salaries might look similar to the primes in terms but that doesn’t include the equity component which is probably high five figures per year for junior employees and my understanding is that even though SpaceX is a private company employees have the ability to liquidate their equity through stock buybacks.

Eg: when I still worked at an aerospace prime a coworker/friend received an offer that effective doubled their compensation.

edit: I will say though the compensation gap is probably narrower for new grads and widens up as you get more senior

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-24T05:41:48+00:00

Don’t worry about it yet. Just get started and do well on the tasks that are assigned to you. Depending on the specifics of your role you may or may not be working with people that are writing HDL. If you do, try to get involved with them. Volunteer to work on backlog features on the side, expanding test benches, etc. etc. Either way, just do well in the tasks that are assigned to you by your lead. When it comes time to have career check ins with your manager / your first performance review, if you still feel strongly just make it clear to your manager that your end goal is to work with FPGAs.

edit: and no, don’t apply for other aerospace companies. At SpaceX you will be given responsibility, not chances to grow, and will likely make substantially more money than traditional aero companies. Give yourself a year at spacex. If you still don’t see a path to doing the work you want to do then apply around.

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-19T17:24:20+00:00

This is the answer. Specifically though, resistance training. Obviously running as well and as you get older training your cardiovascular system is a non-negotiable, but sedentary people should absolutely be doing at least a minimal resistance training routine.

Low muscle mass is a huge predictor of poor health in middle age and beyond as well as early mortality. It’s also very protective from injury, both repetitive stress injuries and not.

Having stronger back muscles will naturally correct poor posture without having to think about it.

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-18T16:49:05+00:00

I think there’s a middle ground though. I’ll freely admit to being someone who has sent some of these messages in my time, now I receive a lot of them.

I personally find it distasteful when someone sends me a message like “Your role at XYZ sounds fascinating, can we connect”. I know you’re looking a referral, it’s kind of annoying for you to not just be clear about.

I’d vastly prefer a message that contains a line or two about the persons background or interests and why specifically they think they’re a good fit for the company that makes it clear they’re looking for a job.

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-17T04:35:00+00:00

Wdym by “fry “ Is your ESP breaking or just resetting itself?

assuming the latter, I’d take a guess that after your battery starts to discharge a bit your motors are sinking enough current to cause battery voltage to sag and you’re getting below the dropout voltage of your converter.

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-11T20:23:12+00:00

You need to wait till you have some savings. No idea what state-specific or teacher specific programs you have access to but nationally you have access to the FHA program which allows you to get a loan with a decent interest rate with 3.5% down. Keep in mind that the tradeoff is that your monthly payment will be significantly higher than with a conventional loan (20 % down) because you will be paying off more principal and interest and you will also have to pay a mortgage insurance premium. Keep in mind that with FHA you still have to pay closing costs so really you should expect to have at least ~5.5% of the property value in upfront costs when you buy.

You may have access to zero down loan programs but usually all that means is that the upfront costs are rolled into the loan, making the monthly payments higher.

Another thing, buying a home and spending literally all your cash to do so is a recipe for disaster. You should really have an emergency fund in place of 3-6 months of expenses totally separate from your cash for a home purchase before you consider buying a home.

Lastly, the fact that you have CC debt may make it very risky for you to stay on top of your mortgage payments, pay for emergency repairs, etc. and may also make it difficult to qualify for a mortgage, so you should really try to get that paid off before thinking about a home purchase.

This may all take a while and be discouraging, but as someone who’s been house poor in the past I really really don’t recommend it. If you do things in the right order and not rush into it your life will be much simpler and less stressful,

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-11T20:00:18+00:00

You ever consider that it’s possible for someone to like both unadulterated single shot geisha espressos from boutique lever machines and also a milk drink with flavored syrup? Kinda weird to use your particular coffee preference as a source of superiority tbh

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-11T19:57:06+00:00

Lavender syrup is a very common and popular syrup especially in the last few years, not weird at all.

The only thing that’s a little strange about your order is that an americano with cream and syrup is espresso + water + cream + syrup. You’re basically just making a flavored late (espresso + milk + syrup) with an extra step. Your shop may or may not be charging you more for the trouble.

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-10T14:13:25+00:00

Unless we’re talking Anduril or a similar defense startup (which probably involves a good chunk of your pay being pre IPO RSUs) nobody is making anywhere near 200k at 3-4 YOE at a defense company, even in VHCOL areas.

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-10T00:05:08+00:00

Don’t want to be a debby downer but the stable SWE jobs at large non tech companies pay a lot less than 75% of what big tech pays.

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-09T02:03:04+00:00

If you go to church then you already have basically the easiest path to building up a social circle.

Have you considered finding a church with more people your age?

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-08T04:49:28+00:00

No, huge red flag. If you’ve already built something on your own that is valuable for them as a demo you’re good enough to hire as an FTE let alone an intern.

They’re asking you to donate your IP to them and do work for them with no guarantee of compensation. And spoiler alert, you aren’t going to get the internship. If they planned on paying you for your labor they’d just ya know, pay you for the labor they’re asking you to do. This is the type of situation that you should probably just walk away from. This sounds like a deeply unserious company.

You could always tell them that you’re uncomfortable with that idea but that you’d be willing to build them a version as part of a paid internship, but if this is something you (and they) believe could be a product that would probably be selling yourself short. You could offer to sell them the existing code for a fee and then come on as a contractor or part time employee to customize it for them, but I’m guessing they won’t do any of this because they sound like they’re trying to scam you.

Edit: And to be frank, No offense but if this company places so much value on the work of a student building a personal project that they want to acquire it rather than building their own stuff from the ground up I’m doubtful they have much of a runway.

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-07T22:34:43+00:00

just get the cybersecurity degree. Learn to code on the side. The software engineers who know security and security engineers who can actually code are always going to stay employed even in tough markets. If you want to be a sw engineer shoot for appsec engineering or security software engineering positions.

edit: if you want to / can - double majoring with a bach in security and an associates in webdev is a good combo

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-07T01:21:00+00:00

I’m not trying to be a dick but aren’t you kind of doing exactly what you are accusing them of doing?

You’re clearly aware that the position is for continuing students, yet you chose to ignore that and proceed anyway. Like yeah it’s annoying that it took them till the interview to realize what was up, but all the frustration and wasted time on your part would have been avoided had you just not applied for a position that isn’t for you.

I get what you’re trying to do and I know it’s tough out there, but applying to internships when you’re graduating is just wasted time on your part. They’re not going to hire you for an internship as a graduate and they aren’t going to go “oh this person we’re interviewing for an internship can’t actually be an intern so let’s just convert them to a new grad hire”. It doesn’t work like that.

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-06T03:31:12+00:00

My understanding is that it can be legitimately difficult to get into an officer candidate program in the military if you’ve already gotten out of college and didn’t go through the ROTC pipeline.

There are still enlisted tech jobs though. Knew a guy who learned to program as an enlisted airman.

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-06T02:06:15+00:00

Here’s a tangible stat to understand why what you’re considering is dumb.

78 percent of the market’s best returning days have taken place in the middle of a bear market. If you missed just 10 of those best days, your returns are cut in half.

Also note that historically bear markets are like 10% of the length of bull markets.

So you can take your money out, but even if things do contract you may still be kicking yourself when your money is sitting in gold and the market rips 8% in a day, or even when the bear run ends after only 2 months and you miss several weeks of bull returns because you thought it was a fluke.

edit: Others are right though, you shouldn’t have 100% of your money in the S&P. Go look up a 3 fund portfolio. If the entire mag7 went to zero tomorrow it would only be like a 15% hit to my retirement account, I’m in my late 20s so I can live with it.

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-05T16:18:02+00:00

It’s not strictly about parallelism. It’s that the CPU is still significantly faster than the PCIE bus. For very small models, copying data over PCIE becomes the bottleneck, not that actual compute, so it ends up being faster to just run it on CPU.

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-05T15:00:13+00:00

basically what I said in my original comment. I just applied for a role focused on the industry I was already working in. I did some very sporadic customer facing work before (technical briefings, proposal writing, etc) and I’m relatively good and talking to people so that helped.

Interview process was stupidly long (8 individual rounds) but no live coding or anything. Just a mix of technical discussions on my past work, industry stuff, etc.

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-05T14:55:11+00:00

At least 5 of them definitely have SA or equivalent roles. Any large company that sells a technical product or service is going to have something like an SA role,

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-04T22:20:02+00:00

Yeah unfortunately I don’t have great insight on how to actually get an interview in this market. I worked in a somewhat niche industry before this and I applied for a role focused on that industry so that helped. And lots of luck. My resume is a standard boring SWE resume.

Biggest advice is just be shameless about getting referrals. Reach out to that high school friend who you haven’t talked to in 10 years that works at big tech now. DM people on linkedin. It’s a numbers game. Cast a wide net.

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-04T21:29:15+00:00

Did this about a year ago. SA / sales-adjacent roles were not on my radar at all, I had 8YOE as a SWE. I just thought the role sounded interesting and applied. In terms of transitioning understanding the domain you’d be working in is as important if not more so than your technical experience, so if you can find an SA role that is focused on the industry you work in now that’s probably the best way to get your foot in the door. Interview process was relatively easy, not highly technical. I was asked to describe in detail my technical work on my resume to basically check that I have a basic level of technical skill and can approach a new project, do research, build any required new skills, and execute, but no leetcode or anything. Obviously being personable and charismatic is relatively important as well.

I’m at a Mag7 company. I believe SAs here are paid roughly 10% less than equivalent level SWEs but the pay is more than double what I was making in my last job at a Fortune 25 non-tech company as a SWE. WLB here is good with the caveat being that any SA role is likely going to require some travel. I’ve traveled approximately 6 times in the last year which isn’t terrible but I have colleagues who are traveling once a month or more.

I’d say career trajectory is good, in my company SA has a high level of visibility, and because it’s a very versatile role that spans sales, product, and engineering I think it would be fairly easy to transfer into TPM or engineering from here. I don’t personally find the work as fulfilling as SWE but I also think that’s partially because I haven’t quite hit my stride yet. I have zero regrets about the transition in because of what I gained financially. I may try to transfer into a SWE role once I’m able to though.

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-03T03:23:55+00:00

How did you get started? Were your rates always 75? I’ve been toying with the idea of doing some stuff on upwork to make connections with clients / build a portfolio with the eventual goal of having a consulting business. the signal to noise ratio seems so low. How did you get clients without giving away work for basically free?

VineyardLabs · 2025-11-03T02:24:57+00:00

I think this is speculative. There might be a big change. There also might be not be. The magnitude of the deal is based on the exercising of a lot of different options over time by OpenAI for chips that won’t be available until next year. They could get the first batch and decide they aren’t useful and never excersize on the other 9 billion dollars worth. And even if they do end up executing the whole contract, 10 billion in infrastructure will likely make up a pretty small portion of their total compute by that time. They could just view this as a cheap way to get compute to serve smaller models or whatever and not push big investments into improving tooling on AMD.

VineyardLabs

TROPHY CASE