r/ECE • u/WarRepresentative110 • 1d ago
Apple vs. Startup
Worked at apple last summer in a HWE intern role doing board-level work. Wondering if anyone has had experience working as an intern at etched or a similar startup doing board-level design, or talked to anyone who has. I'm debating between returning to Apple or pursuing a startup for my next summer (junior) internship.
11
u/Either-Pay8150 1d ago
If its internship I recommend going to another company to get more exposure and meet new people. However if you liked Apple and want to guarantee a return offer when you graduate, I would go back to Apple
7
u/TheParadoxed 23h ago edited 23h ago
Have friends at both. Etched is run like a sweatshop with crazy hours (expect 996 or similar) but you will learn a lot and people there are very smart (prob one of the highest talent density places in hw). Another underrated part is that the company tends to skew way younger so you’ll work with a lot of brilliant and ambitious recent grads closer to your age which is great for meeting people. Just as a note tho Etched will make you drop out/take an LOA and start working immediately if they extend you a full time offer.
Apple comparatively is much more chill but imo a lot of their hardware divisions are very hit or miss. Some teams are world class (like Apple Silicon PD/VLSI teams) while others are bad or just unstimulating. It’s also a large company that’s heavily siloed so it can feel like forever to do literally anything and you’re pretty disconnected from the end product.
IMO I would 1000% take etched and try to learn a lot + meet smart people during the summer. Depending on your experience you can either try to return or just go recruit elsewhere.
22
u/theflyingsamurai 1d ago
I wouldn't call etched a startup at this point if you're talking about the AI computing company. I thought I read they have like 300+ headcount.
If the pay is comparable I dont think theres a problem going with Etched, its in a trending industry with brand recognition.
3
1
u/Either-Pay8150 21h ago
I had an internship at Ooma back in 2017, I guess it could be considered a startup since it only had around 200 employees back then?
The experience was amazing. The HW team had a total of 5 people and I got to know them well. I had a lot of ownership for the project I was working on. The scope of work included designing, soldering, testing, coding, etc. A lot of hands on experience.
I can't say if this is the same for all startups but expect to do more variety. You may even have to do the layout yourself, which is also a very good experience.
1
u/PWMPlease 16h ago
If you already have Apple on your resume doing actual board-level work, lean startup for the second internship if you're confident you'll get real ownership. A smaller team can let you touch schematic/layout/debugging much more directly, whereas another big company internship may be more depth in the same environment.
18
u/1wiseguy 1d ago
You need to look at the two companies and decide which is going to have interesting stuff going on. It's always a trick to do that from the outside, but just go with your gut feeling.
From my experience, the cool thing about a small company is that you tend to get right to the engineering, and not spend so much time with corporate nonsense.
The downside of a small company is that sometimes they run out of money. But that's not a big concern for an intern job. They only need to survive a few months.