I Should Have Been Networking With My Parents’ Friends at Micron

Growing up in Boise, Idaho, a lot of my parents’ friends worked at Micron. At the time, I was not interested at all in tech. I was very content with riding my bike outside, playing “fugitive” with my local mutual group, and practicing basketball so I could one day play for the high school team.

What a waste.

I did not become a professional BMXer. I did not play in the NBA. Fugitive was still fun though.

I should have been networking with all my parents’ friends and collecting that sweet Micron stock so I could be retired by now.

Boise has always had more going on than I realized.

Anyway, I am not really trying to make a point here. These are just some thoughts I had watching what is happening with Micron right now.

Micron was just... there

I can think of two people specifically.

One of my youth leaders at church worked at Micron for what felt like forever. I know he was some kind of engineer, although I genuinely cannot remember whether that meant chemical, electrical, software, or something else.

At one point, Micron moved him to Asia for work.

Again, at the time, I did not think this was cool.

Looking back, getting sent across the world to work on semiconductor manufacturing sounds extremely cool.

Another family friend was an electrical engineer who also worked at Micron for a long time. I remember getting tacos together as families, having him help on campouts, and basically everything except ever asking him what he actually did at work.

This was completely normal in Boise.

So many people worked at Micron that I personally thought Micron was kind of a boring company.

The building also just... kept getting bigger

We drove between Boise and Utah a lot growing up, and you pass the Micron campus right off the freeway.

It was always there.

Micron around 2012

Micron Boise around 2003.

And now:

Micron in 2026

Micron Boise in 2026. The difference is absurd. According to Micron’s Idaho expansion plans, the company is building two leading-edge fabs alongside its existing Boise R&D operation, with DRAM production from the first new fab expected to begin in 2027. The expansion is expected to create more than 17,000 jobs when direct, construction, and indirect employment are included.

So... are all my parents’ friends gajillionaires now?

This was naturally my next question.

Micron has had an employee stock purchase program for a very long time. In 2001, its SEC filing described a plan that let eligible employees put as much as 20% of their compensation toward Micron shares at 85% of the lower of the stock price at the beginning or end of the offering period. In other words, employees were getting at least a 15% discount, sometimes on an already lower price.

That basic idea still exists today. Micron’s current ESPP lets employees contribute through payroll deductions and buy shares at 85% of the lower price at the beginning or end of each six-month period. Micron also awards restricted stock units to some employees. So I did some extremely scientific back-of-the-napkin math.

Say you were an engineer making a nice round $70,000 in 2000.

Assume:

• you put only 5% of your salary into Micron’s ESPP
• your salary increased 3% per year
• you always got the basic 15% stock discount
• you never sold
• for simplicity, we use each year’s closing stock price rather than trying to reconstruct every individual ESPP purchase window

You would end up with roughly 10,400 shares.

Based on Micron’s historical stock-price data, the company closed 2000 at about $34.62 per share and was trading around $1,050 per share on September 21, 2026.

Those shares would be worth roughly:

$10.9 million.

Boise quietly got some extremely deep tech

The part I appreciate more now is what Micron has done for Idaho for basically my entire life.

These are not just generic “tech jobs.”

Micron develops memory, semiconductor process technology, advanced manufacturing, packaging, and now high-bandwidth memory used in AI systems. It recently announced Micron Research Labs, a new long-horizon research organization headquartered in Boise and backed by a planned $10 billion investment over the next decade.

That is pretty serious technical work happening in Idaho.

And Micron has been doing some version of this there since it was founded in Boise in 1978.

It's deeper tech than Utah.

Anyway, love Micron

I mostly took Micron for granted growing up because it had always been there.

Now that I work in tech, I understand a little more of how interesting the work happening around me actually was.

I am happy to see Micron continuing to invest in Boise, bringing technical jobs into the valley, and building some genuinely hard things there.