It's not open, but many of the new engineers are currently training in Taiwan. The engineer in question is simply seeing what his TSMC counterparts are doing. The Taiwanese culture is very hard working and that is why TSMC is ahead of Intel and Samsung now. You are correct though, there won't be an issue because this hard work atmosphere will weed out the weak and breed the strong.
This seems like total nonsense. Korea's work culture is not exactly Scandinavia and even the US is tough by the standards of other high-income countries. Plus, like, how did Dutch ASML get ahead, did they get some sort of special dispensation?
They cornered the market...they literally have a monopoly and it's impossible to compete against at this point. AMAT is also impossible to compete against despite how shitty they are because they just buy competitors and make them shitty to.
If you have seen how TSMC works on the inside you would understand the culture and the drive to succeed. They don't care about political correctness, they could care less about having a diversity program...they want the best person for the job. They hired a former Intel HR director for the AZ plant and the first thing he asked was about their diversity program...after multiple issues with him he is no longer at TSMC AZ.
I doubt Samsung has much of a diversity operation in Korea either. I am rather incredulous that those positions (which, frankly, do not actually have that much influence on the running of the business day-to-day) make that much of a difference to the success of one company or another.
What? No. The reason they got ahead was because their business model got them volume production on a scale that let them tweak and improve their process faster and more efficiently compared to the competition. And Intel shooting themselves in the foot and skipping EUV for their last few nodes was a big factor too.
Also, suggesting people are “weak” or “strong” based on the number of hours they’re willing/able to work is… problematic at best.
Who's "we're"? There will always be those willing to embrace the "grind culture". Whether it's new grads eager for experience, those that have experienced life without opportunity and "freedom" or just those desperate to make ends meet.
Hustle culture exploits the young, the economically disadvantaged, and the desperate. It's basically poison, and there are enough people finally saying the quiet part out loud.
I guess "we" is whoever doesn't believe in exploiting the young, economically disadvantaged, or desperate. I guess some people love exploiting vulnerable groups though, you're right. I just assumed nobody would want to be associated with that kinda toxicity.
Exactly this...there are always those willing to work their ass off to succeed. Those who are willing to do so get rewarded...but finding out who those people are takes time and generally that's not something you can see on a resume. The engineer in this story may not fit the bill...
Certainly not everyone and there are plenty of companies not willing to reward you the proper way. In my experience TSMC is not one of those companies.
It's not mysterious at all: since they are shorter on average and thus have smaller hands, their work culture advantage only appeared at processes smaller than 10nm!
Samsung (and Korean companies in general) isn't exactly known for work-life balance either (source: uncle was an exec and a sibling was a senior engineer there).
I agree that it reads like a hit piece and leads the reader to believe that it's already a disaster there. Is it possible that Intel is so worried about the talent vacuum that they'd pay someone to write this kind of story?
The working requirements in 24/7 manufacturing facilities is different than most 8-5 jobs. When you have $30B invested into a facility you have to maximize output and that means keeping all of the equipment up and running.
Downtime in one of these EUV fabs is going to cost in excess of ~$1m worth of product per hour. So yeah, you keep it staffed full of very talented maintenance technicians 24/7.
“An equipment engineer might start work at 8 o’clock in the morning and leave around 9 o’clock at night, but is it normal? This may happen two or three days a week
This was the line that had me in splits, like "What do you mean staying 13 hours a day two to three days a week makes it normal?"
Normal fab work is a 12 hour shift-- plus having to suit up and unsuit outside those shifts-- 3.5 times per week in the US. Yes, this means some overtime.
Regardless of whether it's actually normal or not, I find it funny that the engineer thinks something happening "2 to 3 times a week" doesn't make it normal.
My friends and I may lick doorknobs 3 times per week, but others would be hard pressed to describe it as "normal". Though perhaps within the context of our custom, and from our point of view, it is.
And quite common in certain industries. I have relatives in oil rigs and aircraft maintenance who work 12 hour shifts 4 days a week. But they do usually get 3 day weekends and other perks.
In the UK North Sea, two weeks on and two weeks off certainly used to be standard on the rigs, fisherman would often be at sea Sunday evening to Thursday or Friday every week.
this is not 996. its common in the semis industry even in the US.
when i was younger i used work in a Motorola fab at Austin, TX. you work couple days in a week like 3 days and overnight into the morning then for the rest of week you are off.
this got nothing to do with 996 or whatever. its the norm in the semis industry.
My comment was in response to "12 hour days. Sounds pretty dystopian." Maybe it's dystopian, but a worse version has been standard practice in China for a while.
Nor even terribly unusual--even in US manufacturing. Longer than 8 hour shifts is simply a matter of scheduling--you then wind up doing things like 4 days on/3 days off.
However, when you pass 40 hours, you owe people overtime in the US. I imagine that TSMC isn't particular stringent about documenting that in Taiwan.
You wrote: <<However, when you pass 40 hours, you owe people overtime in the US.>> In the United States, this is not true for the _vast_ majority of salaried knowledge workers. Do you have a source... or is this just a guess? We are not talking about people working in logistics -- driving trucks, working at a warehouse. They will be hourly wage workers and have overtime.
It might be unusual if these Taiwanese 12-hour shifts don't actually come with 3 days off, and are just in addition to "regular" hours, 5-day work week.
The vast majority of factory workers are not salaried, last I checked.
However, even salaried workers in the US are nominally required to be compensated for extra hours. It's not quite as straightforward, but you can't simply expect 50 hours per week from every salaried worker--that will likely land you in trouble.
And we also need to remember that, after 12 hours of work, you are no longer the sharper tool in the box.
What is the cost fraction of humans in this? Chip foundries are so ridiculously capital intensive I can’t imagine it to be a huge part of the operating costs.
Very interesting. Yeah labour is cheap in Taiwan. Even highly qualified, specialized labour. That's why talent leaves to China, USA and Israel.
But about the factory itself, American Factory was quite interesting[1]. Chinese company, but similar culture clash.
It is interesting however that from what I have seen Europeans that wouldn't lift a finger on a weekend would expect Taiwanese to have results on Monday morning, when they themselves only send information about their requests on Friday end of day. So in the middle of the Friday night for the Taiwanese.
> It is distributed by Netflix and is the first film acquired by Barack and Michelle Obama's production company, Higher Ground Productions
So... I'm betting there's a political angle there.
> from what I have seen Europeans that wouldn't lift a finger on a weekend would expect Taiwanese to have results on Monday morning
Many fabs and factories work around the clock or 4-3 shifts. It's less common in the white collar space, so perhaps that's culturally different. However, I've personally done those shifts before.
> So... I'm betting there's a political angle there.
If there is, it's that Americans are lazy. Maybe even so lazy that instead of reading the synopsis they just read Wikipedia intro paragraphs to confirm their own biases.
I don't see any contradictions. There are day jobs, and there are 24/7 jobs. Someone working 9 to 5, 5 days a week isn't supposed to answer the phone after the work hours, that constitutes employer abuse. If the employer want to have someone always available, then they should hire people for 24/7 and pay accordingly.
Talent generally doesn't leave for China from Taiwan, conditions in China are even worse. The Taiwanese computer chip talent that worked in China were almost all working for Taiwanese firms. There are a lot of programs where they try to lure in foreigners who're ignorant about China with high wages, from what I see Taiwanese do not tend to fall for this for obvious reasons. In recent years there have been lots of less qualified folks leaving Taiwan though and China is one of the destinations. With China's rapidly growing economy there was a lot of opportunity there for basically anyone, you could make quite a bit of cash if you were hustling and stayed out of "trouble". But those years seem to be coming to an end.
> Europeans that wouldn't lift a finger on a weekend would expect Taiwanese to have results on Monday morning
My Monday morning is Taiwan’s end of business day. I would expect the message is acknowledged and that at least simple questions be answered by then. OTOH, they can sure expect me to act on their requests while they are off for the evening.
“Our analysis software has been passed down since the establishment of the company [in 1987]. There may have been some slight improvements in the software along the way, but the interface remains almost the same.
This seems shockingly outdated. They should hire an UX Expert and rewrite the whole thing with React
Yes, the company that has overtaken the other Semiconductor giants like Intel and Samsung must be doing a poor job with their internal tools. Not every company uses Matlab or Mathworks to analyze data...they take the simple stuff that works and form it into something no frills and useful. A brand new engineer out of college may not realize it, but there are reasons why they do what they do.
> “That’s a lot of the work day. Some of the solution may be in software. Most of these meetings could be automated. The engineer who last worked with the equipment would record tool status and changes and make recommendations” to the next shift.
... since 1987.
This process sounds like a liability to me. If you're having daily hours-long meetings for humans to communicate information to other humans, who then have to manually incorporate that information into their operations, and people who know the process say it could be automated, this sounds like a massive inefficiency (and opportunity for error) that only exists because labor has always been cheap enough to allow it to continue. Why wouldn't you spend a little money trying to optimize it?
It sounds like inefficiency to those that don't understand the process. These engineers are working on equipment that costs $10M-150M each. Having a long meeting in person meeting to discuss ongoing issues is not a liability. A brand new engineer probably doesn't realize the value in having face to face communication.
Also...they didn't say it hasn't been changed since 1987, it's just the same system (like saying I have been using Windows since 1995).
I mean, if you know this first-hand, then I concede to your knowledge, but the article does say the system has only had some "slight improvements" since 1987. I can easily see dismissing someone griping just because the UI is "old", but if they have feedback about how the system of communicating critical data across shifts can be automated so it doesn't take three hours, I'd be all ears. I wouldn't advocate doing away with that face-to-face, but a three hour handoff knowledge dump for a 12 hour shift seems excessive.
But you're right, I'm not familiar with the process. I'm relying on the testimony of that one complainy engineer.
Having critical information relayed in text form is a sure way to make the next person read it, right.
There is a benefit to both: if they can be expressed in a system quickly (someone needs to carefully put it in, and someone needs to attentively read it), they can be expressed in a meeting quickly too. In practice, if it takes a 3h face-to-face handoff, it'd probably be 4h for each side to do it properly in a textual form.
The benefit to having it recorded in the system is for reference and tracking purposes.
But like any system, there are always inefficiences to remove and optimize. Bring it up with your manager and they should push for it if it makes sense.
> Bring it up with your manager and they should push for it if it makes sense.
Wholly agreed, but the word "should" is dual-meaning there. The implication I get from the article is that even if management "should" listen to this feedback and push for change, it doesn't necessarily do that, given the track record of overworking people and having little change in the software since the beginning of the company. It's a little easier to believe they top-down ordered the worker bees to shut up and be happy with the tools than it is to believe they nailed the best UX for 2021 chip-building in 1987...
Sure, sure, sure: they are massively successful and that must mean there are zero improvements they can make to their processes, as the ancestor comment implies. Or maybe, just maybe, they could continue working on efficiency and do even better.
This is really a weak argument. Just because they're successful doesn't mean everything they do is brilliant. It could easily be that they could be even more successful if they made changes. If that were not the case, we'd quickly run into contradictions where two companies did totally opposite things yet were both successful, and be unable to explain them with our framework.
Lol. I'm going to assume you're joking with the last bit, but they should definitely hire a UX expert if they are interested in efficiency and accuracy and the workforce is complaining about manual work recording, handing off, and using operational parameters or state between shifts. That sounds fatiguing and error prone.
I thought it was common for fab operators to work a 11 hour shifts in the US. Also, if Samsung can figure out how to work with Americans, I'm sure TSMC can too.
Fab operators and technicians generally work compressed shifts yes, but not usually engineers which is what the glassdoor reviewer is. Engineers work M-F usually and generally 8-5, but when the fab needs them they are there. That may entail the occasional 12 hour day, but that is what comes with the job (and the pay).
Agreed, and it's been that way since the 80s. The building & equipment has always cost more than staff & engineers. The "R&D Fab" is in Taiwan. These are going to be exempt employees. What's the agenda here?
Probably yes. Major manufacturing sites are often CONTINUOUSLY (24/365.25+) staffed with "12 hour" shifts that include overlap via a lunch and normal breaks making those at least 13 hours of on site time long. One body slot takes 4 people to fill that way, but that leaves zero slack for vacation, sick days, etc.
I'm also confused. It's not like the US doesn't have factories that run 24/7. I spent a summer working swing shifts 12 hours a day, 3 days on, 3 days off.
That might be the crux of it. I gather it's similar on e.g. offshore oil rigs, one week on, one week off, but long, grueling days.
That said, this article (and the other threads) describe being available 24/7; you probably weren't expected to be on call during your days off.
Anyway, I think being on call is fine, as long as you get compensated for it - because you have to change your lifestyle to be available, plan things like going out or having a drink.
Large continuous process plants like refineries and chemical plants run 24/7. Some processes can’t be shutdown as they’ll be damaged if they are down for too long.
Some plants run the DuPont shift pattern or they run 3 8 hour shifts per day.
I consider my self a fairly hard working person, in my first job I've seen situations where people came in on a Monday and would go to their homes next Monday. I've done a full time start up with a day job, quite literally coding every waking hour of my life(like 2 - 4 hours sleep a day) for years. And then I relocated from Bangalore to Bay Area for a while, and met a few of our Chinese colleagues- Even by my standards the Chinese were in a different productivity league altogether.
One person I knew would have three monitors, would eat at desk all the three meals, not sure when he even took breaks, but he kind of worked all the time, I mean literally. Would watch tickets in one screen, production issues in one, and work in another one. He'd read every ticket, feature request, pull request, and comment every where, knew everything and would just outperform anybody by some factors(Mind you people in our team I knew were kind of legends themselves). It ain't just the hours, they through and through dominated the initiative. You stood no chance.
I knew several Chinese colleagues and friends like these. They are all good people wanting to make a good life by working hard, nothing to blame them. But it was kind of an unwritten rule that if you had two Chinese working in your team, you had no chance beating them.
Im in serious awe of the Chinese culture. They also seemed to have very little gender discrimination, and in general little less hyper about things like religion etc. I guess all this things give them a natural edge.
>> I knew several Chinese colleagues and friends like these. They are all good people wanting to make a good life by working hard, nothing to blame them. But it was kind of an unwritten rule that if you had two Chinese working in your team, you had no chance beating them.
I've had the opposite experience. Most of the ones I knew were work evasive, and spent substantial time craming for leet code. I think there might be a generation gap at work.
No, as in they worked with me during graduate studies or were on my team and it was extremely frustrating. In particular "playing dumb" to avoid work was particularly offensive as that strategy created more future work but also involved people lying to my face.
Yeah, maybe you were in a bubble. Chinese are awesome, but they are human. Many a deeply racist, and have a number of other problems. Work as life culture is not something to look up to. You probably should re-evaluate your own objectives if you believe working round the clock while neglecting any other form of life is something to look up to.
>>Yeah, maybe you were in a bubble. Chinese are awesome, but they are human. Many a deeply racist, and have a number of other problems.
My interactions have been very positive, and being an Indian I have never experienced any racism from them. There is a language gap for sure, and due to that times, more than a round of clarification is needed to be on the same page, but that was nothing I couldn't work out.
I agree your interactions would have been different.
It is also possible that I interacted with subset of Chinese immigrants in the Bay Area, which generally happens to be a place for people who in general value diversity and happens to be a meritorious place.
>>You probably should re-evaluate your own objectives
I have, I don't believe in linear returns any more and my days of attempting to scale personal growth as a function of hours worked are behind me. You grow up with age and your perspectives change too.
At the same time I have mad respect for immigrants(as a former failed immigrant myself) and other communities that are working day and night for a good life. More power to them.
>I've done a full time start up with a day job, quite literally coding every waking hour of my life(like 2 - 4 hours sleep a day) for years
I am much more productive coding than 99% of the people around me. One of my secrets is I sleep well. Probably your definition of coding is different from mine because of your working area. People make stupid mistakes when they are sleepy, including me, and it is way more expensive to fix(finding bugs in a big codebase) than not making then in the first place.
I have met lots of Chinese people working and had the opposite experience. China is so big that outliers that represent one in a thousand are more common but most people are that, average at most, way worse than European trained workers.
The fact that they sleep on their shops and workshops does not make them super human. Quite the opposite, they are human and working more hours make them work less intense.
I don't believe the Story that Chinese can run at Marathon pace all day, because they are similar mental limits for humans as they are physical ones. And Chinese people get burnout like everybody else or worse. Apathy on workers is the normal state.
Based on what you just described?! I'm sure there are many great reasons to be in awe of Chinese culture, but what you just described sounds like an absolute nightmare. How is this stuff a positive thing? How is this person anything more than a work machine? What's the point of their life at that point?
The people you know worked long hours, but were they actually more productive?
Studies on working have consistently shown diminishing returns on longer and longer hours, generally past 30-40, depending on job type, i.e. physical jobs like assembly line work drop of slowly (mistakes rise but only gradually) vs intellectual jobs where mistakes either rise rapidly or people adjust by taking more slack time throughout the shift.
In all studies that I saw (and there is general lack of quality studies in that area - hard to set up realistic A/B experiment and observational data get you only so far) while average productivity dropped after 40h there were outliers (~10%) with no drop in productivity or increase in error rate with 60h/week. There is good chance that in elite job in Asia (and TSMC is definitely elite) almost everyone is in that category - can work very long hours without burning out. People who could not are either pushed out or leave on their own.
How long were those studies going on for? I can do 12-14 hour days for a week, I even once programmed quite challenging code for 36 hours without making anymore mistakes towards the end, but after I do this I'll be very tired for a few days once the rush is over.
1. A global pandemic that has resulted in 4.5 million people quitting their jobs in the United States in the last month has resulted in people leaving jobs with long shifts. I bet that this has also affected people in TSMC fabrication plants.
2. It is possible that being on call at Intel requires fewer hours of attention than being on call at TSMC. It is also possible that Intel is offering higher starting salaries than TSMC, given that Intel is in a position of relative weakness.
3. You don't actually know if Samsung has been doing "just fine" recently in the United States. I'm sure it did in 2018 and 2019 and the beginning in 2020. I'm very skeptical that Samsung has been humming along without incident for the past six months.
Right. I’m hearing US citizens have become “practically ungovernable.” I’ve definitely experienced people acting with more hostility and clear inner turmoil just out running errands than ever before now. And this is enough to shock me after living a decade in one of the most hostile, large metropolitans in the US.
I am hearing that employers in the US are no longer able to negotiate the low pay per hours of work, often at undesirable times of the day and week and year, that they used to be able to demand.
The type of work described in the article has a reputation of low pay per hour and being undesirable.
> TSMC will have to change to an eight-hour work day five days a week.”
Is this US society breaking down and American people being unmanageable? Or is it people being able to negotiate reasonable pay to working conditions ratios?
The us does not offer competitive infrastructure to allow for those kind of job conditions. Working 10-12 hours means you need either good super reliable child care or a spouse that does not work. The us does not offer the same level of reliable public services as Taiwan does for example
> This is what happens when the US tries to compete with Asia on manufacturing in a free market.
Does you definition of free market come from the "you'll work as much as I need you to if you want to eat" camp or the "if you want me to work bad enough, you'll pay me what I ask and negotiate the hours I am willing to work for you" camp?
Yeah agree. After reading more of the article I’m wondering if it’s more of a hit piece than anything else. Az has plenty of semi industry. TSMC may just want to back out. Edit-or maybe TSMC wants pretext for some eventual reason like backlash. Edit 2-or it could merely be an author looking for a story or a competitor looking to smear TSMC. People do have a way of seeming All around horrible until some missing criteria is changed-like better pay or giving them some leeway.
Two things can be true though and may not be related.
I don't really see it as a hit piece, all sides here sound reasonable. It will be interesting to see what the end solution is. I think that the author would have shown a strong opinion on how to resolve it if it was a hit piece.
I agree. As usual, the headline overstates the article. The actual article (mostly sourced from anonymous online comments...) doesn't sound nearly as alarmist. Just a new business unit working out the kinks.
Compliance assumes there is an underlying agreement or need to comply.
Characterizing TSMC not being able to find sufficient people to accept their working conditions/pay as "US workers not being compliant" is a meaningless use of the word compliant in this context.
I'm talking about the article, I have little to no insight on TSMC beyond this article which says things I find to be highly suspect.
there is an underlying agreement...just because it isn't directly stated doesn't make them not real. Social contracts arise from cultural norms and very much are a thing.
> I’m hearing US citizens have become “practically ungovernable.”
The OP article, IMHO, smells a bit like misinformation. There are interests (especially in the US) which want to see a never-ending stream outsourcing to "low-cost centers". Stuff like the article provides fodder for that point of view by painting a false picture that americans can't measure up.
Supposedly, the word "ungovernable" was used by anticolonialist/anti-imperialist factions in the '70s to describe a deliberate strategy of breaking down the "peace, order, and good government" that their imperialist counterparts offered as justification for their existence. Closely related is "no justice, no peace". However, this attribution of "ungovernable" to left-actors came to me via a right-source, so I'm not completely sure about it. If true, however, then I think you're implicitly reaching back to that era, to conjure images of South Africa and Uganda. I think the recent coinage of "Brazilianization" has a similar goal. Anyway, I would be very interested if anyone could help trace this sense of "ungovernable" to its source.
There's also, uh, this insanity [7]; it's so far off the deep end it could be a right wing false flag, but, well, it's from 2021(?), so anything's possible:
Below is to point out that causation is being thrown around way too much with respect to the pandemic, not that the conclusions are incorrect.
> A global pandemic that has resulted in 4.5 million people quitting their jobs in the United States in the last month
4.5 million people quit their jobs and there was a global pandemic. 4.5 million would need to be compared to historical rates to say the pandemic resulted in an increase of X people quitting their jobs, not the total of 4.5 million. But even that X increase is a correlation and I highly doubt that the pandemic was 100% responsible for every single one of those individuals quitting their jobs.
A more complete story can be found from the bureau of labor statistics.
> Over the 12 months ending in November 2021, hires totaled 74.5 million and separations totaled 68.7 million, yielding a net employment gain of 5.9 million.
I still agree that the idea of bullet 1. is likely valid, that people are leaving jobs that are undesirable and getting better ones - but I'd be careful to add the reason why. Causation has been thrown around casually during the pandemic to influence policy without any evidence of the causation or the magnitude of that causal relationship. You could just delete "A global pandemic that has resulted in" and the sentence would stand alone.
Work culuture is very different in the many countries and are in line with the gernal culture.
Based in Europe, Germany, we had this when we had meetings with chipmanufacturers in Japan vs. USA. So when a company comes from one culture into another another it always has a learning curve. Even when you employ local people helping you to adopt to the local culture. Because you have still managers in the other cultur with their expectations.
I learned that also from Daimler/Mercedes Benz. When they startet to copy their manufacturing plant from Germany into the USA, they had many quality problems and all kind of problems. Over the years there was a learning curve to adopt to the US work culture. So they still don't have only about a 2/3 output compared to the very same manufcaturing plants based in Germany.
While Asian companies have much higher working culture than Germany, I assume the experience at first is horrible for the Asian managers.
> I assume the experience at first is horrible for the Asian managers.
When I worked at Samsung, there was virtually always friction between the Korean and American stakeholders. It was something we learned to tolerate though and eventually these differences did bring a lot of combined value.
The general theme was something like - Korea uses American talent to shake up processes and innovate in ways they would be difficult to approach on cultural grounds. For instance, directly challenging an incorrect idea from your manager's manager. This would be a standard Monday morning activity for any native Texan/American working at SAS. It may initially cause an uproar (why didn't you notify xyz first... etc.), but it always got the ball rolling on a quick resolution and left an implicit obligation to review why certain management chain links were skipped over in the first place.
On the other hand, Korea brought a degree of consistency/discipline in their process engineering that staggered many of us. Virtually everyone balked at this stuff initially, but we grew to understand the value over time.
The language barrier was the hardest thing from the American perspective. I feel like many of us would have had an easier time if all of the documentation wasn't originally developed in Korean. Automatic translation tech was not able to help back in the day, so your next best bet was to find a Korean who worked in your office area to help you out. Needless to say, ad-hoc human translation services were hard to come by, especially if one didn't want to feel abusive about it.
Many moons ago I used to work inside a samsung fab. At no point was I ever feeling a sense of outrage regarding having a literal 80s-style pager strapped to my body 24/7/365.
A big part of why this didnt bother me was the scale/impact of what I was doing - I was responsible for the primary business interface used across the entire factory floor.
Once you see a modern fab with your own eyes, it will change you in a deep way. I felt a sense of compassion for this incredibly complex and valuable thing that humanity is just barely able to scrape together. Nothing you see in media can prepare you for the real thing.
Definitely not a job for everyone, but its really easy for me to see how a lot of us were able to otherwise deal with the stress.
Yeah, but it's not only "the mission", it's your relationships with managers/colleagues, the environment, the perks, etc
That being said, being on call is not for everybody, and a well managed planning goes a long way. It's one thing to be called for a true emergency, another because a colleague doesn't know how to turn on a monitor or because someone did something stupid on a weekend (extreme example)
I wanted to get deeper into software development and better understand how to design new complex systems.
Working in the US for a Korean megacorp, who rightfully demanded heavy standardization of manufacturing processes, meant I had basically zero latitude on this sort of stuff. I did manage to get approval for 1 minor development project which was ported back to Korea.
I still consider going back to SAS. I departed on amicable terms. The amount of impact I could bring with my skills today would probably open some additional doors. Working with stuff like Blazor in 2022 sometimes has me thinking about ways I could revamp that factory UX and solve problems that were impossible to solve before.
It does sound like an outlier in terms of demand, but to back up your point, there are many industries in which there is critical infrastructure and activities going on potentially 24x7 most of not all weeks.
I support financial applications that could be considered critical infrastructure for the country. To the point where the government has set up special regulatory procedures to ensure it’s managed properly. We make sure everyone we hire in the support roles understands that this job isn’t for everyone, there’s work that needs to be done at possibly any hour of any day, and while we have offshore teams there can still be gaps due to sickness, power cuts, etc. we have in depth on call rotas. We pay overtime and on call supplements.
Even outside IT, there are power stations and telecoms systems, water mains, TV and radio stations, who knows what else that operate round the clock, round the year. There are a lot of people in every nation that work these kinds of jobs.
A standard expectation of 11 or 12 hour days is extreme though. No company should plan their operations around that as a standard practice. I’ve worked a 70+ hour week before when there’s been a proper crisis going on though. I got paid for every hour, and I know my work is appreciated so there should be a nice bonus on the way in a few months.
yeah, that is definitely rough for American standards and probably not sustainable. After going back to the article, the confusing part is that the hours are so inconsistent. I wonder if they are running 3x 8 hour shifts and people need to stay longer to cover vacancies or close out problems that occurred on their shift.
They may also be running into the issue that physicians and residents do: hand-off errors. I have seen arguments that it's better to have an exhausted physician who has been monitoring you for 12+ hours than a fresh one who just started their shift. There's a lot of state of the current situation that can't be easily transmitted from one shift to the next.
I'd say 12 hour shifts are OK as long as the work time per week does not exceed 40 hours too much. That is, 12 hours 3 days a week, maybe 4 days on some weeks, could be very reasonable.
> Once you see a modern fab with your own eyes, it will change you in a deep way. Nothing you see in media can prepare you for the real thing.
While working for Samsung Austin Semiconductor in 2013, I needed to travel to Korea for a month as part of our work on a global supply chain software project. IIRC, we were working at the semiconductor complex at Giehung. The fabs there are unbelievably enormous, much bigger than American fabs. Twelve stories tall, ~200x700 meters. A half dozen of these behemoths parked next to each other.
I felt like I was walking through an industrial city in Star Wars.
Edit to add: I believe you can probably contact the public relations department at Samsung Austin Semiconductor and schedule a tour for your group.
>Once you see a modern fab with your own eyes, it will change you in a deep way. I felt a sense of compassion for this incredibly complex and valuable thing that humanity is just barely able to scrape together. Nothing you see in media can prepare you for the real thing.
I interned at Micron as an industrial engineer looking at capacity and equipment purchases. I can very much relate to that. The whole summer was my mind being blown by the orders of magnitude across the board and it's somehow it's an economically viable process.
First, we take this giant silicon crystal taller than humans and cut it into wafers. Then we take these pure materials (like 99.99999% pure) and transfer a tiny big on to the wafers in a successive layering process. Oh no, the deposition process wasn't perfectly even across the whole wafer (because of annoying laws of physics), so we'll throw it into the chemical mechanical planarizarion process to skim off a tiny layer keep the internal mechanical stressed down. Add in other mechanical, etching, lithography, and measurement processes and it gets crazy.
Wafers go through hundreds of manufacturing steps depending entirely on purpose, and with each step there's a possibility of messing up part or all of the wafer.
99% yield on a per-machine basis is sub-par in most manufacturing environments, but achieving that would be devastating in semiconductors. For sake of demonstration:
0.99^100{manufacturing steps} = 36.6% total process yield.
0.995^200 = 36.6% total process yield.
0.9975^400 = 36.7% total process yield.
Each additional 9 on yield is really expensive to add.
In school we talked about 1/1000th of an inch being kinda tight to hold on a CNC mill, with 1/10,000th needing a lot more specialized processing and time. Suddenly I was hearing about nanometer thick layers with tolerances measured in angstroms.
And the capital expenditure was nuts! 6-figures hardly gets you anything in a fab, it's really in the 7-8 figure range where you see most of your equipment landing. That will be old but still viable equipment in a few years.
Somehow depreciating all that equipment designed to make chips sold at pennies to dollars each is profitable.
As far as I'm concerned, it's black magic and truly an incredible achievement for humanity.
> Each additional 9 on yield is really expensive to add.
That’s a really good point. It’s crazy to think that as we get smaller processes that not adding additional 9’s gets you relegated out of the leading edge, and possibly out of relevancy.
> As far as I'm concerned, it's black magic and truly an incredible achievement for humanity.
Fabs seem to be the far edge of tools-to-make-the-tools dependency stack, with some of the necessary sorcerous gadgets (like EUV lithography) themselves only having a single supplier with the necessary secret incantations on the other side of the planet.
Does the knowledge even exist to bootstrap things back up again should the present infrastructure and supply chains be sufficiently disrupted?
I've long admired David J. Gingery's 'Build Your Own Metal Working Shop from Scrap' and wondered whether anything like it is even possible for integrated circuits.
> 3) We have sticks and stones and whatever is in our brains. Start fresh like a game of Factorio and see how well you can do on a speed run.
I don't recall exactly where (some large ouvre like The Culture, or The Polity), but some SF novel referred in passing to this becoming an extreme sport: Your team is dropped with no supplies on an uninhabited planet, and you try to bootstrap back to an interstellar capability.
IIRC, the aside mentioned that the current record was ~70 years, by a team genetically engineered for ultra-efficient digestion and no need for sleep.
> Different positions may have different requirements, so work hours vary, according to the principal engineer. “An equipment engineer might start work at 8 o’clock in the morning and leave around 9 o’clock at night, but is it normal? This may happen two or three days a week. On a production line, the equipment must be maintained.”
> “If you are a process engineer, it will be more stable. Maybe you can start work at 8:30 a.m.and leave before 7:30 p.m. If there are some urgent matters, you may have to stay later.”
This doesn't sound like long shifts, but regular 60+ hour weeks. If a 13 hour shift (8 to 9) is "not normal" but happens 2 to 3 days a week, it doesn't sound like they are just working 3 days a week. A "more stable" position works 11 hours.
As an European these hours would be completely unacceptable to me unless it's 3 days on 4 days off, which it doesn't seem to be.
Fabs tend to be the kind of workplace where certain optimizations regarding employment law don't work well (i.e. no hiring everyone as contractor)[0], and that means dealing with employment law that has no concept of "overtime exempt" and often strong requirements on things like "maximum hours per week including overtime".
[0] Hiring as permanent employee vs fictitious "B2B" contracting can have different trade offs to employer, and while the later is cheaper in terms of wages, things like due diligence or contractual responsibility to customers/suppliers might be easier with permanent workers.
It's not about the way fabs operate, but about work laws and culture. If you need your employees to work in 12 hour shifts to keep the fab running then hire enough employees so they can still have a <=40 hour week, i.e. only work 3 days a week. Or (which is afaik the default in Germany) run the fab with three 8 hour shifts per day.
> Or (which is afaik the default in Germany) run the fab with three 8 hour shifts per day.
That seems reasonable, as long as workers have a stable schedule rather than the 'flex time' insanity that plagues many US workplaces.
That said, I imagine there are productivity tradeoffs between fresher workers (esp. at end of shift) vs. more handoffs between shifts and higher headcount of both workers and managers (so more communication overhead). How does that work out in practice?
> As an European these hours would be completely unacceptable to me unless it's 3 days on 4 days off, which it doesn't seem to be.
Americans aren’t interested in 13 hour shifts, either, unless the pay is extraordinarily high.
I agree: Something is missing from this article. If they’re running 3-on, 4-off schedules with these hours, that’s one thing. But if they’re asking 13-hour days and 5-day weeks then it’s an open and shut case: Their jobs are a poor value proposition and people will (rightly) leave.
from my experience in semiconductor fabs, its probably worth differentiating the different schedules a little bit. I'm going to start from generally the lowest to the highest paid while noting this doesn't necessarily reflect the lowest to highest value.
The factory: runs 24x7x365 - it has to, most processes have enough controlled time processes that it is a effectively week (or weeks) long process to shut down certain steps in the factory. Note for this whole comment I'm speaking of a typical 300mm high output FAB from a couple of years ago when I left the industry...for mental health/work life balance reasons. The reality is, if a single piece of critical equipment is down, it doesn't matter who you are, you will be on the phone, computer, or in the factory if your services are needed. During new process qualification it is not unheard of for equipment/process engineers to be expected to be at their equipment when certain special FOUPs of wafers are run - day or night.
The operators: typically 12ish hour shifts. Really 12 hours with an extra 15-30 min at the end to do an effective handover of the current situation of the fab. Typically in US fabs from my experience these are 3on 4off 4 on 3off schedules, often with wednesday or saturday/sunday as the swing day. In the olden days, these folks physically moved wafers and wafer boxes about the factory and it was a menial, fairly low skill, but highly precise job. Nowadays, most of them are sitting in some form of ops center monitoring looking at screens - because they are an unnecessary contaminant in the FAB. Due to automation, their number has gone down but their value and cognitive ability has definitely gone up because they are looking at the state of many pieces of equipment and many steps in the factory in an abstract way on a computer screen and controlling the movement of thousands of wafers and millions of dollars simultaneously. Good ones seem like they can see the future and are worth at least their weight in silver. I spent a lot of time trying to turn what the good ones saw/observed intuitively into systems, metrics, and control logic - that was cool and humbling.
The technicians: typically 12hour ish shifts 3 on 4 off unless doing cross training or something - with the same handover process that might last a little longer if they need to show something in person or show engineers something. These are the people physically working on the equipment by hand to perform preventative maintenance and repairs. These are the guys in the bunnysuits in the fab. Basically like the PhD version of a car mechanic. Good ones are paid more than a lot of the engineers - and are worth every cent. Beloved by ex navy folks (especially navy nukes and air force enlisted) - I knew of a fab in the North Eastern US where something like 16 techs 'hot bunked' in a nearby 2 bedroom apartment, 4 per shift, 4 shifts per week. Made local rent incredibly cheap and let them live somewhere else further away and nicer the remainder of the time.
The equipment/shift engineers: Half step between technicians and the process/yield engineers. Responsible for making sure individual pieces of equipment and fleets of equipment 'work' - meaning on target, clean, reliable etc. These are most frequently the people who's life get eaten by the job. They are attached to a physical asset that must work 95-99%+ of the 24x7x365 day year. This is where a lot of young engineers start and there is serious churn in some fabs. Compared to a lot of engineering roles, these folks really need good communication skills but it isn't necessarily obvious up front because it looks like a highly technical job on the surface. You have to build good relationships with your techs or you will fail, and often that means putting your ass in the FAB, listening, wiping, cleaning up tools to establish respect and trust.
The process engineers/yield team: Baseline is 9ish-5ish M-F, in my personal experience more like 7:15 to 5:30ish with coverage on weekends and nights available by a smaller group - not dissimilar to SREs in cloud companies. Its not that they don't work long hours, but they are not (generally) not on call as much or attached to a single physical asset.
Managers: work schedule unknown, except they are always there when you don't want them to be and never there when you wish they were :). Many of these roles become 'always available' roles, or historically they have been...some places have made moves to put two-in-a-box management models which seems to help burnout. I never did it officially but did a lot of coverage of these roles. It's kind of like air traffic control on + engineering + strategic planning mixed together.
Bigger picture - not everyone operates on the same schedule, because of the work they do and a variety of other factors. All of this is also dependent on when the 12/24 hour shifts start and end - some might run 7-7, others 8-8 or even 9-9. The exact shifts seem to shift FAB to FAB/company to company along with the boundaries of these roles. Production is different from 'ramp' is different from process development is different from R&D. What has seemed pretty universal is long hours for 'engineering types' who are doing the knowledge work and first level management of the factories physical assets. But long hours along with expectations for in person/on the phone/offline vary with a number of factors.
Would the FABS be better off with a larger workforce and a better work-life balance? My US/Euro work background perspective says yes - but I would also acknowledge there becomes, over time a huge amount of innate and tacit knowledge in these jobs that are highly experientially developed and just training more people is really hard. Coordinating amongst a larger group is even harder. That being said, I know a number of FABS that are really trying to push towards 'teams' of engineers that can slide and cross cover because the work life balance really can suck.
When I say suck I mean like (1) 'therapists near the plant who's entire patient list works for the FAB because its easier on the therapist and they still have a waiting list' sucks. And (2) 'people married to other FAB employees or single career households have longer lasting marriages' sucks.
One thing worth considering is that it is well known that long shifts increase the odds of worker error. This is why we have strict laws against pilots or truck drivers working past their effective hours.
An accident at a chip factory isn't going to be front page news the way an airplane crash is, but it could very easy cost millions in repairs and lost productivity. When I see talk about 12 hour shifts I always wonder if the management isn't costing themselves more in the long run, even if they aren't allowed to admit it for macho culture reasons.
Mentioned elsewhere is that increase handoffs (which happen with shorter shifts) also increase the odds of worker error. Where exactly the sweet-spot is is probably an open question.
My brother in law worked in steel for years. Being on call and doing everything to avoid downtime was totally normal and he has tons of entertaining war stories.
If they are having issues with this it sounds like a management problem.
A friend of mine works at a fab at another company and he's not working crazy hours. I think he currently works the three days on three days off shift.
It's one thing to have on-call hours, it's another to have on-call hours while also being expected to work 60 hours a week. It sounds like TSMC is expecting the latter.
It might also just simply be a problem with management.
There's other industrial manufacturing that happens 24/7 in the US, so it's possible
The entire article just works off a glassdoor reviews and seems to assume these individuals also know how to run ops at said place. Not much different than any place really. I even tell my guys, sure I may have opinions, but one has to understand those opionions are formed from a specific point of view and information set. And those making the decisions we are levying criticism on are likely working of entirely different points of view and information sets.
Its a confirmation bias thing common with low level guys. It happens in the military too. For example it was a major takeway for me when watching Generation Kill. Like this interview the reporter has with the point he has to make at 1:50 int he video
Fab plants like this usually run 3 shifts, thats 24/7 production right there. So you can still do 5x8's and run a plant 24/7. My father in law literally ran ops for a few places doing printed circuit board fab before it was all sent offshore. Most of what made him valuable was logistics and managing shifts/workers/on call and ops process to ensure it ran smoothly. Not everyone can do it and many that THINK they can would flounder when put in the hotseat. Similar when people ascend to Director or Executive roles.
>Moving 1,000 employees from Taiwan to Arizona won’t work, she added. Fab employees must be part of the local culture. That strategy may have some shortcomings, however. Arizona employees are mainly recent graduates who have “zero working experience,”according to Gao. “Most of them probably have never been to Asia. So cross-cultural communication and collaboration is very important.”
AZ has 10 semiconductor plants in AZ across 6 different companies not including the new TSMC one. There will be plenty of employees to recruit who have experience. I am sure this was a primary reason for selecting the site in AZ.
>The biggest may be moving the entire supply chain of test-and-assembly companies and materials suppliers to the U.S., according to the principal engineer in Taiwan.
ASML, Applied Materials, LCY, Chang Chun Group, and Nova have or are building facilities in AZ. There will be plenty of suppliers and experience for TSMC to choose from.
How can the article be so poorly researched as to not mention this?
They don't want experienced people from other fabs. That's the whole point...forming a former Intel engineer to the TSMC way is extremely difficult and the success rate is extremely low. A recent grad is malleable and they don't have preconceptions about how they did things at the last place they worked (that fell behind in the technology race).
Hell, the semiconductor industry is what brought my family out to Arizona in 1993. My dad was transferred as a packaging engineer for Olin Chemical when they opened their high purity doping chemicals plant in Mesa, Arizona. At the time, I believe they were supplying to Motorola which eventually became On Semiconductor and Freescale/NXP. Oh, and Intel has had a fab in Chandler since 1980, and the massive Fab 12 site since 1996. And they're building two new fabs for $20B.
If there's literally anywhere in the US equipped for the semiconductor supply chain... it's here in Arizona.
So, they spoke with one anonymous staff member, and then sourced, wait for it... Glassdoor. I'm not saying these claims are untrue or that they even seem untrue, but it's still squeezing an article out of... not a whole lot. Glassdoor doesn't have a reputation (in my circles) for "balanced opinions".
When looking at or using platforms like Glasdoor one always has to take the "selection bias" into account. People posting on a platform selfselect.
And it is often when something is wrong, that one tends to feel the need to communicate that. When all is fine there often just is no need to communicate that.
So using Glasdoor without taking this into consideration is at least an interesting editorial decision.
On average, reviews tend to the extremes, whether on Glassdoor, Amazon, or anywhere else. People with balanced experiences feel less of a need to voice them than people who are elated or furious about a job or product.
That's exactly it, a lot of people will only leave a review if they have something negative to say, be it Glassdoor, App Store, webshops, etc.
This is why apps prompt you to leave a review (sometimes offering rewards, often encouraging you to leave five stars), because without that prompt, content or happy people wouldn't leave a review.
The "exact" same comment has been circulating since late 2020 before it even appeared on Glassdoor. I mean I even wrote about it on HN [1] twenty days before hand. And my knowledge of it didn't came from Glassdoor.
At first I thought it could be some sort of smear / PR campaign. But given the time it took to MSM media this doesn't seems to be the case. And yes work culture is quite different, you are expected long hours in TSMC ( It is well known within Taiwan ), but it is not "that" much different to working in Samsung or Intel Foundry. As deepnotderp pointed out in the current top post. You want to catch up to leading edge TSMC, you work hard! You dont want Intel and Samsung to catch up to TSMC, you work harder.
I just lived in Taiwan for about a year, and it's pretty common feeling there that TSMC is struggling "to get Americans to work hard" in Arizona. I had several folks mention it to me when TSMC came up as a topic. They're worried they'll have to start sending full teams of Taiwanese engineers over to staff the factory (in addition to those required for training & supervision).
That doesn't mean it's necessarily true -- folks in any country, in aggregate, tend to talk about themselves as harder working than their neighbors. But I think this general idea/complaint is way more prevalent than a few Glassdoor comments, even if that's where they sourced the article.
compressed shift in the semis industry is the norm even in the US.
i used to work for a Motorola fab at Austin, TX when i was young. you work couple days a week like 3 days into the morning then you are off for the rest of week.
I work at another semiconductor manufacturer in the US. You could find and replace TSMC with my employer and write the exact same article.
Re: giving PhDs menial tasks and working a lot/odd hours
I've spent a lot of time thinking about it and it actually makes a certain kind of sense. From an engineering standpoint, there can be a lot variability in the amount of work needed. Some days you are on fire solving issues with the tools and some days there is almost nothing to do. Better to hire one PhD who is used to that kind of variable pace and pay them a relatively high, fixed salary, rather than 2-4 bachelors covering all shifts who will eat up more payroll, have lower peak effectiveness, and have even less to do per person. The pointless, excessive meetings likely exist to fill up the extra downtime and are easily skipped when you have real work to do (or if, realizing they serve no purpose, you come up with schemes to get out of them). If TSMC is doing the exact same thing on this front, I am even more convinced the so-called headcount shortage will never be fixed.
> Some days you are on fire solving issues with the tools and some days there is almost nothing to do
Being programmer/sysadmin, I've never ever encountered such a day. A day with very low productivity? Yes. But not that the task list is short. Are there really days when you have nothing to do within any engineering job? Ofcourse, different jobs etc, but I suspect when everything is working, you still have to do maintenance. If not, you may fill your time by learning new/effective ways of doing your work, etc.
> Better to hire one PhD... rather than 2-4 bachelors...
Speculation? Having PhD in title really makes you more effective? For sure, it's a proof you had research in some niche topic. Good if they can utilize that at work and be more effective. Non-PhDs can also do research that brings fruits to your labor.
My experience with PhDs (at least without years of relevant industry experience) is that they are, unsurprisingly, good at research and developing early prototypes but not so good at engineering and at getting commercial products done.
So it really depends on the job and individual skills, indeed. For software dev (which is what I know best) I would definitely choose to hire several smart, down to Earth bachelors rather than one PhD.
> Having PhD in title really makes you more effective?
I think rererr means: If a machine needs 24/7 expert support, having a single PhD paid $$$$ to be on call 24/7 might be cheaper than having a rota of 4 non-PhDs, even if the latter are cheaper per head.
Of course, in my experience it depends on the details; if the system is so needy the people doing support can't even go to the supermarket or on a date or drink a glass of beer? That's a job for a rota of people, not a single person.
1. Physical maintenance is usually done by a separate team. There is always more low-immediate-value stuff like skill development, but actual process or procedural improvements almost always require support from multiple stakeholders. Those folks may already be prioritizing other projects, and if the process is already mature, they are likely to tell you to go away if you aren't solving a major pain point. It's honestly a lot like grad school in solid state physics. A lot of hurry up and wait.
2. Mostly I mean higher effectiveness in that one person knowing all the random details of a tool or process can, at least in the short term, be more effective than multiple people spread out over time just because it eliminates the issue of knowledge transfer. The follow-up to that can reasonably be "write better documentation," but some amount of unstructured talking is usually required to convey the full nuance of a situation. Doing that with multiple people spread across four or more shifts that don't overlap is fairly difficult.
To a limited extent, I also mean that PhDs have higher effectiveness because a PhD has a much higher chance of having delivered on process development on relevant tools while in grad school.
Labor costs are probably the major reason why US chip firms went fabless in the past few decades. Chip production in the lower 48 makes rational sense for national security but not necessarily economic sense. The higher labor costs will be passed through to the supply chain ultimately to spendthrift consumers.
Note the comparison to Wall Street investment banking culture, where you work 14+ hrs a day 7 days a week (and you wanted to).
"we want reasonable jobs that allow us to have a life and do not functionally make us the property of a corporate entity that does not share sufficient amounts of the gains of our labor with us and labels requests to be treated with respect as unintelligible"
States/those with power claiming things are 'unintelligible' when in fact they just don't like them or want to treat them as valid is a classic form of control.
The power they have over the "corporate" entity is a function of what they have to offer relative to everyone else. A few decades ago when US corps made everything and the rest of the world bought them they could demand high paying union jobs and get them. The cost of this was subsidized by buyers from around the world and cheap input material and energy corps could get due to US's geopolitical position.
That ship has sailed.
Now they have to be more in line with the rest of the world.
What the "corporation" can offer and survive or stay ahead of the pack is a function of choices available to it. Which are different now than decades ago.
This myth that Americans can demand better things that the rest of the world can't needs to die. If they want to work less great they can. They need to become more efficient to produce more goods with less labor otherwise people in other countries will not want to trade with them. That is reflected to the American worker through the set of jobs and work conditions available to them.
Workers have to compete with everyone else in the world. If a company employs American workers who demand high wages to do the same work that international workers do for less pay that company will fail. The economy is a competition, companies can't just give away money.
> The economy is a competition, companies can't just give away money.
And this article makes that point very salient, as does antiunion drives at many companies. Say it costs me X to run a PR campaign about lazy workers or hire an antiunion consulting firm. It might cost me Y to raise pay, hire more workers, and/or improve working conditions. If X is less than Y and achieves the same effect - I do X, if Y is less, I do Y.
Employees are allowed to make employers compete as well. This is HN, like the home of the switch companies regularly in silicon valley & silicon valley was created because no non-competes.
In a flush labor market, employees compete for jobs from companies. In a tight labor market companies might have to compete (and treating workers better/paying more is a form of competing). If you don't want to compete by paying more, you can compete by accepting lower quality - just like if I go buy a product from a company or its competitors.
The strident defenses of the poor companies having to compete for labor being unfair is just such a strange narrative to me but one that has weaseled its way into a lot of the American subconscious.
If TSMC did know enough about American semiconductor employee work culture before investing $12 Billion in a new factory that they are surprised by this that's on them. If we accept your claim about American workers demanding higher wages than international workers for the same effort, then TSMC certainly knew that going in. TMSC isn't some innocent and naïve child...but they did build near Intel's castle hoping (it seems) to extract intellectual capital. A lot of those ex Intel-ers leave because of burnout and may have a shorter tolerance for BS than TSMC. TSMC is one of the top 10 employers in Taiwan, maybe that was something they didn't consider the influence of that in their work culture enough?
My suspicion is that this is an effectively planted article as part of a drive for better incentives by TSMC. This stinks of Foxconn and Wisconsin.
The engineers at this TSMC plant will get what they want. TSMC knows that which is why they wrote this article. The people who are really fucked are the blue collar workers whose job is moving to a sweatshop in south east asia.
except if it were solely up to TSMC this fab would not even exist. this whole project is a product of US pressure on Taiwan, as they would have much more leverage over the US if they kept their semiconductor expertise to themselves. let's not pretend the US would be so gung-ho if it weren't for TSMC, Taiwan provides little value otherwise
One factor you are missing in that analysis: TSMC is very profitable—about $5 billion per quarter. Better working conditions don't have to mean more expensive products; it could instead mean reduced profits.
Where do those profits go? Presumably TSMC doesn't just sit on it. Surely they either invest it back into their business to stay competitive or deal it out as compensation.
How so? The rich don't benefit from profits being tied up in a business account. If they want that money, they either have to receive it as immediate compensation or invest it in hopes of receiving even greater compensation in the future.
The generally accepted meaning of "compensation" is not related to distribution of profit. All compensation to employees and managers (including bonuses) is a "before-profit" expense; and all distribution of profits to company owners like dividends and stock buybacks is not called compensation, that's an entirely separate category.
Investments and bonuses are not part of any of those categories. Profits don't just get dumped into a Scrooge McDuck-esque money pool. Businesses obviously keep some money on hand, but it doesn't benefit anyone involved to have the money sit there forever. Profits are eventually used to fund expansions, acquisitions, improvements, charitable donations, rewards, etc.
There's nothing cynical about that, for most companies in the world their entire purpose and primary reason for existence - explicitly and openly stated, and mandated by their bylaws - is to generate this return on investment for the owners.
Like, this is the primary goal; any other uses of profit are valid only with the expectation that they will allow the owners to extract more money later.
I don’t think the parent response is correct, though, if by profit (colloquially) we go by earnings that could be distributed to shareholders.
Sure, gross profit would not include either of those expenses. But operating profit would subtract research and development (e.g. the salaries and bonuses of the engineers working on the next process node) and depreciation on new factory (i.e. the cost of the new factory spread out over its useful lifetime - though it doesn’t include a factory under construction). Then you subtract interest and taxes to get to net profit. And TSMC has net profit margins of 39% in 2020!
To put that into scale, here's some quotes from TSMC's Wikipedia article[0]:
> In November 2020 officials in Phoenix, Arizona in the United States approved TSMC's plan to build a $12 billion chip plant in the city. [...] In 2021, news reports claimed that the facility may be tripled to roughly a $35 billion investment with six factories.
> In November 2021, TSMC and Sony announced that TSMC would be establishing a new subsidiary named Japan Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing (JASM) in Kumamoto, Japan. [...]. The initial investment will be approximately $7 billion with Sony investing approximately $500 million for a less than 20% stake.
When you're committing to $42B of investments, $28.4B doesn't seem like all that much to have on hand.
I don't think that dividends are typically coupled to inflation. The return on an investment (at least via stock ownership) includes dividends + asset appreciation, right? I would expect the combination to be related to inflation but not necessarily dividends alone. Is that the right way to think about it? I'm not a finance guy.
An idealized company in a static market that has been making the same real (i.e. inflation adjusted) profits for a while and is expected to for quite some time will have its price track inflation, so any dividends paid out will be on top of inflation.
Real life is much messier than the above, due to things like speculation (how much some people think other people will think the company will be worth in a year), changes in the broader market (if the "zero risk" rate of returns goes up or down, then equities, which have higher risk will tend to move in the opposite direction), and such can have drastic effects on a company's market value.
"People" in each line are different groups of people. ...but the underlying lesson is correct - you cannot just listen to the loudest group. You have to enact policies that are based on an educated understanding of economics.
I suppose even if there were different groups (say, one free trade group, another protectionist group), the people individually could have coherent opinions. It would then go wrong when the elected representatives try to pander to both groups simultaneously.
No you can reasonably have high wages, decent profits, and high output. Big tech in the US already does that exceptionally well. There's no reason TSMC can't do it, other than they don't want to sacrifice some profit.
TSMC is upset because of the lack of enough slave labor in Arizona.
Going by the article, it seems a large part of the "culture clash" is TSMC's insistence on three hours of meetings each day and using outdated software that was designed back in 1987(!). While workers in Taiwan used to work 12 hour days, time worked is not a good indicator of productivity and I'm willing to bet that TSMC's massive profitability meant there wasn't much incentive to make the work process more efficient.
Honestly, I'm surprised so much hands-on work is needed when we're talking about a semiconductor company. One would think a lot of the fine-tuning work, which seems to be what requires a lot of the labor, could be easily automated with current technology.
Any company that runs down worker resources by running them out of spec is not sustainable and indicative of a lack of mature management. You wouldn't run your physical machinery outside of its operating area, so don't do it to your workforce. Automate. Fabs are the knife edge of technology, literally building the components that go into all other forms of automation, yet they are reliant on primate and medieval era organizational structures and processes?
Ask anyone who worked in retail for a long time. When they replaced the point of sale and catalog search systems in the early 2000's, everyone's productivity plummeted.
They replaced old, DOS/Norton-style keyboard-only systems with a legion of shortcuts and archaic codes with Web-based touch-screen or mouse-based UIs with modern UX etc.
The new technology was obviously more modern and allowed faster training, and it's hard to imagine any world where that upgrade doesn't happen. But the old system was faster, and allowed experienced users to do more.
Now, if you're talking about a Blockbuster Video, maybe it's the right choice.
But if you're talking about extremely specialized semiconductor manufacturing, maybe you stick with the highly optimized system that works. Some things changed a lot since 1987. Others haven't.
I appreciate the sentiment, but we are talking about different things. My comment was directed entirely at how hard some companies push their workforce, not what era the technology is from.
My impression was that the extra hours are due to the factories being on a 24/7 uninterrupted production cycle. Having people work 12 hour shifts instead of 8 reduces the headcount required by 33%.
Not true, you can pay 33% or more and still save money on overhead, head count, and shift changes. You see this in the US despite overtime laws, where it is still better to pay a worker 150% for the extra hours.
I don't think shift duration changes the headcount, it really depends on the total hours per week each person is working.
There's 168 hours in a week. If people work for 40 hours a week, to cover the 168 hours you need to employ 4.2 people for every employee you want on the floor at any given time. That means everyone works 5 8-hour shifts, or 3.3 12-hour shifts per week.
If you reduce headcount by 33%, that works out to 2.8 people per employee on the floor, which means everyone works 60 hours per week -- 7.5 8-hour shifts, or 5 12-hour shifts. That's a lot.
> While workers in Taiwan used to work 12 hour days, time worked is not a good indicator of productivity and I'm willing to bet that TSMC's massive profitability meant there wasn't much incentive to make the work process more efficient.
That's one of the pitfall of low labor costs: since time is virtually free it tends to create a culture that doesn't use it efficiently.
I've seen it with offshored devs way too often; why take the time to learn version control when you can pass around code in emails and on thumb drives?
> [...] we moved because it cost less with no labor or environmental protections and we could work the shit out of people.
TSMC was never in North America, it was always a Taiwanese company. It's literally an Asian company moving production to the US.
Taiwan isn't some rando poor Asian country; it's a rich democracy. The work culture is no doubt different (as it is, say, in Japan or South Korea), but to pretend that it has no labor or environmental laws is somewhere between racist and naive.
I didn't read that comment in relation to TSMC, but as a rebuttal to the GP's assertion that it was "people" who drove US production over seas over the past 40 years.
In this specific situation that's glossing things over as well. I would have chosen locally made except intel completely stalled their progress for years. In my recent upgrade I went with a TSMC (I believe) made AMD chip because it had better access to SSDs and PCI bus and cores that I couldn't get in an intel chip AND better prices. It's hard to buy local if local companies in fast evolving products are going to sit on their laurels.
I can only think of lame examples I'm sorry but there is this silly trend where careful expert design is replaced with letting the end user decide. To me this is just a sign of incompetence. The expert needs to carefully craft into the product what the user wants but only after careful examination. The lame examples would be to let the driver design the car, the passenger the aircraft or the patient the surgery room etc
The story as told above on how production moved to cheap labor countries, jobs were lost as well as purchase power has a weird continuation where the decline of purchase power scales down production and makes life harder for the cheap laborer therefore more fragile. We shift from [the absurd] putting the consumer in charge of the economic decisions to having the "choices" made by (or more like making the results depend on-) people all the way at the bottom of the food chain. We are pretty much left collectively hoping that they can keep up with our unreasonably demanding demands.
I'm not even complaining that we are squeezing people to hard. I have issues with a system that can just abruptly stop - entirely! Sure, I want cheaper products but I have no idea what kind of risks we are taking. I should not be the one to decide. I would rather have a large group of highly trained professionals calculate the risks and present them in a way we might understand. Make me a map of the [proverbial] meteor strikes and the global economic consequences. What parts of the show can go on if ingredient X is taken out of the soup?
(edit: Ofc there is more than cheap labor pushing localized specializations which increase efficiency and decrease resilience)
TSMC's largest customers are American though. Apple, Nvidia, and AMD. These companies sourced their chips internationally to TSMC for cost reasons, related mainly to labor. They're to blame. There's a compounding effect too. They could've purchased American chips and subsidized American foundries. They didn't and instead American foundries have fallen behind.
The GDP per capita of Taiwan is higher than France. It's not the place you move jobs to to optimize for labor costs.
Again, there's a pretty racist subtext here that because it's in Asia, you assume that must be cheap labor, not innovation. Would you have the same argument if the fabs were in France or Spain, both of which have lower GDPs per capita than Taiwan?
Calling this racist seems applicable but quite a stretch to me.
From the article is seems workers in Taiwan work 12 hour days as normal. Couple that with the fact that manufacturing used by primarily US being done outside US borders is generally some for cost saving reasons and it seems to make sense to assume that Taiwan IS doing this cheaper somehow. If it were a matter of innovation wouldn't the same innovation hold in their new plant in Arizona?
The article is about engineers, not factory workers. Are you really telling me there's no culture of overworking for engineers in Silicon Valley? It's contrasting Arizona with Taiwan; I don't think this same article would be written about Silicon Valley vs. Taiwan.
There's also a difference between what you're saying and what the great-grandparent said: being cheaper can be because they have better processes or are more innovative, or have shorter supply lines, or better access to mainland China or whatever.
But the great-grandparent both (a) assumed that tech fundamentally belongs to the US, and if it's being done somewhere else, it's in service to the US, and (b) that the primary reason someone would produce things outside of the US is labor costs.
Labor costs are no longer the primary reason things are produced outside of the US. At this point, it's primarily industrial capacity and know-how.
Salary info I'm finding on google suggest that electrical engineers still get paid less in Taiwan than in the US. I'd also be very curious what those numbers looked like over the decades when offshoring really ramped up.
Not "10x less" or anything incredibly dramatic, but for a business, money saved is money saved.
It's silly to have a whole thread of back and forth responses on "is it racist to say cost of labor is cheaper somewhere else" without looking at the numbers to see if it actually is. GDP per capita is very much not the same as salary.
Personally I'm waiting for engineering salaries in the non-US to catch up to the US because it'll make it easier for me to leave the US if I choose to do so but it doesn't look like it's happened yet.
Engineers in virtually every country in the world make less money than in the US. But the reason people have jobs in the rest of the world isn't because everyone wants to make things in the US, but it's just too expensive, so they'll settle for somewhere else. That's pretty heavy-handed American exceptionalism.
TSCM has the best fabs in the world. This article literally mentions them having to build the factory in the US and send people over to teach the Americans how to run it. They're just better at it. To keep insisting that that's not the case, and that this is really all about their lower salaries is, in fact, racist.
Here we're looking at an industry where the US used to be dominant. So it's not a question of "how did another country beat the US to this sort of industry despite having less money floating around than the US?" It's specifically "how did this industry leave the US and why is it non-trivial to rebuild some of it?"
I'm talking about the how of them becoming the best in the world, not arguing that they aren't the best now. As money for semiconductor manufacturing moved to overseas companies, initially driven by costs, those companies ended up with the money to invest in getting good at it.
But that money was directed there as a result of specific actions by people in the US. So yes, all the conversation about immediate-cost-focused decisions, and the difference in the labor costs, are relevant.
It's not "American exceptionalism" to be aware of this history, it's "American exceptionalism" that caused this and that drives the laissez faire attitude that there wouldn't be domestic impact like loss of expertise and reliance on overseas producer from a focus on immediate cost over all else. The idea that if we wanted to, we could simply build the industry back up. Because we're America! Same as all the rest of "it can't happen here" BS that people use to excuse ignoring various domestic issues.
--
To frame the labor cost issue a different way, let's look at what the reverse process, bringing that expertise back to the US, would look like: let's say tomorrow the US wanted to build up a domestic best-in-the-world alternative company. They'd have to hire a bunch of engineers! Even best-case, it would take those engineers quite a while to reproduce all the earned knowledge and expertise of TSMC's engineers. All the while you're gonna have to pay those engineers more than TSMC's engineers are making, because it's a more expensive labor market. And then even if they do produce equally high levels of output after a while, all those higher costs are going to put them at a competitive disadvantage. So if you want to be good at it domestically, and you live in a country with more competition for labor, you really have to commit to spending extra to do it. (Getting TSMC to build some plants domestically is a way of short-cutting the knowledge acquisition step, but it's just a small step towards really rebuilding the industry.)
Except that your history is wrong in this case. It's more about politics and Intel's failure, and Taiwan and TSMC's capitalization on that than it is about salaries.
A lot of manufacturing did move to Taiwan in the 70s and 80s because labor costs were lower there then, and because the US was investing a lot in Taiwan because of its strategic role vis-a-vis mainland China. But that wasn't especially high tech, and was decades before TSMC became relevant on the global market for anything but very low-end chips.
The way that TSMC ended up on top was by beating Intel at its own game. It did that at a time where Taiwan was already rich, and the US wasn't actively subsidizing the semi-conductor industry, whereas Taiwan's government was. It seems naive to assume that Intel wouldn't have had a decade of missed deadlines if it'd just thrown more money at the problem. In that this article started off about corporate culture, it's not hard to argue that much of what killed US chip fabrication dominance was Intel's corporate culture (as opposed to cheap Asian labor).
Basically there was a lot of consolidation in fabrication in the US, then with all of the eggs in a couple of baskets, the US-based fabs dropped the ball, and TSMC and Samsung smelled blood and stepped up their game.
I'm not particularly focused on Intel at the very top-end here. TSMC capitalizing on Intel dropping the ball in the 2010s doesn't happen if there wasn't a trend that continued through the 90s and 2000s that helps them get in the position to capitalize. Labor costs then were part of the equation - after all, they still haven't fully caught up.
The US being down to essentially one player that made their living focusing on just the top of the market is because of that process that hollowed out the US-based industry.
The alternative scenario I'm pitching isn't "Intel doesn't screw up cause they throw even more money at it" it's "the US semiconductor industry has multiple big players so that the are more domestic players to try to pounce on Intel's mistakes." But, because of cost pressure, including cost of labor, I believe that would take specific action and policy choices.
> Personally I'm waiting for engineering salaries in the non-US to catch up to the US because it'll make it easier for me to leave the US if I choose to do so but it doesn't look like it's happened yet.
What difference would it make to your quality of life if you made $60k in Europe instead of $150k in America? Sure, your net worth wouldn't increase at the same rate, but should we define our lives around our net worth?
It would primary affect both the specific city/location and quality of housing my family was in as well as our long-term economic security and flexibility. The latter is the most important part, but the former is important to me as well.
Having money in the bank is basically the same as having choices.
This implies that someone making $60k in Europe is living in poorer quality housing and/or living in a poorer location compared to someone making $150k in America, which I do believe to be the case.
>as well as our long-term economic security and flexibility >Having money in the bank is basically the same as having choices.
Do people in Europe not have long-term economic security and flexibility? Do they not have choices?
> Personally I'm waiting for engineering salaries in the non-US to catch up to the US because it'll make it easier for me to leave the US if I choose to do so but it doesn't look like it's happened yet.
Let me chime in to say that salary isn't everything in life, or the key to live a good, fulfilling life. I'd even argue that socialized healthcare and worker's rights, ensured in numerous European countries, do far more to achieve good life than, say, an absurdly high salary.
I would imagine there comes a point where an "absurdly" high salary can more than compensate for deficiencies in the US healthcare system. Sacrificing some work-life balance as well.
In the latter case, that point is different for different people, but if you're making FAANG seniorSWE+ level compensation (especially if it's at one of the easier FAANGs), I would think the options to optimize your quality of life is probably higher in the US than in the hypothetical more socialistic European countries you mention.
> Americans workers at TSMC’s Arizona fab may chafe at becoming the humble students of their mentors in Taiwan, who nearly 50 years ago transferred semiconductor technology from RCA of the U.S.
It was more geostrategic rather than capitalist outsourcing that lead to the knowledge transfer, but after that transfer was complete, the economic factors mentioned by the person you're responding to would fully be in effect. A nontrivial part of Taiwan's economic success has been that knowledge transfer that enabled the creation of TSMC.
> TSMC was never in North America, it was always a Taiwanese company.
This isn't about a particular company, it's an industry-wide trend. Semiconductor manufacturing was predominantly in the US, then it wasn't.
> The work culture is no doubt different (as it is, say, in Japan or South Korea), but to pretend that it has no labor or environmental laws is somewhere between racist and naive.
This is actually the root of the problem. The problem isn't the existence of labor or environmental laws, it's that many labor and environmental laws exist in the US that can't survive a cost benefit analysis, so the US loses manufacturing to countries with a more efficient regulatory environment.
People act like regulation is some binary thing where the only choices are "on" or "off" when the reality is that the details are what matter.
The article is about a specific company. People are commenting with generalizations that don't apply to TSMC and so it is rather unclear how these comments are on topic. The comments also don't acknowledge that they don't apply to the specific context of the article which makes them misleading and in need of correction.
It is not necessary for the labor and environmental laws to be such that they "can't survive a cost benefit analysis" for them to create a force pushing manufacturing towards places without those laws. Any regulation will have this effect, and the details you speak of determine the degree.
> Any regulation will have this effect, and the details you speak of determine the degree.
There's more to it than that.
The ban on leaded gasoline makes gasoline somewhat more expensive. If you multiply that by all the unleaded gasoline everybody has bought since the 1970s, that's a lot of money! But lead is really, really, really bad. That ban is cost effective even if it costs billions of dollars. Which it does, but the alternative is much worse.
There are other regulations that cost just as much and provide nowhere near the same benefit. The deterrent effect on doing business in the US of both regulations is the same, but the benefit we receive isn't.
And the deterrent is cumulative. There are advantages to doing business in the US. An educated workforce and a stable government etc. Companies move out when the cumulative regulatory deterrent exceeds the advantages.
Which means you can have a ban on leaded gasoline without anyone leaving, because the cost of that doesn't exceed the other advantages of the US. Which means that anyone trying to repeal the ban on leaded gasoline is doing it wrong.
But if you have a ban on leaded gasoline and 250,000 other regulations that each cost just as much but are barely breakeven if that on the benefit side, you exceed the threshold and lose the jobs. To get the jobs back, you have to get rid of some of the regulations.
We need to get rid of the ones with a poor cost benefit ratio, not the ones with a great cost benefit ratio. Which is, to be honest, most of them -- but it's still really important that it be the right ones.
Every regulation (that isn't globally applied/enforced (so all of them)) creates a regulatory deterrent (where it is applied/enforced), independently of its benefit. This is what I said, and this is also implicit in your comment.
The advantages of doing business in the US that are balanced against "cumulative regulatory deterrent" are largely independent of the specific regulations involved, though not always (much harder to get an educated workforce when everyone is lead-poisoned in childhood). Deciding which costs should be considered baked in (you're saying "no leaded gasoline") and which are on the margin (you're saying whichever 250,000 you claim are as costly as no leaded gasoline) is not inherent to the problem based on "efficiency" alone.
"Benefit" is rarely neutral. Values and politics are its domain. ("It's your luggage that has put the plane over its weight threshold, not my luggage!")
Also,
> To get the jobs back, you have to get rid of some of the regulations.
presumes that other countries' regulatory environments are functionally fixed and not impacted by international cooperation. International effort imposed extra costs on those who would employ child labor, for instance. Other types of responses exist besides "well we have to let them give Kentuckian factory-workers spinal problems because otherwise they'll go off and give Vietnamese factory-workers spinal problems!"
Painting it as a single company moving back and forth is an oversimplification but in a open market it's pretty close to "company located in US loses business to company located in less expensive country." Taiwan is hardly cheap but local labor-dependent stuff in Taipei seemed cheaper than the US when I visited - unlike Europe, say. Similarly, fewer workers seem to leave the US for better-paying jobs in Taiwan then vice versa. Googling salary estimates for EE jobs in Taiwan gives me ranges of up to 2.5M NT annual (90K USD) or 80K NT per month ($2900 USD).
TSMC was also founded in 1987, Taiwan has changed a lot over the decades and at a certain point inertia works for a lot even as costs may even out compared to in the past. What were those salaries in 2000?
People can't consume more than they produce, unless they are riding on the coat tails other workers. Right now, America is used to riding on the coat tails of Asian labour and that is eventually going to come to an end.
You should watch "American Factory" on Netflix. It is about a Chinese company opening a factory in Ohio. There may be economics behind the different work cultures, but the cultures are hugely different at this point. The Chinese managers are actually baffled that workers only want to work for the paycheck, and don't work hard for pride. They have to take courses about how American workers need to be coddled and treated as special.
Not a factory, and Korean instead of Chinese, but I worked for one of the major householdname Korean conglomerates at their US branch. It was well known amongst the Korean and Korean-American employees that their salaries were lowballed versus their non-Korean colleagues, and that they were also expected to work longer hours.
The reason?
"Korean Pride".
You were expected to go above and beyond for sake of the glory and well being of the Republic of Korea and the Korean People, via the proxy of The Company.
Most of us (myself included) internally thought this was total bullshit, and were on the lookout for the first opportunity to jump ship specifically for a non-Korean company. Of course we would never admit that to a manager, especially the expats from Korea.
It was also known that the best teams to work for in terms of work-life balance and just general pleasantness were ones where the manager and teammates were comprised mostly (or entirely) of non-Koreans, or at least heavily Americanized Korean-Americans. Having an older conservative expat Korean manager was the worst possible scenario.
One nice perk was having a big name like The Company on your resume wasn't bad at all for future job prospects.
Electronics/anything that uses ICs should never have been as cheap as they are now. NAFTA has been a fucking disaster; we're addicted to cheap shit we don't need, and it's near-impossible to break. It affects every aspect of society.
“TSMC will have to change to an eight-hour work day five days a week.”
They could have paid me a few thousand bucks as a consultant to tell them that's standard operating procedure around the US ... they could use hourly employees and offer overtime but they can't expect it. Do multiple shifts -- day and night shifts. How did nobody do due dilligence before setting up fabs in the US?
I mean fabs are billions of dollars. Even if forced to open one they’re too expensive to do so poorly. Best to find a way to make it profitable than to throw a hissy fit about it and pout.
I’ve known many Intel process engineers who’ve worked 80 hour weeks for years on end. This 48 hour TSMC demand would be a relief. Unfortunately, while TSMC moved to AZ, the moved to the other side of Phoenix from the existing Fabs. An Intel engineer isn’t going to just wake up one day and decide to change jobs to TSMC. They’re an hour and a half away from each other during the morning commute. So now, the engineer needs to sell their house, move their kids to a different school. Ridiculous. It’s going to be a rare Intel engineer that’s willing to make that jump. They’re going to get the engineers who are running away from Intel, not the good ones.
I feel like your post is incongruent. Intel engineers wouldn't be willing to endure a 10-14 hour longer commute to save 32 hours of working time?
Moving an hour down the road isn't a big deal. I've done so many times. You don't even need special moving companies and looking at houses isn't a huge deal if you batch them up.
The barrier to move an hour and a half is less than moving across country, but it’s not insignificant. Your kids are changing school/school districts. You’re finding a new church. Your friends who you met for dinner each Friday - not going to see them but once a month now. Your relatives that you invited over for dinner every Tuesday - you’ll see them on birthdays and the holidays. The distance is too far to comfortably commute for more than a year. I did roughly half that same commute for 2 years and it was mentally taxing. And no, the engineers who are working 80 hours a week aren’t “normal” people who are all of a sudden going to start working just 48 hours a week.
Btw, the Intel engineers in Chandler aren’t the cause of Intel’s process woes. They’re world class. TSMC is hiring fresh new hires, from a generation that doesn’t yet know or celebrate hard work.
First, the structure. TSMC will have tool owners who manage the tool on their side. The tool suppliers will have engineers who maintain the tools from their side. A tool is a piece of equipment involved in the manufacturing process.
This relationship is interesting. The tool owner's performance is heavily dependent upon their ability to maximize availability. This mainly involves managing relationships with the suppliers and fighting for more resources from the supplier's engineers to fix the tools.
Supplier sign availability contracts to provide maintenance for the tools. There is a lot of pressure and politics involved.
Second is hiring. Onboarding is a big problem. Training a college grad from scratch requires 1.5 years, a lot of domain knowledge. It is a huge investment to fly them around the world to different training sites and to give them opportunities to practice on the tools.
Lastly is culture. TSMC pushes their guys and their tools to their limits. They work in high pressure environments and are expected to proactively step up. In Taiwan, the managers often yell at their workers and the workers have little room to negotiate.
TSMC tool owners know a lot more about how the tools work than their competitors, sometimes even more than their suppliers. TSMC tool owners often step in and do things themselves.
TSMC will also not be able to hire the same quality of talent as in Taiwan. TSMC in Taiwan pays more and has higher prestige. This is not the same in Arizona. They will also have trouble convincing "target school" talent to relocate to Arizona.
Now what does this amount to?
First, the supplier's engineers will have options to work for Intel and Samsung and will probability prefer to work at those sites. Intel has the best work culture. Quality, safety, etc. This will force TSMC to make changes.
Second, TSMC will have trouble keeping talent if they push phds to work as tool owners, as the job market provides better opportunities in the US.
This will result in the new fab to staffed with more inexperienced workers. This is very problematic because domain knowledge from experience in this field is key. The inexperience will result in availability issues (5-10 percent) affect production.
So what should TSMC do?
What TSMC must adapt to the local culture and lower their expectations. They must be able to convince experienced engineers to work at their site. They can also push this to their supplier's side in terms of availability contracts. They need to relocated some experienced process engineers and tool owners from Taiwan or the throughput and yield will drop.
If they do hire new talent, they have a great opportunity to break industry norms. This industry is filled with bad practices from older engineers. These habits are incredibly difficult to break. If they train new engineers correctly, they can outperform the older engineers.
End of the day, the fab will come up, it will run. The question is how many chips will they be able to produce in the first few years.
>In post-industrial Ohio, a Chinese billionaire opens a factory in an abandoned General Motors plant, hiring two thousand Americans. Early days of hope and optimism give way to setbacks as high-tech China clashes with working-class America.
Objections over long hours? Unlikely. Assuming TSMC (and their contractors) pays overtime...
I want quotes from actual people doing the work.
My bestie was a welder working on fabs in the 80s and 90s. In Phoenix. Lax regulation, lax oversight. He loved the work, loved the pay.
And he locked horns with mgmt. Every single day. Mostly over safety issues. Cutting corners, skipping steps, providing the necessary training.
And all of his employers were USA corporations. Even back then, operational fabs make millions of dollars per day. Clock is ticking! Every day, hour, minute the fab isn't running is pure waste. The pressure to "get 'er done!" is immense.
They couldn't fire my welder buddy, much as they wanted to, because specialists like him were so scarce.
This is not a "cultural" mismatch. Please.
This is straight up mgmt vs labor. As old as history.
There wont be an issue here.
IMO this reads more like a hit piece or something indicating that they want to back out of the Arizona deal or get more money. It's not really clear.
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