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)

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.

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.

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.

IIRC they do regular tours for schools and other STEM groups. Last I badged out, there was an entire museum room dedicated to the history/tech/etc.

https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

Then I got it. Brilliant.

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.

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.

Black magic indeed!

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.

Man, I'd love to know. Hypothetical scenarios are:

1) Everything is available at your fingertips supply chain wise, but you have no equipment. How long until we're at our current technical capability?

2) No equipment and the supply chain need to be rebuilt, but the designs are still present.

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.