Comment by Xeronate 4 days ago
I read the main problem with hiring chip factory workers in Arizona was the factory just didnt pay enough for the long hours demanded. I looked up the median salary and its only 50k so I'm assuming it's not crazy skilled labor (e.g. brain drain). Taiwanese workers just seem more willing to do it.
It's also highly-skilled, yet very boring work. The way it was described to me is that every major piece of equipment has a PhD assigned to it and their job is basically to babysit the machine and troubleshoot when things go wrong.
US PhDs typically have other options and would consider this sort of work a waste of their time.
I know several people working as customer engineers in a fab based in America. They are very much not PhD‘s or even mechanical engineers.
They are each assigned one tool to maintain as you said. They each make around 100K and 3 12hr days per week.
They were working in the automotive industry before these jobs. Sounds pretty damn good to me, but I suppose that’s one reason American companies cannot compete with TSMC.
There are loads of highly qualified US engineers who would love to babysit enormously complicated industrial equipment for a living.
But not for 50k, lol.
> every major piece of equipment has a PhD assigned to it and their job is basically to babysit the machine and troubleshoot when things go wrong
This works in Taiwan. It doesn’t in America. The Taiwanese workers will help transfer knowledge to American workers; it will be the joint responsibility of them both to come up with how those processes are adapted for American preferences. (Probably more automation, rotation between machines or possibly even not being under TSMC.)
I mean, that was exactly the way the job was described when I interviewed at Intel for a process engineer, and everyone doing the same job was at the time a PhD according to the interviewer. Did it change?
Being on call 24/7 to troubleshoot million dollar pieces of equipment sounded like a poor life choice, so I didn't take it. But Intel also hasn't exactly done great since then...
> was exactly the way the job was described when I interviewed at Intel for a process engineer, and everyone doing the same job was at the time a PhD according to the interviewer. Did it change?
Not sure. What has changed in recent years is the quality of industrial automation, particularly in semiconductors.
I'm unconvinced the only way to make these chips is for highly-trained engineers to caramelise onions on the stove. (At the very least, they could be allowed time to conduct experiments into new production methods, et cetera. Similar to how universities let professors do research in exchange for putting in teaching hours.)
> The way it was described to me is that every major piece of equipment has a PhD assigned to it...
did they mean that literally or just that an expert was assigned to it? What kind of PhD would even be relevant to maintaining machinery on an assembly line? Perhaps a PhD on the operations of that specific machine but even then, the person's knowledge would be so focused on whatever physics/chemistry/science is being used that i find it hard to believe a PhD would know what to do when something broke without tons of specific training on the hardware.
I mean, it's a long, specialized project. It really depends on the specialization. a new grad with a PhD in some LLM tech would be grabbed up much faster than a hobbyist with 5+ years in general SWE with maybe some pet projects made with AI tech.
> he way it was described to me is that every major piece of equipment has a PhD assigned to it and their job is basically to babysit the machine and troubleshoot when things go wrong.
Yes.
"It’s the Most Indispensable Machine in the World—and It Depends on This Woman"
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/asml-euv-machine-lithography-chi...
Even China has ruled 996 illegal in 2021: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system#Legal_...
No one should be forced to work those kinds of hours. It's unreasonable to call Westerners/Americans lazy if they refuse to work 996.
50k is/was recently a decent salary (not SF). In the last 5 years, not so much anywhere outside the absolute lowest CoL areas.
But yes, most Americans do not want to work on a death march. And employers don't want to pay it. I doubt they can argue 50k as exempt so that's a lot of overtime. They may as well be salaried 6 figures at that point.
Why would they require these hours? In the U.S. I think they would need to pay time and a half for anything north of 40-hours. Seems like it would be cheaper to hire more workers and not force the overtime. Then they might be able to increase the salary some. Everyone wins except the people who are willing to sacrifice the time for time and a half pay.
50k is just a step above McDonalds these days in a lot of areas. Sure minimum wage might be $15k, but realistically nobody pays that little except in very rural areas (if you need a small number of low skilled employees a small rural town is a perfect spot to build - but if you need more than a small number they can't provide more at any price - you will pay more in the city but there are a lot more people around if you need more)
McDonalds in Sunnyvale CA starts at 20/h, so 41k/year for the lowest role
Perhaps - in California.
Median US Salary is $59,384. Half of workers make less.
You need to factor in that only ~30% of workers work full-time.
Men with a bachelor's degree who work full-time have a median income is ~$89k - (basically the entire demographic of these TSMC workers).
The statistic I gave was for solely full-time workers in the US.
...just seem more willing to do it
That's why manufacturing offshored in the first place, companies feel they're receiving better value for money on wages elsewhere for this kind of work (and these days not to mention more & larger facilities, proximity to component sources, and a strong ecosystem of supporting and complimentary facilities).
I think that's obviously a major part of it but it ignores other stuff like lax environmental and safety standards.
It would be interesting to see how much of the economic advantage of off-shoring is due to lower wages due intrinsic to lower cost of living vs stuff like ignoring/bribing foreign officials or non-existent environmenta/safety standards that objectively should exist.
Personally I won't mind paying more to buy manufactured goods. My mom told me that a pair of sneakers before the offshoring back in the late 80s usually cost more than $300 in today's dollars. Yes, it was expensive, but I would just buy fewer and use the one for longer time. The reason is that in the long run the manufacturing cost would get lower due to increased efficiency, and loss of supply chain is detrimental to the entire country - and our living expenses will increase overall. Case in point, how much tax do we have to pay and how much inflation do we have to suffer in order to build those super expensive weapons? Part of the reasons that we had $20K toilet and $100 screws is that we simply don't have large enough supply chain to offset the cost of customized manufacturing.
Besides, the US loses know-how on manufacturing, eliminating potentially hundreds of thousands of high-paying engineering jobs - it will also be a pipe dream that we can keep the so-called high-end jobs by sitting in an office drawing boxes all day. Sooner or later, those who work with the actual manufacturing processes on the factor floor will out compete us and grab our the cushy "design" jobs.
it’s mostly just baumol cost disease.
you can feel free to buy american, i don’t care so i would prefer if it were not mandated and you get your individual choice to pay more for your goods if you want
Easy to get better value on wages when you get to pay under the minimum wage of your home country. And/or aren't required to offer benefits, vacation. And are able to work them twice as long without overtime pay. And don't need to care about child labor laws.
To be blunt: yes, slavery is cheap, isn't it?
Cost of living can be a lot lower in Taiwan, if your property is already paid off.
Unfortunately housing is super overpriced, due to the Asian mentality resulting in high property ownership.
Real estate is always the monkey wrench in the gears of capitalism because of high necessity yet limited supply.
> Unfortunately housing is super overpriced, due to the Asian mentality resulting in high property ownership.
I have no clue what this means and in countries like Japan, housing is a depreciating asset vs. an investment, so…?
More so in the Chinese-speaking world and South Korea because the industrialization/urbanization is more recent, so there's rising demand in the urban areas with high population growth, resulting in high prices.
Japan's urbanization stopped long ago, and it's not taking in immigrants fast enough, so the urban areas have stopped growing.
The mentality refers to East Asia's deep agrarian root that places high value on owning land that can be passed down the generations (the alternative was often quasi-servile farm labour that locks families in poverty). Property purchases are usually multi-generational efforts, so families can generally take the brunt of overinflated prices.
It's just an obvious nonsense. Housing cost is dependent variable of local economic activities. People gather and property prices soar. Taiwan is jam packed so land prices would be higher relative to GDP per capita.
I think GP is finding concept of land scarcity non-intuitive for some reason.
> Real estate is always the monkey wrench in the gears of capitalism because of high necessity yet limited supply.
This only happens when the government becomes captured by land owners to constrain the supply, since otherwise you can build up. But governments getting captured by land owners happens a lot.
I spoke to a Taiwanese person and apparently the salaries there are actually quite good, even by western standards (normal ones; not SF). The downside is they have very very long hours (996, barely any holiday, etc.).