Comment by jonas21 4 days ago
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.
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.
The 996 should be regulated against, it's simply unreasonable
Apparently there are laws against it in China. But I guess the US isn't the only one with loosely enforced labor regulations.
> 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...
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.