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Comment by didibus | Hacker News Reader

Do gigafab manufactures like that really create high income jobs? I assumed it was mostly low income close to minimum wage kind of thing.

On a similar tangeant, how are these able to compete with similar manufacturing done in Asia or Africa?

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Average salary is probably around $100k. Even the techs with high school educations can make in the range of $40-60 an hour and generous overtime.

>On a similar tangeant, how are these able to compete with similar manufacturing done in Asia or Africa?

Because it is all high skill labor. Techs that are able to strip down a 10 MM machine and identify the source of sub micron particule contamination are worth their weight in gold.

>>Average salary is probably around $100k. Even the techs with high school educations can make in the range of $40-60 an hour and generous overtime.

Do you have a source for that? I'm surprised as when I contracted at the Intel fab in PHX, the workers in the actual fab were not making anything close to that. Management maybe, but not actual line workers. The standing joke was "they were working for the stock"...

Were they working for the stock?

I found this which has a manufacturing plant section. No idea how accurate: https://www.zippia.com/intel-careers-6055/salary/#by-job-tit...

Hmm - that's interesting. If the "Intel Plant/Manufacturing Salaries" section is true, process technician and production operator (which I guess are the people that run the line?) make quite a bit below $100K. Oddly enough, it seems like the software jobs are better paid then the hardware ones?

Thanks for the link!

How is that odd? Software salaries have been outpacing hardware ones for at least the past 1-2 decades. When the big tech companies are paying over $100k for software developers fresh out of college, supply and demand is probably forcing this state of affairs.

I just would have figured a hardware company would be focusing on the hardware personnel.

After all, there are plenty of places that don't pay FAANG level salaries for software developers. I still regularly see < $60K software jobs advertised from smaller companies.

They may be costing the company the equivalent of $40–60/hr, but more realistically, techs are starting at < $20/hr and have to spend years on the payroll of a third-party staffing company.

That's a good point, $40-60/hr is the pay for seniors level techs. Entry level techs are making much less and are employed through staffing companies.

In Taiwan, an average semi technician salary is $38-$40k a year

I don't know anything about how they are run, but I would assume you need a large number of on-site engineers and process overseers. What are the low-income jobs? Security?

I thought it was mostly assembly line workers putting parts together, with machines doing the rest. Kinda like what this photo shows: https://bit.ly/3a8uRFM

That’s board assembly, not chip fabrication.

So you admit you were ignorant. That's a rarity on here. People will defend their wrong views here because they don't want to hear they aren't a polymath.

This is how it looks like now: https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/TSMC-...

Machines feed each other via conveyor belts, everything automated, tight control loops check/move things around.

Notice the difference in human presence.

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