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Comment by ipnon | Hacker News Reader

Presumably they would be poached to work in China and not Taiwan.

That's the policy. But the effect is that TSMC doesn't need to raise salaries to retain workers, they can rely on the government to prevent the workers from being recruited in the first place.

(edit: Can I say how amazingly hilarious it is watching all these notionally free-marketeer libertarians who believe in just compensation rush in to explain why it's totally OK for the Taiwanese government to shamelessly restrain trade as long as they're trying to stick it to the PRC?)

Taiwanese workers may find their wages lowered due to lack of China bidding on their salaries, but there's still the rest of the world.

The vast majority of the pressure comes from China.

TSMC will always lose that bid against a hostile state actor (the PRC) which can totally ignore market value in pursuit of strategic goals.

It’s absurd people dumping on Taiwan don’t realise this. There is no way for Taiwan to compete with CCPs deep pockets if the CCP has decided it needs these engineers at all costs.

But again, TSMC not only isn't trying to compete with "CCPs deep pockets", they're not even trying to compete with Apple or Intel! The time for that complaint is if they're still seeing poaching despite paying FAANG-scale salaries commensurate with their now-FAANG-scale revenue.

To wit: TSMC is one of the big boys now, it's time to act like it and pay their workers. What they're doing right now is trying to cheat by using their government as a weapon against their own employees.

It doesn't aritificially depress wages if China was offering artificially high wages in the first place.

If these people really are critical to the survival and future of your country, how can any wage be too high?

You're thinking in absolutes. We would both agree that a billion dollars a month is too high.

And I don't see how what you've said is related to what I said, which was a critique of the idea that this move is artificially depressing wages when allegedly it's an attempt to stop poaching of key talent at artificially high non market rates.

>We would both agree that a billion dollars a month is too high.

I would not necessarily agree. There are CEOs who make around that amount, why shouldn't an engineer make that much if they're equally important to the organization?

From what I could gather from Google, TSMC engineers make far less than I do as a FAANG engineer, and TSMC posted a ~$14 billion profit last year. If these employees are so important to Taiwan's future, why can't they at least pay them FAANG-level salaries? It's not that they don't have the money.

Because they're not equally important. Most engineers don't add billions of dollars of value. If a miscellaneous engineer resigns, it will have in most cases little impact on the prospects of the company. Most add only incremental value. The superstar seven figure ICs do get paid as such but they're rare, most people aren't that capable of that much value add as an IC.

The company made billions in profits. That could be due to a number of reasons. IP, relationships, network effects, scale economies, regulatory capture, brand equity, etc.

>Because they're not equally important. Most engineers don't add billions of dollars of value.

Let the market decide that.

>The company made billions in profits. That could be due to a number of reasons. IP, relationships, network effects, etc.

That's not the point. The point is they're using the government to make it harder for their engineers to find other work, rather than just pay them higher wages so they'll stay on their own accord.

If the workers aren't important, then they don't need laws to stop them from looking for jobs elsewhere. Are us software engineers more important than those in other countries with comparable costs of living? That's hard to answer in general, but software engineers in the US are paid much better on average than in most European countries. Of course there are exceptions but hacker news is full of stories talking about this issue (many euro engineers come to the us bc we pay so much more).

It's very hard to overcome economics. If they don't pay their engineers at TSMC something approaching alternatives, they will start to leave. It doesn't matter whether the company made billions of dollars because of a few people - the company will struggle if they start losing their engineering talent. So that kind of sets their value.

What I'm arguing is that they'll need to pay better wages, otherwise people will leave, regardless of this law about advertising jobs.

There are other places in the world Taiwanese talent can work. And other sources of FDI in Taiwan that can create wage competition -- see other comments about Google.

China is uniquely and specifically trying to destroy Taiwan. The exception makes sense and doesn't have a totalizing effect.

This is kind of an anti-dumping measure by Taiwan.

It's not an anti-dumping measure. TSMC would be profitable paying their workers that much and so will be SMIC.

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