My favorite story about this is a paint manufacturer building a brand new, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility to increase their capacity. Everything was controlled, monitored, etc. to the nth degree.
Only one problem--paint from the new line no longer stuck to anything.
Cue a crash debugging with all hands on deck. The problem? The new line was too clean.
Paint relies on the correct ends attaching to the wall and then the other ends forming a kind of network to protect those. But there is a tradeoff--the outer paint surface (exposed to elements) vs the inner paint surface (attaches to the wall) have different needs. If you make the inner paint surface too dense (molecules all vertical) the paints sticks great, but then doesn't protect against the elements. If you make the outer paint surface dense (molecules all horizontal) then the paint protects well, but then won't stick to the wall.
The solution: add some "dirt". Adding some very fine, very small inert particles can change the angle that the paint molecules connect and fix the adhesion issues.
The lesson: nobody knows all the things necessary to run a manufacturing line. Ever.
Regardless, it’s similar to software companies claiming to run agile, but always reverting to the “get it done, waterfall deadline” mode. It takes good effort and detailed knowledge of pitfalls to avoid to actually make a less intuitive, but more repeatable and productive process work. (Agile’s been around for over 10years and people still don’t do good versions well)
Agile software development has been around since the early 90’ies. Scrum is from something like 1995.
The reason people fail to implement it so often is that project management sort or doesn’t work in software development, and it doesn’t work because you can spend two hours looking for a spelling error or a missing semicolon, and you can create Godlike code in half an hour, and you never know which mode you’re going to be in when you get up in the morning.
Waterfall doesn’t work either, for the same reason, and for all the adaptive reasons that lead to agile.
The best way to deal with it is to take the methods that make sense for your current project and run with that. 99% or the time that’s a kanban board, and maybe some time registration software if you’re unfortunate enough to work in a place that bills by the hour.
The worst part about the project management methods in my personal opinion is that they all want to sell themselves as the universal solution, in a world where no two projects are alike but you also can’t be bothered to have 90 different project models in an organisation, because then what’s the point.
That's ADHD (maybe modulo some external factors like scattered meetings)
That doesn't seem like ADHD to me. Getting to a super-productive flow state is notoriously difficult to do reliably for everyone, and getting stuck on a stupid typo you can't find even though you know it is somewhere in the 50 lines of code you're looking at is likewise a fairly common experience.
Folks with ADHD may actually be better at achieving a hyperfocused state of flow, but the flip side of that isn't hunting for a typo, it is falling down a rabbit hole of yak-shaving, procrastination (productive or otherwise), and other distractions.
Somewhere in between is the experience of trying to hold more and more context in your head at once, resulting in a feeling like your brain has been pummeled and leaking out your ears, staring at some code that has become entirely illegible. This can be the result of ADHD-driven yak-shaving, but more commonly is the result of needing to comprehend huge chunks of a badly architected system before you can make a change with any confidence.
My family gets contacted now and then by researchers trying to figure out how to do it.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Bernauer
https://chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002...
Two pictures I have of him, one with a telescope the other with a microscope. Both sides of my family were nerds :-)
He also led a team to Iceland in the 1930s to set some surveying markers to determine if Iceland was expanding, which would prove the continental drift theory. After the war, other researchers went back and confirmed it. I'm kinda sad he died before completing this, and so others got the credit for continental drift.
However, their style of process/chip design is very hierarchical with HUGE teams to get the implementation out in the 3-4year cycles (there are multiple overlapping teams). This was driven over the successes of decades of scaling. Then it failed. Now they are behind. If they had been able to pivot early they might be parallel with rather than behind TSMC, but they couldn't admit it wasn't working. The large group structure got in the way.
We'll see if they can fix it.
I don't think the US border control system works like that. If you're a citizen, you never need an exit visa. IIRC, as long as you have a valid passport, you can exit and enter as you please, but if there's probable cause to suspect you of a crime they can arrest you.
China's system, on the other hand, does work like that. IIRC, anyone with any authority or access to secrets isn't allowed to have free control over their passport, and they have systems for denying people exit permission.
Even if somehow you got on the no-fly list, you can take a boat. Or drive/walk across one of the land borders. Perfectly legally.
Security clearances are a red herring. The folks working in Intel/TSMC/TI/etc fabs don't have or need security clearances. This is private technology.
Anyone who has been through civics 102 in the US knows that there's lots of ways to get your passport taken away, and without one you're not getting far. It looks like Canada's requiring either passports or fancy drivers licenses (only available from some states), and Mexico's at least as strict.
But that's irrelevant unless one of those ways is to "possess [ITAR-controlled and requires a security clearance] information," as one of the ancestor comments stated. If that's actually the case, someone should be able to cite law/regulation or provide examples of the practice, but no one has.
But they won’t be stopped at the border. They might be fired when they return though.
Maybe it's not that easy. I have no knowledge of semiconductor manufacturing (let alone advanced semiconductor manufacturing), but it strikes me as one of those areas that might have thousands of very specialized crazy hard problems that all need to be solved just right to get things working. If you hire away some guy from a leading company, at best he might have a thousandth of that company's solution (and maybe that thousandth of a solution is only valuable in a path-dependent context with all the other solutions that leading company followed).
> Are non-competes enforceable internationally?
Doubt it. Though I suppose in some cases disclosing trade secrets for advanced technology my violate other laws.
Yeah, that's a real obstacle, not much of a "maybe" about it.
I have a feeling that this, more than any other factor, is what is driving large-scale international tech IP theft. You have to grab stuff wholesale in hopes of either (a) teasing out isolated nuggets that happen to be applicable to your own efforts, or (b) recreating the surrounding path-dependent context (which doesn't have a well-defined boundary) in order to have a working solution.
How EUV works: https://youtu.be/5Ge2RcvDlgw
https://istanbultarihi.ist/578-the-nuri-demirag-aircraft-fac...
That probably overstates the case a little bit since capacity is distributed around the world, but in some sense yes.
It's not particularly hypothetical. If China (PRC) was to invade Taiwan, that would potentially knock out a frightening proportion of the world's leading-edge capacity.
> Developing jet engine is not an easy game unlike rocket engines as it's comparatively very compact in size & it requires advance engineering to develop it's crystal blades technology & maintain it's thrust to weight ratio & that's what make jet engine technology one of the most complicated technology.
From https://defenceview.in/how-difficult-is-it-to-build-an-jet-e...
> Developing jet engine is not an easy game unlike rocket engines as it's comparatively very compact in size & it requires advance engineering to develop it's crystal blades technology & maintain it's thrust to weight ratio & that's what make jet engine technology one of the most complicated technology.
That's a terribly worded and nonsensical claim (and almost reads like it was written by a ten year old). How could someone claim that rocket engines are "not very compact in size"? The RD-180 turbopump for example generates 170 MW of mechanical power, much more than any jet engine in operation, and in a smaller package to boot. Likewise, the HPFTP on the RS-25 generates around 50 MW of mechanical power, and does so in a package sized 0.55m by 1.1m or something like that.
especially in case of jet turbines, due to their much larger size than chips?
Even once you have the blade to copy, you don't know why the features are the way they are. What bits are important? Which areas must have high tolerance? After that, there is the question of how to make it. You probably cannot just mass spectrometer it, put those ingredients in a vat, heat it up, and pour it into a mold. Is the order of ingredients important? The exact ratios? How quickly do you cool it? At what temperature? And how do you get those holes in it? How do you do it economically? You can't just 3D print these, and even if you did, it'd be way too slow.
They could just hire the experts from the incumbents
HSMC attracted a former top TSMC executive as chief executive. QXIC recruited dozens of experienced engineers from Taiwan, including from TSMC, with relatively big pay packages, according to former employees.
Then again, there may be no "secret sauce" in the way we usually think about it. You might have to hire hundreds of people from an incumbent to pull in enough institutional knowledge to get things going. And even then it's not going to happen overnight.
I feel like the right people to hire, at any rate, aren't the executives. You need the right engineers, scientists, and researchers.
yes, they have to repeat all that work, they have to solve all those solved problems again because companies that solved the problems won't share their solutions.
indeed, I wish I could answer this.
> Not to mention the national security arguments.
it is an inteserting excercise to consider this from the rival's point of view
...because those solutions are the company's competitive advantage that China has tried to steal for years on end now? Not to mention in many instances those 'solutions' are owned by or access controlled by the parent country of said company, many of which view China as at the least a bad faith actor, and at the worst an inevitable opponent?
Pretending China hasn't engaged in the world's largest industrial espionage campaign over the last two decades, and then victim blaming the companies involved for not "sharing their solutions" with China is a perverse form of logic.