Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]
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It's a very high-energy place with more going on than you can ever hope to keep track of. Even if the technology doesn't interest you, the cultural interactions should. You could have some days with Japanese, Koreans and Americans translating 3-ways in a conference room. Opportunities for business travel are probably restricted more now, but when I was there they practically begged us to travel to the Korean sites in hopes that we would learn more faster.
Some roles can be far more exciting than others. Someone has to work security and manage the facilities. That said, all the important roles seem to be the compelling ones too. I don't know of anyone who had a hard time getting another super cushy job after time at Samsung, so it's also great for long term career prospects.
This would be an interesting employer for many trades.
I come from a CS background. If you leave school and enter the workforce at SAS, you will be at a disadvantage insofar as you are looking for a workplace that you hope to learn something from or one that you hope reinforces good engineering practices. The semiconductor industry, from the vantage point of an experienced systems thinker, reinforces awful engineering practices. All the things that SE folks take for granted—version control, e.g, as a discipline/tool to name one example, for regression analysis—say goodbye to any of these things, along with any expectation of competence from your colleagues.
The semiconductor industry sources heavily from the defense sector, and this has deleterious, catastrophic effects.
A close friend (from a non-CS engineering background) I know to still be at SAS. We don't talk about finances, but at around 8 years in, I estimate that he just recently (since COVID) crossed the six figure threshold. He's in a fairly senior role. Meanwhile: "What's x86?" — a direct quote from a conversation not too long ago.
He has no real professional experience outside of SAS, was not set up in an environment that rewards "extracurricular" experience, so he doesn't have any of that, either, and he's effectively stuck as a result of the "golden" handcuffs that the path at SAS has led him on.
Don't work in the semiconductor industry, folks. What you can expect to be is a monkey pressing buttons on a machine (that your supervisor—and their supervisor—doesn't understand, and nor will you; you pass butter). Make no mistake: there's an abundance of low-hanging fruit. But you won't have, as Gerry Weinberg put it, "permission" to pick it.
By all means, if your prospects/ambitions look to be something like working for the state/federal government, learning nothing over your career, and cashing mediocre checks for doing mediocre work along the way, then by all means go for it. Otherwise, it is likelier that you'll be hobbled by your time in the industry. And not for no good reason. If I'm evaluating someone and it came up that they'd done any significant time in the world of semiconductors, the net impression it'd have on me (having hash an insider's view of it) would be one worse than if they said that they'd just gotten their degree and had spent the last N years flipping burgers, cf Dan Luu.
Don't do semiconductors, folks.
PS: sorry, drunk.
Their friend also stayed there for 8 years while the poster presumably quit sooner.
Semiconductor fabrication is the most advanced engineering humanity has ever attempted, so you will reach your threshold eventually solving problems that might not have answers (depending on your role). Not everyone wants to do that though, and the world needs implementers and those focused on details.
Pay? Could be higher for sure.
In fact, an entire generation of SWEs who forgot the concepts of simplicity and efficiency, coding a never-ending avalanche of rubbish bloated apps is why we continually need new silicon.
Recent front page submission comes to mind XD
Fab engineers in the US are fairly disposable because their existence isn't based on market needs but really as a hedge by the US to be independent. That's going to suck for you because TSMC isn't going to value you that much because you're not really business critical, you're just there to get government subsidies. In Taiwan it's another story and it's almost competitive with good SWE jobs.
Why do you have this idea ? I'm not sure it sounds more "just" than saying, for example, that tasks that are physically more challenging should pay more, or humanly more challenging should pay more, etc..
The truth is we don't need fab engineers because the applications we need to build require already "solved" hardware problems which are mostly supplied en-masse by a the few, large companies.
But, the deeper truth is that we don't need any of it... I have been recently and somewhat pleasantly surprised by how little I truly need. E.g., a 200$ chrome-book satisfies most of my needs. I have much, much beefier computers, hundreds of gigs of ram and multi-core processor, etc...all a waste. (I work as a software engineer and regularly find myself maxing my cores for things I don't really need).
If I could build my own hardware and have it actually do things, man, that would _useful_. Unlike this giant rickety tower of babel we have built...
It's okay just to say that you like the money. You don't always have to use the largest words. It's also okay for someone to say that software engineers are paid lots of money. Perhaps too much.
-> how about starting a semiconductor company where people are paid more?
I'm assuming you're being facetious given the enormous logistical and financial costs of starting a somewhat up-to-date semiconductor company. But, maybe that's the point.
I'm not an SWE.
> You don't always have to use the largest words.
Some words have specific meanings, rather than just being longer synonyms for short words.
> Perhaps too much.
Again, no. This was my point — this is like saying that the solution to homelessness is to take away the homes of everyone with homes, so that everyone is now equally homeless.
Don't pay the people who are already getting a good deal less; pay the people who are currently getting a bad deal more.
> I'm assuming you're being facetious given the enormous logistical and financial costs of starting a somewhat up-to-date semiconductor company.
No. Just fucking do it. Start another company that's less complex but is an obvious money earner; get rich; reinvest your wealth into a semiconductor company. Should only take 10 years. If you care, do it.
If Elon can do it — and Elon is not the smartest man — you can do it too.
(To be clear, you don't have to start a company that competes in the wider semiconductor market; you just have to start a company that competes in a niche. Like, for example, 5G radios. But your goal does have to be to compete; getting acquired means you no longer have control over your own business strategy, incl. profit margins, and therefore can no longer make your company "the one where people get paid well.")
I can agree with this, definitely. I still don't think that it's that easy to start a semiconductor company for the average person considering the requisite expertise and scale of capital necessary. However, outside of the basic accounting, it's not really my area of expertise.
Better than most people.
For the vast swathes of the country where the available jobs are some mix of retail/warehouse low wage drudgery, long haul trucking, drug dealing / fraud / other crime, or welfare, working in semiconductors might be a welcome and attractive option.
I don't know, I have seen numerous PHDs who can't competently write any piece of code, I'm beginning to think it's a feature, not a coincidence.
So for the set of people who can be fab engineers, live in the USA and speak English, yes, the FANG engineer option is always there.
Here’s an example: https://www.ziprecruiter.com/c/HRL-Laboratories/Job/Wafer-Pr...
You might not get an interview at any given company in a particular year, but you should be able to get some interviews over a couple years if you have decent GPA or work experience. You probably won't be placed on a top-notch team, but you'll get in.
I remember a professor sympathetically talking about how little clusters of people just split up the homework load together like it was a team project from random classes and then tell each other how to solve it to each other to save time.
CS was just another science degree in comparison.
You're correct that their software practices, by and large, are absolutely atrocious. In general, I found that if a team had people who could code, they'd just write their own programs and stay in the Shadow IT realm. I taught myself JS/PHP/SQL while I was there, and built a shitty CRUD app to replace some even worse Excel sheets others were using.
However, from SAS' perspective, they aren't making software. All of the machines have their own control systems (which are usually running XP and are terrible), and they need tools that can connect to those, retrieve data, dump it into a DB, and run queries on it. It never needs to leave the site, you don't have to worry about surprise traffic, and scaling issues are never going to get to the point of needing thousand-node clusters or the like. What they have works.
Re: pay, IME engineers of any kind would start at ~$80K fresh out of college, which in 2017 wasn't that bad for Austin. Engineers also got promoted very quickly. Yes, pure software jobs rapidly outpace SAS salaries. Hell, I went from a supervisor role making $86K to an Associate SRE role (I have 20 years of hobbyist Linux experience, I just never did anything with it - also I got a Master's in SWE while I was at SAS) elsewhere, and immediately went past $100K.
It's a fascinating company that is also incredibly stressful, the pay isn't as good/fast as others, and to my knowledge remote work doesn't exist. Still, someone has to do it, else we wouldn't have chips. Also, they employ some _crazy_ intelligent PHds. They just exude brilliance. It's awe-inspiring watching them talk through problems.
What does this part mean, exactly? Are photolithography lasers just repurposed Naval anti-aircraft lasers or something?
-> He has no real professional experience outside of SAS, was not set up in an environment that rewards "extracurricular" experience, so he doesn't have any of that, either, and he's effectively stuck as a result of the "golden" handcuffs that the path at SAS has led him on.
-> Don't work in the semiconductor industry, folks. What you can expect to be is a monkey pressing buttons on a machine (that your supervisor—and their supervisor—doesn't understand, and nor will you; you pass butter). Make no mistake: there's an abundance of low-hanging fruit. But you won't have, as Gerry Weinberg put it, "permission" to pick it.
-> By all means, if your prospects/ambitions look to be something like working for the state/federal government, learning nothing over your career, and cashing mediocre checks for doing mediocre work along the way, then by all means go for it. Otherwise, it is likelier that you'll be hobbled by your time in the industry. And not for no good reason. If I'm evaluating someone and it came up that they'd done any significant time in the world of semiconductors, the net impression it'd have on me (having hash an insider's view of it) would be one worse than if they said that they'd just gotten their degree and had spent the last N years flipping burgers, cf Dan Luu
All I'm understanding from this is not "don't go into the semiconductor industry" but rather that you're an awful friend to be trash talking your friend. It seems like you just called their career a waste of time and implied your friend to be more poor (since when was 6 figures not a decent amount of money?) than you and less knowledgeable ('what is x86'). I'm sure you'll agree that your friend is neither poor nor stupid, as you seem to imply here for their working in the semiconductor industry. I'm sure your friend would be delighted to know that they're a monkey pressing buttons without any knowledge of what's going on or that you estimate a fast food worker has a better background for transitioning to software engineering.
You haven't talked to your friend about finances, but you can magically estimate their savings? I understand that you might be able estimate within an order of magnitude based on context, but you don't know how much this person has saved nor do you seem to consider that they might spend their money on personal emergencies, sick family members, or kids. That your estimation of your friend's savings should be taken as evidence for poor compensation in the semiconductor industry is laughable, honestly. But, hey, I at least appreciate your earnest opinion.
You're right. I appreciate the correction. I didn't think of that as referring to the salary.
When I mentioned Dan Luu, I was specifically referring to the recent thunderstorm on Twitter where he mentioned the uncanny valleyness of doing work for unsexy companies and that it's actually more like a blemish on your résumé than a non-zero positive contribution.
Could the tooling be better? Sure. Our version control system is pretty old, but the company has made a massive push over the last few years to modernize all of it, and when we transition to that at the end of this year I think we'll be in a pretty great spot. Some teams are already using the new tooling and it has gotten very positive reviews. I have a great relationship with my team and my manager. I get to work on interesting stuff (mostly embedded systems), and I've had the opportunity to learn a small part of one of the most advanced machines humans have ever built.
I'll say the thing about getting people from defense is true, but not so much in software. If anyone has other questions feel free to just ask.
But going back to your point, there are certain areas within semiconductor manufacturing that are software engineering jobs. They tend to be closely related to what's called physical design in the design part of making a chip. Or EDA coders. It's a cool area. But the bigger part of semiconductor manufacturing is working in a fab, which is atrocious grueling work, which is quite boring and dangerous.
Their latest equipment had some issues that were only showing up on production lines, so they wanted engineers to babysit the equipment at the fabs, and write patches on the spot for any issues observed. They repeatedly stressed how much money their customers lost for any downtime, and how there must not be downtime.
Sure, that's how the world knows how to make chips now, but given the varying laws between those two places, and the varying workforce cultures, I think it's safe to say that adaptations will be made to the experience to suit American workers, and those adaptations won't result in meaningful drop offs in quality or execution.
As an outsider, it seems pretty clear that the rejection to the industry is more about the cultural mismatch than it is to the actual work needing to be executed.
It's just weird to me that people really believe nothing about the job will change, and all of the Asian cultural aspects of the way the job is currently executed would be dropped on American workers with zero adjustments.
Besides, this discussion is not about their respective cultures in general, but about manufacturing styles and working conditions, which are indeed, and even by necessity, similar.
Not that they don't also have shared history, interactions and cultural exchanges going back thousands of years. So, yeah, even that would be more like comparing Argentina and Uruguay, or comparing US and Canada, or France and Belgium, and so on, than some unfathomable comparison.
Look at Intel. It's a western company, but it famously fell behind its competitors due to offering comparatively shit pay and conditions to its staff, so the best people left. The problem is hardware company culture, not Asian company culture.
Apple's M1 is an example of what a company that compensates its staff fairly can achieve in hardware. Hardware companies need to get the idea out of their head that they can pay people shit (even when they've got huge monopoly profits like Intel had) and still expect to remain competitive.
In my country there are probably 2? 3? serious semico companies
And shitton of JS-using companies
Maybe this explains why embedded/hardware/firmware devs are underpaid?
If the pay is so low, it’s kind of curious that the supply doesn’t drop.
However, the tools suck more than the English language has good words to describe, so it's hard for an engineer to be productive. And the products are complex, so you need a lot of engineers. And you're manufacturing physical products, so most of that huge dollar amount in the industry is trapped in manufacturing, not design. So even if you were the cream of the crop engineer, it's hard to extract much of that value for yourself.
On the other hand, webdev has extremely low capital overhead, and improvements in tools can go directly into developer productivity, which can immediately be realized as value (which gives you resources to improve even more).
So even if Verilog developers made the same money as JS developers today, in ten years, I'd expect the JS developers to make more.
One lesson here is that if you want your designs to improve rapidly, decouple them from the manufacturing business as much as you can. And you'll probably be able to pay better and attract better talent in the proces, which is a not insignificant benefit. Perhaps the rise of fabless semiconductor companies is understood even better in this light?
As far as I know, working in a non-chip part of Intel in the 90s, the place was always an abusive sweatshop except maybe for some top people. And Intel isn't some failed from the start enterprise - they're currently third or so in a long, long competition among fabs, chip-makers and etc. They had a long, long successful run while being awful.
Essentially, model the of gaslighting, abusing and discarding people works great as long as a company can keep their employee's illusions alive and/or trapping them so they have no choices regardless.
As far as I know, Apple pays well compared to the US median for a job but poorly relative to other FANG companies. Plenty of tales of abuse and secrecy exist in Apple but plenty of people assert the virtues of working there and show great loyalty.
Which is to say these practices are very common in globally competitive markets. A company that pays well and inspires great loyalty and hard work from it's employees can always be undercut by a company that pays shit and still inspires great loyalty and hard work from it's employees. And if the model falls-apart, it can be rebuilt elsewhere (this is the problem/challenge of markets that are truly global).
I am entirely unqualified to judge cultural advantages/disadvantages in the manufacturing industry.
I think general mismanagement explains Intel's decline more than money or working conditions. TSMC pays embarrassing low, which is why a lot of engineers end up being poached by China.
This is backwards; M1 is not merely an implementation of an efficient ISA, Apple sponsored the design of the ISA in order to create M1 with it. That's why ARMv8 is significantly different from v7.
ISA doesn't matter that much though and it is well designed besides that.
Toyota is the one of largest employers of Americans in the auto industry today: https://www.thomasnet.com/articles/top-suppliers/car-manufac...
And why the reference to Geordies - natives of Newcastle - when the plant is in Sunderland?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motor_Manufacturing_U...
Google maps tells me those two places are only 14.3 miles away. So 1) that's pretty understandable to conflate and 2) a lot of people from Newcastle probably commute there.
just look at football rivalries to get the idea.
This can go very deep because as you know (but may be surprising to our American friends) in Europe we have much less cultural uniformity.
For example, in the two towns in Central Italy that I'm thinking about, which are only 15 km apart, people speak completely different dialects that are only partially intelligible one another.
A fun fact is that now I live in Australia which is one of the countries in the world with the least variance in accent. You can't tell Sydney and Perth accents apart, even though the two cities are thousands of kms apart.
In Britain, people from both places will leave their shoes on indoors at home, praise the NHS, watch football and think the queen is fine.
This is by no means a universal thing here!
And yes, even the queen is not universally accepted. Famously, the Labour party used to be republican, but seems to have mostly given up on that plank of policy.
In any case, my main point was that intense local rivalries exist, but actual differences between neighbouring places are typically fairly minor.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyne%E2%80%93Wear_derby
EDIT: Please forgive me for bringing this up. I appreciate it's not particularly relevant to moomin's comment about the culture of the Nissan plant, which I agree with aside from my nitpicks, nor to the original video.
Have a look at Greek and Turkey for example. Even their cuisine is nearly identical.
Or look at the adherents of the major parties in many countries around the world.
To avoid an American example: if you put a member of the British Tories or Labour into Japan, they will pretty much be seen as just some Brits.
Are you American? That's a long way in terms of cultural differences in the UK.
Why would you assume that?
That's a long way in terms of cultural differences in the UK.
Sure, but it's pretty insignificant to someone not in or familiar with the UK. Which is the vast majority of planet earth.
I didn't assume it - I asked.
> Sure, but it's pretty insignificant to someone not in or familiar with the UK. Which is the vast majority of planet earth.
Yeah... which is why I explained it to you, since it's unfamiliar to so many people.
Did you not want it explained to you?
And I’m loving the extremely detailed Tyneside vs Sunderland debate you managed to kick off.
Which is not to say American's can't make chips, perhaps with less efficiency. Which ultimately doesn't matter because semi is being elevated to critical strategic industry and the governemnt's money printer is going to keep US fabs open regardless of how competitive US fabs are.
The issue is that the Asian work culture in the tech industry is not sustainable, as seen from their demographic replacement rates. They are burning too hot and the culture will change or they will disappear.
In Taiwan, for instance, the working age population peaked just five years ago[1], so I doubt that the fact that their worker shortage is permanent and going to get worse has yet sunk in the brains of the management and political class in Taiwan.
Give it ten years, they might start understanding what's going on. Based on China's and Japan's responses, they'll have no idea what to do.
1. https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/20-64...
It is akin to assuming that you can import soil after you have depleted your own. Human ecology matters as much as soil ecology does.
I want sustainable to be sustainable. Responsible societies should be able to maintain and improve the people that they have. Any people imported should be a supplementary augmentation, calculated for sustainable growth and improvement of the society as a whole. An augmentation, a supplement, is very different from a replacement. A replacement is what happens when you have the irresponsible depletion of human capital, and frankly, any immigrant should not want to go to a place where human capital is unsustainably depleted in such a way, as their own offspring are likely to receive the same treatment.
Semiconductor plant jobs may not be as lucrative as SW engineering, but they are indeed jobs that pay alright for low to moderate skilled labour. And on-shoring of tech manufacturing seems like a good idea.
Sigh. There's another conversation I had on here that went similar to this one. Basically, a guy was saying, "the tough road I took to get to my position is what made me who I am" which is perhaps literally true but also trash. There is always a way you could have gotten to where you are today, or indeed even a better place, with less hardship. If you rubbed a lamp and a genie asked if you wanted to change anything about your past, saying "no I'm perfectly happy with who I am today" is a brazen lie and about the stupidest thing you could do. You have no regrets? You don't want to be a better person? The hell is wrong with you?
Likewise, why want hardship for your children just for the sake of hardship? They could learn without hardship just as well, though you may not be smart enough to figure out how.
It is entirely possible to get good work out of younger generations, but you really have to start paying them competitively with how much you pay management and how much you pay capital.
It turns out there is a whole lot of rent seeking by people who don't do much (own capital, work as a middle manager, own real estate) and to compete, people are just checking out instead of trying to climb to an ever smaller top.
If it seems impossible to have a home, a family, and resources to actually do things with your life, living in a van and traveling around actually enjoying the world, even in rather extreme poverty, is quite a better life than being a wage slave.
That's why there were news stories about them "running out of people to employ." Word gets around eventually. Especially if the economy is doing well, most people will not want to work for you.
99% of humans in the semi-conductor field are not designing masks and worrying about etching time or whatever nonsense marketing NANOMETER terminology is in place.
They are building "don't fuck this up" teams that are focused on quality manufacturing and how many PPI in the air, highly caustic chemicals, and FUPs not failing. The same stuff everyone with an assembly line deals with turned up to 11.
Then there are the IT folks who have to ensure that all these proprietary ASML or similar monstrosities are not compromised by some field tech with a compromised USB stick.
The nightmares I've had about that, multi-million dollar machines controlled by Windows X and never patched and yet somehow allowed to talk to a network that also has access to the Internet and rando field techs with "updates" on a stick.
Its almost as scary as how much international business relies on some random Excel file updated by humans.
Many problems working in fab. Current workforce very aged, many staff have let the world pass them by. These staff do no understand the world anymore. Can’t empathize new peoples! Some do not have cell phone, credit card, or home internet/computer. Staff have paid their mortgage long time and cannot understand why us young kid complain about cost of housing. Cheap 1br apartment At lowest starting wage two weeks of work. Bus take some people 2-3/hr each way if live in expensive place near bus. Need car!
Old staff leave without good staff replaced them. Many mistakes. Many people worked too hard. Burnout!
Manager are old guys club and play favorites. Many are sexist racist. Company tries to advertise as progressive but that’s only for looks during onboarding and stock market. Many minority are not given opportunity to advance or get promotion raises while people who look talk like manager do get advance. Many minority in lowest jobs.
Manager tell work positive with COVID. They no care! COVID spread to everyone!
Work long shifts and have no time for family.
Many divorced and unhappy people in dying marriages due to no work life balance take their pain to work spread their misery.
Laissez faire attitude to working dangerous chemical and gases. Missing warning signs and no training. No one worry about strange smell everywhere all time!
Bo wonder no one want work in fab!
If you want young Americans to work these jobs, you need to pay /more/ than software jobs, because the conditions are worse. Otherwise, you only get the people who can't escape. Anyone who can escape eventually does.
In the decades since I've come to believe that actually liking working on software requires a certain sort of...personality that most people just don't have.
The reality is that most people follow incentives, almost nobody works their actual dream job, they work the job that they have the most return for their abilities and investment. HW and SW jobs used to have a lot of overlap from an abilities perspective, but as each has become more specialized that overlap has eroded. A lot of people are choosing to go all-in on software, whether they particularly love it or not, because it is a far better environment to work in.
I make far more money than a lot of other people while working less, and much more comfortably from my own home. Why do anything else? I’ve concluded people will really subject themselves to a lifetime of grueling pointless work just to avoid some math and science.
If the right tools were invented for them, they might take to it like ducks to water.
1. There is a limit of complexity that a given person or a given team can deal with happily. Below the threshold work satisfaction is great: “I am solving more and more complicated tasks”, after the threshold a stress eats job satisfaction: “I do not want to open my emails in the morning - what if I will not be able to solve some new problem”.
2. Complexity of each successful product grows until this threshold is reached. The successful product is used by more and more people. The successful product is put as a building stone in more and more complicated projects.
3. Because of 1 and 2 a successful SE is an unhappy person running under a lot of stress.
Now let’s see how decreasing the complexity of tools changes the situation. Bad tools: 50% of the complexity of the situation is caused by the tools, 50% - by the complexity of the product. Let’s improve tools twice. Now the tools create only 25% of the original complexity, and since the product causes 50% of the original complexity overall situation improved to 75% total of the original one. The engineer can have a happy life? No so fast. Since the product is successful, the is a great demand for new features. The complexity of the product increases to 75% and the programmer lives under stress again.
So, better tools allow to create more complicated, more useful products. But they do not improve - in the long run - the quality of programmers’ lifes. So if a person is not happy with current tools, she will not be happy to be a programmer. Or so it seems to me.
Maybe a person loves developing prototypes and POCs, or shepherding new systems through phases of adoption prior to reaching massive “scale.” As some people are wont to say, “Everything breaks at scale.”
Everybody has a complexity band in which they are comfortable operating. Many problems of high complexity can be decomposed sufficiently that they can be attacked teams of mostly mere mortals, with perhaps some assistance or over-sight from the Anointed Ones. Also, many people have significant abilities to navigate the complexities of, say, differential topology but C++ not so much. And vice versa. How information is presented impacts our ability to cope with complexity.
You can say this part about basically any job and it would be true. Tech salaries and work conditions are ridiculously good, compared to any almost other job in the US and any other country than the US. Even other STEM jobs (e.g. civil or mechanical engineering) tend to have less than half the pay and much worse benefits and work conditions compared to software.
If software is eating the world, eventually almost all jobs will in some aspects be software jobs, analogous to how 98% of the population used to be engaged in some aspect of agricultural production. We should focus on providing people with the productivity amplifying tools which might sustain a high quality standard of living.
The other way to do that is cut the wages of software jobs. Honestly with the glut of young developers and remote working it has started to happen already.
Executives have been trying to do that for decades (“The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer” has been heralded since the 80’s).
Even the exhalted Steve Jobs ultimately failed in his cabalistic attempt to hold down programmer pay.
It’s like a menagerie of Elmer Fudds and Yosemite Sam’s trying to bring down Bugs Bunny. Or a mangy pack of Wiley Coyotes desperate to run down the Roadrunner.
There's a place nearby where they produce raw silicon. They are rated three of five stars on Famous_Job_Site, and they only hire through a temp service, and you can be there ten years before getting hired in directly. Rules like if you miss X days or are late Y times you get fired.
The worst job is probably poly breaker, where they have three shifts of people in protective suits that smash large pieces of silicon down with hammers.
Last I heard you get $14/hr. They are always hiring and nobody wants to work there.
Why is this done manually? wouldn't it be easy to automate?
Too many people think shiny Infinity Loop One office when chips come up. The reality is that chip designers are like 0.1% of the available roles. Fab workers/supervisors/maintenance etc are maybe 25% and the rest is in a very very long tail of supply chain involving lots of vary hazardous chemicals and shitty manual labour.
I'm all for trying to diversify semi-conductor manufacturing but I really doubt Americans have it in them to do what the Chinese/Taiwanese currently do - specifically in the fabs themselves and in the chemical and poly silicate plants that support them.
Air Liquide, Air Products, Versum Materials, Brewer Science are all companies with significant US presence.
also this country really needs stricter laws on what qualifies as a temp
Samsung is not like American semiconductor manufacturers. The organization is a bit more militaristic and that's not a bad thing, I liked the discipline displayed by fellow coworkers.
I haven't worked at American semiconductor manufacturers, but know those who have. Their attitude about execution always struck me as less than professional. But again, I can't comment from first-hand knowledge.
Unlike sbx's experience, I was able to shape things and take ownership. I owned or had responsibility for many of the internal fab systems. I created my own kingdom, ensuring it ran like a Swiss watch, against which transgressions were met with something akin to judiciously tempered wrath. I was basically left alone to ensure my responsibilities were well-managed.
I loved it. I was able to work on global, billion-dollar software projects that indirectly helped change the world, through the semiconductors we produced. It's hard to describe the magnitude of a fab's operations if you haven't seen it firsthand. SAS does conduct tours in Austin; I can see if I can get you into one of those if you can't by simply calling them up yourself.
I miss it.
AMA. I'm about to take off from ABIA but I can answer questions later. I do believe we need more domestic semiconductor manufacturing here, so I'd be glad to help.
Spending ~$100M on employee housing would make the compensation a lot more competitive since software salaries are high but tend to be located in HCOL areas. Spend another ~$100M on training and education facilities and I think you could attract a lot of Americans right of of high school. Even if it still a bit less competitive than software it could still be the second best career industry.
I think the industry already partly does this but doing it on a larger scale and marketing it as an alternative to college would make it more compelling. I think the industry is still like many other large industries that really want a degree in some engineering despite it not necessarily being very applicable to fab work.
Lose my job and evicted at the same time? No thanks, plus I want privacy.
This is something that happened a lot in the netherlands in the city of eindhoven. Phillips had its major manufacturing located in the city, and build massive housing projects to house its workers relatively close to the plant.
I want a social life outside of work, and privacy is essential. As an example I generally do not want my colleagues to know who I am dating, or if I am dating more than one person.
People should only know what I choose to share. Separation between work and my personal life is essential.
You don't have to if they give regular leases, which regulations probably require anyway.
I wouldn't directly subsidize it though, that would become bigger shackles than work provided health care.
Correct, factory towns worked out great for the factory owners - not so much for the people that worked there.
Having a good supply of affordable housing nearby any facility that needs to hire a lot of low to middle paying people is probably a good thing, but letting the company run and control it will inevitably lead to abuses imo.
You don't even necessarily need to hire the partner directly; just help them find a job somewhere in the area.
I'd like to add one more factor here. It's transferable knowledge AND cheap cost of building your own business. When I was an intern to install and config a bunch of switches, routers, firewalls, and realized a switch is so expensive that I wouldn't be able to build my own business like this. So I got into software development job. It's way easier and also able to do side software project. IaaS or PaaS is so cheap, no needs to mess with data center myself.
Work for X for a decade and open your own X business is not applicable to semiconductor job.
Most of my friends in the network engineering field either work at companies that are large/complex enough to have challenging environments with proper networking hardware, or work as a freelance consultant for said companies.
The problem with career growth in network engineering is that, to grow in technical skills, usually larger networks are require to get access to gear and systems that can pose a challenge. Not a lot of those companies exist. Also, making a screw up in suchs an environment is far more detrimental than in a small network, because of the increased scale/complexity of the network.
Exactly. Simulation program is not going to suffice. Sometimes one has to bring a firewall home to debug something. And there's going to be several vendors, not only Cisco. And it's going to need more certs, not just CCNP, CCIE.
The issue is getting paid enough, not the nature of the job.
Nannying is quite important but it is low skill (meaning supply of labor is high) and thus will probably command lower wages than semiconductor manufacturing.
Furthermore, with AI becoming increasingly sophisticated, we might see a seachange in developer salaries with only the most talented and valuable devs getting massive increases and all the rest being made redundant. Leading us back to the low skill/high supply problem.
Another thing I think in cloud with pre-packaged solution (not just individual pieces of sw/hw) for most common situations and metered billing, providers are going to take major chunks of IT budgets. It would be similar to past when hardware cost was high so developer would get lower portion of overall budget.
In my mind the era of on-prem systems, custom solutions with high paying FTE jobs is coming to an end. And the myth developers are kings is going to go away along with that.
Yeah, 1-2 per cent of total IT workforce working for cloud providers will be compensated well. Remaining 95% will be either short term gigs or low pay FTE jobs called Cloud Connectivity Developer II and so on.
Her sister isn’t installing HF lines, or clean room downdraft systems. Functional equivalent of flipping burgers.
My understanding is that for a while Intel was trying to only hire PhDs for running its tools, but found that the especially academic individuals had little interest in the statistical process control of wafer manufacturing. In high volume manufacturing, the core engineers are still chemical engineers with bachelors degrees.
People can "consider" anything they want. That doesn't mean it's accurate.
We can’t hope to distinguish the great nannies from the mediocre (or even harmful) until years or decades later. But we don’t even try.
The job is low stress. My kids are easy. We ask the Nannie’s to do nothing but supervise the kids doing their chores (basically loading/unloading the dishwasher and tending to the dogs), drive, and help the kids with their homework (I don’t think the kids have needed help in the last 2 years). Most of them play board games with the kids after homework/chores are done. Something to keep the kids off screens. Most of this is done while the Nannie’s are working on their own homework.
That said, there are other comments here about semi manufacturing pulling from defense and it seems to be true, as even before I’ve started applying those are the companies reaching out with offers in hand.
You just have to talk to the nearest product owner, project manager, or bootcamp grad for an example.
I do know that with Descriptor languages and 'libraries' for chip design they reuse blocks and patterns, I think the challenge they run into however, is the possibility that there is cruft built on the existing setup for circuits and the like, and tweaking such may have impacts to downstream customers, possibly undiscovered until after tape-out.
^0 - Even if sometimes they get mis/overused on a low level. By that I'm referring to cases where someone learning patterns thinks they -have- to use all of them.
^1 - Examples that come to mind would be the 'Grab from queue, do thing, update queue', 'Manual' ETL, and 'Timed Jobs'. The last of which is the most fun to see across orgs, as it tends to have the most derivation between orgs. The most slapshoddingly-functional of which being a bunch of scheduled tasks in windows server (which honestly, worked great for them and their use case)
You basically have to be making enough money to live well before you get to a point where you can genuinely care about things other than the money. Either that or the other factors have to be absolute necessities for you.
Of course the McJobs will have to pay more if somebody hires away too much of their labor pool and they can't find anybody who wants to work for $15 an hour anymore just like they had to start paying more than minimum wage a few years ago when Amazon started paying $15 an hour for warehouse workers. That's why there's so much pushback against this idea.
I am interested in what percentage of these jobs will be able to be filled by individuals with a high school diploma or associates degree.
Can't help but think that now is probably a good time to enter a "trade" due to the lack of people who are doing that.
It looks like jobs which have lots of physical labor are generally correlated with other traits that tend to lower lifespan, so people who do lots of physical labor do end up dying earlier. Mea culpa.
On the other hand, if you control for lifestyle, the people who do physical labor live longer.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/well/move/work-exercise-h...
Among Norwegian men at least.
That was hardly the point of the video's thesis.
The pay isn’t great by Bay Area standards but the plants are located in low cost mid-west cities.
$35/hr plus overtime and benefits is an outstanding job in a city where upper-middle class homes cost $200,000. Those job very highly coveted and people stayed for decades. Top guys were making >$100,000/yr with a 2 year associates degree.
Edit: wow ok it really is 1 guy. (albeit good patreon revenue to pay for research time)
from patreon: > My name is Jon and I make videos on the Asianometry YouTube channel. I started the channel as a way to share things that I've learned about Chinese and Taiwanese history as well as vlog a little bit on my explorations of Taiwan.
It also seems highly unlikely he's only making money from ads and patreon. A lot of youtubers get money under the table to astroturf.
The problem is always pay. Don’t be fooled.
Cannot the business just pay a bit more...
Isn’t that the updated “American Dream”?
It's like the chicken and egg problem. What came first? Societal collapse or the willingness of its citizens to lay down and take it? Both cause eachother. Which variable is the one we can actually change?
Yes, enjoy your lives but only to the extent to where you step away from the grind and reevaluate your priorities, take a look at what is important to you. Hunker down into the priorities that matter and remove the cruft of distractions.
Anyone who has tripped balls and come out OK is not so addicted to literalness as Zuck. They realize a multiverse of perspectives lives within them. It doesn’t need to be made “real”.
In "The Doors of Perception", Aldous Huxley describes it very well: it's like these drugs remove a sensory filter we normally have in place which makes the world feel like...well...reality. When you remove that filter, you're suddenly flooded with the sense that there's so much more to the universe, but in actual fact it's all just in your head. It's just your brain cells doing a lot of communication with each other in a way that is most likely nonsensical.
Some people come out the other side thinking they've found some magic, but more likely they've just experienced what was always there without the filter, and once it wears off you're the same person you were but perhaps with a sense of feeling like you're part of a big system (which we all are, called biology).
From a strictly biological perspective it makes sense, given that most life is based on DNA and we share a lot of DNA with things that we are very different from. We share about 60% of our DNA with bananas.
The previous poster's description of the problem isn't by force of nature. It's by other people ("huge bonuses for the CEOs while the workers have to struggle to pay rent"). Perhaps the CEOs should offer some concessions to the young workers.
Or unsustainable housing costs
Making it easier to obtain leverage doesn't make housing cheaper, it just makes the prices go even higher faster.
Just like housing being too expensive ruins it's ability to provide housing for everyone, money being too expensive causes a recession and unemployment.
The difference however is that money can be created through borrowing so it doesn't go up in value but housing is restricted through zoning and the availability of land, you just can't make more of it.
Why so many vacant homes? The answer (as with everything in economics) is that the incentives are such that it's better to sit on a vacant home. In other words, our current system incentivizes hoarding homes.
And it's impossible to make squatting on a vacant home worthwhile, when you could be earning rent from it.
https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/vacant-nuance-in-the-vac...
I think surveillance and drone/robocop technology will make popular revolutions a thing of the past. People will be actively monitored if they even smell slightly rebellious to an algorithm, will be warned if they seem to be taking themselves seriously, and will be imprisoned if they don't have the appropriate reaction to a warning.
People need privacy and private ways to communicate in order to rebel. All of our movements will be monitored by our phones and street cameras with facial recognition. Cellphone conversations will be terminated with a warning if the algo detects Russian/Chinese/Iranian//North Korean/French(since 2031) propaganda being used to sow discord and evil.
We'll get back to remembering that wars, even civil, are when inbred princes and kings argue, not people with healthy genetics.
People are discovering that working hard doesn't build a better future for oneself, it builds a better future for CEOs and shareholders.
“Nice car you got there boss.
− See, if you work hard, don't count your hours and dedicate your entire life to work, by the end of the year I could buy a second one”
There can only be one captain. If I'm forced onto that ship as a slave, I will do everything I can to break the chains and free my comrades. No matter what kind of riches I'm promised, I won't be the captain of any slave ship, that's for sure.
And you'll be thrown overboard and everyone else (other than the people who you pulled into your plan, who will swim with you) will just get on with the business of surviving. You're not braver than or morally superior to millions of imported slaves. The Atlantic was filled with slaves who didn't think that the material world applied to them.
It's not a death spiral, it's competition.
When people leave shitty jobs and vacancies can't get filled, businesses either improve conditions and pay or they lose to competitors who do.
The only way you can really negotiate is being ready to say no and leave when you get a bad offer. People actually doing that make a difference.
Suddenly a job has to be better than "fuck it" and people are making "fuck it" seem glamorous.
You'll get a lot of business people whining and whinging about it, but only actions actually matter.
Why SHOULD someone who believes the things I've mentioned do anything except attempt to maximize personal pleasure?
– Kurt Vonnegut
I don't know about you all, but I'm not willing to say "fuck it." There's enough beauty in the world to enjoy and seek to preserve. We've clearly made changes in the past and made things better. While we stand on the shoulders of giants, they are in reality 3 dudes in a trench coat sitting on one another. Personally, I take pride in trying to build a better future for my (non-existent) children and generations to come. We're all in this together and I think a lot of us want to build that Sci-Fi utopia that we read about and dreamed of as children. We can still make that world, but not if we say "fuck it."
The reality is that our decisions determine if we live in the Cyberpunk Dystopia or the Sci-Fi Star Trek-esk Utopia. Giving up is choosing the former and actively participating in its creation.
If everyone's depressed, we shouldn't be asking "how do we get more SSRIs into these people?", but rather "how do we fix society so people aren't depressed?".
> As world views become bleak, is encouraging people to say "fuck it" and maximize for enjoyment really the best move?
The answer to this question is obviously yes. Why wouldn't anyone maximize for life enjoyment? I hardly think that's equivalent to saying "fuck it."
Here's the thing: the video talks about the career track of semiconductor manufacturing in Taiwan being limited. When we're talking careers that require education and training, people are going to look at the opportunity cost of choosing one vocation over another.
Whether people want to do this work really just depends on how much these roles are going to pay.
I also think it's incredibly realistic and mature for the youngest generation to acknowledge how their earning potential is being squandered into healthcare, housing, and education that all consistently grow faster than inflation. They are fully aware that employers make minimal investment in employees' education or training, prefer external hires for senior leadership and management rather than promoting from within, and purposefully optimize for their own employees to job hop. Every employee I know is 100% aware that any extra effort they put into their work isn't going to be rewarded with extra pay, and that promotions and pay raises that they can get are never as high as switching jobs.
I applaud every young person who sets boundaries and refuses to go above and beyond for employers who don't go above and beyond for their employees.
From a societal standpoint we should teach our children to just let themselves be cheated and work anyway and shoulder the burden of the cheaters because even if cheaters ruin your life, they only ruin your life, not society as a whole, which only is only ruined if you cheat back.
3 things have led to a greater dejection among the youth:
1. Rising rents and low access to shelter (basic need). Rising costs of Healthcare causes dejection to.
2. Continuous exposure to 'perfect' ultra-high consumerism lives through social media.
3. Climate change led doomerism about if the world will even exist in a few decades.
___________
This culminates into a deep resentment towards older folk. Old people disproportionately own property, stress from the Healthcare system and contributed most to climate change in their hayday.....all while controlling power in the top levels of govt.
The probable solutions are all hard to organically execute. Do we create counter brainwashing systems to make people live within their silos (ignorance is bliss)? Do we trade off guilt driven doomerism about climate change for 'the climate will be just fine' narratives ? Do we push for pro-child policies, so children aid in building longterm hope and long term plans for millennials and gen z ? Do we loosen zoning rules to allow for cheaper housing for the young, even if that means boomers assets reduce in value ? Do we regulate industries such as Healthcare and education to be cheaper by increasing access, even if that means less 'fancy' services and arguably lower quality doctors ?
All hard questions, but those are the peaceful solition. To quote JFK : "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable".
Most people these days have seen multiple large economic crashes and swings and have very little faith that our economic systems are stable or sustainable. Prospects for the bottom 2/3 of the population are negative, stability is questionable, long term sustainability isn't anywhere near feasible yet.
You get one life, might as well enjoy it while you can. Not just labor your days away for the short term benefits of the few.
It said that corporations have a similar political makeup to communist dictatorships because the number of key supporters (shareholders) a CEO needs to stay in power represents a relatively small proportion of people in the company.
As a result, the CEOs only need to keep the largest shareholders happy. Smaller shareholders and workers merely accept the direction of the company. Their opinions don’t matter.
This is why we see CEOs have massive pay and generous severance packages, while workers struggle to pay rents and qualify for government benefits.
There was a saying in factories in the Soviet Union “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work”. We see this same sentiment with workers today with “quiet quitting”. Putting in more work provides no added benefits. Incentives are misaligned, and this leads to inefficiencies that will lead to our downfall.
There are enormous challenges. Life literally depends on solving them. Suggesting that they can't be solved is tantamount to telling humanity to give up and die.
Not only that, but it is _actively_ participating in the cyberpunk dystopia that they are saying is inevitable. If evil only needs good men to do nothing to grow, problems only need us to give up to become worse. (I'm clearly no poet)
Gates and Bezos did lose half their net worth in divorces recently though.
Entertain the idea that every human has the option to be reincarnated when they die. How many people would voluntarily kill themselves to have a chance at being born to rich parents? It wouldn't surprise me if one third of the world population is constantly killing themselves for that lottery ticket.