Comment by JimmieMcnulty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JimmieMcnulty | Hacker News Reader

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Honestly, based on the content of this video and the replies from the prior HN thread, it seems like folks are locked into the belief that the current manufacturing... "experience" (for lack of a better term) for the workers involved will be lifted from Asia and dropped into the US, but that doesn't actually make any sense to me.

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.

Nissan ran a very successful car manufacturing facility for many years in the U.K. This kind of cultural adaptation is exactly how they did it. And it turns out that Geordies were more than capable of executing “The Nissan Way”.

Why "ran" in the past tense? The plant is still running.

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...

And why the reference to Geordies - natives of Newcastle - when the plant is in Sunderland?

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.

The reason I noticed it is that the two cities, though very close geographically, have an intense and not entirely friendly rivalry that goes back hundreds of years and continues to this day. See for example the History section of [0]. Although it's understandable that someone not familiar with the area could confuse the two places, friends from Sunderland tell that they are pretty offended when they are mistaken for Geordies. I imagine it's like accusing Bart Simpson and his friends of being from Shelbyville.

[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.

I appreciated the comment. This kind of tangential but interesting tidbit is one of the more attractive aspects of HN to me.

Eh, close places often have intense rivalries over minor difference (that feel big to them), but to the outsider they look pretty much the same.

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.

I recently learned that there’s a name for this phenomenon, “ schismogenesis”. It seems immediate neighbors adopt opposite stance just to be different.

I don’t know that it’s universal. At least some people I know from Sunderland call themselves Geordies.

Having seen your edit: just wanted to chime in and thank you for the comment - I learned something I never would have otherwise.

> Google maps tells me those two places are only 14.3 miles away.

Are you American? That's a long way in terms of cultural differences in the UK.

Are you American?

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.

> Why would you assume that?

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?

Most of planet earth used to be under UK rule

14 miles in British is something like 200 miles in American.

In Britain, 100 miles is a long distance. In the US, 100 years is a long time.

Especially in the Western US. In Los Angeles, all travel is measured in time rather than distance.

My experience with the British is they frequently have stark rival differences in cultural identity based on which part of which city they live.

Not exclusively a British idiosyncrasy, given gangs and tribal habits elsewhere, but you're quite right that we Brits do take to various ways of distinguishing ourselves on sometimes questionable grounds! Location, education level, schools, universities, colleges within universities, accents, vocabulary, class, sports affiliations, it's endless!

Not nearly to the same extent as the UK, but in the US, people judge you based on regional accent and vocabulary as well. An English teacher at my high school threw out the curriculum she should have been teaching, and just had us practice vocabulary and (remedial) grammar. She said that we will be consigned to the ghetto as long as we sound like that is where we belong.

They will feel stark to the locals only.

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.

> In Britain, people from both places will leave their shoes on indoors at home

This is by no means a universal thing here!

I was stereotyping a bit for the sake of brevity.

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.

I'm Italian and we have a similar situation, things like e.g. heated rivalry between two towns that are 15 km apart.

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.

same goes for many other places in europe aswell. (netherlands, germany, france etc).

just look at football rivalries to get the idea.

Sorry, yes, it’s still running. There’s long term strategic questions over it, but those are nothing to do with the actual work product.

And I’m loving the extremely detailed Tyneside vs Sunderland debate you managed to kick off.

Another attempt, where Toyota and GM attempted to build a plant together in Fremont, California:

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015

Not just an attempt.

Toyota is the one of largest employers of Americans in the auto industry today: https://www.thomasnet.com/articles/top-suppliers/car-manufac...

True, they have plenty of plants, I just mean it sounds like NUMMI wasn't as successful as it could've been.

It was very successful locally. The problem that "killed it" was that GM wanted to expand the model to other plants (Van Nuys was the next) and the same techniques didn't work. Likely because the wrong people were running things in Van Nuys compared to Fremont. Leadership is EVERYTHING when it comes to organizational transitions and problems with that.

According to that story which I’ve listened to before, that partnership had a very specific set of goals, once those goals were achieved or deemed unachievable (as the case may be) the purpose of the plant no longer existed so they shut it down.

That plant is now the Tesla plant.

>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.

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.

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.

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).

Apple's M1 is an irrelevant comparison. Apple doesn't run a fab. Yes, Intel lost a lot of chip designers, etc, but the submission is about fab related work, which Apple is not involved in.

Seeing how Intel hemorrhaged talent that went straight to their competitors, like Apple, I’d say your distinction is not very relevant.

Hot take, apparently: VHDL/Verilog developers should make 5x what JavaScript developers make, and not the other way around.

RTL development is a very interesting beast. On one hand, development is challenging, and there's a massive amount of global $$$ in integrated circuits. These guys should be the top paid, cream of the crop, right?

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?

Hmm

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 it weren’t for pesky things like supply and demand.

If the pay is so low, it’s kind of curious that the supply doesn’t drop.

Prestige can confound this in the short or medium term.

Prestige can be a kind of non-monetary compensation, but one which is generally difficult to measure, especially for rank-and-file employees.

But...ad revenues, microtransactions etc. Solution - hardware full of ads and rentals eek!

They do if they get into high frequency trading :(

What sense of 'should' are you using here?

Isn't M1 manufactured by TSMC? Are you saying TSMC has good pay and treats it's workers great? (it might I honestly don't know).

I'm not taking a position either way, butI believe the poster is talking about the design/integration phase.

Just to be clear, I make no value judgement about Asian cultural norms w/r/t chip manufacturing, my comment is merely meant to suggest the employment experience probably will be adjusted to fit American cultural mores, so the concern that few Americans would want these jobs isn’t entirely fair.

I am entirely unqualified to judge cultural advantages/disadvantages in the manufacturing industry.

Is the M1's design really that technically impressive? The product itself is revolutionary, but my impression was that its main technical advantages is that ARM is more efficient and they had a monopoly on TSMC's 5 nm process.

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.

> ARM is more efficient

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.

Intel lost because of their business model. TSMC was making an order of magnitude more chips at far lower margin and all those manufacturing runs/experiments let them advance that much faster.

I don't get the impression that Apple SEG pays very well, though it does pay slightly more than competitors.

It’s true that Americans are less likely to work 16 hours days with low pay.

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.

Yeah, the next decade is going to be interesting to watch.

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...

Taiwan could import labour.

This is not and will never be an effective, sustainable solution.

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.

Cities have been importing population since the dawn of history. How sustainable do you want sustainable to be?

Folks have been importing top soil for a long time too. That doesn't mean that you get to be okay with soil erosion. Or for a better example, folks have been digging wells and building canals for agriculture for as long as civilization has existed. That doesn't mean you get to deplete your aquifers and natural reservoirs.

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.

Since there's several car manufacturing comparisons of American manufacturing adapting to East Asian manufacturing culture, I feel like there's consensus that Japanese built cars still have tighter QC than ones built in North America. Better fit etc, the kind of details in semi and would compound when moving from millimeters to nanometers. My understanding is the commitment for semi technicians / equipment engineers are also much more rigorous, people being practically married to their stations. Hard to say if high-end chip manufacturing processes refined under East Asian sweatshop work culture that's still better than the alternative can be adapated to west.

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.

Agree… only issue might be managers and supervisors coming from manufacturing in Asia, they will have to re-learn how to treat workers, but I am hopeful

I mean, Toyota and Hyundai make cars in the South, so that particular lesson has been learned before

Are we lumping up modern Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese culture into one now?

From a western perspective, everything people say about the Chinese (regarding culture, "bad products", cheap immitations, low quality, and so on) had been said about the Japanese in the 50s to 70s, the Taiwanese 80s to 90s, and the Koreans 90s to 00ss. In all cases it was followed by "they are now better and cheaper than us" and "they take our jobs".

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.

Surely in terms of work culture they're more similar to each other than any of them are to North American work culture? That's the culture we're all talking about here.

Wasn’t there a documentary about this or something? I swear I’ve seen this premise play out somewhere.

Maybe American Factory (2019) or Gung Ho (1986). The latter isn't a documentary though.

I think the former was it. I only caught clips of it, but the previous comment basically summed up what I saw.

Why would it lead to dropoffs in quality? I think u are underestimating how much ingenuity workers of all cultures have when its encouraged. Considering the strength of American research universities, I believe that we might see gains in quality and productivity.

I think OP is agreeing with you

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