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Comment by Robotbeat | Hacker News Reader

Employees of Taiwanese fans work insane hours and one of the problems with replicating it here was workers not willing to work the hours that Taiwan did. Don’t know if pay in Taiwan is competitive, but when we’re talking about work/conditions, it should be pointed out.

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The United States already has a lot of semiconductor fabs. It was only in recent years that AMD processors fabricated by TSMC overtook the performance of Intel processors fabricated by Intel. Is there something about newer process nodes that makes the employment conditions worse? Otherwise, I'd point to Intel fabs in the United States as an existence proof that the USA can get qualified workers for domestic semiconductor fabrication. (Plus US fabs operated by Texas Instruments, Samsung, GlobalFoundries, and others.)

We were discussing being competitive with peers and what peers are doing vs what we are doing. It seemed pretty relevant.

Also, I mentally separate long working hours from other aspects of “worker conditions.” You can have low working hours but a toxic and unsafe work environment or a physically safe and supportive work environment with long hours. You can also have high and low pay with various working hours (although typically high pay isn’t supported by low working hours unless the business has some sort of massive moat).

I'm saying that I don't know whether employees working insane hours is a necessary or incidental component of the TSMC success story. Up until very recently American fabs were technological leaders with (presumably) less insane hours for employees. My expectation is that American fabs with American-norm working hours would remain competitive as long as they didn't fall behind on node shrinks, which Intel notably failed at in recent years.

Of course it's possible that insane working hours were why TSMC employees got EUV photolithography working at scale before any American manufacturer did. Was that the key difference between Intel and TSMC? It's a question that I personally haven't seen an answer to.

That's a convenient tidbit put forth by who. Reject the premise that "replicating it" requires emphasizing this factor over others. If the true owners of Taiwanese fabs simply took less of the surplus share, the fab could be replicated here by spending more on American workers.

I’m not sure that, in a competitive environment where profit margins are small, that working vast fewer hours is going to beat an aggressive approach like Taiwan’s.

This wouldn’t be a problem, we just let Taiwan work themselves silly why we share in the benefit by getting better and better computer chips, but that doesn’t work if we want to COMPETE with Taiwan in this area.

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