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Comment by babl-yc | Hacker News Reader

I was interested in seeing the kind of job opportunities this would create. Especially after reading Chip War [1] which goes into the history of the offshoring and globalization of Fab processes.

Here are a few of the openings Broadcom's openings at the Fort Collins, CO site [2]:

- Material handler, Manufacturing operator: 12.25 hour shifts, 3-4 day work weeks, ~$19-25/hr. Night shift in higher demand

- General Mechanical Technician: $20-37/hr, alarm response a big component of role

- ASIC Digital Design Engineer, Fab Quality Engineer, R&D Software Engineer, Cleanroom facilities project manager: $78-150k + equity, BS/MS + related experience requirements

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Chip-War-Worlds-Critical-Technology/d... [2] https://broadcom.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/External_Career?locat...

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These are in Fort Collins, CO. It's the 151st largest metro area in the US, so it's not really a tech jobs hub. Getting up to $150K plus equity and benefits wouldn't be a great salary in San Jose or Seattle, but it's not out of line with a lot of tech jobs in less populated metro areas.

Even in New York and Boston there are a lot of programmers and other midlevel ICs making making ~$150k. Not everyone is lucky enough to work at Google.

I work in New York at a tech company with more than 200 employees that's a household name among below 50s and considered a hot brand and I only get paid 150.

NYC metro or Rochester/Buffalo? 150k goes a lot further in the latter.

Last I checked, $150k/year was enough to afford a decent house in a place like Penfield. It's a completely different world. I'm talking about NYC metro. Interestingly it seems like just about all of New England is more expensive than comparable areas in Western NY.

I bought a house in a suburb of Rochester on a $80k salary in 2021. Same house 2 years later would be double the monthly payment :)

Wait, is that due to interest rates or capital appreciation? There is a big difference.

Basically all places in the US with anything resembling urban density and don’t have a reputation for decline have been on this housing cost trajectory for several years now.

Probably both.

It pays to be on the coastal plains, east of the Appalachian mountains.

+1 I live in California or I like in Washington is very different from I live in San Francisco or I live in Seattle.

Basically nobody outside of NY even remembers that Rochester exists, I was being lazy but I figured that most people would interpret NY == NYC.

Most people seem to, which is a thorn in the side of anyone who has lived outside of NYC in the big beautiful state of NY. It's annoying having to regularly clarify "the state, not the city".

NYC, $150k. That's a pretty abysmal salary for a software engineer.

California outside of LA/SD/SF is dramatically different (with the exception of some coastal areas). Even then housing and rental competition can be pretty bad. My brother in law has done 4 hour round trip commutes to the Bay Area for contracting work while managing to find an area with affordable housing.

Yeah, Sonora, about an hour from Stockton or 3 from Bay Area, has houses available at 600k or something. Crazy.

Yup — they’re out that way and it’s still pricey. It’s unreal — the last time I heard the subject of renting here come up there were only 3-4 houses available in the whole town.

Yeahz 3 or 4 at max. At this moment its only 2 houses, and 1 commerical.

ASIC design is a much more ratified skill set than you'd need for a normal programming job. I always found it sad that salaries in the hardware industry are so comparatively low.

It's even crazier when you consider that readily available knowledge for cutting edge hardware is much more scarce compared to software. There are no massive communities of knowledgeable people all trying to show you what you are doing wrong.

Especially for something like silicon design, there is virtually zero knowledge available outside of institutions.

I think in some ways this actually is better though. I find that when I want technical info about hardware-specific topics, I do not find the same kind of dumpster-fire articles like I would about say, ReactJS, or something similarly trendy. Its always some basic html/css website with extremely well written technical information from an old-head that is a master of whatever he is talking about.

I understand what you mean by better but you have to admit the much lower compensation is weird given how much higher the bar is to be an SME and how many fewer the engineers are.

Software doesn't require a few billion in capital as a complement.

I meant that it might be better that there aren't massive communities of them. Didn't mean anything about compensation.

There is nothing "sad" about it. It is simple economics. The return on investment (ROI) is so much higher in software, compared to hardware. Correspondingly, the profits margins are way higher in software, compared to hardware.

Related: When you look at salaries for robotics engineers who work in a factory, the salaries are so much lower than you would expect. Plus, your factory is probably in a rural area due to very cheap land prices.

One more: Anything "embedded" usually pays surprisingly low salaries considering their skill-level (much higher than mine!).

> There is nothing "sad" about it. It is simple economics. The return on investment (ROI) is so much higher in software, compared to hardware. Correspondingly, the profits margins are way higher in software, compared to hardware.

I've seldom seen a more classic example of econ bro arrogance than this comment. Apparently economics doesn't just tell us which neoliberal policies to support, it also tells us when we can be happy and sad too?

I think you're close:

There are relatively fewer employers seeking hardware skillsets compared to employers seeking software skillsets. People may say, "there are way more software engineers though! hardware is SO hard!!" as a counter, but they don't realize there is a proportionally crazy amount of software employers out there trying to hire engineers.

Your pay is capped by what you make your employer (the ROI you mention), but actually determined by how hard it is to replace you. Hard being defined as the difference between "# of Positions" and "# of Employable People". You could make your employer 10 million a year but you won't see a dime of that if anyone on earth can replace you within 5 minutes.

The fact that rural areas pay less has more to do with lower bargaining power of the employees than it does the cost of living. If one quits, the literal million dollar question is where are they going to go work instead? Is there another major manufacturer out here in the middle of nowhere? "Shut up, take what you get." Many build out in these areas for precisely this reason.

If the rate hikes cause a mass startup extinction we'd see an equalization of pay.

I wanted to go into ASIC design a few decades ago, but the level of pay was hordendously low compared to IT.

Sounds like nothing has changed

Housing in the NE isn't amazing, but it's dramatically better than the bay area. You need to make 225+ (300 realistically) in the bay area to be a home owner, and even then you're living in a marginal area with a lot of compromises

I don’t think 225 or even 300 would be enough. Especially if you have kids. I don’t think people truly realize how home ownership has become completely out of reach for most, even for tech workers.

I would want minimum two $200k+ incomes in case of income loss for one person.

My wife and I live in a suburb of the Sacramento, CA area and have a combined household income of $400k and we have 20% saved for a $700k house (avg price in this area). But the mortgage costs would still be insane. We could either pay $2500/to rent a nice house (3-4bed 2b 2000sqft,we have no kids) or $4000-5000/mo for pretty much the same.

At this point in the housing market, buying makes no sense. I wish people would stop pushing the "American dream" of NEEDING to own a home. Homeownership is not a necessity, it is a luxury.

This American dream philosophy has caused very unfair policies where people who make $60k qualify for housing assistance and can buy houses for 0 down because the govt pays for some of their down payment[0].

If I can't enjoy the luxury of owning a home, why do my tax dollars pay for that luxury for those who earn less? I'm not anti socialism at all, either. I'm just stating that home ownership is a luxury in this day and age. Pay for people to live somewhere, yes. Provide them with mental health care, yes. I don't mind my tax dollars being used for those necessities. Helping with home ownership? In a market that already has fierce competition and low inventory? It's ridiculous.

[0] https://abc7.com/amp/california-housing-finance-agency-down-...

I have often seen people on HN with mind boggling (to me) incomes to whom houses that seem relatively very inexpensive are inaccessible. Why is that? Naively I would think you could rent for 30k/y and save enough in just a few years to buy a house without a mortgage

At the same time people start earning those incomes, they are also paying $20k to $30k per year per kid for daycare. Couple that with $50k+ retirement savings (max 401k and HSA) and 2 $50k cars, and it can seem tight.

Also, the higher the pay, the rarer the source of income, and so lower probability of replacing your income if you lose your job. That means you might want to put down more than 20% to ensure your monthly mortgage payment is still possible even if your income drops by 30% to 50%. Such as if the wife has pregnancy complications and cannot work, etc.

Owning a home has been more expensive than renting in the Bay Area for 10+ years. Why would anyone want to buy a home there?

In NY at least, you can do into Fintech. That pays _better_ than Google/Meta.

per hour salary is usually drastically worse though.

Second prize is a set of steak knives…

Now, or doing zero interest rates?

I'm not sure I've ever seen a useful customer fintech company, except maybe Betterment if you ignore half the features.

People always crap on tech for being useless while ignoring that 95% of fintech companies exist solely and completely as a vehicle to generate money for a very small group of people.

I thought they existed to create customer lists for Chase to acquire.

Useful for tiny fraction of people who could benefit from use is a kind of useful, but probably not a kind to write home about.

What makes faang special are rsu refresh, that makes a huge difference.

Genuinely curious - is that now, or back when rates were low?

Hell, I've been programming (among other things) for 20 years now and never even come close to $100K.

Granted, I live in a rural area, so CoL is lower, but still, that doesn't entirely balance out.

Not every tech worker works at a tech company, and not every tech worker makes bank, in either relative or absolute terms.

This does not align with 2018-2022 mainstream HN and Twitter narrative.

1. You should be paid the same regardless where you work.

2. ~150K is significantly underpaid for any programmers.

#1 is only true for remote work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Collins,_Colorado#Economy

>> "Many high-tech companies have relocated to Fort Collins because of the resources of Colorado State University and its research facilities. Hewlett-Packard, Intel, AMD, Broadcom, Beckman Coulter, Microsoft, Rubicon Water and Pelco all have offices in Fort Collins. Other industries include clean energy, bioscience, and agri-tech businesses."

Maybe not a hub yet, but it's headed that way. It's also only an hour away from Denver.

Most of these companies are there because of the HP campus set up there in the 70s/80s. HP liked setting up offices in small towns near colleges where they were the essentially the only tech employer. Broadcom bought HP's fab facilities after they divested. Microsoft started an office there because they wanted to hire optical mice engineers who were working for HP.

Source: Used to work at the Microsoft office in Fort Collins (HoloLens group). Some of the folks I worked with were the original folks that set up the office.

It's sadly been moving a bit the other way. HP/HPE have significantly downsized and Microsoft's office is pretty tiny. I"m not sure AMD even has an office here anymore, if so, they took down the sign on the building it used to be on.

HP, Broadcom, Intel, and AMD used to all be on the same intersection.

And Intel just chopped the size of the office in half. They don't use the upper floor anymore.

People who have been to Fort Collins know that that city needs a _lot_ of infrastructure work to become anything more than it is now. FC already bulges under the pressure of college move-in/out and tourism there is fairly big for Coloradans. I also don't think residents are the kinds that would go for large expansion. Denver still has more than enough room to grow before they push out into the smaller towns, and if they did Boulder would go first since it already has a startup ecosystem IMO.

Do not underestimate the impact of a very large airport on the decision making of senior execs.

Fort Collins is not near a San Jose or Seattle level of tech employment but then, neither is anywhere else in the USA. Any tech worker who ends up there won't be hurting for employment opportunities, especially if they are willing to commute to Denver or Boulder.

Just don't be surprised when the cost-of-living ends up higher then one might expect. Housing is still a good deal by Bay Area or NYC standards, though.

Housing in the corridor from Fort Collins to south of Denver is expensive and comparable to bay area pricing.

You will not be able to afford much on 150K there.

There's a lot of housing in the $500K range in Fort Collins. I can speak with some authority on this situation; I run the MLS for Northern Colorado. :-)

edit: MLS = Multiple Listing Service, that thing you do when you "list" a house.

That is funny because looking on Redfin I see the exact opposite.

4 Bed, 3 Bath 2k to 3k Square feet houses average $264 a square foot, 650k average price.

That is a great deal more affordable than my Zip code or most of the good housing areas in the Bay area

https://www.redfin.com/city/7006/CO/Fort-Collins/filter/sort...

Keep in mind the posted salary is negotiable. It's a rookie mistake to assume that if you are offered the job, your only option is to take the offer at the amount listed in the public job offer.

Negotiating salary well is an important career skill.

Most places I've been at don't have much room to negotiate salary. You can often get a better vacation package though if you ask.

The first time I tried to negotiate (2006) I asked for $52k from $50k and they told me no.

The next time (2008), offer was $60k, I countered at $100k (job required relocation) and we met at $80k.

The next time (2011), offer was $110k, got $120k (relo again, this time to a tech center)

Next time (2012), offer was $125k, got $140k and more equity.

I’ve never had a job offer rescinded over it which was always something I heard about growing up.

Of course times change and ymmv.

This might be true at large companies where you're being handled by a HR team.

Smaller companies are typically very willing to negotiate. It can't hurt to ask for 20% more. The worst that will happen is they'll say no.

Asking for more than 20% gets a bit risky.

Large companies also often have a lot of room to negotiate.

Right, but often not salary. You can get a hiring bonus or more vacation time. What each company can give is different, and it changes with time.

That has worked for me precisely never; in fact I gave up negotiating over job offers at all because what I always wanted was more time off, and all I got was "sorry, we only distribute vacation time based on seniority".

Median house price is still $590k there, which is $4200 a month plus taxes and PMI. $150k is $8800 a month take home pay after taxes (including CO state). Making $150k and still spending more than half your post-tax income (after taxes/PMI/repairs/HOA) on housing is wild.

It's not unfair to say Fort Collins isn't a tech hub, but it's also not too bad. Trivia: One of the first non-CA Hewlett-Packard plants is down the road in Loveland. They also have a big campus in Fort Collins, which is where the Broadcom site is now.

I am from Colorado and went to school in Fort Collins. It maybe be small nationally, but it’s probably the 4th biggest tech area in CO after Denver, DTC, and Colorado Springs. Cost of living is surprisingly high unless you live in student housing.

For added context.. My partner went to CSU and we moved away from FC a little over a year ago. Our rent for a 1BR / 1BA was $1,700 a month.

Everything's relative, but compared to SF, Seattle, Vancouver.. that's still quite affordable.

For apples-to-apples, you’d look at Denver. We’re talking about the state’s 4th largest city which is 65 miles away from the capital and otherwise in the middle of nowhere. It’s extremely expensive for what it is

My daughter had grand plans of "renting a big house with a bunch of her friends" for her first year out of high school in Fort Collins. A couple of weeks ago she told me how all of her friends now plan on staying at home. Apparently she looked up rental prices. :-)

You haven’t worked for Broadcom before. The equity is usually over $100k per year.

Fort Collins housing prices are still high ($550k vs $570k for Denver), typical for CO and much of the intermountain west.

It’s 70-90k for most engineers and probably 130-150 for 20+ year veterans. That’s not great pay anywhere

General Mechanical Technician is another name for mechanical maintenance. in my experience, if "alarm response" is a big part of the gig then run for the hills because this company intends to run their equipment until its literally a pile of flaming grease and beeping melted plastic.

alarm response means you as a mech tech/mechanical maintenance have failed proactive or preventative work and will spend the rest of your career working mandatory overtime to fix what aint fixable anymore. the reason for this failure is nearly always management pushing for higher uptime and output. alarm response should never constitute a new factories big ticket issues.

That asic digital designer range is really low unless the equity is very generous.

Yeah, I remember meeting someone who designed ASICs back in 2000 or 2001 and he made ~$260k/year ($1000/work day) as a salaried employee for a certain large printer company.

The competition is Taiwan, you realise that?

- Automation can't easily justify higher salaries, as it is highly automated to begin with.

- The product's pricing has to be cheap too, which is going to be difficult.

Medium/low pay for the work required

This statement sounds cynical.

I hate the fact that I agree - feeling cynical myself.

At this point when I read about $megacorp moving production to the US, I see an indication of globalization-level exploitation and profits being applied to the US labor market.

> At this point when I read about $megacorp moving production to the US, I see an indication of globalization-level exploitation and profits being applied to the US labor market.

What do you expect or want to happen? Companies will pay the lowest price they can to adequately fill the role they need to fill. As everything it comes down to demand and supply. If lots of folks are available who can fill the role well, the comp is gonna be pretty low. Do you want companies to pay more just out of charity? When apples are on sale, do you ever just pay double the price because it feels fairer? The only place where we do this is with tips and that's usually already priced in.

At that pay band they are looking for warm body levels of fill. Like we need a guy to sit in chair for compliance reasons but he probably shouldn’t touch any of the controls level of pay. Like for reference brown bear car wash pays 22 per hour and a straight out of 2 year trade school mechanic gets 37 with union benefits in Washington state (outside Seattle)

Sounds like they won't be able to hire at that price then. Nice how these problems solve themselves.

> what do you expect to happen?

I am not surprised, I am disappointed.

I hope that we’ll at some point consider economic models that account for externalities, for the finite nature of Earth, for our humanity.

Like the donut economics model aiming for sustainability - or a similar approach.

I too am hoping that we could account for negative externalities and therefore would love to see a carbon tax for example. Can you explain what the unaccounted externality is in this case?

Those are still quite livable wages, I'm not seeing tremendous wealth but I'm not seeing any exploitation either. I imagine in fifty years some people will be getting paid minimum wage accomplishing basically the same output that a masters degree + 250k+ salary is pulling in now, it all depends on the technology in the tools.

These were livable wages 3 years ago. Now it’s surviving wages

I've got to admit I was pretty surprised when I learned about the pay + hard work setup for semi engineers at TSMC in Taiwan. I'd be curious if anyone has any first hand experience with it.

A (westerner) friend who lived in Taiwan for a few years returned recently. He keeps on saying the general lifestyle and living conditions in Taiwan are really lousy compared to Australia.

eg the climate is so wet/humid in Taiwan that the buildings tend to generate mold, most things are run down, and that kind of thing.

Didn't sound like a good place to live (yeah, as a generalisation), if you've got a choice in the matter.

Total comp for onshore TSMC engineers is surprisingly low compared to finance or tech jobs in the US. Yes, cost of living is lower in Taiwan, but most of the big factories are outside mid-sized, unappealing cities. (I'm looking at you Taichung and Hsinchu.)

Pick any two:

- better wages

- US jobs

- lower price

That may be true for highly labor intensive roles but a fully automated operation is _more_ profitable when the few jobs that are required are staffed by trained personnel.

That is one of the reasons this factory isn't located in a poorer area. It's in Ft. Collins _because_ the profitability projections assume they can operate at somewhere better than 97% uptime.

better wages, us jobs. easy.

And don't replace your iPhone every year, because now it costs 50% more.

Of course, walking back on the race to the bottom will be difficult. So I don't know how it plays out in the real world.

> don't replace your iPhone every year, because now it costs 50% more

This flattens down the experience curve [1], meaning the technological edge advances slower. That, in turn, exposes the entire industry to more-agile competition. This is the recipe for undermining competition behind a protectionist wall: cut costs to beat bigger competition with movement and then scale.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects

So you think Apple will be fine with their sales falling down, because they moved production to US?

No, I said it won't play out like that given the race to the bottom. My comment was from an idealistic pov, because the parent comment gave me the opportunity to choose two, and those are the two I would choose if I was king :)

Doesn't the first and last one cancel each other out?

If you want better wages (relative to the location the employees are) and also lower prices of goods, then you can't have production in the US

I dunno, I think it’s actually Pick three:

  - extreme corporate profits
  - better wages
  - US jobs
  - lower prices

You can’t optimize both for extreme shareholder returns and extreme wealth at the top and also pay first world good wages/living standards and have lower prices. Unfortunately, in this race, shareholder returns is often still the last thing compromised on, it seems.

That's not actually pick three. It's that if you have uncompetitive markets (and therefore high rents/inefficiency), you end up with worse wages, loss of US jobs and high prices. Because then the price companies can charge is no longer tied to their labor cost, so they can cut labor costs without lowering prices.

This is clearly what's happened and needs fixing, but even after that, you still have a trade off between high-paying US jobs and low consumer prices.

But the answer to that one isn't as obvious because it isn't linear. In a competitive market, competition with labor in other countries might cause you to get paid $1000/year less, but lower your cost of living by $2000/year.

> can’t optimize both for extreme shareholder returns and extreme wealth at the top and also pay first world good wages/living standards and have lower prices

Ignoring new entrants, sure. In a competitive market, shareholder returns entice new entrants. Flatten those and you lose that edge.

For many markets, the competition caveat is missing: this is something we can improve with policy. But pushing down profits for labor's sake is a false economy; it leaves the industry less resilient in a global context. Put another way, a solid repeatable business plan is finding a market leader suppressing shareholder returns and exploiting what they're missing from a separate jurisdiction.

I understand that, but if better wages lead to increase costs, it should be a zero sum game in the grand scheme of things. But, at least, you are not dependent on China for making stuff.

Lower price of the product I presume.

If you try to argue that the well-being of capitalists and the well-being of regular people/workers are one and the same you run into contradictions very quickly.

What other systems are better at promoting regular peoples' well-being?

Difficulty: answer without referring to lightly-populated and culturally-homogeneous Nordic petrostates.

> Difficulty: answer without referring to lightly-populated and culturally-homogeneous Nordic petrostates.

… All of which are also running under capitalism.

The main class of capitalists in the US is regular people with 401k accounts. (After that is small business owners, who I agree are evil but most people like.)

Ye cast the stone at Taylor Swift, yet do not comprehend that the average musician is Brad with his dusty nylon guitar in the attic? (Egg on my face.)

In the US, every worker with a 401(k) is also a capitalist.

How irrelevant. And uncreative (both of you.)

They aren’t “job creators”.

>12.25 hour shifts

I've never seen this. Is that a required 15 overlap for shift change?

That is exactly what my buddies do in the Alberta oilsands for exactly the overlap reason.

12 hour shifts are 13+ hours of actually being there because of lunch / breaks. For example Genentech in SF / Vacaville are "12 hours paid shifts" with 1 hour mandatory lunch. So no it is not required for an overlap because there i already a required by law break (lunch) that forces overlap (assuming this applies to more states than just CA).

This is the way it was handled when I worked in a place that had 3 8 hour shifts. You actually were there 8.5 hours with a 30 minute lunch, so this additional .25 hours just seemed odd that it was necessary.

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