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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

For something as exotic as chip manufacture, you genuinely can have a labor shortage. We are idiots not to immediately green light any visas for people with these skills.

It can also happen for skilled craft professions. It takes time to train people in that stuff, and if there's been a prolonged period of reduced investment in domestic manufacturing we might genuinely not have enough. Sometimes not having key people like welders, electricians, skilled plumbers, etc. can hold up a project since other things depend on those things.

You could argue that it still ultimately is a wage shortage, but even if the wages are high it takes time to train.

It will take a while for the US to rebuild domestic manufacturing capacity and talent base, but we can do it.

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>but even if the wages are high it takes time to train

Exactly. There's also a brain surgeon shortage even though salaries are great, but not everyone has the will, skills, time, money and patience to study and become a credentialed brain surgeon despite the high pay.

Same with semi jobs, you need a hard science background that not everyone has or is willing to go through, including SW devs. Increasing wages might not fix the shortage because not everyone who can do other well paid jobs, can also do semi work.

>Sometimes not having key people like welders, electricians

I would add to this list the specialized construction workers and engineers who can build the buildings required to house a fab. This is similarly specialized, I imagine, as things like hospital construction. You can't just pull 100 crews used to building homes and say "Hey build this fab mkay?"

Yes, although paying people arbitrarily large amounts makes most shortages go away.

That said, there are a ton of things with a large labor component--and probably most things have a large labor component if you look far enough up the chain--that myself and others will just find a way of doing without if the price increases by 2x/3x/4x/10x.

> For something as exotic as chip manufacture, you genuinely can have a labor shortage. We are idiots not to immediately green light any visas for people with these skills.

All evidence suggests these roles pay between 50-70k USD, require insane hours, and a short course at the local community college is all it takes to be qualified (or qualified enough) to do the job.

For high-end computer-engineering grads? absolutely. For the fork-and-spoon operators in sector 7-G who just press the buttons? nah.

They ain't trying to recruit PhDs or brain surgeons, and may be trying to drag their feet as they do so.

>We are idiots not to immediately green light any visas for people with these skills.

Are we, though? Isn't there some potential for industrial espionage? You know, the kind where the people that desperately want that tech for themselves are kind of the enemy of the main people that have that tech?

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