America is building chip factories. Now to find the workers
economist.com
economist.com
Jacking up salaries without bringing the standard of living for the rest of your society will only lead to a continued breakdown of the social fabric that we have been seeing steadily happening over the past 30-40 years.
Salaries have largely stayed the same while prices have risen and that excess has gone to profits. If workers demand more pay and they force the issue, the economy eventually will reach equilibrium.
The issue currently is that those workers can't really do that because the US government has shown time and again that they don't really care that much if a company violates organised labor laws or labor laws in general (you get a fine and a slap on the wrist) but they will bring down god's wrath if workers/a union has an "illegal strike" after the employer ignores their demands.
There is a reason why ever since Reagan took a hardline anti-union stance and disbanded the PATCO union for having the audacity to strike in the 1980s that the number of major strikes per year has steadily declined.
I'm not saying everyone can't get a pay raise, but we can't think linearly here. Semiconductor workers aren't exactly applying for food stamps.
As long as more of the gross profit goes to workers, that's a step in the right direction.
Though I would say the linear solution is paying everyone $6k more, which is much better!
That's now how the lesser paid workers will see it, unfortunately.
>Though I would say the linear solution is paying everyone $6k more, which is much better!
That would be flat (Y = 6000 vs Y = 1.X%). Perhaps better, but I'm not sure if that's been done outside of stimulus checks.
I think what the person up chain was alluding to was to increase minimum wage or similar initiatives. Doesn't help the higher end of the working class but helps out the lower end immensely, and indirectly helps out the middle as well.
- automation, ie order at a kiosk at McDonald's - not hiring for the job because it is not profitable to do.
This is what happens to low skill workers when we make low skill jobs too expensive.
I don't think corporate has ever said "we have too many people who want to work". There will be more jobs out there that can't be automated, at least until we hit Terminator levels of sentience. But by then our robot overlords will solve capitalism for us.
Sounds better than the current situation where the trends are reversed.
Or, notice how ukraine went from "nazi shithole" to "beacon of freedom and democracy" once the war started?
To know how things really are behind the propaganda is basically impossible.
> Of course you will not do that, everyone is a hero on the internet
Well most people don't speak korean…
Start and learn Korean, and then emigrate. Tell us in 30 years time how it went.
I mean it'd be great but is it really feasible?
Salaries for the top 10% or so have increased significantly over the years. Of course it still pales in comparison to how much the incomes of the top 1% increased over the same period (meaning there is enough money/productivity to pay everyone more)
In order to figure out what activities we ought to allocate resources to, we compare their present values as a sum of future cash flows, each period 'discounted' by a rate. The rate is calculated based on the activities risks + a 'benchmark' or 'risk free' rate. Basically "this activity is risky, how much more should it pay than something totally without risk?"
The closest thing we have to that is US debt. US bonds have a set face value and interest rate, but if you buy above/below the face value, the interest will be a higher or lower return on what you paid, 'yield'. US debt is the most active market in the world, so taking the 'yield' shows what rate the global market[0] is accepting 'risk free' investment.
If the market is nervous, more bonds get bought because everyone wants 'safety'. But this drives up the bond price and lowers yield. Lower yields create an incentive to consider 'hey maybe we do something a little risky after all, it pays better.' Vice versa: if the market is buying risky stuff instead of safe bonds, yields go up and people think 'why do something risky if I can get that return with no risk'?
BUT the Fed interferes in this market. They have unlimited power to buy/sell bonds and therefore establish price ceilings and floors[1]. For most of the past 20 years they created a high price floor, which means low yields. This forces society to allocate resources to risky activity with higher returns.
In particular, when rates go down, cash flows in the future relatively contribute more to present value. With higher rates you look harder at the next 20 years. With lower rates, you look more at years 20+[2].
In practice it made any business that can 'promise the future' an attractive investment. Think Big Tech, VC startups, Tesla, Wework, Theranos. Meanwhile, businesses that are less risky and make goods and services now have to compete with those guys for ROI. If you have little hope of growth, and your business is established you have to raise prices or reduce costs somewhere. You can't control what you pay for raw materials/inputs, but you can control what you pay workers.
To further illustrate: Google burns hundreds of billions on projects that never see daylight or get axed after a couple years. How did market forces decide that was a better use of resources than building (relatively) more hospitals and bridges? Fed yield interference.
I'm not saying high rates are good, or low rates are bad. I'm saying rates that don't match market conditions are bad.
[0] Explainer on the bond market for the uninitiated: Big companies can't safely keep a lot of cash as currency because FDIC insurance is meant for individuals and only covers 250k. Instead you buy something 'safe' and very easily tradeable or 'liquid'. In the past, this might have been gold. Now it's US debt, which works better than gold for this purpose (diff maturities, easier settlement, etc.)
[1] These are decided by a committee of 12 individuals, the FOMC.
[2]To see this for yourself, model out a dcf and then add a row where you divide each discounted cash flow by the present value, "contribution to PV". Then, set up a bar chart for this row and play with your discount rate to see how the "time-shape" of PV contributions changes.
I'm even inclined to agree with you: inflation is better and healthier than the financial gimmickry we did in 2008-2010. But the pushback to that seems to be much broader than "Republicans." Biden's approval rating on the economy is at 36%, and it's just 52% among Democrats 18-44. Americans seem to really hate inflation.
Current wages are at the 1993 levels? That's just not true.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
Inflation-adjusted wages being flat mean that the quality of life linked to a specific job/profession stayed the same, which is absolutely perfectly fine.
Averages also hide very real disparities: software engineers are much better off today than they would have been 30 years ago; truckers, on the other hand, are much worse off today.
When it comes to housing, it's pretty clear how the Fed's monetary policy drove those costs in areas where it is scarce. Luckily counteracting that is simple given political will, at least in principle.
How can that be done without either stoking massive inflation or somehow paying someone else less?
They might indirectly own it, but it is other folks getting rich off of their money.
Realistically, no one should have risk when paying into pensions/retirement for later and it should be somewhat promised. The entire system is reprehensible as it stands.
Prior to that retirement funds were primarily handled by pensions where the company or organisation you worked for put away money for you in a fund and for the employee there was little to no risk that this money would disappear or diminish in value. Behind the scenes the company may invest it in various ways but it was generally a "low risk" retirement fund.
The reason why every company and organisation (other than a handful of government orgs) got rid of pensions and switched to investment based retirement funds was because the risk got moved away from the company to the employee and as a result it was cheaper to operate.
And as an added bonus, now any time we want to consider raising wages or improving things for workers at the cost of shareholders profits, companies can turn around and argue "this is hurting retired people".
So no of course not I don't think retired people should be getting fucked out of the funds they've been paying into for their entire careers but they shouldn't be paying into those funds in the first place. Unless they explicitly opt into that risk, they should be getting access to a pension with guaranteed payout by default.
This is firmly opt-out at this point. Who offers pensions anymore outside of State/Fed (how reliable do we expect those states to be in the coming decades). You can't demand a company provide a pension so it's on you to invest for your retirement ... into what?
Companies don't provide pensions anymore because it is always cheaper for them to provide a 401k or IRA and offload that risk. People only let them do it because we had fairly substantial periods of prosperity where relying on the stock market seemed "guaranteed" even though it is anything but.
What I'm suggesting is that not providing a pension shouldn't be seen as acceptable. I don't know if I'd suggest going as far as mandating it by law but I think workers should be demanding a right to a pension for themselves and all their fellow workers at a given org or in a given industry.
The labor movement is having a bit of a revival at the moment so hopefully unions can start pushing for Qualified Direct Benefit Plans (aka pensions) to be a standard again.
> how reliable do we expect those states to be in the coming decades
The federal government provides guarantees for qualified pensions through the Pension Benefits Guarantee Corporation (https://www.pbgc.gov). Even if the states fuck up, those state employees still get their pensions.
That's the important point. The costs and risks are on the org. They can guarantee the pension with low risk investments or dollar equivalents and have effectively no risk or they can try higher risk investments in an effort to save money but at the end of the day the employee/pensioner gets the amounts promised from the beginning.
1. They can allocate measurably portions of it to low risk investments, bonds, etc.
2. A qualified direct benefit plan (which is referred to as a pension) has guarantees attached to it. Even if the company goes completely under and all that money bursts into flames, the PBGC (https://www.pbgc.gov/) will guarantee the payout of the pension to the pensioner and foot the bill.
I'm not trying to suggest that there aren't costs that need to be borne by someone but forcing the worker to bear those costs seems like it's quite obviously the wrong choice (they should be allowed to bear it if they want to though).
The other reason you're forgetting about is that you can't count on that company actually being in business to provide your pension when you retire. Or not declaring bankruptcy to avoid their pension obligations, as I believe GM did back in 2008. With a 401k/IRA, you don't have that worry: you can contribute to it, and if your company goes belly-up, no problem (well, not for your retirement funds): your money is still there; you can get another job somewhere else and keep contributing to your retirement.
Also, what happens to your retirement funds is strongly controlled by the SEC, unlike company pensions, so there's much less risk for the employee. Of course, the stock market goes up and down a lot, but that can be avoided mostly by directing your funds into safe investments, though your returns won't be that much.
>Unless they explicitly opt into that risk, they should be getting access to a pension with guaranteed payout by default.
That's what government-run pension schemes are for. Government shouldn't be guaranteeing a pension run by a private company.
I'd imagine the typical stock owner by worth of stock owned not remotely being a retired teacher
But the retired teachers indirect stock was also an attempt to get rid of pensions. Why don't we just support retired teachers as they are, instead of tying their well-being to some rich guys?
Edit: Of course some people are going to have less if we redistribute income in any way. There is no real reason that we have such income disparity. It really seems unfair for a few professions, but mostly because the job can be really stressful. Doctors and nurses and teachers, for example: Then again, not all of these jobs are paid well now and some folks would benefit from some of the distribution.
Not that people shouldn't fight to be paid more, just that it has limited effect unless you happen to get paid significantly more than everyone else compared to what things cost now, and hope that continues forever.
That would do nothing to solve the knowledge worker shorter with this chip factories.
Eh, I don't know, if you follow the example of the bay area, jacking up salaries in tech means everyone else paid more money (earning 3k a month means you're upper middle class in France and poor in the bay area). Now if we could fix our housing problem...
Maybe in a poor rural area.
You need to encourage more (efficient) production to make labor better off.
Wages are practically flat.
Software and the internet haven't helped, quite the opposite.
The profits are captured at the top.
1970s, of course, is when the dollar started being backed by nothing more than "full faith and credit".
This is a moving target that can never be met. We can already provide all of that for very cheap if people are willing to accept standards from some decades ago. But they aren't. They want the expensive stuff.
When I was growing up the main part of the meal was potatoes/rice/pasta. Meat was a few times a week (too rarely) and there were no fancy sauces/condiments on it. Why? Because it was cheap.
The three main things which have skyrocketed in price since the 70s are higher education, healthcare, and housing. On top of that, over-credentialized jobs now require bachelor’s degrees for things which used to require high school diplomas. This fact alone has meant that young people today start their careers significantly poorer than their parents did.
Point is, it’s not just about the prices of sneakers and pasta. For all of the most important costs in life, things have gotten much more expensive.
High schools do not maintain any sort of reasonable standards for granting a degree anymore, so it's no wonder businesses require a college degree. We decided everyone needed a HS degree, so we started lowering the standards for it, "teaching to the test", and only focusing on improving the worst quartile students to minimum tested standards. Now the same thing is happening with colleges.
The solution is to fix secondary education, but there's no political will to do that.
My barber, who neither went to college nor inherited anything, lives on a 10-acre property with his wife (who works as a teacher) and two children. His secret? The home is a mobile home (they're saving up to build a real house), and he's in a low COL area with reasonable home prices, with the only real disadvantage being that the rest of the country thinks it's in a "shithole state".
Your statement, properly amended, is as follows: it's impossible to own a home in a highly desirable, relatively low-density area, with many high income earners and lots of inbound migration both internal and external, unless you inherit one. Which of course makes perfect sense, and there's nothing wrong with that picture.
It's actually pretty funny. My old neighborhood was one of those with places with Black Lives Matter signs on every other lawn but approximately zero actual black people living there. Here, there are approximately zero Black Lives Matter signs, but a lot more actual diversity on the ground, with people of different races rubbing shoulders as neighbors, friends, and lovers. There's openly gay people. Everyone minds their own business, for the most part.
Of course, every place has its ups and downs, and there are legitimate downsides to living in a place like this. The restaurant scene is definitely not as good, although I'm sure some of that is due to just the size difference of the cities. But that brings me back to my original point, which is that you can't have your cake (big-city amenities, nice climate, majority politics you agree with) and eat it (houses you can afford right out of the gate as a new participant in the economy), too.
It would be worth their while for "kids these days" to examine whether they'd rather be tutted at and get a cold shoulder every now and then[0] for being a lesbian with purple hair or whatever while having the opportunity to buy a home and make an independent life for themselves, versus having their identity "affirmed" in a place where an actual ownership stake in that society is forever out of reach. I'm not saying there's a right answer here; all I'm saying that it's worth everyone asking that question of themselves.
[0]: And in my experience, it's at most every now and then. The difference in the sociopolitical attitudes between, say, Oregon and Mississippi, is basically just 48% one way and 52% the other, just flipped around. The number of people with similarities are much, much greater than the differences.
That's not going to work in several areas of the world. Which is why we normally make houses.
> the rest of the country thinks it's in a "shithole state".
You mean if he's gay or an atheist he will get shot? Perfectly reasonable to ask people to go live there, of course.
> Which of course makes perfect sense, and there's nothing wrong with that picture.
"I got mine, I don't care if you don't get yours".
You should give speeches, we could bring school children to learn what's wrong with humanity.
> That's not going to work in several areas of the world.
Trust me, this part of the world gets plenty hot in the summer, yet people make do in mobile homes. At least people here are given the choice to suffer through a hot summer in a home they own.
You can set building codes to be arbitrarily high such that nobody will ever suffer the indignity of straying from a 72 degree, 45% relative humidity indoor environment. The only downside to that, of course, is that nobody will able to afford a house.
> You mean if he's gay or an atheist he will get shot?
This is about as accurate as Fox News saying that if you go to San Francisco, roving bands of homeless people will break into your car and take a dump in it, and you'll step on a pile of fentanyl and instantly get addicted.
Unless they don't, of course. Especially considering every year will be hotter than the previous.
>it's impossible to own a home in a highly desirable, relatively low-density area, with many high income earners and lots of inbound migration both internal and external, unless you inherit one
Of course it would be nice if everyone got what they wanted, but when it comes to housing it seems to me that everybody wants to live in the same places. This drives up the prices in those areas because only a limited amount of people can live in a given area.
I don't see how you can fix that with any policy. As long as everyone wants to live in the same place the cost of living is going to be expensive there.
Do you mean hot as flying lead hot?
Sorting out the supply chain here is a pretty critical issue that makes sense to tackle in isolation.
While we do want general welfare to improve that wasn't the topic in the thread.
If you want to buy bread in a supermarket, but the bread is more expensive than you would like it to be -- hey, that's the market price, deal with it.
If a company wants to hire a specialist, but the specialist is more expensive than the company would like them to be be -- attention people, our society has a serious problem that we need to solve immediately by reforming education and immigration and whatever else might be necessary.
Maybe because it is impossible in practice?
I'm an EE trying to move from embedded SW to higher level (backend/dev-ops since I had some experience with that and with python), and all I get are rejections ("sorry, thanks for your application but we can't move forward with it since we have so many quality applicants with more experience to choose from").
To me it seems, the current market doesn't seem to favor career switchers at all. Companies seem to be looking for seniors or at least mid level experienced in their area of work, so switching careers does indeed seem to be impossible right now. Or maybe I live in a bad market.
Unfortunately for me, now's the best and only time, as I was laid off. I have to do what I can. Looks like it's time to overinflate the resume to stand out. Wish me luck.
>Two years ago
Two years ago was a temporary anomaly in many markets, not just employment, that we may never see in the near future.
Their actions the last 30 decades and even 40 are easily Googled
They’ve collided with government to expropriate worker wealth, or more accurately, propagated the myth a mathematical minority are the keystone to physical reality itself
They’re only a few mere mortals and their riches are only possible so long as the majority graciously do not kill them
That could be achieved by pursuing production for use, not profit. Municipal collective ownership works quite well for utilities (like ISPs) and housing. Regional collective/co-op food production can work well too. Nationalised transportation and medicine works in many places. And so on.
It only takes the workers to be sufficiently well organised to obtain the means to produce in this way.
Instead, let’s cut the red tape and remove the barriers in the parts of the economy that are not following the rules of the market. Do that and prices will decrease.
Experiments with collectivisation have failed to serve the needs of the capitalist class, for sure. It's why they use union busting, sanctions, coups and invasions to cause such experiments to fail.
Profit is a much-misunderstood concept. Private profit is the best way discovered so far to align incentives for those who produce. As Adam Smith said, "it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."
A system that disregards profit and instead relies on some other incentive structure can work in small groups of people for short periods of time; but eventually those other incentives (usually some kind of familial love, a sense of group belonging and solidarity, or similar) run out of steam, and it fails to scale both in size and time.
To paraphrase Churchill, free-market capitalism is the worst system of economics, except for all the others that have been tried.
> Nationalised transportation and medicine works in many places
Only for a certain definition of "works". The Seoul Metro, owned by the city of Seoul, for example, is a huge network of clean, efficient subway lines that millions ride daily to get places. It's really quite nice to use. Under the hood, however, is the fact that they lose a quarter of a billion dollars every year, and is subsidized by taxpayers from around the whole country, most of whom don't even live in Seoul.
I think you mean: "lowering prices raises the rents of every worker"
Maybe WW3 can bring it and keep it for a couple of decades, if we don't all die in the mushrooms.
But yes, inequality has also gone up as you point out. Raising other people's salaries is probably the best way to deal with this while staying in the current paradigm. Although raising chip worker wages isn't going to change inequality - you'd have to apply this to other jobs like retail, food service, custodial, etc.
>despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today’s real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
Real wage means purchasing power parity, or it should. These two statements cannot be true, if they are using the same definition of inflation:
- Real wages have risen over the past 50 years
- Today's real average wage has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago
The methodology must be different.
But until that movement is ready to happen, I think it's fine to acknowledge that the "real" cost of living has risen over the past few decades, while most people's "real" wages have remained stagnant. If it's not salaries, then I think the next thing to look at is the exorbitant housing and rent prices.
A doctor working at a public hospital should be paid much more than us, that are sitting at their computer all day. Yes, doctor wages need to rise, but also SW wages need to fall.
And this is comping from an aerospace engineer with an inflated wage, which, being in Europe, is not nearly as unfairly inflated as in the US.
Doctors do have a credential system that sets them up for a longer more stable career path with few ageism concerns. But all things considered more money now for less time investment is more valuable.
But all in all I think worker's share of wealth shoud raise but that's a bloody question.
The way you're phrasing it now it's like you're imagining that there's some central committee to appeal to in order to change this fact, but I imagine you already know that's not how things work -- so why would you phrase it like that?
lol no. I'm not taking a paycut in a world where CEOs making 400x their bottom paid workers are the ones greedily raising prices across the board.
Until then they don’t have to try so hard to find people, students can see the bad salaries ahead of time yet they study for a decade for these roles regardless.
(https://old.reddit.com/r/taiwan/comments/sulof6/tsmc_employe...)
The market has not delivered a resilient supply chain.
If you want it an America, you will need to subsidise it.
It's quite similar to the Baumol effect [1], and I think that's what the CCP and the Chinese authorities more generally had in mind when they cracked down on the likes of Tencent and Alibaba a few years ago, meaning forcing the big Chinese software companies down a peg or two so that Chinese engineers would also go into the hardware industry.
It also helps that while pure software is important for fighting a war, actually making physical stuff is even more important. No-one has ever won a war by employing Tik-Tok against the enemy, while autonomous mass-produced cheap drones have been as close to a game-changer as one could get in this current war in Ukraine (for both sides).
Not for the lack of love, but for the lack of pay. I would love to go back to EE, but I'm making 5x-10x now in ML software.
I don't even understand why the pay in EE is so low. They have healthy profit margins, yet tend to complain about the lack of finding skilled people.
Because:
1) EE profits are not healthy at all. Ignore Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, QUALCOMM, which are the outliers printing money due to their market dominant position bordering on monopoly. Most other HW companies have super thin margins by comparison because they're in a race to the bottom with Asian companies which improved a lot, and R&D costs in HW eat up a lot of the profits, leaving you almost nothing for wages.
I worked at a German company building super cool X-ray machines for the semiconductor industry and the wages were relatively poor because despite those machines costing as much as an apartment, most of that price is eaten up by components, manufacturing, Q&A and R&D that very little is left for high wages.
2) Much more cheap labor competition from abroad due to offshoring because HW is not user facing so it can be offshored without any drops in UX, as the user facing SW is kept in the west.
Since HW offshoring has been going on for much longer than SW and with far more investments in getting it right, meaning companies have a lot more experience with offshore HW dev on the cheap while maintaining high quality.
SW hasn't (yet) seem the same push.
I worked at a HW company and we did our board design, bring-up etc all in Taiwan, board production/population, enclosure, power, final assembly etc all in Shenzhen and firmware/software as global remote but US centric.
It wasn't just that it was cheaper, it was faster, more accurate and more flexible. With collocation of everything you need to build HW (i.e all the inputs, parts etc being made in the same place) it was just so much faster not only to do initial product dev but also to spin revisions/iterate.
It's going to take a long time for similar density to build up somewhere else to enable to same sort of super rapid HW development cycle.
There is nothing abnormal in EE profits _if_compared with any other physical widget manufacturer.
What is abnormal is the zero copy cost of Software, as a product, and the scalability of Software services in an online world with a _world_ of customers.
Nothing in the physical world (other than maybe Financial Products) compares to the margins and scale that you can achieve in Software. This means that for golden geese like AdWords paying 500k to a SWE is just a rounding error.
We all see the problem but that doesn't change the fact that a lot of Engineers from other fields won't rightfully jump on that opportunity and profit from the current imbalance in terms arbitrage of Engineering time.
Not really, abnormal also in the low barrier of regulations in terms of privacy and use of data, compared to traditional engineering jobs, but that is slowly changing, at least in Europe.
>his means that for golden geese like AdWords paying 500k to a SWE is just a rounding error.
Not every SWE in the world works or can work for golden geese. Most SW jobs in the world aren't for global titans but average jobs like any other paid average. The US skews this because it's full of golden geese with global dominance. Europe and other places not so much.
>a lot of Engineers from other fields won't rightfully jump on that opportunity and profit from the current imbalance in terms arbitrage of Engineering time
Won't? I'm currently in the process of trying to jump but aren't' allowed to. 100% rejection rate. The market is brutal for side entrants.
$250,000 in 2023 dollars is about what my father made as a power lineman in 1970, at $15 an hour.
It was a well paid, union trade. But we need to put this in perspective. People don’t want to work for less than a blue collar job was worth in the 70s.
Housing prices (on average) are not that high, wages are ridiculously low in real terms.
The average home price in 2023 is about 350,000 in the USA, about 44,000 in 1970s dollars. That’s 1.5-3 years wages as a journeyman tradesman in 1970s dollars, if she were paying the cash equivalent of 350k for a house.
Of course housing was both typically smaller and much more cheaply built in 1970, and for 350k today you are getting twice the square footage, and a much higher quality structure.
Since an average home in 1970 would have been around half the size and 1/3 the price in inflation adjusted dollars, I think it’s safe to say that the thing that has changed here is primarily that wages are simply not enough to incentivise workers.
Any skilled job that doesn’t pay at least 250k is simply not worth investing the time and effort to get the skills for.
COVID gave people a chance to step back and value their time, interrupting the zombie death march toward slave wages. Now capital needs to readjust its expectations of how much they will have to pay to extract 90 percent of the surplus value of a persons life.
My experience (Texas) is that homes built today might be larger but are FAR worse quality than ones even built in the 90s, let alone the 70s or (heaven forbid) the 20s. In England the same was true but on a much more extreme curve, and without being larger.
But then again in my area the 1970s was a big boom time, with a ton of new construction. Mostly 2x4 and 2x6 construction, with cheap sheathing and a bad subfloor.
Anything built here in the 2000s will be 2x10 or 2x12 walls, double insulated sheathing, with triple pane windows and high r value doors, and with a floor you can confidently lay tile on.
The US is weird, I don’t want my kids to be American.
Don’t get me wrong y’all are nice and I like you. I have a good time here.
But your country is not that confortable. Weird city built around cars. Scary stuff. Nature is still great but rural town are depressing and built around a highway.
This feeling is often shared across my fellow qualified migrant friends from various places.
The one who are adamant about staying have a very broken country of origin.
Yet when we became a couple, we opted to settle in his country, not mine. My quality of life improved when I moved away.
The US is a lovely place to visit. We go as often as we can. But it's not a good place to raise a family and grow old.
That justify the insane salary difference alone. The amount you absolutely have to stash away to guarantee your own future safety is impressive.
If you drive through any city in the US, as compared to major modern cities around the world, while all cities have their problems, US cities and towns are downright ghetto very large fast-food plastic chain stores.
Social services are a joke, politicians are a joke, transportation is a joke, etc.
Unfortunately that is most of the world.
Most people who complain about vocally about life in the US tend to be financially stable expats from western Europe or equally developed nation, not India, China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, etc.
But maybe they can flip that with the help of China?
Just a about all my Chinese American colleagues love going to China for vacations and quite a few plan to retire there due to the lower cost of living.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrZ-tZTy1Dg&t=487s
The three companies set up R&D centers in the United States. There, they aggressively recruited American-trained Korean talents with Korean nationalism and insanely high salaries. In some cases, semiconductor engineers were paid salaries over three times as high as Chairman Lee's. Goldstar and Hyundai did the same too. Collectively, the three companies invested a billion USD into their American efforts to acquire modern technology, train their staff, and coordinate with potential partners.
Given that TSMC's founder was a Taiwanese immigrant educated and trained in the US, we can take a good guess at how the GPs proposal would turn out.
On the other hand, unlike in 19th century, now Asia might offer, say, 50-70M willing skilled workers and people with advanced degrees in technology. Such an influx would be very noticeable, to say the least, in many areas of daily life. Such changes should not be approached too lightly.
With that, the length it currently takes for an Indian national to obtain a green card is ridiculous.
Every time I see this sentiment, all I hear is that people genuinely think a nation is just an amorphous blob of biological entities all interchangeably conducting “economic activity”. If there aren’t enough people here who can do the work, or there are but they don’t want to because of pay or something else, we should address those actual problems. The other thing that I attach to sentiments like yours is that higher education in the United States is a completely fraudulent industry. It utterly fails at educating and preparing its own people for the kinds of jobs we need done in the 21st century, and yet the solution somehow is to bring other people in to attend those same schools and universities.
The United States is not just an economic zone that functions as a means to an end. Imagining that turning it into one is actually good is a deeply misguided approach to solving a very real problem.
Unions object to plans by TSMC to bring workers
from Taiwan to speed up work on new facilities.
The image in my mind is of sealed rooms containing machines that move wafers around. Lots of machinery, few to zero people running the machines. Since what you want is repeatability and reliability, and we've worked out how to make machines do that.
I can see said machines having maintenance schedules, where occasionally you need to turn them off and go and replace parts. Some of that is probably done by people, some by automated cycles.
Are the workers needed people to carefully read maintenance manuals for machines built by someone else? Engineers to design and build new bespoke machinery (seems unlikely if these are copies of existing labs)?
Fundamentally, how many skilled people that are going to be difficult to find does a state of the art semiconductor fab need. If we're talking six per lab, that's a very different problem to six thousand.
(The article talks about technicians, says the US is missing about 60 thousand of them, and that it's a two year community college level of skill with some ideas for reducing that further. That sounds like a problem on the same tier as finding people to work in semi-automated amazon warehouses, i.e. basically fine)
Each section of tools (photo, etch, cleans, etc.) had somewhere between 20-80 technicians spread between four shifts. Mine, cleans, was I think the largest - we had about 20 techs per shift. Process, at the other end, had about 5 per shift. Each section also had N engineers, although most of them worked normal day shift hours.
The fab was fully automated, in that someone would punch in an order, and many days or weeks later, wafers came out the other end. However, the machines to do all of this are incredibly touchy, prone to losing calibration, parts breaking, etc. They also require a ton of maintenance.
The level of knowledge and skill to be an entry level tech is within reach for anyone who’s mechanically minded - we hired people whose only previous experience was auto mechanic. To progress to the Senior or Master tech level, though, you needed an intimate knowledge of multiple tools, to the point of having made improvements to them beyond what the manufacturer provided.
I think the total number of techs in the fab was somewhere around a thousand, but I could be way off. I worked nights, so it was hard to get a sense of other shifts.
I would not consider working in a production fab for the going salaries these days... mostly boring work, on-call all the time, in bunny suit most of the day, bean-counters controlling all of the major decisions. Screw that... life is too short and we all die at the end.
Young people have become a scarce resource and it's painfully visible already.
Yep, it leads to there being even less young people that want to live in the sticks and small towns that need them. But meanwhile they continue to try and build large factories in said locations for tax savings.
Where are the tradeschools in the US ???. The average age of a plumber/joinery tradesman ???.
When there is a genuine shortage, salaries go up. If salaries aren't going up, there isn't a shortage.
Well that’s not going to work. Maybe we should have a Tech Draft.
Don't expect the factory workers to have the same educational requirements and demographics as existing semiconductor workers.
Actual semiconductor design work doesn't happen at said factories. There's also not that much shortage in that space because colleges pump out plenty of EEs with semiconductor focus with Masters and PhDs. They can also struggle to find jobs because well, it's such a niche industry that anyone doing semiconductor design isn't going to leave their job for a non-semiconductor job easily and there's been a lot of industry consolidation in the semiconductor space. The electrical space is quite mature compared to decades ago.
Not joke, and I'm seeing this happening.
Are you seeing the "provoke China to attack Taiwan"-part or the "grab the talents from East Asia"-part?
I guess selling more weapons is a double win then.
Classic case of supply and demand. If there is a high demand for workers and a low supply, then you need to pay higher salaries to attract them. If you can't, then go out of business. This is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. If the US gov. wants these chip factories badly enough then they can help subsidize paying higher wages. In doing so, they should have the right to audit, e.g. ensure the C-suites are not taking an unreasonably large paycheck.
I'm not sure this is going to go well for the simple reason that so far, it seems Taiwan, Korean and China will still be pumping out cheaper chips and more of them which will make this plan financially unviable, which really seems to go against everything the USA stands for...
Personally I think it's a good thing, but I'm not sure who is going to pay for it.
Well, in this case it looks like desirable outcome is to make them stop pumping out chips - which is chilling because it would suggest that the course is set, gears are grinding and it's not matter of "if", only "when"
We just saw the pandemic pause the car industry due to a chip shortage. The ramifications are rather obvious and finally someone is paying attention.
Also the scope is much larger than military, IT has worked its way into every aspect of life.
I usually don't like the USA government's idealogical reasons for doing anything, but I also usually don't like economic reasons either :)
And yet many of those immigrants are on borrowed time. One layoff and they risk losing decades of their life and deported back home. That kind of treatment isn't fair. Especially when these are highly productive, extremely capable, and very educated demographics. They are the ideal and model citizens for any kind of country. Yet they are treated like disposables.
What reasons are there to decline a visa to a PhD employed in a critical industry? Because they were born in a country with a visa backlog of 10 years?
In other words, language requirements are not something we should copy from Canadian immigration policy.
I guess it worked "ok" for America historically because America abused and exploited so many immigrants for so long (go read "The Jungle"), but I don't think that's really something to emulate.
Just because a geographic concentration originated from forced-segregation policies over a century ago does not automatically mean those bad policies and pejorative status continues today.
> It's not really a good recipe for a safe, prosperous nation. [...] exploited so many immigrants
Hold up, I think the goalposts are moving a bit here: Earlier you said it was about "supporting themselves" economically.
However now it sounds like no amount of economic-self-sufficiency is enough--you're saying those people ought to be blocked/deported unless they can satisfy some ill-defined requirement about where they live and who they socialize with.
> bring in millions of people and all they can do is work as exploited workers in restaurants
I am doubtful that millions of people who *checks comment-thread* have doctorate degrees and PhDs will be arriving to work for the rest of their lives in restaurants.
If they do... well, then they're probably choosing it to escape something crappy enough that we should be letting them in for humanitarian reasons anyway.
1. If being unable to support themselves is the concern, why not make that the actual requirement to stay... Versus of an indirect and error-prone language requirement set by what are probably a bunch of old white monolingual men in Washington, DC?
2. Automatic translation tools have advanced by leaps and bounds over the last few decades.
That's a good idea. That's how it is here in Japan: knowing the language is good, and gets you some points on your visa, but it's not a requirement. If you have a high-paying job offer from a sponsoring company, and a good educational and professional background (or other factors, like if you're in academia), then that's good too. They figure you'll learn the language on your own in that case.
If you have no education and no way to support yourself, and can't communicate with anyone, why would they want you? Unless it's to exploit you. I don't think we should be promoting exploitation.
>Versus of an indirect and error-prone language requirement set by what are probably a bunch of old white monolingual men in Washington, DC?
US doesn't have a language requirement. We're talking about Canada, so you mean a bunch of white bilingual (English/French) people in Ottawa.
There are large pockets of all kinds of folks all kinds of places. There is even a city in Mexico with a huge Chinese population.
Americans travel all over expecting to just use English and get by (myself included).
You can absolutely do so, I've known many, Americans in Paris, Chinese in Mexico, French in America, on and on
Don't know who or what kind of analysis they did to pull that 1 billion number. It just shows how inane and stupid the entire US immigration and laws are.
Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2022/07/14/phd-i...
People who graduate are stuck in a weird love-hate relationship. You can't hate it because of the generous funding; you can't not hate it because of the insane politics behind immigration that tied to all sorts of historical notions of racial supremacy and so on.
I believe highly trained individuals in any field should be welcome and treated with respect and equal opportunity. Almost every field supplement each other and the society in some war or the other. I'd urge everyone to look at the declining quality of teachers everywhere. And what it results in? Go figure.
So, yes, if there are enough citizens and permanent residents meeting the current requirements and enough in school to meet projected demand, there's no need to offer a faster route in those fields.
I’ve got nothing against anthropology as a field or anthropologists themselves, but they wouldn’t even show up on the tech tree. You don’t need a PhD to be a school teacher and, frankly, we would be a lot better off if instruction was done by practitioners instead.
And if it really is a critical industry, being dependant on available foreign labor is quite the risk. There's not really any guarantee they'll want to keep moving here.
Also, the US economy is already overly dependent on foreign labor. From offshoring jobs to manufacturing to onshore labor, every sector of the economy is filled with foreign labor. How many things you own were made outside of the US? How many of your coworkers are immigrants? How many foreigners do you interact with when working on a large project at work?
The only issue is if we underpay the immigrants. If Joe Schmoe American isn't the better pick then he shouldn't get the job over someone in a visa queue.
Protectionism of course. The fear is that companies are looking for cheaper foreign labor. Ironically, when allowing some visas with many strings you end up with indentured servants that push labor prices down, not up.
A train of thought is that there's no such thing as a labor shortage, only employers unwilling to pay for labor. Of course it's all very complicated. Attracting top talent is also good.
It's not easy to know what the perfect policy is but there are lots of arguments to sort through.
I forget which H1B consulting farm it was that emailed me(a citizen), but they were advertising a "Full-time salary job" doing software engineering in NYC, $39k/year.
Yea...no shit they won't get any takers and will use that as evidence to hire H1Bs.
Those folks don't vote nor have enough money to create significant lobbies.
I mean, who is declining jobs here on account of pay? I feel like there is some nuance here.
I love hardware and DeepTech but why would I make 3x to 4x times less with little to no chance of remote work from home in uncomfortable clean room/ESD gear.
To quote Ray Liotta this is the proverbial "Fuck you, pay me" situation.