Assembling a motherboard is to semiconductor fabs as flying a toy drone is to landing a Boeing 747. One you can learn in an afternoon; the other takes years to learn.
I disagree. I live next to a fab and have coworkers that have worked the fabs.
Humans in fabs are taken out of the loop as much as possible. That's because when dealing with nanoscale structures, human error is simply too common.
One of my coworkers worked at the fab during a period where they had humans running the forklift that moved the wafers from one stage to the next. That was cut out because the tiny bumps caused by a human operating the controls caused imperfections in the chips that decreased yield (the metric that matters most for a fab). They ultimately removed that work and job and replaced it with robots to carefully move the wafers.
What's complex about a fab ends up being not the frontline work, but rather the layer or 2 in the back (like designing the lithography filter for a given chip). That stuff happen outside the actual plant.
This. We are talking about Atom scale here. I have as much admiration for skilled mechanics as the next guy. I heard about a lathe operator at Patek Phillip who could turn an arbor to within 1 micron precision, just by listening to the pitch the cutting tool made when trimming it down.
And when chip features were on the micron scale, humans in the loop made sense. But chip feature are ten thousand times smaller than that now--4 orders of magnitude. Anything that doesn't need a Ph.D. in solid state physics to do is going to be automated.
They ended up installing shock absorbers everywhere to counteract this problem.
Im not saying its as simple as CNC. I am saying that I doubt you need an IQ of 130 or a PHD. Start investing in the people whose labor were undercut. In fact a skilled machinist or technician seems like a much closer match (in terms of skill and willingness to do the job) than some with an electrical engineering PHD or something.
Don't confuse that with the workers not being skilled - many are, but just like good software, you want your designs to run well even when executed by the worst hardware.
I worked in an R&D fab (albeit, as an intern, many years ago) with an abnormal number of PhDs around (the fab was essentially a small scale test bed for new products and processes - everything tested there first before scaling up overseas). I think we had a 5:1 ratio of techs to engineers. This was in a fab that basically did nothing but R&D and low volume manufacturing for defense.
It's comparable to any kind of high-tech manufacturing where you have engineers designing/testing stuff (and designing the tools to make and test the stuff in the first place) while there have to be techs/mechanics/machine shop workers to actually do the work of making it. It's inefficient and expensive to put the engineers on that task, while they'll still need to do it from time to time.
But still - a lot easier than semiconductors
The hard one to learn is flying a drone, right?
A 747 can pretty much land itself on autopilot.
The only hard part is contacting ground control in the first place. Radio frequencies change all the time.
WaPo tried it out last year and only the fellow who was used to WW2 plane simulators was successful at a probably didn't die landing.