TSMC's debacle in the desert: Missed deadlines and tension among coworkers

Language has long posed a challenge for organizations in Canada with operations and customers in both the English-speaking and the French-speaking regions of the country. These days, though, that has become a comparatively minor issue to deal with.

Severely flawed immigration policies have very quickly brought in a huge number of people who don't know English well, and who also don't know French well, too. In effect, these people don't really fit in linguistically anywhere across the country.

As this third group has gotten larger, especially over the last decade, unnecessary friction has been introduced into even the most basic of interactions, for pretty much all of the participants involved.

In the major cities, for example, it's not uncommon to watch one customer after another with limited English and/or French skills have trouble interacting with a cashier who also has limited English and/or French skills.

Native English and French speakers are left in a position of constantly being unsure if they were properly understood, too.

Miscommunication, misunderstanding, and mistakes have become far more common than they were even as recently as the 1990s and early 2000s. Lots of time, money, effort, and resources are frequently wasted thanks to this.

Canada's productivity has certainly taken an unnecessary hit due to language issues.

I suspect they'd be in much worse shape if Taiwan were invaded.

First, they'd find themselves competing with current TSMC customers for the non-TSMC foundries.

And second, an invasion of Taiwan could lead to a full out war with China, which might mean the non-Taiwanese fabs have their production priorities overridden by the warring governments.

And when there isn't even a shared language that all can use (and are willing to use), it doubles the problem and introduces a lot of inefficiency.

English is generally the current Lingua Franca, but TSMC employees appear to be either to proud of their language or improperly selected for language mastery to be willing or able to switch. And finding enough staff able to work using mostly Mandarin is probably even more unrealistic.

TSMC will probably overcome all of these issues, if the motivation is there. It's just that things will move a bit more slowly than expected until the culture issues settle down.

That would be false; you can read the margins off the report: https://pr.tsmc.com/english/news/3131

"Gross margin for the quarter was 53.1%, operating margin was 42.0%, and net profit margin was 38.0%"

(and of course if the factory isn't operating, its margins are zero!)

No, this is an expertise problem, and I suspect that like a lot of software projects it would get worse with more people because the vast majority of the problem is addressing specific details that require the knowledge of particular individuals. It's not like you can materialize IC factory engineers from anywhere as if they were Uber drivers, either.

> The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company; Taiwanese TSMC veterans described their American counterparts as lacking the kind of dedication and obedience they believe to be the foundation of their company’s world-leading success.

I mean, some humility is in order. TSMC are succeeding because of these things, not in spite of them. Given the supposed need for expedience it's best to copy that as-is and then you can tweak it once it's up and running.

The United States invented and has historically dominated semiconductors until the last decade or so, so yes.

The problem here is two-fold: Financial misincentives, and the fact anyone who achieves #1 in anything will always fall from grace eventually and often disasterously.

It also doesn't help that the Chinese/Taiwanese are very shrewd people compared to Americans who are... lazy, to say the least. I say that as an American.

And moving forward, people are starting to realize the risk of having TSMC manufacture everything in Taiwan, given how little competition they have. If TSMC wouldn't start to move some of their production abroad, they would risk facing import restrictions to western countries or (as already happened) government subsidies to local fabs.

To retain their market share, they were probably forced to set up some fabs abroad.

In the end, I think it's really good for those new countries to have TSMC set up fabs in their countries, both since it guarantees that some production stays available in the case of a war, but also because the TSMC workers will gradually naturalize in the US or Europe and start to work for companies like Intel or ASML and contribute to crosspollination of ideas abilities.

Short term though, cultural conflicts is exactly what one would expect. It's probably very similar to what Western companies experienced when first setting up shops in China or India.

In the beginning Western managers would try to have the locals behave like Western employees when it came to initiative and willingness to "say it as it is" when managers were giving impossible orders.

Over time many would learn that finding really good local managers able to bridge the east/west culture gap could be really helpful.

I'm guessing TSMC will need to do the same thing. Find Western managers (for instance second generation Asians) able to understand both cultures, so they can deal with local employees the way they're used to while also able to work productively with upper management (who would presumably still be Taiwanese).

Think of fabs as having similar advantages to being distributed as do data centers. Imagine the added cost and latency if every data center on Earth was located around SF?