That Taiwainese workers will work 16 hour days and weekends.
That's true and probably won't happen in America with American workers.
But, before we just take that one factoid and call it settled, I'd love to understand what the ROI would be on a plant that just hired twice as many workers. My impression is that the margins on these chips are 100-1000x.
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.
American culture resulted in chip-making moving from the US to Taiwan. That is why the foreigners are building this plant - they do things better than the locals. I hope the Arizona employees are expecting some level of change to happen. Chinese culture has resulted in substantially more prosperity being created than the US has managed over the last 50 years and it is obvious they are doing something better.
Although I'm not sure how much to read in to these sort of articles that are awash with confident anonymous sources. It is hard to get a grip on how much is disgruntled employee chatter and how much is serious.
Perhaps, although even with three times as many people the GDP of China is still less than that of the US. We should also ask in both cases "prosperity for whom" and "at what cost" (and to whom as that cost fallen). The median American is still wildly better off than the median Chinese resident, as can be seen from the migration flows.
Not to mention that Taiwan is not, despite all the polite fictions, China, and TSMC is anyway a unique project. You might as well ask "can we clone Morris Chang?"
It seems like a larger percentage of the population in Taiwan (compared to mainland China) have the kind of productivity that has been gathering in a few mainland cities, such as Shanghai.
Younger Taiwanese people in particular also seem to be building a special non-Chinese Taiwanese identity. I'm not sure if that has any significant effect on productivity though.
Prosperity for Chinese people? The stats and anecdotes are both fairly unambiguous. Chinese policy just catapulted ~800 million people out of extreme poverty. Some of my friends just got back from Ancestors' Day and were talking about how their grandfather's village had plumbing now. Shenzhen went from fishing nets to microchips in about a generation, and TSMC is only a little less than 40 years old. These people are wealth creators in the most respectable sense; the fruit of their work is spread extremely wide.
And I'm not sure exactly what we'd call the cost as being but I'm glad they paid it. I think extreme poverty is a bad thing and we'll be doing well to see the back of it. If they can do it more cheaply in Africa and India then that would be good, but the important thing is that it happens ASAP.
Taiwan and China have been following a similar pattern, but even Taiwan has a long way to go to reach US productivity overall. What makes TSMC special, is that they don't have to compete for the top talent within the nation. They're kind of what Nokia used to be for Finland.
But the rest of Taiwan's companies are not doing as well. If more companies like TSMC emerge, the talent pool available will shrink. Also, most companies with little competition tend to experience entropic decay over time.
Now, it IS possible that Taiwan/China will eventually overtake the US eventually, even in terms of GDP/capita. But I would say it's equally possible that they will follow a path similar to Japan/Korea, where they reach a plateau.
And if there is something that holds these countries back, I suspect it's that the highly hierarchical social structure is not ideal for creativity in the long term, especially once people forget that their parents or grandparents were poor, and start to getting used to relative wealth.
And then there's the fact that the brightest minds from all over the world tend to be quite mobile, and tend to go to the place where they're likely to get the greatest reward for their talent. Currently that's the US, and I think it's likely to stay that way until the US has some kind of cultural collapse or a civil war.
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.
Because frankly I don't think American engineers will (nor should) work 18 hour days unless they are getting paid I don't know, 200k->300k.
If we can't find a way to make the factory break-even meeting industrial regulations for US citizens then perhaps it needs to be staffed by H1B workers or something.
> “They really are trying to push this narrative that Americans are slower because of lower technical ability, but I really don’t believe that’s the truth,” an American engineer who recently left TSMC told Rest of World. “The Taiwanese create this false sense of urgency with every single task, and they really push ‘you need to finish everything immediately.’ But it’s just not realistic for people that want to have some normal work-life balance.”