TSMC tried to build fabs in US, it doesn’t work, turns out you can’t hire top PhDs and pay them 30k and tell them it’s a lot of money
https://fortune.com/2023/06/03/tsmc-arizona-plant-jobs-salar...
>New engineering grads with a master’s degree earn on average $65,700 a year, while general full-time staff earn $32,800—compared to Taiwan’s average annual income of $21,700.
$32.8k for full time salaries in Taiwan, which is more than the average. And this is _general_ staff. Not engineering staff my dude.
>Another challenge is compensation. TSMC pays up to $160,000 annually “for Ph.D.s with some good experience,” says an Arizona-based CEO of a semiconductor recruitment firm hiring for TSMC. That same Ph.D. can earn some $30,000 more at Intel, according to Payscale, a website that tracks company salaries.
And that's the real number for PhDs in the US.
Quite frankly, though, they probably have less competition with Intel now that it's collasping ;)
>TSMC’s American rivals, meanwhile, are defending against its recruiting onslaught. The recruitment firm CEO says candidates have gotten “counter-offers like we’ve never seen. Intel is… giving [people] $10,000 to $20,000 to stick around. We’ve lost people that way.”
AND, if TSMC was really paying so low, their competition wouldn't be falling over themselves to pay retention bonuses.
(I also think they are probably underpaid in their current jobs and don't know it)
This was a few years back, maybe TSMC realized you can't pay Taiwan rates in the US.
Once I was reading an article saying the company I worked for didn't operate its own datacenters... while I was setting up new hardware in one of our several datacenters.