10 ms·

None of this makes sense. 1. Long shifts are normal for fab operators in the U.S., eg Intel. 2. Certain engineers are always on call if an emergency happens,

None of this makes sense. 1. Long shifts are normal for fab operators in the U.S., eg Intel. 2. Certain engineers are always on call if an emergency happens, also true at Intel. 3. Samsung, not exactly the “live slow and enjoy life” type of culture as an employer operates fabs just fine in the U.S.

kurthr 5y ago
Agreed, and it's been that way since the 80s. The building & equipment has always cost more than staff & engineers. The "R&D Fab" is in Taiwan. These are going to be exempt employees. What's the agenda here?
mlindner 5y ago
Intel has people work "more than 12-hour workdays" often?
- mjevans 5y ago
  Probably yes. Major manufacturing sites are often CONTINUOUSLY (24/365.25+) staffed with "12 hour" shifts that include overlap via a lunch and normal breaks making those at least 13 hours of on site time long. One body slot takes 4 people to fill that way, but that leaves zero slack for vacation, sick days, etc.
  - tester34 5y ago
    but of course 3/4 days a week those 12-13h? I worked in system like this and I actually loved that, especially that those were night shifts I'd really take 3(+1)x 12h nights over 5x 8h
    - ratww 5y ago
      Same. Just having free days that are not weekends is amazing.
imgabe 5y ago
I'm also confused. It's not like the US doesn't have factories that run 24/7. I spent a summer working swing shifts 12 hours a day, 3 days on, 3 days off.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  > 3 days on, 3 days off. That might be the crux of it. I gather it's similar on e.g. offshore oil rigs, one week on, one week off, but long, grueling days. That said, this article (and the other threads) describe being available 24/7; you probably weren't expected to be on call during your days off. Anyway, I think being on call is fine, as long as you get compensated for it - because you have to change your lifestyle to be available, plan things like going out or having a drink.
- c_o_n_v_e_x 5y ago
  Large continuous process plants like refineries and chemical plants run 24/7. Some processes can’t be shutdown as they’ll be damaged if they are down for too long. Some plants run the DuPont shift pattern or they run 3 8 hour shifts per day.
kamaal 5y ago
There are long hours, and there are long hours. I consider my self a fairly hard working person, in my first job I've seen situations where people came in on a Monday and would go to their homes next Monday. I've done a full time start up with a day job, quite literally coding every waking hour of my life(like 2 - 4 hours sleep a day) for years. And then I relocated from Bangalore to Bay Area for a while, and met a few of our Chinese colleagues- Even by my standards the Chinese were in a different productivity league altogether. One person I knew would have three monitors, would eat at desk all the three meals, not sure when he even took breaks, but he kind of worked all the time, I mean literally. Would watch tickets in one screen, production issues in one, and work in another one. He'd read every ticket, feature request, pull request, and comment every where, knew everything and would just outperform anybody by some factors(Mind you people in our team I knew were kind of legends themselves). It ain't just the hours, they through and through dominated the initiative. You stood no chance. I knew several Chinese colleagues and friends like these. They are all good people wanting to make a good life by working hard, nothing to blame them. But it was kind of an unwritten rule that if you had two Chinese working in your team, you had no chance beating them. Im in serious awe of the Chinese culture. They also seemed to have very little gender discrimination, and in general little less hyper about things like religion etc. I guess all this things give them a natural edge. So yeah, not all long shifts are equal.
- frozenport 5y ago
  >> I knew several Chinese colleagues and friends like these. They are all good people wanting to make a good life by working hard, nothing to blame them. But it was kind of an unwritten rule that if you had two Chinese working in your team, you had no chance beating them. I've had the opposite experience. Most of the ones I knew were work evasive, and spent substantial time craming for leet code. I think there might be a generation gap at work.
  - msie 5y ago
    “Knew” as in caught a glimpse of at a distance?
Edman274 5y ago
1. A global pandemic that has resulted in 4.5 million people quitting their jobs in the United States in the last month has resulted in people leaving jobs with long shifts. I bet that this has also affected people in TSMC fabrication plants. 2. It is possible that being on call at Intel requires fewer hours of attention than being on call at TSMC. It is also possible that Intel is offering higher starting salaries than TSMC, given that Intel is in a position of relative weakness. 3. You don't actually know if Samsung has been doing "just fine" recently in the United States. I'm sure it did in 2018 and 2019 and the beginning in 2020. I'm very skeptical that Samsung has been humming along without incident for the past six months.
- ianai 5y ago
  Right. I’m hearing US citizens have become “practically ungovernable.” I’ve definitely experienced people acting with more hostility and clear inner turmoil just out running errands than ever before now. And this is enough to shock me after living a decade in one of the most hostile, large metropolitans in the US.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I am hearing that employers in the US are no longer able to negotiate the low pay per hours of work, often at undesirable times of the day and week and year, that they used to be able to demand. The type of work described in the article has a reputation of low pay per hour and being undesirable. > TSMC will have to change to an eight-hour work day five days a week.” Is this US society breaking down and American people being “ungovernable”? Or is it people being able to negotiate reasonable pay to working conditions ratios?
    - scarab92 5y ago
      This is what happens when the US tries to compete with Asia on manufacturing in a free market. These are people who want that job to exist, but are unwilling to work for the pay and conditions necessary for that job to exist.
PinguTS 5y ago
Work culuture is very different in the many countries and are in line with the gernal culture. Based in Europe, Germany, we had this when we had meetings with chipmanufacturers in Japan vs. USA. So when a company comes from one culture into another another it always has a learning curve. Even when you employ local people helping you to adopt to the local culture. Because you have still managers in the other cultur with their expectations. I learned that also from Daimler/Mercedes Benz. When they startet to copy their manufacturing plant from Germany into the USA, they had many quality problems and all kind of problems. Over the years there was a learning curve to adopt to the US work culture. So they still don't have only about a 2/3 output compared to the very same manufcaturing plants based in Germany. While Asian companies have much higher working culture than Germany, I assume the experience at first is horrible for the Asian managers.
- bob1029 5y ago
  > I assume the experience at first is horrible for the Asian managers. When I worked at Samsung, there was virtually always friction between the Korean and American stakeholders. It was something we learned to tolerate though and eventually these differences did bring a lot of combined value. The general theme was something like - Korea uses American talent to shake up processes and innovate in ways they would be difficult to approach on cultural grounds. For instance, directly challenging an incorrect idea from your manager's manager. This would be a standard Monday morning activity for any native Texan/American working at SAS. It may initially cause an uproar (why didn't you notify xyz first... etc.), but it always got the ball rolling on a quick resolution and left an implicit obligation to review why certain management chain links were skipped over in the first place. On the other hand, Korea brought a degree of consistency/discipline in their process engineering that staggered many of us. Virtually everyone balked at this stuff initially, but we grew to understand the value over time. The language barrier was the hardest thing from the American perspective. I feel like many of us would have had an easier time if all of the documentation wasn't originally developed in Korean. Automatic translation tech was not able to help back in the day, so your next best bet was to find a Korean who worked in your office area to help you out. Needless to say, ad-hoc human translation services were hard to come by, especially if one didn't want to feel abusive about it.
bob1029 5y ago
Many moons ago I used to work inside a samsung fab. At no point was I ever feeling a sense of outrage regarding having a literal 80s-style pager strapped to my body 24/7/365. A big part of why this didnt bother me was the scale/impact of what I was doing - I was responsible for the primary business interface used across the entire factory floor. Once you see a modern fab with your own eyes, it will change you in a deep way. I felt a sense of compassion for this incredibly complex and valuable thing that humanity is just barely able to scrape together. Nothing you see in media can prepare you for the real thing. Definitely not a job for everyone, but its really easy for me to see how a lot of us were able to otherwise deal with the stress.
- raverbashing 5y ago
  Yeah, but it's not only "the mission", it's your relationships with managers/colleagues, the environment, the perks, etc That being said, being on call is not for everybody, and a well managed planning goes a long way. It's one thing to be called for a true emergency, another because a colleague doesn't know how to turn on a monitor or because someone did something stupid on a weekend (extreme example)
- ianai 5y ago
  Sounds like you did eventually leave it. You communicated to me why you wanted to work there very well. What led you to leave?
  - bob1029 5y ago
    I wanted to get deeper into software development and better understand how to design new complex systems. Working in the US for a Korean megacorp, who rightfully demanded heavy standardization of manufacturing processes, meant I had basically zero latitude on this sort of stuff. I did manage to get approval for 1 minor development project which was ported back to Korea. I still consider going back to SAS. I departed on amicable terms. The amount of impact I could bring with my skills today would probably open some additional doors. Working with stuff like Blazor in 2022 sometimes has me thinking about ways I could revamp that factory UX and solve problems that were impossible to solve before.
ascar 5y ago
> Different positions may have different requirements, so work hours vary, according to the principal engineer. “An equipment engineer might start work at 8 o’clock in the morning and leave around 9 o’clock at night, but is it normal? This may happen two or three days a week. On a production line, the equipment must be maintained.” > “If you are a process engineer, it will be more stable. Maybe you can start work at 8:30 a.m.and leave before 7:30 p.m. If there are some urgent matters, you may have to stay later.” This doesn't sound like long shifts, but regular 60+ hour weeks. If a 13 hour shift (8 to 9) is "not normal" but happens 2 to 3 days a week, it doesn't sound like they are just working 3 days a week. A "more stable" position works 11 hours. As an European these hours would be completely unacceptable to me unless it's 3 days on 4 days off, which it doesn't seem to be.
- xattt 5y ago
  What’s different about the way fabs operate in Europe?
  - p_l 5y ago
    Fabs tend to be the kind of workplace where certain optimizations regarding employment law don't work well (i.e. no hiring everyone as contractor)[0], and that means dealing with employment law that has no concept of "overtime exempt" and often strong requirements on things like "maximum hours per week including overtime". [0] Hiring as permanent employee vs fictitious "B2B" contracting can have different trade offs to employer, and while the later is cheaper in terms of wages, things like due diligence or contractual responsibility to customers/suppliers might be easier with permanent workers.
  - ascar 5y ago
    It's not about the way fabs operate, but about work laws and culture. If you need your employees to work in 12 hour shifts to keep the fab running then hire enough employees so they can still have a <=40 hour week, i.e. only work 3 days a week. Or (which is afaik the default in Germany) run the fab with three 8 hour shifts per day.
    - 5y ago
saargrin 5y ago
especially true for clean environments as it makes little sense to have people go through the whole procedure for short shifts anyway
api 5y ago
My brother in law worked in steel for years. Being on call and doing everything to avoid downtime was totally normal and he has tons of entertaining war stories. If they are having issues with this it sounds like a management problem.
astura 5y ago
shrug A friend of mine works at a fab at another company and he's not working crazy hours. I think he currently works the three days on three days off shift. It's one thing to have on-call hours, it's another to have on-call hours while also being expected to work 60 hours a week. It sounds like TSMC is expecting the latter. It might also just simply be a problem with management. There's other industrial manufacturing that happens 24/7 in the US, so it's possible
croutonwagon 5y ago
The entire article just works off a glassdoor reviews and seems to assume these individuals also know how to run ops at said place. Not much different than any place really. I even tell my guys, sure I may have opinions, but one has to understand those opionions are formed from a specific point of view and information set. And those making the decisions we are levying criticism on are likely working of entirely different points of view and information sets. Its a confirmation bias thing common with low level guys. It happens in the military too. For example it was a major takeway for me when watching Generation Kill. Like this interview the reporter has with the point he has to make at 1:50 int he video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gguxM8eABP8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gguxM8eABP8 Fab plants like this usually run 3 shifts, thats 24/7 production right there. So you can still do 5x8's and run a plant 24/7. My father in law literally ran ops for a few places doing printed circuit board fab before it was all sent offshore. Most of what made him valuable was logistics and managing shifts/workers/on call and ops process to ensure it ran smoothly. Not everyone can do it and many that THINK they can would flounder when put in the hotseat. Similar when people ascend to Director or Executive roles.

kurthr 5y ago

Agreed, and it's been that way since the 80s. The building & equipment has always cost more than staff & engineers. The "R&D Fab" is in Taiwan. These are going to be exempt employees. What's the agenda here?

mlindner 5y ago

Intel has people work "more than 12-hour workdays" often?

mjevans 5y ago
Probably yes. Major manufacturing sites are often CONTINUOUSLY (24/365.25+) staffed with "12 hour" shifts that include overlap via a lunch and normal breaks making those at least 13 hours of on site time long. One body slot takes 4 people to fill that way, but that leaves zero slack for vacation, sick days, etc.
- tester34 5y ago
  but of course 3/4 days a week those 12-13h? I worked in system like this and I actually loved that, especially that those were night shifts I'd really take 3(+1)x 12h nights over 5x 8h
  - ratww 5y ago
    Same. Just having free days that are not weekends is amazing.

imgabe 5y ago

I'm also confused. It's not like the US doesn't have factories that run 24/7. I spent a summer working swing shifts 12 hours a day, 3 days on, 3 days off.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
> 3 days on, 3 days off. That might be the crux of it. I gather it's similar on e.g. offshore oil rigs, one week on, one week off, but long, grueling days. That said, this article (and the other threads) describe being available 24/7; you probably weren't expected to be on call during your days off. Anyway, I think being on call is fine, as long as you get compensated for it - because you have to change your lifestyle to be available, plan things like going out or having a drink.
c_o_n_v_e_x 5y ago
Large continuous process plants like refineries and chemical plants run 24/7. Some processes can’t be shutdown as they’ll be damaged if they are down for too long. Some plants run the DuPont shift pattern or they run 3 8 hour shifts per day.

kamaal 5y ago

There are long hours, and there are long hours. I consider my self a fairly hard working person, in my first job I've seen situations where people came in on a Monday and would go to their homes next Monday. I've done a full time start up with a day job, quite literally coding every waking hour of my life(like 2 - 4 hours sleep a day) for years. And then I relocated from Bangalore to Bay Area for a while, and met a few of our Chinese colleagues- Even by my standards the Chinese were in a different productivity league altogether. One person I knew would have three monitors, would eat at desk all the three meals, not sure when he even took breaks, but he kind of worked all the time, I mean literally. Would watch tickets in one screen, production issues in one, and work in another one. He'd read every ticket, feature request, pull request, and comment every where, knew everything and would just outperform anybody by some factors(Mind you people in our team I knew were kind of legends themselves). It ain't just the hours, they through and through dominated the initiative. You stood no chance. I knew several Chinese colleagues and friends like these. They are all good people wanting to make a good life by working hard, nothing to blame them. But it was kind of an unwritten rule that if you had two Chinese working in your team, you had no chance beating them. Im in serious awe of the Chinese culture. They also seemed to have very little gender discrimination, and in general little less hyper about things like religion etc. I guess all this things give them a natural edge. So yeah, not all long shifts are equal.

frozenport 5y ago
>> I knew several Chinese colleagues and friends like these. They are all good people wanting to make a good life by working hard, nothing to blame them. But it was kind of an unwritten rule that if you had two Chinese working in your team, you had no chance beating them. I've had the opposite experience. Most of the ones I knew were work evasive, and spent substantial time craming for leet code. I think there might be a generation gap at work.
- msie 5y ago
  “Knew” as in caught a glimpse of at a distance?

Edman274 5y ago

1. A global pandemic that has resulted in 4.5 million people quitting their jobs in the United States in the last month has resulted in people leaving jobs with long shifts. I bet that this has also affected people in TSMC fabrication plants. 2. It is possible that being on call at Intel requires fewer hours of attention than being on call at TSMC. It is also possible that Intel is offering higher starting salaries than TSMC, given that Intel is in a position of relative weakness. 3. You don't actually know if Samsung has been doing "just fine" recently in the United States. I'm sure it did in 2018 and 2019 and the beginning in 2020. I'm very skeptical that Samsung has been humming along without incident for the past six months.

ianai 5y ago
Right. I’m hearing US citizens have become “practically ungovernable.” I’ve definitely experienced people acting with more hostility and clear inner turmoil just out running errands than ever before now. And this is enough to shock me after living a decade in one of the most hostile, large metropolitans in the US.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I am hearing that employers in the US are no longer able to negotiate the low pay per hours of work, often at undesirable times of the day and week and year, that they used to be able to demand. The type of work described in the article has a reputation of low pay per hour and being undesirable. > TSMC will have to change to an eight-hour work day five days a week.” Is this US society breaking down and American people being “ungovernable”? Or is it people being able to negotiate reasonable pay to working conditions ratios?
  - scarab92 5y ago
    This is what happens when the US tries to compete with Asia on manufacturing in a free market. These are people who want that job to exist, but are unwilling to work for the pay and conditions necessary for that job to exist.

PinguTS 5y ago

Work culuture is very different in the many countries and are in line with the gernal culture. Based in Europe, Germany, we had this when we had meetings with chipmanufacturers in Japan vs. USA. So when a company comes from one culture into another another it always has a learning curve. Even when you employ local people helping you to adopt to the local culture. Because you have still managers in the other cultur with their expectations. I learned that also from Daimler/Mercedes Benz. When they startet to copy their manufacturing plant from Germany into the USA, they had many quality problems and all kind of problems. Over the years there was a learning curve to adopt to the US work culture. So they still don't have only about a 2/3 output compared to the very same manufcaturing plants based in Germany. While Asian companies have much higher working culture than Germany, I assume the experience at first is horrible for the Asian managers.

bob1029 5y ago
> I assume the experience at first is horrible for the Asian managers. When I worked at Samsung, there was virtually always friction between the Korean and American stakeholders. It was something we learned to tolerate though and eventually these differences did bring a lot of combined value. The general theme was something like - Korea uses American talent to shake up processes and innovate in ways they would be difficult to approach on cultural grounds. For instance, directly challenging an incorrect idea from your manager's manager. This would be a standard Monday morning activity for any native Texan/American working at SAS. It may initially cause an uproar (why didn't you notify xyz first... etc.), but it always got the ball rolling on a quick resolution and left an implicit obligation to review why certain management chain links were skipped over in the first place. On the other hand, Korea brought a degree of consistency/discipline in their process engineering that staggered many of us. Virtually everyone balked at this stuff initially, but we grew to understand the value over time. The language barrier was the hardest thing from the American perspective. I feel like many of us would have had an easier time if all of the documentation wasn't originally developed in Korean. Automatic translation tech was not able to help back in the day, so your next best bet was to find a Korean who worked in your office area to help you out. Needless to say, ad-hoc human translation services were hard to come by, especially if one didn't want to feel abusive about it.

bob1029 5y ago

Many moons ago I used to work inside a samsung fab. At no point was I ever feeling a sense of outrage regarding having a literal 80s-style pager strapped to my body 24/7/365. A big part of why this didnt bother me was the scale/impact of what I was doing - I was responsible for the primary business interface used across the entire factory floor. Once you see a modern fab with your own eyes, it will change you in a deep way. I felt a sense of compassion for this incredibly complex and valuable thing that humanity is just barely able to scrape together. Nothing you see in media can prepare you for the real thing. Definitely not a job for everyone, but its really easy for me to see how a lot of us were able to otherwise deal with the stress.

raverbashing 5y ago
Yeah, but it's not only "the mission", it's your relationships with managers/colleagues, the environment, the perks, etc That being said, being on call is not for everybody, and a well managed planning goes a long way. It's one thing to be called for a true emergency, another because a colleague doesn't know how to turn on a monitor or because someone did something stupid on a weekend (extreme example)
ianai 5y ago
Sounds like you did eventually leave it. You communicated to me why you wanted to work there very well. What led you to leave?
- bob1029 5y ago
  I wanted to get deeper into software development and better understand how to design new complex systems. Working in the US for a Korean megacorp, who rightfully demanded heavy standardization of manufacturing processes, meant I had basically zero latitude on this sort of stuff. I did manage to get approval for 1 minor development project which was ported back to Korea. I still consider going back to SAS. I departed on amicable terms. The amount of impact I could bring with my skills today would probably open some additional doors. Working with stuff like Blazor in 2022 sometimes has me thinking about ways I could revamp that factory UX and solve problems that were impossible to solve before.

ascar 5y ago

> Different positions may have different requirements, so work hours vary, according to the principal engineer. “An equipment engineer might start work at 8 o’clock in the morning and leave around 9 o’clock at night, but is it normal? This may happen two or three days a week. On a production line, the equipment must be maintained.” > “If you are a process engineer, it will be more stable. Maybe you can start work at 8:30 a.m.and leave before 7:30 p.m. If there are some urgent matters, you may have to stay later.” This doesn't sound like long shifts, but regular 60+ hour weeks. If a 13 hour shift (8 to 9) is "not normal" but happens 2 to 3 days a week, it doesn't sound like they are just working 3 days a week. A "more stable" position works 11 hours. As an European these hours would be completely unacceptable to me unless it's 3 days on 4 days off, which it doesn't seem to be.

xattt 5y ago
What’s different about the way fabs operate in Europe?
- p_l 5y ago
  Fabs tend to be the kind of workplace where certain optimizations regarding employment law don't work well (i.e. no hiring everyone as contractor)[0], and that means dealing with employment law that has no concept of "overtime exempt" and often strong requirements on things like "maximum hours per week including overtime". [0] Hiring as permanent employee vs fictitious "B2B" contracting can have different trade offs to employer, and while the later is cheaper in terms of wages, things like due diligence or contractual responsibility to customers/suppliers might be easier with permanent workers.
- ascar 5y ago
  It's not about the way fabs operate, but about work laws and culture. If you need your employees to work in 12 hour shifts to keep the fab running then hire enough employees so they can still have a <=40 hour week, i.e. only work 3 days a week. Or (which is afaik the default in Germany) run the fab with three 8 hour shifts per day.
  - 5y ago

saargrin 5y ago

especially true for clean environments as it makes little sense to have people go through the whole procedure for short shifts anyway

api 5y ago

My brother in law worked in steel for years. Being on call and doing everything to avoid downtime was totally normal and he has tons of entertaining war stories. If they are having issues with this it sounds like a management problem.

astura 5y ago

shrug A friend of mine works at a fab at another company and he's not working crazy hours. I think he currently works the three days on three days off shift. It's one thing to have on-call hours, it's another to have on-call hours while also being expected to work 60 hours a week. It sounds like TSMC is expecting the latter. It might also just simply be a problem with management. There's other industrial manufacturing that happens 24/7 in the US, so it's possible

croutonwagon 5y ago

The entire article just works off a glassdoor reviews and seems to assume these individuals also know how to run ops at said place. Not much different than any place really. I even tell my guys, sure I may have opinions, but one has to understand those opionions are formed from a specific point of view and information set. And those making the decisions we are levying criticism on are likely working of entirely different points of view and information sets. Its a confirmation bias thing common with low level guys. It happens in the military too. For example it was a major takeway for me when watching Generation Kill. Like this interview the reporter has with the point he has to make at 1:50 int he video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gguxM8eABP8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gguxM8eABP8 Fab plants like this usually run 3 shifts, thats 24/7 production right there. So you can still do 5x8's and run a plant 24/7. My father in law literally ran ops for a few places doing printed circuit board fab before it was all sent offshore. Most of what made him valuable was logistics and managing shifts/workers/on call and ops process to ensure it ran smoothly. Not everyone can do it and many that THINK they can would flounder when put in the hotseat. Similar when people ascend to Director or Executive roles.