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>> It’s like: That's cute, but not what actually happened. It started with: Company: We want more profit Production: Moved to Asia Other Companies: We can't

>> It’s like: That's cute, but not what actually happened. It started with: Company: We want more profit Production: Moved to Asia Other Companies: We can't compete any more Other Production: Moved to Asia Companies: Oh crap, we need production back in the US (for various reasons) Production: Oh shit that's right, we moved because it cost less with no labor or environmental protections and we could work the shit out of people. Companies: Let's call it a "Culture Clash".

flyinglizard 5y ago
In most markets, profit is not elastic, costs are. Meaning that sooner or later the savings will get to the end customer. Don’t believe me? See what changed during the last two decades of globalization, product cost and availability or profit margins.
breezeTrowel 5y ago
Going by the article, it seems a large part of the "culture clash" is TSMC's insistence on three hours of meetings each day and using outdated software that was designed back in 1987(!). While workers in Taiwan used to work 12 hour days, time worked is not a good indicator of productivity and I'm willing to bet that TSMC's massive profitability meant there wasn't much incentive to make the work process more efficient. Honestly, I'm surprised so much hands-on work is needed when we're talking about a semiconductor company. One would think a lot of the fine-tuning work, which seems to be what requires a lot of the labor, could be easily automated with current technology.
- sitkack 5y ago
  Any company that runs down worker resources by running them out of spec is not sustainable and indicative of a lack of mature management. You wouldn't run your physical machinery outside of its operating area, so don't do it to your workforce. Automate. Fabs are the knife edge of technology, literally building the components that go into all other forms of automation, yet they are reliant on primate and medieval era organizational structures and processes?
  - deanCommie 5y ago
    Yes...with a lot of asterixes. Ask anyone who worked in retail for a long time. When they replaced the point of sale and catalog search systems in the early 2000's, everyone's productivity plummeted. They replaced old, DOS/Norton-style keyboard-only systems with a legion of shortcuts and archaic codes with Web-based touch-screen or mouse-based UIs with modern UX etc. The new technology was obviously more modern and allowed faster training, and it's hard to imagine any world where that upgrade doesn't happen. But the old system was faster, and allowed experienced users to do more. Now, if you're talking about a Blockbuster Video, maybe it's the right choice. But if you're talking about extremely specialized semiconductor manufacturing, maybe you stick with the highly optimized system that works. Some things changed a lot since 1987. Others haven't.
    - sitkack 5y ago
      I appreciate the sentiment, but we are talking about different things. My comment was directed entirely at how hard some companies push their workforce, not what era the technology is from.
      - deanCommie 5y ago
        Understood, my mistake.
- _RPL5_ 5y ago
  My impression was that the extra hours are due to the factories being on a 24/7 uninterrupted production cycle. Having people work 12 hour shifts instead of 8 reduces the headcount required by 33%.
  - KptMarchewa 5y ago
    Only if you can get away with not paying people at least 33% more.
    - s1artibartfast 5y ago
      Not true, you can pay 33% or more and still save money on overhead, head count, and shift changes. You see this in the US despite overtime laws, where it is still better to pay a worker 150% for the extra hours.
  - gregmac 5y ago
    I don't think shift duration changes the headcount, it really depends on the total hours per week each person is working. There's 168 hours in a week. If people work for 40 hours a week, to cover the 168 hours you need to employ 4.2 people for every employee you want on the floor at any given time. That means everyone works 5 8-hour shifts, or 3.3 12-hour shifts per week. If you reduce headcount by 33%, that works out to 2.8 people per employee on the floor, which means everyone works 60 hours per week -- 7.5 8-hour shifts, or 5 12-hour shifts. That's a lot.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > While workers in Taiwan used to work 12 hour days, time worked is not a good indicator of productivity and I'm willing to bet that TSMC's massive profitability meant there wasn't much incentive to make the work process more efficient. That's one of the pitfall of low labor costs: since time is virtually free it tends to create a culture that doesn't use it efficiently. I've seen it with offshored devs way too often; why take the time to learn version control when you can pass around code in emails and on thumb drives?
wheels 5y ago
> [...] we moved because it cost less with no labor or environmental protections and we could work the shit out of people. TSMC was never in North America, it was always a Taiwanese company. It's literally an Asian company moving production to the US. Taiwan isn't some rando poor Asian country; it's a rich democracy. The work culture is no doubt different (as it is, say, in Japan or South Korea), but to pretend that it has no labor or environmental laws is somewhere between racist and naive.
- Tostino 5y ago
  I didn't read that comment in relation to TSMC, but as a rebuttal to the GP's assertion that it was "people" who drove US production over seas over the past 40 years.
  - asiachick 5y ago
    it was people who drove US production over seas. Consumers were always free to choose locally made products. They didn't, they chose cheap.
    - grogenaut 5y ago
      In this specific situation that's glossing things over as well. I would have chosen locally made except intel completely stalled their progress for years. In my recent upgrade I went with a TSMC (I believe) made AMD chip because it had better access to SSDs and PCI bus and cores that I couldn't get in an intel chip AND better prices. It's hard to buy local if local companies in fast evolving products are going to sit on their laurels.
    - 6510 5y ago
      I can only think of lame examples I'm sorry but there is this silly trend where careful expert design is replaced with letting the end user decide. To me this is just a sign of incompetence. The expert needs to carefully craft into the product what the user wants but only after careful examination. The lame examples would be to let the driver design the car, the passenger the aircraft or the patient the surgery room etc The story as told above on how production moved to cheap labor countries, jobs were lost as well as purchase power has a weird continuation where the decline of purchase power scales down production and makes life harder for the cheap laborer therefore more fragile. We shift from [the absurd] putting the consumer in charge of the economic decisions to having the "choices" made by (or more like making the results depend on-) people all the way at the bottom of the food chain. We are pretty much left collectively hoping that they can keep up with our unreasonably demanding demands. I'm not even complaining that we are squeezing people to hard. I have issues with a system that can just abruptly stop - entirely! Sure, I want cheaper products but I have no idea what kind of risks we are taking. I should not be the one to decide. I would rather have a large group of highly trained professionals calculate the risks and present them in a way we might understand. Make me a map of the [proverbial] meteor strikes and the global economic consequences. What parts of the show can go on if ingredient X is taken out of the soup? (edit: Ofc there is more than cheap labor pushing localized specializations which increase efficiency and decrease resilience)
throwaway9870 5y ago
People can't consume more than they produce, unless they are riding on the coat tails other workers. Right now, America is used to riding on the coat tails of Asian labour and that is eventually going to come to an end.
ericmcer 5y ago
You should watch "American Factory" on Netflix. It is about a Chinese company opening a factory in Ohio. There may be economics behind the different work cultures, but the cultures are hugely different at this point. The Chinese managers are actually baffled that workers only want to work for the paycheck, and don't work hard for pride. They have to take courses about how American workers need to be coddled and treated as special.
- decafninja 5y ago
  Not a factory, and Korean instead of Chinese, but I worked for one of the major householdname Korean conglomerates at their US branch. It was well known amongst the Korean and Korean-American employees that their salaries were lowballed versus their non-Korean colleagues, and that they were also expected to work longer hours. The reason? "Korean Pride". You were expected to go above and beyond for sake of the glory and well being of the Republic of Korea and the Korean People, via the proxy of The Company. Most of us (myself included) internally thought this was total bullshit, and were on the lookout for the first opportunity to jump ship specifically for a non-Korean company. Of course we would never admit that to a manager, especially the expats from Korea. It was also known that the best teams to work for in terms of work-life balance and just general pleasantness were ones where the manager and teammates were comprised mostly (or entirely) of non-Koreans, or at least heavily Americanized Korean-Americans. Having an older conservative expat Korean manager was the worst possible scenario. One nice perk was having a big name like The Company on your resume wasn't bad at all for future job prospects.

flyinglizard 5y ago

In most markets, profit is not elastic, costs are. Meaning that sooner or later the savings will get to the end customer. Don’t believe me? See what changed during the last two decades of globalization, product cost and availability or profit margins.

breezeTrowel 5y ago

Going by the article, it seems a large part of the "culture clash" is TSMC's insistence on three hours of meetings each day and using outdated software that was designed back in 1987(!). While workers in Taiwan used to work 12 hour days, time worked is not a good indicator of productivity and I'm willing to bet that TSMC's massive profitability meant there wasn't much incentive to make the work process more efficient. Honestly, I'm surprised so much hands-on work is needed when we're talking about a semiconductor company. One would think a lot of the fine-tuning work, which seems to be what requires a lot of the labor, could be easily automated with current technology.

sitkack 5y ago
Any company that runs down worker resources by running them out of spec is not sustainable and indicative of a lack of mature management. You wouldn't run your physical machinery outside of its operating area, so don't do it to your workforce. Automate. Fabs are the knife edge of technology, literally building the components that go into all other forms of automation, yet they are reliant on primate and medieval era organizational structures and processes?
- deanCommie 5y ago
  Yes...with a lot of asterixes. Ask anyone who worked in retail for a long time. When they replaced the point of sale and catalog search systems in the early 2000's, everyone's productivity plummeted. They replaced old, DOS/Norton-style keyboard-only systems with a legion of shortcuts and archaic codes with Web-based touch-screen or mouse-based UIs with modern UX etc. The new technology was obviously more modern and allowed faster training, and it's hard to imagine any world where that upgrade doesn't happen. But the old system was faster, and allowed experienced users to do more. Now, if you're talking about a Blockbuster Video, maybe it's the right choice. But if you're talking about extremely specialized semiconductor manufacturing, maybe you stick with the highly optimized system that works. Some things changed a lot since 1987. Others haven't.
  - sitkack 5y ago
    I appreciate the sentiment, but we are talking about different things. My comment was directed entirely at how hard some companies push their workforce, not what era the technology is from.
    - deanCommie 5y ago
      Understood, my mistake.
_RPL5_ 5y ago
My impression was that the extra hours are due to the factories being on a 24/7 uninterrupted production cycle. Having people work 12 hour shifts instead of 8 reduces the headcount required by 33%.
- KptMarchewa 5y ago
  Only if you can get away with not paying people at least 33% more.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Not true, you can pay 33% or more and still save money on overhead, head count, and shift changes. You see this in the US despite overtime laws, where it is still better to pay a worker 150% for the extra hours.
- gregmac 5y ago
  I don't think shift duration changes the headcount, it really depends on the total hours per week each person is working. There's 168 hours in a week. If people work for 40 hours a week, to cover the 168 hours you need to employ 4.2 people for every employee you want on the floor at any given time. That means everyone works 5 8-hour shifts, or 3.3 12-hour shifts per week. If you reduce headcount by 33%, that works out to 2.8 people per employee on the floor, which means everyone works 60 hours per week -- 7.5 8-hour shifts, or 5 12-hour shifts. That's a lot.
908B64B197 5y ago
> While workers in Taiwan used to work 12 hour days, time worked is not a good indicator of productivity and I'm willing to bet that TSMC's massive profitability meant there wasn't much incentive to make the work process more efficient. That's one of the pitfall of low labor costs: since time is virtually free it tends to create a culture that doesn't use it efficiently. I've seen it with offshored devs way too often; why take the time to learn version control when you can pass around code in emails and on thumb drives?

wheels 5y ago

> [...] we moved because it cost less with no labor or environmental protections and we could work the shit out of people. TSMC was never in North America, it was always a Taiwanese company. It's literally an Asian company moving production to the US. Taiwan isn't some rando poor Asian country; it's a rich democracy. The work culture is no doubt different (as it is, say, in Japan or South Korea), but to pretend that it has no labor or environmental laws is somewhere between racist and naive.

Tostino 5y ago
I didn't read that comment in relation to TSMC, but as a rebuttal to the GP's assertion that it was "people" who drove US production over seas over the past 40 years.
- asiachick 5y ago
  it was people who drove US production over seas. Consumers were always free to choose locally made products. They didn't, they chose cheap.
  - grogenaut 5y ago
    In this specific situation that's glossing things over as well. I would have chosen locally made except intel completely stalled their progress for years. In my recent upgrade I went with a TSMC (I believe) made AMD chip because it had better access to SSDs and PCI bus and cores that I couldn't get in an intel chip AND better prices. It's hard to buy local if local companies in fast evolving products are going to sit on their laurels.
  - 6510 5y ago
    I can only think of lame examples I'm sorry but there is this silly trend where careful expert design is replaced with letting the end user decide. To me this is just a sign of incompetence. The expert needs to carefully craft into the product what the user wants but only after careful examination. The lame examples would be to let the driver design the car, the passenger the aircraft or the patient the surgery room etc The story as told above on how production moved to cheap labor countries, jobs were lost as well as purchase power has a weird continuation where the decline of purchase power scales down production and makes life harder for the cheap laborer therefore more fragile. We shift from [the absurd] putting the consumer in charge of the economic decisions to having the "choices" made by (or more like making the results depend on-) people all the way at the bottom of the food chain. We are pretty much left collectively hoping that they can keep up with our unreasonably demanding demands. I'm not even complaining that we are squeezing people to hard. I have issues with a system that can just abruptly stop - entirely! Sure, I want cheaper products but I have no idea what kind of risks we are taking. I should not be the one to decide. I would rather have a large group of highly trained professionals calculate the risks and present them in a way we might understand. Make me a map of the [proverbial] meteor strikes and the global economic consequences. What parts of the show can go on if ingredient X is taken out of the soup? (edit: Ofc there is more than cheap labor pushing localized specializations which increase efficiency and decrease resilience)

throwaway9870 5y ago

People can't consume more than they produce, unless they are riding on the coat tails other workers. Right now, America is used to riding on the coat tails of Asian labour and that is eventually going to come to an end.

ericmcer 5y ago

You should watch "American Factory" on Netflix. It is about a Chinese company opening a factory in Ohio. There may be economics behind the different work cultures, but the cultures are hugely different at this point. The Chinese managers are actually baffled that workers only want to work for the paycheck, and don't work hard for pride. They have to take courses about how American workers need to be coddled and treated as special.

decafninja 5y ago
Not a factory, and Korean instead of Chinese, but I worked for one of the major householdname Korean conglomerates at their US branch. It was well known amongst the Korean and Korean-American employees that their salaries were lowballed versus their non-Korean colleagues, and that they were also expected to work longer hours. The reason? "Korean Pride". You were expected to go above and beyond for sake of the glory and well being of the Republic of Korea and the Korean People, via the proxy of The Company. Most of us (myself included) internally thought this was total bullshit, and were on the lookout for the first opportunity to jump ship specifically for a non-Korean company. Of course we would never admit that to a manager, especially the expats from Korea. It was also known that the best teams to work for in terms of work-life balance and just general pleasantness were ones where the manager and teammates were comprised mostly (or entirely) of non-Koreans, or at least heavily Americanized Korean-Americans. Having an older conservative expat Korean manager was the worst possible scenario. One nice perk was having a big name like The Company on your resume wasn't bad at all for future job prospects.