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Calling this racist seems applicable but quite a stretch to me. From the article is seems workers in Taiwan work 12 hour days as normal. Couple that with the f

Calling this racist seems applicable but quite a stretch to me. From the article is seems workers in Taiwan work 12 hour days as normal. Couple that with the fact that manufacturing used by primarily US being done outside US borders is generally some for cost saving reasons and it seems to make sense to assume that Taiwan IS doing this cheaper somehow. If it were a matter of innovation wouldn't the same innovation hold in their new plant in Arizona?

wheels 5y ago
The article is about engineers, not factory workers. Are you really telling me there's no culture of overworking for engineers in Silicon Valley? It's contrasting Arizona with Taiwan; I don't think this same article would be written about Silicon Valley vs. Taiwan. There's also a difference between what you're saying and what the great-grandparent said: being cheaper can be because they have better processes or are more innovative, or have shorter supply lines, or better access to mainland China or whatever. But the great-grandparent both (a) assumed that tech fundamentally belongs to the US, and if it's being done somewhere else, it's in service to the US, and (b) that the primary reason someone would produce things outside of the US is labor costs. Labor costs are no longer the primary reason things are produced outside of the US. At this point, it's primarily industrial capacity and know-how.
- majormajor 5y ago
  Salary info I'm finding on google suggest that electrical engineers still get paid less in Taiwan than in the US. I'd also be very curious what those numbers looked like over the decades when offshoring really ramped up. Not "10x less" or anything incredibly dramatic, but for a business, money saved is money saved. It's silly to have a whole thread of back and forth responses on "is it racist to say cost of labor is cheaper somewhere else" without looking at the numbers to see if it actually is. GDP per capita is very much not the same as salary. Personally I'm waiting for engineering salaries in the non-US to catch up to the US because it'll make it easier for me to leave the US if I choose to do so but it doesn't look like it's happened yet.
  - wheels 5y ago
    Here's my point though: Engineers in virtually every country in the world make less money than in the US. But the reason people have jobs in the rest of the world isn't because everyone wants to make things in the US, but it's just too expensive, so they'll settle for somewhere else. That's pretty heavy-handed American exceptionalism. TSCM has the best fabs in the world. This article literally mentions them having to build the factory in the US and send people over to teach the Americans how to run it. They're just better at it. To keep insisting that that's not the case, and that this is really all about their lower salaries is, in fact, racist.
    - majormajor 5y ago
      Here we're looking at an industry where the US used to be dominant. So it's not a question of "how did another country beat the US to this sort of industry despite having less money floating around than the US?" It's specifically "how did this industry leave the US and why is it non-trivial to rebuild some of it?" I'm talking about the how of them becoming the best in the world, not arguing that they aren't the best now. As money for semiconductor manufacturing moved to overseas companies, initially driven by costs, those companies ended up with the money to invest in getting good at it. But that money was directed there as a result of specific actions by people in the US. So yes, all the conversation about immediate-cost-focused decisions, and the difference in the labor costs, are relevant. It's not "American exceptionalism" to be aware of this history, it's "American exceptionalism" that caused this and that drives the laissez faire attitude that there wouldn't be domestic impact like loss of expertise and reliance on overseas producer from a focus on immediate cost over all else. The idea that if we wanted to, we could simply build the industry back up. Because we're America! Same as all the rest of "it can't happen here" BS that people use to excuse ignoring various domestic issues. -- To frame the labor cost issue a different way, let's look at what the reverse process, bringing that expertise back to the US, would look like: let's say tomorrow the US wanted to build up a domestic best-in-the-world alternative company. They'd have to hire a bunch of engineers! Even best-case, it would take those engineers quite a while to reproduce all the earned knowledge and expertise of TSMC's engineers. All the while you're gonna have to pay those engineers more than TSMC's engineers are making, because it's a more expensive labor market. And then even if they do produce equally high levels of output after a while, all those higher costs are going to put them at a competitive disadvantage. So if you want to be good at it domestically, and you live in a country with more competition for labor, you really have to commit to spending extra to do it. (Getting TSMC to build some plants domestically is a way of short-cutting the knowledge acquisition step, but it's just a small step towards really rebuilding the industry.)

wheels 5y ago

The article is about engineers, not factory workers. Are you really telling me there's no culture of overworking for engineers in Silicon Valley? It's contrasting Arizona with Taiwan; I don't think this same article would be written about Silicon Valley vs. Taiwan. There's also a difference between what you're saying and what the great-grandparent said: being cheaper can be because they have better processes or are more innovative, or have shorter supply lines, or better access to mainland China or whatever. But the great-grandparent both (a) assumed that tech fundamentally belongs to the US, and if it's being done somewhere else, it's in service to the US, and (b) that the primary reason someone would produce things outside of the US is labor costs. Labor costs are no longer the primary reason things are produced outside of the US. At this point, it's primarily industrial capacity and know-how.

majormajor 5y ago
Salary info I'm finding on google suggest that electrical engineers still get paid less in Taiwan than in the US. I'd also be very curious what those numbers looked like over the decades when offshoring really ramped up. Not "10x less" or anything incredibly dramatic, but for a business, money saved is money saved. It's silly to have a whole thread of back and forth responses on "is it racist to say cost of labor is cheaper somewhere else" without looking at the numbers to see if it actually is. GDP per capita is very much not the same as salary. Personally I'm waiting for engineering salaries in the non-US to catch up to the US because it'll make it easier for me to leave the US if I choose to do so but it doesn't look like it's happened yet.
- wheels 5y ago
  Here's my point though: Engineers in virtually every country in the world make less money than in the US. But the reason people have jobs in the rest of the world isn't because everyone wants to make things in the US, but it's just too expensive, so they'll settle for somewhere else. That's pretty heavy-handed American exceptionalism. TSCM has the best fabs in the world. This article literally mentions them having to build the factory in the US and send people over to teach the Americans how to run it. They're just better at it. To keep insisting that that's not the case, and that this is really all about their lower salaries is, in fact, racist.
  - majormajor 5y ago
    Here we're looking at an industry where the US used to be dominant. So it's not a question of "how did another country beat the US to this sort of industry despite having less money floating around than the US?" It's specifically "how did this industry leave the US and why is it non-trivial to rebuild some of it?" I'm talking about the how of them becoming the best in the world, not arguing that they aren't the best now. As money for semiconductor manufacturing moved to overseas companies, initially driven by costs, those companies ended up with the money to invest in getting good at it. But that money was directed there as a result of specific actions by people in the US. So yes, all the conversation about immediate-cost-focused decisions, and the difference in the labor costs, are relevant. It's not "American exceptionalism" to be aware of this history, it's "American exceptionalism" that caused this and that drives the laissez faire attitude that there wouldn't be domestic impact like loss of expertise and reliance on overseas producer from a focus on immediate cost over all else. The idea that if we wanted to, we could simply build the industry back up. Because we're America! Same as all the rest of "it can't happen here" BS that people use to excuse ignoring various domestic issues. -- To frame the labor cost issue a different way, let's look at what the reverse process, bringing that expertise back to the US, would look like: let's say tomorrow the US wanted to build up a domestic best-in-the-world alternative company. They'd have to hire a bunch of engineers! Even best-case, it would take those engineers quite a while to reproduce all the earned knowledge and expertise of TSMC's engineers. All the while you're gonna have to pay those engineers more than TSMC's engineers are making, because it's a more expensive labor market. And then even if they do produce equally high levels of output after a while, all those higher costs are going to put them at a competitive disadvantage. So if you want to be good at it domestically, and you live in a country with more competition for labor, you really have to commit to spending extra to do it. (Getting TSMC to build some plants domestically is a way of short-cutting the knowledge acquisition step, but it's just a small step towards really rebuilding the industry.)