23 ms·
Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]
- eru 4y agoAsianometry is a great channel with lots of great videos!
- jleyank 4y agoI think it will come down to money. People work with hot tar in the blazing sun for money, and toil in Amazon warehouses for money. Make it worth people's while and yeah, they'll work in semiconducting manufacturing.
- henning 4y agoYes. The same applies to infosec, COBOL, and other niches where jerbs allegedly can't be filled: pay more money to attract better and more people.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoSoftware jobs don't have manufacturing overhead. You can't compare them to other technical fields.
- BobbyJo 4y agoYou can in terms of labor supply and demand, just not in terms of capital intensity.
- rch 4y agoOffering people time and flexibility is also effective. Some could work '4 on 4 off' schedules, for example.
- godelski 4y agoIt is interesting how often people push back against this solution. We see so many people choose careers based on the projected earnings. It is even a stereotype for immigrants: you can be a doctor, lawyer, (or now) software engineer. Ironically I think the rich would get richer if they chose to pay many of these employees more. We often frame things as zero sum games, but clearly this is a positive sum one. You invent new things and new wealth has entered the world.
- kazen44 4y agoheck, Henry ford started this buy increases wages so much his employees where able to buy the product they themselves have build.
- bdw5204 4y agoIt especially comes down to money when you're trying to hire people who don't have a college degree or who can't get a good paying job with their degree. You basically have to be making enough money to live well before you get to a point where you can genuinely care about things other than the money. Either that or the other factors have to be absolute necessities for you. Of course the McJobs will have to pay more if somebody hires away too much of their labor pool and they can't find anybody who wants to work for $15 an hour anymore just like they had to start paying more than minimum wage a few years ago when Amazon started paying $15 an hour for warehouse workers. That's why there's so much pushback against this idea.
- etempleton 4y agoIt is funny how simple it really is. Everyone has a price and every job has a price. If people can get a better paying job under roughly equivalent working conditions they will do that. When I hear people complain that they can’t find good help it makes me laugh. The answer is and always has been the same. I am interested in what percentage of these jobs will be able to be filled by individuals with a high school diploma or associates degree.
- jmpman 4y agoMy nanny’s sister just started working at a semiconductor plant. Unfortunately she’s talking my nanny into joining. So, yes, if they pay enough.
- teddyh 4y agoYour cue to pay your nanny more?
- jmpman 4y agoOr move on from having a nanny.
- chitowneats 4y agoNot all jobs are worth the same amount. Nannying is quite important but it is low skill (meaning supply of labor is high) and thus will probably command lower wages than semiconductor manufacturing.
- the_lonely_road 4y agoI don't think its low skill/high supply that's the problem here. The fact is a nanny is only servicing one family and so their entire economic input must be a fraction of that family's income. Same problem hair stylist faces compared to a software developer. You can only cut so many heads of hair in a single day which limits your total possible income to a fraction of mine because a billion people can buy my software. Its just the way it is and barring some major change in how society is structured, the way it will always be.
- Bakary 4y agoI don't think it's so clear cut. Baumol costs disease already goes a long way, and developers only receive exponential rewards if they have significant equity. Some can go solo or succeed at the startup route but they are a minority. Furthermore, with AI becoming increasingly sophisticated, we might see a seachange in developer salaries with only the most talented and valuable devs getting massive increases and all the rest being made redundant. Leading us back to the low skill/high supply problem.
- mikewarot 4y agoAlignment of incentives is how you get people motivated. If you're married to a process line, you should get a cut of the profits that specific line makes, and that cut should go up over time.
- bmismyname 4y agoWill there be low wages with huge bonuses for the CEOs while the workers have to struggle to pay rent? Young people know the future is not bright, and I encourage them to enjoy their lives while they still can.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- spaetzleesser 4y ago“Will there be low wages with huge bonuses for the CEOs while the workers have to struggle to pay rent?” Isn’t that the updated “American Dream”?
- bmismyname 4y agoTo quote George Carlin, "they call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it".
- millzlane 4y agoI heard on the news this morning it's called the American Experiment.
- dr-detroit 4y ago
- polishdude20 4y agoThis world view seems like a potential death spiral. As world views become bleak, is encouraging people to say "fuck it" and maximize for enjoyment really the best move? Whatever happened to working hard to build a future for oneself? Yes, I understand there are higher powers that be and people with much more powers than you and I that are ruining the future but is the answer really to lay down and be engulfed in the pleasure-filled dopamine high ebbs and flows of the meta-verse? It's like the chicken and egg problem. What came first? Societal collapse or the willingness of its citizens to lay down and take it? Both cause eachother. Which variable is the one we can actually change? Yes, enjoy your lives but only to the extent to where you step away from the grind and reevaluate your priorities, take a look at what is important to you. Hunker down into the priorities that matter and remove the cruft of distractions.
- yoyopa 4y ago
- worstestes 4y agoAh yes, blame labor. If apple, or really any tech/manufacturing company, want a workforce they need to pay for it accordingly. Money talks. My question to you — do you work in manufacturing? Why or why not?
- paulmd 4y agoDunno why people are picking on apple here… what I have heard from people who worked at Intel is that apple is known in the industry for, I quote, “turning Intel’s training pipeline into a waiting room for apple HR”. After working at Intel for two weeks you are highly likely to get an offer from apple for twice your Intel salary and a lot of people take it. Apple is basically known for paying far above market to retain the best talent, and apple silicon reflects that (or did during the last 10 years although supposedly there has been something of an exodus over the last few). Whereas it’s really Intel who is notorious for playing the “who can we get at 75% of the going market rate” game.
- bnt 4y agoI strongly recommend this channel if you're into all-things semiconductor industry. Great insights and (pretty much) every episode is well written and to the point.
- bob1029 4y agoI worked at the Samsung A2/S2 lines in ATX with a bunch of young Americans back around 2011-2013. I would say they absolutely would. It's a very high-energy place with more going on than you can ever hope to keep track of. Even if the technology doesn't interest you, the cultural interactions should. You could have some days with Japanese, Koreans and Americans translating 3-ways in a conference room. Opportunities for business travel are probably restricted more now, but when I was there they practically begged us to travel to the Korean sites in hopes that we would learn more faster. Some roles can be far more exciting than others. Someone has to work security and manage the facilities. That said, all the important roles seem to be the compelling ones too. I don't know of anyone who had a hard time getting another super cushy job after time at Samsung, so it's also great for long term career prospects.
- dr-detroit 4y ago
- gopher_space 4y ago> Some roles can be far more exciting than others. Someone has to work security and manage the facilities. This would be an interesting employer for many trades.
- rudididdjdh 4y ago
- cxr 4y agoI can't corroborate this at all. I come from a CS background. If you leave school and enter the workforce at SAS, you will be at a disadvantage insofar as you are looking for a workplace that you hope to learn something from or one that you hope reinforces good engineering practices. The semiconductor industry, from the vantage point of an experienced systems thinker, reinforces awful engineering practices. All the things that SE folks take for granted—version control, e.g, as a discipline/tool to name one example, for regression analysis—say goodbye to any of these things, along with any expectation of competence from your colleagues. The semiconductor industry sources heavily from the defense sector, and this has deleterious, catastrophic effects. A close friend (from a non-CS engineering background) I know to still be at SAS. We don't talk about finances, but at around 8 years in, I estimate that he just recently (since COVID) crossed the six figure threshold. He's in a fairly senior role. Meanwhile: "What's x86?" — a direct quote from a conversation not too long ago. He has no real professional experience outside of SAS, was not set up in an environment that rewards "extracurricular" experience, so he doesn't have any of that, either, and he's effectively stuck as a result of the "golden" handcuffs that the path at SAS has led him on. Don't work in the semiconductor industry, folks. What you can expect to be is a monkey pressing buttons on a machine (that your supervisor—and their supervisor—doesn't understand, and nor will you; you pass butter). Make no mistake: there's an abundance of low-hanging fruit. But you won't have, as Gerry Weinberg put it, "permission" to pick it. By all means, if your prospects/ambitions look to be something like working for the state/federal government, learning nothing over your career, and cashing mediocre checks for doing mediocre work along the way, then by all means go for it. Otherwise, it is likelier that you'll be hobbled by your time in the industry. And not for no good reason. If I'm evaluating someone and it came up that they'd done any significant time in the world of semiconductors, the net impression it'd have on me (having hash an insider's view of it) would be one worse than if they said that they'd just gotten their degree and had spent the last N years flipping burgers, cf Dan Luu. Don't do semiconductors, folks. PS: sorry, drunk.
- colechristensen 4y agoYoung Americans are perfectly willing to do a half-assed job when conditions suck and pay is low. They are harder to exploit than foreign workers and previous generations because the "hard work" mentality really doesn't last when the rewards get less with every generation. They will either leave a job whenever they feel like they've had enough or just phone it in for a good long while giving shitty performance for shitty pay. It is entirely possible to get good work out of younger generations, but you really have to start paying them competitively with how much you pay management and how much you pay capital. It turns out there is a whole lot of rent seeking by people who don't do much (own capital, work as a middle manager, own real estate) and to compete, people are just checking out instead of trying to climb to an ever smaller top. If it seems impossible to have a home, a family, and resources to actually do things with your life, living in a van and traveling around actually enjoying the world, even in rather extreme poverty, is quite a better life than being a wage slave.
- KennyBlanken 4y agoThe "hard work" mentality is gone because companies like Amazon purposefully optimize their 'blue collar' jobs to force churn so they can dangle benefits with vesting periods nobody will get to, and have an outsourced hiring firm handle all the paperwork. That's why there were news stories about them "running out of people to employ." Word gets around eventually. Especially if the economy is doing well, most people will not want to work for you.
- JimmieMcnulty 4y agoHonestly, based on the content of this video and the replies from the prior HN thread, it seems like folks are locked into the belief that the current manufacturing... "experience" (for lack of a better term) for the workers involved will be lifted from Asia and dropped into the US, but that doesn't actually make any sense to me. Sure, that's how the world knows how to make chips now, but given the varying laws between those two places, and the varying workforce cultures, I think it's safe to say that adaptations will be made to the experience to suit American workers, and those adaptations won't result in meaningful drop offs in quality or execution. As an outsider, it seems pretty clear that the rejection to the industry is more about the cultural mismatch than it is to the actual work needing to be executed. It's just weird to me that people really believe nothing about the job will change, and all of the Asian cultural aspects of the way the job is currently executed would be dropped on American workers with zero adjustments.
- Curzel 4y agoAgree… only issue might be managers and supervisors coming from manufacturing in Asia, they will have to re-learn how to treat workers, but I am hopeful
- bobthepanda 4y agoI mean, Toyota and Hyundai make cars in the South, so that particular lesson has been learned before
- okdood64 4y agoAre we lumping up modern Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese culture into one now?
- triceratops 4y agoSurely in terms of work culture they're more similar to each other than any of them are to North American work culture? That's the culture we're all talking about here.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoIf the pay is good why not?
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoLots of Americans work as plumbers dealing with literal poop every day. They will even come in the middle of the night to deal with your poop emergency. The issue is getting paid enough, not the nature of the job.
- KingMachiavelli 4y agoA substantial perk would be subsidized housing. A modern fab can cost ~$20B (maybe more in the US) and obviously the planning and permit process is likely also a couple order of magnitudes more difficult than normal real estate development. Spending ~$100M on employee housing would make the compensation a lot more competitive since software salaries are high but tend to be located in HCOL areas. Spend another ~$100M on training and education facilities and I think you could attract a lot of Americans right of of high school. Even if it still a bit less competitive than software it could still be the second best career industry. I think the industry already partly does this but doing it on a larger scale and marketing it as an alternative to college would make it more compelling. I think the industry is still like many other large industries that really want a degree in some engineering despite it not necessarily being very applicable to fab work.
- dijonman2 4y agoThe last thing I would want is to live on a corporate campus. Lose my job and evicted at the same time? No thanks, plus I want privacy.
- kazen44 4y agowhat about a company building housing for its employees. This is something that happened a lot in the netherlands in the city of eindhoven. Phillips had its major manufacturing located in the city, and build massive housing projects to house its workers relatively close to the plant.
- dijonman2 4y agoNo, this is exactly what I want to avoid. If I choose to change jobs then I need to find new housing. I want a social life outside of work, and privacy is essential. As an example I generally do not want my colleagues to know who I am dating, or if I am dating more than one person. People should only know what I choose to share. Separation between work and my personal life is essential.
- graton 4y agoTangentially related is the lack of young people entering the "trades" (plumbing, electrical, construction, etc). Can't help but think that now is probably a good time to enter a "trade" due to the lack of people who are doing that.
- rcarr 4y agoEveryone I know who got an apprenticeship after school instead of going to uni are absolutely raking it in and have enjoyed a significantly better quality of life than their uni going peers. I personally can’t see how the uni goers will end up having a better time in the long run as the official narrative goes. The majority of the tradies seem to end up buying multiple houses and going the landlord route for early retirement.
- TylerE 4y agoAsk them about their back and knees when they’re 50.
- bee_rider 4y agoSitting in a chair is really unhealthy, so it isn't like the programmers have dodged selling their bodies for a nice salary.
- mhh__ 4y ago"really" unhealthy
- bee_rider 4y agoQuotes for emphasis?
- lotsofpulp 4y agoQuotes are because you are comparing damage from sitting in a chair that can be mitigated by walking around, standing, and working out, to inevitable damage from inhaling fumes and particles, lifting objects, and repeatedly contorting one’s body and putting pressure on joints that have a far higher probability of irreversible damage.
- buggythebug 4y agoSuch a stupid question. Some will, some won't.
- 0xbadc0de5 4y agoJust out of high-school, I worked in a fiber-optic component assembly plant - wave-division multiplexers, optical circulators, etc. It was clean room, bunny suit, microscope work for the most part. But it was also moderate-skill, repetitive work - they'd hire large cohorts and provide all the necessary training. If you could keep up with the quotas and QC, you were in and made a decent wage and there was some room for growth. If not, you were let go. Not the type of work I'd take a pay cut for these days, but for young me, it was a foot in the door, paid okay and provided great experience. Semiconductor plant jobs may not be as lucrative as SW engineering, but they are indeed jobs that pay alright for low to moderate skilled labour. And on-shoring of tech manufacturing seems like a good idea.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoThis alludes to an important point. If the semiconductor manufacturers coming to the US could take advantage of the software skill sets for automation that exist in the US, it could really help people have less repetition in their job and make it more rewarding.
- R0b0t1 4y agoIf the work is repetitive I'm not sure you can say it was good experience. Your time would have been better spent learning or creating, I assume. No reason to want your children to work.
- 0xbadc0de5 4y agoI'm not sure you're qualified to have an opinion on what I took away from my own experience or whether I'd want my children to have access to similar opportunities. For the record, I did say it was a good experience and I stand by that. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that the time I spent working construction and flipping burgers prior to that also had value. I think it's a mistake to assume that just because work is repetitive, that there is no opportunity for "learning and creating." I was creating things - fibre optic components. I was also learning things - all about the components and their manufacturing process. And yes, I hope my children have access to as broad a range of experience as I've had. I think there are many reasons to want your children to work - not least of which is the value it adds to society and the self-sufficiency it provides them.
- honkler 4y agoAm I going to be a wagie. If yes, then no.
- jhallenworld 4y agoSo here is my recommendation: provide more chairs in the cleanroom. Seriously, there are like no chairs in there..
- tristor 4y agoI have worked with a lot of people that escaped from fab jobs here in the US during my career. The biggest issue I see is that manufacturing has an absolutely grueling schedule and the pay is half or less than what equivalent level software jobs pay, with worse working conditions. If you want young Americans to work these jobs, you need to pay /more/ than software jobs, because the conditions are worse. Otherwise, you only get the people who can't escape. Anyone who can escape eventually does.
- xwdv 4y agoA lot of people cannot escape. And it often surprises me how many people really don’t want to work in software.
- dougabug 4y agoI think a lot of people don’t want to work in software because of the perception or reality of the software development systems that they have been exposed to. If the right tools were invented for them, they might take to it like ducks to water.
- MikePlacid 4y agoAnd then what? Let’s consider the following. 1. There is a limit of complexity that a given person or a given team can deal with happily. Below the threshold work satisfaction is great: “I am solving more and more complicated tasks”, after the threshold a stress eats job satisfaction: “I do not want to open my emails in the morning - what if I will not be able to solve some new problem”. 2. Complexity of each successful product grows until this threshold is reached. The successful product is used by more and more people. The successful product is put as a building stone in more and more complicated projects. 3. Because of 1 and 2 a successful SE is an unhappy person running under a lot of stress. Now let’s see how decreasing the complexity of tools changes the situation. Bad tools: 50% of the complexity of the situation is caused by the tools, 50% - by the complexity of the product. Let’s improve tools twice. Now the tools create only 25% of the original complexity, and since the product causes 50% of the original complexity overall situation improved to 75% total of the original one. The engineer can have a happy life? No so fast. Since the product is successful, the is a great demand for new features. The complexity of the product increases to 75% and the programmer lives under stress again. So, better tools allow to create more complicated, more useful products. But they do not improve - in the long run - the quality of programmers’ lifes. So if a person is not happy with current tools, she will not be happy to be a programmer. Or so it seems to me.
- samfisher83 4y agoI used to work in semi. Pay and opportunities are way better in software.
- JoeDaDude 4y agoFrom second hand anecdotes, I understand a lot of work involves handling dangerous chemicals, maybe enough to scare people away after a couple of years. I know one person that did exactly that, the risk wasn't worth it anymore.
- abdullah2993 4y agoWhat a wonderful solution. Lets pay software engineers less so they are forced to work on hardware. Why not just have higher pays for semiconductor people since they are crucial?
- bluedino 4y agoDepends on the role. There's a place nearby where they produce raw silicon. They are rated three of five stars on Famous_Job_Site, and they only hire through a temp service, and you can be there ten years before getting hired in directly. Rules like if you miss X days or are late Y times you get fired. The worst job is probably poly breaker, where they have three shifts of people in protective suits that smash large pieces of silicon down with hammers. Last I heard you get $14/hr. They are always hiring and nobody wants to work there. https://imgur.com/a/OmqsEuM https://imgur.com/a/OmqsEuM
- dmitriy_ko 4y ago> poly breaker, where they have three shifts of people in protective suits that smash large pieces of silicon down with hammers Why is this done manually? wouldn't it be easy to automate?
- ElevenLathe 4y agoNo idea, but assuming this guy doesn't live in mid-Michigan, there's a plant here that hires people to do the same thing.
- bluedino 4y agoTalking about HSC ;)
- jpgvm 4y agoCorrect. Too many people think shiny Infinity Loop One office when chips come up. The reality is that chip designers are like 0.1% of the available roles. Fab workers/supervisors/maintenance etc are maybe 25% and the rest is in a very very long tail of supply chain involving lots of vary hazardous chemicals and shitty manual labour. I'm all for trying to diversify semi-conductor manufacturing but I really doubt Americans have it in them to do what the Chinese/Taiwanese currently do - specifically in the fabs themselves and in the chemical and poly silicate plants that support them.
- 7speter 4y agoReally, after watching channels like Moores Law Is Dead and other techtubers and learning about the gpu and cpu markets and products, I wish I got into electrical engineering to so that I could work on the design teams at Intel or AMD or NVidia or Apple
- apengwin 4y agoif you pay them they will come
- bfung 4y agoVery good video outlining the context, problems, and bringing info from social media (hn) and other news!
- booleandilemma 4y agoI think young americans will work wherever the money is. I see people everyday (both american and non) that are in software because that's what pays right now. You just have to talk to the nearest product owner, project manager, or bootcamp grad for an example.
- dougabug 4y agoSoftware has structural economic advantages that are difficult to match in other professions (particularly ones that can scale up to support such a large number of practitioners).
- to11mtm 4y agoThis is, in some ways, the unseen benefit of 'patterns' in software. [^0] Outside of certain problem domains or extreme requirements, the basic patterns work well enough for a variety of tasks with the right mixing, you usually get introduced to mundane patterns quickly [^1] and over time you move on to advanced pattern abstractions. I do know that with Descriptor languages and 'libraries' for chip design they reuse blocks and patterns, I think the challenge they run into however, is the possibility that there is cruft built on the existing setup for circuits and the like, and tweaking such may have impacts to downstream customers, possibly undiscovered until after tape-out. ^0 - Even if sometimes they get mis/overused on a low level. By that I'm referring to cases where someone learning patterns thinks they -have- to use all of them. ^1 - Examples that come to mind would be the 'Grab from queue, do thing, update queue', 'Manual' ETL, and 'Timed Jobs'. The last of which is the most fun to see across orgs, as it tends to have the most derivation between orgs. The most slapshoddingly-functional of which being a bunch of scheduled tasks in windows server (which honestly, worked great for them and their use case)
- Existenceblinks 4y agoExcellent. My background is computer engineering who enrolled shit load of computer network classes, interned for a Cisco gold partner, but then switched to software development. At some points my network engineers friends (and hardware stuff engineers) turned into software development, mostly web development. I'd like to add one more factor here. It's transferable knowledge AND cheap cost of building your own business. When I was an intern to install and config a bunch of switches, routers, firewalls, and realized a switch is so expensive that I wouldn't be able to build my own business like this. So I got into software development job. It's way easier and also able to do side software project. IaaS or PaaS is so cheap, no needs to mess with data center myself. Work for X for a decade and open your own X business is not applicable to semiconductor job.
- kazen44 4y agostarting a networking company (except consulting) is extremely hard. Building an ISP is even harder and requires insane amounts of money. Most of my friends in the network engineering field either work at companies that are large/complex enough to have challenging environments with proper networking hardware, or work as a freelance consultant for said companies. The problem with career growth in network engineering is that, to grow in technical skills, usually larger networks are require to get access to gear and systems that can pose a challenge. Not a lot of those companies exist. Also, making a screw up in suchs an environment is far more detrimental than in a small network, because of the increased scale/complexity of the network.
- Existenceblinks 4y ago> usually larger networks are require to get access to gear and systems that can pose a challenge Exactly. Simulation program is not going to suffice. Sometimes one has to bring a firewall home to debug something. And there's going to be several vendors, not only Cisco. And it's going to need more certs, not just CCNP, CCIE.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bigcat12345678 4y agoWtf is this type of discussion... Cannot the business just pay a bit more...
- iancmceachern 4y agoI love this channel, glad to see it here. I agree with his sentiment after working in the semiconductor industry in the Bay area off and on for the last 15 years.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- abledon 4y agojust looked at that youtube channel... holy cow the amount of content coming out is huge. surely its not just 1 guy doing all the research _and_ narrating? he probably has a team? Edit: wow ok it really is 1 guy. (albeit good patreon revenue to pay for research time) from patreon: > My name is Jon and I make videos on the Asianometry YouTube channel. I started the channel as a way to share things that I've learned about Chinese and Taiwanese history as well as vlog a little bit on my explorations of Taiwan.
- KennyBlanken 4y agoSays he's one guy != he's actually one guy. Almost certainly has an editor, a script proofer, etc. It also seems highly unlikely he's only making money from ads and patreon. A lot of youtubers get money under the table to astroturf.
- kranke155 4y agoIf it pays enough, yes. The problem is always pay. Don’t be fooled.
- renewiltord 4y agoWell, I have lots of friends and relatives who work at the Intel fab and Intel is a pretty big employer, so the answer is yes, right?
- sudosysgen 4y agoIntel famously has had problems retaining and hiring highly qualified people.
- systems_glitch 4y agoSpeaking from experience, if you're not into the semiconductor engineering side, consider looking for maintenance personnel positions with fabs. The work is interesting, your boss will probably hold a PhD and be competent, and you won't be stuck behind a desk all day.
- CobaltFire 4y agoI’m retiring from the military with a cross section of skills that seem to be in demand for semi manufacturing, so have had a few conversations with recruiters. The wages on offer weren’t terrible, but given the best offer came from San Jose and it was right about a mortgage on a 3/2 after taxes I’m not sure if that’s sustainable comp. That said, there are other comments here about semi manufacturing pulling from defense and it seems to be true, as even before I’ve started applying those are the companies reaching out with offers in hand.
- jason-phillips 4y agoI worked at Samsung Austin Semiconductor for a decade. Samsung treated me extremely well and I really do consider them to be like family. Samsung is not like American semiconductor manufacturers. The organization is a bit more militaristic and that's not a bad thing, I liked the discipline displayed by fellow coworkers. I haven't worked at American semiconductor manufacturers, but know those who have. Their attitude about execution always struck me as less than professional. But again, I can't comment from first-hand knowledge. Unlike sbx's experience, I was able to shape things and take ownership. I owned or had responsibility for many of the internal fab systems. I created my own kingdom, ensuring it ran like a Swiss watch, against which transgressions were met with something akin to judiciously tempered wrath. I was basically left alone to ensure my responsibilities were well-managed. I loved it. I was able to work on global, billion-dollar software projects that indirectly helped change the world, through the semiconductors we produced. It's hard to describe the magnitude of a fab's operations if you haven't seen it firsthand. SAS does conduct tours in Austin; I can see if I can get you into one of those if you can't by simply calling them up yourself. I miss it. AMA. I'm about to take off from ABIA but I can answer questions later. I do believe we need more domestic semiconductor manufacturing here, so I'd be glad to help.
- mkl 4y agoWhat made you leave?
- jason-phillips 4y agoI worked there for ten years and decided that I needed to work for smaller startups using different tech stacks. It was a good move career-wise. Now I do consulting.
- bmitc 4y agoThe world is, in general, in trouble. We are absolutely obsessed with scale at all costs, and the costs will be humans and a lot of other things in the wake, as already apparent. Humans are not meant for “at scale” activities because they require things like that found in Amazon fulfillment centers or Apple’s iPhone factories. They are tedious, monotonous, and soulless jobs that are heading for more and more automation.
- jprd 4y agoI think the first thing everyone here needs to recognize, is that this is primarily a MANUFACTURING / FACTORY jerb. 99% of humans in the semi-conductor field are not designing masks and worrying about etching time or whatever nonsense marketing NANOMETER terminology is in place. They are building "don't fuck this up" teams that are focused on quality manufacturing and how many PPI in the air, highly caustic chemicals, and FUPs not failing. The same stuff everyone with an assembly line deals with turned up to 11. Then there are the IT folks who have to ensure that all these proprietary ASML or similar monstrosities are not compromised by some field tech with a compromised USB stick. The nightmares I've had about that, multi-million dollar machines controlled by Windows X and never patched and yet somehow allowed to talk to a network that also has access to the Internet and rando field techs with "updates" on a stick. Its almost as scary as how much international business relies on some random Excel file updated by humans.
- yrgulation 4y agoIf they get paid. I’d work on it even in europe if it did.
- fabthrow 4y agoCurrently working in a fab. Company and title undisclosed. Forgive language, obscures to protect self. Many problems working in fab. Current workforce very aged, many staff have let the world pass them by. These staff do no understand the world anymore. Can’t empathize new peoples! Some do not have cell phone, credit card, or home internet/computer. Staff have paid their mortgage long time and cannot understand why us young kid complain about cost of housing. Cheap 1br apartment At lowest starting wage two weeks of work. Bus take some people 2-3/hr each way if live in expensive place near bus. Need car! Old staff leave without good staff replaced them. Many mistakes. Many people worked too hard. Burnout! Manager are old guys club and play favorites. Many are sexist racist. Company tries to advertise as progressive but that’s only for looks during onboarding and stock market. Many minority are not given opportunity to advance or get promotion raises while people who look talk like manager do get advance. Many minority in lowest jobs. Manager tell work positive with COVID. They no care! COVID spread to everyone! Work long shifts and have no time for family. Many divorced and unhappy people in dying marriages due to no work life balance take their pain to work spread their misery. Laissez faire attitude to working dangerous chemical and gases. Missing warning signs and no training. No one worry about strange smell everywhere all time! Bo wonder no one want work in fab!
- refurb 4y agoThe best analogy I can think of is medical device manufacturing, since there is a decent amount in the US. The pay isn’t great by Bay Area standards but the plants are located in low cost mid-west cities. $35/hr plus overtime and benefits is an outstanding job in a city where upper-middle class homes cost $200,000. Those job very highly coveted and people stayed for decades. Top guys were making >$100,000/yr with a 2 year associates degree.