7 ms·

I suspect instead a wage shortage, not a lack of people to hire.

schnitzelstoat 3y ago
I'm not so sure - this is incredibly technical work so it doesn't ring as hollow as it does when McDonald's or whatever claim the same.
- newsclues 3y ago
  A lot of the work is actually just working with dangerous chemicals, and isn't a technical desk job with prestige. It's factory work!
  - sparrowInHand 3y ago
    This - chip factory work is actually a factory job, with a obssesive compulsive quality control part. One stop, one power drop and the yield goes nowhere..
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - schnitzelstoat 3y ago
    Yeah, my brother worked on stuff like this while working in a Physics lab, he got transferred to doing the software dev parts in the end as working with the acid was very stressful.
- itake 3y ago
  My family member works at TSMC. Last I talked to him (8mo ago), American engineers quit left and right due to working conditions and pay.
  - registeredcorn 3y ago
    Can you expand a little bit on the issues with working conditions/pay at all? It would be good to have something written down publicly, if employees are being mistreated or taken advantage of.
    - javajosh 3y ago
      It depends on what's available. If you grew up in abject poverty on a rural farm then getting a job in doors, in air conditioning, without requiring brutal, repetitive physical labor is like heaven - requiring you to work 15 hour days and 7 days a week is a small price to pay. If you grew up in a wealthy suburb, then the baseline is 40-hour weeks in the same conditions, and you have aspirations to either a) work less for the same money or b) make a lot more money. Anything else is "abusive" to you. There's something like labor arbitrage going on here...
      - throw9away6 3y ago
        Those people are gone from the labor pool. They were a momentary artifact of class mobility that was present up to the early 90s but is no longer a thing
      - registeredcorn 3y ago
        I totally feel that! :) One of the things that I found great about working with computers was that it got me away from being a few inches away from a fryer for 8-16 hours a day. Not having to deal with screaming parents, sobbing children, and people literally (yes, literally) throwing hot food at me that "had too much (whatever) on it". Instead, getting to sit in a calm quiet environment for literally something like 5x the pay, for barely 3 to 4 hours of work, was a massive improvement. Over time, I managed to get into a role that has even less customer interaction, for higher pay, and less stress. It's also in something I actually care about, too! It's really great how freeing things can be, once you start to get specialized into specific areas. Anyway, I was kind of tripped out on how the commenter had phrased their initial comment, "people quitting left and right". I had taken to mean something like "...because of a recent change", and was wondering what it was. The commenter made a follow up and it sounds closer to something like, "People would join and work for TSMC for a short time, then get disgusted and quit." I had assumed that there was a long-term American work force that had been floating around, but left because of something that wasn't covered in the article, and I wanted to know what that was. It sounds like that's not really what they meant.
- intrasight 3y ago
  As any economist would tell you, "Labor Shortage" is a myth in any industry.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    Not in new or rapidly expanding fields that require expertise.
- maldev 3y ago
  Hardware (And even embedded programming) pays absolute ass since it's all outsourced to Asia. Zero reason not to do literally any other job which will use the same skills, and pay double. Bringing it to America, means upping the salaries to match what Americans expect, and alot of jobs just lowball still.
localplume 3y ago
[dead]
gloryjulio 3y ago
I agree. Labor shortage is mostly just lowball pay most the time. List the work and salary range and then let's see if it's a real shortage
nine_zeros 3y ago
It is also a shortage of workers willing to take slave driving conditions.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
phil21 3y ago
I suspect this is just the start of such stories being an extremely common theme for almost all industry other than white collar prestige careers moving forward. The demographics are pretty much written in stone at this point for the foreseeable future.
- polski-g 3y ago
  The world is running out of children: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F031019f2-eb52-44d1-9822-52676be54b39_936x660.png?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... And soon, the world will run out of people: https://twitter.com/dylanmatt/status/1676590258857603076 https://twitter.com/dylanmatt/status/1676590258857603076
  - arbitrary_name 3y ago
    Run out of people... for what? For buying Tesla model 3s? For logging the Amazon?
    - red-iron-pine 3y ago
      Pffffff the Amazon will be long gone by then. they'll be fighting over arable land in now-tropical Upstate New York
api 3y ago
For something as exotic as chip manufacture, you genuinely can have a labor shortage. We are idiots not to immediately green light any visas for people with these skills. It can also happen for skilled craft professions. It takes time to train people in that stuff, and if there's been a prolonged period of reduced investment in domestic manufacturing we might genuinely not have enough. Sometimes not having key people like welders, electricians, skilled plumbers, etc. can hold up a project since other things depend on those things. You could argue that it still ultimately is a wage shortage, but even if the wages are high it takes time to train. It will take a while for the US to rebuild domestic manufacturing capacity and talent base, but we can do it.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >but even if the wages are high it takes time to train Exactly. There's also a brain surgeon shortage even though salaries are great, but not everyone has the will, skills, time, money and patience to study and become a credentialed brain surgeon despite the high pay. Same with semi jobs, you need a hard science background that not everyone has or is willing to go through, including SW devs. Increasing wages might not fix the shortage because not everyone who can do other well paid jobs, can also do semi work.
- javajosh 3y ago
  >Sometimes not having key people like welders, electricians I would add to this list the specialized construction workers and engineers who can build the buildings required to house a fab. This is similarly specialized, I imagine, as things like hospital construction. You can't just pull 100 crews used to building homes and say "Hey build this fab mkay?"
- joncrane 3y ago
  >We are idiots not to immediately green light any visas for people with these skills. Are we, though? Isn't there some potential for industrial espionage? You know, the kind where the people that desperately want that tech for themselves are kind of the enemy of the main people that have that tech?
- ghaff 3y ago
monsieurgaufre 3y ago
Most definitely.
beanjuiceII 3y ago
what evidence do you have to suspect that? any info on current wages in that field vs what TSMC were offering etc?
- kibwen 3y ago
  Labor is a market, which means that the only two possibilities are 1) the offered pay is too low, 2) literally nobody in the entire country exists with these skills (in which case, the company needs to pony up the money to train them).
  - whiddershins 3y ago
    They have to be able to sell chips at a competitive price. In the extreme/absurd case they could pay each employee $1B/year and I’m sure they could find qualified people but they would immediately go out of business.
    - mcphage 3y ago
      So thus, the right salary to hire the people they need is somewhere between what they're currently paying, and $1B/year. My guess—and this is only a guess, mind you—is that they'd still be able to staff up on something significantly lower than $1B. But I'm not an economist, so I might be wrong there.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      TSMC has a long history of increasing double digit profit margins, in the range of $10B+ per year, and is amongst the most profitable businesses in the world. I would err on the side of TSMC deciding not to pay sufficiently to incentivize labor (which may still be the optimal move for TSMC). https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSM/taiwan-semiconductor-manufacturing/profit-margins https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSM/taiwan-semicon... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSM/taiwan-semiconductor-manufacturing/net-income https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSM/taiwan-semicon...
  - jltsiren 3y ago
throw9away6 3y ago
Someone posted some jobs listings a while back. They pay on the low end and they want a lot of work in return. It’s not surprising at all.
metaphor 3y ago
I suspect not... BLS national semiconductor industry-specific occupational employment data[1] circa 2022 suggests there are roughly as many 15-1252 title-specific "Software Developers"[2] (13,220) as there are all positions categorized under 49-0000 "Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations"[3] (13,410)...never mind that what requires specialized handling is bleeding edge ASML EUV tech for which there is a single deeply backlogged global source of, substantially increasing risk to TSMC at what is clearly a critical phase. [1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/naics4_334400.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/naics4_334400.htm [2] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/naics4_334400.htm#15-0000 https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/naics4_334400.htm#15-0000 [3] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/naics4_334400.htm#49-0000 https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/naics4_334400.htm#49-0000
somerandomqaguy 3y ago
Sorta. If the internet is to believed: > “The reality for people from Taiwan is that they are doing even more than 12-hour days often,” said the American engineer on Glassdoor. “There’s also the night shifts and weekend shifts on duty and/or on call.” - https://www.eetimes.com/tsmcs-arizona-culture-clash/ https://www.eetimes.com/tsmcs-arizona-culture-clash/ >“Sure, TSMC might allow a reasonable expression of opinion [on work-related matters]—but only from an engineer or deputy manager to the department manager,” Joey, who has worked as a 5-nanometer chip engineer for TSMC in Taiwan for nearly six years, told Fortune. “It’s impossible for managers to express their opinions to upper-level management. This simply cannot be done,” Joey said. (He asked to be identified only by his nickname due to fear of reprisals.) > [...] > “Our salary is only [for] 10 hours [a day], [but] we don’t leave until we’re done. And we’ve never been willing to report it,” a member of a private 85,000-person Facebook group for current and former employees of TSMC in Taiwan wrote in February. - https://fortune.com/2023/06/03/tsmc-arizona-plant-jobs-salary-culture-hiring/ https://fortune.com/2023/06/03/tsmc-arizona-plant-jobs-salar... This doesn't sound like it's only a wage problem. This sound like TSMC trying to use a work culture that just doesn't mesh with what Americans are willing to tolerate.
- glimshe 3y ago
  Pay high enough and people will tolerate everything that you describe. Just imagine if every chip assembly worker made 500K/year - would they care that upper management isn't listening? No, they wouldn't. Would they be okay with 12h/day? A lot of people absolutely would. The problem is rock bottom pay for rock bottom work environment.
  - benterix 3y ago
    While I completely agree, there might be something else, i.e. the elephant in the room. While having TSMC factories in the USA is great for everyone, it's not ideal for Taiwan as a state. Therefore it's in the best interest of Taiwan to prolong the current situation where the whole world depends on TSMC factories located in Taiwan, and not anywhere else.
    - 3y ago

I'm not so sure - this is incredibly technical work so it doesn't ring as hollow as it does when McDonald's or whatever claim the same.

newsclues 3y ago
A lot of the work is actually just working with dangerous chemicals, and isn't a technical desk job with prestige. It's factory work!
- sparrowInHand 3y ago
  This - chip factory work is actually a factory job, with a obssesive compulsive quality control part. One stop, one power drop and the yield goes nowhere..
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- schnitzelstoat 3y ago
  Yeah, my brother worked on stuff like this while working in a Physics lab, he got transferred to doing the software dev parts in the end as working with the acid was very stressful.
itake 3y ago
My family member works at TSMC. Last I talked to him (8mo ago), American engineers quit left and right due to working conditions and pay.
- registeredcorn 3y ago
  Can you expand a little bit on the issues with working conditions/pay at all? It would be good to have something written down publicly, if employees are being mistreated or taken advantage of.
  - javajosh 3y ago
    It depends on what's available. If you grew up in abject poverty on a rural farm then getting a job in doors, in air conditioning, without requiring brutal, repetitive physical labor is like heaven - requiring you to work 15 hour days and 7 days a week is a small price to pay. If you grew up in a wealthy suburb, then the baseline is 40-hour weeks in the same conditions, and you have aspirations to either a) work less for the same money or b) make a lot more money. Anything else is "abusive" to you. There's something like labor arbitrage going on here...
    - throw9away6 3y ago
      Those people are gone from the labor pool. They were a momentary artifact of class mobility that was present up to the early 90s but is no longer a thing
    - registeredcorn 3y ago
      I totally feel that! :) One of the things that I found great about working with computers was that it got me away from being a few inches away from a fryer for 8-16 hours a day. Not having to deal with screaming parents, sobbing children, and people literally (yes, literally) throwing hot food at me that "had too much (whatever) on it". Instead, getting to sit in a calm quiet environment for literally something like 5x the pay, for barely 3 to 4 hours of work, was a massive improvement. Over time, I managed to get into a role that has even less customer interaction, for higher pay, and less stress. It's also in something I actually care about, too! It's really great how freeing things can be, once you start to get specialized into specific areas. Anyway, I was kind of tripped out on how the commenter had phrased their initial comment, "people quitting left and right". I had taken to mean something like "...because of a recent change", and was wondering what it was. The commenter made a follow up and it sounds closer to something like, "People would join and work for TSMC for a short time, then get disgusted and quit." I had assumed that there was a long-term American work force that had been floating around, but left because of something that wasn't covered in the article, and I wanted to know what that was. It sounds like that's not really what they meant.
intrasight 3y ago
As any economist would tell you, "Labor Shortage" is a myth in any industry.
- thfuran 3y ago
  Not in new or rapidly expanding fields that require expertise.
maldev 3y ago
Hardware (And even embedded programming) pays absolute ass since it's all outsourced to Asia. Zero reason not to do literally any other job which will use the same skills, and pay double. Bringing it to America, means upping the salaries to match what Americans expect, and alot of jobs just lowball still.

localplume 3y ago

[dead]

gloryjulio 3y ago

I agree. Labor shortage is mostly just lowball pay most the time. List the work and salary range and then let's see if it's a real shortage

nine_zeros 3y ago

It is also a shortage of workers willing to take slave driving conditions.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

phil21 3y ago

I suspect this is just the start of such stories being an extremely common theme for almost all industry other than white collar prestige careers moving forward. The demographics are pretty much written in stone at this point for the foreseeable future.

polski-g 3y ago
The world is running out of children: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F031019f2-eb52-44d1-9822-52676be54b39_936x660.png?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... And soon, the world will run out of people: https://twitter.com/dylanmatt/status/1676590258857603076 https://twitter.com/dylanmatt/status/1676590258857603076
- arbitrary_name 3y ago
  Run out of people... for what? For buying Tesla model 3s? For logging the Amazon?
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    Pffffff the Amazon will be long gone by then. they'll be fighting over arable land in now-tropical Upstate New York

api 3y ago

For something as exotic as chip manufacture, you genuinely can have a labor shortage. We are idiots not to immediately green light any visas for people with these skills. It can also happen for skilled craft professions. It takes time to train people in that stuff, and if there's been a prolonged period of reduced investment in domestic manufacturing we might genuinely not have enough. Sometimes not having key people like welders, electricians, skilled plumbers, etc. can hold up a project since other things depend on those things. You could argue that it still ultimately is a wage shortage, but even if the wages are high it takes time to train. It will take a while for the US to rebuild domestic manufacturing capacity and talent base, but we can do it.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>but even if the wages are high it takes time to train Exactly. There's also a brain surgeon shortage even though salaries are great, but not everyone has the will, skills, time, money and patience to study and become a credentialed brain surgeon despite the high pay. Same with semi jobs, you need a hard science background that not everyone has or is willing to go through, including SW devs. Increasing wages might not fix the shortage because not everyone who can do other well paid jobs, can also do semi work.
javajosh 3y ago
>Sometimes not having key people like welders, electricians I would add to this list the specialized construction workers and engineers who can build the buildings required to house a fab. This is similarly specialized, I imagine, as things like hospital construction. You can't just pull 100 crews used to building homes and say "Hey build this fab mkay?"
joncrane 3y ago
>We are idiots not to immediately green light any visas for people with these skills. Are we, though? Isn't there some potential for industrial espionage? You know, the kind where the people that desperately want that tech for themselves are kind of the enemy of the main people that have that tech?
ghaff 3y ago

monsieurgaufre 3y ago

Most definitely.

beanjuiceII 3y ago

what evidence do you have to suspect that? any info on current wages in that field vs what TSMC were offering etc?

kibwen 3y ago
Labor is a market, which means that the only two possibilities are 1) the offered pay is too low, 2) literally nobody in the entire country exists with these skills (in which case, the company needs to pony up the money to train them).
- whiddershins 3y ago
  They have to be able to sell chips at a competitive price. In the extreme/absurd case they could pay each employee $1B/year and I’m sure they could find qualified people but they would immediately go out of business.
  - mcphage 3y ago
    So thus, the right salary to hire the people they need is somewhere between what they're currently paying, and $1B/year. My guess—and this is only a guess, mind you—is that they'd still be able to staff up on something significantly lower than $1B. But I'm not an economist, so I might be wrong there.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    TSMC has a long history of increasing double digit profit margins, in the range of $10B+ per year, and is amongst the most profitable businesses in the world. I would err on the side of TSMC deciding not to pay sufficiently to incentivize labor (which may still be the optimal move for TSMC). https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSM/taiwan-semiconductor-manufacturing/profit-margins https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSM/taiwan-semicon... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSM/taiwan-semiconductor-manufacturing/net-income https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSM/taiwan-semicon...
- jltsiren 3y ago

throw9away6 3y ago

Someone posted some jobs listings a while back. They pay on the low end and they want a lot of work in return. It’s not surprising at all.

metaphor 3y ago

I suspect not... BLS national semiconductor industry-specific occupational employment data[1] circa 2022 suggests there are roughly as many 15-1252 title-specific "Software Developers"[2] (13,220) as there are all positions categorized under 49-0000 "Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations"[3] (13,410)...never mind that what requires specialized handling is bleeding edge ASML EUV tech for which there is a single deeply backlogged global source of, substantially increasing risk to TSMC at what is clearly a critical phase. [1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/naics4_334400.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/naics4_334400.htm [2] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/naics4_334400.htm#15-0000 https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/naics4_334400.htm#15-0000 [3] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/naics4_334400.htm#49-0000 https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/naics4_334400.htm#49-0000

somerandomqaguy 3y ago

Sorta. If the internet is to believed: > “The reality for people from Taiwan is that they are doing even more than 12-hour days often,” said the American engineer on Glassdoor. “There’s also the night shifts and weekend shifts on duty and/or on call.” - https://www.eetimes.com/tsmcs-arizona-culture-clash/ https://www.eetimes.com/tsmcs-arizona-culture-clash/ >“Sure, TSMC might allow a reasonable expression of opinion [on work-related matters]—but only from an engineer or deputy manager to the department manager,” Joey, who has worked as a 5-nanometer chip engineer for TSMC in Taiwan for nearly six years, told Fortune. “It’s impossible for managers to express their opinions to upper-level management. This simply cannot be done,” Joey said. (He asked to be identified only by his nickname due to fear of reprisals.) > [...] > “Our salary is only [for] 10 hours [a day], [but] we don’t leave until we’re done. And we’ve never been willing to report it,” a member of a private 85,000-person Facebook group for current and former employees of TSMC in Taiwan wrote in February. - https://fortune.com/2023/06/03/tsmc-arizona-plant-jobs-salary-culture-hiring/ https://fortune.com/2023/06/03/tsmc-arizona-plant-jobs-salar... This doesn't sound like it's only a wage problem. This sound like TSMC trying to use a work culture that just doesn't mesh with what Americans are willing to tolerate.

glimshe 3y ago
Pay high enough and people will tolerate everything that you describe. Just imagine if every chip assembly worker made 500K/year - would they care that upper management isn't listening? No, they wouldn't. Would they be okay with 12h/day? A lot of people absolutely would. The problem is rock bottom pay for rock bottom work environment.
- benterix 3y ago
  While I completely agree, there might be something else, i.e. the elephant in the room. While having TSMC factories in the USA is great for everyone, it's not ideal for Taiwan as a state. Therefore it's in the best interest of Taiwan to prolong the current situation where the whole world depends on TSMC factories located in Taiwan, and not anywhere else.
  - 3y ago