17 ms·
America is building chip factories. Now to find the workers
- archo 3y agohttps://archive.is/BjHpZ https://archive.is/BjHpZ
- outside1234 3y agoThe reality is that these factories are nearly lights out now.
- postalrat 3y agoCan you name some of these factories?
- georgeburdell 3y agoSoftware salaries have to fall a lot more to keep semiconductor experts from doing lateral moves. I have an EE PhD, concentration semiconductors, and worked in the industry for a while, and a decade out my entire group of semiconductor PhD friends has now moved onto data science, ML, firmware, etc.
- voidfunc 3y agoOr semiconductor salaries need to rise...
- doctorwho42 3y agoYou guys keep focusing on the wrong thing, salaries are a first order solution. What needs to happen is that the average salary can provide a citizen with a comfortable and simple life (housing/shelter, food, clothing, etc.). Jacking up salaries without bringing the standard of living for the rest of your society will only lead to a continued breakdown of the social fabric that we have been seeing steadily happening over the past 30-40 years.
- CuriousCosmic 3y agoYeah and that can happen by paying everybody more. Salaries have largely stayed the same while prices have risen and that excess has gone to profits. If workers demand more pay and they force the issue, the economy eventually will reach equilibrium. The issue currently is that those workers can't really do that because the US government has shown time and again that they don't really care that much if a company violates organised labor laws or labor laws in general (you get a fine and a slap on the wrist) but they will bring down god's wrath if workers/a union has an "illegal strike" after the employer ignores their demands. There is a reason why ever since Reagan took a hardline anti-union stance and disbanded the PATCO union for having the audacity to strike in the 1980s that the number of major strikes per year has steadily declined. https://www.bls.gov/web/wkstp/annual-listing.htm https://www.bls.gov/web/wkstp/annual-listing.htm
- johnnyanmac 3y agoif you pay everyone 10% more, the difference between a $30k worker barely scaping by and a $100k worker that is cofortable simply increases by $7k. I'm not saying everyone can't get a pay raise, but we can't think linearly here. Semiconductor workers aren't exactly applying for food stamps.
- Dylan16807 3y ago> if you pay everyone 10% more, the difference between a $30k worker barely scaping by and a $100k worker that is cofortable simply increases by $7k. As long as more of the gross profit goes to workers, that's a step in the right direction. Though I would say the linear solution is paying everyone $6k more, which is much better!
- johnnyanmac 3y ago>As long as more of the gross profit goes to workers, that's a step in the right direction. That's now how the lesser paid workers will see it, unfortunately. >Though I would say the linear solution is paying everyone $6k more, which is much better! That would be flat (Y = 6000 vs Y = 1.X%). Perhaps better, but I'm not sure if that's been done outside of stimulus checks. I think what the person up chain was alluding to was to increase minimum wage or similar initiatives. Doesn't help the higher end of the working class but helps out the lower end immensely, and indirectly helps out the middle as well.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoHow could we afford to run the software if the transistors were two micro pennies more?
- zbrozek 3y agoIf each transistor got 2 micropennies more expensive, that would more than double the price of a midrange CPU.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dontupvoteme 3y agoThe problem is there are only a few players in the game, so they basically collaborate to keep wages down.
- 4gotunameagain 3y agoI know this will be unpopular here, but no, SW wages need to fall. They are incredibly inflated compared to the rest of professions, and not only it is impossible to raise all wages like that, but other, harder and more important professions need to be incentivised more. A doctor working at a public hospital should be paid much more than us, that are sitting at their computer all day. Yes, doctor wages need to rise, but also SW wages need to fall. And this is comping from an aerospace engineer with an inflated wage, which, being in Europe, is not nearly as unfairly inflated as in the US.
- hardware2win 3y agoDoctors are paid better than SEs, arent they?
- yomlica8 3y agoI think depends upon the SWE and depends upon the doctor's specialization. Doctors do have a credential system that sets them up for a longer more stable career path with few ageism concerns. But all things considered more money now for less time investment is more valuable.
- markus_zhang 3y agoI think average doctors should get paid more but doctors who work in private places probably need to get the same treatment as high end SWE. But all in all I think worker's share of wealth shoud raise but that's a bloody question.
- dnissley 3y agoDo you have any ideas about how to make software cheaper?
- 4gotunameagain 3y agoYeah, don't pay people that write back end javascript more than firemen. Let's start with that.
- gregoriol 3y agoOr things need to be automated
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jmoak3 3y agoIt’ll rise when there are more employers competing for the workers. Until then they don’t have to try so hard to find people, students can see the bad salaries ahead of time yet they study for a decade for these roles regardless.
- typon 3y agoSame story here. Why should I spend years toiling away in a clean-room for shit pay when I can 3x or 4x my pay doing a much easier job?
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoSupply and demand for labor should fix this. NVidia and friends can clearly afford to pay more for wafers.
- seydor 3y agocan never be competitive with overseas suppliers
- tpmx 3y agoFor reference: The annual median TSMC salary in Taiwan including bonus was 58k USD in 2021. (https://old.reddit.com/r/taiwan/comments/sulof6/tsmc_employees_to_receive_an_average_of_nt1249/iyhatyv/ https://old.reddit.com/r/taiwan/comments/sulof6/tsmc_employe...)
- dharmab 3y agoWhich is more than TSMC offered some of my friends in the US who had industry experience. They're cheapskates.
- jameshush 3y ago58k/year in Taiwan is also considered crazy good money. The average income in taiwan is about $58k NTD/month (aka $1900ish USD) https://www.statista.com/statistics/319845/taiwan-average-monthly-wage/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/319845/taiwan-average-mo...
- tpmx 3y agoSure, but that doesn't help with making it easier to compete with Taiwan in this field on a global scale.
- dharmab 3y agoI had a number of friends working in chip fabs and all of them left the industry due to terrible pay and benefits. Most went into software, some into other manufacturing industries.
- baz00 3y agoYeah this. Hasn’t changed then. 25 years ago I finished a few years sitting in front of Virtuoso. I did some days working in the internal fab as well. Left and worked for a web design startup and tripled my salary overnight.
- paganel 3y ago> Software salaries have to fall a lot more to keep semiconductor experts from doing lateral moves. It's quite similar to the Baumol effect [1], and I think that's what the CCP and the Chinese authorities more generally had in mind when they cracked down on the likes of Tencent and Alibaba a few years ago, meaning forcing the big Chinese software companies down a peg or two so that Chinese engineers would also go into the hardware industry. It also helps that while pure software is important for fighting a war, actually making physical stuff is even more important. No-one has ever won a war by employing Tik-Tok against the enemy, while autonomous mass-produced cheap drones have been as close to a game-changer as one could get in this current war in Ukraine (for both sides). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
- 317070 3y agoOf me and my friends that finished a master in EE, everyone went into software (well, one in mechatronica instead). Not for the lack of love, but for the lack of pay. I would love to go back to EE, but I'm making 5x-10x now in ML software. I don't even understand why the pay in EE is so low. They have healthy profit margins, yet tend to complain about the lack of finding skilled people.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>I don't even understand why the pay in EE is so low. They have healthy profit margins, yet tend to complain about the lack of finding skilled people. Because: 1) EE profits are not healthy at all. Ignore Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, QUALCOMM, which are the outliers printing money due to their market dominant position bordering on monopoly. Most other HW companies have super thin margins by comparison because they're in a race to the bottom with Asian companies which improved a lot, and R&D costs in HW eat up a lot of the profits, leaving you almost nothing for wages. I worked at a German company building super cool X-ray machines for the semiconductor industry and the wages were relatively poor because despite those machines costing as much as an apartment, most of that price is eaten up by components, manufacturing, Q&A and R&D that very little is left for high wages. 2) Much more cheap labor competition from abroad due to offshoring because HW is not user facing so it can be offshored without any drops in UX, as the user facing SW is kept in the west. Since HW offshoring has been going on for much longer than SW and with far more investments in getting it right, meaning companies have a lot more experience with offshore HW dev on the cheap while maintaining high quality. SW hasn't (yet) seem the same push.
- jpgvm 3y agoPretty much this. I worked at a HW company and we did our board design, bring-up etc all in Taiwan, board production/population, enclosure, power, final assembly etc all in Shenzhen and firmware/software as global remote but US centric. It wasn't just that it was cheaper, it was faster, more accurate and more flexible. With collocation of everything you need to build HW (i.e all the inputs, parts etc being made in the same place) it was just so much faster not only to do initial product dev but also to spin revisions/iterate. It's going to take a long time for similar density to build up somewhere else to enable to same sort of super rapid HW development cycle.
- K0balt 3y agoOr, we could just pay semiconductor work for what it is, producing the most advanced technology on the planet. $250,000 in 2023 dollars is about what my father made as a power lineman in 1970, at $15 an hour. It was a well paid, union trade. But we need to put this in perspective. People don’t want to work for less than a blue collar job was worth in the 70s. Housing prices (on average) are not that high, wages are ridiculously low in real terms. The average home price in 2023 is about 350,000 in the USA, about 44,000 in 1970s dollars. That’s 1.5-3 years wages as a journeyman tradesman in 1970s dollars, if she were paying the cash equivalent of 350k for a house. Of course housing was both typically smaller and much more cheaply built in 1970, and for 350k today you are getting twice the square footage, and a much higher quality structure. Since an average home in 1970 would have been around half the size and 1/3 the price in inflation adjusted dollars, I think it’s safe to say that the thing that has changed here is primarily that wages are simply not enough to incentivise workers. Any skilled job that doesn’t pay at least 250k is simply not worth investing the time and effort to get the skills for. COVID gave people a chance to step back and value their time, interrupting the zombie death march toward slave wages. Now capital needs to readjust its expectations of how much they will have to pay to extract 90 percent of the surplus value of a persons life.
- jen20 3y ago> Of course housing was both typically smaller and much more cheaply built in 1970 My experience (Texas) is that homes built today might be larger but are FAR worse quality than ones even built in the 90s, let alone the 70s or (heaven forbid) the 20s. In England the same was true but on a much more extreme curve, and without being larger.
- K0balt 3y agoInteresting. May be regional I guess. Most of the homes I have been into the bones of in my area that were built in the 1970s were pretty crap. But then again in my area the 1970s was a big boom time, with a ton of new construction. Mostly 2x4 and 2x6 construction, with cheap sheathing and a bad subfloor. Anything built here in the 2000s will be 2x10 or 2x12 walls, double insulated sheathing, with triple pane windows and high r value doors, and with a floor you can confidently lay tile on.
- resonious 3y agoI'm in kind of the opposite situation where I've grown up in web dev, kinda want to get into EE, but the job prospects are really bad so hard to motivate.
- gumballindie 3y agoThis is just crab mentality.
- hindsightbias 3y ago“Immigrants account for about 40% of highly skilled workers in America’s semiconductor industry.” Well that’s not going to work. Maybe we should have a Tech Draft.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago> Maybe we should have a Tech Draft. https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1408131418589384704 https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1408131418589384704
- mensetmanusman 3y agoWe would have to employ Hollywood to young teach people that math is awesome.
- patmorgan23 3y agoMaybe through in some grammar too
- Thorrez 3y agoAnd throw in some spelling.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xorbax 3y agoThat's a humanity, and everyone knows those are bad and evil
- BeFlatXIII 3y agoGrammar is where they'll learn what a pronoun is, too!
- seydor 3y ago
- JimtheCoder 3y agoSo...did they not think of this before they started building the factories, or did they just think the employees with the required skills would magically appear?
- TrainUrWorkers 3y agoMan if only there were some sort of super obvious solution to this missing across every industry in america
- pacija 3y agoIf you build it they will come :)
- barryrandall 3y agoIf you subsidize it, they'll collect the subsidies.
- Tade0 3y agoTalking with people from different backgrounds I noticed that almost no one appreciates the scale of demographic shift the industrialized world (so that includes China and India) experienced over the past two decades. Young people have become a scarce resource and it's painfully visible already.
- delfinom 3y ago>Young people have become a scarce resource and it's painfully visible already. Yep, it leads to there being even less young people that want to live in the sticks and small towns that need them. But meanwhile they continue to try and build large factories in said locations for tax savings.
- BenFranklin100 3y agoMore immigration and raise salaries.
- remarkEon 3y agoIncreasing the supply of labor decreases wages.
- uoaei 3y agoEconomics theories based on equilibrium, laboratory settings are not all that helpful when more than one thing is changing at a time (which is literally all the time, because we live in The Real World).
- remarkEon 3y agoLabor supply and wages are a weird genre of discourse wherein people come out of the woodwork to explain ways that increasing the available pool of labor, somehow and through some magical means that we may never fully understand, does not have any effect on wages. It’s just absolutely crazy. You do not need some wildly complicated multivariate analysis to understand the effects. This was standard fare economic understanding in this country right up until the 1990s when, I suppose, we all got put back in a laboratory where labor supply and demand do not matter anymore.
- tomohelix 3y agoI am sure anyone who work in STEM can attest: immigrants do a lot of the work. Look to your left and look to your right of your work desk, chances are there is an immigrant in one of the directions you look. And yet many of those immigrants are on borrowed time. One layoff and they risk losing decades of their life and deported back home. That kind of treatment isn't fair. Especially when these are highly productive, extremely capable, and very educated demographics. They are the ideal and model citizens for any kind of country. Yet they are treated like disposables. What reasons are there to decline a visa to a PhD employed in a critical industry? Because they were born in a country with a visa backlog of 10 years?
- lotsofpulp 3y agoThey should be handed a permanent resident card with their doctorate. Maybe even Masters degrees, at least in STEM.
- sgc 3y agoCanada has an immigration system that prioritizes educated people who speak their languages. It is a much saner model.
- patmorgan23 3y agoProportionally they also take in 10x as many permanent residents each year. They also don't have per country limits.
- Terr_ 3y agoI'd interject here that America has no official national language, and I think it's prudent to keep it that way. In other words, language requirements are not something we should copy from Canadian immigration policy.
- midoridensha 3y agoIf you can't communicate effectively in one of your host country's main languages, you're not going to be able to support yourself and survive.
- NotSuspicious 3y agoI could work there and I know quite a few people who could as well. It's not a lack of skill. It's a lack of pay.
- photonbeam 3y agoIt always comes back to: pay more
- missedthecue 3y agoIs this the solution that you give to any shortage? No housing shortage, people just not paying enough? I mean, who is declining jobs here on account of pay? I feel like there is some nuance here.
- rapsey 3y agoIf they have multiple job options of course they are declining some of them based on pay?
- DoingIsLearning 3y agoThere is no nuance. Anyone in EE working in the industry can easily transition into software (in fact most of my peers migrated to ECE before even finishing their undergraduate, as soon as they understood the work prospects). I love hardware and DeepTech but why would I make 3x to 4x times less with little to no chance of remote work from home in uncomfortable clean room/ESD gear. To quote Ray Liotta this is the proverbial "Fuck you, pay me" situation.
- mint2 3y agoSame with my ChemE degree didn’t want to work for oil companies, best alternative was switch to data stuff. Pay and work location/conditions did not make sense otherwise.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoHousing is a supply shortage. There are ~300 million workers in NA, many can be wooed with high pay.
- ChatGTP 3y agoBut then the price of American chips will go up and less people will want to buy them...there is a reason why the USA went offshore in the first place...money money money
- wilg 3y agoIMO let's just let in all skilled workers as permanent residents in a quick process. Brain drain our geopolitical foes by just being a better place to live and work. After that, extend it to everybody else who wants to immigrate. Put a few guardrails on it for criminal records and ensuring they have a place to live and work and whatever else. But let's just let everyone who wants to work in the US and can find a job do it.
- dopidopHN 3y agoI’ve been brain drained. Made some money. Looking for going back home in a few years max. Maybe sooner. The US is weird, I don’t want my kids to be American. Don’t get me wrong y’all are nice and I like you. I have a good time here. But your country is not that confortable. Weird city built around cars. Scary stuff. Nature is still great but rural town are depressing and built around a highway. This feeling is often shared across my fellow qualified migrant friends from various places. The one who are adamant about staying have a very broken country of origin.
- RoyalHenOil 3y agoI grew up in the US and have American citizenship. My partner is not American, but he has an in-demand skillset and has numerous standing job offers in the US that pay much higher than any job he could get in his home country. Yet when we became a couple, we opted to settle in his country, not mine. My quality of life improved when I moved away. The US is a lovely place to visit. We go as often as we can. But it's not a good place to raise a family and grow old.
- genmud 3y agoThere needs to be more money and/or a non 4 year degree path for more of these jobs if they want to fill them.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- iamericaa 3y ago[flagged]
- rhelz 3y agoIn a capitalistic economy, what is it that signals we need to produce more of some product? Buehler? Buehler?
- phendrenad2 3y agoWhat specific skills are missing? Is that covered anywhere in other articles?
- markus_zhang 3y agoI think the low hanging fruit is to provoke China to attack Taiwan and then grab the talents from East Asia. Not joke, and I'm seeing this happening.
- hnben 3y ago> I'm seeing this happening. Are you seeing the "provoke China to attack Taiwan"-part or the "grab the talents from East Asia"-part?
- markus_zhang 3y agoBoth. But the second part definitely only starts and needs more work on the first part. I guess selling more weapons is a double win then.
- ChatGTP 3y agoDownvoted because starting WW3 is a stupid idea...
- markus_zhang 3y agoPeople done stupid things before :) good luck
- JonChesterfield 3y agoQuestion for those closer to fabrication. What workers are we talking about here? The image in my mind is of sealed rooms containing machines that move wafers around. Lots of machinery, few to zero people running the machines. Since what you want is repeatability and reliability, and we've worked out how to make machines do that. I can see said machines having maintenance schedules, where occasionally you need to turn them off and go and replace parts. Some of that is probably done by people, some by automated cycles. Are the workers needed people to carefully read maintenance manuals for machines built by someone else? Engineers to design and build new bespoke machinery (seems unlikely if these are copies of existing labs)? Fundamentally, how many skilled people that are going to be difficult to find does a state of the art semiconductor fab need. If we're talking six per lab, that's a very different problem to six thousand. (The article talks about technicians, says the US is missing about 60 thousand of them, and that it's a two year community college level of skill with some ideas for reducing that further. That sounds like a problem on the same tier as finding people to work in semi-automated amazon warehouses, i.e. basically fine)
- sgarland 3y agoI worked at Samsung’s fab in Austin for a few years, mid-2010s. Each section of tools (photo, etch, cleans, etc.) had somewhere between 20-80 technicians spread between four shifts. Mine, cleans, was I think the largest - we had about 20 techs per shift. Process, at the other end, had about 5 per shift. Each section also had N engineers, although most of them worked normal day shift hours. The fab was fully automated, in that someone would punch in an order, and many days or weeks later, wafers came out the other end. However, the machines to do all of this are incredibly touchy, prone to losing calibration, parts breaking, etc. They also require a ton of maintenance. The level of knowledge and skill to be an entry level tech is within reach for anyone who’s mechanically minded - we hired people whose only previous experience was auto mechanic. To progress to the Senior or Master tech level, though, you needed an intimate knowledge of multiple tools, to the point of having made improvements to them beyond what the manufacturer provided. I think the total number of techs in the fab was somewhere around a thousand, but I could be way off. I worked nights, so it was hard to get a sense of other shifts.
- 3y ago
- ChatGTP 3y agoDoes anyone else find it interesting that the USA seems to be doing this for ideological and political reasons more than just economics? I'm not sure this is going to go well for the simple reason that so far, it seems Taiwan, Korean and China will still be pumping out cheaper chips and more of them which will make this plan financially unviable, which really seems to go against everything the USA stands for... Personally I think it's a good thing, but I'm not sure who is going to pay for it.
- pxtail 3y ago> not sure this is going to go well for the simple reason that so far, it seems Taiwan, Korean and China will still be pumping out cheaper chips and more of them which will make this plan financially unviable, which really seems to go against everything the USA stands for Well, in this case it looks like desirable outcome is to make them stop pumping out chips - which is chilling because it would suggest that the course is set, gears are grinding and it's not matter of "if", only "when"
- mixmastamyk 3y agoStrategic reasons. Makes zero sense for a country to be completely dependent on a overseas potential adversary. We just saw the pandemic pause the car industry due to a chip shortage. The ramifications are rather obvious and finally someone is paying attention.
- ChatGTP 3y agoIf this is a government strategy (which it is) then it's political, but this doesn't mean it makes economic sense to build chips in America, it might make military sense, but that is different.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoSense is sense, who cares about only one facet in the real world? Also the scope is much larger than military, IT has worked its way into every aspect of life.
- black_13 3y ago[dead]
- tibbydudeza 3y agoTSMC is already having issues in Arizona as the local air-conditioning union wants them to employ locals but they need specialists from overseas and not folks who only know about office and home HVAC systems. Where are the tradeschools in the US ???. The average age of a plumber/joinery tradesman ???.
- bsder 3y agoThe trade schools are just fine, TYVM. However, salaries have not been rising that much in the trades which indicates that there is not some magic "undersupply" in them. When there is a genuine shortage, salaries go up. If salaries aren't going up, there isn't a shortage.
- hgs3 3y ago> America is building factories, but can it find the workers to operate them? With the jobless rate near a five-decade low, firms are already struggling to find staff. Classic case of supply and demand. If there is a high demand for workers and a low supply, then you need to pay higher salaries to attract them. If you can't, then go out of business. This is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. If the US gov. wants these chip factories badly enough then they can help subsidize paying higher wages. In doing so, they should have the right to audit, e.g. ensure the C-suites are not taking an unreasonably large paycheck.
- cashsterling 3y agoI worked in Government R&D microdevice fab for years and it was a lot of fun but hard work. What made it fun is always working on something new and challenging (inventing new processes), but in a relatively low stress environment with a lot of other absolutely brilliant people (like I was dumbest person in the room, all the time, every time). I would not consider working in a production fab for the going salaries these days... mostly boring work, on-call all the time, in bunny suit most of the day, bean-counters controlling all of the major decisions. Screw that... life is too short and we all die at the end.
- dv_dt 3y agoI find it representative of modern business management that the word “find” was used instead of “train”.
- iancmceachern 3y agoTotally, it represents a lack of understanding that they need to invest in workforce training, invest in people, not just find them randomly on the street and expect them to be trained
- GoldenMonkey 3y agoIt is not hard to find workers... if the pay is good. We have a lot of STEM resources.
- iancmceachern 3y agoThat's the rub, the pay isn't competitive as compared to similar fields and industries
- paulmd 3y ago“Nobody wants to work 20 hour shifts 5 days a week for $60k a year anymore. Also, masters degree required.”
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]