23 ms·

Software 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

Software 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 ago
Or semiconductor salaries need to rise...
- doctorwho42 3y ago
  You 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 ago
    Yeah 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 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. 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.
        ms4720 3y ago
        Minimum wage raises encourage two things in business: - automation, ie order at a kiosk at McDonald's - not hiring for the job because it is not profitable to do. This is what happens to low skill workers when we make low skill jobs too expensive.
        wildrhythms 3y ago
        Not sure if you've noticed but all those things have happened (self checkout, ordering kiosks) while wages haven't grown to meet inflation.
  - deburo 3y ago
    I guess you can keep cheerleading UBI then.
  - Clent 3y ago
    No one is trying to solve the world's economic problems here. That would do nothing to solve the knowledge worker shorter with this chip factories.
  - thatfrenchguy 3y ago
    > 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. Eh, I don't know, if you follow the example of the bay area, jacking up salaries in tech means everyone else paid more money (earning 3k a month means you're upper middle class in France and poor in the bay area). Now if we could fix our housing problem...
    - qwytw 3y ago
      > earning 3k a month means you're upper middle class in France Maybe in a poor rural area.
  - wnc3141 3y ago
    You are correct, however a more practical read is: In the short run, precluding net growth and change in supply, a rise in salary implies a redistribution from capital (shareholders) to labor.
    - Aerroon 3y ago
      Money might move from capital to labor, but you aren't getting any extra production of goods. The stuff labor wants to buy still has the same amount of scarcity. Ie you will get inflation. You need to encourage more (efficient) production to make labor better off.
      - oblio 3y ago
        Productivity has risen a ton since the 1970s. Wages are practically flat. Software and the internet haven't helped, quite the opposite. The profits are captured at the top.
        gottorf 3y ago
        https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ 1970s, of course, is when the dollar started being backed by nothing more than "full faith and credit".
        oblio 3y ago
        That graphic is misleading: https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/what-really-happened-in-1971 https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/what-really-happened-in-1971
  - Aerroon 3y ago
    >What needs to happen is that the average salary can provide a citizen with a comfortable and simple life (housing/shelter, food, clothing, etc.). This is a moving target that can never be met. We can already provide all of that for very cheap if people are willing to accept standards from some decades ago. But they aren't. They want the expensive stuff. When I was growing up the main part of the meal was potatoes/rice/pasta. Meat was a few times a week (too rarely) and there were no fancy sauces/condiments on it. Why? Because it was cheap.
    - janalsncm 3y ago
      > We can already provide all of that for very cheap if people are willing to accept standards from some decades ago. But they aren't. They want the expensive stuff. The three main things which have skyrocketed in price since the 70s are higher education, healthcare, and housing. On top of that, over-credentialized jobs now require bachelor’s degrees for things which used to require high school diplomas. This fact alone has meant that young people today start their careers significantly poorer than their parents did. Point is, it’s not just about the prices of sneakers and pasta. For all of the most important costs in life, things have gotten much more expensive.
      - TexanFeller 3y ago
        > over-credentialized jobs now require bachelor’s degrees for things which used to require high school diplomas High schools do not maintain any sort of reasonable standards for granting a degree anymore, so it's no wonder businesses require a college degree. We decided everyone needed a HS degree, so we started lowering the standards for it, "teaching to the test", and only focusing on improving the worst quartile students to minimum tested standards. Now the same thing is happening with colleges.
        janalsncm 3y ago
        Sure, but that means that students today aren’t getting bachelor’s degrees (the “expensive stuff”) by choice, but by necessity. That’s tens of thousands poorer (and ~4 years older) because of a shifting job market.
  - jabradoodle 3y ago
    The world runs on chips, a huge proportion of which comes from a single country which also happens to be under threat of invasion from a country hostile to the West. Sorting out the supply chain here is a pretty critical issue that makes sense to tackle in isolation.
  - vasco 3y ago
    To solve the need for super specialized workers you actually need to jack up salaries. Nobody is going through the training and intensity of a semiconductor fab job for the same they could make walking dogs if that's how it worked.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    In context, relative salaries are exactly the right thing to focus on. If software salaries are higher than EE salaries, EEs will move into software. Although occasionally I talk to people who seem to believe changing careers is impossible for some reason so Imagine there probably is some confusion on that point among some readers. While we do want general welfare to improve that wasn't the topic in the thread.
    - Viliam1234 3y ago
      For some reason, the free-market arguments only apply to the people at the bottom of the pyramid. If you want to buy bread in a supermarket, but the bread is more expensive than you would like it to be -- hey, that's the market price, deal with it. If a company wants to hire a specialist, but the specialist is more expensive than the company would like them to be be -- attention people, our society has a serious problem that we need to solve immediately by reforming education and immigration and whatever else might be necessary.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      >If software salaries are higher than EE salaries, EEs will move into software. Although occasionally I talk to people who seem to believe changing careers is impossible for some reason Maybe because it is impossible in practice? I'm an EE trying to move from embedded SW to higher level (backend/dev-ops since I had some experience with that and with python), and all I get are rejections ("sorry, thanks for your application but we can't move forward with it since we have so many quality applicants with more experience to choose from"). To me it seems, the current market doesn't seem to favor career switchers at all. Companies seem to be looking for seniors or at least mid level experienced in their area of work, so switching careers does indeed seem to be impossible right now. Or maybe I live in a bad market.
      - careerswitcher 3y ago
        Now is a bad time. Two years ago I was hired with no experience as a career switcher onto a full-stack web (mostly backend) team. Now the same team is hiring and wants a mid-level with 3 years of experience.
  - dontlaugh 3y ago
    Correct. Lowering prices increases the purchasing power of every worker. That could be achieved by pursuing production for use, not profit. Municipal collective ownership works quite well for utilities (like ISPs) and housing. Regional collective/co-op food production can work well too. Nationalised transportation and medicine works in many places. And so on. It only takes the workers to be sufficiently well organised to obtain the means to produce in this way.
    - cpursley 3y ago
      The entire selling point of free markets is that it keeps prices in check due to competition. Every experiment in human history of nationalization of production has failed miserably. Instead, let’s cut the red tape and remove the barriers in the parts of the economy that are not following the rules of the market. Do that and prices will decrease.
      - dontlaugh 3y ago
        Every experiment in human history of deregulation, privatisation and austerity (neoliberalism) has failed miserably to serve the needs of the working class. Experiments with collectivisation have failed to serve the needs of the capitalist class, for sure. It's why they use union busting, sanctions, coups and invasions to cause such experiments to fail.
    - gottorf 3y ago
      > pursuing production for use, not profit Profit is a much-misunderstood concept. Private profit is the best way discovered so far to align incentives for those who produce. As Adam Smith said, "it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." A system that disregards profit and instead relies on some other incentive structure can work in small groups of people for short periods of time; but eventually those other incentives (usually some kind of familial love, a sense of group belonging and solidarity, or similar) run out of steam, and it fails to scale both in size and time. To paraphrase Churchill, free-market capitalism is the worst system of economics, except for all the others that have been tried. > Nationalised transportation and medicine works in many places Only for a certain definition of "works". The Seoul Metro, owned by the city of Seoul, for example, is a huge network of clean, efficient subway lines that millions ride daily to get places. It's really quite nice to use. Under the hood, however, is the fact that they lose a quarter of a billion dollars every year, and is subsidized by taxpayers from around the whole country, most of whom don't even live in Seoul.
  - probelm 3y ago
    Nah, you’re wrong too. Tax the rich. Their actions the last 30 decades and even 40 are easily Googled They’ve collided with government to expropriate worker wealth, or more accurately, propagated the myth a mathematical minority are the keystone to physical reality itself They’re only a few mere mortals and their riches are only possible so long as the majority graciously do not kill them
    - cpursley 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - probelm 3y ago
        The cause is collusion between political and private entities to insulate a mathematical minority from taxation. Trying to change the narrative altogether while claiming solidarity is disingenuous bullshit. “Hey that guy lit the house on fire! I have 4K video and a confession!” “Yeah I saw him too! But did he really or was it the gas and the lighter? Who knows. We should look into it.”
        cpursley 3y ago
        You’re half way there - the other half is crony capitalism (regulatory capture). The solution is dealing with those issues at the source, not the tail end.
        probelm 3y ago
        [flagged]
    - probelm 3y ago
      [flagged]
  - markus_zhang 3y ago
    We need a fundamental rehaul of the system which sadly won't happen without major effort and maybe bloodshed because in the least (assuming we still want to keep Capitalism) somehow we will have to 1) Remove the political power groups that benefit from past 40 years' global development, and 2) Remove similar groups in any other sphere that support the people in 1). Maybe WW3 can bring it and keep it for a couple of decades, if we don't all die in the mushrooms.
  - giantg2 3y ago
    It's also possible that we've already peaked as a society and we can't continue to have infinite higher standard of living. Real wages have declined over the past 50 years. Due to both resource consumption/demand and environmental impact it may not be feasible for the next generation to have the same things as the previous generation. Even shifts like a secondary economy transitioning to a tertiary economy can cut out more people due to the demand for high skill/education. Despite all this, standard of living has gone up, even for the less fortunate if you compare to the past, mostly due to the quality of goods and the advantage of trade with poorer nations. When that might end or reverse is anyone's guess. But yes, inequality has also gone up as you point out. Raising other people's salaries is probably the best way to deal with this while staying in the current paradigm. Although raising chip worker wages isn't going to change inequality - you'd have to apply this to other jobs like retail, food service, custodial, etc.
    - mech765 3y ago
      Real wages have risen over the last 50 years.
      - wildrhythms 3y ago
        It's about purchasing power; not just real wages. >despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today’s real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
        gottorf 3y ago
        > It's about purchasing power; not just real wages. Real wage means purchasing power parity, or it should. These two statements cannot be true, if they are using the same definition of inflation: - Real wages have risen over the past 50 years - Today's real average wage has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago The methodology must be different.
  - black_13 3y ago
    [dead]
  - UtopiaPunk 3y ago
    I mean, sure, but we gotta start somewhere. If you want my opinion on big, society-wide changes, "What needs to happen is that the average salary can provide a citizen with a comfortable and simple life (housing/shelter, food, clothing, etc)" isn't enough. The capitalist system needs to be destroyed, and we need a new arrangement of society where workers own the means of production and the value is shared with everyone, not a few arbitrary billionaires. Restructure society to benefit everyone (or at least work towards that goal), rather than a society that unequally benefits the capitalist class. But until that movement is ready to happen, I think it's fine to acknowledge that the "real" cost of living has risen over the past few decades, while most people's "real" wages have remained stagnant. If it's not salaries, then I think the next thing to look at is the exorbitant housing and rent prices.
  - randysalami 3y ago
    Or we go back to the old ways where servants make up one chunk of society, indebted and poor, and the rest is made up of petty elites and elites. You can tell from this post how many people want this and are scared they might eventually fall to the former. “No it’s perfect reasonable for me to make 150k. No that doesn’t make me an oppressor. Sorry you make 30k a year, now go fill up my beverage peasant or die”.
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  How could we afford to run the software if the transistors were two micro pennies more?
  - zbrozek 3y ago
    If each transistor got 2 micropennies more expensive, that would more than double the price of a midrange CPU.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- dontupvoteme 3y ago
  The problem is there are only a few players in the game, so they basically collaborate to keep wages down.
- 4gotunameagain 3y ago
  I 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 ago
    Doctors are paid better than SEs, arent they?
    - yomlica8 3y ago
      I 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 ago
    I 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 ago
    Do you have any ideas about how to make software cheaper?
    - 4gotunameagain 3y ago
      Yeah, don't pay people that write back end javascript more than firemen. Let's start with that.
- gregoriol 3y ago
  Or things need to be automated
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jmoak3 3y ago
  It’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 ago
Same 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 ago
  Supply and demand for labor should fix this. NVidia and friends can clearly afford to pay more for wafers.
  - seydor 3y ago
    can never be competitive with overseas suppliers
    - tpmx 3y ago
      For 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 ago
        Which is more than TSMC offered some of my friends in the US who had industry experience. They're cheapskates.
      - jameshush 3y ago
        58k/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 ago
        Sure, but that doesn't help with making it easier to compete with Taiwan in this field on a global scale.
dharmab 3y ago
I 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 ago
Yeah 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 ago
Of 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 ago
    Pretty 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 ago
Or, 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 ago
    Interesting. 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 ago
I'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 ago
This is just crab mentality.

voidfunc 3y ago

Or semiconductor salaries need to rise...

doctorwho42 3y ago
You 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 ago
  Yeah 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 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. 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.
        ms4720 3y ago
        Minimum wage raises encourage two things in business: - automation, ie order at a kiosk at McDonald's - not hiring for the job because it is not profitable to do. This is what happens to low skill workers when we make low skill jobs too expensive.
        wildrhythms 3y ago
        Not sure if you've noticed but all those things have happened (self checkout, ordering kiosks) while wages haven't grown to meet inflation.
- deburo 3y ago
  I guess you can keep cheerleading UBI then.
- Clent 3y ago
  No one is trying to solve the world's economic problems here. That would do nothing to solve the knowledge worker shorter with this chip factories.
- thatfrenchguy 3y ago
  > 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. Eh, I don't know, if you follow the example of the bay area, jacking up salaries in tech means everyone else paid more money (earning 3k a month means you're upper middle class in France and poor in the bay area). Now if we could fix our housing problem...
  - qwytw 3y ago
    > earning 3k a month means you're upper middle class in France Maybe in a poor rural area.
- wnc3141 3y ago
  You are correct, however a more practical read is: In the short run, precluding net growth and change in supply, a rise in salary implies a redistribution from capital (shareholders) to labor.
  - Aerroon 3y ago
    Money might move from capital to labor, but you aren't getting any extra production of goods. The stuff labor wants to buy still has the same amount of scarcity. Ie you will get inflation. You need to encourage more (efficient) production to make labor better off.
    - oblio 3y ago
      Productivity has risen a ton since the 1970s. Wages are practically flat. Software and the internet haven't helped, quite the opposite. The profits are captured at the top.
      - gottorf 3y ago
        https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ 1970s, of course, is when the dollar started being backed by nothing more than "full faith and credit".
        oblio 3y ago
        That graphic is misleading: https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/what-really-happened-in-1971 https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/what-really-happened-in-1971
- Aerroon 3y ago
  >What needs to happen is that the average salary can provide a citizen with a comfortable and simple life (housing/shelter, food, clothing, etc.). This is a moving target that can never be met. We can already provide all of that for very cheap if people are willing to accept standards from some decades ago. But they aren't. They want the expensive stuff. When I was growing up the main part of the meal was potatoes/rice/pasta. Meat was a few times a week (too rarely) and there were no fancy sauces/condiments on it. Why? Because it was cheap.
  - janalsncm 3y ago
    > We can already provide all of that for very cheap if people are willing to accept standards from some decades ago. But they aren't. They want the expensive stuff. The three main things which have skyrocketed in price since the 70s are higher education, healthcare, and housing. On top of that, over-credentialized jobs now require bachelor’s degrees for things which used to require high school diplomas. This fact alone has meant that young people today start their careers significantly poorer than their parents did. Point is, it’s not just about the prices of sneakers and pasta. For all of the most important costs in life, things have gotten much more expensive.
    - TexanFeller 3y ago
      > over-credentialized jobs now require bachelor’s degrees for things which used to require high school diplomas High schools do not maintain any sort of reasonable standards for granting a degree anymore, so it's no wonder businesses require a college degree. We decided everyone needed a HS degree, so we started lowering the standards for it, "teaching to the test", and only focusing on improving the worst quartile students to minimum tested standards. Now the same thing is happening with colleges.
      - janalsncm 3y ago
        Sure, but that means that students today aren’t getting bachelor’s degrees (the “expensive stuff”) by choice, but by necessity. That’s tens of thousands poorer (and ~4 years older) because of a shifting job market.
- jabradoodle 3y ago
  The world runs on chips, a huge proportion of which comes from a single country which also happens to be under threat of invasion from a country hostile to the West. Sorting out the supply chain here is a pretty critical issue that makes sense to tackle in isolation.
- vasco 3y ago
  To solve the need for super specialized workers you actually need to jack up salaries. Nobody is going through the training and intensity of a semiconductor fab job for the same they could make walking dogs if that's how it worked.
- roenxi 3y ago
  In context, relative salaries are exactly the right thing to focus on. If software salaries are higher than EE salaries, EEs will move into software. Although occasionally I talk to people who seem to believe changing careers is impossible for some reason so Imagine there probably is some confusion on that point among some readers. While we do want general welfare to improve that wasn't the topic in the thread.
  - Viliam1234 3y ago
    For some reason, the free-market arguments only apply to the people at the bottom of the pyramid. If you want to buy bread in a supermarket, but the bread is more expensive than you would like it to be -- hey, that's the market price, deal with it. If a company wants to hire a specialist, but the specialist is more expensive than the company would like them to be be -- attention people, our society has a serious problem that we need to solve immediately by reforming education and immigration and whatever else might be necessary.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >If software salaries are higher than EE salaries, EEs will move into software. Although occasionally I talk to people who seem to believe changing careers is impossible for some reason Maybe because it is impossible in practice? I'm an EE trying to move from embedded SW to higher level (backend/dev-ops since I had some experience with that and with python), and all I get are rejections ("sorry, thanks for your application but we can't move forward with it since we have so many quality applicants with more experience to choose from"). To me it seems, the current market doesn't seem to favor career switchers at all. Companies seem to be looking for seniors or at least mid level experienced in their area of work, so switching careers does indeed seem to be impossible right now. Or maybe I live in a bad market.
    - careerswitcher 3y ago
      Now is a bad time. Two years ago I was hired with no experience as a career switcher onto a full-stack web (mostly backend) team. Now the same team is hiring and wants a mid-level with 3 years of experience.
- dontlaugh 3y ago
  Correct. Lowering prices increases the purchasing power of every worker. That could be achieved by pursuing production for use, not profit. Municipal collective ownership works quite well for utilities (like ISPs) and housing. Regional collective/co-op food production can work well too. Nationalised transportation and medicine works in many places. And so on. It only takes the workers to be sufficiently well organised to obtain the means to produce in this way.
  - cpursley 3y ago
    The entire selling point of free markets is that it keeps prices in check due to competition. Every experiment in human history of nationalization of production has failed miserably. Instead, let’s cut the red tape and remove the barriers in the parts of the economy that are not following the rules of the market. Do that and prices will decrease.
    - dontlaugh 3y ago
      Every experiment in human history of deregulation, privatisation and austerity (neoliberalism) has failed miserably to serve the needs of the working class. Experiments with collectivisation have failed to serve the needs of the capitalist class, for sure. It's why they use union busting, sanctions, coups and invasions to cause such experiments to fail.
  - gottorf 3y ago
    > pursuing production for use, not profit Profit is a much-misunderstood concept. Private profit is the best way discovered so far to align incentives for those who produce. As Adam Smith said, "it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." A system that disregards profit and instead relies on some other incentive structure can work in small groups of people for short periods of time; but eventually those other incentives (usually some kind of familial love, a sense of group belonging and solidarity, or similar) run out of steam, and it fails to scale both in size and time. To paraphrase Churchill, free-market capitalism is the worst system of economics, except for all the others that have been tried. > Nationalised transportation and medicine works in many places Only for a certain definition of "works". The Seoul Metro, owned by the city of Seoul, for example, is a huge network of clean, efficient subway lines that millions ride daily to get places. It's really quite nice to use. Under the hood, however, is the fact that they lose a quarter of a billion dollars every year, and is subsidized by taxpayers from around the whole country, most of whom don't even live in Seoul.
- probelm 3y ago
  Nah, you’re wrong too. Tax the rich. Their actions the last 30 decades and even 40 are easily Googled They’ve collided with government to expropriate worker wealth, or more accurately, propagated the myth a mathematical minority are the keystone to physical reality itself They’re only a few mere mortals and their riches are only possible so long as the majority graciously do not kill them
  - cpursley 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - probelm 3y ago
      The cause is collusion between political and private entities to insulate a mathematical minority from taxation. Trying to change the narrative altogether while claiming solidarity is disingenuous bullshit. “Hey that guy lit the house on fire! I have 4K video and a confession!” “Yeah I saw him too! But did he really or was it the gas and the lighter? Who knows. We should look into it.”
      - cpursley 3y ago
        You’re half way there - the other half is crony capitalism (regulatory capture). The solution is dealing with those issues at the source, not the tail end.
        probelm 3y ago
        [flagged]
  - probelm 3y ago
    [flagged]
- markus_zhang 3y ago
  We need a fundamental rehaul of the system which sadly won't happen without major effort and maybe bloodshed because in the least (assuming we still want to keep Capitalism) somehow we will have to 1) Remove the political power groups that benefit from past 40 years' global development, and 2) Remove similar groups in any other sphere that support the people in 1). Maybe WW3 can bring it and keep it for a couple of decades, if we don't all die in the mushrooms.
- giantg2 3y ago
  It's also possible that we've already peaked as a society and we can't continue to have infinite higher standard of living. Real wages have declined over the past 50 years. Due to both resource consumption/demand and environmental impact it may not be feasible for the next generation to have the same things as the previous generation. Even shifts like a secondary economy transitioning to a tertiary economy can cut out more people due to the demand for high skill/education. Despite all this, standard of living has gone up, even for the less fortunate if you compare to the past, mostly due to the quality of goods and the advantage of trade with poorer nations. When that might end or reverse is anyone's guess. But yes, inequality has also gone up as you point out. Raising other people's salaries is probably the best way to deal with this while staying in the current paradigm. Although raising chip worker wages isn't going to change inequality - you'd have to apply this to other jobs like retail, food service, custodial, etc.
  - mech765 3y ago
    Real wages have risen over the last 50 years.
    - wildrhythms 3y ago
      It's about purchasing power; not just real wages. >despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today’s real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
      - gottorf 3y ago
        > It's about purchasing power; not just real wages. Real wage means purchasing power parity, or it should. These two statements cannot be true, if they are using the same definition of inflation: - Real wages have risen over the past 50 years - Today's real average wage has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago The methodology must be different.
- black_13 3y ago
  [dead]
- UtopiaPunk 3y ago
  I mean, sure, but we gotta start somewhere. If you want my opinion on big, society-wide changes, "What needs to happen is that the average salary can provide a citizen with a comfortable and simple life (housing/shelter, food, clothing, etc)" isn't enough. The capitalist system needs to be destroyed, and we need a new arrangement of society where workers own the means of production and the value is shared with everyone, not a few arbitrary billionaires. Restructure society to benefit everyone (or at least work towards that goal), rather than a society that unequally benefits the capitalist class. But until that movement is ready to happen, I think it's fine to acknowledge that the "real" cost of living has risen over the past few decades, while most people's "real" wages have remained stagnant. If it's not salaries, then I think the next thing to look at is the exorbitant housing and rent prices.
- randysalami 3y ago
  Or we go back to the old ways where servants make up one chunk of society, indebted and poor, and the rest is made up of petty elites and elites. You can tell from this post how many people want this and are scared they might eventually fall to the former. “No it’s perfect reasonable for me to make 150k. No that doesn’t make me an oppressor. Sorry you make 30k a year, now go fill up my beverage peasant or die”.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
How could we afford to run the software if the transistors were two micro pennies more?
- zbrozek 3y ago
  If each transistor got 2 micropennies more expensive, that would more than double the price of a midrange CPU.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
dontupvoteme 3y ago
The problem is there are only a few players in the game, so they basically collaborate to keep wages down.
4gotunameagain 3y ago
I 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 ago
  Doctors are paid better than SEs, arent they?
  - yomlica8 3y ago
    I 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 ago
  I 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 ago
  Do you have any ideas about how to make software cheaper?
  - 4gotunameagain 3y ago
    Yeah, don't pay people that write back end javascript more than firemen. Let's start with that.
gregoriol 3y ago
Or things need to be automated
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jmoak3 3y ago
It’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 ago

Same 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 ago
Supply and demand for labor should fix this. NVidia and friends can clearly afford to pay more for wafers.
- seydor 3y ago
  can never be competitive with overseas suppliers
  - tpmx 3y ago
    For 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 ago
      Which is more than TSMC offered some of my friends in the US who had industry experience. They're cheapskates.
    - jameshush 3y ago
      58k/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 ago
        Sure, but that doesn't help with making it easier to compete with Taiwan in this field on a global scale.

dharmab 3y ago

I 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 ago

Yeah 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 ago

Of 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 ago
  Pretty 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 ago

Or, 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 ago
  Interesting. 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 ago

I'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 ago

This is just crab mentality.