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WRT to lack of a skilled workforce, here is an interesting anecdote. I remember back in the late 90's, Intel had to fire most line workers in their FABS, and h
by rhelz 3y ago
WRT to lack of a skilled workforce, here is an interesting anecdote. I remember back in the late 90's, Intel had to fire most line workers in their FABS, and hire people with Ph.D.'s in solid-state physics.
I actually knew one of these people who were fired: She was our housecleaner. And--like the supper-smart garbage man of the Dilbert Cartoons, she was very smart. Smarter than me. I know because she helped me solve some problems I couldn't solve on my own.
Why was she cleaning houses? Tragic story. No doubt she could have gotten a Ph.D., but she was older, had some health problems which wouldn't let her work 60-80 hours a week. And she was black, perhaps discrimination was a factor too.
I'd hate to even think of how smart you have to be to work in FABs today, but let me tell you, not even $8.5 billion is going to create more of these people. Best you can hope for is you can pay them enough to get them to work for you.
- up2isomorphism 3y agoMaybe too much money is exactly the problem? I rarely see people tackling hard problem for money, because it is not an efficient way of making money.
- Esras 3y agoToo much money in what context? It can be an extremely effective motivator for solving a business problem - hire smart people to work on it, they'll happily go work for double their pay.
- adolph 3y agoA baby can't be made in one month just because you had the money to hire 9 surrogates. Many processes do not scale just because a money spigot turned on. What most often does scale as quickly as monetary availability is fraud, waste and abuse.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoThere are thousands of items on the agenda in the present day, everything from better open source LLMs to moon-base railway designs, so even if 99% of these turn out to be duds that can’t be budged, there are still sufficiently many remaining to absorb all bonafide super-geniuses on Earth several times over.
- adolph 3y agoIn this particular item on the agenda, chip fabs, it is not clear spending more money one time will produce a result, much less a faster result by attracting "bonafide super-geniouses." One might respond that "you can't win if you don't play" which would lay bare the gamble.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoChip fabs is just one of ‘many processes’ which was what I was replying to. It’s practically irrelevant if even 99% of all processes have this characteristic. There’s way more than enough remaining to occupy all available people who could actually speed up large complex projects by 10x. Of course if they were somehow disproportionately forced to only ever work on chip fabs for the rest of their lives, then that would create huge waste, but this doesn’t seem likely.
- lupire 3y agoThat's exactly the problem. We don't have an abundant supply of supergeniuses
- MichaelZuo 3y agoIf there was an ‘abundant supply’ most of them wouldn’t be considered such any longer, just regular geniuses, because the population average would have been raised up.
- tacocataco 3y agoCouldn't you keep hiring surrogates until you get a premature birth?
- II2II 3y agoWhile you could convince me that too much money would attract the wrong type of people, you would be hard pressed to find more competent people by offering less money. (I'm not dismissing that there are other motivations involved, just the ability to grow a talent pool by offering less.)
- bluGill 3y agoOnce you have a "good life" you start looking for other things than money. I know a few people who have quit a good job they didn't like for one that paid a little less but they liked more. Though there is a limit to how far someone can go down in pay before they don't like the new job because of pay.
- eitally 3y agoThat's a silly anecdote and I have a hard time believing chip fab line workers are too much different from those in other types of high-tech (where I spent 15 years working on test automation & quality systems). Some smart folks, for sure, but almost zero roles required even actual engineering background. A lot of management had strong technical education, but the vast majority of line workers are just following simple instructions. I could be wrong about how fabs work, of course, and would love to learn more.
- nonethewiser 3y agoI think people are also underestimating the intelligence of people in the once very large manufacturing workforce.
- bluGill 3y agoIt doesn't help that the union culture is opposed to promoting smart people. If you work an assembly line you are not better than anyone else on the line, so their position makes sense - smart people are not worth more. However it also means smart people that want to move to management (want - if you are content that is your choice) find things worse: you are required to start at the bottom and your previous experience doesn't count for anything (including the pension)
- smallmancontrov 3y agoThe decline in American manufacturing happened alongside a decline in union membership in manufacturing. If unions were the causal factor, why do these trends coincide rather than oppose? Alternative theory: Protectionism industrializes and trade liberalization deindustrializes. Alexander Hamilton's protectionist policies weren't just successful at industrializing the USA, he and his successors were correct as to why they were successful. The relatively recent shift to trade liberalization, by contrast, had the generally accepted effect of such policies on the industrial base. Of course, assets got pumped along the way and that's what really mattered to the people in charge.
- 1-6 3y agoCould her health problem stem from the fact that she worked at the chip fab? Those places are notorious for using chemicals that are harmful to humans.
- mfer 3y agoThis award isn't about innovation, the best way to do things, or job requirements. This about supply chain security and national defense. So many of our components are made overseas and under governments who are not close allies. This is in order to operate things in our country. When you have the FABs in the US and under US control you can handle international foreign policy and the security of the nation differently.
- okasaki 3y ago> under governments who are not close allies. I wonder why...
- chiefalchemist 3y agoFair enough. But then the question is: How did this happen in the first place? If the Pentagon is playing out scenerio after scenerio after scenerio, how did we allow ourselves to be so embarrassingly venerable? And now the taxpayer is on the hook for $8.5B and growing? There's a certain smell to all this.
- rhelz 3y ago> How did this happen in the first place? By not pursuing protectionist public policies. > the taxpayer is on the hook for $8.5B $8.5B is a big price tag, but whether the government should spend it or not depends on whether or not the investment pays off.
- pwthornton 3y agoThis is way bigger than trade policies. Intel was the world leader in chip-making until fairly recently. Steve Jobs wanted them to build the iPhone chips because they were a generation or two ahead of any other fab in the world. Today, Intel is no longer leading the world in chip fab process. Intel at the time wasn't interested in fabing ARM chips, and the rest is history. Intel and American fabs fell behind for a number of reasons. Some of it is tied to our education system and the kinds of people we are training. Some of it is probably related to Intel turning their nose up at the iPhone chip making, losing billions upon billions of money they could have put into R&D. Some of it is a story of American corporate culture not innovating enough.
- UncleOxidant 3y agoAren't the vast majority of line workers in a fab people with a bachelors degree (or less)? The process engineers might be PhDs, but not most of the folks working in the fabs. Also, fabs are becoming more and more automated, so less people are needed overall.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoIntel became the biggest sponsor of EE H1Bs in this time frame. They were trading competent citizens for compliant serfs.
- Raydovsky 3y agoIIRC The original chips act had a provision that companies would have to train and hire X% of non-white/non-asian engineers.
- gen220 3y agoIt wasn't just intel, it was every semi-conductor manufacturer in the valley (hence the inability to find other work). They closed because it was cheaper to build in other countries, or to outsource from contractors who build in other countries (where organized labor doesn't exist). The U.S. lost thousands of high-paying (and tax-paying) labor positions and atrophied the skills that went with them. Intel profited from it. These people were disproportionately minorities, disproportionately well-represented by unions, and had made a lot of progress in improving their working conditions re: use of terribly corrosive chemicals. All of that backslid when labor went off-shore. Now, the taxpayer has to pay Intel $8.5B to bring back manufacturing capacity to the U.S.; nice job, if you can get it. It'll be really interesting to see who takes these jobs, and how quickly we can rebuild the muscles that Intel shareholders profited from decomposing.
- gentleman11 3y agoHow long until all those new workers are laid off again as intel goes back to overseas fabs?
- speed_spread 3y agoAdd the numbers get bigger and the risks increase, the number of "cheap labor" countries where investments in large tech infrastructure are safe is shrinking every year. Maybe South America? Intel has (had?) a fab in Costa Rica...
- golergka 3y agoSouth America is very underrated. People still think about the region in 20-30 year old stereotypes, but most countries have gotten much more stable, economics have improved drastically. Workforce is highly educated, different countries share a very similar culture and mostly speak the same language, which means that a lot of things can be scaled much easier. Of course, there's also Portuguese, which is still somewhat similar, and Quechuan languages speakers who learn Spanish as a second language, but this doesn't change the equation much. The only thing the region lacks is investment and ecosystem to attract and protect it.
- demondemidi 3y agoWell, I was there in the late 90's and don't recall that anecdote. Most of the people in the fab shuttle the lots from station to station. Some even look at porn and get high while waiting (that's my anecdote, clean room alarms went bananas when he lit up). And robots that zip around the ceiling and drop down in dangerous areas do the rest. Mind citing your anecdote? I realize I wasn't in every fab, but it's not rocket science, even on 300mm and beyond.
- rhelz 3y agochuckle Asking for further justification is always fair play, and I don't mind being checked....but I'm kind of a loss as to what to cite. It wasn't something I read in a book, it was lived experience. But, I mean when you say: > clean room alarms went bananas when he lit up you might have answered your own question...that stuff may have flied when we were at 180 nanometers, but lets face it, there's only so far down the road of Moore's law you can travel with people who smoke in a clean room...
- demondemidi 3y agoJust show me where PhDs are needed to wheel a batch of wafers from the litho room to the bath. I'll wait.
- rhelz 3y agoIf you think that is the bulk of what people in fabs do, well… obviously you aren’t a golfer.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- demondemidi 3y agoThere's thousands of people working at D1X. They are not all PhDs. Your initial post is just some made up BS polluting hacker news. I really like this site, but if you want points for storytelling, go to slashdot or reddit.
- imgabe 3y agoYou should hire the very smart people to figure out how to make the jobs doable for average people. Surely there must be a way to configure line work to not require a PhD...
- rhelz 3y agoAnything which doesn't require a Ph.D. in solid-state physics to do must be automated, because only machines can handle/manipulate/transport the wafers with enough precision not to damage them.
- joncrane 3y ago>Intel had to fire most line workers in their FABS, and hire people with Ph.D.'s in solid-state physics Why did Intel HAVE to fire most line workers and hire Ph.Ds?
- rhelz 3y agoWell, even back in my grandfather's day (he was a millwright for Ford) working on the line required more mental skills than most people realized. Remember when Elon Musk finally gave up trying to 100% automate his factories? He said "we undervalued the abilities of humans." If manufacturing cars is so complex you can't train monkeys, or build robots, to do it, how much harder must it be to make chips? Making things that small, that precisely, repeatably, profitably, by the millions and billions, is spectacularly complex. And with each process node, the complexity grows even faster than Moore's law does. Eventually, it gets to the point that even to tell somebody how to do something, you need to do it using the language of advanced physics, the kind of physics which requires you to spend studying 60-80 hours a week, for 5-7 years in grad school to learn. As the gen-X proverb goes, reality bites.
- Spooky23 3y agoHardware people get boned. I worked at a non-semiconductor tenant company in a semiconductor research campus/facility. Parking lots tell the story. There was a pecking order for the lots, which made it easy to classify. The best off working people were the trades guys. The plumbers and electricians were high-skilled and well paid. Like guys commuting 2,000 miles and buying a second $90k F-250 to drive around town in. The bigshots were Teslas, BMWs, big SUVs. There were a few corvettes and a Ferrari. The Fab engineers and workers were all driving old Hondas and Hyundais. One of my good friends from high school was a mechanical engineer at IBM and a master at some super-critical process for mainframes. They moved to a different architecture and his entire team was just nuked from orbit before they even knew what was happening. He was selling real estate for awhile and eventually got back into engineering.
- fireflash38 3y agoI don't think you can draw conclusions from that, considering you have absolutely no idea who is in massive debt for those vehicles. Especially with tradesfolk because the vehicle is a business expense.
- Spooky23 3y agoPeople making good money tend to not, as a cohort, drive 8 year old cheap cars. And of course ymmv between companies, regions, facilities or projects. There are software people trapped maintaining stupid legacy insurance code and similar dreck too.
- anonuser123456 3y agoI work at a hardware company. Our parking lot looks like a Tesla, Rivian and Mazarati dealership.
- davidgay 3y agoThere's something off in this thread, which seems to posit that all of this is about Intel moving fab capacity back to the US and away from unreliable places. That is clearly not the reality: according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_sites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si..., 16 of 23 of Intel's fabs are in the US and 6 of the other 7 are in close allies (Ireland, Israel, Germany). There may be something to be said about what's happened to the rest of the US fab industry, though.
- 0xedd 3y ago[flagged]