3 ms·

Thanks, this is interesting to read! If what you're saying is true, it's a bit sad that all these large-capex industries that are so important for society to h

• alephnerd 2y ago
  Conversely, the money that was redeployed into higher margin industries had a net benefit for innovation. AMD EPYC would not have existed if AMD was stuck in the fabrication and packaging space because they wouldn't have had the money to spend building a dedicated design team, and Nvida's breakthroughs in GPUs would have never happened if Nvidia had to also fabricate and package. A company cannot have every single subsegment of an industry - it's unrealistic and a bad use of capital. And high capex low margins industries are bad for workers from a salary perspective. This is why CS became so popular in comparison to EE/CE - the starting salaries are easily 2x as a SWE compared to working as a Fab Engineer. And it's not a simple question of raising salaries. Becuase margins are very low (within the low double digits at most), a foreign competitor like TSMC, Samsung, and UMC can win by paying peanuts - which is what they did. Engineering salaries at those companies in Taiwan and SK are around $40-70k with 996 hours de facto enforced (and why Samsung employees globally are on strike right now)