Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlAWx_X5opA

by henning • 4 years ago

214 313 4 years ago

jleyank• 4 years ago

I think it will come down to money. People work with hot tar in the blazing sun for money, and toil in Amazon warehouses for money. Make it worth people's while and yeah, they'll work in semiconducting manufacturing.

henning• 4 years ago

Yes. The same applies to infosec, COBOL, and other niches where jerbs allegedly can't be filled: pay more money to attract better and more people.

kevin_thibedeau• 4 years ago

Software jobs don't have manufacturing overhead. You can't compare them to other technical fields.

rch• 4 years ago

Offering people time and flexibility is also effective. Some could work '4 on 4 off' schedules, for example.

godelski6• 4 years ago

It is interesting how often people push back against this solution. We see so many people choose careers based on the projected earnings. It is even a stereotype for immigrants: you can be a doctor, lawyer, (or now) software engineer. Ironically I think the rich would get richer if they chose to pay many of these employees more. We often frame things as zero sum games, but clearly this is a positive sum one. You invent new things and new wealth has entered the world.

kazen445• 4 years ago

heck, Henry ford started this buy increases wages so much his employees where able to buy the product they themselves have build.

bdw5204• 4 years ago

It especially comes down to money when you're trying to hire people who don't have a college degree or who can't get a good paying job with their degree.

You basically have to be making enough money to live well before you get to a point where you can genuinely care about things other than the money. Either that or the other factors have to be absolute necessities for you.

Of course the McJobs will have to pay more if somebody hires away too much of their labor pool and they can't find anybody who wants to work for $15 an hour anymore just like they had to start paying more than minimum wage a few years ago when Amazon started paying $15 an hour for warehouse workers. That's why there's so much pushback against this idea.

etempleton• 4 years ago

It is funny how simple it really is. Everyone has a price and every job has a price. If people can get a better paying job under roughly equivalent working conditions they will do that. When I hear people complain that they can’t find good help it makes me laugh. The answer is and always has been the same.

I am interested in what percentage of these jobs will be able to be filled by individuals with a high school diploma or associates degree.

jmpman4• 4 years ago

My nanny’s sister just started working at a semiconductor plant. Unfortunately she’s talking my nanny into joining. So, yes, if they pay enough.

teddyh• 4 years ago

Your cue to pay your nanny more?

jmpman4• 4 years ago

Or move on from having a nanny.

chitowneats2• 4 years ago

Not all jobs are worth the same amount.

Nannying is quite important but it is low skill (meaning supply of labor is high) and thus will probably command lower wages than semiconductor manufacturing.

kbelder• 4 years ago

Heh. Sorry for your nanny loss, but that's awesome.

jmpman4• 4 years ago

Most my nannies have been high school seniors with half days. Out of the 5 Nannie’s, 3 have gone on to graduate from a 4 year college, and one just finished her associates. One is now a nurse and another is starting med school next year.

The job is low stress. My kids are easy. We ask the Nannie’s to do nothing but supervise the kids doing their chores (basically loading/unloading the dishwasher and tending to the dogs), drive, and help the kids with their homework (I don’t think the kids have needed help in the last 2 years). Most of them play board games with the kids after homework/chores are done. Something to keep the kids off screens. Most of this is done while the Nannie’s are working on their own homework.

mikewarot• 4 years ago

Alignment of incentives is how you get people motivated. If you're married to a process line, you should get a cut of the profits that specific line makes, and that cut should go up over time.

bmismyname15• 4 years ago

Will there be low wages with huge bonuses for the CEOs while the workers have to struggle to pay rent? Young people know the future is not bright, and I encourage them to enjoy their lives while they still can.

spaetzleesser• 4 years ago

“Will there be low wages with huge bonuses for the CEOs while the workers have to struggle to pay rent?”

Isn’t that the updated “American Dream”?

bmismyname15• 4 years ago

To quote George Carlin, "they call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it".

millzlane• 4 years ago

I heard on the news this morning it's called the American Experiment.

polishdude20• 4 years ago

This world view seems like a potential death spiral. As world views become bleak, is encouraging people to say "fuck it" and maximize for enjoyment really the best move? Whatever happened to working hard to build a future for oneself? Yes, I understand there are higher powers that be and people with much more powers than you and I that are ruining the future but is the answer really to lay down and be engulfed in the pleasure-filled dopamine high ebbs and flows of the meta-verse?

It's like the chicken and egg problem. What came first? Societal collapse or the willingness of its citizens to lay down and take it? Both cause eachother. Which variable is the one we can actually change?

Yes, enjoy your lives but only to the extent to where you step away from the grind and reevaluate your priorities, take a look at what is important to you. Hunker down into the priorities that matter and remove the cruft of distractions.

bmismyname15• 4 years ago

Forget the metaverse, try LSD and psilocybin. I think the only reason Zuck is pushing this VR nonsense is that he took too much and now he thinks he can put ads in your VR trip.

Apocryphon3• 4 years ago

What came first? Societal collapse or the willingness of its citizens to lay down and take it?

The previous poster's description of the problem isn't by force of nature. It's by other people ("huge bonuses for the CEOs while the workers have to struggle to pay rent"). Perhaps the CEOs should offer some concessions to the young workers.

ModernMech• 4 years ago

Whatever happened to working hard to build a future for oneself?

People are discovering that working hard doesn't build a better future for oneself, it builds a better future for CEOs and shareholders.

jjk1662• 4 years ago

Once the captain abandons ship, why should anyone else be manning their posts? If you do not have the power to change the situation, the best move is to adapt to it, and in times of societal collapse that means looking out for yourself.

colechristensen2• 4 years ago

This world view seems like a potential death spiral.

It's not a death spiral, it's competition.

When people leave shitty jobs and vacancies can't get filled, businesses either improve conditions and pay or they lose to competitors who do.

The only way you can really negotiate is being ready to say no and leave when you get a bad offer. People actually doing that make a difference.

Suddenly a job has to be better than "fuck it" and people are making "fuck it" seem glamorous.

You'll get a lot of business people whining and whinging about it, but only actions actually matter.

powerslacker• 4 years ago

If life is ultimately meaningless then why not? The world you are talking about where people work to better the future for themselves and their progeny is reliant on life having some kind of purpose or meaning. If the universe is the result of random chance and life itself is the result of accidental chemical processes then life doesn't have inherent meaning.

Why SHOULD someone who believes the things I've mentioned do anything except attempt to maximize personal pleasure?

godelski6• 4 years ago

I think what is most insidious about this world view is that working on solutions to the issues appear as support for the viewpoint. We're all problem solvers here and we all know that the first thing to creating something new is recognizing a problem that can be solved. It can then be broken down into many sub problems that can either be worked on individually or need to be solved in tandem. But breaking down our problems and revealing its complexities are often not seen as the first steps towards solutions, but rather seen as a larger force that we need to overcome. It ignores the momentum that we see every day in our solutions: hardest at first, but once the ball is rolling things start to fall into place (often making progress, unfortunately, difficult to measure. Especially when you're in the thick of it). That frustration and setbacks can make it hard to move forward, but we always find a way in the end. We wouldn't be problem solvers if we didn't.

I don't know about you all, but I'm not willing to say "fuck it." There's enough beauty in the world to enjoy and seek to preserve. We've clearly made changes in the past and made things better. While we stand on the shoulders of giants, they are in reality 3 dudes in a trench coat sitting on one another. Personally, I take pride in trying to build a better future for my (non-existent) children and generations to come. We're all in this together and I think a lot of us want to build that Sci-Fi utopia that we read about and dreamed of as children. We can still make that world, but not if we say "fuck it."

The reality is that our decisions determine if we live in the Cyberpunk Dystopia or the Sci-Fi Star Trek-esk Utopia. Giving up is choosing the former and actively participating in its creation.

dangus2• 4 years ago

The person you replied to has some...interesting opinions about psychedelics...anyway...

As world views become bleak, is encouraging people to say "fuck it" and maximize for enjoyment really the best move?

The answer to this question is obviously yes. Why wouldn't anyone maximize for life enjoyment? I hardly think that's equivalent to saying "fuck it."

Here's the thing: the video talks about the career track of semiconductor manufacturing in Taiwan being limited. When we're talking careers that require education and training, people are going to look at the opportunity cost of choosing one vocation over another.

Whether people want to do this work really just depends on how much these roles are going to pay.

I also think it's incredibly realistic and mature for the youngest generation to acknowledge how their earning potential is being squandered into healthcare, housing, and education that all consistently grow faster than inflation. They are fully aware that employers make minimal investment in employees' education or training, prefer external hires for senior leadership and management rather than promoting from within, and purposefully optimize for their own employees to job hop. Every employee I know is 100% aware that any extra effort they put into their work isn't going to be rewarded with extra pay, and that promotions and pay raises that they can get are never as high as switching jobs.

I applaud every young person who sets boundaries and refuses to go above and beyond for employers who don't go above and beyond for their employees.

imtringued5• 4 years ago

It's a prisoners dilemma. Someone cheats and you can either not cheat and be treated like a fool while the cheater gets all the status and attention and calls you stupid and says that you deserve it or you can cheat, walk toward the cliff and fall off together with the cheater.

From a societal standpoint we should teach our children to just let themselves be cheated and work anyway and shoulder the burden of the cheaters because even if cheaters ruin your life, they only ruin your life, not society as a whole, which only is only ruined if you cheat back.

screye• 4 years ago

The worst thing is that enjoyment and consumerism of all sorts is relative. Once you get access to food, shelter and clothing (and healthcare) ....everything else only feels necessary because someone else on Instagram had it.

3 things have led to a greater dejection among the youth:

1. Rising rents and low access to shelter (basic need). Rising costs of Healthcare causes dejection to.

2. Continuous exposure to 'perfect' ultra-high consumerism lives through social media.

3. Climate change led doomerism about if the world will even exist in a few decades.

___________

This culminates into a deep resentment towards older folk. Old people disproportionately own property, stress from the Healthcare system and contributed most to climate change in their hayday.....all while controlling power in the top levels of govt.

The probable solutions are all hard to organically execute. Do we create counter brainwashing systems to make people live within their silos (ignorance is bliss)? Do we trade off guilt driven doomerism about climate change for 'the climate will be just fine' narratives ? Do we push for pro-child policies, so children aid in building longterm hope and long term plans for millennials and gen z ? Do we loosen zoning rules to allow for cheaper housing for the young, even if that means boomers assets reduce in value ? Do we regulate industries such as Healthcare and education to be cheaper by increasing access, even if that means less 'fancy' services and arguably lower quality doctors ?

All hard questions, but those are the peaceful solition. To quote JFK : "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable".

AngryData2• 4 years ago

And what are they building toward if most people are consistently losing wages under inflation and the wealthy keep getting wealth injections from the government? Many people sees this only going two ways, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer so they will likely spend their lifetime just barely surviving, or there is a huge economic crash from the top heavy economy in which case anything they built gets smashed to pieces anyways.

Most people these days have seen multiple large economic crashes and swings and have very little faith that our economic systems are stable or sustainable. Prospects for the bottom 2/3 of the population are negative, stability is questionable, long term sustainability isn't anywhere near feasible yet.

You get one life, might as well enjoy it while you can. Not just labor your days away for the short term benefits of the few.

vegetablepotpie• 4 years ago

I just finished reading a book called The Dictators Handbook, which is a tounge-and-cheek title for a book about a political science topic called selectorate theory.

It said that corporations have a similar political makeup to communist dictatorships because the number of key supporters (shareholders) a CEO needs to stay in power represents a relatively small proportion of people in the company.

As a result, the CEOs only need to keep the largest shareholders happy. Smaller shareholders and workers merely accept the direction of the company. Their opinions don’t matter.

This is why we see CEOs have massive pay and generous severance packages, while workers struggle to pay rents and qualify for government benefits.

There was a saying in factories in the Soviet Union “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work”. We see this same sentiment with workers today with “quiet quitting”. Putting in more work provides no added benefits. Incentives are misaligned, and this leads to inefficiencies that will lead to our downfall.

erdos4d• 4 years ago

Completely agree. I see others are not liking this comment. I suspect they have an interest in young people continuing to slave themselves for less and less. The cold truth is that young people can cause a hell of a lot of trouble if they do it en mass. I encourage them to not only enjoy their lives but to be ready to buck the system hard when the time comes. This world can't continue this way and the ones pushing for it are not going to stop and cut the youth a fair deal until they feel their backs against the wall and the real fear sets in. They are a thick bunch, you have to get through to them this way.

jamestimmins• 4 years ago

As a young (ish) person, I wholeheartedly disagree with and reject this worldview, and would argue you're doing others an enormous disservice by promoting it.

There are enormous challenges. Life literally depends on solving them. Suggesting that they can't be solved is tantamount to telling humanity to give up and die.

godelski6• 4 years ago

Suggesting that they can't be solved is tantamount to telling humanity to give up and die.

Not only that, but it is _actively_ participating in the cyberpunk dystopia that they are saying is inevitable. If evil only needs good men to do nothing to grow, problems only need us to give up to become worse. (I'm clearly no poet)

imtringued5• 4 years ago

They are trivial to solve but putting the solution in practice is impossible.

joemazerino• 4 years ago

Speak for yourself, nihilist. Opportunities abound for those willing to work for them.

bmismyname15• 4 years ago

Once you realize the game can't be won by doing what master tells you, you can start to beat the game. Master will not tell you how to beat him, for him to succeed you must fail.

imtringued5• 4 years ago

We have to create artificial opportunities to keep that facade up.

abletonlive• 4 years ago

This is a "doomer" comment and should be called out as such. It doesn't reflect the reality that in general globally, people enjoy a higher quality of life than previous generations do.

bnt• 4 years ago

I strongly recommend this channel if you're into all-things semiconductor industry. Great insights and (pretty much) every episode is well written and to the point.

bob1029• 4 years ago

I worked at the Samsung A2/S2 lines in ATX with a bunch of young Americans back around 2011-2013. I would say they absolutely would.

It's a very high-energy place with more going on than you can ever hope to keep track of. Even if the technology doesn't interest you, the cultural interactions should. You could have some days with Japanese, Koreans and Americans translating 3-ways in a conference room. Opportunities for business travel are probably restricted more now, but when I was there they practically begged us to travel to the Korean sites in hopes that we would learn more faster.

Some roles can be far more exciting than others. Someone has to work security and manage the facilities. That said, all the important roles seem to be the compelling ones too. I don't know of anyone who had a hard time getting another super cushy job after time at Samsung, so it's also great for long term career prospects.

gopher_space• 4 years ago

Some roles can be far more exciting than others. Someone has to work security and manage the facilities.

This would be an interesting employer for many trades.

cxr6• 4 years ago

I can't corroborate this at all.

I come from a CS background. If you leave school and enter the workforce at SAS, you will be at a disadvantage insofar as you are looking for a workplace that you hope to learn something from or one that you hope reinforces good engineering practices. The semiconductor industry, from the vantage point of an experienced systems thinker, reinforces awful engineering practices. All the things that SE folks take for granted—version control, e.g, as a discipline/tool to name one example, for regression analysis—say goodbye to any of these things, along with any expectation of competence from your colleagues.

The semiconductor industry sources heavily from the defense sector, and this has deleterious, catastrophic effects.

A close friend (from a non-CS engineering background) I know to still be at SAS. We don't talk about finances, but at around 8 years in, I estimate that he just recently (since COVID) crossed the six figure threshold. He's in a fairly senior role. Meanwhile: "What's x86?" — a direct quote from a conversation not too long ago.

He has no real professional experience outside of SAS, was not set up in an environment that rewards "extracurricular" experience, so he doesn't have any of that, either, and he's effectively stuck as a result of the "golden" handcuffs that the path at SAS has led him on.

Don't work in the semiconductor industry, folks. What you can expect to be is a monkey pressing buttons on a machine (that your supervisor—and their supervisor—doesn't understand, and nor will you; you pass butter). Make no mistake: there's an abundance of low-hanging fruit. But you won't have, as Gerry Weinberg put it, "permission" to pick it.

By all means, if your prospects/ambitions look to be something like working for the state/federal government, learning nothing over your career, and cashing mediocre checks for doing mediocre work along the way, then by all means go for it. Otherwise, it is likelier that you'll be hobbled by your time in the industry. And not for no good reason. If I'm evaluating someone and it came up that they'd done any significant time in the world of semiconductors, the net impression it'd have on me (having hash an insider's view of it) would be one worse than if they said that they'd just gotten their degree and had spent the last N years flipping burgers, cf Dan Luu.

Don't do semiconductors, folks.

PS: sorry, drunk.

verall• 4 years ago

Not every semicon is SAS, I've heard similar things as what your friend has said about them though. No offense but your post comes off as someone who has spent their whole life in software and has no experience in semicon.

mensetmanusman6• 4 years ago

This is like saying don’t go into medicine because you have to be a resident nurse along the way.

Semiconductor fabrication is the most advanced engineering humanity has ever attempted, so you will reach your threshold eventually solving problems that might not have answers (depending on your role). Not everyone wants to do that though, and the world needs implementers and those focused on details.

Pay? Could be higher for sure.

jason-phillips4• 4 years ago

sxr's posts about Samsung Semiconductor always strike me as being particularly bitter. The thing about chronically bitter people is that they're implacable.

assttoasstmgr• 4 years ago

You're right, we should encourage the new generation to all strive to become overpaid mediocre SWEs only in it for the quick cash, because the world doesn't have enough shitty food delivery apps. Hopefully I've painted this with a broad enough brush. There is more to a fulfilling career than money.

In fact, an entire generation of SWEs who forgot the concepts of simplicity and efficiency, coding a never-ending avalanche of rubbish bloated apps is why we continually need new silicon.

nixass• 4 years ago

Drunk is not an excuse for such a crappy view on the world

jimbokun• 4 years ago

but at around 8 years in, I estimate that he just recently (since COVID) crossed the six figure threshold.

Better than most people.

Der_Einzige• 4 years ago

All this because Intel couldn't pay market rate for SWEs. Lol

imgabe• 4 years ago

I think you’re looking at this from the wrong perspective. If your other option is to be a FAANG software engineer, sure, do that instead.

For the vast swathes of the country where the available jobs are some mix of retail/warehouse low wage drudgery, long haul trucking, drug dealing / fraud / other crime, or welfare, working in semiconductors might be a welcome and attractive option.

manimino• 4 years ago

Ahh, "SAS" here refers to Samsung Austin Semiconductor.

sgarland• 4 years ago

Source: I was a supervisor in Cleans at SAS for two years, with my only qualification being I was a submarine nuclear operator previously, which is what that hiring manager was looking for. There are a lot of ex-nukes at SAS. Anyway.

You're correct that their software practices, by and large, are absolutely atrocious. In general, I found that if a team had people who could code, they'd just write their own programs and stay in the Shadow IT realm. I taught myself JS/PHP/SQL while I was there, and built a shitty CRUD app to replace some even worse Excel sheets others were using.

However, from SAS' perspective, they aren't making software. All of the machines have their own control systems (which are usually running XP and are terrible), and they need tools that can connect to those, retrieve data, dump it into a DB, and run queries on it. It never needs to leave the site, you don't have to worry about surprise traffic, and scaling issues are never going to get to the point of needing thousand-node clusters or the like. What they have works.

Re: pay, IME engineers of any kind would start at ~$80K fresh out of college, which in 2017 wasn't that bad for Austin. Engineers also got promoted very quickly. Yes, pure software jobs rapidly outpace SAS salaries. Hell, I went from a supervisor role making $86K to an Associate SRE role (I have 20 years of hobbyist Linux experience, I just never did anything with it - also I got a Master's in SWE while I was at SAS) elsewhere, and immediately went past $100K.

It's a fascinating company that is also incredibly stressful, the pay isn't as good/fast as others, and to my knowledge remote work doesn't exist. Still, someone has to do it, else we wouldn't have chips. Also, they employ some _crazy_ intelligent PHds. They just exude brilliance. It's awe-inspiring watching them talk through problems.

derefr3• 4 years ago

The semiconductor industry sources heavily from the defense sector

What does this part mean, exactly? Are photolithography lasers just repurposed Naval anti-aircraft lasers or something?

formerkrogemp4• 4 years ago

-> A close friend (from a non-CS engineering background) I know to still be at SAS. We don't talk about finances, but at around 8 years in, I estimate that he just recently (since COVID) crossed the six figure threshold. He's in a fairly senior role. Meanwhile: "What's x86?" — a direct quote from a conversation not too long ago.

-> He has no real professional experience outside of SAS, was not set up in an environment that rewards "extracurricular" experience, so he doesn't have any of that, either, and he's effectively stuck as a result of the "golden" handcuffs that the path at SAS has led him on.

-> Don't work in the semiconductor industry, folks. What you can expect to be is a monkey pressing buttons on a machine (that your supervisor—and their supervisor—doesn't understand, and nor will you; you pass butter). Make no mistake: there's an abundance of low-hanging fruit. But you won't have, as Gerry Weinberg put it, "permission" to pick it.

-> By all means, if your prospects/ambitions look to be something like working for the state/federal government, learning nothing over your career, and cashing mediocre checks for doing mediocre work along the way, then by all means go for it. Otherwise, it is likelier that you'll be hobbled by your time in the industry. And not for no good reason. If I'm evaluating someone and it came up that they'd done any significant time in the world of semiconductors, the net impression it'd have on me (having hash an insider's view of it) would be one worse than if they said that they'd just gotten their degree and had spent the last N years flipping burgers, cf Dan Luu

All I'm understanding from this is not "don't go into the semiconductor industry" but rather that you're an awful friend to be trash talking your friend. It seems like you just called their career a waste of time and implied your friend to be more poor (since when was 6 figures not a decent amount of money?) than you and less knowledgeable ('what is x86'). I'm sure you'll agree that your friend is neither poor nor stupid, as you seem to imply here for their working in the semiconductor industry. I'm sure your friend would be delighted to know that they're a monkey pressing buttons without any knowledge of what's going on or that you estimate a fast food worker has a better background for transitioning to software engineering.

You haven't talked to your friend about finances, but you can magically estimate their savings? I understand that you might be able estimate within an order of magnitude based on context, but you don't know how much this person has saved nor do you seem to consider that they might spend their money on personal emergencies, sick family members, or kids. That your estimation of your friend's savings should be taken as evidence for poor compensation in the semiconductor industry is laughable, honestly. But, hey, I at least appreciate your earnest opinion.

klooney• 4 years ago

Dan Luu worked in semiconductors and spoke quite highly of his time there.

md2020• 4 years ago

To offer a different point of view, I'm a software engineer at ASML in the US. I can only offer the experience I've had on my specific team, and I've heard that this does vary between teams, but we do follow normal software industry practices. We have version control. We have automated regression testing, and unit tests for everything we write. We do Agile and use Jira (with all the same gripes that everyone else has about those). I made $90k here right out of my undergrad, and got a raise one year later (this year) to be over $100k.

Could the tooling be better? Sure. Our version control system is pretty old, but the company has made a massive push over the last few years to modernize all of it, and when we transition to that at the end of this year I think we'll be in a pretty great spot. Some teams are already using the new tooling and it has gotten very positive reviews. I have a great relationship with my team and my manager. I get to work on interesting stuff (mostly embedded systems), and I've had the opportunity to learn a small part of one of the most advanced machines humans have ever built.

I'll say the thing about getting people from defense is true, but not so much in software. If anyone has other questions feel free to just ask.

sillystuff2• 4 years ago

Many years ago, I interviewed at a company that manufactured equipment used by fabs. My impression was of a very stressful environment.

Their latest equipment had some issues that were only showing up on production lines, so they wanted engineers to babysit the equipment at the fabs, and write patches on the spot for any issues observed. They repeatedly stressed how much money their customers lost for any downtime, and how there must not be downtime.

colechristensen2• 4 years ago

Young Americans are perfectly willing to do a half-assed job when conditions suck and pay is low. They are harder to exploit than foreign workers and previous generations because the "hard work" mentality really doesn't last when the rewards get less with every generation. They will either leave a job whenever they feel like they've had enough or just phone it in for a good long while giving shitty performance for shitty pay.

It is entirely possible to get good work out of younger generations, but you really have to start paying them competitively with how much you pay management and how much you pay capital.

It turns out there is a whole lot of rent seeking by people who don't do much (own capital, work as a middle manager, own real estate) and to compete, people are just checking out instead of trying to climb to an ever smaller top.

If it seems impossible to have a home, a family, and resources to actually do things with your life, living in a van and traveling around actually enjoying the world, even in rather extreme poverty, is quite a better life than being a wage slave.

KennyBlanken2• 4 years ago

The "hard work" mentality is gone because companies like Amazon purposefully optimize their 'blue collar' jobs to force churn so they can dangle benefits with vesting periods nobody will get to, and have an outsourced hiring firm handle all the paperwork.

That's why there were news stories about them "running out of people to employ." Word gets around eventually. Especially if the economy is doing well, most people will not want to work for you.

JimmieMcnulty2• 4 years ago

Honestly, based on the content of this video and the replies from the prior HN thread, it seems like folks are locked into the belief that the current manufacturing... "experience" (for lack of a better term) for the workers involved will be lifted from Asia and dropped into the US, but that doesn't actually make any sense to me.

Sure, that's how the world knows how to make chips now, but given the varying laws between those two places, and the varying workforce cultures, I think it's safe to say that adaptations will be made to the experience to suit American workers, and those adaptations won't result in meaningful drop offs in quality or execution.

As an outsider, it seems pretty clear that the rejection to the industry is more about the cultural mismatch than it is to the actual work needing to be executed.

It's just weird to me that people really believe nothing about the job will change, and all of the Asian cultural aspects of the way the job is currently executed would be dropped on American workers with zero adjustments.

Curzel• 4 years ago

Agree… only issue might be managers and supervisors coming from manufacturing in Asia, they will have to re-learn how to treat workers, but I am hopeful

bobthepanda• 4 years ago

I mean, Toyota and Hyundai make cars in the South, so that particular lesson has been learned before

the_only_law2• 4 years ago

Wasn’t there a documentary about this or something? I swear I’ve seen this premise play out somewhere.

logicchains• 4 years ago

As an outsider, it seems pretty clear that the rejection to the industry is more about the cultural mismatch than it is to the actual work needing to be executed.

Look at Intel. It's a western company, but it famously fell behind its competitors due to offering comparatively shit pay and conditions to its staff, so the best people left. The problem is hardware company culture, not Asian company culture.

Apple's M1 is an example of what a company that compensates its staff fairly can achieve in hardware. Hardware companies need to get the idea out of their head that they can pay people shit (even when they've got huge monopoly profits like Intel had) and still expect to remain competitive.

nightski• 4 years ago

Isn't M1 manufactured by TSMC? Are you saying TSMC has good pay and treats it's workers great? (it might I honestly don't know).

BeetleB2• 4 years ago

Apple's M1 is an irrelevant comparison. Apple doesn't run a fab. Yes, Intel lost a lot of chip designers, etc, but the submission is about fab related work, which Apple is not involved in.

klyrs• 4 years ago

Hot take, apparently: VHDL/Verilog developers should make 5x what JavaScript developers make, and not the other way around.

joe_the_user• 4 years ago

Look at Intel. It's a western company, but it famously fell behind its competitors due to offering comparatively shit pay and conditions to its staff, so the best people left.

As far as I know, working in a non-chip part of Intel in the 90s, the place was always an abusive sweatshop except maybe for some top people. And Intel isn't some failed from the start enterprise - they're currently third or so in a long, long competition among fabs, chip-makers and etc. They had a long, long successful run while being awful.

Essentially, model the of gaslighting, abusing and discarding people works great as long as a company can keep their employee's illusions alive and/or trapping them so they have no choices regardless.

As far as I know, Apple pays well compared to the US median for a job but poorly relative to other FANG companies. Plenty of tales of abuse and secrecy exist in Apple but plenty of people assert the virtues of working there and show great loyalty.

Which is to say these practices are very common in globally competitive markets. A company that pays well and inspires great loyalty and hard work from it's employees can always be undercut by a company that pays shit and still inspires great loyalty and hard work from it's employees. And if the model falls-apart, it can be rebuilt elsewhere (this is the problem/challenge of markets that are truly global).

JimmieMcnulty2• 4 years ago

Just to be clear, I make no value judgement about Asian cultural norms w/r/t chip manufacturing, my comment is merely meant to suggest the employment experience probably will be adjusted to fit American cultural mores, so the concern that few Americans would want these jobs isn’t entirely fair.

I am entirely unqualified to judge cultural advantages/disadvantages in the manufacturing industry.

mensetmanusman6• 4 years ago

Intel lost because of their business model. TSMC was making an order of magnitude more chips at far lower margin and all those manufacturing runs/experiments let them advance that much faster.

Aunche• 4 years ago

Is the M1's design really that technically impressive? The product itself is revolutionary, but my impression was that its main technical advantages is that ARM is more efficient and they had a monopoly on TSMC's 5 nm process.

I think general mismanagement explains Intel's decline more than money or working conditions. TSMC pays embarrassing low, which is why a lot of engineers end up being poached by China.

astrange5• 4 years ago

I don't get the impression that Apple SEG pays very well, though it does pay slightly more than competitors.

moomin2• 4 years ago

Nissan ran a very successful car manufacturing facility for many years in the U.K. This kind of cultural adaptation is exactly how they did it. And it turns out that Geordies were more than capable of executing “The Nissan Way”.

Apocryphon3• 4 years ago

Another attempt, where Toyota and GM attempted to build a plant together in Fremont, California:

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015

chris_j2• 4 years ago

Why "ran" in the past tense? The plant is still running.

And why the reference to Geordies - natives of Newcastle - when the plant is in Sunderland?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motor_Manufacturing_U...

pm90• 4 years ago

Why would it lead to dropoffs in quality? I think u are underestimating how much ingenuity workers of all cultures have when its encouraged. Considering the strength of American research universities, I believe that we might see gains in quality and productivity.

madrox• 4 years ago

I think OP is agreeing with you

dirtyid• 4 years ago

Since there's several car manufacturing comparisons of American manufacturing adapting to East Asian manufacturing culture, I feel like there's consensus that Japanese built cars still have tighter QC than ones built in North America. Better fit etc, the kind of details in semi and would compound when moving from millimeters to nanometers. My understanding is the commitment for semi technicians / equipment engineers are also much more rigorous, people being practically married to their stations. Hard to say if high-end chip manufacturing processes refined under East Asian sweatshop work culture that's still better than the alternative can be adapated to west.

Which is not to say American's can't make chips, perhaps with less efficiency. Which ultimately doesn't matter because semi is being elevated to critical strategic industry and the governemnt's money printer is going to keep US fabs open regardless of how competitive US fabs are.

mensetmanusman6• 4 years ago

It’s true that Americans are less likely to work 16 hours days with low pay.

The issue is that the Asian work culture in the tech industry is not sustainable, as seen from their demographic replacement rates. They are burning too hot and the culture will change or they will disappear.

tuatoru• 4 years ago

Yeah, the next decade is going to be interesting to watch.

In Taiwan, for instance, the working age population peaked just five years ago[1], so I doubt that the fact that their worker shortage is permanent and going to get worse has yet sunk in the brains of the management and political class in Taiwan.

Give it ten years, they might start understanding what's going on. Based on China's and Japan's responses, they'll have no idea what to do.

1. https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/20-64...

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 4 years ago

Lots of Americans work as plumbers dealing with literal poop every day. They will even come in the middle of the night to deal with your poop emergency.

The issue is getting paid enough, not the nature of the job.

ThrowawayTestr• 4 years ago

If the pay is good why not?

KingMachiavelli• 4 years ago

A substantial perk would be subsidized housing. A modern fab can cost ~$20B (maybe more in the US) and obviously the planning and permit process is likely also a couple order of magnitudes more difficult than normal real estate development.

Spending ~$100M on employee housing would make the compensation a lot more competitive since software salaries are high but tend to be located in HCOL areas. Spend another ~$100M on training and education facilities and I think you could attract a lot of Americans right of of high school. Even if it still a bit less competitive than software it could still be the second best career industry.

I think the industry already partly does this but doing it on a larger scale and marketing it as an alternative to college would make it more compelling. I think the industry is still like many other large industries that really want a degree in some engineering despite it not necessarily being very applicable to fab work.

dijonman22• 4 years ago

The last thing I would want is to live on a corporate campus.

Lose my job and evicted at the same time? No thanks, plus I want privacy.

kazen445• 4 years ago

what about a company building housing for its employees.

This is something that happened a lot in the netherlands in the city of eindhoven. Phillips had its major manufacturing located in the city, and build massive housing projects to house its workers relatively close to the plant.

stonemetal12• 4 years ago

I could see it working if it were indirect and at arms length. A bit of a planned neighborhood that included High and medium density housing near the factory, maybe kick a few bucks the developers way to get it built right. That way there is supply of reasonably priced housing nearby.

I wouldn't directly subsidize it though, that would become bigger shackles than work provided health care.

ejb999• 4 years ago

>I wouldn't directly subsidize it though, that would become bigger shackles than work provided health care.

Correct, factory towns worked out great for the factory owners - not so much for the people that worked there.

Having a good supply of affordable housing nearby any facility that needs to hire a lot of low to middle paying people is probably a good thing, but letting the company run and control it will inevitably lead to abuses imo.

mattkrause• 4 years ago

Spousal hiring is another very under-rated recruiting tool, especially if you want to bring someone in from far away.

You don't even necessarily need to hire the partner directly; just help them find a job somewhere in the area.

splistud• 4 years ago

Pay people, don't try to fit some other benefit on all employees

erik_seaberg• 4 years ago

There have been times I would have liked to live on campus, and it’s often not possible to get that for any amount of money.

graton• 4 years ago

Tangentially related is the lack of young people entering the "trades" (plumbing, electrical, construction, etc).

Can't help but think that now is probably a good time to enter a "trade" due to the lack of people who are doing that.

rcarr2• 4 years ago

Everyone I know who got an apprenticeship after school instead of going to uni are absolutely raking it in and have enjoyed a significantly better quality of life than their uni going peers. I personally can’t see how the uni goers will end up having a better time in the long run as the official narrative goes. The majority of the tradies seem to end up buying multiple houses and going the landlord route for early retirement.

TylerE• 4 years ago

Ask them about their back and knees when they’re 50.

mindentropy• 4 years ago

When I see videos of Ben Mallah on Youtube with juicy contracts on maintaining his properties, it is fantastic for people who are in the trades. A talented person can easily graduate to earning a firm.

trinovantes• 4 years ago

In my area trades are almost impossible to enter if you do not have family/friend that's willing to take you on as an apprentice. It pays well but is also heavily gated by nepotism.

buggythebug• 4 years ago

Such a stupid question. Some will, some won't.

0xbadc0de53• 4 years ago

Just out of high-school, I worked in a fiber-optic component assembly plant - wave-division multiplexers, optical circulators, etc. It was clean room, bunny suit, microscope work for the most part. But it was also moderate-skill, repetitive work - they'd hire large cohorts and provide all the necessary training. If you could keep up with the quotas and QC, you were in and made a decent wage and there was some room for growth. If not, you were let go. Not the type of work I'd take a pay cut for these days, but for young me, it was a foot in the door, paid okay and provided great experience.

Semiconductor plant jobs may not be as lucrative as SW engineering, but they are indeed jobs that pay alright for low to moderate skilled labour. And on-shoring of tech manufacturing seems like a good idea.

mensetmanusman6• 4 years ago

This alludes to an important point. If the semiconductor manufacturers coming to the US could take advantage of the software skill sets for automation that exist in the US, it could really help people have less repetition in their job and make it more rewarding.

R0b0t12• 4 years ago

If the work is repetitive I'm not sure you can say it was good experience. Your time would have been better spent learning or creating, I assume. No reason to want your children to work.

0xbadc0de53• 4 years ago

I'm not sure you're qualified to have an opinion on what I took away from my own experience or whether I'd want my children to have access to similar opportunities. For the record, I did say it was a good experience and I stand by that. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that the time I spent working construction and flipping burgers prior to that also had value. I think it's a mistake to assume that just because work is repetitive, that there is no opportunity for "learning and creating." I was creating things - fibre optic components. I was also learning things - all about the components and their manufacturing process. And yes, I hope my children have access to as broad a range of experience as I've had. I think there are many reasons to want your children to work - not least of which is the value it adds to society and the self-sufficiency it provides them.

honkler• 4 years ago

Am I going to be a wagie. If yes, then no.

jhallenworld• 4 years ago

So here is my recommendation: provide more chairs in the cleanroom. Seriously, there are like no chairs in there..

tristor2• 4 years ago

I have worked with a lot of people that escaped from fab jobs here in the US during my career. The biggest issue I see is that manufacturing has an absolutely grueling schedule and the pay is half or less than what equivalent level software jobs pay, with worse working conditions.

If you want young Americans to work these jobs, you need to pay /more/ than software jobs, because the conditions are worse. Otherwise, you only get the people who can't escape. Anyone who can escape eventually does.

xwdv2• 4 years ago

A lot of people cannot escape. And it often surprises me how many people really don’t want to work in software.

snerbles• 4 years ago

Growing up playing with BASIC on an old DOS machine, in my childhood solipsism I had this notion that everyone would love writing code as much as I do and it would be nothing special.

In the decades since I've come to believe that actually liking working on software requires a certain sort of...personality that most people just don't have.

tristor2• 4 years ago

Ironically, I much prefer hardware to software myself, but during college (while studying EE) decided that it was a deadend career path and figured out a way to be software-adjacent without having to be a developer. It worked out pretty well for me so far.

The reality is that most people follow incentives, almost nobody works their actual dream job, they work the job that they have the most return for their abilities and investment. HW and SW jobs used to have a lot of overlap from an abilities perspective, but as each has become more specialized that overlap has eroded. A lot of people are choosing to go all-in on software, whether they particularly love it or not, because it is a far better environment to work in.

dougabug8• 4 years ago

I think a lot of people don’t want to work in software because of the perception or reality of the software development systems that they have been exposed to.

If the right tools were invented for them, they might take to it like ducks to water.

smnrchrds• 4 years ago

pay is half or less than what equivalent level software jobs pay, with worse working conditions

You can say this part about basically any job and it would be true. Tech salaries and work conditions are ridiculously good, compared to any almost other job in the US and any other country than the US. Even other STEM jobs (e.g. civil or mechanical engineering) tend to have less than half the pay and much worse benefits and work conditions compared to software.

mensetmanusman6• 4 years ago

The coming cohort of university students is showing a huge influx of CS majors. I wonder how long the high pay lasts after the flood.

BeetleB2• 4 years ago

Most jobs Americans do are not in SW and pay a lot less than SW. Saying an industry won't thrive because the work is hard and the pay is less than SW is silly.

georgeburdell• 4 years ago

Semiconductor job skills are highly transferrable to software.

titanomachy• 4 years ago

The video was specifically referring to high-skill manufacturing engineers, most of whom probably could get some kind of software job if they wanted to.

dougabug8• 4 years ago

Well, at least the people won’t thrive if the work is hard and the pay is low. Some people frame this as some kind of character defect on the part of Americans, but to me it just seems like common sense to avoid hard work for low pay, if possible (unless the work is stupendously interesting).

rr888• 4 years ago

you need to pay /more/ than software jobs

The other way to do that is cut the wages of software jobs. Honestly with the glut of young developers and remote working it has started to happen already.

dougabug8• 4 years ago

Good luck with that.

Executives have been trying to do that for decades (“The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer” has been heralded since the 80’s).

Even the exhalted Steve Jobs ultimately failed in his cabalistic attempt to hold down programmer pay.

It’s like a menagerie of Elmer Fudds and Yosemite Sam’s trying to bring down Bugs Bunny. Or a mangy pack of Wiley Coyotes desperate to run down the Roadrunner.

EddySchauHai• 4 years ago

The hardest job I had paid minimum wage when I was 16 in the UK - 3.98 an hour. I make more money taking a crap as a software engineer than I made in an 8 hour day as a developer. That's not a joke, I did the math the other day. People work much harder jobs than sw for much lower wages all over the country and world.

samfisher83• 4 years ago

I used to work in semi. Pay and opportunities are way better in software.

JoeDaDude• 4 years ago

From second hand anecdotes, I understand a lot of work involves handling dangerous chemicals, maybe enough to scare people away after a couple of years. I know one person that did exactly that, the risk wasn't worth it anymore.

abdullah2993• 4 years ago

What a wonderful solution. Lets pay software engineers less so they are forced to work on hardware. Why not just have higher pays for semiconductor people since they are crucial?

trasz• 4 years ago

Because hardware business is based on real economy, instead of just pretending to be doing something useful to siphon investors money.

sampo• 4 years ago

Well, there was Theranos. And Juicero.

okdood642• 4 years ago

Lets pay software engineers less

That was hardly the point of the video's thesis.

bluedino2• 4 years ago

Depends on the role.

There's a place nearby where they produce raw silicon. They are rated three of five stars on Famous_Job_Site, and they only hire through a temp service, and you can be there ten years before getting hired in directly. Rules like if you miss X days or are late Y times you get fired.

The worst job is probably poly breaker, where they have three shifts of people in protective suits that smash large pieces of silicon down with hammers.

Last I heard you get $14/hr. They are always hiring and nobody wants to work there.

https://imgur.com/a/OmqsEuM

dmitriy_ko• 4 years ago

poly breaker, where they have three shifts of people in protective suits that smash large pieces of silicon down with hammers

Why is this done manually? wouldn't it be easy to automate?

ElevenLathe• 4 years ago

No idea, but assuming this guy doesn't live in mid-Michigan, there's a plant here that hires people to do the same thing.

jpgvm2• 4 years ago

Correct.

Too many people think shiny Infinity Loop One office when chips come up. The reality is that chip designers are like 0.1% of the available roles. Fab workers/supervisors/maintenance etc are maybe 25% and the rest is in a very very long tail of supply chain involving lots of vary hazardous chemicals and shitty manual labour.

I'm all for trying to diversify semi-conductor manufacturing but I really doubt Americans have it in them to do what the Chinese/Taiwanese currently do - specifically in the fabs themselves and in the chemical and poly silicate plants that support them.

coredog64• 4 years ago

This ignores the fact that there’s a number of companies that currently fab semiconductors in the United States. Phoenix/Mesa is one epicenter, but there’s also some high tech fabs in Oregon and New York.

smegger001• 4 years ago

that seems like a job that should have been replaced by a machine. no way it more effective to have people breaking that with hammers than to have machine do it.

also this country really needs stricter laws on what qualifies as a temp

7speter• 4 years ago

Really, after watching channels like Moores Law Is Dead and other techtubers and learning about the gpu and cpu markets and products, I wish I got into electrical engineering to so that I could work on the design teams at Intel or AMD or NVidia or Apple

apengwin• 4 years ago

if you pay them they will come

bfung• 4 years ago

Very good video outlining the context, problems, and bringing info from social media (hn) and other news!

booleandilemma• 4 years ago

I think young americans will work wherever the money is. I see people everyday (both american and non) that are in software because that's what pays right now.

You just have to talk to the nearest product owner, project manager, or bootcamp grad for an example.

dougabug8• 4 years ago

Software has structural economic advantages that are difficult to match in other professions (particularly ones that can scale up to support such a large number of practitioners).

to11mtm• 4 years ago

This is, in some ways, the unseen benefit of 'patterns' in software. [^0] Outside of certain problem domains or extreme requirements, the basic patterns work well enough for a variety of tasks with the right mixing, you usually get introduced to mundane patterns quickly [^1] and over time you move on to advanced pattern abstractions.

I do know that with Descriptor languages and 'libraries' for chip design they reuse blocks and patterns, I think the challenge they run into however, is the possibility that there is cruft built on the existing setup for circuits and the like, and tweaking such may have impacts to downstream customers, possibly undiscovered until after tape-out.

^0 - Even if sometimes they get mis/overused on a low level. By that I'm referring to cases where someone learning patterns thinks they -have- to use all of them.

^1 - Examples that come to mind would be the 'Grab from queue, do thing, update queue', 'Manual' ETL, and 'Timed Jobs'. The last of which is the most fun to see across orgs, as it tends to have the most derivation between orgs. The most slapshoddingly-functional of which being a bunch of scheduled tasks in windows server (which honestly, worked great for them and their use case)

Existenceblinks2• 4 years ago

Excellent. My background is computer engineering who enrolled shit load of computer network classes, interned for a Cisco gold partner, but then switched to software development. At some points my network engineers friends (and hardware stuff engineers) turned into software development, mostly web development.

I'd like to add one more factor here. It's transferable knowledge AND cheap cost of building your own business. When I was an intern to install and config a bunch of switches, routers, firewalls, and realized a switch is so expensive that I wouldn't be able to build my own business like this. So I got into software development job. It's way easier and also able to do side software project. IaaS or PaaS is so cheap, no needs to mess with data center myself.

Work for X for a decade and open your own X business is not applicable to semiconductor job.

kazen445• 4 years ago

starting a networking company (except consulting) is extremely hard. Building an ISP is even harder and requires insane amounts of money.

Most of my friends in the network engineering field either work at companies that are large/complex enough to have challenging environments with proper networking hardware, or work as a freelance consultant for said companies.

The problem with career growth in network engineering is that, to grow in technical skills, usually larger networks are require to get access to gear and systems that can pose a challenge. Not a lot of those companies exist. Also, making a screw up in suchs an environment is far more detrimental than in a small network, because of the increased scale/complexity of the network.

Existenceblinks2• 4 years ago

usually larger networks are require to get access to gear and systems that can pose a challenge

Exactly. Simulation program is not going to suffice. Sometimes one has to bring a firewall home to debug something. And there's going to be several vendors, not only Cisco. And it's going to need more certs, not just CCNP, CCIE.

bigcat12345678• 4 years ago

Wtf is this type of discussion...

Cannot the business just pay a bit more...

iancmceachern• 4 years ago

I love this channel, glad to see it here. I agree with his sentiment after working in the semiconductor industry in the Bay area off and on for the last 15 years.

abledon• 4 years ago

just looked at that youtube channel... holy cow the amount of content coming out is huge. surely its not just 1 guy doing all the research _and_ narrating? he probably has a team?

Edit: wow ok it really is 1 guy. (albeit good patreon revenue to pay for research time)

from patreon: > My name is Jon and I make videos on the Asianometry YouTube channel. I started the channel as a way to share things that I've learned about Chinese and Taiwanese history as well as vlog a little bit on my explorations of Taiwan.

KennyBlanken2• 4 years ago

Says he's one guy != he's actually one guy. Almost certainly has an editor, a script proofer, etc.

It also seems highly unlikely he's only making money from ads and patreon. A lot of youtubers get money under the table to astroturf.

kranke155• 4 years ago

If it pays enough, yes.

The problem is always pay. Don’t be fooled.

renewiltord• 4 years ago

Well, I have lots of friends and relatives who work at the Intel fab and Intel is a pretty big employer, so the answer is yes, right?

sudosysgen10• 4 years ago

Intel famously has had problems retaining and hiring highly qualified people.

systems_glitch• 4 years ago

Speaking from experience, if you're not into the semiconductor engineering side, consider looking for maintenance personnel positions with fabs. The work is interesting, your boss will probably hold a PhD and be competent, and you won't be stuck behind a desk all day.

CobaltFire• 4 years ago

I’m retiring from the military with a cross section of skills that seem to be in demand for semi manufacturing, so have had a few conversations with recruiters. The wages on offer weren’t terrible, but given the best offer came from San Jose and it was right about a mortgage on a 3/2 after taxes I’m not sure if that’s sustainable comp.

That said, there are other comments here about semi manufacturing pulling from defense and it seems to be true, as even before I’ve started applying those are the companies reaching out with offers in hand.

jason-phillips4• 4 years ago

I worked at Samsung Austin Semiconductor for a decade. Samsung treated me extremely well and I really do consider them to be like family.

Samsung is not like American semiconductor manufacturers. The organization is a bit more militaristic and that's not a bad thing, I liked the discipline displayed by fellow coworkers.

I haven't worked at American semiconductor manufacturers, but know those who have. Their attitude about execution always struck me as less than professional. But again, I can't comment from first-hand knowledge.

Unlike sbx's experience, I was able to shape things and take ownership. I owned or had responsibility for many of the internal fab systems. I created my own kingdom, ensuring it ran like a Swiss watch, against which transgressions were met with something akin to judiciously tempered wrath. I was basically left alone to ensure my responsibilities were well-managed.

I loved it. I was able to work on global, billion-dollar software projects that indirectly helped change the world, through the semiconductors we produced. It's hard to describe the magnitude of a fab's operations if you haven't seen it firsthand. SAS does conduct tours in Austin; I can see if I can get you into one of those if you can't by simply calling them up yourself.

I miss it.

AMA. I'm about to take off from ABIA but I can answer questions later. I do believe we need more domestic semiconductor manufacturing here, so I'd be glad to help.

mkl• 4 years ago

What made you leave?

jason-phillips4• 4 years ago

I worked there for ten years and decided that I needed to work for smaller startups using different tech stacks. It was a good move career-wise. Now I do consulting.

bmitc• 4 years ago

The world is, in general, in trouble. We are absolutely obsessed with scale at all costs, and the costs will be humans and a lot of other things in the wake, as already apparent. Humans are not meant for “at scale” activities because they require things like that found in Amazon fulfillment centers or Apple’s iPhone factories. They are tedious, monotonous, and soulless jobs that are heading for more and more automation.

jprd2• 4 years ago

I think the first thing everyone here needs to recognize, is that this is primarily a MANUFACTURING / FACTORY jerb.

99% of humans in the semi-conductor field are not designing masks and worrying about etching time or whatever nonsense marketing NANOMETER terminology is in place.

They are building "don't fuck this up" teams that are focused on quality manufacturing and how many PPI in the air, highly caustic chemicals, and FUPs not failing. The same stuff everyone with an assembly line deals with turned up to 11.

Then there are the IT folks who have to ensure that all these proprietary ASML or similar monstrosities are not compromised by some field tech with a compromised USB stick.

The nightmares I've had about that, multi-million dollar machines controlled by Windows X and never patched and yet somehow allowed to talk to a network that also has access to the Internet and rando field techs with "updates" on a stick.

Its almost as scary as how much international business relies on some random Excel file updated by humans.

yrgulation• 4 years ago

If they get paid. I’d work on it even in europe if it did.

fabthrow• 4 years ago

Currently working in a fab. Company and title undisclosed. Forgive language, obscures to protect self.

Many problems working in fab. Current workforce very aged, many staff have let the world pass them by. These staff do no understand the world anymore. Can’t empathize new peoples! Some do not have cell phone, credit card, or home internet/computer. Staff have paid their mortgage long time and cannot understand why us young kid complain about cost of housing. Cheap 1br apartment At lowest starting wage two weeks of work. Bus take some people 2-3/hr each way if live in expensive place near bus. Need car!

Old staff leave without good staff replaced them. Many mistakes. Many people worked too hard. Burnout!

Manager are old guys club and play favorites. Many are sexist racist. Company tries to advertise as progressive but that’s only for looks during onboarding and stock market. Many minority are not given opportunity to advance or get promotion raises while people who look talk like manager do get advance. Many minority in lowest jobs.

Manager tell work positive with COVID. They no care! COVID spread to everyone!

Work long shifts and have no time for family.

Many divorced and unhappy people in dying marriages due to no work life balance take their pain to work spread their misery.

Laissez faire attitude to working dangerous chemical and gases. Missing warning signs and no training. No one worry about strange smell everywhere all time!

Bo wonder no one want work in fab!

eru7• 4 years ago

Asianometry is a great channel with lots of great videos!

refurb• 4 years ago

The best analogy I can think of is medical device manufacturing, since there is a decent amount in the US.

The pay isn’t great by Bay Area standards but the plants are located in low cost mid-west cities.

$35/hr plus overtime and benefits is an outstanding job in a city where upper-middle class homes cost $200,000. Those job very highly coveted and people stayed for decades. Top guys were making >$100,000/yr with a 2 year associates degree.

Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]

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