TSMC delays US chip fab opening, says US talent is insufficient

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/tsmc-delays-us-chip-fab-opening-says-us-talent-is-insufficient/

by em3rgent0rdr • 3 years ago

39 31 3 years ago

Can anyone comment on this industry? Is it a good idea for a college student today to try to study a major related to chip fab? What majors are those?

Are they actually offering competitive jobs, or is this more of "Americans just don't want to work anymore!"

opportune• 3 years ago

I got some recruiter spam to work for TSMC about 1-2 years ago. They wanted to pay something like 80 or 90k/y (a fraction of my pay which a recruiter should know) and have me do like 6mo of training in Taiwan.

I don’t know what their criteria were for sending out that spam but no, if they were targeting experienced engineers at well known large US tech companies, it was not at all competitive and made me think they didn’t know how to hire here.

fooker• 3 years ago

That’s actually a solid idea if you’re a US citizen and starting out in the industry.

Get the training, work for them for a year and so and then to to Intel or whoever the US govt is funding to be competitive.

ImAnAmateur• 3 years ago

I can't comment on the pay, but from what I gather the leadership at TSMC is terrible. There's a plethora of firsthand accounts that you can find on places like Glassdoor.

FirmwareBurner4• 3 years ago

what I gather the leadership at TSMC is terrible

But if leadership is terrible how are they the no. 1 player in the world?

sweetjuly• 3 years ago

There is quite a bit of domestic fabrication in the US but Intel is really the only cutting edge player anymore. Many of these other fabs are not really interested in changing their processes (in fact, they are heavily disincentivized to!) because their margins are not particularly high and so being low cost and high reliability are their only goals. This can be extremely frustrating to people knew to the field since, after toiling away for years and years on your PhD, everyone is telling you not to change anything and to just keep things working as they are. If you get into Intel, you might get to do some really cool work, but that's quite a risk to bank your entire career on IMO (especially given that nobody pays that well either).

So, yes and no. Fab is neat but realistically if you like chips I'd really encourage you to go for VLSI and/or some other EE specialty since the US does have plenty of high paying demand from many companies for these positions.

iancmceachern• 3 years ago

My experience in this industry is that it is not very kind to it's employees and contractors

It's very boom and bust, between the big companies and contractors they employ they hire and fire thousands on yearly time scales. Long hours and mindless dedication to put in a lot of hours despite big misses by management leading to lots of cancelled half finished projects. Lots of work double time and weekends for 3 months and then they just shut it down anyway and expect you to find another job.

In my experience other tech industries, particularly in the bay area, things like big tech, med tech, etc. are much better fields for technical professionals to get into

brutus1213• 3 years ago

I don't think these are competitive jobs ($$ wise) .. if I was advising a student, software and AI are the future.

lithos• 3 years ago

Chip makers never seemed to have figured out the bullwhip effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect , and I would personally guess intentionally as a way to purposefully keep workers fearful (as serious layoffs are guaranteed every couple of years during slow periods, meaning during worker-squeeze periods you obey or end up first to be gone in a year).

meltyness• 3 years ago

Horrid.

It's a kickback sheme too probably, directors collude to clamp hiring to "the cream of the crop" which is basically no one, while the other 2 outfits benefit from monopsony and an influx of cheaper talent they can make investments until their own situation gets dire, and let hiring breathe again. A sort of autoeconomic career cycle dysplasia.

Most of these jobs are only open if you went to college, decided 2 years in that you wanted to work at one of these joints, worked in a lab for 4 years to get your masters, had excellent grades, and your PI was a friend of a friend.

HR just assumes like 99% of the population is deranged.

anonzzzies• 3 years ago

When they (and others) announced this, I was a bit confused about it; you cannot expect to get talent for your US plants to be anywhere close to the same compensation as you pay in China, Taiwan, India, Vietnam and Philippines. So how is that going to work unless you bring them over from those country and expect massive retention issues when they discover they can make far more at other companies once living in the US?

ZeroSolstice• 3 years ago

My rough assumption is that this is by design. If you can't find the local talent you can justify H-1B[1] and L-1B[2][4] visas. For the L-1B I would imagine the TSMC North America[3] would suffice for the criteria of "enables a U.S. employer to transfer a professional employee with specialized knowledge relating to the organization’s interests from one of its affiliated foreign offices to one of its offices in the United States."[2]

While TSMC North America may need to follow US tax codes, employee unemployment insurance, I'm not sure how much negotiating power as a visa/sponsored employee you would have for high salary since your job is linked to your stay or related pay. I'm sure someone has figured out the best way for TSMC North America to bill the visa employees as contractors back to head quarters and avoid visa holder tax with holdings.

These two articles were interesting which indicate "TSMC profited from the tension between China and the U.S. by playing off both sides. Analysts say that TSMC building a plant in Arizona is “the minimal price to stay neutral.”[5][6]

[1] https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/h-1b-spec...

[2] https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...

[3] https://www.tsmc.com/english/contact-us#TSMC-Subsidiaries

[4] https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-2-part-l-chapter-...

[5] https://international.thenewslens.com/article/135648 (2020-05-26)

[6] https://english.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=2719&utm... (2020-05-21)

up2isomorphism• 3 years ago

As someone who lived here for over 15 years I can tell you this is not exactly about the salary.

hsjqllzlfkf2• 3 years ago

Wanna tell us more...?

1letterunixname• 3 years ago

Corporate welfare rides again while undercutting the domestic interests and jobs of the citizenry. And cries a river about a "talent shortage" when it just wants to import and underpay non-union workers on visas to keep them beholden to them and not invest in America, in skills training, or good paying jobs.

FirmwareBurner4• 3 years ago

The way I see it, when Apple, Nvidia, AMD etc, nickel and dime you every step of the way and put pressure on you to lower your costs, semi manufacturing is relatively low margin enough to not be profitable on US soil, compliant to US environmental laws, done by US workers on US working conditions, earning US wages competitive to other US skilled industries.

Therefore chips made in the US would not be nearly as profitable as the ones made in Taiwan therefore it makes no financial sense for TSMC to invest in the US other than for geopolitics.

So I have no idea how TSMC in the US could ever be profitable without big handouts from the US government.

hsjqllzlfkf2• 3 years ago

Where do you find the data saying that semi manufacturing is low margin?

DanielHB• 3 years ago

I work at Northvolt, founded in 2015 in Sweden it is now the main EV battery manufacturer in Europe. A lot of the core positions (most of the battery chemistry researchers, some engineering/management/operational roles) in the earlier days were hired from South Korea, Japan and China. The company now hires a lot of Master's and PhD students from Europe itself (either after graduation or do their thesis in partnership with the company), as well as most of the engineering/operational/management.

That is how you do knowledge transfer.

light_hue_1• 3 years ago

No. They just refuse to pay and they treat their people like garbage. "TSMC is about obedience" https://www.techspot.com/news/99008-tsmc-extreme-work-cultur...

My students looked into some TSMC jobs. The pay is terrible. And they don't scale up or pay for expertise.

Talking to people in the department who have worked there, they treat you like a replaceable cog who should be glad and honored to have a job. You have zero agency. You're told what to do, no explanations, no control. The boss is king.

Hard pass.

There is plenty of expertise in the US. Most of the technology TSMC uses was invented in the US. But people aren't willing to work for nothing, work insane hours and shifts, while being treated poorly, with no agency. I guess by those standards US workers are lacking.

esbranson2• 3 years ago

If anyone has reason to believe that TSMC is gaming the US visa system, or even suspect it, they should probably give the United States a heads up.

https://www.uscis.gov/scams-fraud-and-misconduct/report-frau...

* The H-1B worker is not or will not be paid the wage certified on the Labor Condition Application (LCA).

* There is a wage disparity between H-1B workers and other workers performing the same or similar duties, particularly to the detriment of U.S. workers.

* The H-1B worker is not performing the duties specified in the H-1B petition, including when the duties are at a higher level than the position description.

* The H-1B worker has less experience than U.S. workers in similar positions in the same company.

* The H-1B worker is not working in the intended location as certified on the LCA.

em3rgent0rdr3• 3 years ago

You trying to get us to snitch on our fellow comrades? Taiwanese engineers should be considered friends of US, and honestly US should be doing much more to facilitate free movement of people among fellow democracies, such as Taiwan.

esbranson2• 3 years ago

Retaliation against H-1B employees who report violations or cooperate with investigations can result in debarment from the H-1B program. Is that what you mean by snitching? Or are you confused about who gets reported and investigated?

happytiger2• 3 years ago

I don’t think many of the comments here understand the changes to the global order. It’s a national security risk not to do whatever is necessary to diversify and repatriate fabs in order to ensure uninterruptible production.

Of course there isn’t enough talent in chip manufacturing in a country that has been outsourcing their chip production for decades. This is just the maneuvering to get the coverage required to diversify supply, which must navigate both trade agreements and labor laws (like h1b).

But it must be done — and quickly — or there will be great risk to advanced technology hardware that could be catastrophic.

There is a HUGE push to ramp domestic US capabilities right now, from the liquid gas powered factories of Germany to the chip companies of Taiwan and other Asian countries. No other country is as self-contained from a food and energy perspective or nearly as defensible as the US and as we move to a multipolar world these kinds of moves are inevitable — and coming from the highest authorities in the land.

hulitu• 3 years ago

Of course there isn’t enough talent in chip manufacturing in a country that has been outsourcing their chip production for decades

Around 2000 when i read some IEEE journals regarding VLSI the majority of people who published articles were of Asian descent (chinese, indian, persian).

Maybe US shall rethink its education system because "operation Paperclip " won't last forever.

em3rgent0rdr3• 3 years ago

I don't like your wording to "repatriate" fabs. That wording implies that these fabs belonged to US to being with. But they didn't. TSMC for instance was built primarily by the Taiwanese.

happytiger2• 3 years ago

I only meant it in the context of the fact that semiconductors were invented in the US, and where the US produced 37% of the world's supply of chips as recently as the 1990s, and now only about 12% of all computer chips are produced in the US.

This trend is reversing because of of what happened in 2021 when the decline in domestic chip production was exposed by a worldwide supply chain crisis that led to calls for reshoring (near-shoring, friend-shoring, the semiconductor industry has a l out of terms for it) manufacturing to the US.

There really are only a handful of countries who even have advanced chip manufacturing capabilities, and as many of them are under threat from a changing world order, it’s important to address the need over concentration of supply chains to prevent future calamities.

Repatriation in this case was meant to mean returning something to the country of its origin, not some kind of weird nationalism or whatever you’re finding offensive about the term. That is the actual definition, though it’s also a term that can be used for people.

What’s a better one? Rebuilding domestic capacity? Bring back chip manufacturing that once existed in the US to the US? That’s literally what repatriating an outsourced industry means by definition. If you have better terms for it, I would genuinely love to explore them.

It is simply the act or process of restoring or returning someone or something to the country of origin, in this case creating a more robust global supply chain that won’t repeat the devastating impacts of the 2021 crisis. And it is the country that invented semiconductors, though Braun, Bose and many other global scientists contributed important contributions to the science — but largely the industry arose in the US — primarily at Bell labs, and with the work or Kilby and Noyce, who later went on to create Intel and the rest is history.

Perhaps there are more delicate ways to put it, but rebuilding domestic US manufacturing capabilities is important for everyone involved in most industries and not just a few countries or the semiconductor industry itself. The term literally means bringing things back to the country of origin and I know of none better to mean just that and not some Weird sideways Xenophobic implication. I think you probably don’t like it because the word is also frequently used for its other definition as a dogwhistle for racists in the unrelated and deeply politicized American immigration press, but I’d hate to lose articulate vocabulary that means precisely what it’s meant to just because the word is tainted by its alternative use in politics, but that’s a whole other debate.

TSMC delays US chip fab opening, says US talent is insufficient

Related Stories