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.
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.
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.
It's not really about quick cash. The truth is just that additional SWEs are right now more useful than additional fab engineers, in the US. It sucks to hear but it's true. There just aren't that many fab engineers necessary. Even TSMC employs a large part of SWE and IC designers, probably close to or more than process engineers.
Fab engineers in the US are fairly disposable because their existence isn't based on market needs but really as a hedge by the US to be independent. That's going to suck for you because TSMC isn't going to value you that much because you're not really business critical, you're just there to get government subsidies. In Taiwan it's another story and it's almost competitive with good SWE jobs.
This seems obviously true. It only seems unjust because we have this idea that tasks that are more intellectually challenging should pay more. That isn't how supply and demand work. If you need twice as many typists as are graduating, but only need a quarter of the radiologists that complete residency, well then typists will be paid far more than radiologists. We have an excess of people who want to work hardware, specifically because it is challenging, and that draws interest. So the interesting work is part of the compensation. We accept this as true for game development, it shouldn't surprise us for hardware, or embedded software. It doesn't matter that what you are doing is "harder", we need more bodies slinging fullstack generic buisiness logic than we can possibly educate it seems, so that is what will pay best. As for why we need that many people? I don't have any clue. It really seems like low-code should eventually replace the need for most SWE and drive down wages, but that has been a dream for decades and it hasn't happened yet.
> we have this idea that tasks that are more intellectually challenging should pay more
Why do you have this idea ? I'm not sure it sounds more "just" than saying, for example, that tasks that are physically more challenging should pay more, or humanly more challenging should pay more, etc..
I was constraining the statement to tech work. It does feel to me like roofers in southern summers should get paid like C levels in the valley. But that isn't how the world works and writing a new physics engine for an indie game, while difficult, is not going to pay as much as much as modifying a payment portal ui to get 0.3% more transactions completed. Because of of those things is in far more demand.
I think its somewhere more in the middle - software bloat is getting to legendary proportions (why do I need 16+ gigs of RAM and a modern cpu+gpu to run a calculator that I could buy for 50 cents 20 years ago?), and the software bloat drives the hardware bloat.
The truth is we don't need fab engineers because the applications we need to build require already "solved" hardware problems which are mostly supplied en-masse by a the few, large companies.
But, the deeper truth is that we don't need any of it... I have been recently and somewhat pleasantly surprised by how little I truly need. E.g., a 200$ chrome-book satisfies most of my needs. I have much, much beefier computers, hundreds of gigs of ram and multi-core processor, etc...all a waste. (I work as a software engineer and regularly find myself maxing my cores for things I don't really need).
If I could build my own hardware and have it actually do things, man, that would _useful_. Unlike this giant rickety tower of babel we have built...
I'm all for sarcasm but please show me a calculator that needs 16GB of RAM. Your input detracts from the original argument and doesn't progress the discussion at all.
It's okay just to say that you like the money. You don't always have to use the largest words. It's also okay for someone to say that software engineers are paid lots of money. Perhaps too much.
-> how about starting a semiconductor company where people are paid more?
I'm assuming you're being facetious given the enormous logistical and financial costs of starting a somewhat up-to-date semiconductor company. But, maybe that's the point.
Some words have specific meanings, rather than just being longer synonyms for short words.
> Perhaps too much.
Again, no. This was my point — this is like saying that the solution to homelessness is to take away the homes of everyone with homes, so that everyone is now equally homeless.
Don't pay the people who are already getting a good deal less; pay the people who are currently getting a bad deal more.
> I'm assuming you're being facetious given the enormous logistical and financial costs of starting a somewhat up-to-date semiconductor company.
No. Just fucking do it. Start another company that's less complex but is an obvious money earner; get rich; reinvest your wealth into a semiconductor company. Should only take 10 years. If you care, do it.
If Elon can do it — and Elon is not the smartest man — you can do it too.
(To be clear, you don't have to start a company that competes in the wider semiconductor market; you just have to start a company that competes in a niche. Like, for example, 5G radios. But your goal does have to be to compete; getting acquired means you no longer have control over your own business strategy, incl. profit margins, and therefore can no longer make your company "the one where people get paid well.")
> Don't pay the people who are already getting a good deal less; pay the people who are currently getting a bad deal more
I can agree with this, definitely. I still don't think that it's that easy to start a semiconductor company for the average person considering the requisite expertise and scale of capital necessary. However, outside of the basic accounting, it's not really my area of expertise.
I would like to second your observation. Fundamentally, the entire IT industry is mostly ruined, by Moore’s “law” … the mess of the IT ecosystem in almost every large enterprise is evidence.
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.
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.
They were giving anecdotes of "fairly senior people" and talking about the incompetence expected of managers, which is not analogous to a resident nurse.
I’ve heard it describes as a nerd trap: salaries are low and working conditions meh precisely because nerds want to work on the most advanced engineering humanity has ever attempted.
Its only a trap if you walk in unaware. If you acknowledge part of your pay is being excited by your work, then it's a choice. We don't expect game development to pay the same as writing payment portals for a faang, even if it's harder, because we understand the task itself is part of the exchange. Jobs people enjoy will always pay less than those they enjoy less, given they both have the same qualifications.
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.
Maybe I didn't succeed at getting it across, but my anecdotes about SAS are not only by proxy. (I.e. my friend's experience and that alone.) I worked there.
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.
Sure but people able to be process engineers on the caliber of those at TSMC are likely to be able to get good SWE jobs if they really wanted to. We're talking about highly qualified jobs here, un Taiwan a lot of those are gonna have PhDs+.
Some of those that maintain and make sure some machines are working correctly do have very advanced degrees, but I agree most aren't as qualified. However, these aren't the people the video is talking about nor the people that will be difficult to recruit.
If you can get a STEM PhD you can probably get into FAANG. Sure they're not what they used to be, they're still difficult to get. And they require many of the same skills as modern programming interviews.
That's because their job isn't really to write code, it's to do something else. But if you can get a PhD you can probably learn how to leetcode. A lot of them don't really care much about being able to write good code.
The vast majority of people who are smart enough and have the work ethic to finish an EE degree are also smart enough to become a FANG engineer. EE is harder than computer science by far.
So for the set of people who can be fab engineers, live in the USA and speak English, yes, the FANG engineer option is always there.
As an EE I can assure you that’s not true. Also, many jobs at a fab don’t require a bachelors. Often they will want a relevant associate degree though.
That's not really the jobs that are most problematic. As the video mentions, Intel fixed this issue for them by setting up training pipelines from community colleges for these jobs. The issue is moreso for the positions requiring more advanced education.
EE isn't necessarily harder than CS, it just really depends on the school. CS degrees are extremely variable while engineering degrees are much less so. I agree with the rest of your argument though.
In my school in Canada it had one extra class per semester and I think took 5 years. It was known as a place where you didn't have a life and you were buried in coursework and not really expected to get great grades because of the workload.
I remember a professor sympathetically talking about how little clusters of people just split up the homework load together like it was a team project from random classes and then tell each other how to solve it to each other to save time.
They interview people from everywhere. Literally everywhere. They basically have tapped the whole market worth of talent.
You might not get an interview at any given company in a particular year, but you should be able to get some interviews over a couple years if you have decent GPA or work experience. You probably won't be placed on a top-notch team, but you'll get in.
this may have been true at some point in the past, but it certainly isn't now. most of the engineers I work with have degrees from schools I had never heard of before meeting them. my team just hired a new grad that didn't even have any internships in school. it's not hard to get an interview at FAANGs these days. the difficult (or "luck-required") part is actually giving good solutions to four out of five algo problems, each in 45 minutes.
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.
I'm talking about making chips, not being a software engineer that happens to work in the same building as people making chips (or the building where people work on making machines that make chips). SEs showing up and saying things were fine at their SE job doesn't move the needle on this topic. Purdue's semiconductor degree program for EEs is only incidentally relevant in that case.
For the most part, Fab engineering is beyond boring and exploitative. I quit my PhD because it was excruciatingly boring, all you do is click ON/OFF on a big machine that deposits metal, and I realized, that this was what I'd be doing for 100K a year. On paper it sounds like you're doing some genius work manipulating atoms, but really it's actually quite mindless and boring, which is part of the reason the physics departments don't do this work anymore, only EE, since physics does the actual cool stuff. I think it's somewhat related to the fact that these degrees have almost no americans, and are full of foreigners that really need a visa. As an american, it made no sense to do this work, given that there are much more interesting and lucrative options.
But going back to your point, there are certain areas within semiconductor manufacturing that are software engineering jobs. They tend to be closely related to what's called physical design in the design part of making a chip. Or EDA coders. It's a cool area. But the bigger part of semiconductor manufacturing is working in a fab, which is atrocious grueling work, which is quite boring and dangerous.
sxr's posts about Samsung Semiconductor always strike me as being particularly bitter. The thing about chronically bitter people is that they're implacable.
The nice thing about the trick used in this comment is that it basically allows the person making it to just decide to believe whatever they want—and you hardly even notice it doesn't contain anything substantive about the real topic at hand or that it carries a personal attack as its payload, right there in the open but under the radar.
Dan Luu worked for one of the semiconductor industry's customers. He didn't work at S2 or another chipmaker. (He also explicitly mentions that he was lucky to work at Centaur starting out, but that's besides the point—since, again, Centaur is not a chipmaker.)
When I mentioned Dan Luu, I was specifically referring to the recent thunderstorm on Twitter where he mentioned the uncanny valleyness of doing work for unsexy companies and that it's actually more like a blemish on your résumé than a non-zero positive contribution.
-> 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.
"crossed the six figure threshold" likely refers to salary. this is pretty easy to estimate based on title if the person works at a large, well-known company. but otherwise, you're right. you can't possibly estimate an ordinary person's net worth without intimate knowledge of their investments, spending habits, etc.
-> "crossed the six figure threshold" likely refers to salary. this is pretty easy to estimate based on title if the person works at a large, well-known company.
You're right. I appreciate the correction. I didn't think of that as referring to the salary.
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.
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.
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”.
And why the reference to Geordies - natives of Newcastle - when the plant is in Sunderland?
Google maps tells me those two places are only 14.3 miles away. So 1) that's pretty understandable to conflate and 2) a lot of people from Newcastle probably commute there.
The reason I noticed it is that the two cities, though very close geographically, have an intense and not entirely friendly rivalry that goes back hundreds of years and continues to this day. See for example the History section of [0]. Although it's understandable that someone not familiar with the area could confuse the two places, friends from Sunderland tell that they are pretty offended when they are mistaken for Geordies. I imagine it's like accusing Bart Simpson and his friends of being from Shelbyville.
EDIT: Please forgive me for bringing this up. I appreciate it's not particularly relevant to moomin's comment about the culture of the Nissan plant, which I agree with aside from my nitpicks, nor to the original video.
I recently learned that there’s a name for this phenomenon, “ schismogenesis”. It seems immediate neighbors adopt opposite stance just to be different.
Not exclusively a British idiosyncrasy, given gangs and tribal habits elsewhere, but you're quite right that we Brits do take to various ways of distinguishing ourselves on sometimes questionable grounds! Location, education level, schools, universities, colleges within universities, accents, vocabulary, class, sports affiliations, it's endless!
Not nearly to the same extent as the UK, but in the US, people judge you based on regional accent and vocabulary as well. An English teacher at my high school threw out the curriculum she should have been teaching, and just had us practice vocabulary and (remedial) grammar. She said that we will be consigned to the ghetto as long as we sound like that is where we belong.
And yes, even the queen is not universally accepted. Famously, the Labour party used to be republican, but seems to have mostly given up on that plank of policy.
In any case, my main point was that intense local rivalries exist, but actual differences between neighbouring places are typically fairly minor.
I'm Italian and we have a similar situation, things like e.g. heated rivalry between two towns that are 15 km apart.
This can go very deep because as you know (but may be surprising to our American friends) in Europe we have much less cultural uniformity.
For example, in the two towns in Central Italy that I'm thinking about, which are only 15 km apart, people speak completely different dialects that are only partially intelligible one another.
A fun fact is that now I live in Australia which is one of the countries in the world with the least variance in accent. You can't tell Sydney and Perth accents apart, even though the two cities are thousands of kms apart.
It was very successful locally. The problem that "killed it" was that GM wanted to expand the model to other plants (Van Nuys was the next) and the same techniques didn't work. Likely because the wrong people were running things in Van Nuys compared to Fremont. Leadership is EVERYTHING when it comes to organizational transitions and problems with that.
According to that story which I’ve listened to before, that partnership had a very specific set of goals, once those goals were achieved or deemed unachievable (as the case may be) the purpose of the plant no longer existed so they shut it down.
>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.
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).
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.
RTL development is a very interesting beast. On one hand, development is challenging, and there's a massive amount of global $$$ in integrated circuits. These guys should be the top paid, cream of the crop, right?
However, the tools suck more than the English language has good words to describe, so it's hard for an engineer to be productive. And the products are complex, so you need a lot of engineers. And you're manufacturing physical products, so most of that huge dollar amount in the industry is trapped in manufacturing, not design. So even if you were the cream of the crop engineer, it's hard to extract much of that value for yourself.
On the other hand, webdev has extremely low capital overhead, and improvements in tools can go directly into developer productivity, which can immediately be realized as value (which gives you resources to improve even more).
So even if Verilog developers made the same money as JS developers today, in ten years, I'd expect the JS developers to make more.
One lesson here is that if you want your designs to improve rapidly, decouple them from the manufacturing business as much as you can. And you'll probably be able to pay better and attract better talent in the proces, which is a not insignificant benefit. Perhaps the rise of fabless semiconductor companies is understood even better in this light?
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.
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.
This is backwards; M1 is not merely an implementation of an efficient ISA, Apple sponsored the design of the ISA in order to create M1 with it. That's why ARMv8 is significantly different from v7.
ISA doesn't matter that much though and it is well designed besides that.
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.
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.
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.
Folks have been importing top soil for a long time too. That doesn't mean that you get to be okay with soil erosion. Or for a better example, folks have been digging wells and building canals for agriculture for as long as civilization has existed. That doesn't mean you get to deplete your aquifers and natural reservoirs.
I want sustainable to be sustainable. Responsible societies should be able to maintain and improve the people that they have. Any people imported should be a supplementary augmentation, calculated for sustainable growth and improvement of the society as a whole. An augmentation, a supplement, is very different from a replacement. A replacement is what happens when you have the irresponsible depletion of human capital, and frankly, any immigrant should not want to go to a place where human capital is unsustainably depleted in such a way, as their own offspring are likely to receive the same treatment.
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.
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
From a western perspective, everything people say about the Chinese (regarding culture, "bad products", cheap immitations, low quality, and so on) had been said about the Japanese in the 50s to 70s, the Taiwanese 80s to 90s, and the Koreans 90s to 00ss. In all cases it was followed by "they are now better and cheaper than us" and "they take our jobs".
Besides, this discussion is not about their respective cultures in general, but about manufacturing styles and working conditions, which are indeed, and even by necessity, similar.
Not that they don't also have shared history, interactions and cultural exchanges going back thousands of years. So, yeah, even that would be more like comparing Argentina and Uruguay, or comparing US and Canada, or France and Belgium, and so on, than some unfathomable comparison.
Surely in terms of work culture they're more similar to each other than any of them are to North American work culture? That's the culture we're all talking about here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You don't think I'm qualified? Why? Because what I said made you feel bad for some reason? Well jackass, you're definitely not qualified, keep reading. Or maybe don't, because what people put in books must also be wrong because you're a special snowflake.
Sigh. There's another conversation I had on here that went similar to this one. Basically, a guy was saying, "the tough road I took to get to my position is what made me who I am" which is perhaps literally true but also trash. There is always a way you could have gotten to where you are today, or indeed even a better place, with less hardship. If you rubbed a lamp and a genie asked if you wanted to change anything about your past, saying "no I'm perfectly happy with who I am today" is a brazen lie and about the stupidest thing you could do. You have no regrets? You don't want to be a better person? The hell is wrong with you?
Likewise, why want hardship for your children just for the sake of hardship? They could learn without hardship just as well, though you may not be smart enough to figure out how.
For someone who claims to be such an expert on my subjective experiences, you seem to rely an awful lot on name-calling, straw-man arguments and assuming opinions I have not stated. Bravo.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
It’s not a zero sum game. There isn’t some fixed, finite demand for software. There’s no upper bound on how much value can be created by skilled, imaginative software engineers, and a programmer can be productive with a relatively inexpensive set of tools (i.e., a computer and Internet access, which pretty much everybody has today).
If software is eating the world, eventually almost all jobs will in some aspects be software jobs, analogous to how 98% of the population used to be engaged in some aspect of agricultural production. We should focus on providing people with the productivity amplifying tools which might sustain a high quality standard of living.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's exactly how I felt. As a kid, I actually planned on a different career in something less fun like chemistry or biology because I thought there's no way people would pay me to write software. Thankfully people informed me I was wrong.
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.
“Passions” aside, I struggle to think of any other career better than software engineering, in terms of return on investment on the effort applied. And with low barrier to entry.
I make far more money than a lot of other people while working less, and much more comfortably from my own home. Why do anything else? I’ve concluded people will really subject themselves to a lifetime of grueling pointless work just to avoid some math and science.
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.
1. There is a limit of complexity that a given person or a given team can deal with happily. Below the threshold work satisfaction is great: “I am solving more and more complicated tasks”, after the threshold a stress eats job satisfaction: “I do not want to open my emails in the morning - what if I will not be able to solve some new problem”.
2. Complexity of each successful product grows until this threshold is reached. The successful product is used by more and more people. The successful product is put as a building stone in more and more complicated projects.
3. Because of 1 and 2 a successful SE is an unhappy person running under a lot of stress.
Now let’s see how decreasing the complexity of tools changes the situation. Bad tools: 50% of the complexity of the situation is caused by the tools, 50% - by the complexity of the product. Let’s improve tools twice. Now the tools create only 25% of the original complexity, and since the product causes 50% of the original complexity overall situation improved to 75% total of the original one. The engineer can have a happy life? No so fast. Since the product is successful, the is a great demand for new features. The complexity of the product increases to 75% and the programmer lives under stress again.
So, better tools allow to create more complicated, more useful products. But they do not improve - in the long run - the quality of programmers’ lifes. So if a person is not happy with current tools, she will not be happy to be a programmer. Or so it seems to me.
I am not suggesting that the right tools will allow absolutely anyone to be happy working in any given role in the domain of software development. Scoping is a big part of finding the right roles for people.
Maybe a person loves developing prototypes and POCs, or shepherding new systems through phases of adoption prior to reaching massive “scale.” As some people are wont to say, “Everything breaks at scale.”
Everybody has a complexity band in which they are comfortable operating. Many problems of high complexity can be decomposed sufficiently that they can be attacked teams of mostly mere mortals, with perhaps some assistance or over-sight from the Anointed Ones. Also, many people have significant abilities to navigate the complexities of, say, differential topology but C++ not so much. And vice versa. How information is presented impacts our ability to cope with complexity.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
>>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.
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.
No, this is exactly what I want to avoid. If I choose to change jobs then I need to find new housing.
I want a social life outside of work, and privacy is essential. As an example I generally do not want my colleagues to know who I am dating, or if I am dating more than one person.
People should only know what I choose to share. Separation between work and my personal life is essential.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
She describes her sister’s job as filling a cartridge with wafers, and then sending it into some robotic conveyance. And then just sitting there. Probably about as much skill as navigating a car through rush hour traffic to soccer practice.
Her sister isn’t installing HF lines, or clean room downdraft systems. Functional equivalent of flipping burgers.
My understanding is that for a while Intel was trying to only hire PhDs for running its tools, but found that the especially academic individuals had little interest in the statistical process control of wafer manufacturing. In high volume manufacturing, the core engineers are still chemical engineers with bachelors degrees.
I don't think its low skill/high supply that's the problem here. The fact is a nanny is only servicing one family and so their entire economic input must be a fraction of that family's income. Same problem hair stylist faces compared to a software developer. You can only cut so many heads of hair in a single day which limits your total possible income to a fraction of mine because a billion people can buy my software. Its just the way it is and barring some major change in how society is structured, the way it will always be.
I don't think it's so clear cut. Baumol costs disease already goes a long way, and developers only receive exponential rewards if they have significant equity. Some can go solo or succeed at the startup route but they are a minority.
Furthermore, with AI becoming increasingly sophisticated, we might see a seachange in developer salaries with only the most talented and valuable devs getting massive increases and all the rest being made redundant. Leading us back to the low skill/high supply problem.
Very true. I see that bi-modal salary distribution is already happening in many places. In fact at lot of places even pretty good s/w skills might not matter. So there are run-of-the-mill Java/.net/PHP etc developer jobs which will get a low band salary irrespective of actual skill level. And then Reactive/Mobile/Kubernetes/Deep-learning developer jobs which by default are set in higher-band salary.
Another thing I think in cloud with pre-packaged solution (not just individual pieces of sw/hw) for most common situations and metered billing, providers are going to take major chunks of IT budgets. It would be similar to past when hardware cost was high so developer would get lower portion of overall budget.
In my mind the era of on-prem systems, custom solutions with high paying FTE jobs is coming to an end. And the myth developers are kings is going to go away along with that.
Yeah, 1-2 per cent of total IT workforce working for cloud providers will be compensated well. Remaining 95% will be either short term gigs or low pay FTE jobs called Cloud Connectivity Developer II and so on.
But different families have different levels of income, and there is a very long tail. If nannying paid better, it would just be a smaller fraction of families that could afford it. The fact is because it's a low skill/high supply labor pool, the equilibrium point is reasonably low, such that even many middle class households can afford nannies. For software yeah your cost could be borne by a billion people, but those billion people could instead bear the cost of a cheaper developer if they were available.
Nannying is only considered low skill because outcomes are very difficult to measure and so the job becomes “keep child alive” when society makes that mostly trivial for most children.
We can’t hope to distinguish the great nannies from the mediocre (or even harmful) until years or decades later. But we don’t even try.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not as much of an issue if you can transition by mid 30s to being a landlord. You’re almost in the same boat as professional athletes then, rigorous toll on the body for 15/20 years and then chill for the rest of it. These guys normally go straight into an apprenticeship at 16, have qualified by 19 and have bought their first house by 21. If they stay over here they’re normally on at least £60k, if they go abroad they can earn six figures easily, especially if they’re willing to go places like Middle East and Africa. But they can also hit that back home or in developed countries like Australia if they’ve got the right tickets and experience and are willing to travel where the work is which most of them do.
Do you really think sitting in a chair is even comparable to move hundred or thousands of pounds of work materials at a time, being bent or twisted into access holes, being exposed to various construction dusts and materials, or even just working in often excessively hot or cold environments?
I think it's worth looking at, rather than making an assumption. Tradespeople are a lot more physically fit than the median office drone. I had abs when I worked on the factory floor, when I was promoted to the offices, I put on 40 lbs.
It looks like jobs which have lots of physical labor are generally correlated with other traits that tend to lower lifespan, so people who do lots of physical labor do end up dying earlier. Mea culpa.
On the other hand, if you control for lifestyle, the people who do physical labor live longer.
Quotes are because you are comparing damage from sitting in a chair that can be mitigated by walking around, standing, and working out, to inevitable damage from inhaling fumes and particles, lifting objects, and repeatedly contorting one’s body and putting pressure on joints that have a far higher probability of irreversible damage.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Indeed. Eventually there will be a revolution if the wealth concentration trend continues. I'm on the side of the working class forever and always, as I grew up dirt poor (and got exceptionally lucky because of my early interest in computers) and my family is still dirt poor today, so I have a good idea of what it's _actually_ like to starve.
> Eventually there will be a revolution if the wealth concentration trend continues.
I think surveillance and drone/robocop technology will make popular revolutions a thing of the past. People will be actively monitored if they even smell slightly rebellious to an algorithm, will be warned if they seem to be taking themselves seriously, and will be imprisoned if they don't have the appropriate reaction to a warning.
People need privacy and private ways to communicate in order to rebel. All of our movements will be monitored by our phones and street cameras with facial recognition. Cellphone conversations will be terminated with a warning if the algo detects Russian/Chinese/Iranian//North Korean/French(since 2031) propaganda being used to sow discord and evil.
We'll get back to remembering that wars, even civil, are when inbred princes and kings argue, not people with healthy genetics.
Housing is treated as an investment these days, instead of as housing. That's the fundamental cause of unaffordability, and it exacerbates the problem. It's easily fixed with the right policies, but at this point it can never be fixed (with a huge political left turn, maybe).
Making it easier to obtain leverage doesn't make housing cheaper, it just makes the prices go even higher faster.
It's the same with money, when money deflates it's treated as an investment too, not a medium of exchange.
Just like housing being too expensive ruins it's ability to provide housing for everyone, money being too expensive causes a recession and unemployment.
The difference however is that money can be created through borrowing so it doesn't go up in value but housing is restricted through zoning and the availability of land, you just can't make more of it.
You're correct, but the other thing with housing is that we actually have a supply glut. There are something like 16 million vacant homes in the US (according to numbers from an internet search).
Why so many vacant homes? The answer (as with everything in economics) is that the incentives are such that it's better to sit on a vacant home. In other words, our current system incentivizes hoarding homes.
This is false, "vacant homes" has no relation to "vacant homes you'd want to live in". Half could be condemned shacks in Detroit and the other half could be homes people have signed leases for but aren't moving in till next week.
And it's impossible to make squatting on a vacant home worthwhile, when you could be earning rent from it.
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.
You should try psychedelics, or at least read a few books on them. It probably won't change your life, but it'll definitely give you new perspectives. In my case, I think it made me a better person, and I find I have much better relationships now.
Is badgering people to do psychedelics in situations with zero contextual relevance to doing psychedelics one of the ways in which you've become a better person, or is that a remaining negative personality trait where a few more psychedelic sessions might cure you of the affliction?
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.
Why get on the ship in the first place? Was I forced onto the ship as a slave to be sold to the highest bidder in America? Or am I the captain of the ship who will get to keep all the riches?
There can only be one captain. If I'm forced onto that ship as a slave, I will do everything I can to break the chains and free my comrades. No matter what kind of riches I'm promised, I won't be the captain of any slave ship, that's for sure.
> If I'm forced onto that ship as a slave, I will do everything I can to break the chains and free my comrades.
And you'll be thrown overboard and everyone else (other than the people who you pulled into your plan, who will swim with you) will just get on with the business of surviving. You're not braver than or morally superior to millions of imported slaves. The Atlantic was filled with slaves who didn't think that the material world applied to them.
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.
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.
I reject the idea that depression is the source of your problems. It's just a symptom. Treating depression as anything other than a symptom won't make you happier, at best you'll feel numb, but likely maintain your profound sense of sadness.
If everyone's depressed, we shouldn't be asking "how do we get more SSRIs into these people?", but rather "how do we fix society so people aren't depressed?".
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.
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?
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".
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.
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.
I think it’s the opposite; he’s such a square which explains why his imagination is stuck on literally creating Snow Crash.
Anyone who has tripped balls and come out OK is not so addicted to literalness as Zuck. They realize a multiverse of perspectives lives within them. It doesn’t need to be made “real”.
That's a neat way to think about it. I think a lot of the hype about AI or whatever is just because so many techies have tried these substances and realized that the brain is such a weird thing, and now they think they can emulate it, commodify it, and sell it for a monthly subscription fee. The truth is, we have no idea how the brain _actually_ works.
In "The Doors of Perception", Aldous Huxley describes it very well: it's like these drugs remove a sensory filter we normally have in place which makes the world feel like...well...reality. When you remove that filter, you're suddenly flooded with the sense that there's so much more to the universe, but in actual fact it's all just in your head. It's just your brain cells doing a lot of communication with each other in a way that is most likely nonsensical.
Some people come out the other side thinking they've found some magic, but more likely they've just experienced what was always there without the filter, and once it wears off you're the same person you were but perhaps with a sense of feeling like you're part of a big system (which we all are, called biology).
From a strictly biological perspective it makes sense, given that most life is based on DNA and we share a lot of DNA with things that we are very different from. We share about 60% of our DNA with bananas.
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.
> 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)
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You're talking on a form full of people who code for a living. Many who have seen their lives become substantially better. There are many problems and challenges that we still face, but that doesn't mean there are no solutions.
I'm not sure what you're trying to tell me here. I'm well aware of this. I'm saying that we need to do something about it or stop complaining. If you complain and take no further steps you are advocating for the issues, not condemning them.
Yes and that is why it is better if humanity didn't exist. I.e. nobody plays.
Entertain the idea that every human has the option to be reincarnated when they die. How many people would voluntarily kill themselves to have a chance at being born to rich parents? It wouldn't surprise me if one third of the world population is constantly killing themselves for that lottery ticket.
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.
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.
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.
But a lot of people aren't even doing that. They're choosing to pick more lucrative career paths such as pushing JavaScript for cat photo social networks, working on ways to increase engagement for users to see ads, and whatever other ways FAANGs previously propped up by low interest rates, or startups propped up by VC funding, make money.
That work isn't necessarily easier, but it's not semiconductor manufacturing, or rebuilding American infrastructure, or being essential workers during a pandemic, or whatever other important but far less-paying work than consumer software engineering (or say, the financial industry).
If software engineering is such a cushy, desirable, lucrative job, why don't more people do it?
It's easy to forget the thousands of hours it takes to become competent in this field once you've been in it for a while. Most people simply do not care enough to take the time to learn to do it despite being fully capable. It ain't rocket surgery.
> If software engineering is such a cushy, desirable, lucrative job, why don't more people do it?
Lots of people are, and try, that's why bootcamps and Leetcode prep have been so big for the past decade. More and more people are joining, but also there's a lot of demand so jobs are unfilled.
(You're also completely failing to read when I said "that work isn't necessarily easier".)
My point is that a lot of people gravitate towards those hot industries, definitely more people than those going to lesser-paying industries in say semiconductor manufacturing, which is what TFA is about. My point is your comment about "attitudes exacerbating downward mobility" have nothing to do with why people don't want to work in semiconductor manufacturing.
"That work isn't necessarily easier", is obviously implying that it can be easier, or is roughly equivalent. Your entire comment was a clever way of turning the tables on software engineers. Please don't insult my intelligence by pretending otherwise.
> My point is your comment about "attitudes exacerbating downward mobility" have nothing to do with why people don't want to work in semiconductor manufacturing.
It has everything to do with why they don't want to do software engineering. I can't tell you how many of my educated peers think it's "lame" or "selling out" to work in a skilled career rather than being a bartender, activist, starving artist, etc.
> Your entire comment was a clever way of turning the tables on software engineers. Please don't insult my intelligence by pretending otherwise.
Thank you for calling me clever, but getting personal in a comment section isn't exactly amenable to discussion. Not to mention, ignoring all of the other points mentioned in the reply. I will accept your compliment, however.
> It has everything to do with why they don't want to do software engineering. I can't tell you how many of my educated peers think it's "lame" or "selling out" to work in a skilled career rather than being a bartender, activist, starving artist, etc.
What does that have to do with them not wanting to work in semiconductor manufacturing, which generally pays less than median software engineering salaries and is less sought-after? Do you actually have any comments germane to the discussion at hand? Are your educated peers actually eschewing well-paid skilled careers, either in software engineering or not, in favor of those other professions you've listed? What other careers are they pursuing instead? Are you attempting to establish a link between them calling those professions '"lame" or "selling out"' and downwards mobility? How old are these peers, and do they actually exist? What is your actual point here?
Gee, Weird how a little realism is somehow making a downward mobility.
The fact is that a good deal of workers are struggling to get by while the folks at the top get bonuses equal to more than a few weeks pay. Being realistic, even when hidden under a layer of sarcasm, is preferable lest things not change.
Dunno why people are picking on apple here… what I have heard from people who worked at Intel is that apple is known in the industry for, I quote, “turning Intel’s training pipeline into a waiting room for apple HR”. After working at Intel for two weeks you are highly likely to get an offer from apple for twice your Intel salary and a lot of people take it.
Apple is basically known for paying far above market to retain the best talent, and apple silicon reflects that (or did during the last 10 years although supposedly there has been something of an exodus over the last few). Whereas it’s really Intel who is notorious for playing the “who can we get at 75% of the going market rate” game.
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.