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TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

asia.nikkei.com

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Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#231

Post by _ph_ »

suction wrote: post #76
Heliosmaster wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those companies involved in semiconductor industry, where machines cost 100M usd EACH... People are just a rounding error. Should we hire 100 more? 1000 more? Whatever

Keep in mind that for a high-profile engineer or lead who expects to make 400k at least per year, the company would actually have to pay him 800k to make that much net. Labor cost in Germany is sky high. That times a thousand is not insignificant.

I don't know where you get the 400k number for an engineer, typical salaries are rather about 100k, somewhat more, a lot less.

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#232

Post by shoto_io »

polskibus wrote: post #196

Just recently we've discussed "faltering" talks in Europe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27161217 and "eyeing" Japan https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/TSMC-ey... I wonder if this media noise is more to do with negotiation tactics than with real intentions.

They gotta talk about something…

and for that they need to amplify the smallest signal into a trend! I mean noise…

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#233

Post by Akronymus »

_ph_ wrote: post #230
Akronymus wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that 800 is what you see on your paycheck. The company pays around double that in total.

No, there are only very little payments beyond the pay check. The employee does of course only get payed out a large part of the pay check, the rest goes to taxes and social insurances.

Huh, I may have (wrongly) assumed it'd be the same in Germany as in Austria.

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#234

Post by adwn »

artemonster wrote: post #59
spaniard89277 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm, isn't there people pushing for better standards, language, tools?

there are some developments, but mostly you would get new additional tool on top of existing stack, rather than a new stack. Problem 1. patents. in early FOSS days people got momentum to push hard for corporations to give up compiler patents and other obvious nonsense and let GCC flourish. same situation is here in hardware, the very idea of simulating circuits is a mine field of patents and you'd be sued out of exis…

> the very idea of simulating circuits is a mine field of patents and you'd be sued out of existence.

Doesn't that apply to basically every kind of software? How's it different for HDL simulation software?

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#236

Post by ineedasername »

Heliosmaster wrote: post #43
artemonster wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ha! I guess you haven't worked as a designer or verification engineer, designing chips then? let me tell you: you work with a commitee-designed c++ like abomination language with 300 non-composible keywords that make no freaking sense. all of that crap grew from legacy-upon-legacy of crutches as an attempt to fix the goddamn broken-by-design verilog. Ultimately, this craplanguage + library that is 90% non-debuggable…

Or working with a 40M Loc codebase started in the 80s with 50% code duplication. Because it's so mission critical that nobody really touches existing code. Or that everything needs to be rubber-stamped by a ton of people and even a rename takes months to make it in the codebase. Oh well. That's probably every enterprise

That's probably every enterprise

Yep, pretty much any industry or individual organization that's been around for 40 years will have decades-old cruft complicating attempts to make changes. That's why it's good to have some sort of skunkworks unit as well.

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#237

Post by GrigoriyMikh »

benhurmarcel wrote: post #226
GrigoriyMikh wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why you think that Germany has a lot of good and cheap engineers? I think the biggest problem that low salaries are causing there is that people with some(5+ years) experience are moving either to Switzerland/US or to freelance for Switzerland/US companies. So, there's big deficit of experienced engineers. German companies are trying to solve it by inviting Eastern European/Indian/Asian workers, that are cheaper, but…

That's funny because a lot of experienced engineers move to Germany from France, Spain, Italy, the UK, etc to get better salaries. Engineering salaries in Germany are high compared to most of western Europe.

Is that true even if sum up higher taxes and cost of living in Germany? At least in Eastern Europe(specifically Russia, Belarus and Ukraine), average salary for mediocre software engineer is about 3k$ per month after taxes which is already comparable with German average SE salary. But cost of living in EE is a lot cheaper, apartments in Moscow are 3 times cheaper than in major German cities. Food, on average 2 times cheaper and transportation(taxes, public transport and fuel) sometimes up to 10 times cheaper than in Germany.

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#238

Post by kaba0 »

jcfrei wrote: post #188
suction wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be true, but in Germany, the salary you pay to your employee is also about 1% of all the labor cost for him or her. Which is hyperbole, of course, but Germany is one of those countries where the actual net payout is usually significantly less than 50% of the salary the company provides. I'm not criticising it as I think Germany is a good example of a well-working system but net salaries are low for most.

A well-working system? Germany only has an income tax but no wealth tax, unsurprisingly there's a huge inequality in wealth. If you earn your living in Germany through work you are basically a sucker: You have to hand on average 38.9% to the state. Taxation on capital gains, interest and dividends is 25%. This difference is compounding every year so the net effect over a lifetime is huge.

Is the wealth inequality larger in Germany than in the US?

Also, you still end up paying for all those things. And private health insurance will simply always be more expensive

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#239

Post by _ph_ »

volta83 wrote: post #97
martin_a wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a German myself: Why would you not invest? Infrastructure, state of mind? I'd really love to see more high-tech companies invest here, after we've managed to kill the solar companies... :-/

Top technical talent scarcity and cost. In Silicon Valley, you can find a dozen 600k$ engineers relatively quickly to scale up a random startup. In Germany... the salaries these people would be making would be This disparity in the valuation of top engineers cause many to emigrate, and once you are in the US, it is impossible to financially justify taking a 5x pay cut to go back to Germany. (You can justify it "non-f…

If you would offer $600k for an engineering position, there would be no problem finding any numbers of engineers in Germany. They all would have to line up behind me of course :).

Yes, to quickly ramp up, you would have to pay more than teh average market salary, but as you pointed out, engineering positions are not as highly paid in Germany as in the silicon valley. There is nothing preventing you from paying good salaries though.

Europe has a great supply of electronic engineers and physicists. The only challenge would be that currently a lot of semiconductor investments happen in Europe, but these investments don't happen because Europe is such a bad place to invest in. Including a great supply of engineers.

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#240

Post by bluGill »

GrigoriyMikh wrote: post #202
bluGill wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, the union has enough benefits that the value of higher salary positions isn't worth it to many. In the union you are not allowed to work more than 36 hours a week (I might have the numbers off a bit?) and they check to ensure that. Non-union can work longer hours, in practice they don't, but they are allowed to. There are a number of other things like that, the one lead engineer I work with in Germany does…

What's "the union"? I never heard about it. Not a single engineer that i know personally is in this union(or at least they are hiding that). And literally all of them planning to leave Germany once the good opportunity arrives. Also, i know personally almost 20 engineers who left the country only for better pay and that's during pandemic only.

Depends on the industry, different industries get different unions. I believe the ones I work with are in the steel workers union, but since I don't live in Germany I'm sure. I just know they find their union worth it.
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