241–250 of 450 posts
This is a good move for TSMC. A lot of action happens through ASML ( Netherlands) and IMEC ( Belgium). Germany is relatively close to both.
Why would the locations of those research organizations matter?
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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.
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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.
It is hard to tell if you are in a better or worse situation as a developer when you work in such a company. Many employees in such companies would like to have a 40-hour week, because that would result in higher pay. Unions, however, push to allow 40-hour weeks only to a small percentage of the workforce on the grounds that if the workload is higher, it should be compensated by new hires instead of overtime for existing employees, since more employees also means more union members and thus more power for unions.
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> after everybody is seeing what Germany is doing to Tesla's Gigafactory there Yeah, the Walmart said the same in the 90s when they tried to concur Germany, only to miserably fail. The thing is that the Germany (and the EU as a whole) is no Wild West and there are actually rules, environmental responsibility and labor laws to follow.
I am pretty sure the other reailers in Germany like Aldi and Lidl teamed up to prevent Walmart from getting a foothold. They are extremely strong and this for a reason. I went to Walmart in Jena when they opened their shop there and was really underwhelmed by what they had to offer.
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There aren't any competitors in the state, and there has been basically no politically influential pushback, so that line of argument doesn't really make sense.
There is no overt pushback. That doesn't mean that there is none. And the presence and activity of the usual environmental NIMBY organisations like Deutsche Umwelthilfe, NABU, BUND, etc. point to at least some covert opposition, since those organisations happily serve as fronts for non-environmental interests. And state politics, especially in the east, is rife with people using it as a stepping stone to the federal…
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Germany is a great place to invest. So is most of Western Europe. The #1 thing you are looking for is _stability_ and a good engineering job market. Both is available. For this kind of automated high-tech manufacturing, nobody cares about salaries. They are <<1% of the cost.
Is Germany really stable considering Tesla story ? Chip making isn't clean by any standard.
While the original plan seemed to aim for starting production without a local battery plant this summer, there is no sign of starting production yet. On the other side, they already started to build a giant concrete foundation for what looks like a battery plant, this might come much earlier as initially planned. And this proceeds, like most other parts of the factory, at a very quick speed.
Germany has strict environmental regulations, but most places in the world have those by now. As long as you plan to fulfill the regulations, there should be no reason not to build in Germany.
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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 $600k for an engineering position, there would be no problem finding any numbers of engineers in Germany. They all would have to line up behind me of course :). Yes, to quickly ramp up, you would have to pay more than teh average market salary, but as you pointed out, engineering positions are not as highly paid in Germany as in the silicon valley. There is nothing preventing you from paying good s…
I'm baffled at some of the answers.
Paying somebody 600k$ does not make that person a good engineer.
You could pick an undergrad, offer them 600k$, and they could take the job, but that won't make them top talent.
No company out there paying their engineers 600k$ is going to give an engineer 600k$ if they are not worth each $ of those 600k$.
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It's not about finding engineers that are willing to have a 600k$ salary (who wouldn't if someone offers it to you?), but about attracting the best of the best engineers of a particular field, many of which already do have that salary. Why should they move to Germany?
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Not to mention the people who design many of the machines that TSMC use in their plants: ASML. "The mirrors guiding this light, made of sandwiched layers of silicon and molybdenum, are ground so precisely that, if scaled to the size of Germany, they would have no bumps bigger than a millimetre" https://www.economist.com/business/2020/02/29/how-asml-becam... >
Extremely naive question, but I always wonder how you can "bootstrap" this kind of precision — intuitively for something to be this precise, the tools and equipment that "create" it should also have to be more or less equally precise. Or is it a matter of manufacturing it, testing it, and rejecting some percentage of things that don't fit your requirements due to imprecisions? Are there any good background resources…
Examples of this is the device[1] used for the redefined kilogram[2], LIGO[3] and many others.
[1]: https://www.nist.gov/si-redefinition/kilogram-kibble-balance
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_redefinition_of_the_SI_ba...
[3]: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/LA/page/faq (first question)
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Dial down your tone - it is unwarranted. Rules and red tape was exactly my point. Why would TSMC choose to run that gauntlet willingly and potentially fall foul of the same hurdles that Tesla has encountered? One of the big problems Tesla had was around water supply. Do you have any idea how much water a chip fab uses? My point around export restrictions was in reference to the EU blocking vaccine exports this year b…
> My point around export restrictions was in reference to the EU blocking vaccine exports this year because it suited them. LMAO The EU blocks ONE vaccine shipment - while the UK and the US had export bans in place for months and now the EU is the bad guy. smh
Or, more pointedly - why are some people so eager to gleefully regurgitate such misinformation?
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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…
Hmmm, isn't there people pushing for better standards, language, tools?
I am hoping we can start proving many if the things they brute-force model check today, too.