Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

TSMC’s Arizona Culture Clash

eetimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 303 posts

Re: TSMC’s Arizona Culture Clash

#201

Post by Tostino »

wheels wrote: post #198
phkahler wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It’s like: That's cute, but not what actually happened. It started with: Company: We want more profit Production: Moved to Asia Other Companies: We can't compete any more Other Production: Moved to Asia Companies: Oh crap, we need production back in the US (for various reasons) Production: Oh shit that's right, we moved because it cost less with no labor or environmental protections and we could work the shit out…

> [...] we moved because it cost less with no labor or environmental protections and we could work the shit out of people. TSMC was never in North America, it was always a Taiwanese company. It's literally an Asian company moving production to the US. Taiwan isn't some rando poor Asian country; it's a rich democracy. The work culture is no doubt different (as it is, say, in Japan or South Korea), but to pretend that…

I didn't read that comment in relation to TSMC, but as a rebuttal to the GP's assertion that it was "people" who drove US production over seas over the past 40 years.

Re: TSMC’s Arizona Culture Clash

#202

Post by Server6 »

wheels wrote: post #198
phkahler wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It’s like: That's cute, but not what actually happened. It started with: Company: We want more profit Production: Moved to Asia Other Companies: We can't compete any more Other Production: Moved to Asia Companies: Oh crap, we need production back in the US (for various reasons) Production: Oh shit that's right, we moved because it cost less with no labor or environmental protections and we could work the shit out…

> [...] we moved because it cost less with no labor or environmental protections and we could work the shit out of people. TSMC was never in North America, it was always a Taiwanese company. It's literally an Asian company moving production to the US. Taiwan isn't some rando poor Asian country; it's a rich democracy. The work culture is no doubt different (as it is, say, in Japan or South Korea), but to pretend that…

TSMC's largest customers are American though. Apple, Nvidia, and AMD. These companies sourced their chips internationally to TSMC for cost reasons, related mainly to labor. They're to blame. There's a compounding effect too. They could've purchased American chips and subsidized American foundries. They didn't and instead American foundries have fallen behind.

Re: TSMC’s Arizona Culture Clash

#203

Post by Diesel555 »

Edman274 wrote: post #67
deepnotderp wrote: post #17

None of this makes sense. 1. Long shifts are normal for fab operators in the U.S., eg Intel. 2. Certain engineers are always on call if an emergency happens, also true at Intel. 3. Samsung, not exactly the “live slow and enjoy life” type of culture as an employer operates fabs just fine in the U.S.

1. A global pandemic that has resulted in 4.5 million people quitting their jobs in the United States in the last month has resulted in people leaving jobs with long shifts. I bet that this has also affected people in TSMC fabrication plants. 2. It is possible that being on call at Intel requires fewer hours of attention than being on call at TSMC. It is also possible that Intel is offering higher starting salaries t…

Below is to point out that causation is being thrown around way too much with respect to the pandemic, not that the conclusions are incorrect.

> A global pandemic that has resulted in 4.5 million people quitting their jobs in the United States in the last month

4.5 million people quit their jobs and there was a global pandemic. 4.5 million would need to be compared to historical rates to say the pandemic resulted in an increase of X people quitting their jobs, not the total of 4.5 million. But even that X increase is a correlation and I highly doubt that the pandemic was 100% responsible for every single one of those individuals quitting their jobs.

A more complete story can be found from the bureau of labor statistics.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm

> Over the 12 months ending in November 2021, hires totaled 74.5 million and separations totaled 68.7 million, yielding a net employment gain of 5.9 million.

I still agree that the idea of bullet 1. is likely valid, that people are leaving jobs that are undesirable and getting better ones - but I'd be careful to add the reason why. Causation has been thrown around casually during the pandemic to influence policy without any evidence of the causation or the magnitude of that causal relationship. You could just delete "A global pandemic that has resulted in" and the sentence would stand alone.

Re: TSMC’s Arizona Culture Clash

#204

Post by fitchjo »

CivBase wrote: post #186
contidrift wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought profits meant "the amount of income that remains after accounting for all expenses, debts, additional income streams, and operating costs."

Investments and bonuses are not part of any of those categories. Profits don't just get dumped into a Scrooge McDuck-esque money pool. Businesses obviously keep some money on hand, but it doesn't benefit anyone involved to have the money sit there forever. Profits are eventually used to fund expansions, acquisitions, improvements, charitable donations, rewards, etc.

Or, most cynically, returned to owners in the form of dividends/distributions or stock buybacks

Re: TSMC’s Arizona Culture Clash

#205

Post by Tostino »

JohnWhigham wrote: post #181
neonihil wrote: post #137

It’s like: People: We want stuff cheaply, immediately and in immense volume! Production: Moves to Asia People: We want jobs! Production: Opens a new factory in the USA People: We don’t want to work that much! Production: increases pay, which increases product cost People: this is too expensive. Can we buy from overseas cheaply instead? Production: Closes USA factory, moves back to Asia. People: we want jobs…

Electronics/anything that uses ICs should never have been as cheap as they are now. NAFTA has been a fucking disaster; we're addicted to cheap shit we don't need, and it's near-impossible to break. It affects every aspect of society.

If it is possible to produce them in a way that doesn't damage the environment and gives the workers a good life, why shouldn't we want cheap ICs?

Re: TSMC’s Arizona Culture Clash

#206

Post by _ht0b »

jve wrote: post #93
_ht0b wrote: post #78

I work at another semiconductor manufacturer in the US. You could find and replace TSMC with my employer and write the exact same article. Re: giving PhDs menial tasks and working a lot/odd hours I've spent a lot of time thinking about it and it actually makes a certain kind of sense. From an engineering standpoint, there can be a lot variability in the amount of work needed. Some days you are on fire solving issues…

> Some days you are on fire solving issues with the tools and some days there is almost nothing to do Being programmer/sysadmin, I've never ever encountered such a day. A day with very low productivity? Yes. But not that the task list is short. Are there really days when you have nothing to do within any engineering job? Ofcourse, different jobs etc, but I suspect when everything is working, you still have to do main…

1. Physical maintenance is usually done by a separate team. There is always more low-immediate-value stuff like skill development, but actual process or procedural improvements almost always require support from multiple stakeholders. Those folks may already be prioritizing other projects, and if the process is already mature, they are likely to tell you to go away if you aren't solving a major pain point. It's honestly a lot like grad school in solid state physics. A lot of hurry up and wait.

2. Mostly I mean higher effectiveness in that one person knowing all the random details of a tool or process can, at least in the short term, be more effective than multiple people spread out over time just because it eliminates the issue of knowledge transfer. The follow-up to that can reasonably be "write better documentation," but some amount of unstructured talking is usually required to convey the full nuance of a situation. Doing that with multiple people spread across four or more shifts that don't overlap is fairly difficult.

To a limited extent, I also mean that PhDs have higher effectiveness because a PhD has a much higher chance of having delivered on process development on relevant tools while in grad school.

Re: TSMC’s Arizona Culture Clash

#207

Post by wheels »

Server6 wrote: post #202
wheels wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] we moved because it cost less with no labor or environmental protections and we could work the shit out of people. TSMC was never in North America, it was always a Taiwanese company. It's literally an Asian company moving production to the US. Taiwan isn't some rando poor Asian country; it's a rich democracy. The work culture is no doubt different (as it is, say, in Japan or South Korea), but to pretend that…

TSMC's largest customers are American though. Apple, Nvidia, and AMD. These companies sourced their chips internationally to TSMC for cost reasons, related mainly to labor. They're to blame. There's a compounding effect too. They could've purchased American chips and subsidized American foundries. They didn't and instead American foundries have fallen behind.

The GDP per capita of Taiwan is higher than France. It's not the place you move jobs to to optimize for labor costs.

Again, there's a pretty racist subtext here that because it's in Asia, you assume that must be cheap labor, not innovation. Would you have the same argument if the fabs were in France or Spain, both of which have lower GDPs per capita than Taiwan?

Re: TSMC’s Arizona Culture Clash

#208

Post by analognoise »

j_walter wrote: post #194
chrisjc wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's "we're"? There will always be those willing to embrace the "grind culture". Whether it's new grads eager for experience, those that have experienced life without opportunity and "freedom" or just those desperate to make ends meet.

Exactly this...there are always those willing to work their ass off to succeed. Those who are willing to do so get rewarded...but finding out who those people are takes time and generally that's not something you can see on a resume. The engineer in this story may not fit the bill...

Does anyone believe the "work hard you'll be rewarded" schtick anymore? Usually the only reward is...more work.

You can destroy yourself and your relationships for a job and they won't "reward you" if they can.

Re: TSMC’s Arizona Culture Clash

#209

Post by kristjansson »

monkeybutton wrote: post #140
simonh wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does sound like an outlier in terms of demand, but to back up your point, there are many industries in which there is critical infrastructure and activities going on potentially 24x7 most of not all weeks. I support financial applications that could be considered critical infrastructure for the country. To the point where the government has set up special regulatory procedures to ensure it’s managed properly. We m…

Mines operate 24/7 with 12 hour shifts. Many build and run their own infrastructure, including power plants.

Mines, famously tolerable workplaces that are a reasonable model for the rest of the economy

Re: TSMC’s Arizona Culture Clash

#210

Post by _RPL5_ »

breezeTrowel wrote: post #185
phkahler wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It’s like: That's cute, but not what actually happened. It started with: Company: We want more profit Production: Moved to Asia Other Companies: We can't compete any more Other Production: Moved to Asia Companies: Oh crap, we need production back in the US (for various reasons) Production: Oh shit that's right, we moved because it cost less with no labor or environmental protections and we could work the shit out…

Going by the article, it seems a large part of the "culture clash" is TSMC's insistence on three hours of meetings each day and using outdated software that was designed back in 1987(!). While workers in Taiwan used to work 12 hour days, time worked is not a good indicator of productivity and I'm willing to bet that TSMC's massive profitability meant there wasn't much incentive to make the work process more efficient…

My impression was that the extra hours are due to the factories being on a 24/7 uninterrupted production cycle. Having people work 12 hour shifts instead of 8 reduces the headcount required by 33%.
Post reply on HN