Well, I have lots of friends and relatives who work at the Intel fab and Intel is a pretty big employer, so the answer is yes, right?
Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]
191–200 of 349 posts
Re: Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]
#192I 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).
Re: Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]
#193I 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 f…
I can't corroborate this at all. 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 t…
Drunk is not an excuse for such a crappy view on the world
Re: Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]
#194I 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, yo…
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.
Semiconductor job skills are highly transferrable to software.
Re: Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]
#195I 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, yo…
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.
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.
Re: Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
The coming cohort of university students is showing a huge influx of CS majors. I wonder how long the high pay lasts after the flood.
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.
Re: Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]
#197I 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 f…
I can't corroborate this at all. 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 t…
> but at around 8 years in, I estimate that he just recently (since COVID) crossed the six figure threshold.
Better than most people.
Re: Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't corroborate this at all. 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 t…
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 avalan…
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
Recent front page submission comes to mind XD
Re: Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]
#199Honestly, 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 betwe…
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.
1. https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/20-64...
Re: Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct. 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 Ameri…
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.
Yes, just the fabs. Where do they import the bulk of the chemicals and other inputs from?