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Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]
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Re: Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you’re critical of others for working at a place you have worked at? How does that work?
I’m talking about the hypocrisy of holding it against someone for having worked somewhere that you yourself have worked at, not the industry itself.
> for having worked somewhere that you yourself have worked at
Their friend also stayed there for 8 years while the poster presumably quit sooner.
Re: Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Eh, close places often have intense rivalries over minor difference (that feel big to them), but to the outsider they look pretty much the same.
Have a look at Greek and Turkey for example. Even their cuisine is nearly identical.
Or look at the adherents of the major parties in many countries around the world.
To avoid an American example: if you put a member of the British Tories or Labour into Japan, they will pretty much be seen as just some Brits.
Re: Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My experience with the British is they frequently have stark rival differences in cultural identity based on which part of which city they live.
They will feel stark to the locals only.
In Britain, people from both places will leave their shoes on indoors at home, praise the NHS, watch football and think the queen is fine.
Re: Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 i…
Hot take, apparently: VHDL/Verilog developers should make 5x what JavaScript developers make, and not the other way around.
What sense of 'should' are you using here?
Re: Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Taiwan could import labour.
Re: Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]
#267Earlier 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…
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.
Re: Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
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+.
phD are not what they used to be
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.
Re: Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]
#269Earlier 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…
It's not the SWE's fault that the market pays for crap. If anything, good for them for making hay whilst the sun shines.
Re: Will young Americans want to work in semiconductor manufacturing? [video]
#270I 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…
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.