271–280 of 349 posts
The pay isn’t great by Bay Area standards but the plants are located in low cost mid-west cities.
$35/hr plus overtime and benefits is an outstanding job in a city where upper-middle class homes cost $200,000. Those job very highly coveted and people stayed for decades. Top guys were making >$100,000/yr with a 2 year associates degree.
Honestly, 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…
>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…
Tangentially related is the lack of young people entering the "trades" (plumbing, electrical, construction, etc). Can't help but think that now is probably a good time to enter a "trade" due to the lack of people who are doing that.
Everyone I know who got an apprenticeship after school instead of going to uni are absolutely raking it in and have enjoyed a significantly better quality of life than their uni going peers. I personally can’t see how the uni goers will end up having a better time in the long run as the official narrative goes. The majority of the tradies seem to end up buying multiple houses and going the landlord route for early re…
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>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…
Is the M1's design really that technically impressive? The product itself is revolutionary, but my impression was that its main technical advantages is that ARM is more efficient and they had a monopoly on TSMC's 5 nm process. I think general mismanagement explains Intel's decline more than money or working conditions. TSMC pays embarrassing low, which is why a lot of engineers end up being poached by China.
This is backwards; M1 is not merely an implementation of an efficient ISA, Apple sponsored the design of the ISA in order to create M1 with it. That's why ARMv8 is significantly different from v7.
ISA doesn't matter that much though and it is well designed besides that.
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what about a company building housing for its employees. This is something that happened a lot in the netherlands in the city of eindhoven. Phillips had its major manufacturing located in the city, and build massive housing projects to house its workers relatively close to the plant.
No, this is exactly what I want to avoid. If I choose to change jobs then I need to find new housing. I want a social life outside of work, and privacy is essential. As an example I generally do not want my colleagues to know who I am dating, or if I am dating more than one person. People should only know what I choose to share. Separation between work and my personal life is essential.
You don't have to if they give regular leases, which regulations probably require anyway.
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It's the same with money, when money deflates it's treated as an investment too, not a medium of exchange. Just like housing being too expensive ruins it's ability to provide housing for everyone, money being too expensive causes a recession and unemployment. The difference however is that money can be created through borrowing so it doesn't go up in value but housing is restricted through zoning and the availability…
You're correct, but the other thing with housing is that we actually have a supply glut. There are something like 16 million vacant homes in the US (according to numbers from an internet search). Why so many vacant homes? The answer (as with everything in economics) is that the incentives are such that it's better to sit on a vacant home. In other words, our current system incentivizes hoarding homes.
And it's impossible to make squatting on a vacant home worthwhile, when you could be earning rent from it.
https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/vacant-nuance-in-the-vac...
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I think you’re looking at this from the wrong perspective. If your other option is to be a FAANG software engineer, sure, do that instead. For the vast swathes of the country where the available jobs are some mix of retail/warehouse low wage drudgery, long haul trucking, drug dealing / fraud / other crime, or welfare, working in semiconductors might be a welcome and attractive option.
The vast majority of people who are smart enough and have the work ethic to finish an EE degree are also smart enough to become a FANG engineer. EE is harder than computer science by far. So for the set of people who can be fab engineers, live in the USA and speak English, yes, the FANG engineer option is always there.
Here’s an example: https://www.ziprecruiter.com/c/HRL-Laboratories/Job/Wafer-Pr...
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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You're talking on a form full of people who code for a living. Many who have seen their lives become substantially better. There are many problems and challenges that we still face, but that doesn't mean there are no solutions.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/16/super-rich-f...
Gates and Bezos did lose half their net worth in divorces recently though.
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We should compare people's actual options, and not fall victim to the nirvana fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
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+.
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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…
sxr's posts about Samsung Semiconductor always strike me as being particularly bitter. The thing about chronically bitter people is that they're implacable.