NB: Jason is referring to "S2" aka Samsung Austin Semiconductor. I'm familiar with Jason's previous comments in threads about Samsung, but outside of that I don't know him (even, say, by name). This makes sense, given the separation between the work of an SE manager and the actual day-to-day operations that are involved with getting wafers fabbed and shipped.
I worked at SAS in lots of different areas—Metro, Photo, and PIE (process integration).
The emotional defense above notwithstanding (which I'd characterize as not actually being supported, either...), SAS indeed has very, very deep cultural problems that make for a shockingly bad example of how to do engineering in a large organization. There are several factors contributing to this.
SAS doesn't treat information systems, or things IT-related generally, as an engineering concern. If it doesn't look like a materials science problem, SAS doesn't have the capacity to critically evaluate its impact on rates of production and yield.
Problems, though, range from lots of things, like:
- far too many things in-fab being handled with pen and paper
- reports that have to be tediously assembled manually, so they get sent out once a day, while realistically they should be available to an engineer at any given time (behind a button that generates them on the fly instead of throwing $45k/year technicians at the problem like a 1960s-era secretary pool)
- workers committed to this state of affairs remaining so indefinitely
- Conway-style balkanization and groups who have no idea what their role is ("are they asking me or are they telling me?")
- a bunch of dumb macho shit that is used to prevent critical productivity problems from being addressed because being lazy and not addressing it is somehow virtuous and not lazy—it's the application of basic engineering principles to eliminate a problem that's lazy!
- an effect that I have no way to describe except as the proliferation of mid-40s to 50s men of mediocre talent (to a degree that's even worse than what you can expect to see elsewhere, generally)
- an overreliance on the labor pool of people with military experience / government work for no reason other than they've been conditioned to survive in the kind of bureaucratic senselessness that SAS exemplifies
- unabashed credentialism, which gets people hired who shouldn't be
- Microsoft Office products being abused for everything—including areas where a different Microsoft Office product would be the most appropriate tool for the job (reaching for PowerPoint when the problem calls for Word—or any word processor)
- work showstoppers caused by truly ridiculous problems, like Windows crashing a half a dozen times a day; Caps Lock on a fab tool keeping people from remoting in from within the office, so they have to suit up, go into the fab, press the Caps Lock key, and return to their desk and resume work; lots of monkeying around just to share a file with someone, because everything has to be ferried through a proprietary document sharing system that amounts to a crippled, quasi-web-based thing that wants to be Windows Explorer-cum-Google Drive
- unit parts (i.e. manufacturing divisions) basically re-discovering/re-inventing the value version of control and implementing it in an ad hoc way for the tools that they ineract with, poorly—not to mention all opportunities for human error (which does happen regularly but no one does anything about it because 40% of the job is CYA and the CYA approach tends to be "don't let anyone find out this happened")
- tons of janky-ass software from S1, like "Simax", which is written in a proprietary Lisp-ish(?) that uses ActiveX to run in an IE9-10-11 window and that re-invents its own window management and basic form controls, was never fully localized into English (so you're clicking buttons with terse messages in Hangul that still don't make sense even if understanding the language is no problem), and times out and ends your session if you look away from it for 10 minutes (or whatever)
- overall just really bad engineering discipline; people putting wafers on hold and not being clear about they're expecting to do with them next or what they need someone else to do; people inventing new acronyms all over the place (because job security and also "mediocre talents") and using them liberally in the notes they do leave for others; people not documenting why something happened, which also happens to help when covering something up and hoping that no one has the time budget to untangle things to the point where it's obvious/incontrovertible that something did go wrong; also lots of people not having a dedicated workstation of their own, so when shifts change they have to be out of their seat so it can be ready—no putting in a little extra time to make sure that the kinds of fires that were put out that day won't just happen again tomorrow and the day after, ad infinitum