The 'brain drain' (as you refer to it) stems from intelligent/motivated grads in the US for the last two decades (at least) pursuing more lucrative fields like finance and adtech (re: Google, Facebook). Or some pursue management route (attending big MBA schools and switching to management roles where they climb corporate ladder). In other words, there are not a lot of college/grad students who want to pursue traditional engineering routes in the US.
I myself was an electrical engineering (EE) major until I switched to computer science in my third (junior) year of college because like a friend of mine at the time told me, "<my name>, if you don't major in computer science, you will not be able to find a job easily after graduation". He was right. All of my former college friends in EE ended up pursuing programming jobs (a few of them now works for FAANG; I used to work for one but left a year ago due to RTO). That is why the US has no sufficient personnel to do traditional engineering jobs and we have shipped off a lot of those to foreign countries.
I'm a EE and had no problem finding a job and neither did any of my classmates in my EE program (early 2010s). I also didn't exactly go to anything approaching MIT, but it was an engineering school and I had a decent GPA. Particularly, there are a lot of well paying jobs in power systems with good work life balance. We have an energy transition going on, so that helps. Having an internship probably helped me too. I acknowledge that things might have broadly changed.
> there are a lot of well paying jobs in power systems with good work life balance
How much electrical engineering is there in these jobs? I knew a few electrical engineer at university (weirdly they outnumbered the software engineers 3 to 1) and some of them told me they could get work for a local power company, but it was mostly looking at spreadsheets and not really using anything that they'd learned.
It depends on what exactly you do as the industry is so vast.
It is true (I'd wager this is true in most engineering fields) that very few actually use a lot of what you learned in school as it has all been put into fancy software packages. For example, my wife uses some kind of drafting software to design things like roads that she learned all the math to understand in college. It is the same in my industry where yeah, you use a lot of spreadsheets and Python scripts and SQL to help automate software and analyze the results. In a lot of cases you don't really need an engineering degree, but it helps a lot in understanding what is going on when the results don't make sense. Getting the engineering degree is also just really good training for the kind of rigorous thought processes needed for solving open problems.
There are also plenty of jobs in power that are closer to what you would consider engineering. For example, you might have to go to the substation switch yard, help supervise a crew installing new transformers, help design a microgrid...etc.
I'll add that it is pretty common for engineers to have some kind of existential crisis once you graduate and you realize what you thought you'd be doing once you graduated (in my case crawling around Jefferies tubes and fixing the warp reactor) is totally different in the real world. It's kind of similar in computer science where most graduates are basically just gluing library code together instead of writing their own software from scratch in C. I recall reading somewhere that the famous SICP course moved from Scheme to Python precisely because of the change in how people coded now.
> I'll add that it is pretty common for engineers to have some kind of existential crisis once you graduate and you realize what you thought you'd be doing once you graduated (in my case crawling around Jefferies tubes and fixing the warp reactor) is totally different in the real world.
Thank you for saying this out loud. It took me years to recover from this, and I "recovered" mostly by giving up and accepting that, unlike fiction, real world doesn't have to make sense or offer interesting, fulfilling work.
Now I just dream that one of these days, I'll build a house, and I'll design it with a Jefferies tube, just to scratch my itch.
I'm with you there friend! To continue the Star Trek analogies, I think a lot of modern day engineers (mind you not all) are at least partially just business folks, but instead of being Ferengi we have a more Vulcan like mindset and fill a different niche within the business in understanding the technical side of things in a way that few have an aptitude/interest for.
I work a lot with electricity markets though and find it to be very interesting and challenging as the field is surprisingly vast and incredibly dynamic. It requires knowledge of power fundamentals as well as economics, operations research, and honestly history. It isn't at all what I thought I would do back when I was in highschool, but a pleasant surprise all the same. I do sometimes get the itch to be like the guy that invented the lotus office software who lived in a cabin in the woods somewhere and implemented his own product, but the software market is already saturated in this space. Also, I have a family now which prevents my hermit dream and that is yet another wonderful surprise and has been very fulfilling as well as maddening at times :)
Similar qualifications here, but no internships. Couldn't find anything after grad school in the early 2010s (and still nothing in the mid 2010s after trying again). Went into telcom and I'm a happy little coder now. Nice to actually feel appreciated in this field compared to EE where it felt like I was always working my butt off for scraps.
I was focused on finding something entry-level. Did a non-thesis masters focused on mixed signal / RF design and R&D didn't really appeal to me at the time
I don't know if there is a somber write up. But from what I have heard from a lot of people, is that jobs designing and making say PCB boards and electronic circuits just don't exist. They are all in Shenzhen. Those American firms that have American engineers still, seem to all involve flying to those factories to help fix problems, and are dead end jobs. At least thats my impression.
Having known several great EEs in FAANG who did exactly that job, sometimes paying Chinese income tax due to the length of their stays at the factory, that is my impression as well.
Chip design/semiconductors/etc. have been a dead end in the US for 30+ years, but EE is a broad field and other specialties like RF/power systems/anything defense related are still in high demand. An EE with a PE will have an infinitely easier time getting a job working at a utility or engineering firm than any software developer these days to be honest.
Limited to non existent jobs. Not much else to say, the jobs like so many others have been exported. Taiwan and China being the electronics and manufacturing centers means design has steadily moved as well. Ask any board house in the west how things are going, the ones that are left that is.
It would help if they didn't charge $50 for a single raw PCB in low quantity when I can have the same board not just made, but also assembled in China for a fraction of that, shipping included. Literally.
I've often wondered if that's some kind of industry inertia issue, or if there's some underlying additional cost to build in the US.
People here cost a little more. No one here does quite the volume jlcpcb likely does. Perhaps there’s some artificial market factor as well like CCP tends to weigh some scales. There’s board assembly machines made in china as well likely further reducing the cost to build out assembly lines. Perhaps cheaper sources of basic materials like copper.
Likely multitudes of factors at play all of them in favor of China
I could buy that to some degree, but not to the current insane level of price disparity.
PCB production should be one of those things that is or can be mostly automated if it isn't already. Assembly is definitely already a mostly automated process. This is all existing tech. Thus the cost differential doesn't seem justifiable.
I have to think that this is very much "build it and they will come" territory if you can get within 1.5x to 3x the price, so it continues to boggle my mind that nobody has managed to make it happen.
The only blocker I can truly identify is the magnitude of the initial investment. That doesn't explain why the prices at domestic board houses seem to have remained pretty much exactly the same for the last couple of decades, though.
As far as I can tell, they just don't want the business.
The personnel that swaps part dispenser blades in the USA costs more. What's there to understand?
Automated assembly still has setup costs that take real humans walking around physically.
It's more likely that the Chinese companies are offering prototyping at a loss, because they know people won't switch to a different board house, once the prototyping phase is over.
Software jobs are more plentiful, sure, but you’re discounting the extremely high quantity of EE/CE jobs available at semiconductor companies (Intel, AMD, and many smaller ones) and companies like Apple. They don’t pay as well, but they can pay quite good over time and tend to be more stable than software jobs.
It's not even brain drain, America's dominance came from the fact that for nearly a century the brightest people in the world were willing to give up everything to come here. That is no longer the case. Today's Einstein probably isn't going to immigrate here.
I just want to point out that germany and US have a similar number when adjusted to it's respected population size (I think it's even a little bit higher).
Exactly. Something is penalizing or inhibiting manufacturing in developed countries. That something is just regular progression on the ladder of classical infinitely extending three-sector model[1] and gradual obsolescence of its lower rungs, but that is problematic, and without healthy preceding sectors for each, it's just a measuring contest being held in a skydiving.
Einstein didn't emigrate to get rich, he emigrated because the Nazi's took over Germany. Germany had the best universities in the world before they took the path of self-destruction. So that was a second, separate event that helped America.
Well, hopefully nothing like that happens in the US - that is to say an ideologue that ruins a country by ostracizing and then removing skilled immigrants or deters them from coming in the first place. Perhaps we can examine some recent large scale survey data to determine if the US populace gives a shit.
For all I shit relentlessly on this country and its culture, it's still an extremely attractive place to live if you're well-situated to make money. (Most people are not—hence my contempt for how the society functions. This presumably DOES apply to an "Einstein", if indeed this Einstein wants money.) China still has a way to go in catering to and granting citizenship (or some amenable equivalent) to foreigners.
You have the metaphor backwards. Where do you go if you're a talented American and your own country continually does not want to pay for your talent? It's the brain drain out of the US to worry about, not the influx of immigration.
> Where do you go if you're a talented American and your own country continually does not want to pay for your talent?
China is the only country that pays even remotely competitively. Yes, even including all the nice benefits of living in a european welfare state, yes including the other anglo colonies.
Makes sense, it's just basic economy to pay for spent and get it. Something the US is continually giving up.
Still, their culture basically does make it so certain types of people simply can't exist there. And I hear there's a healthy dose of racism as well. Nothing unique to China, sadly.
You make a good point about China. It’s still an ethnostate, and I don’t see how it can reconcile such a strong ethnic nationalist identity with its own demographic crisis and competition for labor from abroad.
The US didn't win World War 2, break the sound barrier, or put a man on the Moon only or primarily due to immigrant workers. We scoured the country's public school system for the sharpest young minds, sent them to institutions of higher learning with rigorous curricula, and found them positions in industry, government, or the military which made good use of their talent. Fetishizing the "nation of immigrants" narrative at the expensive of the native-born Americans who actually built most of this country's prosperity is, at best, ahistorical.
We literally put a man on the moon because we acquired Werner Von Braun and used his plans... I mean, we probably would have eventually done it, but the timeline likely would have been different and the soviets might have beaten us to the moon, but the time line we are in, we had a space program as successful as it was because we acquired German scientists who were already thinking about these problems a even a decade or so before we started to invest into it.
1,200 men of the same ethnic and religious background of the median American, brought over in a one-time arrangement in the wake of the most destructive war ever fought, versus 100,000 Indian H1B visas granted annually. That's just India, not counting other countries or visa types. Okay. Sure. Totally the same. We couldn't have made it back to the Moon without a million indentured IT workers.
I really have no clue what you're trying to say. You presented as a bad historical example for your argument, landing on the moon. I showed how that was a flawed example and now you're talking about a people from India in IT and the Artemis program and an accomplishment of it that hasn't even happened yet. Looks like your trying to pick an argument of H1B visas with my comment that had no mention of it.
>Fetishizing the "nation of immigrants" narrative at the expensive of the native-born Americans who actually built most of this country's prosperity is, at best, ahistorical.
Except many of us can trace our family lines to immigration. On one side I have to go back to the early 1800's to see when they immigrated, but this is literally a country of immigrants. (other half of the family is late 1800s/early 1900s immigration)
Even today I would assume the average American doesn't have to trace back more than 100-150 years to see when part of their family moved here.
>We scoured the country's public school system for the sharpest young minds, sent them to institutions of higher learning with rigorous curricula, and found them positions in industry, government, or the military which made good use of their talent.
Don't even get us started on ahistorical nonsense when you just want to make things up. Not when talented folks[0] had to work through system that didn't want them so they could eventually make all the difference.
I hear you, I took umbrage with that comment as well. But I think it’s fair to consider whether we are doing enough for Americans just as we are welcoming newcomers to settle here at the same time? My experience as a native born Californian, raised by a single immigrant mother living in urban poverty is no, we do not. Granted I escaped poverty by self-funding my engineering education (Federal Loans and working full time) but it took the better part of my 20s to do so, at great personal cost and risk. In many ways that experience taught me just how unfairly stacked the odds are against the working poor, let alone their children.
I am really curious how welcoming do you think US is to new comers.. Most of the early immigrants in 1800s and early 1900s were blue collar workers (exactly like the people coming from the south of the border). Do you think there is any part of the system that is welcoming to them?
The brain-drain from the rest of the world to US started only after WW2 when US became the only industrialized country with a viable student -> employee -> citizen path and even that only works for a very small set of people.
I would love to hear about programs where the newcomers are treated better than you as a native citizen when both of you are equally qualified.
Our German scientists were better than their German scientists. We had no real science PhD programs until the 1920's. We had no scouting for young minds until the 1950's.
> Fetishizing the "nation of immigrants" narrative at the expensive of the native-born Americans who actually built most of this country's prosperity is, at best, ahistorical.
Most of those native-born Americans were the children or grandchildren of immigrants.
What do you think a nation is? Is it a sports team or economic zone that hands out name tags to whoever steps off the boat with the right attitude? Or is it a specific group of people in a specific place with a shared language, lineage, culture, history, faith, and common destiny? I submit to you that it's the latter, and no empire nor state organized as the former can endure.
> Or is it a specific group of people in a specific place with a shared language, lineage, culture, history, faith, and common destiny?
I'm American, so I've never lived in this kind of nation.
> no empire nor state organized as the former can endure.
Looking at many of the longer-lived nations and empires of the past—having a shared language, lineage, culture, history, faith, common destiny? They had none of those. They were a conglomeration of people speaking different languages, from different lineages, with different cultures, different histories, and practicing different faiths.
The USSR never did pay us back for the massive, unprecedented, war-winning aid we delivered to them under Lend-Lease. Half a million trucks, thousands of tanks, tens of thousands of airplanes, millions of tons of food. And what did we get out of it? An implacable evil empire that sat like a boot on the neck of Eastern Europe for another 50 years after our "victory."
A total of $50.1 billion (equivalent to $672 billion in 2023 when accounting for inflation) worth of supplies was shipped, or 17% of the total war expenditures of the U.S.
In all, $31.4 billion went to the United Kingdom, $11.3 billion to the Soviet Union, $3.2 billion to France, $1.6 billion to China, and the remaining $2.6 billion to other Allies.
Material delivered under the act was supplied at no cost, to be used until returned or destroyed.
In practice, most equipment was destroyed, although some hardware (such as ships) was returned after the war.
Supplies that arrived after the termination date were sold to the United Kingdom at a large discount for £1.075 billion, using long-term loans from the United States, which were finally repaid in 2006.
Similarly, the Soviet Union repaid $722 million in 1971, with the remainder of the debt written off.
This is all correct. It’s also hard to believe that any other country could have sustained the casualties the USSR took and it saved lives for the other allies by diverting troops to the Eastern Front. The US had nearly 500k deaths, the USSR (post war borders) had something like 26 million.
Both sides needed each other. From a US perspective, trading money for lives likely seemed worth it.
The USSR was an objectively terrible regime, and most the Russian governments that have followed on from it have been too. Underestimating the deaths Russian leadership is willing to tolerate has proven unwise a few too many times.
If you only came across ten thousand years ago, you are just a colonist that killed and displaced the people who came across sixteen thousand years ago. But that said, native born has a definition, and it is where you were born, not where your parents, grandparents or grand^14 parents was born.
my grand^10 parent's didn't exactly "immigrate" her per se. They were "invited". I guess they were "persuaded" to help fight the occasional war though.
It is kind of disingenuous and dishonest to say that there is no value or meaning on those Americans born in American soil, a nation should prioritize the people that live on it or well at least care for them and make them useful for nation building in the future.
Canada has proven that importing punjabis for almost two decades and ignoring the local people is not effective. So yeah there is a meaningful difference and saying native born in this context allows us to steer the conversation towards taking care towards those in the country already, which is something that neolib governments have not done in the last decades.
I say this as a person that was not born in the country he resides in now, but saying "calling yourself "native born" doesn't mean a thing " is a dishonest way to try to dissuade and delete necessary words that work towards more fruitful conversatons about how to improve th esytems in North America.
>Canada has proven that importing punjabis for almost two decades and ignoring the local people is not effective.
Curious, that's what Americans once said about the Irish and the Italians and the Germans and the French and the Poles and the Chinese and Jews and Catholics and Muslims and so on and on ad nauseum.
It's just a generational crab mentality born from xenophobia. Every new wave of immigrants decides they're "native" as soon as the next wave shows up. None of them are any more native than the others.
This type of solipsistic kumbaya slop is running face-first into reality, fast. People are different. Groups of people are different. Nations of people can be very different. They differ in meaningful and important and obvious ways. You'll live to see these differences continue to manifest in ways that will doubtless surprise you.
And the Ellis Islanders were at least mostly Christian, white, European. They shared a common cultural, historical, religious, and racial frame with native-born Americans. They could and did meaningfully assimilate. Despite this, that wave of migrants almost broke us. Anarchy, terrorism, riots, organized crime, et cetera. The Johnson-Reed Act was passed in response in 1924 and it slowed immigration to a crawl until the 1960s.
Today we have immigrants who speak utterly alien tongues, with no shared history or civilized tradition, arriving at breakneck pace, and who barely learn English because they can scrape by with apps and translation services, who stay in the cultural bubble of their country of origin, who don't see an American culture worth assimilating to. Especially among so-called high skill immigrants, they pick up a US passport and immediately see me as a worse or lesser "American" than they are. That's nuts. The melting pot, if one ever existed, has broken down. What's happening now is something quite different, and it's not good for me or my fellow Americans.
It seems like you have misread my comment and think I have a particular thing against any group of people.
That is simply not the intention of the comment, if you read correctly you will note that what I meant is that you need to take care of your own people, something that the United States ACCOMPLISHED from the fifties until before Reagan.
I am just not more native than an Indian or Italian person that just like me came a few decades ago. However to pretend there is no difference between me and someone whose family has been here for decades or centuries... that is dishonest.
Why do you call Xenophobia to prioritize giving good jobs to the local population ? It seems like your reading comprehension as well as your definition of Xenophobia is deeply, deeply flawed. We can have immigration that makes sense. Like what Canada used to have...
We should prioritize those that have been for decades in a country and those whose families have paid taxes for multiple generations, there is absolutely nothing xenophobic about that.
If you want to pick an era of technological progress to make that point maybe don't pick the one that involves America becoming a superpower by putting a bomb invented by Jewish refugees on a rocket build by ex Nazi scientists after a physics revolution where be basically got to go and take all of Germany's top talent lol
Alternate explanation: electrical engineering is actually really hard and some parts of computer science look comparatively easier. Plus coding is startups is cool, EE is still nerd as in Nerd.
Well yes, that's why China's in the lead. We willingfully gave it up because corporate decided it was too expensive to pay american talent. They started the death spiral towards "No American wants to work in EE anymore".
I disagree. From what I've seen, the lower level you go, the more advanced it is seen by other developers. As the copypasta goes:
At the beginning, there was Purusha. From his face, born was the Brahmin, the priestly caste, the tooling creator, one who develops programming languages, compilers and standard libraries.
From the arms of the Purusha, Kshatriya, the warrior caste, was born. Kshatriya is the developer of systems software; operating systems, database engines, graphics drivers and high performance networked servers.
Then comes the Vaishya, the merchant caste, the Application developer, who was born from the knees of Purusha. From the feet of Purusha, the fourth varnā, Shudrā, the system administrator, was born. Shudrā serves the above three Varnās, his works range from administrating computers in bureaucratic organizations to replying to support requests.
that's by other developers, but I think in the mainstream know nothing culture people have an image of "coding" that's more prestigious and hackery than EE?
Hard and well paid gets a flood of people pursing it so difficulty can't be the only explanation. Finance, actuarial science, medicine, and law get plenty of applicants. I think it's that CS is an office job that pays well and is in-demand.
I studied both, can't say for sure EE was harder. Some courses in computer science were extremely hard for me (complexity, discrete math) and some courses in EE engineering were equally hard (most of the physics courses, analog circuits and more)
Both degrees can be made super hard, as hard as the school desires them to be...
Nah I did EE and then CompE (which was just replacing some later EE classes with hardware design stuff) and EE is not "actually really hard" - although people like to put it on a pedastel.
I never studied the hard sciences very seriously, although I feel like in retrospect I could have done so at much lesser proficiency than someone with much more encouragement, discipline, and interest, so my path of starting with web/software and then diving into electronics and EE would feel quite different
> I myself was an electrical engineering (EE) major until I switched to computer science in my third (junior) year of college because like a friend of mine at the time told me, "<my name>, if you don't major in computer science, you will not be able to find a job easily after graduation". He was right. All of my former college friends in EE ended up pursuing programming jobs (a few of them now works for FAANG; I used to work for one but left a year ago due to RTO).
Nothing against you looking out for your future, but this is exactly what I describe to people when I say the industry has changed. It used to be nerds who were very passionate. Now it’s full of people who are just doing a job.
Hit the nail on the head. I went to the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering in Albany for a master's in "nanoscale engineering" which essentially boiled down to a master's in being a fab line manager. I finished the degree since it was only a 3 semester program and I was getting paid for research work, but almost immediately after chatting with alumns that went to go work at IBM/Intel/etc it was pretty clear that software engineering was a much more lucrative and less stressful career.
Definitely true, as there weren’t EE jobs here. Now that we’re moving chip manufacturing back, and with programming job market being saturated, perhaps it will shift and EE will pay more due to being more in demand
The jobs needed for chip manufacturing aren’t primarily EE. It’s largely chemical engineering with specializations related to semiconductor tech. EEs use the tools developed by fabs to make their products, but those are typically separate companies (or, in the case of in-house fabs like Intel, basically run as separate companies).
I suspect the kinds of salaries that's possible in Silicon Valley only happens because:
(A) Skills are fairly transferable.
(B) There is a lot of employers competing for workers.
(C) An awful lot of value is created along the way.
If you specialize in some tiny part of chip manufacturing, there aren't many places you can transfer your skills.
Even if, in the future, you have multiple chip vendors. They won't all use the same processes, and you might only fit into one role at each of these businesses.
Maybe it's not that simple. But few chip companies have to compete against startups for workers. And that probably won't change.
Not saying the jobs can't be well paid, just that it's not unlikely that it won't be absurd SV level salaries.
> Maybe it's not that simple. But few chip companies have to compete against startups for workers. And that probably won't change.
It seems like what EE needs is something similar to open source, so that does happen.
The way things like Google or AWS got started is they started with Linux and built something on top of it, so it could be a startup because they don't first have to build the world in order to make a contribution, and they're not building on top of someone else's land.
There isn't any reason that couldn't inherently work in EE. Get some universities or government grants to publish a fully-open spec for some processors that could be fabbed by TSMC or Intel. Not as good as the state of the art, but half as good anyway.
Now people have a basis for EE startups. You take the base design and tweak it some for the application, so that it's a startup-sized job instead of a multinational-sized job, and now you've got EE startups making all kinds of phone SoCs and NVMe drives and Raspberry Pi competitors and whatever else they think can justify a big enough production run to send it to a fab and sell it to the public.
An interesting license for this could be something along the lines of: You can make derivative works, but you have to release them under the same license within five years. In other words, you get five years to make money from this before it goes into the commons, which gives you the incentive to do it while keeping the commons rich so the next you can do it again tomorrow.
RISC-V is the ISA, which is a solid first step. What you need is a production-ready fully open source whole device, so that someone who wants to fork it only has to change the parts they need to be different instead of having to also re-engineer the missing components.
I think your explanation about large numbers of motivated students pursuing lucrative Non-STEM degrees is incomplete without mentioning the cost of an undergraduate and graduate STEM education in the USA.
The most critical shortages of STEM graduates are in roles requiring advanced degrees. Your median undergraduate education (~$40k) and median graduate education (~$60k) saddles students with approximately $100k in unforgivable student debt! Never mind the years lost that one could otherwise be working. So it’s no wonder students are motivated by the ROI of their degrees, it’s why I chose Computer Engineering over Electrical Engineering.
These are expensive STEM degrees which students on visas are all too willing to pay for a chance at a residency and a pathway to citizenship. So no wonder the majority of undergraduate and graduate STEM students are foreign born in the US. The ROI is not worth it for the debt. We don’t have enough need based scholarships available to finance the STEM graduates this country claims it needs.
Really appreciate this comment and perspective! In the larger context of immigration and brain drain in other countries, how the US also has one, but of a different kind. Ultimately, it's a loss of potential. I'd somewhat disagree with the directionality of the correlative/causal relation, though. But what can be said is that the US also experiences a knowledge drain towards plainly lucrative jobs. I'd wager that it was/is a cyclical effect that just worsened over the decades and that neither engineers moving to fintech nor low-paying engineering jobs were/are the sole reason.
My hot take as to the reason EE is a bit of a dead end in the US is that the options outside of the handful of primary employers are limited. It is very capital intensive to run a semiconductor fab, design chips or assemble electronics at scale. Therefore the employer has all of the leverage. The equipment and/or factory worker infrastructure comes first and the engineering teams are just a cog.
Compare that to having all the degrees of freedom as a computer science student to start up a niche mobile app or internet based niche service after working at FAANG for 5-6 years. Even AI infrastructure will eventually go down in price making niche AI first startups a possibility. In finance its the same, as a post i-banker you have the option to start a boutique fund, a niche fintech or just invest your own savings.
What you said seems contradictory. You open with the premise that intelligent youth go the finance / CS / MBA path instead of engineering and then say that those who do go into traditional engineering can’t find jobs. Couldn’t it be that people don’t go into engineering because there aren’t any jobs? Wouldn’t the lack of jobs explain the low salaries and thus the preference for more high paying alternatives?
I read the main problem with hiring chip factory workers in Arizona was the factory just didnt pay enough for the long hours demanded. I looked up the median salary and its only 50k so I'm assuming it's not crazy skilled labor (e.g. brain drain). Taiwanese workers just seem more willing to do it.
I spoke to a Taiwanese person and apparently the salaries there are actually quite good, even by western standards (normal ones; not SF). The downside is they have very very long hours (996, barely any holiday, etc.).
It's also highly-skilled, yet very boring work. The way it was described to me is that every major piece of equipment has a PhD assigned to it and their job is basically to babysit the machine and troubleshoot when things go wrong.
US PhDs typically have other options and would consider this sort of work a waste of their time.
I know several people working as customer engineers in a fab based in America. They are very much not PhD‘s or even mechanical engineers.
They are each assigned one tool to maintain as you said. They each make around 100K and 3 12hr days per week.
They were working in the automotive industry before these jobs. Sounds pretty damn good to me, but I suppose that’s one reason American companies cannot compete with TSMC.
> every major piece of equipment has a PhD assigned to it and their job is basically to babysit the machine and troubleshoot when things go wrong
This works in Taiwan. It doesn’t in America. The Taiwanese workers will help transfer knowledge to American workers; it will be the joint responsibility of them both to come up with how those processes are adapted for American preferences. (Probably more automation, rotation between machines or possibly even not being under TSMC.)
I mean, that was exactly the way the job was described when I interviewed at Intel for a process engineer, and everyone doing the same job was at the time a PhD according to the interviewer. Did it change?
Being on call 24/7 to troubleshoot million dollar pieces of equipment sounded like a poor life choice, so I didn't take it. But Intel also hasn't exactly done great since then...
> was exactly the way the job was described when I interviewed at Intel for a process engineer, and everyone doing the same job was at the time a PhD according to the interviewer. Did it change?
Not sure. What has changed in recent years is the quality of industrial automation, particularly in semiconductors.
I'm unconvinced the only way to make these chips is for highly-trained engineers to caramelise onions on the stove. (At the very least, they could be allowed time to conduct experiments into new production methods, et cetera. Similar to how universities let professors do research in exchange for putting in teaching hours.)
> The way it was described to me is that every major piece of equipment has a PhD assigned to it...
did they mean that literally or just that an expert was assigned to it? What kind of PhD would even be relevant to maintaining machinery on an assembly line? Perhaps a PhD on the operations of that specific machine but even then, the person's knowledge would be so focused on whatever physics/chemistry/science is being used that i find it hard to believe a PhD would know what to do when something broke without tons of specific training on the hardware.
A PhD is really just a project in an academic setting.
There’s likely little real world difference in capability between someone with first class honours and a year in industry, than first class honours plus a PhD.
I mean, it's a long, specialized project. It really depends on the specialization. a new grad with a PhD in some LLM tech would be grabbed up much faster than a hobbyist with 5+ years in general SWE with maybe some pet projects made with AI tech.
> he way it was described to me is that every major piece of equipment has a PhD assigned to it and their job is basically to babysit the machine and troubleshoot when things go wrong.
Yes.
"It’s the Most Indispensable Machine in the World—and It Depends on This Woman"
Not just long hours right? Speaking to Taiwanese friends involved in semiconductor work (not TSMC employees though) it's the shift work that's really hard to manage in the US.
50k is/was recently a decent salary (not SF). In the last 5 years, not so much anywhere outside the absolute lowest CoL areas.
But yes, most Americans do not want to work on a death march. And employers don't want to pay it. I doubt they can argue 50k as exempt so that's a lot of overtime. They may as well be salaried 6 figures at that point.
Why would they require these hours? In the U.S. I think they would need to pay time and a half for anything north of 40-hours. Seems like it would be cheaper to hire more workers and not force the overtime. Then they might be able to increase the salary some. Everyone wins except the people who are willing to sacrifice the time for time and a half pay.
This is only accurate inasmuch as most salaried employees are overtime exempt for other reasons (e.g. because they are executive or administrative professionals). Paying employees a salary, on its own, does not make them overtime exempt.
One that comes to mind is an on-site caretaker position (e.g. on a remote property), where the employee is effectively being paid to be available, not to do a certain number of hours of work.
50k is just a step above McDonalds these days in a lot of areas. Sure minimum wage might be $15k, but realistically nobody pays that little except in very rural areas (if you need a small number of low skilled employees a small rural town is a perfect spot to build - but if you need more than a small number they can't provide more at any price - you will pay more in the city but there are a lot more people around if you need more)
AZ minimum wage is 14.70. If it was 996 and you somehow only got straight time for working 72h a week, it would pay 55000. Assuming there's no overtime exemption it would be $67000. I'm pretty sure it's not a 996 in AZ.
By how much? Where I live in IA McDonalds is starting at $17/hour, which is not that much behind California. (and both states are large enough to expect some variation depending on where you live)
That's why manufacturing offshored in the first place, companies feel they're receiving better value for money on wages elsewhere for this kind of work (and these days not to mention more & larger facilities, proximity to component sources, and a strong ecosystem of supporting and complimentary facilities).
I think that's obviously a major part of it but it ignores other stuff like lax environmental and safety standards.
It would be interesting to see how much of the economic advantage of off-shoring is due to lower wages due intrinsic to lower cost of living vs stuff like ignoring/bribing foreign officials or non-existent environmenta/safety standards that objectively should exist.
Personally I won't mind paying more to buy manufactured goods. My mom told me that a pair of sneakers before the offshoring back in the late 80s usually cost more than $300 in today's dollars. Yes, it was expensive, but I would just buy fewer and use the one for longer time. The reason is that in the long run the manufacturing cost would get lower due to increased efficiency, and loss of supply chain is detrimental to the entire country - and our living expenses will increase overall. Case in point, how much tax do we have to pay and how much inflation do we have to suffer in order to build those super expensive weapons? Part of the reasons that we had $20K toilet and $100 screws is that we simply don't have large enough supply chain to offset the cost of customized manufacturing.
Besides, the US loses know-how on manufacturing, eliminating potentially hundreds of thousands of high-paying engineering jobs - it will also be a pipe dream that we can keep the so-called high-end jobs by sitting in an office drawing boxes all day. Sooner or later, those who work with the actual manufacturing processes on the factor floor will out compete us and grab our the cushy "design" jobs.
you can feel free to buy american, i don’t care so i would prefer if it were not mandated and you get your individual choice to pay more for your goods if you want
Easy to get better value on wages when you get to pay under the minimum wage of your home country. And/or aren't required to offer benefits, vacation. And are able to work them twice as long without overtime pay. And don't need to care about child labor laws.
More so in the Chinese-speaking world and South Korea because the industrialization/urbanization is more recent, so there's rising demand in the urban areas with high population growth, resulting in high prices.
Japan's urbanization stopped long ago, and it's not taking in immigrants fast enough, so the urban areas have stopped growing.
The mentality refers to East Asia's deep agrarian root that places high value on owning land that can be passed down the generations (the alternative was often quasi-servile farm labour that locks families in poverty). Property purchases are usually multi-generational efforts, so families can generally take the brunt of overinflated prices.
2 is pretty infamous unless something big happened recently (a lot of big things in JP happened recently, so I could have legitmately missed something).
1 is 50/50. Urbanization is growing because the small town life is shrinking.it's wrong at face value, but there is a cost to this in the overall economy, since the country overall isn't growing.
It's just an obvious nonsense. Housing cost is dependent variable of local economic activities. People gather and property prices soar. Taiwan is jam packed so land prices would be higher relative to GDP per capita.
I think GP is finding concept of land scarcity non-intuitive for some reason.
> Real estate is always the monkey wrench in the gears of capitalism because of high necessity yet limited supply.
This only happens when the government becomes captured by land owners to constrain the supply, since otherwise you can build up. But governments getting captured by land owners happens a lot.
The chips still need to fly back to Taiwan to be packaged as packaging partner Amkor's facility in Arizona won't be ready until 2027*. I'm not sure the cause of the delta but it could be in part because Fab 21 got back on schedule rather impressively following earlier delays.
* updated to reflect newer article that Amkor's facility is delayed beyond late-2025
I was about to say, surly at some point in the near future the USA will introduce this capability. Shame they did not match each other in completion time.
Yeah definitely unfortunate. That said, I'm guessing the overall cost of overseas packaging is really tiny, otherwise Intel would've made a great customer since they are already packaging TSMC N6, N5, and N3 in New Mexico for their Arrow Lake CPUs.
This is not adversarial thinking. Ukraine would be delighted to hit one container with all Russia's advanced chips going to e.g. Vietnam or China to be packaged and sent back.
This is a massive supply chain weakness and presumably will be addressed as soon as possible.
Ticks do not require the consent of the host to drink blood.
Things like Google and Facebook cannot be parasitic, every dollar gained is a voluntary exchange with no threats. People choose to use Google and gain something from doing so.
Yep if the host agreed to die, then the market is a success. We've discovered the most efficient outcome – sucking the customer dry until they die! Thank you to the free market for delivering us this efficient result.
Remember kids – thousands dying from lack of healthcare isn't a bug of the system, it's a feature. This has been determined as necessary, nay even beneficial, by market forces that can never be wrong.
A business’s viability outside of advertising doesn’t change the morality of advertising.
Regardless of which side of the camp you fall on, you can’t argue that ads are “good” just because some businesses need them to survive. In fact, I’d wager if a business NEEDS ads to survive, it’s probably a net negative on society as a whole.
That's when you call any type of promotion advertising, in that case, sure, there is some innocent advertising. People here are (obviously) talking about 'modern' advertising which is what google/fb etc are doing which is just plain bad for everyone except for Google shareholders (I would imagine, besides money, it's not even good for the people working on it as it must do your head in to be a brilliant engineer and then working on tech so miserable and foul as that).
You think all businesses should just spread awareness by word of mouth? Can you put a sign on your store or is that an ad? What if you don't have a store? Yes, advertising can be really awful but that doesn't meaning all advertising is "cancer." If you have a good business that creates actual value for people, advertising it can actually be seen as a good thing.
> If you owned a small business you'd be singing a very different tune.
The problem with advertising is that a little bit done honestly is actually good and fine. What we actually have way, way too much, and it's often dishonest and manipulative.
It's a similar thing with finance. It's necessary, but way too many talented people are spending their energies on it.
Black and white thinking doesn't really capture the situation, and ends up creating a lot of noise (BAN IT ALL vs. IT'S ALL GOOD AND YOU LOVE IT, FIGHT!).
Honestly, I think it might be a good thing to put caps on the number of people that can work in sectors like that (and further limit the number of very smart people working in them), to direct talented people to more productive and socially beneficial parts of the economy.
Maybe 1 percent of Google's headcount is actually working on ad technology. There isn't some brain drain problem where people are doing ads instead of curing cancer.
Directly working. But then you have all the vehicles that, in the grand scheme of things, exist solely to enable ads and make data mining for them easier, such as Chrome and Android. Then there are products that exist primarily to lock you into the Google ecosystem so that you're forced to interact with the rest of it.
At the end of the day, if most of company's income is from ads, it can be safely assumed that whatever else it does is somehow about ads even if it doesn't contribute directly. Well, or else Google is incredibly inept.
Those "US STEM grads have their skills wasted" are solving those problems (optimal ad load, bad ads, etc.) but its a very hard problem. Don't be so dismissive.
There are "very hard problems" that don't need to be solved, or are far lower priority than other problems. Hard doesn't imply being "productive, useful and beneficial to society."
Setting aside the moral aspect which is highly subjective and seems to have a price tag (for example tech CEOs quit any sort of morals for a good paycheck), the productivity question is a measurable one.
Aka does advertising as a whole increase total consumption or is it a zero sum game (aka send bigger slice of the same pie to a competitor)
From what I know advertising does increase total demand aka more things/services need to be produced and sold on aggregate.
Some of the demand induced by ads is useful; people becoming aware of stuff they didn’t know exists, and finding that it provides a useful service for them.
But most ads are trying to convince you to buy their brand’s version of a product that you already know of, or (even worse!) a new version of an old product. Any demand induced there is just wastefulness.
If Amazon can figure out that I’m interested in headphones, I already know more actual information about headphones than their ads will give me.
I can’t relate to that. When I see a banner ad I find it obtrusive whether it’s from Bank of America or my favorite HAM radio company. If I’m in the market for a product I value hearing the testimonials of people in my life rather than an advertisement.
The one case where I find ads useful, when word of mouth isn't an option, is in a static image on a site (review site, blog, whatever) where I'm researching a thing. The ad would be related to that thing, doesn't need to know a thing about me other than I'm browsing that page, and is related to the content on that page. I click on those ads sometimes.
I’m trying to think of anything I find useful that I stumbled upon thanks to ads over the past twenty years or so, and I’m pretty much drawing a blank. It certainly seems negligible.
The problem with prohibiting ads is how to prevent (or even define) payed hidden promotions. But tracking and targeted ads could be prohibited, which would already make things much more civil and less relevant as a tech profit center.
>I’m trying to think of anything I find useful that I stumbled upon thanks to ads over the past twenty years or so, and I’m pretty much drawing a blank. It certainly seems negligible.
Maybe the ad is good when you arent even aware that you were influenced by it?
If you're "really interested" in something, you're already following new releases, doing extensive research for purchases etc, so why would you need ads?
Even worse, because advertising is a Red Queen's Race where the only limit on expense is what your competitors are spending, it's actually worse than unproductive because it increases company expenses without increasing product quality, leading to higher costs on everything for everyone.
You cannot be serious it. All of the ad tech companies produce a service people want otherwise no one would use them!
There may be other services that might be better if not for network effects, but it is trivially true that a search engine is better for most people than no search engine at all. And that is what is produced.
At least a few evil people attack once in a while thus proving some defense is needed so they they are not completely unproductive/useless. Much as I wish they were not needed.
It is though, more value is generated by the MIC than is put in and war has yet to ruin the productive capacity of the United States. The societal ills of this are why it’s popular to call America an evil empire
No actually, that's about the opportunity cost of war. There's a left-wing argument I frequently see that the US finds wars to increase profitability but I'm talking about the propping up of firms to keep the industrial capacity ready. It is not the most productive use of capital, but it is productive.
I think about this quite often. What I'd really like to study at some point is: How much more does the receptionist at JP Morgan's head quarters make than the receptionist at Walmart's headquarters?
Because fundamentally I think there is an effect where the people in proximity to lots of money earn more. Obviously the Walmart receptionist and the JP Morgan receptionist are doing basically the same job. But the JP Morgan receptionist is surrounded by people who wouldn't think twice about doubling the receptionists pay and I would imagine that has a significant effect.
Experienced this(or actually, a similar phenomenon) myself during the brief, beautiful moment in my life when I was working in Switzerland and was making as much as the locals, while hailing from a country with approximately 20% the GDP per capita, if not less.
Crazy how the same box of pasta is suddenly three times the price once you cross the border.
It's not the proximity to money, it's the real estate tied to doing that job.
If you want to be the receptionist at Goldman Sachs at their headquarters at 200 West Street, New York, NY 10282, then you're looking at paying $616,250 for a 556 sq. ft. studio apartment. And that's just the housing. If you want to live within 30 minutes of work, you can get that number down to $400,000, but that's also a studio apartment.
Then you have to consider some place to eat - or you bring your own meals.
What about clothing? You need clothing that looks the part.
It's the proximity to real estate, which I guess you could argue is a proximity to "lots of money" as you put it, but... not reeeaaaally...
Sure, but real estate is expensive in those places for a reason - it being typically because a sufficient number of people with lots of money want to buy it.
There is only a weak correlation between local income and housing costs, and most of that is that it's hard to get extreme housing prices in areas with low income, rather than that housing in high income areas is inherently required to be expensive.
For example, Boston has a higher per-capita income than NYC but somewhat lower housing costs, and Austin has around the same per-capita income as Los Angeles but significantly lower housing costs. Because it's a lot easier to build housing in Texas than in California.
These companies hire all of these exemplary graduates and pay them so well because (1) they are flush with cash because businesses are essentially held hostage to adtech; and (2) so that they won't go out into the world and build systems that make them irrelevant, as smart people are wont to do from time to time. Someone on your payroll doesn't have the time nor the inclination to knock you from your pedestal.
Why else would Google need 182,000 employees? Or how about Facebook with 67,000? Microsoft clocks in at a whopping 228,000, and Apple at 161,000.
These are staggering numbers of employees. So many, in fact, that it would be an exercise in futility to try and manage so many for the number of products they offer, especially Google and Meta.
It's cheaper to make busywork than risk the cash cow.
Options traders are paid well. It's still unproductive.
You're just shifting around a bunch of numbers temporarily to make a bunch of money for someone and lose a bunch for someone else.
Lots of shit we do is well-paid and unproductive.
If, as a species, we eliminated all bullshit jobs, there's a good chance only 20-30% of the species would be working. Here in America, only around 50% of people are actually working. Everyone else is in school, or retired.
You are downvoted because what you say is unpopular, but nobody tried to refute what you say.
Despite what some people may think, options are not just for gambling, but some people - like farmers who have to plan for uncertain weather - use them for a real purpose. And of course the use of option in the financial sector for hedging is extremely important too. But it's easier to dismissively say that trading options is a "bullshit job" and go back to one's ivory tower.
For a new factory with a new entry into the local market it makes perfect sense to bring in experienced workers for knowledge transfer. This is more an issue if a decade later this is still how things are done.
Back when American companies were offshoring, the initial start up teams were comprised of a lot of Americans who would do commissioning and initial ramp ups while training up the foreign workers. It's a lot easier to train people on a production line that is proven to work.
Problem is, those jobs in emerging markets were desirable compared to other jobs (for pay and opportunities), which helped with talent growth. These factory jobs, in comparison to other jobs, aren’t that desirable.
Fairly bad locations, average pay. It's not like the newer Japanese towns chip towns where you can get on a train and be in a proper city (ex. 40 min ride from Chitose to Sapporo), with okay pay as well. If pay was really good, it wouldn't matter, but selling this dream to a university grad is a bit hard in the US. I still hope it pans out though, cause NA manufacturing revival would be great. It's just the odds are against it so far.
Edit: This is not news. This (combined with their higher EE education) is why Taiwan won IBM PC-clone-related manufacturing in the 80s. And why they now have TSMC.
Such a great victory for American industry... the future is to bring workers from Taiwan with skills and willingness to receive a fraction of US salaries.
Say TSMC pays supper competitive US salaries to attract US-only labor, higher labor cost which is causing the end product to be more expensive, which makes that fab uncompetitive globally causing Apple to go buying from someone else and TSMC either choosing leaving the US or going bust eating the losses.
You can't compete with lower-wage countries in a globalized world with no trade barriers and no tariffs, when Apple wants higher profits and consumers want lower prices. Something has to give.
You can put tariffs on imported chips to equalize the field, but then iPhones would be more expensive for the average American and Apple's stock would tank.
More automation. Given the chemicals involved in fab work in general I expect this fab is very automated just for safety reasons and so very few employees are needed. Thus the cost of labor isn't a significant factor.
>Thus the cost of labor isn't a significant factor.
It is. Semi fabs aren't fire-and-forget. You need highly skilled people to constantly check and tweak all the operations in a feedback loop 24/7 and every hour of downtime due to any issue means millions lost. You hire the right people to minimize that downtime while also keeping the costs in check. It's a delicate balance.
The problem was never the cost of labor. US tech is already highly profitable and they can pay the full salary if they wish to. But their desire is basically to get a free card to pay lower salaries by any means, so they can send more of those profits to shareholders. The US is essentially a fighting arena between shareholders and workers. The profit is there, it is just a matter of how business want to keep always more of the spoils to themselves.
Why would well educated US grads go work in a semi fab for 50k when they can make 5-10x in an office or at home, getting people to click on ads in the bay area, or move money around between tax heavens in new york?
Your answer explains why the US is creating a failed society. It either implodes or needs to control other countries to maintain its profit and consumption levels.
This solves for the US national security issue; in the event of war between China and Taiwan (and a possible proxy war with US), Taiwan immigration would qualify for asylum.
This is not arrogance. This is not even about China and Taiwan fighting a war. (Heck, that's probably never gonna happen anyway.)
This is about the US manufacturing important things on our own. And it's not just the US either by the way. The Europeans want to be able to manufacture their own chips. The Russians. The Chinese. The Japanese. The Koreans. And on and on and on.
Why? Because the current system is dumb for everyone who is not Taiwan. For a whole lot of reasons. (Most of them economic.) No one wants to say that out loud, but it's the truth. We can't have everyone dependent on chips but only one nation capable of making them. Again, we're not the only ones who have come to this conclusion. Are the Chinese also "arrogant"? Are the Japanese "arrogant"? The Europeans? The Russians? Are the Koreans "arrogant"?
So everyone else can make common sense moves, but it's "arrogant" if the US does the same common sense thing? So we should just keep paying out an increasing share of our GDP as chips become more and more important and expensive while everyone else makes moves to cut their costs right? Is that what we have to do to be considered not "arrogant"?
You can't really be this obtuse. Asylum of high-skilled silicon workers from an ally under invasion isn't nearly the same thing as the asylum being granted over the last 4 years to anyone who could download the CBP One app.
> the asylum being granted over the last 4 years to anyone who could download the CBP One app
This is entirely unmoored from reality. CBP One only allows people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to make appointments, and once they have one, they have to actually show up and argue their case (why they need to come to the US for their own safety). You can’t just show a border patrol officer that you have CBP One and walk on through.
How much does salary contribute to the overall cost of operating TSMC? Perplexity said that the average salary of a TSMC employee is $76K a year, and TSMC had about 80K people. So it cost them around $6B a year on salary. In the meantime, their operational cost was about $46B a year, so that's 13%. TSMC shipped about 16 million 12-in wafers. Each 12-inch wafer can make about 300 to 400 chips. Let's say 200 to stay on the conservative side. That will be 3.2B chips a year. That means the cost per chip on salary will be less than $2 a year. It looks HC cost is not that dominant?
Making chips isn't something you learn the details of at University. You can take all the classes you want in advanced semiconductor techniques but the simple fact is University level manufacturing is nowhere close to SOTA.
Basically, you need fab workers to spend time in Taiwan/China, and then return to USA. It's the same model that most foreign students use at schools in USA/Canada. Get USA/Canadian name brand school on resume, learn english, and go back to home country = profit.
Re the first point: Why do you think it is so difficult to transfer chip production off Taiwan?
I don’t think this is about salaries. Nor is this about facilities.
This is about process know-how. And it’s currently not available outside of Taiwan. I’m glad we’re finally starting to transfer knowledge. It will take a couple more years.
Does anyone know the general path to get involved in this? Perhaps its romantic, but this seems important, it seems hard, and it seems like something I can be proud of working on (as opposed to maximizing ad clicks). I'm just a SWE w/ a Comp sci degree, so what's the entry-point here?
Your entry point is a masters and probably Phd in Electrical Engineering, specializing in some aspect of semiconductor manufacturing. It’s definitely not CS.
Surely there is a lot of software involved in the design / operation of these fabs, it's not just designing the chip directly. Another commenter mentioned EDA so maybe I'll look into that.
There is a huge amount of software in every single step of making an ASIC, digital or analog. Or even a PCB for that matter. Long gone are the days of cutting tape and etching anything yourself. Apple's M3 has 25 billion transistors. No human drew those.
I'm not too sure but I would assume there's going to be faster turn prototype chips in the USA now? Is packaging needed to prove a prototype? Can we start buying IP blocks and make our own ICs? I'd love a MCU with built in IMU and wide range LDO, not sure if that's possible all on the same node.
There's going to be some niches opening as a result of this IMO.
It might be possible but domain knowledge might give some candidates a leg up on the competition, going in blind just seems suboptimal, though most of the relevant EE undergraduate classes were in sophomore and junior level for me in the late 1980's and I only got to use EDA software when working a couple of semesters for AMD as a junior.
it's first step. you gotta do something to bootstrap, solve chicken-egg problem. From what I can see around me, the "made in america" is a no joke branding. a lot of pppl going tobuyjust because of that. and may even consider it as social status and their policial support.
Another $100. That's a little over six years old now though, so bump it up to $200.
Would I pay $1399 for an American made iPhone with American made internals, as the article suggests it would cost ($100, but I doubled it for inflation, because, why not?)? You bet your sweet ass I would.
Sure, but this is how a supply chain gets bootstrapped. All those factories in China didn't magically appear one day. Just like they didn't appear when Apple started moving operations to Vietnam. You start piecemeal and build out.
I have two kids in grade school and middle school and I see why we have a STEM gap. I have to constantly correct the learning at home in math. Also, I think it's fair to assume that in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and China the school kids are actually put on an academic grindset unlike here where there is such little academic rigor or discipline being enforced by the school it makes sense why the k-12 education numbers are as bad as they are in the USA.
It might be worth getting up in front of the kids in middle school + and saying "Hey you're in competition at a global scale here. You're going to have to work your butts off to stay relevant."
Maybe that's how US is going to have enough STEM talents -- just like WWI and WWII, take as many talents as possible when the other parts of the world are in shit.
The scenario that we’re going to be able to fight a war with another first world power, where we will attack their infrastructure but ours will be left untouched, seems unlikely.
We just need to make sure that we never fight directly with another regional power, e.g. China or Russia. IMO, neither of them wants a fight with the US too, because you don't want to push a super power to the corner, EVEN if you think you are good enough to win.
In the mean time, the situation in EU and Asia is going to deteriorate and North America can absorb more talents as it sees fit. The last two times it was mostly EU but this time Asia might be the new talent pool we can draw from.
It seems likely enough if the situation escalates. The conflict could be anything from a naval skirmish where neither side attacks the other's mainland to a total war scenario. It will likely start as naval-only and become gradually more involved if no side backs down.
However, it's safe to assume cyber attacks will hit Arizona. It's not unreasonable to assume crazy people will attack critical infrastructure, and we'll have to deal with the social fallout from that.
I have no specific info regarding this plant, but for anyone who never experienced this: flying in people from other plants at the starts (and all 3rd party vendors for a hypercare phase at launch) seems pretty normal.
If they have to keep staffing it that way, that's different.
you can fly a few hundred million dollars worth of chips in a single flight. You need not be concerned. The impact from temu shipments is several orders of magnitude higher.
made in america is also a federally defined standard that these chips categorically fail to meet. assembled in the united states is more appropriate, and even then if you didnt hire americans to do it, what was the point?
this is starting to feel like the best of intentions that has spiraled into a political theatricality where close-enough will be good-enough.
given the current state of declining US college enrollment, the affordability crisis of college, the growing wage gap, the failure of the minimum wage to keep up with the cost of living, and the failure to reform predatory US student lending practices I do not see how the US will in the next 25 years ever manage to curate the type of braintrust for which it was once renowned across the globe.
This is so disconnected from reality. They've gone from breaking ground to replicating one of the most advanced fabrication processes in the history of the world _at scale_ in about 4 years, but they'll be sending the dies off for packaging while their packaging partner comes online so its just political theatre?
Also, over half of the employees are local hires and the ratio will increase as more of the fab spins up. IMO it would be much worse political theatre to delay and balloon the cost of the project by forcing TSMC to exclusively use a workforce that has no experience with the companies tools and processes.
There's simply no real reason we can't have a deep and robust manufacturing base in America. Well except for the fact that some specific people made a whole lot of money while letting it fall apart, and have paid for decades of media relations trying to convince everyone otherwise.
If you're reading this statement I just made and want to instinctively disagree with me, start by interrogating your own opinion. Why do you think America can't compete with China, for example, over the long term? What "well everyone knows" facts are you using to create that opinion that you don't have any first hand relationship to.
> Why do you think America can't compete with China, for example, over the long term?
Not saying I necessarily disagree with you, but just to give an example, the US has considerably better labor practices and labor laws than China. It's not perfect but there are protections about making sure people are paid what they're owed, how much you are allowed to work someone, safety protocols, etc. All of those things could, in theory, cost more money and make labor more expensive.
Compare this to nations that don't have the same work protections, where they can pay people peanuts and have them work much longer shifts with effectively no protection (e.g. Foxconn in China [1]).
This might translate to decreased cost, and Americans have made it excruciatingly clear that we're apparently fine with slave labor as long as it doesn't happen within the US.
Just calling out that worker protections and increased labor costs seem to be the result of workers making more money. As the work force becomes wealthier, they _need_ less money, and their standards rise. This means their labor becomes more expensive and they demand safer workplaces. They demand more time off. This happened in the USA and is currently happening in China and other low-labor-cost nations.
I think the person you responded to is right. The USA can and should restore its manufacturing base, for many reasons. The whole country would greatly benefit from the return of blue-collar jobs.
I don't have sources for this, but the info is out there.
Also, there are a lot of nuances around this topic that I'm not getting into here. Just want to acknowledge that...
Sure, but it's worth inquiring why the jobs left in the first place.
There's probably a few hundred reasons, but I think the core one was "manufacturing in China is cheaper because labor is cheaper."
Even if China starts demanding better worker protection (and they should! I am actually fine with my products costing more if I have a guarantee that the workers were treated well), I think that there's still a reasonably high chance that manufacturing would still move to another developing country that doesn't.
The why is not trivial to explain, but it's related to the petrodollar system. It's good for the USA if we create markets with countries that are developing by moving manufacturing there, because it helps them acquire the dollars that they need to buy energy on the international market. This helps the USA maintain global hegemony.
The core reasons the jobs left are industrial and monetary policies.
Or, said another way, because the Chinese prioritized and subsidized manufacturing growth and we did the opposite.
Why? Because it made some specific Americans very rich. It also ruined the lives of many other Americans. While making the country much less resilient to shocks or conflicts.
Foxconn is a Taiwanese company. China's revolution is about delivering for workers. I don't get where ppl are coming up with "slave labor" when it is American allies possibly operating in China's SEZ that are doing the bad stuff.
It's also simultaneously sanctimonious sounding when development is very difficult and America sacrificed three generations to industrial capitalism, stole half a continent of land, and used slaves to do our own development depending on how you count inputs to the process.
I am not sold that this is a real thing in China in the first place. The main citation I can find is for the U.S. fake story about Xianjiang that is debunked on cursory inspection.
> Well except for the fact that some specific people made a whole lot of money while letting it fall apart, and have paid for decades of media relations trying to convince everyone otherwise.
I like the idea of made in America and bringing manufacturing self sufficiency to the US. But I don’t like the idea of reducing dependency on Taiwan, which makes it so that the world may ignore their plight in face of increasing aggression from China. The CCP is an authoritarian dictatorial government that seeks illegitimate control over Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and other areas. They need to be stopped and the solution isn’t to remove incentives to defend those areas.
There's a need to be pragmatic here; In the event of any kinetic Chinese aggression, TSMC (and other co's) fabs are going to be rendered inoperable, regardless of how well executed a US response is.
The world will will not be able to help with their plight, just as it was not with Ukraine and more recently Palestine. Might as well secure the supply chain.
Protecting Taiwan would mean WWIII. I hope the West and the Taiwanese figure this out ASAP and start moving as many people as possible out of there, and destroy all the fabs.
China is building more warships than the rest of the world combined. And NATO can't even recruit enough people to man their existing fleet.
But it seems the West is a victim of its own propaganda so there's no political will.
"TSMC does not have an advanced packaging facility in the U.S., and its partner Amkor will only start packaging chips in Arizona in 2027. As a result, Blackwell AI silicon produced in Arizona will need to be shipped back to Taiwan for final assembly, as all of TSMC's CoWoS packaging capacity remains in Taiwan."
Given that there may be a 25% chance that China invades Taiwan by 2030, having the ability to package SOTA chips in the US by 2027 seems "soon enough".
There's a window where China will have it max capability to invade for the next few years. After that their population is going to start shrinking and every year will be harder than the next to invade.
But they don’t have energy independence or food security yet, which is kind of a hard requirement for an invasion.
There’s not enough rail lines and gas pipelines from Russia to feed them with significant quantities of fossil fuels.
Imagine how bad Russias invasion of Ukraine would’ve been without energy independence and food security. The invasion of Taiwan is an order of magnitude more difficult, and Taiwan now has the recipe for how to knock out the entire naval fleet of a more powerful nation (see how Ukraine has essentially incapacitated Russia in the Black Sea).
I would expect an invasion to prompt the US navy to put up a blockade, disrupting China's oil supplies and generally making it very hard to keep their economy going. Admittedly, Trump is a wild card; he's random enough that it is hard to be sure what would happen.
Not a chance. Russia has no way to deliver oil in large quantities to China. New pipelines, if they could even build them, would take many, many years.
If renewables was adequate they would not be importing vast amounts of oil.
Except TW TFR even worse than PRC TFR, and ultimately scale effect takes over - PRC with crippled TFR still generates about as much male new borns per year than TW has men 18-40 total. PRC still on trend to generate 3-4x more MEN than US projected to add population per year, incidentally around the same as active duty military... having enough bodies is not going to be an issue for decades. Having enough nukes is.
I disagree, bodies is not limitting factor for PRC, it also becomes cheaper to wait for TW specifically because TW male 18-40 is set to decline = less kill bots / occupation force needed. Attacker:defender ratio (i.e. commonly 3:1) = every defender TW loses due to demographics, PRC with same TFR will come out significantly ahead, will need less enforcement:civilian ratio for occupation.
But ultimately, it's about hardware+industry - current trend = regional force balance shifting in PRC favour vs US+co every year with no end in sight. PRC better off accumulating capabilities at scale, not just regional, but global (i.e. prompt global strike) and increase autarky (less net population + more electrifcation = more calorie + energy security). All trend incentivizes waiting and building.
TLDR waiting and building becomes less costly (or rather less risky) to pursue PRC's ultimate strategic goals associated with TW scenario... displacing US posture out of east Asia and perhaps hitting CONUS infra at scale as response to US intervention. The latter part is key, there are important stretch goals to TW scenario that secures PRC geopolitical interests for 50-100+ years. It's much more important to be able to tackle those "costly" scenarios "cheaper", where cheaper is also relative to making intervention much more expensive for adversaries, i.e. PRC "winning" hand in TW scenario is to show US posture in east asia not sustainable, and CONUS (including TSMC Arizona) not defendable.
The population of 18-30 year old males is generally what matters for an invasion and China has been shrinking that for a long time. The rest of the population can plan the invasion, but they rarely actually do it. (a few countries also invite young females to an invasion, but that is not normal)
I'm not sure where GP's 25% comes from. But there have been various assessments that China intends to "reunify" with Taiwan by 2030. [1] Xi Xinping has also instructed the PLA to be prepared to invade by 2027. [2]
If you then ask yourself whether China would rather invade during the Trump administration (with its tendencies towards isolationism and "deal making") or roll the dice on a subsequent U.S. administration, you might find yourself thinking that the odds actually seem considerably higher than 25% that this could happen in the next four years.
To the extent that this narrative comes via the U.S. intelligence/defense community, one has to assume that it may biased towards exaggerating the threat. I for one hope that is the case, since I do not want to see a U.S.-China conflict any time soon. At the same time, I unfortunately don't think it's likely to be completely baseless.
"Packaging" in this context means taking the wafer of compute die (made in Arizona), dicing it up into individual die, mounting it onto a silicon interposer (an even bigger die, no idea where that's made, but probably taiwan) along with a bunch of HBM die, then mounting that Si interposer on a somewhat larger, very fine-pitched circuit board ('substrate') that is essentially a breakout for power and high-speed I/O from the compute die. That thing is the packaged 'CoWoS' system, where CoWoS==Chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, that eventually gets attached to a 'normal' PCB.
What I've always wondered was, how is it possible to do this process (or well, the less advanced version of it, for smaller/older chips) cheaply/at massive scale, for those ICs that cost a few cents in bulk?
Like, scaling wafer (die?) production to insanely low costs makes intuitive sense. The input is sand, the process itself is just easily-parallellizable chemistry and optics, and the output is a tiny little piece of material.
But packaging sounds as though it requires intricate mechanical work to be done to every single output chip, and I just can't wrap my head around how you scale that to the point where they cost a few cents...
This sounds like a complex procedure. Are there currently alternative packaging facilities that could do this work, if Taiwan were locked into kinetic war?
I'm making an educated guess but probably the cutting of chips from the wafers, placing them into the appropriate ceramic socket types (DIP, BFGA, SMD etc), soldering the line wires from chip to pin, encasing the chip, etc.
I am happily imagining opening a recent Apple device and seeing 74 gates with through holes in green PCBs, with an Apple logo made in soldering lead marking in the corner of the board.
I believe packaging in this context means taking the raw silicon dies and assembling them into a package which can be soldered onto a PCB (or put in a socket, but Apple doesn't socket anything).
The machines and processes needed to package the individual integrated circuits are fantastically expensive but the margins are so low in that step that it's only profitable at massive scales.
So you put the fantastically expensive machines near where most of the customers are and most of the customers are in Asia.
Works the same way with fiber optic cables. Making the long skinny bits is hard and high-margin. Actually turning them into cables is easy and low-margin.
So Corning makes huge spools of fiber optic cable in Arizona, North Carolina, and New York (I think) and ships it off to Taiwan and China where it is made into the cables that you plug into stuff.
Marine shipping is just about the most fuel efficient way of moving things between any two places, by a lot. A 100,000 dwt ship can get 1050 miles per gallon per ton of cargo. It takes about a teaspoon full of fuel to move an iPhone sized device across the pacific when I ran the numbers last.
To ship things to/from these fabs by sea you have to add the cost of shipping by truck between Phoenix and (presumably) LA. Not sure how big of a difference that makes.
Plus, chips are small in size and cost a lot so you can fit a lot in a container. Per unit shipping costs probably come out to be pretty low. Especially when compared to the political costs and risks associated with not onshoring.
Your overall point is probably right, but "tens of thousands of dollars of value in each gram" seems like an exaggeration. How much does one CPU weigh?
Depends on the chip. A typical consumer processor is 100-200 mm². Wafers are about 1mm thick (actually a bit less, but close enough) and silicon has a density of 2300kg/m³. So it's 2.3mg/mm² of wafer area. The chip is then 0.23-0.46g. if it's high end and worth $1000, then the wafers are $2-4000 per gram. Probably the low end of that since the fancier chips are usually the physically bigger ones.
However, low-end processors will be worth radically less ($100 CPUs aren't 10x smaller) and things like top-end FPGAs will be worth substantially more. An Agilex 7 can be $40,000 and if it's got less then 4 grams (around 1700mm², or 41mm*41mm), the wafer is worth over $10k/gram. The entire chip is 56x56, and from the package drawing, the die appears to be around 30x30, so it exceeds the threshold.
This is assuming all the value of the retail price is the main wafer, which is also not true.
Thousands per gram, certainly seems possible, though I doubt it's even that on average across all chips, and considering that there is non-wafer content in the price. Tens of thousands is probably pushing it. However, it's certainly likely to be rather more than gold in terms of specific value ($100/g, ish). Harder to fence, though.
Order of magnitude it's within range. A single wafer for something higher end is worth tens of thousands of dollars. So whatever that weighs. It's not much.
I see that source too (universitywafer.com) which is sucked into the AI slop panel on Google.
A 300mm wafer at 0.775mm thickness that weighs that much would be a density of 15g/cm³: midway between lead (11) and gold (19). Silicon is only 2.3g/cm³.
A 300mm wafer should be much closer to 100g than 1kg. Another page (on the same website!) says 125g, which is pretty dead-on 2.3g/cm³.
I'm suprised they can't ship (flat) packaging that could be used in Arizona with a simple assembly line.
If they had that packaging design then for this to make financial sense the two way shipping (and loading, unloading, custom clearance etc) would have to be less than shipping the packaging, the setup cost per unit cost of putting the chip in a box
Wait, wait. In the context of semiconductor manufacturing packaging does not mean what you think it means. It is not putting the product in a paper box.
It is about cutting the wafer into individual chips, wire bonding the silicone to pins, and covering the whole thing with epoxy.
You are correct. I was just illustrating what kind of processes belong to the umbrella term "packaging" in the context of semiconductor manufacturing. Was not talking about what particular process are missing from the Arizona facility.
But you are right on that it is CoWoS which is the missing ingredient.
Their new stuff is. The iPad mini just moved from the A15 to the A17, The first MacBook with Intel processors had access to a bin that was not generally available yet. The yield was too low for it to work for an IBM, a Sony, or a Fujitsu. But Apple was low volume and high margin.
If I was nervous about a new fab, there’s the iPhone SE, the Apple TV, lots of choices for a less aggressive manufacturing node and less aggressive sales figures. If yield is shit you can still offer a product that isn’t killed by its own success.
I wonder if Apple Intelligence is forcing them to create new chips for things like the SE and TV instead of using old chips which I think they’d usually do.
I'm a long time AAPL shareholder, admittedly I have not been paying super close attention over the last couple of years. But I'm pretty sure Apple has a history of being perfectly fine with their entry level devices being one killer feature behind the rest of their fleet. If the old hardware can support it fine, and if not then better luck next time (literally and figuratively).
They don't usually do it for very long, and my recollection is that they usually bring it down market before (maybe concurrent with) introducing yet another new killer feature.
So you'll be correct soon enough, but there's slack time there that they can use to hedge their bets on the new fab before leaning on it for the WWDC keynote.
They have adopted a n-2 type of rule for advanaced tech...but as of yesterday they seem to have relaxed this rule and approved transfer of 2nm from Taiwan fabs to the AZ fab at some point in the near future.
Advanced lithography is like if a mystery cult were real: Secret knowledge only understood by the most learned initiates, tightly-guarded process, etching symbols that do things...
Even more depressing: it's like a very complicated baking recipe arrived at by tweaking parameters over and over a again. There is no deep understanding... just a giant list of baking parameters that seem to work, sometimes.
Wow I did not know this and it is fantastic news, surprised Taiwan allowed this as they see chips as being the most important reason America would intervene if they were invaded.
In case of invasion, it's not that unlikely that the fabs in Taiwan get destroyed, or at least lose the ability to keep making and selling chips while the conflict is hot. In that case TSMC and Taiwan might prefer having a backup. As long as the US doesn't confiscate the Arizona fab, effectively siding with China, Taiwan would arguably have more leverage by still having something of immense strategic value to trade.
The US is not going to hold on to some working fab for some Taiwan-government-in-exile. As soon as you are out of power, even your allies generally take the time to plunder what they can.
Just like the US plundered any Ukrainian assets they could get their hands on, instead of supporting the Ukrainian government and freezing Russian assets instead?
In fact the RoC government is already in exile in Taiwan, though it seems unlikely that they would find another piece of real estate if they lost that.
In the case of invasion, the equipment within the TSMC factories will be affirmatively destroyed / sabotaged to the extent that it can't be used or studied.
Taiwan is a long-standing well-functioning democracy and a core ally. On the other side, I also view Russia's grievances as somewhat more legitimate than China's.
not the point of my comment. war is never good, whether it is Russia invading Ukraine, China invading Taiwan, or the US invading Iraq+Afghanistan - everyone should focus on finding common ground and understanding the perspectives of others
Addressing those "grievances" hasn't worked out too well for Russia. They complained about Ukraine moving in the general direction of NATO membership, and got Sweden and Finland as actual new members of NATO. Finland has a longer Russian border than Ukraine, and Sweden has a regional navy that pretty much controls the Baltic Sea. Both countries were pretty firmly neutral before the war.
Because for all of Russia's apocalyptic rhetoric about the dire consequences of NATO membership on their borders, they've done nothing significant about Finland and Sweden actually becoming NATO members while stepping up their military spending. By comparison, a little political noise about Ukraine maybe joining NATO someday is much less of a provocation, which makes it seem unlikely to have been Russia's actual reason for invasion. And from any reasonable ethical perspective it's certainly not a legitimate one.
from both legal and realpolitik lenses the Taiwan issue is fully legitimate. your country has done far worse to Cuba for far less. Even setting aside the historical context and the Chinese civil war, what is illegitimate about not wanting an antagonistic and belligerent foreign power installing weapons in an island mere miles off the mainland coast?
I keep hearing about a skills gap in the US for fabs, what skills or jobs are actually suffering from this? people with masters in nanotech, compeng, EE?
Perhaps there is a skill gap because nobody actually knows there is a demand? I have no idea what to recommend to people who are trying to choose a college degree.
With my industry in infosec, at least there are certifications one can take, even proper masters degrees these days. In my experience, there is no skills gap in cybersec, despite what CEO's and linkedin-types' sentiment. They just don't want to pay market price for skilled talent. "skills gap" has meant "we need more talent so we can pay less", there is no actual shortage of people who can do the jobs adequately.
Is it different for chip fabrication? and if so, how can regular people work/study to obtain these skills? If I, having read HN for years and reading about the fab process have no clue, how can regular people who don't visit HN?
If you all can help me answer this, I'll try to recruit a few people into pursuing the right career to help meet this demand.
Off topic... Taiwan also machines and heat treats some of the best cutlery steels in the world. Taichung City is famous for this. This is not as delicate a process as producing CPU chips, but it is hard to get right consistently.
Most all major cutlery companies have product lines that are produced solely in Taiwan (Spyderco, Cold Steel, Demko, etc.)
It would be nice to see Taiwanese steel industy move some production to the US as well.
High-quality knives come from proper metallurgy, especially as it relates to proper hardening steps. If you don't get these things exactly right, the best machining on earth is not going to produce even mediocre knives.
The announcement of this plant coincided with the announcement of the Endless Frontier Act and CHIPS for America act, which is what eventually became the bill we call CHIPS and Science Act.
This plant was the foundation that the CHIPS act was built upon. The Secretary of State had to secure an agreement with TSMC to build this fab before the bills could be drafted, as a lot of the recipients of the funding are suppliers for this plant.
It is completely truthful to assert that this is the result of the CHIPS act. Congress agreed to introduce the bills as a result of TSMC's agreement to build the fab in Arizona. If you have to avoid giving Biden credit, then you can point out that it was Trump's SoS who negotiated this original agreement.
I agree that the CHIPS Act was likely contingent on someone showing semiconductor manufacturing could actually be onshored. I’m not sure I buy that TSMC’s investment was contingent on an Act that was contingent on them investing in the first place. It’s not like TSMC was ever going to get a check to just reimburse themselves. Even now, their subsidies are only for new plans.
Intel, on the other hand, is a great example of a how a company dependent on the government funding for semiconductor manufacturing behaves. Heck, look at the Foxconn debacle; companies prefer incentives up front.
If you remember, TSMC had the immediate fear of losing ~15% of their revenue with the Huawei export ban. I wouldn’t be surprised if that influenced their decision to cozy up to America.
What makes you think construction was completed in July 2022? The shell of Phase 1 may have been completed, but even now the construction continues in Phase 1B and Phase 2.
Half of the works are from Taiwan
All machines were imported to build the factory.
USA can't do anythings without immigrants.
China was able to develop its own chip factory without immigrants and without buying machines (because USA blocked the 'free market')
This is really exciting. It'd be awesome if the rebirth of American industrialism was tech hardware driven. It sounds like this being mass production ready is still a few years off, but kudos to Apple and TSMC for working to make this happen.
My guess is no, it won't. This is US taxpayer money being used to increase the manufacturing capacity available to the market so that the US has domestic manufacturing when stuff goes sideways. A similar thing regularly occurs with auto manufacturing and manufacturing in country A usually frees up capacity for other countries, resulting in slightly lower prices.
What could happen is that once the US has manufacturing capacity it decides to tariff imported chips, causing your country to retroactively do the same. This is decades away, and the US has a problem sourcing chips it can trust right now, so it's not currently on the radar. It's not something I'm going to worry about.
Viewed through a pessimistic eye, the US finally is realizing that its arms production critically relies on chip production and it can't says its chips are US made when selling arms on the market. A change in mindset like this typically takes a generation and so even though this change in weapons really happened around the turn of the century, the people in power have mostly retired and the new generation now understands this reality.
Do we know why the US government did not promise to buy chips but to give tax breaks (or investment thereof)? Wouldn't promise to buy create a better incentive to the manufacturers?
There's just such a big shift between parties right now that when the current admin is done, you're not gonna know what to expect with the next. Especially with something that's more policy (purchase orders) than law (taxes). Better to just codify the benefits.
They'll be flown from the US to Taiwan for packaging, at least until packaging services exist here. Then they'll be flown to China, Southeast Asia, India, or possibly Brazil for final assembly into an iPhone or computer, at least until lower cost assembly plants are built here or someplace cheaper like Mexico.
I'm not interested what Apple says. What they do in FB is so many posts they posting what ever they like even posts of almost naked women and girls, looks like prostitution in FB. They are saying is their right to do that and their policy. It is disgusting thing in my point of view. Used to be postings of my friends now is totally disaster.
Maybe this is the discussion worth having. Taiwanese engineers competed to get into TSMC. Their management practically lived in the factory to solve production issues when needed. The local workers in the Arizona factory said the pay was pretty good per another comment. Yet somehow we thought that we were slaving the labors? What is the fundamental difference here? Personally, if I were a worker who could find just a service job that pays $30K a year or less, I'd kill to work for TSMC for $50K+/year and learn everything I can about chip manufacturing in my capacity. It would be proud to do it, and I wouldn't mind some overtime.
And I'm not sure why this got downvoted. Not that it matters, but I'm very curious about why people were not happy with the questions. My fundamental belief is that if someone chose to accept an offer and then work hard, it's not slavery but free will. But well, I guess American culture is interesting in the regard. If I study STEM hard in school, I'll be a "teacher's pet" or a nerd who knows only "how to cram". On the other hand, if I free throw under a hoop 4000 times a day, I'm DA man and it's worth the highest praise on the level of "have you seen the LA of 4:00am". Or if I'm a banker or a startup employee who worked 100hr+, I'm building the future of the US, yet if I worked in a fab 996 on my own will, I'll be a slave?
- Over 50% of the workers flew in from Taiwan to work on this plant and make these chips.
- The chips still need to fly back to Taiwan to be packaged as there are no facilities here with such a capability.
Made in america is a hard sell. But at least showing the glaring STEM field gap in the U.S. is a start to finally addressing the brain drain.
The 'brain drain' (as you refer to it) stems from intelligent/motivated grads in the US for the last two decades (at least) pursuing more lucrative fields like finance and adtech (re: Google, Facebook). Or some pursue management route (attending big MBA schools and switching to management roles where they climb corporate ladder). In other words, there are not a lot of college/grad students who want to pursue traditional engineering routes in the US.
I myself was an electrical engineering (EE) major until I switched to computer science in my third (junior) year of college because like a friend of mine at the time told me, "<my name>, if you don't major in computer science, you will not be able to find a job easily after graduation". He was right. All of my former college friends in EE ended up pursuing programming jobs (a few of them now works for FAANG; I used to work for one but left a year ago due to RTO). That is why the US has no sufficient personnel to do traditional engineering jobs and we have shipped off a lot of those to foreign countries.
Everyone I know that was in EE falls into two camps basically:
1. Became web developers
2. Work in Defense or some other regulated industry that has protections from being outsourced to China
I'm a EE and had no problem finding a job and neither did any of my classmates in my EE program (early 2010s). I also didn't exactly go to anything approaching MIT, but it was an engineering school and I had a decent GPA. Particularly, there are a lot of well paying jobs in power systems with good work life balance. We have an energy transition going on, so that helps. Having an internship probably helped me too. I acknowledge that things might have broadly changed.
> there are a lot of well paying jobs in power systems with good work life balance
How much electrical engineering is there in these jobs? I knew a few electrical engineer at university (weirdly they outnumbered the software engineers 3 to 1) and some of them told me they could get work for a local power company, but it was mostly looking at spreadsheets and not really using anything that they'd learned.
It depends on what exactly you do as the industry is so vast.
It is true (I'd wager this is true in most engineering fields) that very few actually use a lot of what you learned in school as it has all been put into fancy software packages. For example, my wife uses some kind of drafting software to design things like roads that she learned all the math to understand in college. It is the same in my industry where yeah, you use a lot of spreadsheets and Python scripts and SQL to help automate software and analyze the results. In a lot of cases you don't really need an engineering degree, but it helps a lot in understanding what is going on when the results don't make sense. Getting the engineering degree is also just really good training for the kind of rigorous thought processes needed for solving open problems.
There are also plenty of jobs in power that are closer to what you would consider engineering. For example, you might have to go to the substation switch yard, help supervise a crew installing new transformers, help design a microgrid...etc.
I'll add that it is pretty common for engineers to have some kind of existential crisis once you graduate and you realize what you thought you'd be doing once you graduated (in my case crawling around Jefferies tubes and fixing the warp reactor) is totally different in the real world. It's kind of similar in computer science where most graduates are basically just gluing library code together instead of writing their own software from scratch in C. I recall reading somewhere that the famous SICP course moved from Scheme to Python precisely because of the change in how people coded now.
> I'll add that it is pretty common for engineers to have some kind of existential crisis once you graduate and you realize what you thought you'd be doing once you graduated (in my case crawling around Jefferies tubes and fixing the warp reactor) is totally different in the real world.
Thank you for saying this out loud. It took me years to recover from this, and I "recovered" mostly by giving up and accepting that, unlike fiction, real world doesn't have to make sense or offer interesting, fulfilling work.
Now I just dream that one of these days, I'll build a house, and I'll design it with a Jefferies tube, just to scratch my itch.
I'm with you there friend! To continue the Star Trek analogies, I think a lot of modern day engineers (mind you not all) are at least partially just business folks, but instead of being Ferengi we have a more Vulcan like mindset and fill a different niche within the business in understanding the technical side of things in a way that few have an aptitude/interest for.
I work a lot with electricity markets though and find it to be very interesting and challenging as the field is surprisingly vast and incredibly dynamic. It requires knowledge of power fundamentals as well as economics, operations research, and honestly history. It isn't at all what I thought I would do back when I was in highschool, but a pleasant surprise all the same. I do sometimes get the itch to be like the guy that invented the lotus office software who lived in a cabin in the woods somewhere and implemented his own product, but the software market is already saturated in this space. Also, I have a family now which prevents my hermit dream and that is yet another wonderful surprise and has been very fulfilling as well as maddening at times :)
“Fun” fact: pure EE is no longer a major at MIT
Similar qualifications here, but no internships. Couldn't find anything after grad school in the early 2010s (and still nothing in the mid 2010s after trying again). Went into telcom and I'm a happy little coder now. Nice to actually feel appreciated in this field compared to EE where it felt like I was always working my butt off for scraps.
Just curious, were you still looking for entry level jobs after grad school or something more in the R&D realm?
I was focused on finding something entry-level. Did a non-thesis masters focused on mixed signal / RF design and R&D didn't really appeal to me at the time
Is there a somber write-up anywhere as to the future of EE in the West?
I don't know if there is a somber write up. But from what I have heard from a lot of people, is that jobs designing and making say PCB boards and electronic circuits just don't exist. They are all in Shenzhen. Those American firms that have American engineers still, seem to all involve flying to those factories to help fix problems, and are dead end jobs. At least thats my impression.
Having known several great EEs in FAANG who did exactly that job, sometimes paying Chinese income tax due to the length of their stays at the factory, that is my impression as well.
So basically fits the theme of "we gave up silicon production to cheaper countries and we're shocked those countries have surpassed us"
Does that include the EEs designing PCBs and circuits for Apple products?
Chip design/semiconductors/etc. have been a dead end in the US for 30+ years, but EE is a broad field and other specialties like RF/power systems/anything defense related are still in high demand. An EE with a PE will have an infinitely easier time getting a job working at a utility or engineering firm than any software developer these days to be honest.
Plenty of chip design done in the US
Limited to non existent jobs. Not much else to say, the jobs like so many others have been exported. Taiwan and China being the electronics and manufacturing centers means design has steadily moved as well. Ask any board house in the west how things are going, the ones that are left that is.
It would help if they didn't charge $50 for a single raw PCB in low quantity when I can have the same board not just made, but also assembled in China for a fraction of that, shipping included. Literally.
I've often wondered if that's some kind of industry inertia issue, or if there's some underlying additional cost to build in the US.
People here cost a little more. No one here does quite the volume jlcpcb likely does. Perhaps there’s some artificial market factor as well like CCP tends to weigh some scales. There’s board assembly machines made in china as well likely further reducing the cost to build out assembly lines. Perhaps cheaper sources of basic materials like copper.
Likely multitudes of factors at play all of them in favor of China
I could buy that to some degree, but not to the current insane level of price disparity.
PCB production should be one of those things that is or can be mostly automated if it isn't already. Assembly is definitely already a mostly automated process. This is all existing tech. Thus the cost differential doesn't seem justifiable.
I have to think that this is very much "build it and they will come" territory if you can get within 1.5x to 3x the price, so it continues to boggle my mind that nobody has managed to make it happen.
The only blocker I can truly identify is the magnitude of the initial investment. That doesn't explain why the prices at domestic board houses seem to have remained pretty much exactly the same for the last couple of decades, though.
As far as I can tell, they just don't want the business.
The personnel that swaps part dispenser blades in the USA costs more. What's there to understand? Automated assembly still has setup costs that take real humans walking around physically.
It's more likely that the Chinese companies are offering prototyping at a loss, because they know people won't switch to a different board house, once the prototyping phase is over.
Software jobs are more plentiful, sure, but you’re discounting the extremely high quantity of EE/CE jobs available at semiconductor companies (Intel, AMD, and many smaller ones) and companies like Apple. They don’t pay as well, but they can pay quite good over time and tend to be more stable than software jobs.
It's not even brain drain, America's dominance came from the fact that for nearly a century the brightest people in the world were willing to give up everything to come here. That is no longer the case. Today's Einstein probably isn't going to immigrate here.
That is still the case and no where else is even close.
https://www.statista.com/chart/30815/top-destination-countri...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/468218/nearly-900-million-world...
Does a want to immigrate necessarily mean that the US is the most favoured destination for the world’s intellectuals?
It might, but how do you measure that?
I just want to point out that germany and US have a similar number when adjusted to it's respected population size (I think it's even a little bit higher).
I am kinda surprised to see it so far on the top
Today's Einstein ARE immigrating to US for such positions as finance, adtech and management, ones that explicitly produce no physical artifact.
Unfortunately, I spent more than a trivial amount of time wondering what an Einstein of Adtech looks like.
Is adtech the new pejorative for Facebook & co?
Adtech is a pejorative on its own.
But not for the hardware that powers the white collar. China is taking those.
Exactly. Something is penalizing or inhibiting manufacturing in developed countries. That something is just regular progression on the ladder of classical infinitely extending three-sector model[1] and gradual obsolescence of its lower rungs, but that is problematic, and without healthy preceding sectors for each, it's just a measuring contest being held in a skydiving.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_sector
Einstein didn't emigrate to get rich, he emigrated because the Nazi's took over Germany. Germany had the best universities in the world before they took the path of self-destruction. So that was a second, separate event that helped America.
America stills gets a lot of immigrants.
Well, hopefully nothing like that happens in the US - that is to say an ideologue that ruins a country by ostracizing and then removing skilled immigrants or deters them from coming in the first place. Perhaps we can examine some recent large scale survey data to determine if the US populace gives a shit.
Pretty sure the use of "Einstein" here is symbolic, not literal.
So use a different example? Einstein isn’t interchangeable, lol.
For nearly a century Europe incinerated itself twice over.
> That is no longer the case.
For all I shit relentlessly on this country and its culture, it's still an extremely attractive place to live if you're well-situated to make money. (Most people are not—hence my contempt for how the society functions. This presumably DOES apply to an "Einstein", if indeed this Einstein wants money.) China still has a way to go in catering to and granting citizenship (or some amenable equivalent) to foreigners.
Going through the _legal_ immigration in the US is hell. Even if you're immigrating through a "talent" visa. Never mind regular work visa/GC.
Well, what's the alternative? Live in some poor country with a happy and contented existence? Fuck no, I want money: happiness is for suckers
You have the metaphor backwards. Where do you go if you're a talented American and your own country continually does not want to pay for your talent? It's the brain drain out of the US to worry about, not the influx of immigration.
> Where do you go if you're a talented American and your own country continually does not want to pay for your talent?
China is the only country that pays even remotely competitively. Yes, even including all the nice benefits of living in a european welfare state, yes including the other anglo colonies.
Makes sense, it's just basic economy to pay for spent and get it. Something the US is continually giving up.
Still, their culture basically does make it so certain types of people simply can't exist there. And I hear there's a healthy dose of racism as well. Nothing unique to China, sadly.
The alternative is to go to another first-world country that makes it easier. E.g. Canada or Australia.
You make a good point about China. It’s still an ethnostate, and I don’t see how it can reconcile such a strong ethnic nationalist identity with its own demographic crisis and competition for labor from abroad.
>if you're well-situated to make money
so basically, like everything else, you make a lot of money but it isn't a great place to live unless you make ALL the money.
The US didn't win World War 2, break the sound barrier, or put a man on the Moon only or primarily due to immigrant workers. We scoured the country's public school system for the sharpest young minds, sent them to institutions of higher learning with rigorous curricula, and found them positions in industry, government, or the military which made good use of their talent. Fetishizing the "nation of immigrants" narrative at the expensive of the native-born Americans who actually built most of this country's prosperity is, at best, ahistorical.
We literally put a man on the moon because we acquired Werner Von Braun and used his plans... I mean, we probably would have eventually done it, but the timeline likely would have been different and the soviets might have beaten us to the moon, but the time line we are in, we had a space program as successful as it was because we acquired German scientists who were already thinking about these problems a even a decade or so before we started to invest into it.
1,200 men of the same ethnic and religious background of the median American, brought over in a one-time arrangement in the wake of the most destructive war ever fought, versus 100,000 Indian H1B visas granted annually. That's just India, not counting other countries or visa types. Okay. Sure. Totally the same. We couldn't have made it back to the Moon without a million indentured IT workers.
I really have no clue what you're trying to say. You presented as a bad historical example for your argument, landing on the moon. I showed how that was a flawed example and now you're talking about a people from India in IT and the Artemis program and an accomplishment of it that hasn't even happened yet. Looks like your trying to pick an argument of H1B visas with my comment that had no mention of it.
That team was one of three that was developing rockets. The others were air force and navy.
>Fetishizing the "nation of immigrants" narrative at the expensive of the native-born Americans who actually built most of this country's prosperity is, at best, ahistorical.
Except many of us can trace our family lines to immigration. On one side I have to go back to the early 1800's to see when they immigrated, but this is literally a country of immigrants. (other half of the family is late 1800s/early 1900s immigration)
Even today I would assume the average American doesn't have to trace back more than 100-150 years to see when part of their family moved here.
>We scoured the country's public school system for the sharpest young minds, sent them to institutions of higher learning with rigorous curricula, and found them positions in industry, government, or the military which made good use of their talent.
Don't even get us started on ahistorical nonsense when you just want to make things up. Not when talented folks[0] had to work through system that didn't want them so they could eventually make all the difference.
[0]https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/hidden-no-more-...
I hear you, I took umbrage with that comment as well. But I think it’s fair to consider whether we are doing enough for Americans just as we are welcoming newcomers to settle here at the same time? My experience as a native born Californian, raised by a single immigrant mother living in urban poverty is no, we do not. Granted I escaped poverty by self-funding my engineering education (Federal Loans and working full time) but it took the better part of my 20s to do so, at great personal cost and risk. In many ways that experience taught me just how unfairly stacked the odds are against the working poor, let alone their children.
I am really curious how welcoming do you think US is to new comers.. Most of the early immigrants in 1800s and early 1900s were blue collar workers (exactly like the people coming from the south of the border). Do you think there is any part of the system that is welcoming to them?
The brain-drain from the rest of the world to US started only after WW2 when US became the only industrialized country with a viable student -> employee -> citizen path and even that only works for a very small set of people.
I would love to hear about programs where the newcomers are treated better than you as a native citizen when both of you are equally qualified.
Our German scientists were better than their German scientists. We had no real science PhD programs until the 1920's. We had no scouting for young minds until the 1950's.
Our Jews from Odessa were better than theirs too.
> Fetishizing the "nation of immigrants" narrative at the expensive of the native-born Americans who actually built most of this country's prosperity is, at best, ahistorical.
Most of those native-born Americans were the children or grandchildren of immigrants.
What do you think a nation is? Is it a sports team or economic zone that hands out name tags to whoever steps off the boat with the right attitude? Or is it a specific group of people in a specific place with a shared language, lineage, culture, history, faith, and common destiny? I submit to you that it's the latter, and no empire nor state organized as the former can endure.
> Or is it a specific group of people in a specific place with a shared language, lineage, culture, history, faith, and common destiny?
I'm American, so I've never lived in this kind of nation.
> no empire nor state organized as the former can endure.
Looking at many of the longer-lived nations and empires of the past—having a shared language, lineage, culture, history, faith, common destiny? They had none of those. They were a conglomeration of people speaking different languages, from different lineages, with different cultures, different histories, and practicing different faiths.
>I'm American, so I've never lived in this kind of nation.
"What is water?", said the fish
Wait, you think America is that? Dude, you need to get out more, meet some new people.
I wouldn't say most native borns "built" the US. But sure, there are plenty of native born leaders who set the direction towards building such stuff.
> The US didn't win World War 2
The USSR would like a word.
The USSR never did pay us back for the massive, unprecedented, war-winning aid we delivered to them under Lend-Lease. Half a million trucks, thousands of tanks, tens of thousands of airplanes, millions of tons of food. And what did we get out of it? An implacable evil empire that sat like a boot on the neck of Eastern Europe for another 50 years after our "victory."
This is all correct. It’s also hard to believe that any other country could have sustained the casualties the USSR took and it saved lives for the other allies by diverting troops to the Eastern Front. The US had nearly 500k deaths, the USSR (post war borders) had something like 26 million.
Both sides needed each other. From a US perspective, trading money for lives likely seemed worth it.
The USSR was an objectively terrible regime, and most the Russian governments that have followed on from it have been too. Underestimating the deaths Russian leadership is willing to tolerate has proven unwise a few too many times.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
Unless your ancestors crossed the Bering Strait ten thousand years ago, calling yourself "native born" doesn't mean a thing.
If you only came across ten thousand years ago, you are just a colonist that killed and displaced the people who came across sixteen thousand years ago. But that said, native born has a definition, and it is where you were born, not where your parents, grandparents or grand^14 parents was born.
my grand^10 parent's didn't exactly "immigrate" her per se. They were "invited". I guess they were "persuaded" to help fight the occasional war though.
You would never apply this reductive, solipsistic lens to any non-white ethnicity or culture and I think you know it
What’s magic about the Bering strait?
It's always a treat knowing every comment you get is going to either be triggered or purposely obtuse.
Usually considered the way that first humans got to the landmass, way back when.
It is kind of disingenuous and dishonest to say that there is no value or meaning on those Americans born in American soil, a nation should prioritize the people that live on it or well at least care for them and make them useful for nation building in the future.
Canada has proven that importing punjabis for almost two decades and ignoring the local people is not effective. So yeah there is a meaningful difference and saying native born in this context allows us to steer the conversation towards taking care towards those in the country already, which is something that neolib governments have not done in the last decades.
I say this as a person that was not born in the country he resides in now, but saying "calling yourself "native born" doesn't mean a thing " is a dishonest way to try to dissuade and delete necessary words that work towards more fruitful conversatons about how to improve th esytems in North America.
>Canada has proven that importing punjabis for almost two decades and ignoring the local people is not effective.
Curious, that's what Americans once said about the Irish and the Italians and the Germans and the French and the Poles and the Chinese and Jews and Catholics and Muslims and so on and on ad nauseum.
It's just a generational crab mentality born from xenophobia. Every new wave of immigrants decides they're "native" as soon as the next wave shows up. None of them are any more native than the others.
This type of solipsistic kumbaya slop is running face-first into reality, fast. People are different. Groups of people are different. Nations of people can be very different. They differ in meaningful and important and obvious ways. You'll live to see these differences continue to manifest in ways that will doubtless surprise you.
And the Ellis Islanders were at least mostly Christian, white, European. They shared a common cultural, historical, religious, and racial frame with native-born Americans. They could and did meaningfully assimilate. Despite this, that wave of migrants almost broke us. Anarchy, terrorism, riots, organized crime, et cetera. The Johnson-Reed Act was passed in response in 1924 and it slowed immigration to a crawl until the 1960s.
Today we have immigrants who speak utterly alien tongues, with no shared history or civilized tradition, arriving at breakneck pace, and who barely learn English because they can scrape by with apps and translation services, who stay in the cultural bubble of their country of origin, who don't see an American culture worth assimilating to. Especially among so-called high skill immigrants, they pick up a US passport and immediately see me as a worse or lesser "American" than they are. That's nuts. The melting pot, if one ever existed, has broken down. What's happening now is something quite different, and it's not good for me or my fellow Americans.
My ancestor was a Punjabi who immigrated in 1920. He managed not to blow up the country.
It seems like you have misread my comment and think I have a particular thing against any group of people.
That is simply not the intention of the comment, if you read correctly you will note that what I meant is that you need to take care of your own people, something that the United States ACCOMPLISHED from the fifties until before Reagan.
I am just not more native than an Indian or Italian person that just like me came a few decades ago. However to pretend there is no difference between me and someone whose family has been here for decades or centuries... that is dishonest.
Why do you call Xenophobia to prioritize giving good jobs to the local population ? It seems like your reading comprehension as well as your definition of Xenophobia is deeply, deeply flawed. We can have immigration that makes sense. Like what Canada used to have...
We should prioritize those that have been for decades in a country and those whose families have paid taxes for multiple generations, there is absolutely nothing xenophobic about that.
If you want to pick an era of technological progress to make that point maybe don't pick the one that involves America becoming a superpower by putting a bomb invented by Jewish refugees on a rocket build by ex Nazi scientists after a physics revolution where be basically got to go and take all of Germany's top talent lol
Alternate explanation: electrical engineering is actually really hard and some parts of computer science look comparatively easier. Plus coding is startups is cool, EE is still nerd as in Nerd.
why would someone pursue a route that's harder AND pays less AND has far fewer jobs available?
Well yes, that's why China's in the lead. We willingfully gave it up because corporate decided it was too expensive to pay american talent. They started the death spiral towards "No American wants to work in EE anymore".
And has less cultural cachet.
I disagree. From what I've seen, the lower level you go, the more advanced it is seen by other developers. As the copypasta goes:
At the beginning, there was Purusha. From his face, born was the Brahmin, the priestly caste, the tooling creator, one who develops programming languages, compilers and standard libraries.
From the arms of the Purusha, Kshatriya, the warrior caste, was born. Kshatriya is the developer of systems software; operating systems, database engines, graphics drivers and high performance networked servers.
Then comes the Vaishya, the merchant caste, the Application developer, who was born from the knees of Purusha. From the feet of Purusha, the fourth varnā, Shudrā, the system administrator, was born. Shudrā serves the above three Varnās, his works range from administrating computers in bureaucratic organizations to replying to support requests.
that's by other developers, but I think in the mainstream know nothing culture people have an image of "coding" that's more prestigious and hackery than EE?
I don't know a single person outside the tech bubble who sees "coding" as something prestigious
Hard and well paid gets a flood of people pursing it so difficulty can't be the only explanation. Finance, actuarial science, medicine, and law get plenty of applicants. I think it's that CS is an office job that pays well and is in-demand.
I studied both, can't say for sure EE was harder. Some courses in computer science were extremely hard for me (complexity, discrete math) and some courses in EE engineering were equally hard (most of the physics courses, analog circuits and more)
Both degrees can be made super hard, as hard as the school desires them to be...
Nah I did EE and then CompE (which was just replacing some later EE classes with hardware design stuff) and EE is not "actually really hard" - although people like to put it on a pedastel.
Compared to CompE or Comp Sci?
I never studied the hard sciences very seriously, although I feel like in retrospect I could have done so at much lesser proficiency than someone with much more encouragement, discipline, and interest, so my path of starting with web/software and then diving into electronics and EE would feel quite different
Both?
> I myself was an electrical engineering (EE) major until I switched to computer science in my third (junior) year of college because like a friend of mine at the time told me, "<my name>, if you don't major in computer science, you will not be able to find a job easily after graduation". He was right. All of my former college friends in EE ended up pursuing programming jobs (a few of them now works for FAANG; I used to work for one but left a year ago due to RTO).
Nothing against you looking out for your future, but this is exactly what I describe to people when I say the industry has changed. It used to be nerds who were very passionate. Now it’s full of people who are just doing a job.
Hit the nail on the head. I went to the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering in Albany for a master's in "nanoscale engineering" which essentially boiled down to a master's in being a fab line manager. I finished the degree since it was only a 3 semester program and I was getting paid for research work, but almost immediately after chatting with alumns that went to go work at IBM/Intel/etc it was pretty clear that software engineering was a much more lucrative and less stressful career.
Definitely true, as there weren’t EE jobs here. Now that we’re moving chip manufacturing back, and with programming job market being saturated, perhaps it will shift and EE will pay more due to being more in demand
The jobs needed for chip manufacturing aren’t primarily EE. It’s largely chemical engineering with specializations related to semiconductor tech. EEs use the tools developed by fabs to make their products, but those are typically separate companies (or, in the case of in-house fabs like Intel, basically run as separate companies).
I suspect the kinds of salaries that's possible in Silicon Valley only happens because:
(A) Skills are fairly transferable. (B) There is a lot of employers competing for workers. (C) An awful lot of value is created along the way.
If you specialize in some tiny part of chip manufacturing, there aren't many places you can transfer your skills.
Even if, in the future, you have multiple chip vendors. They won't all use the same processes, and you might only fit into one role at each of these businesses.
Maybe it's not that simple. But few chip companies have to compete against startups for workers. And that probably won't change.
Not saying the jobs can't be well paid, just that it's not unlikely that it won't be absurd SV level salaries.
> Maybe it's not that simple. But few chip companies have to compete against startups for workers. And that probably won't change.
It seems like what EE needs is something similar to open source, so that does happen.
The way things like Google or AWS got started is they started with Linux and built something on top of it, so it could be a startup because they don't first have to build the world in order to make a contribution, and they're not building on top of someone else's land.
There isn't any reason that couldn't inherently work in EE. Get some universities or government grants to publish a fully-open spec for some processors that could be fabbed by TSMC or Intel. Not as good as the state of the art, but half as good anyway.
Now people have a basis for EE startups. You take the base design and tweak it some for the application, so that it's a startup-sized job instead of a multinational-sized job, and now you've got EE startups making all kinds of phone SoCs and NVMe drives and Raspberry Pi competitors and whatever else they think can justify a big enough production run to send it to a fab and sell it to the public.
An interesting license for this could be something along the lines of: You can make derivative works, but you have to release them under the same license within five years. In other words, you get five years to make money from this before it goes into the commons, which gives you the incentive to do it while keeping the commons rich so the next you can do it again tomorrow.
I believe you’ve just described the RISC-V project, though I could be mistaken.
RISC-V is the ISA, which is a solid first step. What you need is a production-ready fully open source whole device, so that someone who wants to fork it only has to change the parts they need to be different instead of having to also re-engineer the missing components.
There were a ton of chip making startups in the 1970-1980's. Now the processes are much harder to access so you have fabless.
It's just maturity. You can't invent the op amp twice.
The same analysis makes me doubt those wages are likely to prevail for software engineers. They are the result of a particular time and place.
I think your explanation about large numbers of motivated students pursuing lucrative Non-STEM degrees is incomplete without mentioning the cost of an undergraduate and graduate STEM education in the USA.
The most critical shortages of STEM graduates are in roles requiring advanced degrees. Your median undergraduate education (~$40k) and median graduate education (~$60k) saddles students with approximately $100k in unforgivable student debt! Never mind the years lost that one could otherwise be working. So it’s no wonder students are motivated by the ROI of their degrees, it’s why I chose Computer Engineering over Electrical Engineering.
These are expensive STEM degrees which students on visas are all too willing to pay for a chance at a residency and a pathway to citizenship. So no wonder the majority of undergraduate and graduate STEM students are foreign born in the US. The ROI is not worth it for the debt. We don’t have enough need based scholarships available to finance the STEM graduates this country claims it needs.
Really appreciate this comment and perspective! In the larger context of immigration and brain drain in other countries, how the US also has one, but of a different kind. Ultimately, it's a loss of potential. I'd somewhat disagree with the directionality of the correlative/causal relation, though. But what can be said is that the US also experiences a knowledge drain towards plainly lucrative jobs. I'd wager that it was/is a cyclical effect that just worsened over the decades and that neither engineers moving to fintech nor low-paying engineering jobs were/are the sole reason.
My hot take as to the reason EE is a bit of a dead end in the US is that the options outside of the handful of primary employers are limited. It is very capital intensive to run a semiconductor fab, design chips or assemble electronics at scale. Therefore the employer has all of the leverage. The equipment and/or factory worker infrastructure comes first and the engineering teams are just a cog.
Compare that to having all the degrees of freedom as a computer science student to start up a niche mobile app or internet based niche service after working at FAANG for 5-6 years. Even AI infrastructure will eventually go down in price making niche AI first startups a possibility. In finance its the same, as a post i-banker you have the option to start a boutique fund, a niche fintech or just invest your own savings.
What you said seems contradictory. You open with the premise that intelligent youth go the finance / CS / MBA path instead of engineering and then say that those who do go into traditional engineering can’t find jobs. Couldn’t it be that people don’t go into engineering because there aren’t any jobs? Wouldn’t the lack of jobs explain the low salaries and thus the preference for more high paying alternatives?
Your argument doesnt really make sense : there are no EE jobs in the use, therefore no one wants to pursue EE jobs, therefire there are no EE jobs.
I read the main problem with hiring chip factory workers in Arizona was the factory just didnt pay enough for the long hours demanded. I looked up the median salary and its only 50k so I'm assuming it's not crazy skilled labor (e.g. brain drain). Taiwanese workers just seem more willing to do it.
I spoke to a Taiwanese person and apparently the salaries there are actually quite good, even by western standards (normal ones; not SF). The downside is they have very very long hours (996, barely any holiday, etc.).
It's also highly-skilled, yet very boring work. The way it was described to me is that every major piece of equipment has a PhD assigned to it and their job is basically to babysit the machine and troubleshoot when things go wrong.
US PhDs typically have other options and would consider this sort of work a waste of their time.
I know several people working as customer engineers in a fab based in America. They are very much not PhD‘s or even mechanical engineers.
They are each assigned one tool to maintain as you said. They each make around 100K and 3 12hr days per week.
They were working in the automotive industry before these jobs. Sounds pretty damn good to me, but I suppose that’s one reason American companies cannot compete with TSMC.
There are loads of highly qualified US engineers who would love to babysit enormously complicated industrial equipment for a living.
But not for 50k, lol.
996 at 50K is less than Arizona's minimum wage.
The 996 should be regulated against, it's simply unreasonable
Apparently there are laws against it in China. But I guess the US isn't the only one with loosely enforced labor regulations.
I have a math PhD and a number of my colleagues went on to finance jobs which they described as "babysit an algorithm"
> every major piece of equipment has a PhD assigned to it and their job is basically to babysit the machine and troubleshoot when things go wrong
This works in Taiwan. It doesn’t in America. The Taiwanese workers will help transfer knowledge to American workers; it will be the joint responsibility of them both to come up with how those processes are adapted for American preferences. (Probably more automation, rotation between machines or possibly even not being under TSMC.)
I mean, that was exactly the way the job was described when I interviewed at Intel for a process engineer, and everyone doing the same job was at the time a PhD according to the interviewer. Did it change?
Being on call 24/7 to troubleshoot million dollar pieces of equipment sounded like a poor life choice, so I didn't take it. But Intel also hasn't exactly done great since then...
> was exactly the way the job was described when I interviewed at Intel for a process engineer, and everyone doing the same job was at the time a PhD according to the interviewer. Did it change?
Not sure. What has changed in recent years is the quality of industrial automation, particularly in semiconductors.
I'm unconvinced the only way to make these chips is for highly-trained engineers to caramelise onions on the stove. (At the very least, they could be allowed time to conduct experiments into new production methods, et cetera. Similar to how universities let professors do research in exchange for putting in teaching hours.)
> The way it was described to me is that every major piece of equipment has a PhD assigned to it...
did they mean that literally or just that an expert was assigned to it? What kind of PhD would even be relevant to maintaining machinery on an assembly line? Perhaps a PhD on the operations of that specific machine but even then, the person's knowledge would be so focused on whatever physics/chemistry/science is being used that i find it hard to believe a PhD would know what to do when something broke without tons of specific training on the hardware.
A PhD is really just a project in an academic setting.
There’s likely little real world difference in capability between someone with first class honours and a year in industry, than first class honours plus a PhD.
I mean, it's a long, specialized project. It really depends on the specialization. a new grad with a PhD in some LLM tech would be grabbed up much faster than a hobbyist with 5+ years in general SWE with maybe some pet projects made with AI tech.
> he way it was described to me is that every major piece of equipment has a PhD assigned to it and their job is basically to babysit the machine and troubleshoot when things go wrong.
Yes.
"It’s the Most Indispensable Machine in the World—and It Depends on This Woman"
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/asml-euv-machine-lithography-chi...
Even China has ruled 996 illegal in 2021: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system#Legal_...
No one should be forced to work those kinds of hours. It's unreasonable to call Westerners/Americans lazy if they refuse to work 996.
Not just long hours right? Speaking to Taiwanese friends involved in semiconductor work (not TSMC employees though) it's the shift work that's really hard to manage in the US.
50k is/was recently a decent salary (not SF). In the last 5 years, not so much anywhere outside the absolute lowest CoL areas.
But yes, most Americans do not want to work on a death march. And employers don't want to pay it. I doubt they can argue 50k as exempt so that's a lot of overtime. They may as well be salaried 6 figures at that point.
996..? doesn't fit into weeks, months or years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system
Why would they require these hours? In the U.S. I think they would need to pay time and a half for anything north of 40-hours. Seems like it would be cheaper to hire more workers and not force the overtime. Then they might be able to increase the salary some. Everyone wins except the people who are willing to sacrifice the time for time and a half pay.
AIUI almost all salaried employees are exempt from overtime pay in the US.
This is only accurate inasmuch as most salaried employees are overtime exempt for other reasons (e.g. because they are executive or administrative professionals). Paying employees a salary, on its own, does not make them overtime exempt.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17a-overtime
Is there ever a situation where it makes sense to pay fixed salaries to non-exempt employees?
One that comes to mind is an on-site caretaker position (e.g. on a remote property), where the employee is effectively being paid to be available, not to do a certain number of hours of work.
Sometimes overtime bonuses get used as an incentive for salaried employees to work more but I guess it's more a bonus than overtime pay.
9am-9pm 6 days a week.
9am to 9pm 6 days a week
50k is just a step above McDonalds these days in a lot of areas. Sure minimum wage might be $15k, but realistically nobody pays that little except in very rural areas (if you need a small number of low skilled employees a small rural town is a perfect spot to build - but if you need more than a small number they can't provide more at any price - you will pay more in the city but there are a lot more people around if you need more)
McDonalds in Sunnyvale CA starts at 20/h, so 41k/year for the lowest role
Perhaps - in California.
Median US Salary is $59,384. Half of workers make less.
You need to factor in that only ~30% of workers work full-time.
Men with a bachelor's degree who work full-time have a median income is ~$89k - (basically the entire demographic of these TSMC workers).
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf
The statistic I gave was for solely full-time workers in the US.
Keep in mind the plant they are talking about is in AZ, where median wages and cost of living are generally lower than California.
Medium individual income in AZ is ~37k. I'm not sure how many Americans would give up a 40hour/week job for a 996 that pays 13k more.
AZ minimum wage is 14.70. If it was 996 and you somehow only got straight time for working 72h a week, it would pay 55000. Assuming there's no overtime exemption it would be $67000. I'm pretty sure it's not a 996 in AZ.
Why does it have to be 996 at TSMC in the US?
Very easily if they need to pay overtime here. I'd be very surprised to find an argument of $37k being exempt in any state.
They will indeed burn themselves out, but that's their choice of work/life balance vs. pay.
By how much? Where I live in IA McDonalds is starting at $17/hour, which is not that much behind California. (and both states are large enough to expect some variation depending on where you live)
...just seem more willing to do it
That's why manufacturing offshored in the first place, companies feel they're receiving better value for money on wages elsewhere for this kind of work (and these days not to mention more & larger facilities, proximity to component sources, and a strong ecosystem of supporting and complimentary facilities).
I think that's obviously a major part of it but it ignores other stuff like lax environmental and safety standards.
It would be interesting to see how much of the economic advantage of off-shoring is due to lower wages due intrinsic to lower cost of living vs stuff like ignoring/bribing foreign officials or non-existent environmenta/safety standards that objectively should exist.
Personally I won't mind paying more to buy manufactured goods. My mom told me that a pair of sneakers before the offshoring back in the late 80s usually cost more than $300 in today's dollars. Yes, it was expensive, but I would just buy fewer and use the one for longer time. The reason is that in the long run the manufacturing cost would get lower due to increased efficiency, and loss of supply chain is detrimental to the entire country - and our living expenses will increase overall. Case in point, how much tax do we have to pay and how much inflation do we have to suffer in order to build those super expensive weapons? Part of the reasons that we had $20K toilet and $100 screws is that we simply don't have large enough supply chain to offset the cost of customized manufacturing.
Besides, the US loses know-how on manufacturing, eliminating potentially hundreds of thousands of high-paying engineering jobs - it will also be a pipe dream that we can keep the so-called high-end jobs by sitting in an office drawing boxes all day. Sooner or later, those who work with the actual manufacturing processes on the factor floor will out compete us and grab our the cushy "design" jobs.
it’s mostly just baumol cost disease.
you can feel free to buy american, i don’t care so i would prefer if it were not mandated and you get your individual choice to pay more for your goods if you want
Easy to get better value on wages when you get to pay under the minimum wage of your home country. And/or aren't required to offer benefits, vacation. And are able to work them twice as long without overtime pay. And don't need to care about child labor laws.
To be blunt: yes, slavery is cheap, isn't it?
Cost of living can be a lot lower in Taiwan, if your property is already paid off.
Unfortunately housing is super overpriced, due to the Asian mentality resulting in high property ownership.
Real estate is always the monkey wrench in the gears of capitalism because of high necessity yet limited supply.
> Unfortunately housing is super overpriced, due to the Asian mentality resulting in high property ownership.
I have no clue what this means and in countries like Japan, housing is a depreciating asset vs. an investment, so…?
More so in the Chinese-speaking world and South Korea because the industrialization/urbanization is more recent, so there's rising demand in the urban areas with high population growth, resulting in high prices.
Japan's urbanization stopped long ago, and it's not taking in immigrants fast enough, so the urban areas have stopped growing.
The mentality refers to East Asia's deep agrarian root that places high value on owning land that can be passed down the generations (the alternative was often quasi-servile farm labour that locks families in poverty). Property purchases are usually multi-generational efforts, so families can generally take the brunt of overinflated prices.
I thought the Tokyo megalopolis was still growing due to internal migration, at the cost of depleting literally everywhere else in the country.
2 is pretty infamous unless something big happened recently (a lot of big things in JP happened recently, so I could have legitmately missed something).
1 is 50/50. Urbanization is growing because the small town life is shrinking.it's wrong at face value, but there is a cost to this in the overall economy, since the country overall isn't growing.
I mean, I think it's close to "not even wrong" territory. Crazy talks.
It's just an obvious nonsense. Housing cost is dependent variable of local economic activities. People gather and property prices soar. Taiwan is jam packed so land prices would be higher relative to GDP per capita.
I think GP is finding concept of land scarcity non-intuitive for some reason.
> Real estate is always the monkey wrench in the gears of capitalism because of high necessity yet limited supply.
This only happens when the government becomes captured by land owners to constrain the supply, since otherwise you can build up. But governments getting captured by land owners happens a lot.
The chips still need to fly back to Taiwan to be packaged as packaging partner Amkor's facility in Arizona won't be ready until 2027*. I'm not sure the cause of the delta but it could be in part because Fab 21 got back on schedule rather impressively following earlier delays.
* updated to reflect newer article that Amkor's facility is delayed beyond late-2025
The hardest part is making the chips, no?
Packaging facilities cost ~20% of a fab, right?
Naively, I'm assuming packaging is also not as complicate and difficult as fabrication.
Surely if they can build a fab in the US, they can build packaging facilities, too.
Rome wasn't built in a day.
Packaging facilities are delayed but in progress.
I was about to say, surly at some point in the near future the USA will introduce this capability. Shame they did not match each other in completion time.
> Shame they did not match each other in completion time.
Why?
If the packaging facility was ready early it would have sat idle losing money.
If it's ready late, products from the fab can obviously easily be shipped off to be packaged.
Tight coordination of timelines adds needless cost when there is an easy alternative.
Yeah definitely unfortunate. That said, I'm guessing the overall cost of overseas packaging is really tiny, otherwise Intel would've made a great customer since they are already packaging TSMC N6, N5, and N3 in New Mexico for their Arrow Lake CPUs.
It basically rounds down to $0 if you’re willing for it to be slow. A single shipping container can fit millions of chips
This is not adversarial thinking. Ukraine would be delighted to hit one container with all Russia's advanced chips going to e.g. Vietnam or China to be packaged and sent back.
This is a massive supply chain weakness and presumably will be addressed as soon as possible.
Just because something fits in a single shipping container doesn't mean it'll be sent out in a random single shipping container via the lowest bidder.
It just illustrates it is really quite cheap and so won't be that expensive in the grand scheme of things.
(Also not certain the GP's comment is necessarily correct even.)
Also a lot of US STEM grads have their skills wasted in unproductive fields, like the ad business.
the internet ad industry is raking billions from all over the world into the USA, how can you call that unproductive.
It's parasitic, not productive.
A tick can contain a lot of blood, doesn't mean it produced that blood.
Ticks do not require the consent of the host to drink blood.
Things like Google and Facebook cannot be parasitic, every dollar gained is a voluntary exchange with no threats. People choose to use Google and gain something from doing so.
Yep if the host agreed to die, then the market is a success. We've discovered the most efficient outcome – sucking the customer dry until they die! Thank you to the free market for delivering us this efficient result.
Remember kids – thousands dying from lack of healthcare isn't a bug of the system, it's a feature. This has been determined as necessary, nay even beneficial, by market forces that can never be wrong.
Hackernews has finally declined to the level of reddit. :(
Because is fucking undproductive, useless and detrimental to society. Advertising is a cancer, an immoral activity.
If you owned a small business you'd be singing a very different tune.
Own a small business, still cancer. Will never use and lo and behold, all runs fine.
Most small businesses do not have the luxury of ready made distribution channels.
Especially if it's an ecommerce business.
A business’s viability outside of advertising doesn’t change the morality of advertising.
Regardless of which side of the camp you fall on, you can’t argue that ads are “good” just because some businesses need them to survive. In fact, I’d wager if a business NEEDS ads to survive, it’s probably a net negative on society as a whole.
I won’t die on that hill, but that’s my hunch.
Your entire premise is ridiculous.
Advertising is nothing more than bringing attention to your product to your target customer.
And without this so called immoral behaviour I fail to see how any business works.
That's when you call any type of promotion advertising, in that case, sure, there is some innocent advertising. People here are (obviously) talking about 'modern' advertising which is what google/fb etc are doing which is just plain bad for everyone except for Google shareholders (I would imagine, besides money, it's not even good for the people working on it as it must do your head in to be a brilliant engineer and then working on tech so miserable and foul as that).
> tech so miserable and foul as that
The tech is fine. The toxic parts (data collection, spying, etc) aren't even in the ad tech divisions and aren't done for advertising purposes.
They collect data because it gives them bargaining power and a seat at the table with state-level actors.
Uh… sure that’s an oversimplified reduction. We were specifically discussing advertising within the context of Google and online advertising.
It’s not even debated that advertising as it exists with Google, for the sake of profit at all costs is a net-negative in society.
It’s not the same as putting a sign by the road.
Hi. I own a business. I still find ads to be cancer.
You think all businesses should just spread awareness by word of mouth? Can you put a sign on your store or is that an ad? What if you don't have a store? Yes, advertising can be really awful but that doesn't meaning all advertising is "cancer." If you have a good business that creates actual value for people, advertising it can actually be seen as a good thing.
> If you owned a small business you'd be singing a very different tune.
The problem with advertising is that a little bit done honestly is actually good and fine. What we actually have way, way too much, and it's often dishonest and manipulative.
It's a similar thing with finance. It's necessary, but way too many talented people are spending their energies on it.
Black and white thinking doesn't really capture the situation, and ends up creating a lot of noise (BAN IT ALL vs. IT'S ALL GOOD AND YOU LOVE IT, FIGHT!).
Honestly, I think it might be a good thing to put caps on the number of people that can work in sectors like that (and further limit the number of very smart people working in them), to direct talented people to more productive and socially beneficial parts of the economy.
Maybe 1 percent of Google's headcount is actually working on ad technology. There isn't some brain drain problem where people are doing ads instead of curing cancer.
Directly working. But then you have all the vehicles that, in the grand scheme of things, exist solely to enable ads and make data mining for them easier, such as Chrome and Android. Then there are products that exist primarily to lock you into the Google ecosystem so that you're forced to interact with the rest of it.
At the end of the day, if most of company's income is from ads, it can be safely assumed that whatever else it does is somehow about ads even if it doesn't contribute directly. Well, or else Google is incredibly inept.
Those "US STEM grads have their skills wasted" are solving those problems (optimal ad load, bad ads, etc.) but its a very hard problem. Don't be so dismissive.
There are "very hard problems" that don't need to be solved, or are far lower priority than other problems. Hard doesn't imply being "productive, useful and beneficial to society."
That's a problem that advertising both created and feeds off of.
Setting aside the moral aspect which is highly subjective and seems to have a price tag (for example tech CEOs quit any sort of morals for a good paycheck), the productivity question is a measurable one.
Aka does advertising as a whole increase total consumption or is it a zero sum game (aka send bigger slice of the same pie to a competitor)
From what I know advertising does increase total demand aka more things/services need to be produced and sold on aggregate.
Some of the demand induced by ads is useful; people becoming aware of stuff they didn’t know exists, and finding that it provides a useful service for them.
But most ads are trying to convince you to buy their brand’s version of a product that you already know of, or (even worse!) a new version of an old product. Any demand induced there is just wastefulness.
If Amazon can figure out that I’m interested in headphones, I already know more actual information about headphones than their ads will give me.
> for example tech CEOs quit any sort of morals for a good paycheck
An alternative explanation is that prospective tech CEOs who are willing to overlook morals are scarcer and thus mandate higher salaries. ;)
Is increasing total consumption something positive?
I disagree
There is good and bad advertising.
I'd want to receive ads for things that I'm really interested in.
I can’t relate to that. When I see a banner ad I find it obtrusive whether it’s from Bank of America or my favorite HAM radio company. If I’m in the market for a product I value hearing the testimonials of people in my life rather than an advertisement.
The one case where I find ads useful, when word of mouth isn't an option, is in a static image on a site (review site, blog, whatever) where I'm researching a thing. The ad would be related to that thing, doesn't need to know a thing about me other than I'm browsing that page, and is related to the content on that page. I click on those ads sometimes.
I'm mostly thinking about finding things that you werent even aware that they do exist
I’m trying to think of anything I find useful that I stumbled upon thanks to ads over the past twenty years or so, and I’m pretty much drawing a blank. It certainly seems negligible.
The problem with prohibiting ads is how to prevent (or even define) payed hidden promotions. But tracking and targeted ads could be prohibited, which would already make things much more civil and less relevant as a tech profit center.
>I’m trying to think of anything I find useful that I stumbled upon thanks to ads over the past twenty years or so, and I’m pretty much drawing a blank. It certainly seems negligible.
Maybe the ad is good when you arent even aware that you were influenced by it?
like Cola vs Pepsi, McDonald vs KFC, etc.
It's like saying there is good and bad diseases because some solve other problems like space in nursing home.
Depends on the product being advertised. I don't see how you can compare a product that enhances someone's life to a disease.
No, it isn't.
People want to buy things, especially the ones that make their life easier, but you got to get to know them somehow, right?
If you're "really interested" in something, you're already following new releases, doing extensive research for purchases etc, so why would you need ads?
a profitable market can still be unproductive if the overall result is a nuisance to society on almost every level
like the healthcare industry in the US
Stealing is raking billions every year as well, yet I wouldn't call it productive.
It doesn’t produce any things.
Even worse, because advertising is a Red Queen's Race where the only limit on expense is what your competitors are spending, it's actually worse than unproductive because it increases company expenses without increasing product quality, leading to higher costs on everything for everyone.
You cannot be serious it. All of the ad tech companies produce a service people want otherwise no one would use them!
There may be other services that might be better if not for network effects, but it is trivially true that a search engine is better for most people than no search engine at all. And that is what is produced.
The same could be said of tobacco companies. You might want to rethink your argument.
How do you feel about online gambling?
Imo, profits != productive or to a benefit of society.
By that definition, war is extremely productive
At least a few evil people attack once in a while thus proving some defense is needed so they they are not completely unproductive/useless. Much as I wish they were not needed.
what evil ppl? what attack?
Putin is attacking Ukraine right now. There have been various coups and attempted coups around the world. Nigeria and South Korea both come to mind.
This is not our concern? The US is safe.
As far as I can tell, the war hasn’t killed Putin, and instead killed tens of thousands of men in their 20s and lots of innocent families
It is though, more value is generated by the MIC than is put in and war has yet to ruin the productive capacity of the United States. The societal ills of this are why it’s popular to call America an evil empire
Ah the broken window fallacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
No actually, that's about the opportunity cost of war. There's a left-wing argument I frequently see that the US finds wars to increase profitability but I'm talking about the propping up of firms to keep the industrial capacity ready. It is not the most productive use of capital, but it is productive.
Ready for what? War with China or Russia? Do you really think multibillion dollar aircraft carriers are what would win that war?
Ready for whatever the pentagon wants.
I don’t want a trillion dollars a year to spent so that the pentagon can have whatever it wants
If it's so unproductive why does it pay so well?
What makes you think pay is necessarily correlated to productivity?
Taken to the extreme, literal theft can pay well, and produces absolutely nothing.
Pay indicates the transfer of wealth -- it can be a heuristic for productivity, sure, but productivity is clearly not its only source.
I think about this quite often. What I'd really like to study at some point is: How much more does the receptionist at JP Morgan's head quarters make than the receptionist at Walmart's headquarters?
Because fundamentally I think there is an effect where the people in proximity to lots of money earn more. Obviously the Walmart receptionist and the JP Morgan receptionist are doing basically the same job. But the JP Morgan receptionist is surrounded by people who wouldn't think twice about doubling the receptionists pay and I would imagine that has a significant effect.
Experienced this(or actually, a similar phenomenon) myself during the brief, beautiful moment in my life when I was working in Switzerland and was making as much as the locals, while hailing from a country with approximately 20% the GDP per capita, if not less.
Crazy how the same box of pasta is suddenly three times the price once you cross the border.
It's not the proximity to money, it's the real estate tied to doing that job.
If you want to be the receptionist at Goldman Sachs at their headquarters at 200 West Street, New York, NY 10282, then you're looking at paying $616,250 for a 556 sq. ft. studio apartment. And that's just the housing. If you want to live within 30 minutes of work, you can get that number down to $400,000, but that's also a studio apartment.
Then you have to consider some place to eat - or you bring your own meals.
What about clothing? You need clothing that looks the part.
It's the proximity to real estate, which I guess you could argue is a proximity to "lots of money" as you put it, but... not reeeaaaally...
Sure, but real estate is expensive in those places for a reason - it being typically because a sufficient number of people with lots of money want to buy it.
There is only a weak correlation between local income and housing costs, and most of that is that it's hard to get extreme housing prices in areas with low income, rather than that housing in high income areas is inherently required to be expensive.
For example, Boston has a higher per-capita income than NYC but somewhat lower housing costs, and Austin has around the same per-capita income as Los Angeles but significantly lower housing costs. Because it's a lot easier to build housing in Texas than in California.
JP Morgan is also in NYC and Wal Mart is in Arkansas.
These companies hire all of these exemplary graduates and pay them so well because (1) they are flush with cash because businesses are essentially held hostage to adtech; and (2) so that they won't go out into the world and build systems that make them irrelevant, as smart people are wont to do from time to time. Someone on your payroll doesn't have the time nor the inclination to knock you from your pedestal.
Why else would Google need 182,000 employees? Or how about Facebook with 67,000? Microsoft clocks in at a whopping 228,000, and Apple at 161,000.
These are staggering numbers of employees. So many, in fact, that it would be an exercise in futility to try and manage so many for the number of products they offer, especially Google and Meta.
It's cheaper to make busywork than risk the cash cow.
Re: Apple's 164K employees.
Keep in mind that approximately 50% work in the retail stores.
Right, and at least Microsoft has a large sales organization.
But Google and Meta?
Because there are costs that are externalized.
Options traders are paid well. It's still unproductive.
You're just shifting around a bunch of numbers temporarily to make a bunch of money for someone and lose a bunch for someone else.
Lots of shit we do is well-paid and unproductive.
If, as a species, we eliminated all bullshit jobs, there's a good chance only 20-30% of the species would be working. Here in America, only around 50% of people are actually working. Everyone else is in school, or retired.
Options traders help with the efficient allocation of capital, which is actually very valuable to society.
You are downvoted because what you say is unpopular, but nobody tried to refute what you say.
Despite what some people may think, options are not just for gambling, but some people - like farmers who have to plan for uncertain weather - use them for a real purpose. And of course the use of option in the financial sector for hedging is extremely important too. But it's easier to dismissively say that trading options is a "bullshit job" and go back to one's ivory tower.
They are mercenaries hired to maximize the share of the loot that goes to their employers.
For a new factory with a new entry into the local market it makes perfect sense to bring in experienced workers for knowledge transfer. This is more an issue if a decade later this is still how things are done.
Back when American companies were offshoring, the initial start up teams were comprised of a lot of Americans who would do commissioning and initial ramp ups while training up the foreign workers. It's a lot easier to train people on a production line that is proven to work.
Problem is, those jobs in emerging markets were desirable compared to other jobs (for pay and opportunities), which helped with talent growth. These factory jobs, in comparison to other jobs, aren’t that desirable.
I'd think otherwise and imagine these kinds of high-tech chip factory jobs are quite desirable.
Fairly bad locations, average pay. It's not like the newer Japanese towns chip towns where you can get on a train and be in a proper city (ex. 40 min ride from Chitose to Sapporo), with okay pay as well. If pay was really good, it wouldn't matter, but selling this dream to a university grad is a bit hard in the US. I still hope it pans out though, cause NA manufacturing revival would be great. It's just the odds are against it so far.
> STEM field gap
STEM salary gap
I suspect the Taiwan workers have on average much lower salaries.
Yes, roughly speaking 1:4 compared to California.
Edit: This is not news. This (combined with their higher EE education) is why Taiwan won IBM PC-clone-related manufacturing in the 80s. And why they now have TSMC.
Such a great victory for American industry... the future is to bring workers from Taiwan with skills and willingness to receive a fraction of US salaries.
What are your realistic options?
Say TSMC pays supper competitive US salaries to attract US-only labor, higher labor cost which is causing the end product to be more expensive, which makes that fab uncompetitive globally causing Apple to go buying from someone else and TSMC either choosing leaving the US or going bust eating the losses.
You can't compete with lower-wage countries in a globalized world with no trade barriers and no tariffs, when Apple wants higher profits and consumers want lower prices. Something has to give.
You can put tariffs on imported chips to equalize the field, but then iPhones would be more expensive for the average American and Apple's stock would tank.
So, pick your poison.
More automation. Given the chemicals involved in fab work in general I expect this fab is very automated just for safety reasons and so very few employees are needed. Thus the cost of labor isn't a significant factor.
>Thus the cost of labor isn't a significant factor.
It is. Semi fabs aren't fire-and-forget. You need highly skilled people to constantly check and tweak all the operations in a feedback loop 24/7 and every hour of downtime due to any issue means millions lost. You hire the right people to minimize that downtime while also keeping the costs in check. It's a delicate balance.
What % of the all fab costs over two decades are the people? Including the cost of building it and modernization
All money ultimately goes to labor. Rocks don't accept cash as payment.
but not fab's labor.
Touché
True, but compared to the amount of production I would guess these are only a few people.
The problem was never the cost of labor. US tech is already highly profitable and they can pay the full salary if they wish to. But their desire is basically to get a free card to pay lower salaries by any means, so they can send more of those profits to shareholders. The US is essentially a fighting arena between shareholders and workers. The profit is there, it is just a matter of how business want to keep always more of the spoils to themselves.
Do you also think that if a business loses money, the employees should give some of their pay back to the business? Or does this just go one way?
Workers ALWAYS give back some of their salaries when a company fails. They either get lower compensation or lose their jobs altogether.
What about the US providing actually good education that can produce workers able to compete with Chinese and other Asian countries?
Why would well educated US grads go work in a semi fab for 50k when they can make 5-10x in an office or at home, getting people to click on ads in the bay area, or move money around between tax heavens in new york?
Your answer explains why the US is creating a failed society. It either implodes or needs to control other countries to maintain its profit and consumption levels.
Rather, sounds like paying the real costs rather than playing games to avoid that.
> You can't compete with lower-wage countries in a globalized world with no trade barriers
I think you’ve correctly identified the solutions.
> when Apple wants higher profits and consumers lower prices
Trump wants chips that say "Made in 'Merica". I dont think cost comes into it that much.
The DoD is the driver. They're freaked out about the supply chain vulnerabilities.
That's the catch, he said "Made in America", not "Made by American workers" :)
This solves for the US national security issue; in the event of war between China and Taiwan (and a possible proxy war with US), Taiwan immigration would qualify for asylum.
> This solves for the US national security issue
I mean, maybe it's okay that some other country is better than you at something important. Excuse me but: the arrogance.
OK. Cards on the table.
This is not arrogance. This is not even about China and Taiwan fighting a war. (Heck, that's probably never gonna happen anyway.)
This is about the US manufacturing important things on our own. And it's not just the US either by the way. The Europeans want to be able to manufacture their own chips. The Russians. The Chinese. The Japanese. The Koreans. And on and on and on.
Why? Because the current system is dumb for everyone who is not Taiwan. For a whole lot of reasons. (Most of them economic.) No one wants to say that out loud, but it's the truth. We can't have everyone dependent on chips but only one nation capable of making them. Again, we're not the only ones who have come to this conclusion. Are the Chinese also "arrogant"? Are the Japanese "arrogant"? The Europeans? The Russians? Are the Koreans "arrogant"?
So everyone else can make common sense moves, but it's "arrogant" if the US does the same common sense thing? So we should just keep paying out an increasing share of our GDP as chips become more and more important and expensive while everyone else makes moves to cut their costs right? Is that what we have to do to be considered not "arrogant"?
People need to be a bit more reasonable.
Would that be the thing that Trump says he wants to stop on day one? Those asylum-seekers? The Trump who is inviting Xi to his inauguration?
You can't really be this obtuse. Asylum of high-skilled silicon workers from an ally under invasion isn't nearly the same thing as the asylum being granted over the last 4 years to anyone who could download the CBP One app.
Trump is inviting Xi as a troll / show of power.
> the asylum being granted over the last 4 years to anyone who could download the CBP One app
This is entirely unmoored from reality. CBP One only allows people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to make appointments, and once they have one, they have to actually show up and argue their case (why they need to come to the US for their own safety). You can’t just show a border patrol officer that you have CBP One and walk on through.
Why don’t you have Elon Musk explain that to Trump’s base who don’t give a shit about Taiwan or H1-Bs
How much does salary contribute to the overall cost of operating TSMC? Perplexity said that the average salary of a TSMC employee is $76K a year, and TSMC had about 80K people. So it cost them around $6B a year on salary. In the meantime, their operational cost was about $46B a year, so that's 13%. TSMC shipped about 16 million 12-in wafers. Each 12-inch wafer can make about 300 to 400 chips. Let's say 200 to stay on the conservative side. That will be 3.2B chips a year. That means the cost per chip on salary will be less than $2 a year. It looks HC cost is not that dominant?
That's really a training issue.
Making chips isn't something you learn the details of at University. You can take all the classes you want in advanced semiconductor techniques but the simple fact is University level manufacturing is nowhere close to SOTA.
Basically, you need fab workers to spend time in Taiwan/China, and then return to USA. It's the same model that most foreign students use at schools in USA/Canada. Get USA/Canadian name brand school on resume, learn english, and go back to home country = profit.
Re the first point: Why do you think it is so difficult to transfer chip production off Taiwan?
I don’t think this is about salaries. Nor is this about facilities.
This is about process know-how. And it’s currently not available outside of Taiwan. I’m glad we’re finally starting to transfer knowledge. It will take a couple more years.
How do we know there is knowledge transfer?
If I were Taiwan/TSMC, I would protect my trade secrets as if my life depended on it (which may actually be true).
We don’t. We expect some, but you’re right it won’t be transferred easily.
> glaring STEM field gap in the U.S.
There is no such gap. The jobs do not pay Americans enough to tolerate the conditions.
And the few people who tolerate such conditions are already employed by game development companies.
Does anyone know the general path to get involved in this? Perhaps its romantic, but this seems important, it seems hard, and it seems like something I can be proud of working on (as opposed to maximizing ad clicks). I'm just a SWE w/ a Comp sci degree, so what's the entry-point here?
Your entry point is a masters and probably Phd in Electrical Engineering, specializing in some aspect of semiconductor manufacturing. It’s definitely not CS.
Surely there is a lot of software involved in the design / operation of these fabs, it's not just designing the chip directly. Another commenter mentioned EDA so maybe I'll look into that.
There is a huge amount of software in every single step of making an ASIC, digital or analog. Or even a PCB for that matter. Long gone are the days of cutting tape and etching anything yourself. Apple's M3 has 25 billion transistors. No human drew those.
EDA software has some of the most amazing algorithms. I'm always surprised more CS people aren't into it.
You can find many great opensource projects here: https://theopenroadproject.org
But to get some context, and try out the flow and how everything works together, start here: https://tinytapeout.com
I'm not too sure but I would assume there's going to be faster turn prototype chips in the USA now? Is packaging needed to prove a prototype? Can we start buying IP blocks and make our own ICs? I'd love a MCU with built in IMU and wide range LDO, not sure if that's possible all on the same node.
There's going to be some niches opening as a result of this IMO.
EDA software?
It might be possible but domain knowledge might give some candidates a leg up on the competition, going in blind just seems suboptimal, though most of the relevant EE undergraduate classes were in sophomore and junior level for me in the late 1980's and I only got to use EDA software when working a couple of semesters for AMD as a junior.
it's first step. you gotta do something to bootstrap, solve chicken-egg problem. From what I can see around me, the "made in america" is a no joke branding. a lot of pppl going tobuyjust because of that. and may even consider it as social status and their policial support.
The Purism Librem 5 phone is very expensive and unfortunately not that popular. Haven't met anyone who uses one yet
That’s very niche. Very few people in the general population will have heard of them.
Apple is well known. If they say the new iPhone SE 7 has a Made In America chip, people will know about it to buy if they care about that.
And it's also a pile of shit compared to an iPhone or a Galaxy S device.
There's your real issue right there. People are already paying $1199 for new phones. According to this article: https://www.vox.com/technology/2018/9/13/17851052/apple-ipho...
Another $100. That's a little over six years old now though, so bump it up to $200.
Would I pay $1399 for an American made iPhone with American made internals, as the article suggests it would cost ($100, but I doubled it for inflation, because, why not?)? You bet your sweet ass I would.
You have to walk before you can run.
You have to crawl before you can walk. Apparently this is where we are at.
Sure, but this is how a supply chain gets bootstrapped. All those factories in China didn't magically appear one day. Just like they didn't appear when Apple started moving operations to Vietnam. You start piecemeal and build out.
I have two kids in grade school and middle school and I see why we have a STEM gap. I have to constantly correct the learning at home in math. Also, I think it's fair to assume that in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and China the school kids are actually put on an academic grindset unlike here where there is such little academic rigor or discipline being enforced by the school it makes sense why the k-12 education numbers are as bad as they are in the USA.
It might be worth getting up in front of the kids in middle school + and saying "Hey you're in competition at a global scale here. You're going to have to work your butts off to stay relevant."
isn't packaging tech mostly from american companies like applied mat/lam research? or am I missing something?
Maybe that's how US is going to have enough STEM talents -- just like WWI and WWII, take as many talents as possible when the other parts of the world are in shit.
The scenario that we’re going to be able to fight a war with another first world power, where we will attack their infrastructure but ours will be left untouched, seems unlikely.
We just need to make sure that we never fight directly with another regional power, e.g. China or Russia. IMO, neither of them wants a fight with the US too, because you don't want to push a super power to the corner, EVEN if you think you are good enough to win.
In the mean time, the situation in EU and Asia is going to deteriorate and North America can absorb more talents as it sees fit. The last two times it was mostly EU but this time Asia might be the new talent pool we can draw from.
China invading Taiwan seems a ton more likely than China lobbing missiles into Arizona.
It seems likely enough if the situation escalates. The conflict could be anything from a naval skirmish where neither side attacks the other's mainland to a total war scenario. It will likely start as naval-only and become gradually more involved if no side backs down.
However, it's safe to assume cyber attacks will hit Arizona. It's not unreasonable to assume crazy people will attack critical infrastructure, and we'll have to deal with the social fallout from that.
I have no specific info regarding this plant, but for anyone who never experienced this: flying in people from other plants at the starts (and all 3rd party vendors for a hypercare phase at launch) seems pretty normal.
If they have to keep staffing it that way, that's different.
this is how chick-fil-a does it
Having a STEM degree isn’t a substitute for real world experience in a production facility.
Clustering is a feedback loop where production creates people with experience in production, something needs to kickstart that process.
> - The chips still need to fly back to Taiwan to be packaged as there are no facilities here with such a capability.
This seems to be a much more achievable barrier to work around than not having a fab.
I think people are missing something, training.
It's a new fab, and people need to be trained on current processes and work roles. If you have a skilled work force, you use them to train.
can you really say the chip was made in America when it is only the die wafer which was made there and the rest was made and assembled in Taiwan?
> The chips still need to fly back to Taiwan
The planet burned, but at least we made a few chips in America.
you can fly a few hundred million dollars worth of chips in a single flight. You need not be concerned. The impact from temu shipments is several orders of magnitude higher.
e.g. you can get 572 a15 dies per 300mm wafer at 90% yield. These likely weigh a few hundred grams.
By my rough calculations a million iPhones of a15s is about 200kg of silicon. excluding packaging, which would dwarf this mass entirely.
>50% of the workers flew in from Taiwan to work on this plant
I wonder what % of work they did.
It's a start
brain drain from where? thought a problem is influx of workers into us although more for software not sure of chip tech
made in america is also a federally defined standard that these chips categorically fail to meet. assembled in the united states is more appropriate, and even then if you didnt hire americans to do it, what was the point?
this is starting to feel like the best of intentions that has spiraled into a political theatricality where close-enough will be good-enough.
given the current state of declining US college enrollment, the affordability crisis of college, the growing wage gap, the failure of the minimum wage to keep up with the cost of living, and the failure to reform predatory US student lending practices I do not see how the US will in the next 25 years ever manage to curate the type of braintrust for which it was once renowned across the globe.
This is so disconnected from reality. They've gone from breaking ground to replicating one of the most advanced fabrication processes in the history of the world _at scale_ in about 4 years, but they'll be sending the dies off for packaging while their packaging partner comes online so its just political theatre?
Also, over half of the employees are local hires and the ratio will increase as more of the fab spins up. IMO it would be much worse political theatre to delay and balloon the cost of the project by forcing TSMC to exclusively use a workforce that has no experience with the companies tools and processes.
Off topic but currently relevant:
Over 50% of the workers flew in from Taiwan to work on this plant and make these chips.
Those are the 50% we’re willing to bring in no questions asked via any visa program.
Not the elusive Java developer.
Seems like this is actually happening.
I saw so many predictions of how this couldn't happen and "yeah but" ... but it seems to be happening for the most part.
Indeed. It's just bullshit, propaganda.
There's simply no real reason we can't have a deep and robust manufacturing base in America. Well except for the fact that some specific people made a whole lot of money while letting it fall apart, and have paid for decades of media relations trying to convince everyone otherwise.
If you're reading this statement I just made and want to instinctively disagree with me, start by interrogating your own opinion. Why do you think America can't compete with China, for example, over the long term? What "well everyone knows" facts are you using to create that opinion that you don't have any first hand relationship to.
> Why do you think America can't compete with China, for example, over the long term?
Not saying I necessarily disagree with you, but just to give an example, the US has considerably better labor practices and labor laws than China. It's not perfect but there are protections about making sure people are paid what they're owed, how much you are allowed to work someone, safety protocols, etc. All of those things could, in theory, cost more money and make labor more expensive.
Compare this to nations that don't have the same work protections, where they can pay people peanuts and have them work much longer shifts with effectively no protection (e.g. Foxconn in China [1]).
This might translate to decreased cost, and Americans have made it excruciatingly clear that we're apparently fine with slave labor as long as it doesn't happen within the US.
[1] https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/chinese-workers-foxc...
Just calling out that worker protections and increased labor costs seem to be the result of workers making more money. As the work force becomes wealthier, they _need_ less money, and their standards rise. This means their labor becomes more expensive and they demand safer workplaces. They demand more time off. This happened in the USA and is currently happening in China and other low-labor-cost nations.
I think the person you responded to is right. The USA can and should restore its manufacturing base, for many reasons. The whole country would greatly benefit from the return of blue-collar jobs.
I don't have sources for this, but the info is out there.
Also, there are a lot of nuances around this topic that I'm not getting into here. Just want to acknowledge that...
Sure, but it's worth inquiring why the jobs left in the first place.
There's probably a few hundred reasons, but I think the core one was "manufacturing in China is cheaper because labor is cheaper."
Even if China starts demanding better worker protection (and they should! I am actually fine with my products costing more if I have a guarantee that the workers were treated well), I think that there's still a reasonably high chance that manufacturing would still move to another developing country that doesn't.
The why is not trivial to explain, but it's related to the petrodollar system. It's good for the USA if we create markets with countries that are developing by moving manufacturing there, because it helps them acquire the dollars that they need to buy energy on the international market. This helps the USA maintain global hegemony.
Again, my comment here is super simplified.
The core reasons the jobs left are industrial and monetary policies.
Or, said another way, because the Chinese prioritized and subsidized manufacturing growth and we did the opposite.
Why? Because it made some specific Americans very rich. It also ruined the lives of many other Americans. While making the country much less resilient to shocks or conflicts.
Which is, of course, the problem.
Foxconn is a Taiwanese company. China's revolution is about delivering for workers. I don't get where ppl are coming up with "slave labor" when it is American allies possibly operating in China's SEZ that are doing the bad stuff.
It's also simultaneously sanctimonious sounding when development is very difficult and America sacrificed three generations to industrial capitalism, stole half a continent of land, and used slaves to do our own development depending on how you count inputs to the process.
Slavery was wrong even in the 1700s and and 1800s. I wish it hadn't happened, but until we have a time machine there's not a lot we can do about it.
Just because the US has committed major sins in the past doesn't mean we should be slap-happy about other countries repeating those sins.
It might be "sanctimonious", but I don't think "I'm against slave labor everywhere" is an especially brave take.
I am not sold that this is a real thing in China in the first place. The main citation I can find is for the U.S. fake story about Xianjiang that is debunked on cursory inspection.
> Well except for the fact that some specific people made a whole lot of money while letting it fall apart, and have paid for decades of media relations trying to convince everyone otherwise.
Who are some of these people?
Jack Welch
I like the idea of made in America and bringing manufacturing self sufficiency to the US. But I don’t like the idea of reducing dependency on Taiwan, which makes it so that the world may ignore their plight in face of increasing aggression from China. The CCP is an authoritarian dictatorial government that seeks illegitimate control over Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and other areas. They need to be stopped and the solution isn’t to remove incentives to defend those areas.
There's a need to be pragmatic here; In the event of any kinetic Chinese aggression, TSMC (and other co's) fabs are going to be rendered inoperable, regardless of how well executed a US response is.
The world will will not be able to help with their plight, just as it was not with Ukraine and more recently Palestine. Might as well secure the supply chain.
We can do lots of things to help. But we need to get our military operational in that case.
Protecting Taiwan would mean WWIII. I hope the West and the Taiwanese figure this out ASAP and start moving as many people as possible out of there, and destroy all the fabs.
China is building more warships than the rest of the world combined. And NATO can't even recruit enough people to man their existing fleet.
But it seems the West is a victim of its own propaganda so there's no political will.
These chips are still sent to Taiwan for packing, so it's a good step but not a complete step.
Until 2027, yes.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/tsmc-is-repo...
"TSMC does not have an advanced packaging facility in the U.S., and its partner Amkor will only start packaging chips in Arizona in 2027. As a result, Blackwell AI silicon produced in Arizona will need to be shipped back to Taiwan for final assembly, as all of TSMC's CoWoS packaging capacity remains in Taiwan."
Given that there may be a 25% chance that China invades Taiwan by 2030, having the ability to package SOTA chips in the US by 2027 seems "soon enough".
Would be interesting if China uses drones with technology from Taiwan to invade Taiwan.
where did you get that number from
There's a window where China will have it max capability to invade for the next few years. After that their population is going to start shrinking and every year will be harder than the next to invade.
But they don’t have energy independence or food security yet, which is kind of a hard requirement for an invasion.
There’s not enough rail lines and gas pipelines from Russia to feed them with significant quantities of fossil fuels.
Imagine how bad Russias invasion of Ukraine would’ve been without energy independence and food security. The invasion of Taiwan is an order of magnitude more difficult, and Taiwan now has the recipe for how to knock out the entire naval fleet of a more powerful nation (see how Ukraine has essentially incapacitated Russia in the Black Sea).
I would expect an invasion to prompt the US navy to put up a blockade, disrupting China's oil supplies and generally making it very hard to keep their economy going. Admittedly, Trump is a wild card; he's random enough that it is hard to be sure what would happen.
I do not think China could survive a blockade.
Huh? China will get all the energy it needs from Russia. Plus China is the leader in renewables production.
Not a chance. Russia has no way to deliver oil in large quantities to China. New pipelines, if they could even build them, would take many, many years.
If renewables was adequate they would not be importing vast amounts of oil.
Except TW TFR even worse than PRC TFR, and ultimately scale effect takes over - PRC with crippled TFR still generates about as much male new borns per year than TW has men 18-40 total. PRC still on trend to generate 3-4x more MEN than US projected to add population per year, incidentally around the same as active duty military... having enough bodies is not going to be an issue for decades. Having enough nukes is.
I'm not arguing against that at all. Just that if the PRC wants it's best chance, the clock is ticking. It becomes more costly the longer they wait.
I disagree, bodies is not limitting factor for PRC, it also becomes cheaper to wait for TW specifically because TW male 18-40 is set to decline = less kill bots / occupation force needed. Attacker:defender ratio (i.e. commonly 3:1) = every defender TW loses due to demographics, PRC with same TFR will come out significantly ahead, will need less enforcement:civilian ratio for occupation.
But ultimately, it's about hardware+industry - current trend = regional force balance shifting in PRC favour vs US+co every year with no end in sight. PRC better off accumulating capabilities at scale, not just regional, but global (i.e. prompt global strike) and increase autarky (less net population + more electrifcation = more calorie + energy security). All trend incentivizes waiting and building.
TLDR waiting and building becomes less costly (or rather less risky) to pursue PRC's ultimate strategic goals associated with TW scenario... displacing US posture out of east Asia and perhaps hitting CONUS infra at scale as response to US intervention. The latter part is key, there are important stretch goals to TW scenario that secures PRC geopolitical interests for 50-100+ years. It's much more important to be able to tackle those "costly" scenarios "cheaper", where cheaper is also relative to making intervention much more expensive for adversaries, i.e. PRC "winning" hand in TW scenario is to show US posture in east asia not sustainable, and CONUS (including TSMC Arizona) not defendable.
The population of 18-30 year old males is generally what matters for an invasion and China has been shrinking that for a long time. The rest of the population can plan the invasion, but they rarely actually do it. (a few countries also invite young females to an invasion, but that is not normal)
Metaculus - this is the median prediction.
You know where
I'm not sure where GP's 25% comes from. But there have been various assessments that China intends to "reunify" with Taiwan by 2030. [1] Xi Xinping has also instructed the PLA to be prepared to invade by 2027. [2]
If you then ask yourself whether China would rather invade during the Trump administration (with its tendencies towards isolationism and "deal making") or roll the dice on a subsequent U.S. administration, you might find yourself thinking that the odds actually seem considerably higher than 25% that this could happen in the next four years.
To the extent that this narrative comes via the U.S. intelligence/defense community, one has to assume that it may biased towards exaggerating the threat. I for one hope that is the case, since I do not want to see a U.S.-China conflict any time soon. At the same time, I unfortunately don't think it's likely to be completely baseless.
[1] https://media.defense.gov/2023/Apr/24/2003205865/-1/-1/1/07-...
[2] See, e.g., https://cimsec.org/the-maritime-convoys-of-2027-supporting-t... https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4547637-china-potential-t...
what is involved in the packaging process ? I believe they don't ship fully assembled chips to Taiwan only to be put in a pretty box ?
"Packaging" in this context means taking the wafer of compute die (made in Arizona), dicing it up into individual die, mounting it onto a silicon interposer (an even bigger die, no idea where that's made, but probably taiwan) along with a bunch of HBM die, then mounting that Si interposer on a somewhat larger, very fine-pitched circuit board ('substrate') that is essentially a breakout for power and high-speed I/O from the compute die. That thing is the packaged 'CoWoS' system, where CoWoS==Chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, that eventually gets attached to a 'normal' PCB.
What I've always wondered was, how is it possible to do this process (or well, the less advanced version of it, for smaller/older chips) cheaply/at massive scale, for those ICs that cost a few cents in bulk?
Like, scaling wafer (die?) production to insanely low costs makes intuitive sense. The input is sand, the process itself is just easily-parallellizable chemistry and optics, and the output is a tiny little piece of material.
But packaging sounds as though it requires intricate mechanical work to be done to every single output chip, and I just can't wrap my head around how you scale that to the point where they cost a few cents...
This sounds like a complex procedure. Are there currently alternative packaging facilities that could do this work, if Taiwan were locked into kinetic war?
I'm making an educated guess but probably the cutting of chips from the wafers, placing them into the appropriate ceramic socket types (DIP, BFGA, SMD etc), soldering the line wires from chip to pin, encasing the chip, etc.
> DIP
I am happily imagining opening a recent Apple device and seeing 74 gates with through holes in green PCBs, with an Apple logo made in soldering lead marking in the corner of the board.
I believe packaging in this context means taking the raw silicon dies and assembling them into a package which can be soldered onto a PCB (or put in a socket, but Apple doesn't socket anything).
Believe it or not, sending them overseas just to be put in a box actually can be cost-effective. Like with those pears: "grown in Argentina, packaged in Thailand, sold in UK" https://www.birminghamfoodcouncil.org/2022/01/16/part-i-pear...
I think "packaging" here refers to the process of putting the silicon die in its plastic casing and connecting the die's pad to the case's pins, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit_packaging
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-egYoxajTz0
How does this make any financial sense?
The machines and processes needed to package the individual integrated circuits are fantastically expensive but the margins are so low in that step that it's only profitable at massive scales.
So you put the fantastically expensive machines near where most of the customers are and most of the customers are in Asia.
Works the same way with fiber optic cables. Making the long skinny bits is hard and high-margin. Actually turning them into cables is easy and low-margin.
So Corning makes huge spools of fiber optic cable in Arizona, North Carolina, and New York (I think) and ships it off to Taiwan and China where it is made into the cables that you plug into stuff.
Marine shipping is just about the most fuel efficient way of moving things between any two places, by a lot. A 100,000 dwt ship can get 1050 miles per gallon per ton of cargo. It takes about a teaspoon full of fuel to move an iPhone sized device across the pacific when I ran the numbers last.
To ship things to/from these fabs by sea you have to add the cost of shipping by truck between Phoenix and (presumably) LA. Not sure how big of a difference that makes.
A semi truck carries +- 15 tons of cargo and gets an average of about 6 MPG, so about 90 MPG/ton.
Trains are pretty efficient as well.
Chips are small, so one truck once a few days may suffice.
Airplanes. They use airplanes. We are talking about microchips here, possibly the highest dollar per gram substance that exists on the planet.
The interest you'd pay just losing a couple days in transit time would exceed the cost of purchasing a dedicated private jet and the crew to fly it.
Imagine the insurance...
Interesting. Could you give a brief description of how you got that number? Eg. what factors were considered.
Those numbers match what comes up with a quick search:
https://www.extension.iastate.edu/grain/topics/EstimatesofTo...
That study uses 1,043.4 mpg for the fuel economy of a 100,000 dwt ship.
Videos of transportation ship engines are cool. Each cylinder is wide enough for a person to lay down inside it.
https://youtu.be/G0eMyA388bE
This is how most modern supply chains look like.
Plus, chips are small in size and cost a lot so you can fit a lot in a container. Per unit shipping costs probably come out to be pretty low. Especially when compared to the political costs and risks associated with not onshoring.
> you can fit a lot in a container
Guys these are microchips on wafers. You can put a million dollars worth in your jacket pocket. They aren't being shipped in containers.
These are literally microchips. Tens of thousands of dollars of value in each gram.
Shipping cost is fundamentally irrelevant, you can put $100MM worth on a direct flight and have room left over for your family and friends.
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/dsv-unveils-details-for-ne...
^certainly there's activity in that space
Your overall point is probably right, but "tens of thousands of dollars of value in each gram" seems like an exaggeration. How much does one CPU weigh?
Depends on the chip. A typical consumer processor is 100-200 mm². Wafers are about 1mm thick (actually a bit less, but close enough) and silicon has a density of 2300kg/m³. So it's 2.3mg/mm² of wafer area. The chip is then 0.23-0.46g. if it's high end and worth $1000, then the wafers are $2-4000 per gram. Probably the low end of that since the fancier chips are usually the physically bigger ones.
However, low-end processors will be worth radically less ($100 CPUs aren't 10x smaller) and things like top-end FPGAs will be worth substantially more. An Agilex 7 can be $40,000 and if it's got less then 4 grams (around 1700mm², or 41mm*41mm), the wafer is worth over $10k/gram. The entire chip is 56x56, and from the package drawing, the die appears to be around 30x30, so it exceeds the threshold.
This is assuming all the value of the retail price is the main wafer, which is also not true.
Thousands per gram, certainly seems possible, though I doubt it's even that on average across all chips, and considering that there is non-wafer content in the price. Tens of thousands is probably pushing it. However, it's certainly likely to be rather more than gold in terms of specific value ($100/g, ish). Harder to fence, though.
Order of magnitude it's within range. A single wafer for something higher end is worth tens of thousands of dollars. So whatever that weighs. It's not much.
But surely a wafer weighs more than a gram, no?
Yes. One source I just double checked says that a 300mm silicon wafer weighs 840 grams, which seems to be in the right range anyway.
I see that source too (universitywafer.com) which is sucked into the AI slop panel on Google.
A 300mm wafer at 0.775mm thickness that weighs that much would be a density of 15g/cm³: midway between lead (11) and gold (19). Silicon is only 2.3g/cm³.
A 300mm wafer should be much closer to 100g than 1kg. Another page (on the same website!) says 125g, which is pretty dead-on 2.3g/cm³.
I'm suprised they can't ship (flat) packaging that could be used in Arizona with a simple assembly line.
If they had that packaging design then for this to make financial sense the two way shipping (and loading, unloading, custom clearance etc) would have to be less than shipping the packaging, the setup cost per unit cost of putting the chip in a box
Wait, wait. In the context of semiconductor manufacturing packaging does not mean what you think it means. It is not putting the product in a paper box.
It is about cutting the wafer into individual chips, wire bonding the silicone to pins, and covering the whole thing with epoxy.
Here is a video which explains it better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gg2eVVayA4
It would be indeed crazy if they would ship the ready chips to Taiwan just to be put in a paper box.
basically the input of the process is a wafer which looks like this: https://waferpro.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Patterned-Lo...
And the output of the process is something which looks like this: https://res.cloudinary.com/rsc/image/upload/b_rgb:FFFFFF,c_p...
The packaging in this context is not wire bonding but CoWoS - chip-wafer and wafer-wafer bonding.
You are correct. I was just illustrating what kind of processes belong to the umbrella term "packaging" in the context of semiconductor manufacturing. Was not talking about what particular process are missing from the Arizona facility.
But you are right on that it is CoWoS which is the missing ingredient.
You seem to be confusing the term packaging...it is not the box, it is how the chips are assembled together to make the final product.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-egYoxajTz0
Dont downvote the guy for not knowing this very specific definition of 'packaging'
Right, but he assumed he knew a technical term when he didn't, which is unwise.
What does "packaging" mean in this context? I'm a total n00b when it comes to chips.
What comes to my mind is wrapping a piece of electronics in some bubble wrap and cardboard, which doesn't sound that hard...
Made using which process? The article doesn't mention this.
https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/log...
The smallest process they've got up and running right now is 4nm, last I checked
And for the record the A17 Pro chip is 3nm. Used in the iPhone 15 pro and the iPad mini.
But they could make iPhone 14’s and the smaller 15’s.
So which device will these be for then? I thought Apple stuff are always on the cutting edge node.
Their new stuff is. The iPad mini just moved from the A15 to the A17, The first MacBook with Intel processors had access to a bin that was not generally available yet. The yield was too low for it to work for an IBM, a Sony, or a Fujitsu. But Apple was low volume and high margin.
If I was nervous about a new fab, there’s the iPhone SE, the Apple TV, lots of choices for a less aggressive manufacturing node and less aggressive sales figures. If yield is shit you can still offer a product that isn’t killed by its own success.
I wonder if Apple Intelligence is forcing them to create new chips for things like the SE and TV instead of using old chips which I think they’d usually do.
I'm a long time AAPL shareholder, admittedly I have not been paying super close attention over the last couple of years. But I'm pretty sure Apple has a history of being perfectly fine with their entry level devices being one killer feature behind the rest of their fleet. If the old hardware can support it fine, and if not then better luck next time (literally and figuratively).
They don't usually do it for very long, and my recollection is that they usually bring it down market before (maybe concurrent with) introducing yet another new killer feature.
So you'll be correct soon enough, but there's slack time there that they can use to hedge their bets on the new fab before leaning on it for the WWDC keynote.
Apple still produces older generation devices long after the latest ones are released. That's their whole strategy to address the lower end market.
iPhone SE
As an outsider that means somewhere in 2nm-10nm as everyone measures different things or have awfully off-standard rulers.
I’d say it means TSMC 4nm.
4nm
I thought Taiwan prohibited export of this kind of know-how? What did I miss?
They have adopted a n-2 type of rule for advanaced tech...but as of yesterday they seem to have relaxed this rule and approved transfer of 2nm from Taiwan fabs to the AZ fab at some point in the near future.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/tsmc-cleared-for-2nm-p...
Advanced lithography is like if a mystery cult were real: Secret knowledge only understood by the most learned initiates, tightly-guarded process, etching symbols that do things...
Sadly true.
Even more depressing: it's like a very complicated baking recipe arrived at by tweaking parameters over and over a again. There is no deep understanding... just a giant list of baking parameters that seem to work, sometimes.
(Yes, a bit like an AI. Hmm....)
I'd be extremely surprised if Apple is now able to source CPUs for current-gen high-end iPhones from a US fab.
2 gens ago, sure.
Wow I did not know this and it is fantastic news, surprised Taiwan allowed this as they see chips as being the most important reason America would intervene if they were invaded.
In case of invasion, it's not that unlikely that the fabs in Taiwan get destroyed, or at least lose the ability to keep making and selling chips while the conflict is hot. In that case TSMC and Taiwan might prefer having a backup. As long as the US doesn't confiscate the Arizona fab, effectively siding with China, Taiwan would arguably have more leverage by still having something of immense strategic value to trade.
The US is not going to hold on to some working fab for some Taiwan-government-in-exile. As soon as you are out of power, even your allies generally take the time to plunder what they can.
Just like the US plundered any Ukrainian assets they could get their hands on, instead of supporting the Ukrainian government and freezing Russian assets instead?
The Ukrainian government is very much still extant
Just as the Taiwan government could continue to be, despite invasion from China.
In fact the RoC government is already in exile in Taiwan, though it seems unlikely that they would find another piece of real estate if they lost that.
In the case of invasion, the equipment within the TSMC factories will be affirmatively destroyed / sabotaged to the extent that it can't be used or studied.
I'm a China dove and I'd favor full-throated defense of Taiwan in any invasion (much more so than Ukraine) regardless of chips.
I don’t disagree with the core premise, but why much more than Ukraine?
Taiwan is a long-standing well-functioning democracy and a core ally. On the other side, I also view Russia's grievances as somewhat more legitimate than China's.
No grievances that Russia might have had can justify this devastating war, and total annihilation, and mass murder.
not the point of my comment. war is never good, whether it is Russia invading Ukraine, China invading Taiwan, or the US invading Iraq+Afghanistan - everyone should focus on finding common ground and understanding the perspectives of others
Addressing those "grievances" hasn't worked out too well for Russia. They complained about Ukraine moving in the general direction of NATO membership, and got Sweden and Finland as actual new members of NATO. Finland has a longer Russian border than Ukraine, and Sweden has a regional navy that pretty much controls the Baltic Sea. Both countries were pretty firmly neutral before the war.
and that has what, exactly, to do with the legitimacy of said grievances?
Because for all of Russia's apocalyptic rhetoric about the dire consequences of NATO membership on their borders, they've done nothing significant about Finland and Sweden actually becoming NATO members while stepping up their military spending. By comparison, a little political noise about Ukraine maybe joining NATO someday is much less of a provocation, which makes it seem unlikely to have been Russia's actual reason for invasion. And from any reasonable ethical perspective it's certainly not a legitimate one.
The NATO stuff is such propaganda, the idea has always been imperialism and to take the people and turn them into Russians.
in what sense could you _possibly_ argue this
from both legal and realpolitik lenses the Taiwan issue is fully legitimate. your country has done far worse to Cuba for far less. Even setting aside the historical context and the Chinese civil war, what is illegitimate about not wanting an antagonistic and belligerent foreign power installing weapons in an island mere miles off the mainland coast?
ASML, a Dutch firm, sells photolithography equipment to TSMC.
I keep hearing about a skills gap in the US for fabs, what skills or jobs are actually suffering from this? people with masters in nanotech, compeng, EE?
Perhaps there is a skill gap because nobody actually knows there is a demand? I have no idea what to recommend to people who are trying to choose a college degree.
With my industry in infosec, at least there are certifications one can take, even proper masters degrees these days. In my experience, there is no skills gap in cybersec, despite what CEO's and linkedin-types' sentiment. They just don't want to pay market price for skilled talent. "skills gap" has meant "we need more talent so we can pay less", there is no actual shortage of people who can do the jobs adequately.
Is it different for chip fabrication? and if so, how can regular people work/study to obtain these skills? If I, having read HN for years and reading about the fab process have no clue, how can regular people who don't visit HN?
If you all can help me answer this, I'll try to recruit a few people into pursuing the right career to help meet this demand.
Off topic... Taiwan also machines and heat treats some of the best cutlery steels in the world. Taichung City is famous for this. This is not as delicate a process as producing CPU chips, but it is hard to get right consistently.
Most all major cutlery companies have product lines that are produced solely in Taiwan (Spyderco, Cold Steel, Demko, etc.)
It would be nice to see Taiwanese steel industy move some production to the US as well.
Buck Knives at least, mostly manufacture in the U.S., and their 110 model at least still arrives shaving sharp and keeps a decent edge.
High-quality knives come from proper metallurgy, especially as it relates to proper hardening steps. If you don't get these things exactly right, the best machining on earth is not going to produce even mediocre knives.
Sorry, don't think that's a national security priority.
Funny enough, Fab 21 was announced in May 2020 and completed construction in July 2022, a month before the Chips Act was signed.
The announcement of this plant coincided with the announcement of the Endless Frontier Act and CHIPS for America act, which is what eventually became the bill we call CHIPS and Science Act.
This plant was the foundation that the CHIPS act was built upon. The Secretary of State had to secure an agreement with TSMC to build this fab before the bills could be drafted, as a lot of the recipients of the funding are suppliers for this plant.
It is completely truthful to assert that this is the result of the CHIPS act. Congress agreed to introduce the bills as a result of TSMC's agreement to build the fab in Arizona. If you have to avoid giving Biden credit, then you can point out that it was Trump's SoS who negotiated this original agreement.
I agree that the CHIPS Act was likely contingent on someone showing semiconductor manufacturing could actually be onshored. I’m not sure I buy that TSMC’s investment was contingent on an Act that was contingent on them investing in the first place. It’s not like TSMC was ever going to get a check to just reimburse themselves. Even now, their subsidies are only for new plans.
Intel, on the other hand, is a great example of a how a company dependent on the government funding for semiconductor manufacturing behaves. Heck, look at the Foxconn debacle; companies prefer incentives up front.
If you remember, TSMC had the immediate fear of losing ~15% of their revenue with the Huawei export ban. I wouldn’t be surprised if that influenced their decision to cozy up to America.
What makes you think construction was completed in July 2022? The shell of Phase 1 may have been completed, but even now the construction continues in Phase 1B and Phase 2.
I’m going off the purely structural construction of the first fab. There’s a timeline on TSMC’s site.
Half of the works are from Taiwan All machines were imported to build the factory. USA can't do anythings without immigrants. China was able to develop its own chip factory without immigrants and without buying machines (because USA blocked the 'free market')
USA lost.
This is really exciting. It'd be awesome if the rebirth of American industrialism was tech hardware driven. It sounds like this being mass production ready is still a few years off, but kudos to Apple and TSMC for working to make this happen.
As an european, all I wonder is if this will make Apple devices even more expensive.
My guess is no, it won't. This is US taxpayer money being used to increase the manufacturing capacity available to the market so that the US has domestic manufacturing when stuff goes sideways. A similar thing regularly occurs with auto manufacturing and manufacturing in country A usually frees up capacity for other countries, resulting in slightly lower prices.
What could happen is that once the US has manufacturing capacity it decides to tariff imported chips, causing your country to retroactively do the same. This is decades away, and the US has a problem sourcing chips it can trust right now, so it's not currently on the radar. It's not something I'm going to worry about.
Viewed through a pessimistic eye, the US finally is realizing that its arms production critically relies on chip production and it can't says its chips are US made when selling arms on the market. A change in mindset like this typically takes a generation and so even though this change in weapons really happened around the turn of the century, the people in power have mostly retired and the new generation now understands this reality.
Is this the first “Made in USA” chip in Apple devices since the Fishkill PPC 970?
Weren’t the Intel CPUs made in the US?
Oops, forgot about Arizona.
How hard will this be to scale to up 50% of Taiwan production into the US?
Hard, given how many Taiwanese workers they had to bring in, and how all the dies has to go back to Taiwan for packaging.
Do we know why the US government did not promise to buy chips but to give tax breaks (or investment thereof)? Wouldn't promise to buy create a better incentive to the manufacturers?
There's just such a big shift between parties right now that when the current admin is done, you're not gonna know what to expect with the next. Especially with something that's more policy (purchase orders) than law (taxes). Better to just codify the benefits.
3nm? 5nm? What chips are being made? A chip isn’t a chip
If memory serves me right, it's the Apple S8 chip used in their watches, built on a 7nm process.
Surprised they're going to apple rather than say military purposes
They'll be flown from the US to Taiwan for packaging, at least until packaging services exist here. Then they'll be flown to China, Southeast Asia, India, or possibly Brazil for final assembly into an iPhone or computer, at least until lower cost assembly plants are built here or someplace cheaper like Mexico.
Your comment is correct but this was already stated in earlier comments. This is probably why you are being downvoted.
I'm not interested what Apple says. What they do in FB is so many posts they posting what ever they like even posts of almost naked women and girls, looks like prostitution in FB. They are saying is their right to do that and their policy. It is disgusting thing in my point of view. Used to be postings of my friends now is totally disaster.
Imagine TSMC not getting US funds to bring over a Taiwanese workforce large enough to result in "Little Taiwan" being constructed in the desert.
Taiwan exodus in 3..2..1
with required NSA backdoor of course.
Make America good at slave labor again basically
Maybe this is the discussion worth having. Taiwanese engineers competed to get into TSMC. Their management practically lived in the factory to solve production issues when needed. The local workers in the Arizona factory said the pay was pretty good per another comment. Yet somehow we thought that we were slaving the labors? What is the fundamental difference here? Personally, if I were a worker who could find just a service job that pays $30K a year or less, I'd kill to work for TSMC for $50K+/year and learn everything I can about chip manufacturing in my capacity. It would be proud to do it, and I wouldn't mind some overtime.
And I'm not sure why this got downvoted. Not that it matters, but I'm very curious about why people were not happy with the questions. My fundamental belief is that if someone chose to accept an offer and then work hard, it's not slavery but free will. But well, I guess American culture is interesting in the regard. If I study STEM hard in school, I'll be a "teacher's pet" or a nerd who knows only "how to cram". On the other hand, if I free throw under a hoop 4000 times a day, I'm DA man and it's worth the highest praise on the level of "have you seen the LA of 4:00am". Or if I'm a banker or a startup employee who worked 100hr+, I'm building the future of the US, yet if I worked in a fab 996 on my own will, I'll be a slave?
The same people downvoting you are likely the same who think doing 996 on the startup lottery is a good idea.
This is only the first (significant) step for the american continent to be able to build cutting edge chips (again).