this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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They never finished the sentence in the news articles.
Business unable to find the labor it needs! Is usually where they stop they leave out the "at the price they want". From the sentence.
It really should say business unable to find the labor it needs at the price it wants
Journalists really shouldn't let businesses get away with not saying the quiet part out loud.
Very rarely is it really something like there's 13 people in the world who can do this. And none of them live here. That's an interesting story, but that's not the story that's often told. It's usually local laborers too expensive we want to import some external labor that's less expensive. At least in the United States then they craft a job specification that can't be matched locally but it's tailored specifically for an external candidate to get a visa.
It's not just the price, it's the whole package. The only place I've seen it being lightly talked about was on the Aug 11th's WAN Show.
TSMC is a Taiwanese company, therefore they expect workers to follow the Asian/Chinese work culture. Meaning basically living (usually literally) in the company and very rarely going home for a quick visit. None of this western "work/life balance" nonsense, none of the unionization stuff. Oh you're not happy with something? Do not even dare speaking up, much less grouping up to discuss or protest. Just suck it up and deal with it.
The price is important, don't get me wrong, but Chinese companies do not want people who won't take any and everything their bosses say without even a slight hint of question.
Most of that is conflation of Taiwan with China (and let's not do that) as well as mixing up TSMC with a random Shenzhen factory. Taiwan is definitely fucked, but it is more "America fucked" than "996 fucked", as it were.
And it is important to understand that TSMC are basically the best of the best in semiconductors. That is skilled labor. I wouldn't want to work there but if I had to pick a semiconductor factory to work in...
No, the reason that the vast majority of "popular science" tech youtubers have not covered this too much is that it is really a mixture of
So 1 and 2... should be valid but This Is America. But 3 is the real issue. Because we have people who are insisting on getting full salaries while more or less needing to be trained (often for a few years) on the job to be qualified. Versus flying out the people who DO know their shit. Like, we all like to complain that outsourcing usually makes a larger support burden on the parent company. And... yeah.
So most tech youtubers aren't touching this with a ten foot pole. And LTT have a long history of spewing complete bullshit. Either people worship Linus for "not being afraid to cover a topic" or get angry and they get publicity for "another hot take".
And basically every other tech youtuber just says "I am not at all qualified to talk about this subject"
This person has no idea what they're talking about. I'm an EE based in Arizona. I work with a lot of people who used to work for Intel, NXP, On Semi, etc. Semiconductor Fabs tend to have a pretty intense work culture. But from what they tell me, TSMC is on a whole 'nother level, and TSMC can't pay them enough to put up with it's work culture and expectations. They have the skills but at the end of the day, for them, family and their sanity is more important.
Are there people who will thrive in such conditions? Absolutely, just like I personally know a guy who thrives working in an Amazon warehouse. However, from my experience, people who want to have families and not have their lives revolve around their jobs are not interest in working for TSMC.
(To a lesser degree every year it seems) In Software and Hardware design, Intel are the big dogs. In terms of fabs? They are woefully behind TSMC (although, there are efforts to narrow that gap and some of the new tech that has been publicly revealed is awesome).
And that is how it plays out in the field. If folk "aren't good enough" to work for a big company (whether because they lack skills or, more frequently, don't want to base their life around matching the corporate profile) they emphasize the bad. I am more on the software side than hardware, but the number of stories about how hellish it is to work at Google and Amazon('s software side) are insane. And almost always associated with "I could have gotten a job there, if I tried". And yeah, there are a LOT of problems. Mostly at the lower level (which is comparable to most startup cultures and why people should REALLY look at "mid tier" companies and orgs to get their initial experience). Once you get to mid career, it is well within the normal range.
Which is more or less true for TSMC. Yeah, it is a factory job and those suck. But if you actually compare it to similar orgs (again, ignoring the hellscape that is Shenzhen and the like), they are generally "roughly average'. Worse in some regards, better in others. And, like I said, that SHOULD be unacceptable that this is "average" but... labor has problems the world around and nobody cares enough to stand up for it.