This is one of the key reasons you need to give the right incentives and compensations to your employees. I have seen too many tech companies failing at employee retention.
The loss of talent will have a medium-long term impact on the company. And, many of their future competitors are going to be created by your current unhappy employees.
I have seen an increasing trend in tech-companies to be more employee-friendly beyond eye-candy perks. But, there is still a long path to walk.
> This is one of the key reasons you need to give the right incentives and compensations to your employees. I have seen too many tech companies failing at employee retention.
(Disclaimer - I speak from a neutral standpoint, I'm not a politics person.)
It's not so black and white. There's also nationality at play. Chinese employees can be very nationalistic in times of war, especially, if they live in and around ASEAN. The moment something bad happens (to China), they will view it as China being the victim and do things others wouldn't normally do.
Case in point: Remember the Huawei ban? A lot of my ex-colleagues and friends (who are Chinese) dumped their iPhones at ridiculously low prices and exchanged it for a Huawei to show support for China (despite being outside of China). I saw this with my own eyes and I was blown away. I mean, convincing an Apple user to switch to Android is a billion dollar problem that Google is trying to solve for years now and just like a snap of a finger, nationality is reason enough for them to make the switch, irrespective of their personal consequences (switching clouds, etc).
Likewise, incentives alone isn't enough, there's not much you can do if the employees view this as a nationalistic issue.
Do you think nationality is the only reason, or do you think they could also genuinely disagree with Huawei's treatment, for reasons that are reasonable if one accepts a different point of view?
Tha fact those ex-colleagues and friends who bought and use iPhone in the first place indciates they are not generally a nationalist person. The reason they bought Huawei is because they realized when the US is banning Huawei, while China is not banning Apple, that is simply not fair, the US is not what it claims to be, or what they thought it to be. To be clear, I don't think it's fair either.
You don't need to assume patriotic sentiment for this. The Chinese are paying a lot more than other companies, and the project is clearly fantastic. Even I would be interested if this was happening in my industry.
Plenty of my friends switched from iPhones to Huawei, they're not Chinese though it's just since iPhones got more expensive when you drop them a few times you just decide to go for something cheaper and Huawei hits all the points they look for in iPhones.
The value prop of the iPhone just isn't there anymore if you are not stuck in the ecosystem.
I'm confused. Are you saying that mainland Chinese feel -more- nationalistic if they live in the ASEAN region, i
e. outside of their home country? Or are these employees from an ASEAN country but are just Chinese in ethnicity?
Dumping Apple isn't the best example, since Apple is a luxury product that is more about signaling status than about a great computing power-vs-cost value proposition.
Nothing different here from the patriotic sentiment in America. One should not be so surprised with something that is already so common in a particular Western country.
Appropriate compensation is important, sure, but it’s impossible to stop talent sniping like this. There’s a fundamental asymmetry.
You are TSMC and have 50k employees, of which say 5,000 are experienced engineers, the top 10%. A competitor wants to hire away 100 of them and offers them an enhanced salary. They only need to offer that to 100 people, but to stop them getting any of those 5000 employees you have to offer a competitive package to all of them. Any you don’t offer it to are vulnerable to getting hired away. So for every $1m they are willing to spend on enhanced packages, you need to spend $50m in enhanced salaries to block them. If they decide to cut it down to hiring away only 50 engineers, now for every $1m they spend you need to spend $100m.
As head of resourcing at TSMC, at what point do you stop the defensive salary inflation? Bear in mind your not competing with the financial resources of just another chip company, you’re competing with the financial resources of the Chinese state.
> A competitor wants to hire away 100 of them and offers them an enhanced salary. They only need to offer that to 100 people, but to stop them getting any of those 5000 employees you have to offer a competitive package to all of them.
I don't think this is true as (I think) you're assuming that all 5000 employees are equally skilled and desired. More realistically, the poaching company wants the more senior/experienced so TSMC only has to watch out for these. Still not an insignificant number nor amount of money.
Long-term, the solution is probably for companies to focus more on building their culture and focusing on the non-financial perks (e.g. ala Google) so employees will think twice about leaving.
> Bear in mind your not competing with the financial resources of just another chip company, you’re competing with the financial resources of the Chinese state.
But you have the resources of the other Chinese state (Taiwan) at your disposal because, TSMC and the Taiwanese semi industry work hand-in-hand with the government as well.
There is a good reason why I've been at my current employer as long as I have, they actually give salary and benefit increases that attempt to reflect how you contribute to the company and how much they want to keep you around.
Unfortunately, there are other factors that you need to maintain that keep employees around and we have lost a few people that really hurt the overall skill level of the team which had nothing to do with compensation.
At first, I thought raising price would do the Job, Wafer is still relatively cheap, It is the Design / Up front cost that is expensive. Higher Revenue > Higher Profits and in turns can paid Engineers a lot better.
But then there is Samsung, which has its foundry business partly funded by NAND and DRAM. i.e TSMC cant exactly dedicate the price as much as everyone think they could.
The "Big Semi" salaries are notoriously low for the amount of effort one needs to put into his education, and early career.
A physics, or engineering PhD. is a minimum to be allowed anywhere near actual work on the process, and those guys only get $50k-$60k a year in Taiwan after 5+ years.
A regular "technician," or a PhD interns can get as little as $2000 a month.
Of course, the few real know how holders are kept loyal at just any cost, and I heard rumours of 7 digit incomes for those few. This is by far the biggest "carrot" that keeps luring people into RnD work in Semi.
Rumors of huge payoffs would be cheap to start. I can't speak to the situation in Taiwan, but in the US it's dismal.
The rumors I heard from disgruntled relatives and postdocs I met in nanofab class prevented me from going down that path despite the strong allure and good match to my interests and skills.
My current job is nowhere near as interesting, but it pays me with actual money, and though that decision felt overwhelmingly cynical when I initially jumped ship, a quick survey of the others in my cohort who didn't jump ship leaves me with few regrets. They work a multiple harder than I do, on things a large multiple more important than I do, and they get paid a fraction what I do.
As a reward for taking the high road, they are likely to lose their jobs as the United States continues shipping semiconductor manufacturing and engineering abroad.
For brain-power-application Vs Payoff, Web Software already overpays. I chatted with crossword designer a few weeks back, and it was fairly heavy brain work for little pay. Similarly, there are lots of people, including electronics engineers who put in fairly more brain work and make little out of it.
Software outside Web dev is somewhat similar too. You don't get paid that much.
I take it that's 60K USD per year, but not adjusted for PPP? Adjusting for PPP that's $140,000 per year.
> Of course, the few real know how holders are kept loyal at just any cost, and I heard rumours of 7 digit incomes for those few.
That's pretty true across any industry. These nominal-to-PPP adjusted salaries are roughly in line re: base compensation for what I would expect a good tech job outside the bay area to pay. If you got a job at the upcoming TSMC fab in the US, $140K would be about right.
Converting using exchange rate isn't the right way of comparing compensation as you're not trying to buy something in the US with your Taiwanese compensation. You're trying to determine a compensation figure in the US that gets you as much in the US as the Taiwanese salary gets you in Taiwan. This is when you use PPP.
Based on anecdotal evidence (interactions with people at MOSIS, Qualcomm engineers, etc.), $140k is quite a bit more than you'd get for 5 years experience, even for a high COL area like Southern California. It's an industry that's got the emotional appeal of gaming due to its cutting edge and impactful nature but the monopolistic economics of telecom due to the investments required, so you either work for the salaries they dictate or you go find another career. The same is largely true for electrical engineers and firmware developers in general.
On the other hand, anyone with enough experience in any of those fields can go off as a consultant and make absolute bank - mid to upper six figures relatively easily. The utility of experience grows superlinearly because the risks and capital involved in each project are so large. Someone with 20 years experience who has seen 5+ successful projects is easily worth 5 to 10x someone with only a few years.
PPP becomes meaningless when you try to buy international standard products or services which are almost always priced in USD, irrespective of purchasing parity.
This also holds true for products and services which are needed for professional skill development and their upkeep. The massive disparity between some countries’ PPP and nominal revenue/income is foolishly portrayed by some economists as a good thing, but at an individual level it’s a huge disadvantage.
Where it is relevant is groceries, fully local services and products.
I seriously dislike PPP calculations for salary numbers. I feel like it disingenuously masks the real event that’s happening - employers arbitraging history and geopolitics to get labour at a suppressed cost.
PPP is one thing. You also don't have to worry about healthcare or tuition costs for your kids or (depending on country) pension. 60K is absolutely plenty of money if you don't have to worry about all of this.
Isn't TSMC's operating margin something obscene? Like ~40%. They could afford better comps. People mentioning PPPs and local standard.. that's all bs if your workforce can and will move globally with ease. Tell them their comps are good for Taiwan while they're packing.
But on the other hand going too far beyond local levels can put a lot of pressure on your hiring process. You might end up with a workforce consisting mostly of experts in appearing very hireable and little else.
$50k~$60k USD is relatively high compare to local living expensives, and average wages. By US standard, or rather Silicon Valley standard, most jobs in most places have extremely low wages. That's not how it works. The currency conversion only works when you go purchase imported goods or export stuff. Use it to compare living standard is only useful when both countries relied heavily on imported goods for essential need, which is not true.
I mean, in the US in 2017 after condensed matter Physics PhD where I did nanofab I could go work for intel/asml/lam and get like 110-140k starting. Or I could do data science/more SWE related and get 140-250k. The choice wasn't very hard. The lowest software job paid as much as the highest hardware job despite me being a specialist in the nanofab/hardware. Also, the opportunities for growth/future earnings/work life balance/etc are all better with software related jobs.
China considers Taiwan a province of its own. People from Taiwan legally can work in China with about as much effort as someone can move from Kansas to California for work. As with Silicon Valley, you’ll find people tend to move where there are bigger salaries.
This is good for silicon engineers and tech industry in general. This will make the entire sector more competitive. Unfortunately HN can't see that and would rather have silicon engineers be paid lower wages than to have them go to China.
When workers fall for nationalistic rhetoric in the media it's the workers that suffer.
I strongly doubt anyone will ever catch up with TSMC or Samsung at this point. Intel might still have a chance, but it seems to be waning.
Semiconductor manufacturing is very unique in that it is easily the hardest thing we do right now. Even if China snipes all the talent, tools, and process designs, they still need mountains of precise parameters that are unique to the specific installation of each tool at the specific site. Tuning these parameters relative to the process technology can take years and requires the kind of long term, open collaboration & innovation sessions that the CCP seems fundamentally incompatible with.
There are simply so many reasons this type of thing is virtually impossible to steal. If you were to ever physically tour a fully-automated semiconductor factory & experience the depth of the system engineering required to tie everything together, you would realize there is nothing as complex as that system anywhere else in the discipline of engineering.
We are not talking about stealing here. They are hiring senior people with the know-how, both engineers and executives, by offering them huge compensation packages. They are hiring from both Taiwan and South Korea btw.
Huawei does the same in mobile. Their know-how comes from hiring good people. They have R&D centers outside China where they employ people they hired from Qualcomm, Nokia, Ericsson and others to design their new 5G SoC and mobile technologies.
> They have R&D centers outside China where they employ people they hired from Qualcomm, Nokia, Ericsson and others to design their new 5G SoC and mobile technologies.
Then it is time to kick Huawei out. Dissolve or nationalize their local entities, ban banks from dealing with their money.
China does not allow foreign companies to operate in China, so why should Western countries do the same? It's either a level field for all - or no field at all. The Western world has appeased China for too long in the hope China would democratize itself. This has evidently failed, it's time to pull the plug.
1. That's a bold assertion you make about the CCP. I don't like them, but they have proven quite resourceful.
2. You say this as someone knowledgeable with other high tech industries? Here in IT we tend to pat ourselves on the back quite a bit, how do you know you're not falling into the same trap?
when it involves oppressing people...truly generative processes? nah...it gets done when they start utilizing markets but otherwise it's fundamentally doomed
Of course they will catch up. It's impossible to maintain a lead forever in a field that is slowing down as a whole. It will take some time, but they will definitely get there at some point. There is no magic sauce that makes TSMC or Samsung better at this than China can ever be. So better plan for that.
Also, China gets things done incredibly quickly when state motivation aligns with technology. See: three gorges dam, national fiber optic network, mobile coverage, HK-Zhuhai-Macau bridge, 100% contactless mobile payment and instant messaging penetration, high speed trains, electric vehicles, etc. All of these examples are from the last 20 years.
"I strongly doubt anyone will ever catch up with TSMC or Samsung at this point."
What timeline are we talking about here? 1 year? 5 years? Forever?
Yes, of course people will "Catch up" to Samsung and TSMC, both of which are relatively recent leaders in this field. There are are loads of foundries around the world, all of which have virtually equivalent level of complexity, but it is small (literally small) advances that give one foundry or another a competitive lead. And those small advances are certainly stealable, quite aside from independent orthogonal advances.
They probably don't need to "catch up" in the traditional sense.
By that, I mean that if someone was starting from nothing and trying to make the same stuff and enter the same market as them, then yes, they will have a massive uphill battle and would likely fail without legislative help. If they did something different but in the same space then that's another matter.
Remember, a short while ago it was all about x86 where Intel had the distinct advantage. AMD cut some of that down and is now gaining rapidly on them.
Nowadays it's all about ARM but in 10 years time it may be something else and if you get in early enough and your predictions are correct then who knows...
One thing I am convinced of is that if Microsoft embrace ARM wholeheartedly (I mean port everything across and let x86 go to hell) then Intel (and AMD for that matter) are in trouble.
The goal is not exclusively to conquer the consumer chip industry.
Ability to manufacture strategic chip industry is also very important.
Remember the sanctioned big Chinese facial recognition companies?
They do not really need 5nm chip for their product, I think 14nm can also work (albeit performance penalty).
Also, PLA, if they ever need to manufacture AI chips for whatever reason, they need to manufacture them in mainland for supply chain security.
It depends on how you want to compare them. You could look at it from a funding perspective. The total cost of ITER through 2013-2025 is expected to be 20-65 billion.
Samsung just revealed they are investing 50 billion to build an EUV foundry. This is on top of all the knowledge and assets they already have. It does not include the R&D to get to the point where you can just buy EUV machines, etchers, atomic layer deposition, etc.
> open collaboration & innovation sessions that the CCP seems fundamentally incompatible with.
The Soviet Union had managed to surpass the US in constructing nuclear bombs in a relatively short matter of time (I'd say that by the 1960s they were already in front), even though they were not as "open" and they didn't have as many Nobel laureates working for them as the US had.
That's not accurate [1]. In the 60s and for most of the 70s, the Soviets were far behind in bombs and delivery systems. Many sources say that the US vastly overestimated the size of the Soviet arsenal at that time - and hence was very cautious. Some sources say that the US did have a fairly decent estimate, but they overstated the threat to get more funding.
TSMC’s advantage is an order of magnitude more engineers of high quality handling yield issues, the machines used to make cutting edge transistors is the same.
With China doing this, TSMC’s advantage will decrease.
I don't get where the logical disconnect is happening. Or maybe it's just an industry trend that isn't explicitly addressed.
Comments here say that silicon engineering is one of the most difficult things that you need very specific education for. Yet salaries are flat and/or not very impressive for that education level, in this industry.
That says to me that there's a surplus of people interested in such jobs, or the current job market shrank compared to what used to be required to innovate and operate all these fabs.
And if there is a surplus of labor, it's cheap for anyone, not just China, to siphon off willing talent.
Well, maybe another way to put it is that it's a business where the costs and value are absolutely clear. And it's a pure physics/technology catchup business. So margins get competed very thin.
Versus what you call "scammy" industries, where people attach emotional value, social value, network effects, irrational likes/dislikes -- there's a lot of margin that can be milked out of stuff like that.
The expensive part isn't getting the labor, it's building and operating the facilities - and then the profit margins aren't even that great.
The existing chip manufacturers are sufficient to supply global demand, creating more competition there is pointless from an economic perspective. It only makes sense from a national security perspective.
And from the perspective of the labor, what good are your highly specialized skills on a million dollar machine if you don't have a million dollar machine? Your only choice is to work for the few companies that own one and take whatever pay they offer you to try and make up for the decade+ of lost income from grad school.
It’s probably been undervalued for a long time. Not just fabs , hardware comp used to on par or higher than SW many years ago. Now it’s fallen behind on average. But eventually shock (eg trade embargo) will cause a correction
Honestly that would mean there's ample room for competition considering what's happening especially with Intel, Nvidia, and AMD. Though I imagine the barrier to entry is high.
Ultimately I think this will be a good thing, so long as TSMC doesn't lose so much talent that it can't remain competitive. We've just seen a wave of consolidation in the fab industry. New players means more competition, and that's good for market competitiveness.
The article isn't clear about this, but when they say "China hires" are they getting hired in Taiwan or moving to mainland China? What kind of package makes it appealing to cross the Strait?
> What kind of package makes it appealing to cross the Strait?
In software and consumer electronics, it's been a while that salaries in mainland China are a lot more competitive than in Taiwan. My friends from Asus, HTC, BenQ... are now making 3x their previous income at companies like Huawei, Oppo, OnePlus, Microsoft, Apple.
It's probably a bit harder to lure people from the industry's current best, but in my experience there's always plenty enough of mid-level managers and senior engineers who think they could do better if they were given more ownership. And here there's almost no language or cultural barrier.
In a free market economy wouldn't this lead to salaries rising in Taiwan as well?
Granted that Taiwan has less domestic consumption potential, but for export its companies have done well and Taiwan is more developed as well. It should be able to compete with salaries across the strait.
If we assume state interference by state funding this out of its pocket, then I guess Taiwan might find hard to compete on its own.
Crossing the Strait is not expensive, and Chinese government is already offering residents of islands near-same treatment as their own citizens few years ago.
Maybe the article was changed out but it at least partly answers your questions:
> TSMC was uncomfortable when QXIC began operating a research and development base not far from the Taiwanese company's most advanced 5-nanometer plant in south Taiwan, one of the people familiar with the matter told Nikkei.
> "Hongxin offered some amazing packages, as high as two to 2.5 times TSMC's total annual salary and bonuses for those people," said a source familiar with the matter.
I found quite interesting that QXIC could just open an R&D centre in Taiwan in order to poach talent.
But then, Taiwan is heavily invested on the mainland as well and, I suppose, cannot afford to face a backlash if it banned mainland companies.
Cross-straight relations are complex.
Edit: This reminds me of the many period dramas on Chinese TV: plenty of spies, double agents, etc. on both sides (and often on 3 sides, because of the Japanese)
Mainland China isn't a bad place to live if you have a good income and an "untouchable" status with regards to the government. That's how most western foreigners lived in China up until about 2012 when things changed somewhat.
> "Hongxin offered some amazing packages, as high as two to 2.5 times TSMC's total annual salary and bonuses for those people," said a source familiar with the matter.
> TSMC was uncomfortable when QXIC began operating a research and development base not far from the Taiwanese company's most advanced 5-nanometer plant in south Taiwan, one of the people familiar with the matter told Nikkei.
A couple weeks ago: integrated circuit major upgrades to first-level discipline in China. Previously IC studies was organized under different disciplines and funding was not streamlined.
There's going to be an oversupply of Chinese IC talent in 5-10 years, Taiwanese talent can see the writing on the wall. 100 TSMC engineers + 3000 chip engineers from Taiwan over last decade (10% of their industry?) is <1% of need, but provides valuable skill. There's still 90% left to poach, I wonder if US new IC fund will compete, whether there's language barriers that prevents Taiwanese engineers from moving to Arizona, and how Taiwan would feel about that.
SMIC head recently said the roadblock was talent not hardware or sanctions, implying obstacles like ASML EUV is surmountable. I'm not expert enough to judge, but China is graduating an Taiwan's worth of semi specialists every 15 months while poaching whoever they can, stealing whatever they can to catch up. The various anecdotes / sentiment from industry experts do not seem super doom and gloom. There's get tons of frank appraisals from Chinese analysts about how _massive_ the military gap between Chinese and US is in specific domains, but so far Chinese semi success seems to be like forgone conclusion. Kind of like ballpoint pen situation, which ppl misconstrue as lol China only learned to make ball point pen recently, when really it was Premier LiKeqiang politicized importance of precision manufacturing for national security, and 2 years later Chinese industry figured out how work with tungsten carbide for advanced munitions. But here's a cute ballpoint pen article to distract laowais.
> The two projects are aiming to develop 14-nanometer and 12-nanometer chip process technologies, which are two to three generations behind TSMC but still the most cutting-edge in China.
I think it's less about overtaking TSMC and more about hedging for a situation where China is completely cut off from chip imports. RIP if have to put out new phones and computers which are worse than the previous year's.
The specific process node isn't important. Once they figure out how to do EUV and other manufacturing techniques that limit their domestic industry's advancement, China will be able to compete at the smaller process nodes too.
Western governments can stop ASML from shipping an EUV machine to a Chinese customer, but they can't stop China from developing their own technology.
Don't forget 12 nm is still the best Intel can fab, it might not be world class currently but it's certainly very capable. Imo it's very threatening, especially if they also keep grabbing talent like they seem to be capable of doing.
SMIC is already manufacturing 14nm. The goal is to vertically integrate the entirety of the process, and thus gain independence as well as a future advantage.
Smaller means, smaller package, more transistors/sq and less power-consumption. But if you can afford to build a bigger chip to have the same transistor count, and you are ok with the higher power-consumption you have in theory the same performance, sometimes you don't even want 'too' small transistors, an example is radiation-hardening.
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This is one of the key reasons you need to give the right incentives and compensations to your employees. I have seen too many tech companies failing at employee retention.
The loss of talent will have a medium-long term impact on the company. And, many of their future competitors are going to be created by your current unhappy employees.
I have seen an increasing trend in tech-companies to be more employee-friendly beyond eye-candy perks. But, there is still a long path to walk.
(Disclaimer - I speak from a neutral standpoint, I'm not a politics person.)
It's not so black and white. There's also nationality at play. Chinese employees can be very nationalistic in times of war, especially, if they live in and around ASEAN. The moment something bad happens (to China), they will view it as China being the victim and do things others wouldn't normally do.
Case in point: Remember the Huawei ban? A lot of my ex-colleagues and friends (who are Chinese) dumped their iPhones at ridiculously low prices and exchanged it for a Huawei to show support for China (despite being outside of China). I saw this with my own eyes and I was blown away. I mean, convincing an Apple user to switch to Android is a billion dollar problem that Google is trying to solve for years now and just like a snap of a finger, nationality is reason enough for them to make the switch, irrespective of their personal consequences (switching clouds, etc).
Likewise, incentives alone isn't enough, there's not much you can do if the employees view this as a nationalistic issue.
The value prop of the iPhone just isn't there anymore if you are not stuck in the ecosystem.
You are TSMC and have 50k employees, of which say 5,000 are experienced engineers, the top 10%. A competitor wants to hire away 100 of them and offers them an enhanced salary. They only need to offer that to 100 people, but to stop them getting any of those 5000 employees you have to offer a competitive package to all of them. Any you don’t offer it to are vulnerable to getting hired away. So for every $1m they are willing to spend on enhanced packages, you need to spend $50m in enhanced salaries to block them. If they decide to cut it down to hiring away only 50 engineers, now for every $1m they spend you need to spend $100m.
As head of resourcing at TSMC, at what point do you stop the defensive salary inflation? Bear in mind your not competing with the financial resources of just another chip company, you’re competing with the financial resources of the Chinese state.
I don't think this is true as (I think) you're assuming that all 5000 employees are equally skilled and desired. More realistically, the poaching company wants the more senior/experienced so TSMC only has to watch out for these. Still not an insignificant number nor amount of money.
Long-term, the solution is probably for companies to focus more on building their culture and focusing on the non-financial perks (e.g. ala Google) so employees will think twice about leaving.
But you have the resources of the other Chinese state (Taiwan) at your disposal because, TSMC and the Taiwanese semi industry work hand-in-hand with the government as well.
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Unfortunately, there are other factors that you need to maintain that keep employees around and we have lost a few people that really hurt the overall skill level of the team which had nothing to do with compensation.
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But then there is Samsung, which has its foundry business partly funded by NAND and DRAM. i.e TSMC cant exactly dedicate the price as much as everyone think they could.
A physics, or engineering PhD. is a minimum to be allowed anywhere near actual work on the process, and those guys only get $50k-$60k a year in Taiwan after 5+ years.
A regular "technician," or a PhD interns can get as little as $2000 a month.
Of course, the few real know how holders are kept loyal at just any cost, and I heard rumours of 7 digit incomes for those few. This is by far the biggest "carrot" that keeps luring people into RnD work in Semi.
The rumors I heard from disgruntled relatives and postdocs I met in nanofab class prevented me from going down that path despite the strong allure and good match to my interests and skills.
My current job is nowhere near as interesting, but it pays me with actual money, and though that decision felt overwhelmingly cynical when I initially jumped ship, a quick survey of the others in my cohort who didn't jump ship leaves me with few regrets. They work a multiple harder than I do, on things a large multiple more important than I do, and they get paid a fraction what I do.
As a reward for taking the high road, they are likely to lose their jobs as the United States continues shipping semiconductor manufacturing and engineering abroad.
Software outside Web dev is somewhat similar too. You don't get paid that much.
> Of course, the few real know how holders are kept loyal at just any cost, and I heard rumours of 7 digit incomes for those few.
That's pretty true across any industry. These nominal-to-PPP adjusted salaries are roughly in line re: base compensation for what I would expect a good tech job outside the bay area to pay. If you got a job at the upcoming TSMC fab in the US, $140K would be about right.
Converting using exchange rate isn't the right way of comparing compensation as you're not trying to buy something in the US with your Taiwanese compensation. You're trying to determine a compensation figure in the US that gets you as much in the US as the Taiwanese salary gets you in Taiwan. This is when you use PPP.
On the other hand, anyone with enough experience in any of those fields can go off as a consultant and make absolute bank - mid to upper six figures relatively easily. The utility of experience grows superlinearly because the risks and capital involved in each project are so large. Someone with 20 years experience who has seen 5+ successful projects is easily worth 5 to 10x someone with only a few years.
This also holds true for products and services which are needed for professional skill development and their upkeep. The massive disparity between some countries’ PPP and nominal revenue/income is foolishly portrayed by some economists as a good thing, but at an individual level it’s a huge disadvantage.
Where it is relevant is groceries, fully local services and products.
Given that you need to go to school for ten years, and work like a dog, 50-60K is not a great wage for that environment.
https://english.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=2403#:~:....
Looks like the local wage is very low in general, 90% percentile is 37,114.60 or 1.09 million in Taiwan Dolloar.
So it seems 50-60$ USD is quite high-end after 5 years with a PhD.
China considers Taiwan a province of its own. People from Taiwan legally can work in China with about as much effort as someone can move from Kansas to California for work. As with Silicon Valley, you’ll find people tend to move where there are bigger salaries.
(not my personal view)When workers fall for nationalistic rhetoric in the media it's the workers that suffer.
Semiconductor manufacturing is very unique in that it is easily the hardest thing we do right now. Even if China snipes all the talent, tools, and process designs, they still need mountains of precise parameters that are unique to the specific installation of each tool at the specific site. Tuning these parameters relative to the process technology can take years and requires the kind of long term, open collaboration & innovation sessions that the CCP seems fundamentally incompatible with.
There are simply so many reasons this type of thing is virtually impossible to steal. If you were to ever physically tour a fully-automated semiconductor factory & experience the depth of the system engineering required to tie everything together, you would realize there is nothing as complex as that system anywhere else in the discipline of engineering.
Huawei does the same in mobile. Their know-how comes from hiring good people. They have R&D centers outside China where they employ people they hired from Qualcomm, Nokia, Ericsson and others to design their new 5G SoC and mobile technologies.
Then it is time to kick Huawei out. Dissolve or nationalize their local entities, ban banks from dealing with their money.
China does not allow foreign companies to operate in China, so why should Western countries do the same? It's either a level field for all - or no field at all. The Western world has appeased China for too long in the hope China would democratize itself. This has evidently failed, it's time to pull the plug.
2. You say this as someone knowledgeable with other high tech industries? Here in IT we tend to pat ourselves on the back quite a bit, how do you know you're not falling into the same trap?
when it involves oppressing people...truly generative processes? nah...it gets done when they start utilizing markets but otherwise it's fundamentally doomed
Where there are resources problems will get solved.
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What timeline are we talking about here? 1 year? 5 years? Forever?
Yes, of course people will "Catch up" to Samsung and TSMC, both of which are relatively recent leaders in this field. There are are loads of foundries around the world, all of which have virtually equivalent level of complexity, but it is small (literally small) advances that give one foundry or another a competitive lead. And those small advances are certainly stealable, quite aside from independent orthogonal advances.
By that, I mean that if someone was starting from nothing and trying to make the same stuff and enter the same market as them, then yes, they will have a massive uphill battle and would likely fail without legislative help. If they did something different but in the same space then that's another matter.
Remember, a short while ago it was all about x86 where Intel had the distinct advantage. AMD cut some of that down and is now gaining rapidly on them.
Nowadays it's all about ARM but in 10 years time it may be something else and if you get in early enough and your predictions are correct then who knows...
One thing I am convinced of is that if Microsoft embrace ARM wholeheartedly (I mean port everything across and let x86 go to hell) then Intel (and AMD for that matter) are in trouble.
Ability to manufacture strategic chip industry is also very important.
Remember the sanctioned big Chinese facial recognition companies? They do not really need 5nm chip for their product, I think 14nm can also work (albeit performance penalty).
Also, PLA, if they ever need to manufacture AI chips for whatever reason, they need to manufacture them in mainland for supply chain security.
I've heard people say the same about the ITER reactor being assembled.
Samsung just revealed they are investing 50 billion to build an EUV foundry. This is on top of all the knowledge and assets they already have. It does not include the R&D to get to the point where you can just buy EUV machines, etchers, atomic layer deposition, etc.
The Soviet Union had managed to surpass the US in constructing nuclear bombs in a relatively short matter of time (I'd say that by the 1960s they were already in front), even though they were not as "open" and they didn't have as many Nobel laureates working for them as the US had.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_nuclear_weapons_s...
Anybody can fall behind if they get complacent or have some bad luck.
How can a CPU, with physics that are more complex than most can even barely grasp, cost 1/3 of what an Embody retails for?
With China doing this, TSMC’s advantage will decrease.
I always see this but it just seems like such a reach - Nazi Germany didn't seem to do too badly on the innovation front, did it?
Comments here say that silicon engineering is one of the most difficult things that you need very specific education for. Yet salaries are flat and/or not very impressive for that education level, in this industry.
That says to me that there's a surplus of people interested in such jobs, or the current job market shrank compared to what used to be required to innovate and operate all these fabs.
And if there is a surplus of labor, it's cheap for anyone, not just China, to siphon off willing talent.
Or am I missing something?
In the US there is a "scam premium". The scammier a business, the higher the multiple.
Fabbing is decidedly unscammy. So according to the theory of scam premiums, everything associated with fabbing should trade at a discount.
Versus what you call "scammy" industries, where people attach emotional value, social value, network effects, irrational likes/dislikes -- there's a lot of margin that can be milked out of stuff like that.
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The existing chip manufacturers are sufficient to supply global demand, creating more competition there is pointless from an economic perspective. It only makes sense from a national security perspective.
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In software and consumer electronics, it's been a while that salaries in mainland China are a lot more competitive than in Taiwan. My friends from Asus, HTC, BenQ... are now making 3x their previous income at companies like Huawei, Oppo, OnePlus, Microsoft, Apple.
It's probably a bit harder to lure people from the industry's current best, but in my experience there's always plenty enough of mid-level managers and senior engineers who think they could do better if they were given more ownership. And here there's almost no language or cultural barrier.
Granted that Taiwan has less domestic consumption potential, but for export its companies have done well and Taiwan is more developed as well. It should be able to compete with salaries across the strait.
If we assume state interference by state funding this out of its pocket, then I guess Taiwan might find hard to compete on its own.
> TSMC was uncomfortable when QXIC began operating a research and development base not far from the Taiwanese company's most advanced 5-nanometer plant in south Taiwan, one of the people familiar with the matter told Nikkei.
> "Hongxin offered some amazing packages, as high as two to 2.5 times TSMC's total annual salary and bonuses for those people," said a source familiar with the matter.
But then, Taiwan is heavily invested on the mainland as well and, I suppose, cannot afford to face a backlash if it banned mainland companies.
Cross-straight relations are complex.
Edit: This reminds me of the many period dramas on Chinese TV: plenty of spies, double agents, etc. on both sides (and often on 3 sides, because of the Japanese)
Chinese IC talent whitepaper from a couple years ago: http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1116108.shtml
Domestic talent 2018
Need: 720k
Has: 400k
Gap: 320k
IC graduates per year: 30k
Current gap: 260k
A couple weeks ago: integrated circuit major upgrades to first-level discipline in China. Previously IC studies was organized under different disciplines and funding was not streamlined.
There's going to be an oversupply of Chinese IC talent in 5-10 years, Taiwanese talent can see the writing on the wall. 100 TSMC engineers + 3000 chip engineers from Taiwan over last decade (10% of their industry?) is <1% of need, but provides valuable skill. There's still 90% left to poach, I wonder if US new IC fund will compete, whether there's language barriers that prevents Taiwanese engineers from moving to Arizona, and how Taiwan would feel about that.
Doesn't seem much of a threat to TSMC.
That's where you are wrong, TSMC is just the producer, but many many more Company are behind it like:
https://www.asml.com/en (Probably the most important Corp in the industry...but no one knows)
http://www.appliedmaterials.com/
https://www.comet-group.com/
And many more, without those chains TSMC could do just nothing.
EDIT: Oh man i forgot Lam Research!!
And the US 'forbid' asml to sell the technology to china, that means quite allot:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-asml-holding-usa-china-in...
interesting, i wanted to invest in some chip companies and this gives some good startin gpoints to investigate
Western governments can stop ASML from shipping an EUV machine to a Chinese customer, but they can't stop China from developing their own technology.
It really Depends:
Smaller means, smaller package, more transistors/sq and less power-consumption. But if you can afford to build a bigger chip to have the same transistor count, and you are ok with the higher power-consumption you have in theory the same performance, sometimes you don't even want 'too' small transistors, an example is radiation-hardening.
Now. It's still brain drain, and it's to boost their industry. Measures such as this do not exist in a vacuum, more will come.