The world’s largest chipmaker promised to create thousands of US jobs. There are growing tensions over whether US workers have the skills or work ethic to do them.::Jobs at the TSMC semiconductor factory in Arizona could require long hours and total obedience. Americans may push back on the company’s culture.
“If an engineer [in Taiwan] gets a call when he is asleep, he will wake up and start dressing,” he said. “His wife will ask: ‘What’s the matter?’ He would say: ‘I need to go to the factory.’ The wife will go back to sleep without saying another word. This is the work culture.”
Fuck that shit, that’s not work culture, that’s exploitation.
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Yeah and TSMC complains about US workers but at the same time keeps opening new plants there. It’s pretty obvious what it’s like to work for TSMC.
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Not much IT work without semiconductors, which is what Taiwan is known for producing en masse. A lot of these decisions to open new factories elsewhere are because of China’s constant threats to invade Taiwan.
You know the US government is paying TSMC hundreds of millions of dollars to open plants in the US, right?
They want to bring their own workers over so they can do exactly that.
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What the fuck needs to get done by a chop engineer on short notice at midnight anyway
Or are they just calling line workers engineers to avoid paying overtime
When I worked in electronics manufacturing, production engineers were frequently out on the floor. Common issues were:
- a machine was placing a part incorrectly
- assembly workers couldn’t understand blueprints
- materials were getting damaged in a process that shouldn’t have been a problem
- a custom design tool/rig was not acting like it was supposed to
- there’s something clearly wrong with a process (like it was designed for one person and not an assembly line)
If anything major (or potentially major) came up, production completely stopped until the problem could be assessed by an engineer. Assembly workers weren’t allowed to fix things and they couldn’t estimate the cost of continuing to run a job with defects. Our engineers didn’t work 2nd/3rd shift though, so every time a job had issues we’d have to drop it and leave it for first shift. A downed line for 8+ hours is a LOT of money and for a bigger company would warrant calling someone in.
(I think the bigger issue is not “work ethics” like the article said or “need” like you said, but that the US has rules and pay requirements for on call employees)
Call me an engineer and you need to pay me a lot more though so that doesn’t really make sense.
That depends on pay and other obligations.
What? Tech companies the world over have people on 24/7 on-call rotas, and it’s usually voluntary.
Depending on the company, you might typically do 1 week in 4 on-call, get a nice little retainer bonus for having to have not much of a social life for 1 week in 4, and then get an additional payment for each call you take, plus time worked at x1.5 or x2 the usual rate, plus time off in lieu during the normal workday if the call out takes a long time. If you do on-call for tech and the conditions are worse than this, then your company’s on-call policies suck.
I used to do it regularly. Over the years, it paid for the deposit on my first house, plus some nice trips abroad. I enjoyed it - I get a buzz out of being in the middle of a crisis and fixing it. But eventually my family got bored of it, and I got more senior jobs where it wasn’t considered a good use of my energies.
Your internet connection, the websites and apps you use, your utilities - they don’t fix themselves when they break at 0300.
If TSMC’s approach to on-call is bad, then yeah, screw that. I don’t see anything in the article that says that one way or the other. But doing an on-call rota at all is a perfectly normal thing to do in tech.
Yeah, but tech workers get paid six figures and TSMC doesn’t want to pay the workers. This issue isn’t that Americans lack the skills. The issue is that TMSC doesn’t want to pay for skilled American labor. In Taiwan they don’t have to. This whole situation is why Thomas Friedman’s theory on globalization was wrong.
The article mentioned employees being discouraged from claiming overtime, so I do wonder how they handle on call.
A SaaS startup I used to work for tried to implement on-call rotations for their salaried engineers. No additional compensation was offered for the time you were on-call, and if you did get called, the policy was going to be essentially “take the next day off” - when we already had unlimited PTO. I was not happy, and made it known at the time. My manager mentioned that, being in a senior role, I might have the opportunity to excuse myself from the rotations. Ew.
The effort didn’t end up going anywhere, but that’s been my sole experience so far with on-call efforts in software engineering.
Our company is like that, but you’re not going to get a call every night. Each person in our (small) support group does a rotation of standby one week every two months. During that week you need to be available after hours and have your cell phone on. The upside is that we get time off for working after hours and we get extra days off just for being on standby which more than compensates, plus we get good overtime pay.
We have this as well. One year into it and I have never been called in. The network engineers have been several times, but the pay is compensation for the inconvenience.
Honey, I’m waiting you tonight.
Sorry, I’m busy.
I made something special…
No, I can’t.
Please, just say you cheat on me. I beg.
Sorry, sug. It’s just work. Again.
What a moodbreaker. Fifth time in a row. Fuck your boss.
Actually, he promoted me and said you can move in with me there.
Where?
Our quarters within the facility. We can have our time on my breaks. They can even hire you too! They’ve even built a kindergarten there, so we are full served as a young family.
Divorce. Now.
I have no problem with that, as long as you pay for what is worth.
I know engineers who had work where their had to be on call like that. However they were doing rotation and they were being compensate for all the time they had to be on call.
From what I remember they were getting 0.3 days of paid holidays for each 12h they were being on call. This was on top of their 5 weeks+ of paid holidays (France).
I think the issue is not the work ethic of the employees, but the ethics of the employer in this case.
Edit: I forgot to say but if course if they are actually called then they get paid for the hours they spend at the factory on top of the compensation.
I work in the US and I’m on call 24 hours a day basically doing IT work it’s not that crazy
If you’re on-call 24/7/365 without a break, and it’s not because you have equity in the company, then find a new job.
If you don’t, then your health (physical and mental) will eventually force you to leave anyway. I did it at a startup where I was employee #1 (no equity for me), just me and the founders, and I nearly had a nervous breakdown from it, and ended up quitting from stress. Afterwards I decided I would do no more than 1 week in 3, and life got better after that.
Unless you let yourself get fucked over, you’re not on call 24/7/365 and for the time you are on call, you should get some sort of compensation.
They want to pay you shitty for 8 hours and than let you work 12-14 plus being on call for the rest of the day.
Here in Italy “being on call” is a contract clause, it’s often a rotation roster between multiple similar employees, and requires extra compensation
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Shitty framing.
They don’t want to pay for the luxury of being able to have an engineer on call 24/7 by paying 3 people to cover a full 24-hr spread of time.
They want to pay one guy a shit salary without overtime and be able to work them 24/7/365.
Work ethic? Fuck you and your “work ethic.” I do my job and I do it well because it pays me to do it and if I don’t do it well, they could replace me. Why do I need a “work ethic?”
They want US workers to be cheap labor without sacrificing quality. It’s impossible to do that so they’re blaming the workers for being bad instead of blaming the companies for not paying workers well enough.
I recently moved some of our team’s headcount from the US to cheaper countries (Balkan). Given how expensive the US is, it made no sense to hire there. You can’t argue against math.
Plus, there are great ecosystems growing in these low cost countries.
So many ignorant comments in this thread. First of all, Taiwan isn’t some poor, developing nation, they’re extremely modernized and highly educated. They literally rank among the highest education rates and scores in the world: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Taiwan
For comparison of a basic education stat, the US has around a 79% literacy rate among adults while Taiwan has around 98%.
Second of all, TSMC workers in Taiwan make decent money on average:
https://focustaiwan.tw/business/202307010011
And for their US operations it will be above average as well:
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/TSMC-Salaries-E4130.htm
https://www.salary.com/research/company/tsmc-salary
Now, I do agree that their work culture appears to be toxic. However, how many companies in the US are just as demanding and brutal? While Americans are stereotyped as lazy, we’re actually the exact opposite when you look at our average productivity and workloads.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/175286/hour-workweek-actually-longer-seven-hours.aspx
https://clockify.me/working-hours
https://www.bls.gov/productivity/
Compared to some Eastern countries, we’re definitely working less, but not necessarily producing less, as it’s pretty much proven that longer hours results in a sharp drop off in productivity.
Anyway, just food for thought.
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“You aren’t sweat-shoppy enough to host one of OUR sweat shops.”
Haha okay, xinny.
This exploitative just creates burned out engineers. It’s a reason total productivity has seen increasing with reduced work weeks. Well rested and happy people are vastly more efficient.
Ah yes, the skill to work 100 hours a week and be on call 24/7 and expect things like breaks. They should ask Amazon where they hire because that’s much of the same!
It’s never been about US workers having the skills. It’s always been that we expect to be compensated for our labor. Paying real wages looks bad for their bottom line so they export the work and import the product at a fraction of the cost.
That’s why manufacturering was sent over there in the first place, to exploit a labor market that works harder for less.
We are not lazy, we just know we are getting fucked and are not too afraid to speak up about it.
That doesn’t sound like jobs. It sounds like indenture.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It’s why the company, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., wants to get the US government to approve visas for up to 500 additional Taiwanese workers — a development that an Arizona labor union is trying to stop.
Differences in work culture between the US and Taiwan — where employees say extended shifts and worker obedience are expected — could bring challenges to not only the construction of the factory but also its operations after opening.
On July 24, a Taiwanese YouTube channel with nearly 3 million subscribers posted a video accusing the Arizona workers of being lazy and using their phones too much on the job, a bilingual newsletter on tech, business, and US-Asia relations reported.
But Focus Taiwan reported in June that when he was asked about US workers’ concerns about the company’s culture, Mark Liu, TSMC’s chair, said: “Those who are unwilling to take shifts should not enter semiconductor manufacturing.”
Liu also said that TSMC’s US workers would not be expected to adopt the same work culture as those in Taiwan — and that he’d be open to changes as long as the company’s core values were upheld.
“The TSMC Arizona fab is now in a critical phase of handling and installing all of the most advanced and dedicated equipment in a sophisticated facility,” the company told Insider, citing the deployment of giant and complex tools.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Why would anyone know how to make chips, if we don’t make chips. Who’s going to teach them to make chips, the chip fairy?
Mr. Pringles
Shit, I’m qualified for this?
Hilariously, Pringles are not technically “chips” and can’t be called that legally.
How about crisps?
If this story interests you, and you haven’t read Chip War, definitely read Chip War.
Thanks for the recommendation! Getting it now!
“Work ethic” is just HR speech for “cheap and easily exploitable”
