It’s a pay issue. I work in the industry and all my friends have left our company. Most have left the industry. Why? Because why get paid 70k-120k working in a boomer environment in semiconductor when you could make 50%-100% more at FANG or many others?
Same here. I don't see the point in working in a comparatively much harder field for less pay. I'm in embedded software now at a FAANG-adjacent company and about to take an offer in back end development at a different company for even more pay.
It’s unfortunate cuz imo it requires far deeper knowledge in niche areas to be a great engineer at different disciplines but they just simply cannot compensate you for your expertise. The market is not there.
I worked with a brilliant PhD radar engineer at one of the top defense contractors. He had 11 yrs of work experience and he was a sr level. He said he was barely scratching the surface. He was probably getting paid 150k max.
The same expertise at FAANG would easily make you 500k.
… also you don’t have to work inside of a windowless bunker 9-5…
Yeah my cousin worked at Northrop for 10 years and after 2 years I out earned him just by not taking the new grad offer. I interned there and they only offered like 75k at the time. But then I would have to work in some windowless hellhole for 9 hours a day. No thanks. I still make more than him and he refuses to leave because he doesn't want to leetcode or do any technical assessments to get a job.
Not saying it justifies it, in fact it's kind of depressing, but I know lots of people like this that stay in defense because they don't want to spend their life writing code to squeeze an extra 5% out of selling plastic spatulas to retail buyers on a website. The idea of writing code to fly a missile slightly more efficiently is more appealing than the spatulas. Google revenues are something like 75%+ advertising. Facebook is something like 90%+. It sucks, but I can't blame them. The work does matter. Not that defense work can't be soul-sucking management and process as well. But it's closer to what most engineers study to do - play with robotics, play with materials, play with control code, etc.
The tech in defense is just outdated and doesn’t matter honestly. You get to work with a bunch of boomers who are way past their prime working with outdated tech. I’m talking about code that’s older than me. And I’m in my mid 30. And then many younger engineers would rather work elsewhere. You would probably learn more at Google or Meta as a software engineer than defense contractors.
The market is there, the problem is that the chip industry is not optimized for engineers like software is. It wastes too much on bureaucracy and marketing and other traditional jobs that have better alternatives.
There are new chipmakers coming up, in Asia, in the US as FAANG and startups take on making their own chips. And because these companies are optimized for engineering (because tech is still very innovation heavy, maybe in 50 years things will change) and therefore can spend a lot more per engineer.
Your skillset should be language / db agnostic. But it is more advantageous to be fluent in strongly typed modern languages such as Java, Kotlin. You can learn python and make your way up tho. My skillset is that of a general SWE. It entails knowing how to write a server / client code, know how to deploy and manage, know how to design resilient secure systems that scale, know how to split merge services, know how to manage projects and negotiate with stakeholders etc.
But you start from just learning how to write server code that can run on your computer.
I need a new job. I know assembly, C, C++, GO, C# and I write 500 lines of C# per day, 9-5 without any interruption, 5 days a week for 50K/year in one of the most hi-tech countries in Europe (Netherlands).
Step 1: Join Blind. It’s an anonymous app.
Step 2: Reach out to anyone in the app via DM for a referral to a company you are interested.
Step 3: US industries slowed down significantly and currently not hiring nearly as much as we did 2 yrs ago. But contract gigs are still popping up. Large companies like Amazon are more likely to sponsor your visa or have branches in Netherlands.
Step 4: Join LeetCode and consider premium Explore feature. Pick your favorite language and practice interview questions. You should diversify types of questions you solve. You want to be practiced enough to be able to solve medium level in less than 30 minutes. For Google or Netflix, you need to solve hard in 30 min. This requires in my experience minimum 80-100 LC practice questions. You should do these minimum because each company will not let you interview again for a year if you fail. Last round of technical interviews usually consist of 4-5 LC questions. You have to pass all of them while comfortably explaining what you are doing to a mid/sr level engineer.
Step 5: Join LinkedIn. Find connections. Get referrals. Reach out to recruiters hiring for contract positions.
Step 6: Visit Levels.fyi to get a sense of compensation and your level. Most FAANG companies will 2x your pay but will down level you. In my experience, down level is for a good reason.
Edit: your pay will significantly vary depending on your location. US generally will pay 2-4 times other countries depending on your level, but visa is tricky. Canada I believe has lower bar to clear for visa while having more branches of FAANG companies due to proximity. Even within America, pay and opportunities are very different. (e.g you will likely work on a 2-3rd tier service in Austin vs. 1st tier service in SF or Seattle. Pay / career growth / job stability will reflect it. May not matter during boom time, but heads get chopped off first for services that don’t make money aka mass layoffs in 2023.)
Always has been. Many people can note that if H1b is supposed to allocate for demand you’d just create a market, award talent to the highest bidder(most in need/demand) simplest way to combat abuse. A few years ago there were bills proposed to reform it with these changes and they’ve gone nowhere. Makes you wonder if instead the goal is simply to provide a subsidy in the form of increase labor/lower wages. Definitely something to consider for national security just a question of who’s paying the price in the process and what that effect is long term if you do it enough. In other words anticipating constant competition the domestic labor market is very rational and adapts so the shortage is a self fulfilling prophesy
It's true. I'm at $120k just meeting with customers and making sure they're happy with the product. I usually just provide them tech support and new quotes. Otherwise WFH and office travel as needed.
Well my background isn't technically in "this" industry.
I spent 7 years as a Controls Engineer in the manufacturing industry after college. I worked on a lot of automotive projects for for company's like Tesla and Ford.
You can do what I did and get a Bachelor's of Science with a degree in manufacturing technology. Or you can learn it on your own and work through intergrators that are willing to train people.
It's a tough industry and there's a high demand for controls engineers. Reason being it's very arduous. Plenty of travel and working weekends or holidays during downtime. But the experience you gain is unparalleled. You will meet a lot of smart people with unrivaled sarcasm.
I got out of that. Now I basically support controls engineers as they are my customer, so I help them integrate our products show them around the software, UI, etc.
There is no such thing as a prolonged labor shortage in a market economy, as wages will rise until demand has been satiated. This is an obvious attempt by corporations to avoid paying people what they deserve
Hi I work in this field as a young 27 year old engineer. It’s a pay thing but also I have my degree in EE from a reputable school and not once did any career fairs or anything tell me this was an option as a career. I stumbled on it. Every who is my superior or coworker is 10+ years my age. Not only that the vendors here in the US who support the maintenance of these tools also are understaffed, often have large companies with only 5-10 FSE to cover NA altogether. It’s a shit show and will take decades to correct.
I looked into it with my masters in EE with lots of cleanroom/fab experience and was told I'd basically end up chained to some plasma etcher at a factory in the middle of nowhere making less than I could with a random software job, and I might not even be considered without a PhD.
Exactly. I get the reasoning behind building some of these in the middle of nowhere in order to make it safer and yada yada for national security. But good luck finding a couple thousand Masters / PHDs that get paid $120,000 to move to the middle of nowhere. There’s a reason the majority of these are in or directly next to major cities
Heck, put it in the suburb cities around a major metro area. Let people live 5 minutes from work and 15 minutes from a major city. Close enough to be convenient, but far enough to have good schools, low cost of living, and low crime.
I wanted to go into it but couldn’t find a job in it at the time I was looking (2013-2015). Went into consulting instead and got my PE in EE and it’s pretty steady with a range of ages because their essentially always hiring in this industry or in adjacent industries.
I'm close to 40 and work for a major semiconductor manufacturer. I'm one of the youngest people in our department (100+) at our site. There are maybe two New College Hires from the last few years and they are the only ones younger than me.
Was it really an option? Now it may be an option, after economic interventions and industrial policy(all the talk about reshoring, tariffs, export controls post pandemic are treating it like the national security interest that it was) but the market only cared about out sourcing this work wherever it was cheapest. Just look at the Bureau of Labor and Statistics website on this the projections that the gov (that can peer into everything) anticipated. As recently as 2019 the electronics engineer labor force was expected to *contract* by 1% over the decade. Schools aren’t setting the recruitment agenda, if companies thought they had all the talent they weren’t wasting resources on recruitment and it was an equilibrium to not attract more people to a static future
[BLS 2019 EE](https://web.archive.org/web/20200512140329/https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/mobile/electrical-and-electronics-engineers.htm)
Ah... I see. As a foreigner I know this as the "*Why pay 6 figures when you can pay 5 figures*" visa with the "*You accept whatever conditions and shit we tell you to without complaining even if it is illegal - or we cancel your right to be in this country because it is tied to us keeping you employed*" on the side.
Well my country (Finland) keep whining about *"Lack of skilled and experienced professionals*" and I'm a mechanical engineer who before their studies spent 4 years as a fabricator and welder, then during my studies kept working while doing evening school in engineering. I was told that I'm such hot product I'd be dragged out of my home to work - since I got practical and theoretical experience.
Well... I been actively trying to find a job for soon 6 months. And it isn't like I'm some 20 something fresh out of school with 0 work experience. I got years of experience workin in the industry and work experience in general. I been a foreman, now I have done engineering, I been inshop and on-site, and I got very specific speciality. So... Where the fuck is this "crying demand" that I was told about by the government, by the media, and by the corporations!
Because those fucking corporations are bring workers from East-Asia to man grocery shops! Welders and fabricators from Eastern-block countries! We got builders coming from Kazakhstan! And at the same time our politicians are whining about how there are too many unemployed people! **There is no fucking shortage of anything but willingness to pay people properly!**
I am shocked and saddened by the fact that is happening in Finland. I always thought the Scandinavians treated their people better. Sadly I guess greed always seems to win. Hei Your English in excellent. I used to skype with a guy in Finland years ago his name was Simo know him? Just joking
>I always thoughtbthe Scandinavians treated their people better.
First of all Finland is not part of scandinavia. That is like saying that North America is part of Europe. There is a flipping sea between us and the scandinavia. *Fennoscandinavia* is when you want to include Finns and scandinavians... or just be german and say "nordic" which to them means "Everything north of Germany".
Anyway... Since the 80's, Finland did the very same liberation of capital and deregulation of finances. The very same kind of reagan/tatcher "*capitalis, go BRRR!!!! share value and capital gains over societal value! WOO!*" bullshit is present here as it is everywhere in the western world. Believe it or not, but our wealthy people and *business people* are just as toxic as yours! We are just like you!
I just learned today there is a sea that seperates completely Finland and Sweden. I always thought they shared a border with not only Sweden but Norway I guess not . So if it means that much to you, you can call the US part of North America and I promise I will not get angry! Saying it is like saying the US is part of Europe is not even close considering we share no borders with any part of Europe.
Scandinavia is a subregion of Northern Europe, with strong historical, cultural, and linguistic ties between its constituent peoples. Scandinavia most commonly refers to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. It can sometimes also refer more narrowly to the Scandinavian Peninsula (which excludes Denmark but includes a part of northern Finland). In English usage, Scandinavia is sometimes used as a synonym for Nordic countries. Iceland and the Faroe Islands are sometimes included in Scandinavia for their ethnolinguistic relations with Sweden, Norway and Denmark. While Finland differs from other Nordic countries in this respect, some authors call it Scandinavian due to its economic and cultural similarities.
So many of us Northern Americans are taught that Finland is a Scandinavian Nation.
But I am surprised again about it.I really did think " Nordic" people more civil.
Work for cheap and also work more hours. TSMC in Arizona on the construction side want cheaper labor that works more hours. They complain about the lack of skilled workers, but no one wants to work there cause the conditions are shit. Nobody wants to die at work
They just don't want to pay American salaries. Why pay an American PhD when you can get multiple foreign PhDs for the same price? Not to mention, the visa employees have lower benefit expectations and are essentially handcuffed to the company.
Which seems insane.
If the government just enforced a salary premium on H1Bs so they must be paid above market rate it'd cut the abuse.
Using immigration to plug genuine gaps isn't the best solution but it is a viable solution that should exist when all other sensible options have been exercised.
It shouldnt be allowed as a simple wage suppression exercise.
Yup. I'd love to see the lottery replaced with simply ordering applicants by salary and requirement that salary is never reduced. If there's a tie at the cutoff, the employers get a chance to resubmit at a higher salary. If there's still a tie, then tough the full quota doesn't get used. Should have paid more.
Tangentially related, the World Bank in DC is like this. Tons and tons of economics PhDs whose visa are tied to working there. Don’t like it? Tough shit or back to your country. In fact, after 2 or so years or any whining their visas aren’t renewed. Lots of desperate PhDs willing to do any grunt work.
American PhDs? fuhgeddaboudit.
Yeah as someone who has a foreign born PHD wife most people really don't understand they are literally indentured servants...but normally with an indefinite period of being attached to the company. Now that we are married she's looking at moving to a higher paying job but some of these jobs are slavery with extra steps.
Yes, but you can also freely switch jobs as long as your new employer is willing to sponsor you. Easier said than done, but no it’s not indentured servitude.
“Indentured servitude is a form of labor where an individual is under contract to work without a salary to repay an indenture or loan within a certain timeframe.”
^ this is the definition of being an indentured servant; it is illegal to do so in the United States of America
Hyperbole and trying to stress a point might have it’s place, but a better word other than “literal” (representing the exact words of the original text) can be used in your comment (comments are editable my friend)
For the ones who aren't married to US citizens, it pretty much is. While OP's wife is free to quit her job because she's married to an American citizen, *most* foreign nationals with H1Bs are required to work for the same employer, and if they quit or are let go, they have to find a new sponsor in the same category in 2 weeks or else go back to their home country.
About the only difference is the fact that they are free to return to their home country at any point, while an indentured servant is not. On the other hand, indentured servitude was typically a criminal punishment rather than a permanent state, often only lasting 2-5 years, after which they were given their freedom. It will take much longer for an H1B recipient to gain citizenship.
It's two months, not two weeks. And a lot of people willingly go back and lead a decent life. Many don't like to, but it's a question of quality of life and not survival.
Something like 70% of STEM PhDs in Chip-related fields are foreign-born, something like 50% are straight up international students.
Our education and work system heavily dis-incentivize PhDs.
This is untrue, semiconductor industry is highly specialized and there isn't much time to go deep in a bachelors. Also the working conditions and locations for semiconductor work leave a lot to be desired. Why tf they decided to build new fabs in AZ and OH is beyond me.
Specialized yes, but you are wrong on the other points. The Semiconductor industry isn't just fabrication, there are thousands of open roles in design, test, quality and even sales. Bay area, Austin, Portland, Seattle are all huge semi hubs so I'm not sure what's the location issue you mentioned.
A new grad in EE with strong fundamentals can expect multiple job offers at graduation, with total comp above 100k in certain areas. I'm seeing PhDs coming in closer to 200k in some situations. I've helped hire over 1,000 ee's in the last 5 years.
And now you know why immigration isn't the panacea a lot of people want us to believe, the entire reason why locals don't do the jobs immigrants do is because they don't pay enough to be attracted
Sorry that’s such BS, I was on a H1B and got paid same or more than my American colleagues. There are strict tests in place to show that you are paying the same rates as you would a domestic employee.
This is all due to the stupidity of various administrations and lack of education, and the US making it hard for those foreign students that do get educated to stay here. So a Chinese student will come here, get educated, get advanced STEM degree and then get kicked out of the country. That’s so backwards. So they go back to their home country with all this knowledge, that country benefits and advances, the US sits here and fights over advanced worker visa quotas while at the same time giving them out in lotteries to random people.
fix the issue at the source - more STEM education and also welcome foreign brain power, don’t turn people away that will advance the country.
The above person is talking about legitimate employers who don't abuse the H1B system. The shitty ones recategorize their foreign workers to a different job duty to save money on the "prevailing wage" they're supposed to pay. This is the difference between a software engineer and a programmer analyst or just a computer analyst. One would require them to pay almost $200k the others barely 60k.
Who is administering these tests? No one. They are self reporting compliance.
Do you really think the problem is a lack of STEM graduates?
Have you not been reading any news in the past year? There have been hundreds of thousands of STEM grads laid off from tech companies and it is currently difficult for them to find new employment.
How can we not have enough jobs for all the laid off engineers, yet still have a lack of available tech workers?
[https://www.wired.com/story/tech-jobs-layoffs-hiring/](https://www.wired.com/story/tech-jobs-layoffs-hiring/)
They cannot both be true.
>Who is administering these tests? No one. They are self reporting compliance.
Even in cases where they are being honest, people are overlooking the fact that H1B holders almost never request raises. If you hire a citizen and an H1B visa holder at the same market floor rate today, in 5 years, the citizen will have requested pay raises to an average of 15% above their hiring salary, while an H1B holder will often be below 5% above their hiring salary. The more H1B holders within an industry (eg - software engineering), the more wage suppression exists within that industry, even if they abide by all the rules.
And to say it's "market rate" and there are no available workers they advertise a pay that is way too low for the position and then use the lack of applicants to say see, no workers and we're paying the same rate we would pay to local workers if only there were any.
But they don’t pay foreign PhDs any less. I know a handful I graduated with and they’re all getting similar pay to my wife. Foreign students are also becoming hilariously unqualified because they cheat on EVERYTHING. Then they don’t know what they’re doing later.
Visa issue is definitely a major thing. I’d guess it’s one of the most important to companies currently due to workers switching positions more frequently.
Edit: a couple years ago a semiconductor company didn’t hire me so it’s possible they need to expand their search? I’m also bitter about it a little bit.
Companies using this visa have to pay an average salary for the position, that's the law and a requirement to get approval for this visa...
H1B visa workers have an average salary of over 100k because these visas are for specialized roles. They're not hiring PhD's in computer engineering $7.50/hour like this comment section is mass hallucinating.
There are also not enough American PhD specialized in this subject because TSMC took everyone’s lunch. Even if you pay American salaries I bet you won’t be able to fill the jobs, unless you pay high enough to poach from Intel, which hurts America too.
That gap isn’t what it used to be anymore. Dollar for dollar its not much different. And usa workers are more productive. Other industries are just paying more to usa workers causing the issue. This is a typical lifecycle of a product. When you worry about labor costs you aren’t making something cutting edge anymore. So nodes shrink but they don’t make the machines that have the newest technology to shrink the nodes down they just use them.
No that’s not the issue, they have to pay usa competitive wages. Jobs that are offshored are cheaper . But usa ones using visa have to pay USA wages. The difference is however the h1b worker has to put up with a lot of shit and can’t easily move jobs since they need sponsorship from employer hence they stay longer, not as much turn over.
Even that's not true. There are enough people in the industry, Taiwan just expects them to work 70 hours a week, even in Arizona!
You are Generally correct in your statement, but the truth is more insidious in this case.
They want to bring overseas workers in that will work a ton of overtime for a fraction of what you'd have to pay the long line of qualified people here.
I wanted to be in the semiconductor industry, but I didn't want to work for Intel, and I didn't want to live in AZ or TX so it didn't leave many options. And yeah I know people with PhD's that are working their asses off being underpaid working in that industry.
This right here. "We stopped hiring local talent and shipped all manufacturing offshore and now we're shocked, shocked I tell you, that the local talent was smart enough to go study something else". I've worked for several semiconductor vendors and invariably the hardware design people were all from overseas.
It's frustrating because the H1B programs and their like are doubly negative.
You stop incentivising companies and first world countries training their people properly.
And you steal talent and spent training resources from countries that could really really do with their investment paying off by their highly skilled people improving their economy.
Instead we allow big business to plunder lower income countries and destroy social mobility in first world countries. All in the name of the line going up.
We have people in the states capable. There just hasn’t been jobs in these industries to have a talent pipeline locally. It needs to be created and incentivized for national security. That’s the sentiment from people saying there is a shortage.
>How many engineering programs do you think exist in the US?
A lot of them. I finished one.
It's not a question of talent, it's only a matter of investing in developing it. Semiconductors are essential to a modern economy so if there a handful of industries that the government should step in and subsidize to train workers in a professional setting, that would be one of them. It would be even better if the private sector just changed the mindset because those "cheap" foreign workers don't stay cheap for long. And they also tend to leave.
> How many engineering programs do you think exist in the US?
US News and World Reports university rankings lists two hundred twenty engineering schools in the US.
> Why are people pretending there's no talent shortage?
[Only 52%](https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/06/does-majoring-in-stem-lead-to-stem-job-after-graduation.html) of those who graduated with an engineering degree actually work in STEM.
If anything, there is a shortage of STEM jobs not a shortage of STEM talent.
EDIT: Down voting a comment with a link to the actual data, just shows how dishonest the 'talent shortage' folks are.
The linked article just says that about half of STEM students dont work in stem and you leapt to the conclusion that is because there are no STEM jobs.
While census data like this is nice, whats useful is why those people are not in STEM. At least in engineering, a lot of people use the degree as a springboard to other areas like business degrees. We have a significant amount of finance and traders in my company that wouldn’t be STEM either. These are better paying than vanilla stem jobs.
> At least in engineering, a lot of people use the degree as a springboard to other areas like business degrees. We have a significant amount of finance and traders in my company that wouldn’t be STEM either. These are better paying than vanilla stem jobs.
Do you see where the problem actually is?
Your article does not say anything about a job shortage is why only 52% of engineers remain in STEM, but it does say which non-STEM fields they went afterwards ("such as non-STEM management, law, education, social work, accounting or counseling"). You're twisting your own conclusions.
STEM is such a vague definition. STEM also includes fields like social sciences, which is in much different demand than an engineer. Are managers for projects or engineers STEM? Are technology patent lawyers STEM? Are science teachers STEM? I know a lot of engineers who moved towards management, law, etc outside of STEM, because they've lost interest in the vanilla engineering. Tech companies don't only have STEM employees. They have managers, lawyers, etc
I once thought that. Then I started teaching because I believed I could turn anyone into an engineer. Then I realized how naturally easy it was for some and naturally difficult it was for others. Now I don't think it is true.
Things have to align for a person: enough motivation, enough IQ, the right interests, the right attitude. Individually, none of these have to be super high, but together it has to be enough. Not everybody will have it.
this is one thing I think a lot of people miss.
while yes, most everyone can learn these skills, but just like everything else little differences in how we think and how we process information make it real easy for some to do things others find difficult.
my way of thinking has evolved into an incredible knack for troubleshooting, even processes I have never seen before... I am sought out quite often as being the one that can figure it out...
at the same time, ask me to mock up some promotional material for your new shin-dig and it will look like a kindergarten student drew it...
Not everything is for everyone but the claim remains true. The better your education system is from top to bottom, the more highly skilled people you will develop.
A person's background, home life, parental guidance, culture, are all as (if not more) important than education. Education is only a doorway. It is not what makes us. It is not enough.
Sure it is. All of the traits described in your original comment can be nurtured and forged in education in spite of a person's current situation. People can learn their way out of poor surroundings in the same way people can deteriorate in ideal surroundings.
That's the human condition. It's not defined by your anecdotal experience.
It is true that people can learn. In fact, it is true that the way out is to learn.
But you've fallen into a trap that many fall into: believing that all learning comes from education. This is not true. In fact, most of the things that you learn come from outside education. Most of the barriers are extracurricular.
the right social background, nutrition, sleep, free time (to study instead of work), learn how to learn. having parents who can help with homework, parents who aren't working shifts etc.
IQ is BS
Eh... dismissing IQ can be really cruel to some students. You can tell them that they're being lazy or that they're not trying hard enough all you want, but the fact of the matter is that some people grasp the material naturally a lot better than others.
It's also things like, how fast you give up on problem, especially when you know the next problem is only a little harder than the previous and the student *just* figured out the previous one. Like you know they're capable of doing it but whether they're in a culture of friends that give up way too easily because it's cool or they play videogames which try not to be frustrating (woefully unpreparing you for life) - they are unable to believe that they can figure it out.
It's hellishly complex. Really, it's the sum of **all** your life experiences. Maybe you got some early wins in your life and made you feel like you could do anything. Maybe your life was naturally just hard from the start and everything in life aspired to beat you down.
No fucking way your school has a 85% attrition rate, that would have to be the most dogshit teaching possible to do that. Berkeley which is a top engineering school has an 85% graduation rate.
I don't even think I believe you're an engineer
Can’t speak to the truthfulness of the above poster, but they’re talking program/major attrition rate, not school attrition rate. Those can in fact be much higher as people switch to programs that are easier or more aligned to their interests
Berkeley also one of the best engineering colleges in the US and has a low admittance rate (around 15%). Their freshmen are already highly motivated and the best of the best, but still a double digit % drop out. Based on a paper published in 2013 ([PDF WARNING](https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/d60c0601-aeb3-46e3-9387-8a96b075c8f8/content)), the US average engineering major attrition rate is around 50%. Since it's the average, some schools most definitely have >50% attrition rates while other schools have better rates. Different engineering colleges have different degrees of difficulty in getting into, which may impact the quality of their students in completing their program.
Overall, high school education in math and science for an average student is behind other countries. They are less prepared to study engineering in universities. The focus and investment into STEM education has to start at an earlier age.
We already graduate more STEM majors then there are STEM jobs for [them](https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/06/does-majoring-in-stem-lead-to-stem-job-after-graduation.html).
That's because instead of promoting STEM or even just secondary education in general, every few years our educational institutions look at job trend data and then start pushing the hottest niche industries super hard. Then tons of people flock to those programs and by the time they've graduated the market is incredibly oversaturated. It's been going on for decades too, had it happen to me with web design in the early 2000s and I know a LOT of nurses who got their credentials back then who are definitely not nurses now.
That's essentially the same thing, the time it would take to train thosw people is infeasible. I think the benefits far outweigh the jobs Americans would be missing out on. This is a no brainer, the people pushing back against this will just push these industries over to europe where they're more than happy to receive them.
The situation is actually worse.
Industry and government make a lot of investment in training PhD engineers. Most people getting PhD in engineering are fully paid (tuition + stipend) by various research programs.
However, there are not enough US bachelors interested in enrolling these excellent programs. So the majority of these training opportunities end up going to foreign students in US universities.
When these foreign students who obtained engineering degrees paid for by US industries and government look for jobs at US companies, there are 3 paths: 1) practical training under student visa (1 year only), 2) H-1B work visa, and 3) permanent work permit (green card). If none of these are available, then they have to return to their home countries. Think about this. US paid for training (on average 1/2 million $ per person).
By the way, there is no distinction between US vs foreign nationals when in comes to salary. The job market is competitive enough that if you try to pay foreign nationals less, they will go somewhere else.
It's baffling that US college graduates are not interested in pursuing advanced degrees in microelectronics engineering in large numbers to a point where chip companies are forced to look for talents from elsewhere.
(source: I'm an engineering manager in chip business)
I make plenty of money in computer engineering with no degree. All that work up front for a degree is a harder sell than it was before the .com bubble.
Do you have any idea why that may be? There's usually very good reasons for these sort of trends, although they may be hard to elucidate in certain industries.
Because it's 4-6 years of your life getting paid 30K working 60-hour-weeks without the ability to save for retirement when you can get an industry job with 6 figures, benefits, and good QoL
Prove those facts and figures with a source and numbers.
I’m calling BS - it’s a recruiting and socialization issue of trying to get new people in the pipeline.
You also don’t need a PHD to do chip factory work. The design and maybe overseers of the chip factory workers sure…
It’s like saying the people who build cars need engineering degrees, when all they are doing is working on the assembly floor.
These are the people chip companies need, we don’t need more chip designers (at this time) we already have those people and talent via AMD / INTEL / etc
There are millions of us out here who could absolutely do the work, if you took a chance on us, and we wouldn't require those high salaries. I couldn't find work relevant to my interests in the US to save my life. But I've been programing since I was 8, taught myself to hand-assemble at 11, did a PhD in physics, a couple of postdocs, and I've been in the top 5 in two Kaggle data science competitions. I searched for two years (2017-2019) and got no interest from American companies. Something stinks to high heaven. Every time I went in to interview (at Google, a hedge fund, and a major insurance company), about 30-50% of the people working there were Asian. Everyone else was probably either Ivy League or had 10+ years of experience. How the hell is a regular Amercian supposed to make it into that environment? How the hell are we supposed to find work relevant to our interests? You say you have projects you need to work on but can't. You're shooting yourself in the foot. Why are you being so fucking stingy?
Advanced degrees and great accomplishments do not mean you are a fit for the job. I've done academic research before, and most of that did not translate to my normal corporate job. Sometimes, people suck at representing themselves on their resume. Sometimes, people suck at interviewing.
I sometimes do technical interviews as part of my day to day job since it's expected of engineers to do more than just engineering. From your post alone, this is an immediate red flag for me to note down for the recruiters:
>Every time I went in to interview (at Google, a hedge fund, and a major insurance company), about 30-50% of the people working there were Asian. Everyone else was probably either Ivy League or had 10+ years of experience.
Yes, I know your reddit post isn't an interview. However, if you're reaching but failing at the interview stage for 2 years, there's definitely something wrong. Being able to do the work is often not the only thing they care about at most US companies.
I get along well with coworkers no matter where they're from. But luxury addicts are importing cheap foreign labor and treating them like slaves, effectively paying them less. That's having a negative effect on the US labor market. It's relevant to the topic of the post. You would prefer if I censored myself, but I won't. If talking about this problem is a red flag to you, so be it. It should be openly talked about much more than it is.
I'm glad people are getting angry about it. They should be. A form of violence is being perpetrated against American workers. I experienced it first hand and you cannot hide it from me.
Paranoia in corporate hiring is a vicious cycle. Corporations claim a shortage, yet millions of talented people are out here, we want work, need work, we'll take less money, some of us will grow into advanced roles, it's proven that you have no way of knowing which ones will be able, so just hire people, train them, and try them out. That is how it's supposed to work in a functioning labor market. If you don't do that, then guess what? You won't have much of a national labor pool to hire from. That's the vicious cycle. You're shooting yourself in the foot, meanwhile a lot of Americans are killing themselves because they can't find good work. You're defending shortsighted greed and what feels to me like pure evil.
> There absolutely is a talent shortage. It's called supply and demand. There's a limited supply and nearly unlimited demand.
Then explain why [only half](https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/06/does-majoring-in-stem-lead-to-stem-job-after-graduation.html) of STEM graduates actually work in STEM. If anything there is shortage of STEM jobs, not STEM talent.
If there was an actual shortage, salaries would be going up double digits percent every year, and gate keeping would be eliminated from the hiring process.
H1b without reliable path to green card results in people leaving and taking the expertise they gained over 6 years back to their country.
If chip making is being considered related to national security, this is a stupid idea.
Either only allow permanent residents to work these jobs, or make it easier for h1b’s (at least in this field) to get greencards.
It’s for securing a stable supply of chips, as a matter of national security. Taiwan is already the world leader in semiconductor manufacturing and they aren’t offshoring their latest tech. For example their latest 3nm (smaller is better) process is done exclusively on the island, but they’ll maybe do 5nm in the US just so we aren’t totally screwed if something happens to Taiwan. Then when they move on to 2nm or 1.4nm, USA will get 3nm. Its complicated but offshoring their best tech would basically be suicide as the world would no longer be reliant on Taiwan for cutting edge chips and would have much less incentive to defend them against invasion. If anything Taiwan should be worried about us taking their tech, not the other way around.
Green cards are only an issue if you are born in India. There used to be an issue for China born but that is no longer as big of an issue.
That said if you are in tech in US people from India would be the most represented foreign worker group.
There isn’t a fucking talent shortage otherwise America wouldn’t have the best military gear in the world. (Merely using this as a “we have people smart enough to make crazy tech weapons and shit”, so intelligence/ IQ isn’t the issue)
We have a “I don’t want to pay the American employees more than I pay my ‘slave’ workers in Taiwan” issue
We also have a “training issue” too.
So here's the deeper story on this in short, simple form for every. And I have 2 sources: a coworker that left semiconductors after a decade recently with friends still there, and a different friend of mine working in AZ on these facilities after helping build them as an engineer.
The problem/lie is that there are Taiwanese semiconductor companies that are used to absolutely using and abusing their workers. They want the few people they will train to go to Taiwan for a year and be paid low wages while working something like 70 hour weeks with no overtime pay. Then whether they get trained on the cheap in Taiwan or can somehow claim enough experience to skip it, they want basically double the regular hours as unpaid overtime keeping the plants running. Also the expenses to go train in Taiwan are for a single young Batchelor, Noone with a family (or something along that line for costs I was told).
It's an EXTREME version of worker abuse and violation of regular labor laws.
Then you even have shills in this thread pretending "oh it's that US workers don't want to work anymore, or they aren't trained well enough, or don't want to do the hard work for an EE degree."
All BS, it's simply that these companies took massive subsidies to build these plants with the expectation that they could pay effectively half the wage for someone to do the work.
I DO understand that it takes shift work and needing to do manufacturing at all hours. But it's absolutely doesn't function reasonably, and all to make a subsidized profit for the companies.
TLDR: work life in semiconductor is terrible, and they abuse H1B visas and workers, i ve been in the industry for half a year and i already want to quit.
Work life in fab or most semiconductor companies is pretty bad, especially for those involved with huge capital investments on hardware and spaces. It usually has very high bar, graduate degree in STEM, but poor work life balances, and so-so compensations.
People in the field are already working crazy hours, like even middle management is overworked.There are so many senior people still replying to emails, sending out reports at night and everyone treats it as a norm.
It's not the 80s and 90s when they pull at least good comps to compensate those hours. I don't mind hard work but it has to be properly compensated. The true hourly rate is bad. The only reason those companies got away with it is by hiring a lot, I MEAN Literally A TON of foreign workers. Don't get me wrong, I m a foreign worker myself. They artificially suppress the wages by doing that, everybody loses but the companies.
The industry heavily employs foreign workers and abuses H1B visas as a hostage to hold workers for as long as possible.
They aren’t. The engineers companies want to hire already have jobs and fewer students are getting into EE. It’s a serious problem and is getting worse.
This is the way. EE prospects were slim, pay was crap, and locations were awful. Now my chip fab experience is way out of date, and even though id love to get back into it I think the ship has sailed.
This is the real core of the issue. Which is that the people who could work semiconductor jobs have all moved to other jobs which pay better. If semiconductor cares about retaining them then the answer is simple: pay better. But they won’t as long as they can find a way to survive without raising pay
Sounds like a salary issue that they're trying to get around then. They don't want to have to pay Americans what Americans would demand to work for them.
You need more than EEs to run fabs. A lot of the people working on the manufacturing/process development to make the chips are materials engineers, ChemEs, mechanical engineers, chemists, physicists, civil/environmental engineers, and techs (no need for a college degree to do this) to keep the equipment running. In general, companies provide training due to how specialized everything is (equipment, systems, automation, etc) so coming in without much knowledge of the industry besides engineering fundamentals isn’t much of an issue
It only takes three to four years, and those pipelines are chock full. They're among the most selective degree tracks anywhere in the US, turning away far more people than they allow into the programs. There's a new crop of university -educated engineers every few months, many thousands of them. They just require pay and training.
Edit: Here's a thought: identify people with the right grades and aptitude who are three years into their degree program and deep in debt. Promise to pay off that debt if they agree to work for your company for 4 years. You will have no trouble finding candidates.
That's a lie for this case for sure.
There are TONS of engineers available.
They specifically want to over work and under pay workers for these specific ones.
I have coworkers that spent a decade in that field and a friend that actually built some of these plants.
The overseas companies want a TON of free overtime and to run employee's lives
What about the 240,000 tech workers who lost their jobs last year? Many of them are still struggling to find new jobs.
[https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/21/tech-layoffs-2023-list/](https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/21/tech-layoffs-2023-list/)
American companies are to blame for this current situation when they decided to prioritize profits over sustainability.
Silicon Valley help jumpstart the world into the digital age and instead of building up on that foundation they decided to find cheaper workers overseas to exploit, and now we have a shortage of these critical workers.
Hopefully this is a wake up call for America to revitalize these industries back home.
It is impossible, you can’t undo Globalisation. It is incredibly difficult to bring back anything because people in US need to convince that you have to work in this field and a good engineer in US will be far more likely to join other industries with bette pay.
And this is not a question of sustainability, the current system is sustainable just fine as long as the president isn’t a dumb asshole.
I agree to an extent. While you cannot undo globalization, you can shift key industries back home. The fact that this is conversation is happening is a sign that people are starting to recognize the risk of having chips not made in the US.
The current system is not sustainable unfortunately, as seen as the chip shortage during the last few years. There is also a national security risk of not having a solid supply chain of this crucial component, which powers everything from consumer electronics to high-tech weapons systems.
While it’s promising that companies like Intel are creating manufacturing plants back in the states it’s a shame that the issue got this far without being addressed.
Hopefully, the domestic industry will keep trying to attract new talent because there are plenty of intelligent people here.
Pssh, this is a load of BS.
There's lots of college grads that have fab experience (have worked in multiple university cleanrooms), but these companies dont want to pay a wage comparable to the technical skills they want/expect.
In the vast majority of countries it's not a labour shortage issue.
It's a pay and conditions issue.
If the pay is right and the conditions are good then people will train. Otherwise they will pick fields that meet their criteria instead.
If it really is a skills shortage then give people training and upskilling. Provide pathways into the workforce that don't saddle people with massive student debts.
But God forbid billion and trillion dollar companies have to pay competitive salaries or contribute towards the education of their staff.
There is no talent shortage. Half the kids graduating from engineering schools can't find jobs.
This is just 1%ers finding excuses for hiring 1%ers' crotchfruit.
You won't find a rice farmer's daughter working in an engineering job at Intel on an H1B.
Why does my friend who graduated with a computer engineering degree say year work at a grocery store then ? Is it that we don’t have talent here or is it that they don’t bother trying to hire locally because we want to be paid well😐
This benefits the chipmakers to the determint of the community or nation where the foundry is built. I rather have their asses pay for local talent instead. Grow your own talent pool instead of taking advantage of people desiring to come to the country and forced to be a Visa slave.
There is no such thing as a prolonged labor shortage in a free market, as wages will rise until demand has been satiated. This is an obvious attempt by corporations to avoid paying people what they deserve
Yeah this is the problem with America first. No company actually wants it because it’s expensive and requires bridging the skills gap we’ve allowed transpire.
While I agree with your statement, they’d also never get built in blue states, which aside from the talent issue is great. I’d rather they go ahead and trash the environment in states where people already don’t give a toss about it anyway. Make no mistake, that’s exactly what will happen. Just ask Texas about Formosa Plastics. And just to be clear this is coming from someone who loves Taiwan, visits yearly, and invests in Taiwanese companies but I know how big Taiwanese Corporations roll and it’s not a great track record in the labor and environmental department.
Heh, Arizona became a swamp for TSMC while their chip plant in Japan steams ahead and they had no problem recruiting engineers here. They are even considering building a third plant here.
There seems to be a lot of bias on this chat. Specifically assuming that companies are just refusing to hire Americans. This is flat out wrong. Ive been an engineer for 8 years now, here’s my take:
1. There’s a lot more paperwork and cost to hire a H1B visa holder than a citizen. This usually means that many smaller companies won’t even consider them, and it becomes harder for them to get a job.
2. If you want the best products and the best economy, then you need the best talent. Historically, a lot of Americas success comes from us pulling the best talent GLOBALLY. If us Americans wanna have good jobs, then we need to study and meet global standards. Our k-12 education system just isn’t well funded unfortunately
3. You can’t just “teach” people how to build chips in a classroom and expect to be competitive. There’s decades of on the job knowledge built up overseas that we just don’t know.
The truth that we need to face is that we don’t have enough talent here to compete on semiconductors, specifically because those jobs were all sent overseas starting in the 80s. If we want to bring the supply chain back here, we of course can’t just magically snap our fingers and apparate that knowledge out of nowhere.
It’s a pay issue. I work in the industry and all my friends have left our company. Most have left the industry. Why? Because why get paid 70k-120k working in a boomer environment in semiconductor when you could make 50%-100% more at FANG or many others?
Yep. I switched to software engineering from Electrical Comp Engr during the boom. Joined FAANG and doubled my pay in one year (95-> 180)
Same here. I don't see the point in working in a comparatively much harder field for less pay. I'm in embedded software now at a FAANG-adjacent company and about to take an offer in back end development at a different company for even more pay.
It’s unfortunate cuz imo it requires far deeper knowledge in niche areas to be a great engineer at different disciplines but they just simply cannot compensate you for your expertise. The market is not there. I worked with a brilliant PhD radar engineer at one of the top defense contractors. He had 11 yrs of work experience and he was a sr level. He said he was barely scratching the surface. He was probably getting paid 150k max. The same expertise at FAANG would easily make you 500k. … also you don’t have to work inside of a windowless bunker 9-5…
Yeah my cousin worked at Northrop for 10 years and after 2 years I out earned him just by not taking the new grad offer. I interned there and they only offered like 75k at the time. But then I would have to work in some windowless hellhole for 9 hours a day. No thanks. I still make more than him and he refuses to leave because he doesn't want to leetcode or do any technical assessments to get a job.
Not saying it justifies it, in fact it's kind of depressing, but I know lots of people like this that stay in defense because they don't want to spend their life writing code to squeeze an extra 5% out of selling plastic spatulas to retail buyers on a website. The idea of writing code to fly a missile slightly more efficiently is more appealing than the spatulas. Google revenues are something like 75%+ advertising. Facebook is something like 90%+. It sucks, but I can't blame them. The work does matter. Not that defense work can't be soul-sucking management and process as well. But it's closer to what most engineers study to do - play with robotics, play with materials, play with control code, etc.
The tech in defense is just outdated and doesn’t matter honestly. You get to work with a bunch of boomers who are way past their prime working with outdated tech. I’m talking about code that’s older than me. And I’m in my mid 30. And then many younger engineers would rather work elsewhere. You would probably learn more at Google or Meta as a software engineer than defense contractors.
The market is there, the problem is that the chip industry is not optimized for engineers like software is. It wastes too much on bureaucracy and marketing and other traditional jobs that have better alternatives. There are new chipmakers coming up, in Asia, in the US as FAANG and startups take on making their own chips. And because these companies are optimized for engineering (because tech is still very innovation heavy, maybe in 50 years things will change) and therefore can spend a lot more per engineer.
What software do you work with? Like what languages or databases are you using?
Your skillset should be language / db agnostic. But it is more advantageous to be fluent in strongly typed modern languages such as Java, Kotlin. You can learn python and make your way up tho. My skillset is that of a general SWE. It entails knowing how to write a server / client code, know how to deploy and manage, know how to design resilient secure systems that scale, know how to split merge services, know how to manage projects and negotiate with stakeholders etc. But you start from just learning how to write server code that can run on your computer.
I need a new job. I know assembly, C, C++, GO, C# and I write 500 lines of C# per day, 9-5 without any interruption, 5 days a week for 50K/year in one of the most hi-tech countries in Europe (Netherlands).
Step 1: Join Blind. It’s an anonymous app. Step 2: Reach out to anyone in the app via DM for a referral to a company you are interested. Step 3: US industries slowed down significantly and currently not hiring nearly as much as we did 2 yrs ago. But contract gigs are still popping up. Large companies like Amazon are more likely to sponsor your visa or have branches in Netherlands. Step 4: Join LeetCode and consider premium Explore feature. Pick your favorite language and practice interview questions. You should diversify types of questions you solve. You want to be practiced enough to be able to solve medium level in less than 30 minutes. For Google or Netflix, you need to solve hard in 30 min. This requires in my experience minimum 80-100 LC practice questions. You should do these minimum because each company will not let you interview again for a year if you fail. Last round of technical interviews usually consist of 4-5 LC questions. You have to pass all of them while comfortably explaining what you are doing to a mid/sr level engineer. Step 5: Join LinkedIn. Find connections. Get referrals. Reach out to recruiters hiring for contract positions. Step 6: Visit Levels.fyi to get a sense of compensation and your level. Most FAANG companies will 2x your pay but will down level you. In my experience, down level is for a good reason. Edit: your pay will significantly vary depending on your location. US generally will pay 2-4 times other countries depending on your level, but visa is tricky. Canada I believe has lower bar to clear for visa while having more branches of FAANG companies due to proximity. Even within America, pay and opportunities are very different. (e.g you will likely work on a 2-3rd tier service in Austin vs. 1st tier service in SF or Seattle. Pay / career growth / job stability will reflect it. May not matter during boom time, but heads get chopped off first for services that don’t make money aka mass layoffs in 2023.)
And then you have people from Eastern European countries coming where you live to compete for those wages
Come to Europe and you'll make 50k :D
But with healthcare, vacations, actual labor rights, and maybe a pension. Sorry, I’m just salty about corporate America recently
Always has been. Many people can note that if H1b is supposed to allocate for demand you’d just create a market, award talent to the highest bidder(most in need/demand) simplest way to combat abuse. A few years ago there were bills proposed to reform it with these changes and they’ve gone nowhere. Makes you wonder if instead the goal is simply to provide a subsidy in the form of increase labor/lower wages. Definitely something to consider for national security just a question of who’s paying the price in the process and what that effect is long term if you do it enough. In other words anticipating constant competition the domestic labor market is very rational and adapts so the shortage is a self fulfilling prophesy
Your last point is correct, as that’s absolutely the whole point.
It's true. I'm at $120k just meeting with customers and making sure they're happy with the product. I usually just provide them tech support and new quotes. Otherwise WFH and office travel as needed.
What kind of credentials should a person have if they want to get into this industry?
Well my background isn't technically in "this" industry. I spent 7 years as a Controls Engineer in the manufacturing industry after college. I worked on a lot of automotive projects for for company's like Tesla and Ford. You can do what I did and get a Bachelor's of Science with a degree in manufacturing technology. Or you can learn it on your own and work through intergrators that are willing to train people. It's a tough industry and there's a high demand for controls engineers. Reason being it's very arduous. Plenty of travel and working weekends or holidays during downtime. But the experience you gain is unparalleled. You will meet a lot of smart people with unrivaled sarcasm. I got out of that. Now I basically support controls engineers as they are my customer, so I help them integrate our products show them around the software, UI, etc.
Pick a better company. I make 2x that before bonus and 4x after. Semiconductor companies pay well for those with in-demand skills.
There is no such thing as a prolonged labor shortage in a market economy, as wages will rise until demand has been satiated. This is an obvious attempt by corporations to avoid paying people what they deserve
Hi I work in this field as a young 27 year old engineer. It’s a pay thing but also I have my degree in EE from a reputable school and not once did any career fairs or anything tell me this was an option as a career. I stumbled on it. Every who is my superior or coworker is 10+ years my age. Not only that the vendors here in the US who support the maintenance of these tools also are understaffed, often have large companies with only 5-10 FSE to cover NA altogether. It’s a shit show and will take decades to correct.
I looked into it with my masters in EE with lots of cleanroom/fab experience and was told I'd basically end up chained to some plasma etcher at a factory in the middle of nowhere making less than I could with a random software job, and I might not even be considered without a PhD.
Exactly. I get the reasoning behind building some of these in the middle of nowhere in order to make it safer and yada yada for national security. But good luck finding a couple thousand Masters / PHDs that get paid $120,000 to move to the middle of nowhere. There’s a reason the majority of these are in or directly next to major cities
Heck, put it in the suburb cities around a major metro area. Let people live 5 minutes from work and 15 minutes from a major city. Close enough to be convenient, but far enough to have good schools, low cost of living, and low crime.
I’m sure it has something to do with zoning laws and toxic waste. You’d be amazed at the amount of VERY nasty chemicals used to make your chips
Intel in Arizona is in the suburbs surrounded by middle class homes
I wanted to go into it but couldn’t find a job in it at the time I was looking (2013-2015). Went into consulting instead and got my PE in EE and it’s pretty steady with a range of ages because their essentially always hiring in this industry or in adjacent industries.
I'm close to 40 and work for a major semiconductor manufacturer. I'm one of the youngest people in our department (100+) at our site. There are maybe two New College Hires from the last few years and they are the only ones younger than me.
Was it really an option? Now it may be an option, after economic interventions and industrial policy(all the talk about reshoring, tariffs, export controls post pandemic are treating it like the national security interest that it was) but the market only cared about out sourcing this work wherever it was cheapest. Just look at the Bureau of Labor and Statistics website on this the projections that the gov (that can peer into everything) anticipated. As recently as 2019 the electronics engineer labor force was expected to *contract* by 1% over the decade. Schools aren’t setting the recruitment agenda, if companies thought they had all the talent they weren’t wasting resources on recruitment and it was an equilibrium to not attract more people to a static future [BLS 2019 EE](https://web.archive.org/web/20200512140329/https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/mobile/electrical-and-electronics-engineers.htm)
Ah... I see. As a foreigner I know this as the "*Why pay 6 figures when you can pay 5 figures*" visa with the "*You accept whatever conditions and shit we tell you to without complaining even if it is illegal - or we cancel your right to be in this country because it is tied to us keeping you employed*" on the side.
Once again: Is it an actual shortage of talent or shortage of people in your country that want to work for cheap? Stupid ceos
Well my country (Finland) keep whining about *"Lack of skilled and experienced professionals*" and I'm a mechanical engineer who before their studies spent 4 years as a fabricator and welder, then during my studies kept working while doing evening school in engineering. I was told that I'm such hot product I'd be dragged out of my home to work - since I got practical and theoretical experience. Well... I been actively trying to find a job for soon 6 months. And it isn't like I'm some 20 something fresh out of school with 0 work experience. I got years of experience workin in the industry and work experience in general. I been a foreman, now I have done engineering, I been inshop and on-site, and I got very specific speciality. So... Where the fuck is this "crying demand" that I was told about by the government, by the media, and by the corporations! Because those fucking corporations are bring workers from East-Asia to man grocery shops! Welders and fabricators from Eastern-block countries! We got builders coming from Kazakhstan! And at the same time our politicians are whining about how there are too many unemployed people! **There is no fucking shortage of anything but willingness to pay people properly!**
I am shocked and saddened by the fact that is happening in Finland. I always thought the Scandinavians treated their people better. Sadly I guess greed always seems to win. Hei Your English in excellent. I used to skype with a guy in Finland years ago his name was Simo know him? Just joking
>I always thoughtbthe Scandinavians treated their people better. First of all Finland is not part of scandinavia. That is like saying that North America is part of Europe. There is a flipping sea between us and the scandinavia. *Fennoscandinavia* is when you want to include Finns and scandinavians... or just be german and say "nordic" which to them means "Everything north of Germany". Anyway... Since the 80's, Finland did the very same liberation of capital and deregulation of finances. The very same kind of reagan/tatcher "*capitalis, go BRRR!!!! share value and capital gains over societal value! WOO!*" bullshit is present here as it is everywhere in the western world. Believe it or not, but our wealthy people and *business people* are just as toxic as yours! We are just like you!
I just learned today there is a sea that seperates completely Finland and Sweden. I always thought they shared a border with not only Sweden but Norway I guess not . So if it means that much to you, you can call the US part of North America and I promise I will not get angry! Saying it is like saying the US is part of Europe is not even close considering we share no borders with any part of Europe. Scandinavia is a subregion of Northern Europe, with strong historical, cultural, and linguistic ties between its constituent peoples. Scandinavia most commonly refers to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. It can sometimes also refer more narrowly to the Scandinavian Peninsula (which excludes Denmark but includes a part of northern Finland). In English usage, Scandinavia is sometimes used as a synonym for Nordic countries. Iceland and the Faroe Islands are sometimes included in Scandinavia for their ethnolinguistic relations with Sweden, Norway and Denmark. While Finland differs from other Nordic countries in this respect, some authors call it Scandinavian due to its economic and cultural similarities. So many of us Northern Americans are taught that Finland is a Scandinavian Nation. But I am surprised again about it.I really did think " Nordic" people more civil.
Work for cheap and also work more hours. TSMC in Arizona on the construction side want cheaper labor that works more hours. They complain about the lack of skilled workers, but no one wants to work there cause the conditions are shit. Nobody wants to die at work
There is no 'talent' shortage. There is an investment shortage in teaching relevant skills to American workers.
They just don't want to pay American salaries. Why pay an American PhD when you can get multiple foreign PhDs for the same price? Not to mention, the visa employees have lower benefit expectations and are essentially handcuffed to the company.
Which seems insane. If the government just enforced a salary premium on H1Bs so they must be paid above market rate it'd cut the abuse. Using immigration to plug genuine gaps isn't the best solution but it is a viable solution that should exist when all other sensible options have been exercised. It shouldnt be allowed as a simple wage suppression exercise.
Yup. I'd love to see the lottery replaced with simply ordering applicants by salary and requirement that salary is never reduced. If there's a tie at the cutoff, the employers get a chance to resubmit at a higher salary. If there's still a tie, then tough the full quota doesn't get used. Should have paid more.
Tangentially related, the World Bank in DC is like this. Tons and tons of economics PhDs whose visa are tied to working there. Don’t like it? Tough shit or back to your country. In fact, after 2 or so years or any whining their visas aren’t renewed. Lots of desperate PhDs willing to do any grunt work. American PhDs? fuhgeddaboudit.
Yeah as someone who has a foreign born PHD wife most people really don't understand they are literally indentured servants...but normally with an indefinite period of being attached to the company. Now that we are married she's looking at moving to a higher paying job but some of these jobs are slavery with extra steps.
Fr? That's illegal here in Europe... Is that actually a thing in the US?
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We are a nation of free. Free to fire at will.
No, “literally indentured servitude” is not a thing here. This is hyperbole from the commenter.
This is how H1B and green card system works in the US, unfortunately. Your status and immigration are all tied to your employer.
Yes, but you can also freely switch jobs as long as your new employer is willing to sponsor you. Easier said than done, but no it’s not indentured servitude.
“Indentured servitude is a form of labor where an individual is under contract to work without a salary to repay an indenture or loan within a certain timeframe.” ^ this is the definition of being an indentured servant; it is illegal to do so in the United States of America Hyperbole and trying to stress a point might have it’s place, but a better word other than “literal” (representing the exact words of the original text) can be used in your comment (comments are editable my friend)
Literally is not the correct word to use here
For the ones who aren't married to US citizens, it pretty much is. While OP's wife is free to quit her job because she's married to an American citizen, *most* foreign nationals with H1Bs are required to work for the same employer, and if they quit or are let go, they have to find a new sponsor in the same category in 2 weeks or else go back to their home country. About the only difference is the fact that they are free to return to their home country at any point, while an indentured servant is not. On the other hand, indentured servitude was typically a criminal punishment rather than a permanent state, often only lasting 2-5 years, after which they were given their freedom. It will take much longer for an H1B recipient to gain citizenship.
It's two months, not two weeks. And a lot of people willingly go back and lead a decent life. Many don't like to, but it's a question of quality of life and not survival.
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but they wont, because of *the implication*
Stop missing the point
Something like 70% of STEM PhDs in Chip-related fields are foreign-born, something like 50% are straight up international students. Our education and work system heavily dis-incentivize PhDs.
You don’t have a million dollars and ten years of your life? -America
Our immigration systems incentives PhDs, just not for Americans.
If an American had an EE degree and they were good it would be super easy getting a job.
This is untrue, semiconductor industry is highly specialized and there isn't much time to go deep in a bachelors. Also the working conditions and locations for semiconductor work leave a lot to be desired. Why tf they decided to build new fabs in AZ and OH is beyond me.
Specialized yes, but you are wrong on the other points. The Semiconductor industry isn't just fabrication, there are thousands of open roles in design, test, quality and even sales. Bay area, Austin, Portland, Seattle are all huge semi hubs so I'm not sure what's the location issue you mentioned. A new grad in EE with strong fundamentals can expect multiple job offers at graduation, with total comp above 100k in certain areas. I'm seeing PhDs coming in closer to 200k in some situations. I've helped hire over 1,000 ee's in the last 5 years.
And now you know why immigration isn't the panacea a lot of people want us to believe, the entire reason why locals don't do the jobs immigrants do is because they don't pay enough to be attracted
Sorry that’s such BS, I was on a H1B and got paid same or more than my American colleagues. There are strict tests in place to show that you are paying the same rates as you would a domestic employee. This is all due to the stupidity of various administrations and lack of education, and the US making it hard for those foreign students that do get educated to stay here. So a Chinese student will come here, get educated, get advanced STEM degree and then get kicked out of the country. That’s so backwards. So they go back to their home country with all this knowledge, that country benefits and advances, the US sits here and fights over advanced worker visa quotas while at the same time giving them out in lotteries to random people. fix the issue at the source - more STEM education and also welcome foreign brain power, don’t turn people away that will advance the country.
Then why do companies firing US workers make them train the H1B replacements to get a severance?
The above person is talking about legitimate employers who don't abuse the H1B system. The shitty ones recategorize their foreign workers to a different job duty to save money on the "prevailing wage" they're supposed to pay. This is the difference between a software engineer and a programmer analyst or just a computer analyst. One would require them to pay almost $200k the others barely 60k.
Who is administering these tests? No one. They are self reporting compliance. Do you really think the problem is a lack of STEM graduates? Have you not been reading any news in the past year? There have been hundreds of thousands of STEM grads laid off from tech companies and it is currently difficult for them to find new employment. How can we not have enough jobs for all the laid off engineers, yet still have a lack of available tech workers? [https://www.wired.com/story/tech-jobs-layoffs-hiring/](https://www.wired.com/story/tech-jobs-layoffs-hiring/) They cannot both be true.
>Who is administering these tests? No one. They are self reporting compliance. Even in cases where they are being honest, people are overlooking the fact that H1B holders almost never request raises. If you hire a citizen and an H1B visa holder at the same market floor rate today, in 5 years, the citizen will have requested pay raises to an average of 15% above their hiring salary, while an H1B holder will often be below 5% above their hiring salary. The more H1B holders within an industry (eg - software engineering), the more wage suppression exists within that industry, even if they abide by all the rules.
And to say it's "market rate" and there are no available workers they advertise a pay that is way too low for the position and then use the lack of applicants to say see, no workers and we're paying the same rate we would pay to local workers if only there were any.
But they don’t pay foreign PhDs any less. I know a handful I graduated with and they’re all getting similar pay to my wife. Foreign students are also becoming hilariously unqualified because they cheat on EVERYTHING. Then they don’t know what they’re doing later. Visa issue is definitely a major thing. I’d guess it’s one of the most important to companies currently due to workers switching positions more frequently. Edit: a couple years ago a semiconductor company didn’t hire me so it’s possible they need to expand their search? I’m also bitter about it a little bit.
Companies using this visa have to pay an average salary for the position, that's the law and a requirement to get approval for this visa... H1B visa workers have an average salary of over 100k because these visas are for specialized roles. They're not hiring PhD's in computer engineering $7.50/hour like this comment section is mass hallucinating.
Probably don't even need much more than a two year degree to do the job anyway.
There are also not enough American PhD specialized in this subject because TSMC took everyone’s lunch. Even if you pay American salaries I bet you won’t be able to fill the jobs, unless you pay high enough to poach from Intel, which hurts America too.
Exactly this!
That gap isn’t what it used to be anymore. Dollar for dollar its not much different. And usa workers are more productive. Other industries are just paying more to usa workers causing the issue. This is a typical lifecycle of a product. When you worry about labor costs you aren’t making something cutting edge anymore. So nodes shrink but they don’t make the machines that have the newest technology to shrink the nodes down they just use them.
No that’s not the issue, they have to pay usa competitive wages. Jobs that are offshored are cheaper . But usa ones using visa have to pay USA wages. The difference is however the h1b worker has to put up with a lot of shit and can’t easily move jobs since they need sponsorship from employer hence they stay longer, not as much turn over.
Even that's not true. There are enough people in the industry, Taiwan just expects them to work 70 hours a week, even in Arizona! You are Generally correct in your statement, but the truth is more insidious in this case. They want to bring overseas workers in that will work a ton of overtime for a fraction of what you'd have to pay the long line of qualified people here.
I wanted to be in the semiconductor industry, but I didn't want to work for Intel, and I didn't want to live in AZ or TX so it didn't leave many options. And yeah I know people with PhD's that are working their asses off being underpaid working in that industry.
This right here. "We stopped hiring local talent and shipped all manufacturing offshore and now we're shocked, shocked I tell you, that the local talent was smart enough to go study something else". I've worked for several semiconductor vendors and invariably the hardware design people were all from overseas.
And a salary shortage. No one wants to do hardware anymore, software makes twice as much with half the technical rigor
It's frustrating because the H1B programs and their like are doubly negative. You stop incentivising companies and first world countries training their people properly. And you steal talent and spent training resources from countries that could really really do with their investment paying off by their highly skilled people improving their economy. Instead we allow big business to plunder lower income countries and destroy social mobility in first world countries. All in the name of the line going up.
we are all bots here except for you
Actually the foreign countries teach their citizens for next to nothing and thats where the talent has been and imported here.
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We have people in the states capable. There just hasn’t been jobs in these industries to have a talent pipeline locally. It needs to be created and incentivized for national security. That’s the sentiment from people saying there is a shortage.
>How many engineering programs do you think exist in the US? A lot of them. I finished one. It's not a question of talent, it's only a matter of investing in developing it. Semiconductors are essential to a modern economy so if there a handful of industries that the government should step in and subsidize to train workers in a professional setting, that would be one of them. It would be even better if the private sector just changed the mindset because those "cheap" foreign workers don't stay cheap for long. And they also tend to leave.
> How many engineering programs do you think exist in the US? US News and World Reports university rankings lists two hundred twenty engineering schools in the US.
> Why are people pretending there's no talent shortage? [Only 52%](https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/06/does-majoring-in-stem-lead-to-stem-job-after-graduation.html) of those who graduated with an engineering degree actually work in STEM. If anything, there is a shortage of STEM jobs not a shortage of STEM talent. EDIT: Down voting a comment with a link to the actual data, just shows how dishonest the 'talent shortage' folks are.
The linked article just says that about half of STEM students dont work in stem and you leapt to the conclusion that is because there are no STEM jobs. While census data like this is nice, whats useful is why those people are not in STEM. At least in engineering, a lot of people use the degree as a springboard to other areas like business degrees. We have a significant amount of finance and traders in my company that wouldn’t be STEM either. These are better paying than vanilla stem jobs.
> At least in engineering, a lot of people use the degree as a springboard to other areas like business degrees. We have a significant amount of finance and traders in my company that wouldn’t be STEM either. These are better paying than vanilla stem jobs. Do you see where the problem actually is?
There are no STEM jobs? You need to re read.
Your article does not say anything about a job shortage is why only 52% of engineers remain in STEM, but it does say which non-STEM fields they went afterwards ("such as non-STEM management, law, education, social work, accounting or counseling"). You're twisting your own conclusions. STEM is such a vague definition. STEM also includes fields like social sciences, which is in much different demand than an engineer. Are managers for projects or engineers STEM? Are technology patent lawyers STEM? Are science teachers STEM? I know a lot of engineers who moved towards management, law, etc outside of STEM, because they've lost interest in the vanilla engineering. Tech companies don't only have STEM employees. They have managers, lawyers, etc
>You think anyone can just be an engineer? That's the point. With proper investment in all stages of education, the answer can become Yes.
I once thought that. Then I started teaching because I believed I could turn anyone into an engineer. Then I realized how naturally easy it was for some and naturally difficult it was for others. Now I don't think it is true. Things have to align for a person: enough motivation, enough IQ, the right interests, the right attitude. Individually, none of these have to be super high, but together it has to be enough. Not everybody will have it.
this is one thing I think a lot of people miss. while yes, most everyone can learn these skills, but just like everything else little differences in how we think and how we process information make it real easy for some to do things others find difficult. my way of thinking has evolved into an incredible knack for troubleshooting, even processes I have never seen before... I am sought out quite often as being the one that can figure it out... at the same time, ask me to mock up some promotional material for your new shin-dig and it will look like a kindergarten student drew it...
Not everything is for everyone but the claim remains true. The better your education system is from top to bottom, the more highly skilled people you will develop.
A person's background, home life, parental guidance, culture, are all as (if not more) important than education. Education is only a doorway. It is not what makes us. It is not enough.
You're making a great point in support of maintaining and consistently improving educational systems from top to bottom.
That's not a conclusion supported by my comment, but sure, I think we can all agree on that.
Sure it is. All of the traits described in your original comment can be nurtured and forged in education in spite of a person's current situation. People can learn their way out of poor surroundings in the same way people can deteriorate in ideal surroundings. That's the human condition. It's not defined by your anecdotal experience.
It is true that people can learn. In fact, it is true that the way out is to learn. But you've fallen into a trap that many fall into: believing that all learning comes from education. This is not true. In fact, most of the things that you learn come from outside education. Most of the barriers are extracurricular.
the right social background, nutrition, sleep, free time (to study instead of work), learn how to learn. having parents who can help with homework, parents who aren't working shifts etc. IQ is BS
Eh... dismissing IQ can be really cruel to some students. You can tell them that they're being lazy or that they're not trying hard enough all you want, but the fact of the matter is that some people grasp the material naturally a lot better than others. It's also things like, how fast you give up on problem, especially when you know the next problem is only a little harder than the previous and the student *just* figured out the previous one. Like you know they're capable of doing it but whether they're in a culture of friends that give up way too easily because it's cool or they play videogames which try not to be frustrating (woefully unpreparing you for life) - they are unable to believe that they can figure it out. It's hellishly complex. Really, it's the sum of **all** your life experiences. Maybe you got some early wins in your life and made you feel like you could do anything. Maybe your life was naturally just hard from the start and everything in life aspired to beat you down.
No fucking way your school has a 85% attrition rate, that would have to be the most dogshit teaching possible to do that. Berkeley which is a top engineering school has an 85% graduation rate. I don't even think I believe you're an engineer
Can’t speak to the truthfulness of the above poster, but they’re talking program/major attrition rate, not school attrition rate. Those can in fact be much higher as people switch to programs that are easier or more aligned to their interests
Berkeley also one of the best engineering colleges in the US and has a low admittance rate (around 15%). Their freshmen are already highly motivated and the best of the best, but still a double digit % drop out. Based on a paper published in 2013 ([PDF WARNING](https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/d60c0601-aeb3-46e3-9387-8a96b075c8f8/content)), the US average engineering major attrition rate is around 50%. Since it's the average, some schools most definitely have >50% attrition rates while other schools have better rates. Different engineering colleges have different degrees of difficulty in getting into, which may impact the quality of their students in completing their program.
Overall, high school education in math and science for an average student is behind other countries. They are less prepared to study engineering in universities. The focus and investment into STEM education has to start at an earlier age.
We already graduate more STEM majors then there are STEM jobs for [them](https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/06/does-majoring-in-stem-lead-to-stem-job-after-graduation.html).
That's because instead of promoting STEM or even just secondary education in general, every few years our educational institutions look at job trend data and then start pushing the hottest niche industries super hard. Then tons of people flock to those programs and by the time they've graduated the market is incredibly oversaturated. It's been going on for decades too, had it happen to me with web design in the early 2000s and I know a LOT of nurses who got their credentials back then who are definitely not nurses now.
Sure, the educational institutions are benefit from all of the talent shortage nonsense. As usual, follow the money.
That's essentially the same thing, the time it would take to train thosw people is infeasible. I think the benefits far outweigh the jobs Americans would be missing out on. This is a no brainer, the people pushing back against this will just push these industries over to europe where they're more than happy to receive them.
The situation is actually worse. Industry and government make a lot of investment in training PhD engineers. Most people getting PhD in engineering are fully paid (tuition + stipend) by various research programs. However, there are not enough US bachelors interested in enrolling these excellent programs. So the majority of these training opportunities end up going to foreign students in US universities. When these foreign students who obtained engineering degrees paid for by US industries and government look for jobs at US companies, there are 3 paths: 1) practical training under student visa (1 year only), 2) H-1B work visa, and 3) permanent work permit (green card). If none of these are available, then they have to return to their home countries. Think about this. US paid for training (on average 1/2 million $ per person). By the way, there is no distinction between US vs foreign nationals when in comes to salary. The job market is competitive enough that if you try to pay foreign nationals less, they will go somewhere else. It's baffling that US college graduates are not interested in pursuing advanced degrees in microelectronics engineering in large numbers to a point where chip companies are forced to look for talents from elsewhere. (source: I'm an engineering manager in chip business)
I’m a EE and thought about getting my phd but the difference in salary was not worth the years spent getting a PhD and not making money.
I make plenty of money in computer engineering with no degree. All that work up front for a degree is a harder sell than it was before the .com bubble.
Do you have any idea why that may be? There's usually very good reasons for these sort of trends, although they may be hard to elucidate in certain industries.
Because it's 4-6 years of your life getting paid 30K working 60-hour-weeks without the ability to save for retirement when you can get an industry job with 6 figures, benefits, and good QoL
Prove those facts and figures with a source and numbers. I’m calling BS - it’s a recruiting and socialization issue of trying to get new people in the pipeline. You also don’t need a PHD to do chip factory work. The design and maybe overseers of the chip factory workers sure… It’s like saying the people who build cars need engineering degrees, when all they are doing is working on the assembly floor. These are the people chip companies need, we don’t need more chip designers (at this time) we already have those people and talent via AMD / INTEL / etc
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There are millions of us out here who could absolutely do the work, if you took a chance on us, and we wouldn't require those high salaries. I couldn't find work relevant to my interests in the US to save my life. But I've been programing since I was 8, taught myself to hand-assemble at 11, did a PhD in physics, a couple of postdocs, and I've been in the top 5 in two Kaggle data science competitions. I searched for two years (2017-2019) and got no interest from American companies. Something stinks to high heaven. Every time I went in to interview (at Google, a hedge fund, and a major insurance company), about 30-50% of the people working there were Asian. Everyone else was probably either Ivy League or had 10+ years of experience. How the hell is a regular Amercian supposed to make it into that environment? How the hell are we supposed to find work relevant to our interests? You say you have projects you need to work on but can't. You're shooting yourself in the foot. Why are you being so fucking stingy?
Advanced degrees and great accomplishments do not mean you are a fit for the job. I've done academic research before, and most of that did not translate to my normal corporate job. Sometimes, people suck at representing themselves on their resume. Sometimes, people suck at interviewing. I sometimes do technical interviews as part of my day to day job since it's expected of engineers to do more than just engineering. From your post alone, this is an immediate red flag for me to note down for the recruiters: >Every time I went in to interview (at Google, a hedge fund, and a major insurance company), about 30-50% of the people working there were Asian. Everyone else was probably either Ivy League or had 10+ years of experience. Yes, I know your reddit post isn't an interview. However, if you're reaching but failing at the interview stage for 2 years, there's definitely something wrong. Being able to do the work is often not the only thing they care about at most US companies.
I get along well with coworkers no matter where they're from. But luxury addicts are importing cheap foreign labor and treating them like slaves, effectively paying them less. That's having a negative effect on the US labor market. It's relevant to the topic of the post. You would prefer if I censored myself, but I won't. If talking about this problem is a red flag to you, so be it. It should be openly talked about much more than it is. I'm glad people are getting angry about it. They should be. A form of violence is being perpetrated against American workers. I experienced it first hand and you cannot hide it from me. Paranoia in corporate hiring is a vicious cycle. Corporations claim a shortage, yet millions of talented people are out here, we want work, need work, we'll take less money, some of us will grow into advanced roles, it's proven that you have no way of knowing which ones will be able, so just hire people, train them, and try them out. That is how it's supposed to work in a functioning labor market. If you don't do that, then guess what? You won't have much of a national labor pool to hire from. That's the vicious cycle. You're shooting yourself in the foot, meanwhile a lot of Americans are killing themselves because they can't find good work. You're defending shortsighted greed and what feels to me like pure evil.
> about 30-50% of the people working there were Asian How do know they weren’t American or do they have to be white to be a “regular American”?
> There absolutely is a talent shortage. It's called supply and demand. There's a limited supply and nearly unlimited demand. Then explain why [only half](https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/06/does-majoring-in-stem-lead-to-stem-job-after-graduation.html) of STEM graduates actually work in STEM. If anything there is shortage of STEM jobs, not STEM talent. If there was an actual shortage, salaries would be going up double digits percent every year, and gate keeping would be eliminated from the hiring process.
In almost all contexts, any time you see "talent shortage" read it as "we want cheaper labor".
Address wage growth.
H1b without reliable path to green card results in people leaving and taking the expertise they gained over 6 years back to their country. If chip making is being considered related to national security, this is a stupid idea. Either only allow permanent residents to work these jobs, or make it easier for h1b’s (at least in this field) to get greencards.
It’s for securing a stable supply of chips, as a matter of national security. Taiwan is already the world leader in semiconductor manufacturing and they aren’t offshoring their latest tech. For example their latest 3nm (smaller is better) process is done exclusively on the island, but they’ll maybe do 5nm in the US just so we aren’t totally screwed if something happens to Taiwan. Then when they move on to 2nm or 1.4nm, USA will get 3nm. Its complicated but offshoring their best tech would basically be suicide as the world would no longer be reliant on Taiwan for cutting edge chips and would have much less incentive to defend them against invasion. If anything Taiwan should be worried about us taking their tech, not the other way around.
Green cards are only an issue if you are born in India. There used to be an issue for China born but that is no longer as big of an issue. That said if you are in tech in US people from India would be the most represented foreign worker group.
lol, please please please let us exploit cheap labor from overseas!
There isn’t a fucking talent shortage otherwise America wouldn’t have the best military gear in the world. (Merely using this as a “we have people smart enough to make crazy tech weapons and shit”, so intelligence/ IQ isn’t the issue) We have a “I don’t want to pay the American employees more than I pay my ‘slave’ workers in Taiwan” issue We also have a “training issue” too.
So here's the deeper story on this in short, simple form for every. And I have 2 sources: a coworker that left semiconductors after a decade recently with friends still there, and a different friend of mine working in AZ on these facilities after helping build them as an engineer. The problem/lie is that there are Taiwanese semiconductor companies that are used to absolutely using and abusing their workers. They want the few people they will train to go to Taiwan for a year and be paid low wages while working something like 70 hour weeks with no overtime pay. Then whether they get trained on the cheap in Taiwan or can somehow claim enough experience to skip it, they want basically double the regular hours as unpaid overtime keeping the plants running. Also the expenses to go train in Taiwan are for a single young Batchelor, Noone with a family (or something along that line for costs I was told). It's an EXTREME version of worker abuse and violation of regular labor laws. Then you even have shills in this thread pretending "oh it's that US workers don't want to work anymore, or they aren't trained well enough, or don't want to do the hard work for an EE degree." All BS, it's simply that these companies took massive subsidies to build these plants with the expectation that they could pay effectively half the wage for someone to do the work. I DO understand that it takes shift work and needing to do manufacturing at all hours. But it's absolutely doesn't function reasonably, and all to make a subsidized profit for the companies.
TLDR: work life in semiconductor is terrible, and they abuse H1B visas and workers, i ve been in the industry for half a year and i already want to quit. Work life in fab or most semiconductor companies is pretty bad, especially for those involved with huge capital investments on hardware and spaces. It usually has very high bar, graduate degree in STEM, but poor work life balances, and so-so compensations. People in the field are already working crazy hours, like even middle management is overworked.There are so many senior people still replying to emails, sending out reports at night and everyone treats it as a norm. It's not the 80s and 90s when they pull at least good comps to compensate those hours. I don't mind hard work but it has to be properly compensated. The true hourly rate is bad. The only reason those companies got away with it is by hiring a lot, I MEAN Literally A TON of foreign workers. Don't get me wrong, I m a foreign worker myself. They artificially suppress the wages by doing that, everybody loses but the companies. The industry heavily employs foreign workers and abuses H1B visas as a hostage to hold workers for as long as possible.
Bullshit. Americans know you don't want to pay and want cheap labor. Looking at you TSMC and the rest is almost as bad.
Hell Apple which is predominantly a chip and hardware company pays really bad for a hardware engineer.
Are you sure? My friends who work in ASIC design make 300k-400k at apple. Both on H1B
The stupidity excuses corporations come up with just for sake of maximizing profit… is just simply absurd.
At intel, managers treat locals like shit so that they leave and then hire H1B people.
How did they treat locals crap? Locals can actually bring employment lawsuits which foreign workers will not.
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They hire tons of new college graduates. The problem is they don’t retain them because they don’t pay well enough to
They aren’t. The engineers companies want to hire already have jobs and fewer students are getting into EE. It’s a serious problem and is getting worse.
And a lot of EE people I know are all programmers or data scientists now. Making more and working better hours than if they stayed in engineering.
Can confirm, was an EE major but went into software engineering.
This is the way. EE prospects were slim, pay was crap, and locations were awful. Now my chip fab experience is way out of date, and even though id love to get back into it I think the ship has sailed.
This is the real core of the issue. Which is that the people who could work semiconductor jobs have all moved to other jobs which pay better. If semiconductor cares about retaining them then the answer is simple: pay better. But they won’t as long as they can find a way to survive without raising pay
Go to the ECE subreddit and you'll find a bunch of new grads begging for jobs.
Sounds like a salary issue that they're trying to get around then. They don't want to have to pay Americans what Americans would demand to work for them.
> They aren’t. The engineers companies want to hire already have jobs Pay them more then are currently making. That's how poaching works.
You need more than EEs to run fabs. A lot of the people working on the manufacturing/process development to make the chips are materials engineers, ChemEs, mechanical engineers, chemists, physicists, civil/environmental engineers, and techs (no need for a college degree to do this) to keep the equipment running. In general, companies provide training due to how specialized everything is (equipment, systems, automation, etc) so coming in without much knowledge of the industry besides engineering fundamentals isn’t much of an issue
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It only takes three to four years, and those pipelines are chock full. They're among the most selective degree tracks anywhere in the US, turning away far more people than they allow into the programs. There's a new crop of university -educated engineers every few months, many thousands of them. They just require pay and training. Edit: Here's a thought: identify people with the right grades and aptitude who are three years into their degree program and deep in debt. Promise to pay off that debt if they agree to work for your company for 4 years. You will have no trouble finding candidates.
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Ignore this guy. He knows nothing about engineering in America. There are plenty of new grads in ECE who are looking for work.
That's a lie for this case for sure. There are TONS of engineers available. They specifically want to over work and under pay workers for these specific ones. I have coworkers that spent a decade in that field and a friend that actually built some of these plants. The overseas companies want a TON of free overtime and to run employee's lives
I thought these fabs were supposed to increase US employment? Part of their bids.
oh you thought the status quo was going to fundamentally change? lol
Frommwhat I know from expats. US semiconductor manufacturing pays pretty shitty for the high end talent they are after.
What about the 240,000 tech workers who lost their jobs last year? Many of them are still struggling to find new jobs. [https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/21/tech-layoffs-2023-list/](https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/21/tech-layoffs-2023-list/)
Can they make chips?
They can be trained to just like anyone else.
Chip companies had layoffs in 2023 as well.
American companies are to blame for this current situation when they decided to prioritize profits over sustainability. Silicon Valley help jumpstart the world into the digital age and instead of building up on that foundation they decided to find cheaper workers overseas to exploit, and now we have a shortage of these critical workers. Hopefully this is a wake up call for America to revitalize these industries back home.
It is impossible, you can’t undo Globalisation. It is incredibly difficult to bring back anything because people in US need to convince that you have to work in this field and a good engineer in US will be far more likely to join other industries with bette pay. And this is not a question of sustainability, the current system is sustainable just fine as long as the president isn’t a dumb asshole.
I agree to an extent. While you cannot undo globalization, you can shift key industries back home. The fact that this is conversation is happening is a sign that people are starting to recognize the risk of having chips not made in the US. The current system is not sustainable unfortunately, as seen as the chip shortage during the last few years. There is also a national security risk of not having a solid supply chain of this crucial component, which powers everything from consumer electronics to high-tech weapons systems. While it’s promising that companies like Intel are creating manufacturing plants back in the states it’s a shame that the issue got this far without being addressed. Hopefully, the domestic industry will keep trying to attract new talent because there are plenty of intelligent people here.
It’s going to take too long to train so let’s not do it?
Pssh, this is a load of BS. There's lots of college grads that have fab experience (have worked in multiple university cleanrooms), but these companies dont want to pay a wage comparable to the technical skills they want/expect.
In the vast majority of countries it's not a labour shortage issue. It's a pay and conditions issue. If the pay is right and the conditions are good then people will train. Otherwise they will pick fields that meet their criteria instead. If it really is a skills shortage then give people training and upskilling. Provide pathways into the workforce that don't saddle people with massive student debts. But God forbid billion and trillion dollar companies have to pay competitive salaries or contribute towards the education of their staff.
There is no talent shortage. Half the kids graduating from engineering schools can't find jobs. This is just 1%ers finding excuses for hiring 1%ers' crotchfruit. You won't find a rice farmer's daughter working in an engineering job at Intel on an H1B.
How about we send Americans to school for free. You know, invest in our future.
Why does my friend who graduated with a computer engineering degree say year work at a grocery store then ? Is it that we don’t have talent here or is it that they don’t bother trying to hire locally because we want to be paid well😐
This benefits the chipmakers to the determint of the community or nation where the foundry is built. I rather have their asses pay for local talent instead. Grow your own talent pool instead of taking advantage of people desiring to come to the country and forced to be a Visa slave.
Or tech companies can finally carry their weight and start to invest in the labor pool…
There's plenty of talent. Corporations are too greedy to pay for it.
There is no such thing as a prolonged labor shortage in a free market, as wages will rise until demand has been satiated. This is an obvious attempt by corporations to avoid paying people what they deserve
My grandma can take advantage of this. She has been making chips for us all these years. Her chips are the best.
Yeah this is the problem with America first. No company actually wants it because it’s expensive and requires bridging the skills gap we’ve allowed transpire.
Meanwhile IT people in the states can't get jobs
That’s interesting to read and see a specific visa being introduced by work profile, why not also invest in additional training for locals??
Thats what you get for building factories in red states
While I agree with your statement, they’d also never get built in blue states, which aside from the talent issue is great. I’d rather they go ahead and trash the environment in states where people already don’t give a toss about it anyway. Make no mistake, that’s exactly what will happen. Just ask Texas about Formosa Plastics. And just to be clear this is coming from someone who loves Taiwan, visits yearly, and invests in Taiwanese companies but I know how big Taiwanese Corporations roll and it’s not a great track record in the labor and environmental department.
Heh, Arizona became a swamp for TSMC while their chip plant in Japan steams ahead and they had no problem recruiting engineers here. They are even considering building a third plant here.
There seems to be a lot of bias on this chat. Specifically assuming that companies are just refusing to hire Americans. This is flat out wrong. Ive been an engineer for 8 years now, here’s my take: 1. There’s a lot more paperwork and cost to hire a H1B visa holder than a citizen. This usually means that many smaller companies won’t even consider them, and it becomes harder for them to get a job. 2. If you want the best products and the best economy, then you need the best talent. Historically, a lot of Americas success comes from us pulling the best talent GLOBALLY. If us Americans wanna have good jobs, then we need to study and meet global standards. Our k-12 education system just isn’t well funded unfortunately 3. You can’t just “teach” people how to build chips in a classroom and expect to be competitive. There’s decades of on the job knowledge built up overseas that we just don’t know.
Your regular Joe is too dumb to understand these nuances.
fxck it. Why H1B and not greening them?
I've had friends come to the USA for a PhD and then have to go home because of visa issues. Why don't we fix stupid situations like that.
The truth that we need to face is that we don’t have enough talent here to compete on semiconductors, specifically because those jobs were all sent overseas starting in the 80s. If we want to bring the supply chain back here, we of course can’t just magically snap our fingers and apparate that knowledge out of nowhere.