Brutal corporate culture getting in the way of TSMC hiring 4500 people in AZ plant

How bad could it be? I’ll fill out an application and report back in a couple of months.

1. Those Asian companies are complete assholes to all their employees
2. There's probably a compressed time line given the fact that China is going to move on Taiwan in the near future

TSMC also has very stiff competition in the area including Intel which has six chip plants in the Phoenix suburbs.

From a September 25, 2021 Reuters article:

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Sept 24 (Reuters) - Intel Corp (INTC.O) on Friday broke ground on two new factories in Arizona as part of its turnaround plan to become a major manufacturer of chips for outside customers.

The $20 billion plants - dubbed Fab 52 and Fab 62 - will bring the total number of Intel factories at its campus in Chandler, Arizona, to six. They will house Intel's most advanced chipmaking technology and play a central role in the Santa Clara, California-based company's effort to regain its lead in making the smallest, fastest chips by 2025, after having fallen behind rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (2330.TW).

The new Arizona plants will also be the first Intel has built from the ground up with space reserved for outside customers. Intel has long made its own chips, but its turnaround plan calls for taking on work for outsiders such as Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.O) Amazon.com's (AMZN.O) cloud unit, as well as deepening its manufacturing relationship with the U.S. military.

"We want to have more resilience to the supply chain," Intel Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger, who earlier in the week attended a White House meeting on the global chip shortage, told Reuters in an interview. "As the only company on U.S. soil that can do the most advanced lithography processes in the world, we are going to step up in a big way."

Gelsinger said it was too early to say how much of the new plants' capacity would be reserved for outside customers. He said the plants would produce "thousands" of wafers per week.

Wafers are the silicon discs on which chips are made, and each can hold hundreds or even thousands of chips.

Intel rival TSMC has also purchased land to build its first U.S. campus in Phoenix, not far from Intel's location, where TSMC plans up to six chip factories, Reuters previously reported.

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“Our salary is only [for] 10 hours [a day], [but] we don’t leave until we’re done. And we’ve never been willing to report it,” a member of a private 85,000-person Facebook group for current and former employees of TSMC in Taiwan wrote in February.

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Adding to the recruiting challenge is TSMC’s demand that new U.S.-based engineering and technician hires ship off to Taiwan for months of training and cultural exposure.

Since April 2021, TSMC has sent 600 newly hired U.S. engineers to Taiwan. “They are now returning to Arizona armed with…the most advanced semiconductor technology knowledge,” a company spokesperson told Fortune.

The overseas training component, which requires U.S. staff to spend anywhere from 12 to 18 months in Taiwan, is uncommon among its rivals in the U.S., even foreign-headquartered firms, says Justin Kinsey, president of SBT Industries, a boutique semiconductor recruitment firm.

Hiring the first batch of engineers and technicians to train in Taiwan was a “heck of a recruiting challenge,” says the Arizona-based CEO. “We’d send 30 jobs [to 30 qualified candidates] and get maybe one or two people to bite,” he said. Recruiters say that some younger engineers viewed TSMC’s overseas training as an all-expenses-paid trip to Taiwan to train on the world’s most sophisticated chipmaking tools. But many candidates were unwilling to go to Taiwan because of the strain it would impose on their families. Some worried about catching COVID-19 and the territory’s geopolitical tensions with China, while others simply didn’t have passports.

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Did they not watch the 80s movie Gung Ho?

Sounds more to me like a lot of positioning to make TSMC look bad before shite meets fan back home.

For now, TSMC is still in the drivers seat and can keep pushing the labor market this way. For many years now, TSMC has been keeping tight quarters on manufacturing processes and overall tech advancements in the chip making world. And they know it.

It’s why, for now, they’re not overly scared about intel, etc. breaking ground on new manufacturing plants. They’re not as good as TSMC. Not even close.

Time will ultimately change that.

They are smart enough to build near the border so they’ll have a constant supply of incoming illegals to staff their sweat shop.

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Did they not watch the 80s movie Gung Ho?

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Is a bullfrogs arse watertight?