Software salaries have to fall a lot more to keep semiconductor experts from doing lateral moves. I have an EE PhD, concentration semiconductors, and worked in the industry for a while, and a decade out my entire group of semiconductor PhD friends has now moved onto data science, ML, firmware, etc.
IMO let's just let in all skilled workers as permanent residents in a quick process. Brain drain our geopolitical foes by just being a better place to live and work. After that, extend it to everybody else who wants to immigrate. Put a few guardrails on it for criminal records and ensuring they have a place to live and work and whatever else. But let's just let everyone who wants to work in the US and can find a job do it.
Question for those closer to fabrication. What workers are we talking about here?<p>The image in my mind is of sealed rooms containing machines that move wafers around. Lots of machinery, few to zero people running the machines. Since what you want is repeatability and reliability, and we've worked out how to make machines do that.<p>I can see said machines having maintenance schedules, where occasionally you need to turn them off and go and replace parts. Some of that is probably done by people, some by automated cycles.<p>Are the workers needed people to carefully read maintenance manuals for machines built by someone else? Engineers to design and build new bespoke machinery (seems unlikely if these are copies of existing labs)?<p>Fundamentally, how many skilled people that are going to be difficult to find does a state of the art semiconductor fab need. If we're talking six per lab, that's a very different problem to six thousand.<p>(The article talks about technicians, says the US is missing about 60 thousand of them, and that it's a two year community college level of skill with some ideas for reducing that further. That sounds like a problem on the same tier as finding people to work in semi-automated amazon warehouses, i.e. basically fine)
I worked in Government R&D microdevice fab for years and it was a lot of fun but hard work. What made it fun is always working on something new and challenging (inventing new processes), but in a relatively low stress environment with a lot of other absolutely brilliant people (like I was dumbest person in the room, all the time, every time).<p>I would not consider working in a production fab for the going salaries these days... mostly boring work, on-call all the time, in bunny suit most of the day, bean-counters controlling all of the major decisions. Screw that... life is too short and we all die at the end.
So...did they not think of this before they started building the factories, or did they just think the employees with the required skills would magically appear?
TSMC is already having issues in Arizona as the local air-conditioning union wants them to employ locals but they need specialists from overseas and not folks who only know about office and home HVAC systems.<p>Where are the tradeschools in the US ???.
The average age of a plumber/joinery tradesman ???.
“Immigrants account for about 40% of highly skilled workers in America’s semiconductor industry.”<p>Well that’s not going to work. Maybe we should have a Tech Draft.
I think the low hanging fruit is to provoke China to attack Taiwan and then grab the talents from East Asia.<p>Not joke, and I'm seeing this happening.
> America is building factories, but can it find the workers to operate them? With the jobless rate near a five-decade low, firms are already struggling to find staff.<p>Classic case of supply and demand. If there is a high demand for workers and a low supply, then you need to pay higher salaries to attract them. If you can't, then go out of business. This is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. If the US gov. wants these chip factories badly enough then they can help subsidize paying higher wages. In doing so, they should have the right to audit, e.g. ensure the C-suites are not taking an unreasonably large paycheck.
Does anyone else find it interesting that the USA seems to be doing this for ideological and political reasons more than just economics?<p>I'm not sure this is going to go well for the simple reason that so far, it seems Taiwan, Korean and China will still be pumping out cheaper chips and more of them which will make this plan financially unviable, which really seems to go against everything the USA stands for...<p>Personally I think it's a good thing, but I'm not sure who is going to pay for it.
I am sure anyone who work in STEM can attest: immigrants do a lot of the work. Look to your left and look to your right of your work desk, chances are there is an immigrant in one of the directions you look.<p>And yet many of those immigrants are on borrowed time. One layoff and they risk losing decades of their life and deported back home. That kind of treatment isn't fair. Especially when these are highly productive, extremely capable, and very educated demographics. They are the ideal and model citizens for any kind of country. Yet they are treated like disposables.<p>What reasons are there to decline a visa to a PhD employed in a critical industry? Because they were born in a country with a visa backlog of 10 years?