> komali2 on March 26, 2019 | parent | un‑favorite | on: Google will open a new office complex and add hund...
>>Last year, the project trained about 5,000 students in AI technology and 50,000 digital marketers.
>I feel like Taiwan represents a talent opportunity like no other. I dream of starting an engineering company there that is literally a clone of some upcoming business model, and doing nothing but capping the work week at 40 hours and guaranteeing 4 weeks vacation. I could snipe the best talent on hand in the country, which is at the very least equal to some of the best silicon valley has to offer, at nearly half the rates. Lord forbid we target foreign contracts and the company can pay near US rates. I'd pilfer everyone's engineering department ;)
>Overworked, underpaid, extremely competent was my experience of Taiwanese engineering. Google is good to step up in Taiwan - I believe it will pay dividends for them. I wonder what the Google work culture and salaries are like for their Taipei 101 office engineers? Last I checked it was about 2,000$/month for entry level.
Yeah, but the key difference is that Taiwan is under direct threat from China. Mr. Xi openly said that he will take back Taiwan by force if necessary. Weakening the Taiwan semiconductor industry is certainly part of this playbook, too.
Imagine if the US would consider India to be part of its territory
and asking for a "re-unification". I am sure that in this case India would try to prevent key software engineers from leaving, too. Actually, I am surprised that Taiwan has done so little so far.
TSMC pays very well compared to other companies in the same market. I'm guessing you are hearing from people who've never worked for UMC or PowerChip!
Of course, the other fun fact: ANY TSMC employees who went to China will never get jobs in Hsinchu et al. ever again. One-way decision only. Burned bridge.
China is offering triple the salary to those people.It's impossible to keep up for a country as small as Taiwan.
The end goal for China is not to immediately outcompete TSMC but make Taiwan beg to be integrated into China.
The Chinese companies are owned or funded by the government, they don't have to worry about profit. It is geopolitical economic warfare. A company cannot compete against that without government help.
capitalism does not work any more since we have unlimited money supply, efficiency is not an issue any more. What you are suggesting is that to let the market work, which is a very conservative idea now.
But, that's now how capitalism works. Capitalism is workers must compete for jobs, services and goods. Capitalism for companies and rich are how to buy off the right people and laws to prevent competition.
I remember in business school how it drilled into us that there are only two important numbers in a company. The price of your product, and the cost of your product. "You can only dictate your cost of your product because your market dictates what you can sell it for." Every time I hear things like "we can't find enough people" or "yeah, but then we'll just pass it along in our cost to customers," I know how much we don't have capitalism.
A surprisingly silly move from an otherwise intelligent country.
* Taiwanese prosecutors alleged last month that China's Bitmain Technologies, the world's leading cryptocurrency mining chip developer, illegally lured more than 100 engineers in Taiwan to boost its artificial intelligence prowess.*
Ah yes, the illegal “offering money in exchange for services rendered” offense.
That seems like it's ignoring some other important circumstances, like a month ago, when their neighbor was staging military drills and threatening their existence if they don't agree to be annexed? https://www.usnews.com/news/world-report/articles/2021-04-09...
You see what has happened in Hong Kong. This is a bit more nuanced than an issue of pay.
When market conditions drive up the price of labor, the owners of large companies will:
1. legally or illegally bring in (or lobby the government to allow) an immigrant workforce to increase labor supply and drive down wages (e.g. us low skilled labor market)
2. collude with other companies not to compete over workers (e.g. tech industry anti-trust action from a few years ago)
3. pass laws against compensation reaching market levels (e.g. US during wwii, Taiwan today)
4. use forced labor (e.g. China today, US 1800's)
I don't like it anymore than you do, but it's not new, and I wouldn't call it "silly"
This is meaningless. Taiwanese can still access job posting sites or be contacted by recruiters from Mainland China. There's no language barrier and they can simply buy a flight ticket to Shanghai and start working wherever they want with full Chinese citizenship.
The brain drain is serious and I don't see how it can be solved unless Taiwan can offer competitive salaries against first-tier cities in the mainland, 10% of Taiwanese population is now living and working in the mainland.
Economic interdependence is a deterrent to war. No country's government can easily handle recessions, but a depression in China would severely jeopardize the Faustian bargain the CCP has given to the citizens of PRC: forfeit your liberties and you are guaranteed prosperity.
China is Taiwan's largest trading partner. Taiwan is China's 6th largest trading partner, but the total trade of Taiwan is worth more than 1/3 of China's total trade with America. That is an extraordinary amount for a country almost 14 times smaller than the United States.
If trade is reduced between the two countries, it could lessen the economic damage taken by the PRC if it were to initiate an invasion, or even increase hybrid and gray-area warfare. This would mean such actions would constitute less political risk for the CCP.
The alternative is that China will continue to salami slice and break every marginal norm they can to choke and bleed out the (ideological) competition.
Taiwan has to worry about large scale invasion but they also have to worry about China using size, lack of attention to the "small stuff" and inertia to much the same effect.
On the other hand, an increase in trade gives China (the bigger partner) more leverage to pressure Taiwan using economic measures. Suppose 60% of all campaign political contributions came from China's puppet companies in Taiwan. Or if companies that lobby against China's interests suddenly (or gradually) find themselves cut off from the Chinese market, while large, politically-connected Chinese companies start undercutting them in the Taiwanese market.
Only ban recruiters? Amateurs. South Korea used to charge those moving employees with industrial espionage. (Maybe it still does, but at least I didn't hear about these "incidents" in recent years, so I'm cautiously hopeful.)
1. TSMC pay its employees well compare to other companies in Taiwan. they are also know for paying big yearly bonus.
2. this news is interesting. i'm guessing we have reach to the point where Taiwan have to use this tactic to prevent brain drain. it also shown us how aggressive China is to make Made in China 2025, a reality. semis chip is the biggest China import.
3. there are several news about China poaching TSMC employees before. this is really going to test TSMC, from what i understand their high end node production process is componentized and not one person know the whole process from start to end. we'll see if that is true.
Yeah , if the Taiwanese government don’t want their engineers to go to China then they should be payed more. Or we could , here in the US start a program to attract talent from Taiwan , give them a green card or something.
I guess current TSMC employees can not leverage other job offers (most of them are from mainland China) to increase their salaries anymore. Essentially, the government is helping TSMC to keep the labor cost low.
Not a good take. TSMC is known for paying well above average in the industry, as well as having an internal culture of pretty fierce loyalty. On top of that, fab is very highly automated. Even though you need a lot of very smart engineers, head count is still very low compared to the value the fab creates. Suppressing labor prices is pretty low down the list of priorities for this industry. Costs are utterly dominated by capital costs to build a new generation of your fab every 2 years.
This seems odd, but it's also unreasonable that a small economy would be able to defend itself from competition from a large state actor.
In 'free trade' deals, the big fear is you 'open up' to competition while the other nation uses massive government money to gut your industry, wipe you out and take over. That's why the legal language on Free Trade surrounds government intervention and subsidies.
China is huge and this is a 'primary strategic concern' for them, they will pay anything for the individuals they need, and of course, to give Taiwan a black eye.
This is literally a form of economic warfare we are seeing with a large country trying to wipe out a strategic industry in a smaller country.
So the action by Taiwan is understandable, even if it seems odd to use in the West.
Believe it or not, TSMC owns and operates a fab in Mainland China, a 28nm one. So I imagine it posts quite a bit of job posting in China. It has recently applied for fab expansion in China, asking for some of that sweet, sweet free money CCP is doling out.
Competing with China seems like a pretty low bar:
imagine google's ban happy AI except that instead of banning you it takes your passport, cuts of government services, and potentially throws you in prison to have your organs harvested.
If you're actually losing employees to that you have a serious moral/retention/communication/pay problem.
[+] [-] Apocryphon|4 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19492995
> komali2 on March 26, 2019 | parent | un‑favorite | on: Google will open a new office complex and add hund...
>>Last year, the project trained about 5,000 students in AI technology and 50,000 digital marketers.
>I feel like Taiwan represents a talent opportunity like no other. I dream of starting an engineering company there that is literally a clone of some upcoming business model, and doing nothing but capping the work week at 40 hours and guaranteeing 4 weeks vacation. I could snipe the best talent on hand in the country, which is at the very least equal to some of the best silicon valley has to offer, at nearly half the rates. Lord forbid we target foreign contracts and the company can pay near US rates. I'd pilfer everyone's engineering department ;)
>Overworked, underpaid, extremely competent was my experience of Taiwanese engineering. Google is good to step up in Taiwan - I believe it will pay dividends for them. I wonder what the Google work culture and salaries are like for their Taipei 101 office engineers? Last I checked it was about 2,000$/month for entry level.
[+] [-] belval|4 years ago|reply
Say India did the same for software engineers leaving for the US, we'd see it as government overreach.
[+] [-] ChemSpider|4 years ago|reply
Imagine if the US would consider India to be part of its territory and asking for a "re-unification". I am sure that in this case India would try to prevent key software engineers from leaving, too. Actually, I am surprised that Taiwan has done so little so far.
[+] [-] xyzzy21|4 years ago|reply
Of course, the other fun fact: ANY TSMC employees who went to China will never get jobs in Hsinchu et al. ever again. One-way decision only. Burned bridge.
[+] [-] sularin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bosswipe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] powerapple|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cdumler|4 years ago|reply
I remember in business school how it drilled into us that there are only two important numbers in a company. The price of your product, and the cost of your product. "You can only dictate your cost of your product because your market dictates what you can sell it for." Every time I hear things like "we can't find enough people" or "yeah, but then we'll just pass it along in our cost to customers," I know how much we don't have capitalism.
[+] [-] sillysaurusx|4 years ago|reply
* Taiwanese prosecutors alleged last month that China's Bitmain Technologies, the world's leading cryptocurrency mining chip developer, illegally lured more than 100 engineers in Taiwan to boost its artificial intelligence prowess.*
Ah yes, the illegal “offering money in exchange for services rendered” offense.
[+] [-] throwaway5752|4 years ago|reply
You see what has happened in Hong Kong. This is a bit more nuanced than an issue of pay.
[+] [-] iso8859-1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qshaman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xyzzy21|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fallingknife|4 years ago|reply
1. legally or illegally bring in (or lobby the government to allow) an immigrant workforce to increase labor supply and drive down wages (e.g. us low skilled labor market)
2. collude with other companies not to compete over workers (e.g. tech industry anti-trust action from a few years ago)
3. pass laws against compensation reaching market levels (e.g. US during wwii, Taiwan today)
4. use forced labor (e.g. China today, US 1800's)
I don't like it anymore than you do, but it's not new, and I wouldn't call it "silly"
[+] [-] zachguo|4 years ago|reply
The brain drain is serious and I don't see how it can be solved unless Taiwan can offer competitive salaries against first-tier cities in the mainland, 10% of Taiwanese population is now living and working in the mainland.
[+] [-] necrotic_comp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ipnon|4 years ago|reply
China is Taiwan's largest trading partner. Taiwan is China's 6th largest trading partner, but the total trade of Taiwan is worth more than 1/3 of China's total trade with America. That is an extraordinary amount for a country almost 14 times smaller than the United States.
If trade is reduced between the two countries, it could lessen the economic damage taken by the PRC if it were to initiate an invasion, or even increase hybrid and gray-area warfare. This would mean such actions would constitute less political risk for the CCP.
[+] [-] elefanten|4 years ago|reply
Taiwan has to worry about large scale invasion but they also have to worry about China using size, lack of attention to the "small stuff" and inertia to much the same effect.
[+] [-] MikeUt|4 years ago|reply
You don't need war to invade.
[+] [-] yongjik|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cigaser|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fatjokes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danuker|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MangoCoffee|4 years ago|reply
2. this news is interesting. i'm guessing we have reach to the point where Taiwan have to use this tactic to prevent brain drain. it also shown us how aggressive China is to make Made in China 2025, a reality. semis chip is the biggest China import.
3. there are several news about China poaching TSMC employees before. this is really going to test TSMC, from what i understand their high end node production process is componentized and not one person know the whole process from start to end. we'll see if that is true.
[+] [-] qshaman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlduan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonwatkinspdx|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlduan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jollybean|4 years ago|reply
In 'free trade' deals, the big fear is you 'open up' to competition while the other nation uses massive government money to gut your industry, wipe you out and take over. That's why the legal language on Free Trade surrounds government intervention and subsidies.
China is huge and this is a 'primary strategic concern' for them, they will pay anything for the individuals they need, and of course, to give Taiwan a black eye.
This is literally a form of economic warfare we are seeing with a large country trying to wipe out a strategic industry in a smaller country.
So the action by Taiwan is understandable, even if it seems odd to use in the West.
[+] [-] Leary|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] east2west|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xyzzy21|4 years ago|reply
2. Any person who left TSMC for SMIC is blacklisted now. They'll never work in Hsinchu et al. again.
[+] [-] seriousblap|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daodedickinson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shadonototro|4 years ago|reply
that'll happen to singapore soon
[+] [-] ricksunny|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swiley|4 years ago|reply
If you're actually losing employees to that you have a serious moral/retention/communication/pay problem.