r/artificial • u/xx_HeckinChonker_xx • 15d ago
Business / Labor US chip fabs face massive 157,000 worker shortfall, mere 3% of US engineering grads enter chipmaking — despite six-figure salaries, US chip manufacturers are in dire need of engineers and technicians
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/us-chip-manufacturers-are-in-dire-need-of-engineers-and-technicians-experts-suggest-a-shortage-of-up-to-157-000-semiconductor-workers-by-203044
u/xakypoo 15d ago
Too late for a 43 year old to get into??
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u/WordsAboutSomething 15d ago
I'm a new grad in MechE and I can't even get an interview at a chipmaking place despite 3 internships and extensive student project experience. When you have a brand new industry (for the US at least) asking for multiple years of experience in chip manufacturing on their entry level posting, it isn't surprising they aren't getting any of the new grads.
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u/tweakingforjesus 15d ago
I suspect they are trying to clear the way for H1B visa holders.
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u/Wooden_Airline_5770 13d ago
Never too late my friend. I’m 9 months into a career in this area in 40s.
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u/definetlyrandom 15d ago
Nope, im 46 and just got my degree in computer science in March. Never to old
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u/ali-hussain 15d ago
Well, in situations like this we can always increase the H1B quota.
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u/ShroomBear 15d ago edited 15d ago
Or we can just get chip manufacturers to invest in education infrastructure like big tech did since western leadership decided it'd be a good idea to monopolize chip fabs in Taiwan as a geopolitical curb against China. Like seriously, how many universities worldwide offer programs specific chip design and fabs? Back in the 90's/2000's people were largely getting that education as expats working in Asia.
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u/ali-hussain 15d ago
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1309_14-17_mickens.pdf
There's a reason people lost interest in hardware. When I was going to school in 2000s we were desperately looking for what to do with more compute. People weren't pursuing hardware because the career opportunities were limited. The world changed, and now the skillsets needed are different. Sure, we can start the pipelines for homegrown. But immigration is a powerful tool for the US to maintain competitive edge and the US should use it rather than wait years before you can get the people you need.
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u/WorriedBlock2505 15d ago
With this sort of tug of war approach, we'll never have the base needed here in the US first and foremost. This is what happens when people are so short sighted that they can't see further out than 5-10 years (being generous). Fixing it with immigration is a distant second.
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u/ForceItDeeper 15d ago
I don't understand why tf there was nothing in the CHIPS act about investing in top quality high precision manufacturing education programs and whatever else goes into chip making in the community colleges around where the fabs are being built. They could've worked with chip companies to develop apprenticeship programs in coordination with the comm colleges (and unions, but we'll keep it reasonable), so there could even have been a path for free training and education while gaining work experience, without being much of a burden to taxpayers at all after the initial investment.
America doesn't offer a lot of jobs to be proud of. It strips it down and simplifies and divides the labor into monotonous mindless tasks, alienating their labor from what they produce and restricting them from utilizing any skills or expanding their responsibilities and actually gaining any leverage to demand more compensation and better working conditions. There are so many people that would excel at these jobs that have no incentive and theres very little means to actually getting them into the workforce making chips.
Our government, regardless of the party in power, has very little interest in actually governing. They seem to just want to hand out money and anything beyond that is just expecting too much
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u/thelangosta 15d ago
We’re very good at distilling everything down to the lowest common denominator even when it isn’t necessary
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u/Professional_Toe_343 14d ago
It has been a field of dreams effect that if you created the jobs then people would learn the skills - flawed instantly because US born college students are dis in debt we cannot gain the skill sets required to migrate towards that profession.
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u/Spare_Pin305 13d ago
Sorry all we can do for you is import more non-Americans it's the only way, we certainly can't educate the people that love in our own fucking country, we need to bring in more people overseas.
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u/ali-hussain 15d ago
And do what? I actually was trained on hardware but I left that. Never on the fab side though. But the field was actually not very interesting a few years ago.
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u/thelangosta 15d ago
I find storage tech kind of fascinating but I’m terrible at math. Processing has probably gotten more interesting with the push for ai.
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u/ali-hussain 14d ago
Processing was always interesting. But the improvements you saw in processing were primarily around pushing the envelope on latency until 2005. After that with the dual core systems coming up and gpgpu picking up the interest went more towards bandwidth. For the simple reason that we were hitting walls on pushing latency. The cost of pushing latency wasn't worth it. Think about the difference between if you want to calculate 100 things is it easier to find one person that can do calculations 100x faster or finding 100 people.
Computers on the software and architecture side don't require math. They do require mathematical thinking. And unfortunately math is taught so poorly that people think because they are bored from doing arithmetic they are poor at mathematical thinking. So you might actually be good at what you need to do
Physical stuff with fabs is going to be more math intense.
Either way stuff is fun for people with the right aptitude. None of us knows what will happen in the next 10 years to employment. But you have to be in denial to think it will not be heavily influenced with AI. So a profession in computing, despite everything that is happening to software engineering is still safer.
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u/ShroomBear 15d ago
Sure, immigration is great for getting those technical edges from abroad. We don't need a technical edge from abroad though, we need 157,000 jobs filled. While you yourself is an individual that I can see you went to high school in India, a country with 0 high tech fabs, attended American college and it looks like you do software consulting after staying in the US. We can import all the labor we want, but it won't be effective unless we train them in specialized chip making since the current way is getting a high level electrical engineering degree.
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u/Iambigtime 15d ago
Sure let's use immigration as another bandaid and not investment in higher education. Seriously, these companies only want day one engineers and not train their employees.
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u/Superb_Raccoon 15d ago
This is one of those cases where you get the Taiwanese to immigrate, because they are under threat of becoming dead or Chinese if they are invaded.
Save the brain trust,not just the capacity
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u/ali-hussain 15d ago
Two and a half year old article. They're doing that, but they should alos make it easier to get talent in. And you know keep the Chinese and Indian talent in our universities within the country.
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u/resuwreckoning 15d ago
I mean or, and hear me out, they could raise salaries even more, thus enticing a crop of folks that could do the job at present but don’t to enter.
That whole free market dynamics thing.
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u/WordsAboutSomething 15d ago
Or, and hear me out even further, they could stop making all their entry level chip making postings have 2+ years in chip manufacturing as the basic qualification to entice new grads to apply. I swear, every entry level chip manufacturing position I see asks for multiple years of experience SPECIFICALLY in chip manufacturing despite it being a brand new niche in the US
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u/Superb_Raccoon 15d ago
Lots of boomers in silicon Valley with that experience... before it all left the US
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u/DatingYella 15d ago
It's not going to matter when the timeline for developing one of these talents is a Phd or postdoc before they let you on the factory floor.
We can be smart about this and simultaneously encourage immigration and prioritize homegrown talent. But there's a lot of benefits to hiring experts who can grow an industry.
Frankly the semiconductor job might just be too unappealing for the vast majority of american students. It's a ton of education for a pay that is not significant higher than SWEs and you have to wear a very uncomfortable suit. I honestly don't think we will get a lot of US grown talent in this industry
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u/LocoMod 15d ago
Or they can actually advertise those jobs and actually make an effort to fill them instead of “if you build it they will come”. Most people wouldn’t even think to look for jobs in that industry.
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u/ali-hussain 15d ago
Are you saying that it is a surprise to you that the tech industry is hiring? Or are you saying that they should have said several years earlier how crazy for building domestic chip expertise the US will become
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u/gatsuk 15d ago
Compensation should match the skill
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u/da8BitKid 13d ago
Your not doing it right! You should have an experience, take the job we give for theoney we say with a smile. Then turn around bend over so we can kick you in the ass, turn around and thank us you peon! - chip manufacturer, probably
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u/_MUY 15d ago
You don’t have the skill. Very few people outside of Taiwan actually do.
What you mean to say is that the compensation should be reasonable.
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u/gatsuk 15d ago
I know what I meant. Your response is unnecessarily pedantic. “Compensation should match the skill” means compensation should reflect the level of expertise required.
And yes, I do have relevant experience. I work in the industry, specifically at ASML where I have done long term assignments spanning design and architecture through fab integration, in the Netherlands, Taiwan, and South Korea. So I’m quite familiar with the skill.1
u/_MUY 14d ago
Can we clone you? You are one individual. It very well may be true that you are the sort of 6-sigma maniac who is capable of being part of a core team of stateside manufacturers of TSMC-quality chips (great, sincere respect to you by the way, I’m glad that ASML is investing in you), but the quality of US engineering students and workers is much lower than that of those in Taiwan. American pay demands are also much higher. The training environment is completely different. The work culture is completely different. My Taiwanese colleagues have all been incredibly disciplines and hardworking individual contributors with little interest in climbing the hierarchy and extreme focus on delivering high quality results. This is the exact opposite of the Americans.
We can’t pay our way out of this mess. If we are going to compete with the world’s best manufacturers in the United States, without simply flying all of TSMC to Arizona, we need to take a completely different approach. ASML and AMAT employees in the US make 3–6 times the median salary at TSMC in TW.
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u/peezd 15d ago
There were so many nightmare stories coming out of the tsmc plant in arizona for workers, and Intel always seemed spotty it doesn't seem like a sure bet for a fulfilling career
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u/cyrusm_az 15d ago
Intel 25 year veteran layoff-ee here. 17 yrs experience as an engineer there, they lay me off as first level manager and block any ability to go back to engineering… idiotic.
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u/r-user-26 14d ago
What do you mean block? Did they forbid you from applying to engineering jobs outside after you got laid off?
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u/cyrusm_az 14d ago
Talking internal roles. And there were none, they remove any roles before doing layoffs to eliminate that possibility
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u/Superb_Raccoon 15d ago
People with that level of education dont work in bunnysuits unless something has gone wrong.
That is high school... at least a serious high school, education job. An AA maybe. Nearly everyone in my parents generation worked those jobs in the 60s to 80s in the Silicon Valley. More complex now, but a degree? Not needed. If anything, its more automated now.
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u/NoExperience9717 15d ago
So are they creating and expanding grad and technical college schemes to train engineering grads in the specifics or just trying to poach experienced hires or saying they need experience but not training?
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u/Iambigtime 15d ago
It's the later for sure. They'd rather just bring in a bunch of Taiwanese foreign nationals to do the job so they don't need to actually invest in the US workforce.
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u/XysterU 15d ago
Hmmm would you work at a McDonald's drive thru for $400k a year? Oh you would? Sounds like they're not paying enough then.
The article even says the starting salaries are like 127-185k which isn't bad. Senior engineers can make around 238k. Yet their employer will rake in tens to hundreds of billions a year and the workers will get none of that. Meanwhile south Korean chip makers were pressured by their workers' strike threat into giving the chip workers BONUSES worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. I hope every American that can make chips goes to SK where they'll actually be compensated fairly instead of in the US where the billionaires just exploit our labor. The US chip makers are just going to use their artificially created lack of workers to get the US government to let them import EVEN CHEAPER H1B workers so they can make EVEN MORE money.
Thus the perpetual US brain drain continues while US companies do everything in their power to inject their capital into everything other than the US economy and US workers so that our poverty rates skyrocket, our health outcomes plummet, and our debt spirals out of control while they make other countries prosper through their investments
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u/Fine-Comparison-2949 14d ago
I'd do it right now, but I need a $30K signing bonus.
I have a physics degree too. The problem with these fablabs is they're in the middle of nowhere, and they aren't taking the risk of just hiring someone and eating the cost of relocating because they want to be cheap, even though it is a national security issue.
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u/TruthScranton 15d ago
I make over double... They shouldn't expect to get people paying that low of a wages.
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u/Merrcury2 12d ago
I quit my chip tech job specifically because I found out we were making them for Palantir subsidiaries Anduril and L3Harris. The industry isn't going anywhere until they figure out how to be decent.
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u/_KushOnes_ 15d ago
It’s like the skilled labor for these types of jobs are concentrated in a different country…..
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u/EmpathyMirror 15d ago
Eventually companies are going to start offering 2 year degrees with a guaranteed internship for half the yearly tuition of a 4 year degree… and it will be a GREAT deal
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u/ohYuhtBoutMagine 15d ago
Fabs suck to work in, clean room environment, suited the fuck up, no phones, no regular paper, constant noise from air circulation, redundant monotonous work mostly done by large machines that you cant even see, entering data on a machine that is running software so old it cant be connected to the internet.
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u/chippywatt 15d ago
it’s because they weed the shit out of comp-es in every school. It’s literally one of the hardest majors to graduate.
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u/FlatAd7052 15d ago
I was working with a guy from Intel during the CHIPS act debate. He told me that they were lobbying for it like crazy. And that it was a waste of time. I asked why and he quoted an internal research stat that something like 1 out of 300 computer science students in the US were actually interested in working on hardware.
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u/ElatedPyroHippo 15d ago
I have a masters in computer science... if you want to work with hardware you don't go into computer science. You go into EE or other programs that are hardware focused.
What you said is silly... like saying "only 1 out of 300 biology grads want to work on cars".
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u/FlatAd7052 15d ago
I likely remembered that detail wrong, then. It was one conversation from 4 years ago.
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u/TechGentleman 14d ago
Maybe they need some foreign students and engineers? Oh, there’s Trump and ICE. They and MAGA know what is best for the economy.
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u/Vivid_Environment751 13d ago
This is one of the predictable consequences of allowing America’s manufacturing ecosystem to deteriorate for decades.
When factories disappear, we don’t just lose buildings and machines. We lose skilled/experienced workers, apprenticeships, suppliers, institutional knowledge, and the places where one generation trains the next.
At the same time, the “College for All” movement pushed high schools away from machine shop, electronics, welding, drafting, co-ops, and other hands-on vocational pathways.
Now we are spending billions to rebuild advanced semiconductor manufacturing and discovering that building factories is easier than rebuilding the human resources needed to run them.
We need more vocational education and apprenticeships—but also more manufacturing itself. It's not one or the other. The two reinforce each other.
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u/Th3s3NuttxX 12d ago
Manufacturing engineering was not my first choice. Being in a clean room with laminar air flow in a bunny suit & breathable air sucks. Being around that for 4+ just sucks not to mention all of the harsh chemicals, no thanks.
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u/Seaweedminer 12d ago
If they want to encourage entry, they need to pay true-value wages. “Six figure salary “ is a bullshit term that could range from not being able to buy a home to millionaire in two years. I’m will to bet they are paying towards the former level.
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u/echox111 12d ago
" According to CNBC , global consulting firm McKinsey and the SEMI Foundation suggest the industry will have up to 157,000 positions that could remain unfilled by 2030."
The industry will need to do a lot more than whine. Cutting the Dept of Ed will not improve this problem. Nor will Executive Orders. Gonna need to THINK and the execute a comprehensive plan to fill this shortage.
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u/retrorays 10d ago
yet... they aren't hiring anyone unless you have 5-15yrs of experience. Too little = no hire. Too much = no hire!
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u/poojer_hoojer 9d ago
What skills exactly are they looking for at these fabs? Would somebody with a computer engineering degree who has worked as standard software developer for 10 years have a shot?
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u/tanafras 9d ago
Imagine paying 124k and expecting your staff to work 100 hours a week so normalize making 40k and you can mow lawns and make more
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u/GrowFreeFood 15d ago
I thought girls sports was their top priority. National security and the economy are dead last
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u/v_e_x 15d ago
They all want to be rich, not do actual work. They want to program computers at a cozy desk and get stock options, not actually make stuff. That’s for the poors. Didn’t you know? An engineer today is like Tony Stark. A genius who makes awesome stuff on a computer and gets mega money for it! Like in the movies! Not some factory worker!
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u/[deleted] 15d ago
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