TSMC

I was able to train in Taiwan, work for one of the most important companies on the planet that no one knows about, be exposed to culture outside the US, and am being given skills I can take to lots of desirable positions in the future.

There are incompatibilities between work culture, learning/teaching style, and other expectations from the US to Taiwan. This is to be expected.

My trainer, I think, has definitely met me part way, and I believe I can say I have done the same. There's still a gap, but this can be worked on.

The work culture in Taiwan is really different than in the US. I am sure TSMC will have to change to an 8-hour workday, five days a week, or do what other companies do with Fabs and run three days on, four days off, four days on, three days off rotations.

As it is right now in Taiwan, the minimum amount of time at the company is 10 hours a day, but realistically, it is running up to even 12 hours a day. This is for those of us who are American training to go back to the new operation in Arizona. The reality for people from Taiwan is that they are doing even more than 12-hour days, often.

There are also night shifts and weekend shifts on duty and/or on call. That last part is understandable as the fab lives 24/7.

The training and experience really depend on the person who is your "trainer." My experience has lacked any structure but had no shortage of expectations. I came up with some process to approach learning new equipment and daily tasks, but to be honest, I don't know that I've arrived yet.

TSMC doesn't seem to enshrine a sense of individual freedom. The company provides housing for those of us training from the States, but has very much micromanaged everything we do in our living arrangement. There's a curfew with no guests allowed, for example. And the long-term housing adds another hour commute.

The software used by TSMC is dated. Of course, TSMC may not be alone in this, as the industry doesn't have the same motivation in software decisions as the consumer-driven market has, which results in amazingly optimized applications. The apps people know and love meet a minimalist and aesthetic criteria for a reason. Big companies don't have the motivation, but minimalist software with an aesthetic UI makes people more efficient at what they're doing and can save the company time. TSMC could even justify having its own internal software development team, and it would save massive amounts of money in people's time. A lot of software at TSMC also seems to be repetitive. TSMC should reduce the amount of software it has for different tasks, find functions that are repeated across applications, and reduce to a common application.

I joined TSMC for the same reason I became an engineer. I want to do something I'm passionate about and improve people's lives in a lasting way. Semiconductors are a magic bullet that have changed and are changing our quality of life and the way we live. Unfortunately, it seems TSMC doesn't enable the same outcome for many of its employees as the technology enables for the planet. The percentage of the budget going to pay employees at a company like TSMC is small compared to the cost of a fab, the equipment it houses, defective product, and other issues. There's no reason TSMC can't increase the number of employees it has to allow people to go home to their families at a reasonable time each day and give them good benefits. I think TSMC might at least approach this in Arizona, as it has to compete to retain and attract talent against companies like Intel right across the street.

Too much time is spent in meetings to review the work from the last night/day in the morning, and to review what was done during the day again in the afternoon. These meetings add up to three hours in a day easily. That's a lot of the work day. Some of the solution may be in software. I truly believe most of these meetings could be automated. The engineer who last worked with the equipment would record tool status and changes, and make recommendations. The manager gives approval to any recommendation or overrides, and the engineer coming into the next shift only looks at the tools they've been assigned to on this "hypothetical" application. The only person it makes sense to have three hours looking at this stuff is the manager, who would have to make approvals, hold engineers accountable, or interject if need be. The rest of the staff should be able to cover the material that actually relates to them on their own in five to ten minutes. TSMC could automate this through software. This could also solve some of the issue with the long work days. People in TSMC Taiwan honestly are not being more productive than Americans on an eight-hour work day. But tasks which don't contribute to what actually needs to be done in an efficient way suck up the employees' time.

The "e-learning" system TSMC uses to teach new employees is terrible and needs to be abandoned. I would seriously recommend TSMC to provide an anonymous survey to the entire company, but also specifically to the American hires, as there are additional translation issues from Chinese which make the learning even worse. Chances are high that if the survey is actually anonymous, people will confess they haven't learned anything from the e-learning and it just wasted time they needed to learn their process.