TSMC

You’ll be paid decently if you’re new to the semiconductor industry and can deal with the constant soul-sucking.

There is nothing positive about working for this company. The HR team is incompetent on all fronts. Any good HR employees that worked here saw the writing on the wall and jumped ship.

Be careful during the hiring process because they will carefully word their vacation policy and sick time policy. They like to send out monthly newsletters showcasing them going to Top Golf, Scottsdale, and other places with no real purpose (makes you wonder how often it was on company time). After a while, you start to wonder what they actually do all day, because it’s often doubtful to be “work”. Well, aside from constantly having to do damage control because they fail their employees constantly.

They used to do Q&A discussions that got so out of hand that they limited interactions and questions before getting rid of the process altogether. Defaulting to “mass” emails sent with pre-recorded announcements and poorly put-together FAQs, but they didn’t usually make it to every employee, so hope that a coworker can send it to you. Otherwise, they would tell managers to relay to teams because they didn’t want to deal with backlash.

Their whole “culture,” if you can call it that, is we’re all one team. So if you make a mistake, everyone on that team will blame you for making them look bad, then will proceed to bully or isolate you. It’s encouraged to “highlight” coworkers’ mistakes, and the more you “highlight,” the better you will look.

You will likely see verbal abuse in one of the countless (I do mean countless) Teams group chats you’re in, even with higher-level management in those chats. Expect your training to be poor, with training documents only just being put together in the past year, by employees new to the industry who also don’t fully understand what they’re doing. There’s a lot of half-baked, partially done training projects that eventually get abandoned until the next massive push for new, different SOPs.

If you stay long enough to be a trainer, you are expected to reach your quota while also training multiple new people and being responsible for their mistakes, even if it’s a process you haven’t touched in literal months with zero time given to get re-familiar with the process again. This happens a lot because you will likely be bounced from wildly different processes or even sent out to help with construction babysitting because even the construction workers despise being on site.

The cliques are rampant in both the Taiwanese and American workers. Expect gossip and rumors to fly constantly, and that if your manager hears about it, they might ask you about it or just further spread the gossip. If a manager has a problem with you, expect it to go through at least 3-5 others before it reaches you.

Every month, you get to see a grading system, but this heavily weighed on manager and supervisor personal opinion. And if it’s a bonus month, they might give you a better grade or worse, depending on how desperate they are to keep you from quitting and how much they dislike you. Not necessarily based off your actual work for each period.

Their reputation as an employer is so abysmal that you’ll find multiple job postings with the same description and location with and without TSMC’s name attached to it.

In Taiwan, they like to hire young to build loyal, long-term employees. They are trying to do something similar by camping out high school job fairs, hiring freshly graduated people, then acting surprised that they aren’t getting the same loyalty they would in Taiwan. This also means it’s a gamble on if you’ll get a hard worker or a loud, useless worker who trashes the company to anyone and everyone while expecting their trainer to pick up the slack or even get the trainer’s own wages/bonuses/compensation hurt.

Also, if you’re over the age of 35, they will likely not hire you. They want employees they can get a lot of years out of, so best to look elsewhere. They will ask very pointed questions in the interview, alluding to longer job history and asking if you “really want to leave such a long tenure.”

Training has never been a priority. They sent people to “train” in Taiwan for a year, and when dealing with the constant frustration from people about the lack of training material or guidance, a particular manager stated, “TSMC wasn’t ready to bring you here.” Fully admitting that this company puts on a front that they are thriving, they know what they’re doing, but you ask any managers, and they will either try to dodge the question or blame someone else.

Be prepared to lock your cellphone away and go through metal detectors. You will get a company phone, so if you have a family emergency, they can contact you, but if you’re seen using the phone regardless of if it’s family-related, your work performance WILL suffer.

If you have any choice, don’t work here. The pay they dangle does not outweigh the mental and physical stress (which your insurance and “mental health” benefits are subpar, so don’t expect that to help you recover).

Get rid of your current HR staff. They’re a long-running joke to the rest of the employees, and it’s not funny anymore.