(Disclaimer - I speak from a neutral standpoint, I'm not a politics person.)
It's not so black and white. There's also nationality at play. Chinese employees can be very nationalistic in times of war, especially, if they live in and around ASEAN. The moment something bad happens (to China), they will view it as China being the victim and do things others wouldn't normally do.
Case in point: Remember the Huawei ban? A lot of my ex-colleagues and friends (who are Chinese) dumped their iPhones at ridiculously low prices and exchanged it for a Huawei to show support for China (despite being outside of China). I saw this with my own eyes and I was blown away. I mean, convincing an Apple user to switch to Android is a billion dollar problem that Google is trying to solve for years now and just like a snap of a finger, nationality is reason enough for them to make the switch, irrespective of their personal consequences (switching clouds, etc).
Likewise, incentives alone isn't enough, there's not much you can do if the employees view this as a nationalistic issue.
What I dislike is people generally assuming that I somehow agree with every single thing Huawei, or the CCP for that matter, has ever done.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1124996/downl...
https://blogs.cisco.com/news/huawei-and-ciscos-source-code-c...
https://amlawdaily.typepad.com/motorolahuawei.pdf
https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/FINAL-Huaw...
The U.S. used to steal from Europe while it was developing, now suddenly IP matters a lot.
The Japanese used to steal quite a bit of IP, yet Nintendo is now super hawkish to protect its own.
Chinese companies will get overly protective of its own IP once they sufficiently develop.
All in all, is a well known circle that may signal it's time to rethink how IP is currently structured and enforced around the world.
Businesses use IP laws to protect their own property rights. Whether you call the property owners "winners" is up to you, but that doesn't change the spirit or letter of IP laws.
>The ship carrying Francis Cabot Lowell and his family home from England in the summer of 1812 was intercepted by a British war squadron, which held the passengers and crew for some days at the British base at Halifax, Canada. Lowell’s baggage was subject to several intensive searches, for his captors had been warned that he may have stolen designs for power textile weaving machinery, a serious crime in England. Lowell, indeed, had done just that — but, aware of the risk, had committed the designs to memory.
Incidentally, US Foreign policy (as well as that of any nation) even in 2020, when you take justifications, stunningly aligned with US national interest. Make of that what you will.
I don't think so, and would actually prefer we take on something closer to the Chinese approach of leasing land in the same way we encourage people to put ideas in the public domain for a guarantee of a period of market monopoly. Though there are many reforms about current US IP law that I would love to see.
>US Foreign policy (as well as that of any nation) even in 2020, when you take justifications, stunningly aligned with US national interest.
I disagree - most nations advocate for their self-interests, otherwise we would be the United States of the World right now rather than the United States of America. Similarly, many countries have a foreign policy favorable to China because of economic incentives with a voluntary relationship between them. Are all countries or localities as equally 'autonomous' as China or the US when deciding with whom their most beneficial economic relationships are? No, though I don't think "dropping IP law" is a particular benefit to increasing that autonomy either.
Asides from Afghanistan and Iraq, are there any states you can name that are advocating for almost objectively US aligned policy?
I'm not making a claim as to what we should do, I'm just saying that our current IP system has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with Western power and interest.
Personally I think a system such as the one you described is preferable too, but I'm just explaining the Realist (and by extension Materialist in the Fuerbachian sense, and thus Marxist, and thus Chinese) perspective on why laws are the way they are (which is incidentally correct), by contrast with the Idealist narrative that States tend to use to justify their interests.
Property rights are neither a question of morality nor a question of realpolitik. They are an economic construct. Property is the only so-called natural right that does not exist at birth. We are born with life, and we are born with liberty, but we are not born with property.
Also, private property simply isn't a natural right, not even by the definition of Hobbes. The right of exclusion of something you don't use is neither natural nor universal in most early human civilizations, it just simply isn't a natural right.
And intellectual property in particular is perhaps the opposite of a natural right.
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/06/23/business/japanese-executi...
As for the spying: it's relatively common knowledge that the chinese government really likes to use the fact that someone might have relatives in mainland china to convice people that they should spy for them. So my guess is that people doing this just for the "prestige" don't even need this kind of stuff...
The U.S. government killed thousands of civilians in the Middle East over the last decade with taxpayer money.
So if you don't support killing civilians, stop paying taxes?
Sometimes it's not as easy.
> So my guess is that people doing this just for the "prestige" don't even need this kind of stuff...
I get your point, but maybe "prestige" isn't the right word. If it's easier to function in society if you're a member and does not require you to commit anything immoral (at least not directly), would you join? My bet would be on yes.
And yes, maybe handling certain people on both sides of the aisle as what they are (e.g. war criminals) is indeed what foreign people should do. In theory, the domestic issue in the US could be solved by voting for a non-drone-killing executive – in China: good luck voting!
> would you join? like I said, we had this with the nazi-party. People joined, afterwards they knew nothing, which might be true in their view because of domestic propaganda. Maybe we should wake up and tell the people clearly that they are supporting a 21-st century government actually building concentration camps. And yes, if you tell them that you have a problem with that side of things (e.g. you are only targeting politicians vanity not "the economy"), in a country as big and dense as China (they've always had their purges, yet always some opposition rose) opposition would eventually form.
It's not mandatory. But lots of things are not mandatory. You staying overtime when your team does. It's not mandatory, but is strongly implied that maybe you should stay too.
All am saying is that being a member of the CCP probably should not be the (sole) deciding factor when you're letting someone in. In fact I'd think that spies would explicitly make sure to NOT be members.
For more please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24145915 elsewhere in this thread, as well as these past explanations:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Personal attacks are not ok. Smears like this are particularly not ok. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They are at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The truth is that the HN community is diverse and divided, with plenty of people on all sides of this issue. Attacking people personally (let alone nationally, ethnically, or racially) simply because they disagree with you is the epitome of what we don't want here. This is not a China issue, it's a Hacker News issue, an internet issue, and frankly a human issue.
Plenty of past explanation here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Cisco doesn't even complain about this anymore, since they got a pretty penny from Huawei for it.
And they are not the only company that started out doing something shady. There are plenty of other examples of American companies that have done things in their past that are also shady.
Why don't you start with something more recent? Like, their 5G technology? Unless of course, your premise is that they also have a time machine and traveled into the future, and stole this 5G technology from Cisco as well.
(to be clear, I’m not sure whether I agree with it or not, but it seems like a strange thing to focus on exclusively)
Nope, Microsoft operates in China, so does IBM, Uber did before the Chinese branch was acquired by Didi (they weren't banned, just outcompeted).
China is funnily enough even facebook's second largest market by revenue (about 5 billion) from Chinese advertisers.
Google probably could operate in China and I guess doesn't because it fears American backlash.
Doing business in China is arguably more complicated for American tech firms than the other way around, but American companies are most definitely not blanked banned or anything.
They are just printing money from their China business.
Now, imagine if Trump told Zuck that Facebook couldn’t do any more transactions with China. That deserves a LOL..
Definitely not a level playing field though.
Yeah that doesn't seem to be the case.
The value prop of the iPhone just isn't there anymore if you are not stuck in the ecosystem.
this isn't a universal phenomenon, funnily enough in China the brand appears to have the opposite effect[1]. It's more seen like a vanity purchase akin to I guess something like a Gucci bag.
"Apple iPhone users in China are generally less educated, hard-up and with few valuable assets, compared to users of other mobile phone brands such as Huawei Technologies or Xiaomi, according to a report by research agency MobData. The Shanghai-based firm also found that most iPhone users are unmarried females aged between 18 and 34, who graduated with just a high-school certificate and earn a monthly income of below 3,000 yuan (HK$3,800). They are perceived to be part of a group known as the “invisible poor” – those who do not look as poor as their financial circumstances."
[1] https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/2174310/research-highlight...
The iPhone SE is up there in power-vs-cost, and in terms of dollars per year of usage Apple probably has the best numbers.
You are TSMC and have 50k employees, of which say 5,000 are experienced engineers, the top 10%. A competitor wants to hire away 100 of them and offers them an enhanced salary. They only need to offer that to 100 people, but to stop them getting any of those 5000 employees you have to offer a competitive package to all of them. Any you don’t offer it to are vulnerable to getting hired away. So for every $1m they are willing to spend on enhanced packages, you need to spend $50m in enhanced salaries to block them. If they decide to cut it down to hiring away only 50 engineers, now for every $1m they spend you need to spend $100m.
As head of resourcing at TSMC, at what point do you stop the defensive salary inflation? Bear in mind your not competing with the financial resources of just another chip company, you’re competing with the financial resources of the Chinese state.
I don't think this is true as (I think) you're assuming that all 5000 employees are equally skilled and desired. More realistically, the poaching company wants the more senior/experienced so TSMC only has to watch out for these. Still not an insignificant number nor amount of money.
Long-term, the solution is probably for companies to focus more on building their culture and focusing on the non-financial perks (e.g. ala Google) so employees will think twice about leaving.
But you have the resources of the other Chinese state (Taiwan) at your disposal because, TSMC and the Taiwanese semi industry work hand-in-hand with the government as well.
Unfortunately, there are other factors that you need to maintain that keep employees around and we have lost a few people that really hurt the overall skill level of the team which had nothing to do with compensation.
But then there is Samsung, which has its foundry business partly funded by NAND and DRAM. i.e TSMC cant exactly dedicate the price as much as everyone think they could.
The CEO and chairman both got almost $10mil each last year.
Taiwan has such a big surplus of engineers and physicist that they don't really make much. Unless you are part of the club that knows TSMC special sauce in which you will be ridiculously well paid even by American standards, but that's not a large group.
I don't know about that. If central planning were a good way to run an economy, the Soviet Union would not have collapsed.
The Soviet Union put the first man into space and had severe shortages of food and consumer goods at the same time. Because that's what central planning does. It causes priorities to be distorted. Whatever the central planning committee is focused on happens and everything else withers and suffocates.
On net it's a massive catastrophic loss, but the places where resources are directed, get them in abundance. (This is also why it's extremely susceptible to corruption and favoritism.)
But I now have come to the realisation that wrong is perhaps only in the eye of the beholder.
And there will always be censorship in a society as long as you look hard enough for it. Probably a feature not a bug though.
Maybe it just demonstrates this is the best we get collectively with neural circuitries like ours.
Shall we try again?
Of course, there is also the problem of incentives, but in the Soviet Union the problem of incentives was really only relevant as far as higher-ups reporting data, Soviet workers worked as hard and as well as any.
That is not to say that central planning directed by a centralized Leninist state is something that I think is desirable (or even something that would be theoretically desirable), but massive computing power is a quantum shift in the possibility of centralized and decentralized planning. The fact that it worked as well as it did in the USSR through pencil and paper is stunning.
Computers are essentially useless for a planned economy. All they can do is provide quicker orders for factories to produce the wrong things in the wrong quantities.
In a planned economy, consumers, be it governmental consumers or average workers, make choices with limited monetary resources about what should be purchased. If there is too much demand, then you end up with a shortage, until the next 5 year plan in which the central planners of the politburo look over the shortage and surplus, do some predictions, and re-allocate supply as well as actualize prices. This is an issue, because there is a 5 year updating period, and planners are prone to error as well as erroneous information.
If your planners had accurate real-time information, and were able to re-calculate the economy every day or so, then the issues of over-supply or under-supply, "orders for factories to produce the wrong things in the wrong quantities" would be fixed.
Maybe this stems from a misconception according to which, in a planned economy, there is no money or no consumer, no buyers and sellers. It is not so. Planned economies have money, they have sellers and buyers, and so on. What is being replaced is the role of the investor and capitalist, which decides where to allocate resources. Therefore, the issue is not in calculation of end-consumer demand, that is the same as in capitalism, the issue is in organization of production. A Marxist would formulate it by saying that the Soviet economy has not abolished the commodity form.
If the Soviets were able to make a 5-year plan every day, and had instant and perfectly accurate supply information, the vast majority of economic inefficiencies would have disappeared. Or, in other words, the factories would have quickly updated orders to produce the things the people want in exactly the quantity they want it.
China isn’t going too capitalist too fast. Nor is it stagnating.
And let us not forget that when the USSR stagnated it has had decades of success in science, education, space exploration etc.
Sure the central planners prioritized some gaudy projects like a space program, but at the expense of its poor population.
Of course it didn't help that the soviet politicians constantly mismanaged the economy at the same time. Also interestingly, Mao was constantly screwing up the economy with his uneducated policies that he was hugely unpopular internally with the CCP. However Mao was hugely popular with the common people that the CCP had to just put up with and put out the fires he starts. (reminds me of Trump today...)
That sounds like decades of economic success to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
Every first world country went from a backwards agricultural society to a far more advanced one during that century. Look up the dust bowl or even better the state of US agriculture during the early 20s.
Without central planning, the people’s of the Soviet republics would not just have been free, they would have grown wealthier
Please keep in mind that the current, mainstream political Western discourse is seriously contemplating whether or not we should re-open, sacrificing a few million people on the altar of economic growth.
According to Wikipedia it is 2.6 times more than New York state:
- New York's gross state product in 2018 was $1.7 trillion.
- Russia has a GDP of $4.519 trillion in 2020
>> In a country of over 140 million people, that is no one's definition of success.
It's half GDP per capita of USA, but USA has half of GDP per capita of Macau or Qatar. Ireland or Norway have a better GDP per capita than US. And if there was no wealth transfer between "rich" US states and "poor" US states, those would be much poorer, and would become comparable to Russia.
From 1917 until the 60s or so they vastly improved the lives of average Russians.
From the 70s until 1989, not so much, and then after 89 you can't really put it on the USSR since it didn't exist anymore.
When everyone else moves forward and you 'stagnate', for all practical purposes you are moving backward from where you could have been.
I get trying to move the Overton window, but this is too much. I'm hoping this is sarcasm on overdrive and I just missed it.
If Pooh Bear decides tomorrow that China will learn how to build pool floats then China will learn how to build pool floats. Everyone falls in line. If the leader of a western democracy wants to do something similar they have to convince people to want to do it and that takes time, policy carrots/sticks and propaganda/indoctrination.
Our problem isn't that we're too free and liberal, our problem is that we're too crooked and stagnant.
Please. The US has never had an issue allocating arbitrarily large amounts of money to random things- either as military spending or moonshot projects. The Apollo program costed the equivalent of about 150 billion in today's money.
An ASEAN-EU-US alliance to directly source cutting-edge research from TSMC like the defense industry sourced from Silicon Valley in the early days when it was just a bunch of scattered suburbs among fruit orchards for example, would pump sufficient money to increase retention via pay and benefits. Lots of problems with that approach, of course. But options exist in Cold War II.
I'm not a fan of top-down interventionist policies, they appear too brittle in a fast-moving innovative environment like we find ourselves in today. So if the US wants to stay on top of the semiconductor/AI/quantum/etc. heap, then the nation will have to find a way to make it attractive again for talent around the world to bring their families to live there. Starting with a well-educated population that uses rational cognition and fact-based decision-making would be good...
Think about millionaires who joined Snap, Uber, Lyft, Pinterest at the right time like this
Sounds like a gaudy central planning project doomed to fall apart as soon as it hits market realities.
Their semiconductor industry will not be solely made up of TSMC engineers, the vast majority are going to be Chinese juniors who will learn from them and eventually replace them.
Let the free market decide. At some point, other, less tangible factors would start playing, such as individual freedoms, quality of the environment, family friednliness, etc.
TSMC wouldn’t have to just offer say 4x salary to 100 of their engineers to prevent the brain drain, they have to give it to several thousand engineers, and then a China would just up their offer to 5x because their ability to pick off a subset of people gives them 10x or even 100x leverage over TSMC. There’s just no way for TSMC to compete on salary like that. The most they could do is make it costly enough that the Chinese only hire away fewer engineers, at crippling cost to themselves, but they can never cut it down to zero.
What I am saying is that the "free market" is not always limited to money. There are other things that play the role. TSMC must find ways to keep the essential engineers, or they are going to lose. This applies to anyone: you have to adjust to the changing environment, or die. Find something that will keep the best ones that other companies can't offer. Or die, like the rest of the manufacturing industry (look, American manufacturing is too expensive, let's make it in China! look, American programmers are too expensive, let's open a dev center in Bangalore!).
On the other hand, I think this is a welcome outcome - the knowledge spreads out and levels the playing field. From a very simplistic and idealistic view, it is better to have multiple industrial and knowledge centers than have everything concentrated in one place or country.
Huawei ban is a message to the Chinese government about explicit spying - and will probably get reversed pretty soon. You can spy, but don't make it so obvious.
Interestingly, I think these bans might have another, unintended, consequence: they might trigger acceleration of locally developed alternatives. We might see more of the Chinese-developed processors and IP in general in the future.
But I do agree that the sooner everyone plays nice, the better it is for everybody. The problem is that there are plenty of forces that benefit from chaos and suffering.
It's an open market. TSMC is not a military organization to stop them from working for another country.
On the other hand TSMC is a publicly traded company. There's a limit to what expenses they can justify in front of the shareholders. China can lure engineers away with 3x the salary probably because that was the limit TSMC settled on, not because that's the limit of what China is willing to pay.
If I go into a supermarket and the bananas are too expensive then I can either pay or not eat a banana. If salaries are increasing companies can either pay market rate or no.
(They can also train internally but that doesn't seem fashionable nowadays)
A nation state devoting their trillions to outbid companies is the exact opposite of capitalist dogma. (Even less capitalist than a monopolist conglomerate abusing their dominant market position to outbid/undercut you.)
Wherever the CEO and chairman's $10m annual package came from. You either pay market rate or risk your employees leaving.
demand and supply.
you see the same thing happen with self driving engineers commanding million dollar packages because they were in such high demand and supply was so low.
http://fortune.com/2020/07/28/intel-7nm-delay-tsmc-stock-sha...
Also, for any aspiring undergrads wandering this way that thought RFIC design was fascinating because they picked up a copy of Razavi's "RF Microelectronics" or something similar and couldn't help but read it cover from cover, the textbooks lie. The analytical equations in a chip design textbook are not reflective of what the actual process is like. While you're still in college, try and get a professor to give you a student addition of Keysight ADS or Microwave Office AWR, along with an SDK from a fab. Then spend a few months of simulation time to see for yourself how much simulated results diverge from analytical models and how painstakingly slow it is to optimize those simulations especially once you start moving into EM simulations. And keep in mind these are simulations, chances are the physical chip will diverge even more due to process variations, unknown parasitics, or even bad simulation models from the fab. If the lack of precision, simulation time, and general drudgery doesn't kill your enthusiasm when compared to your textbook learning, then by all means proceed.
It's still a fascinating subject. Every so often when I need a break from code I'll take out my old RFIC textbooks and read a chapter or two. But you really don't want to know how this sausage is actually made.
I spent my teens looking up to microelectronics career, and actually self-studied a year, or two ahead for entrance to Nanyang, or NTU semi.eng. programs.
I almost accidentally met two ex-TSMC engineers who worked for Chang almost since his first days at ITRI, and they were very good mentors, and seriously warned me about "a decade+ grind ahead." In the end it were my parents who stonewalled the idea, and sent me to a business degree mill in Canada. And this is all was when I had 2 early admission letters from both Nanyang, and NTU on my desk...
Exactly why I stopped, this hits close to home
Please tell me about some quick nasty bits!!!!! I need a joke or entertaining story to share during my friday sprint review
This is one of the key reasons you need to give the right incentives and compensations to your employees. I have seen too many tech companies failing at employee retention.
The loss of talent will have a medium-long term impact on the company. And, many of their future competitors are going to be created by your current unhappy employees.
I have seen an increasing trend in tech-companies to be more employee-friendly beyond eye-candy perks. But, there is still a long path to walk.