I have no doubts brilliant European engineers are going to work on the hard problems of shipping a next gen chip process and design... In America!
What the EU should do is earmark some of that money to be directly paid as engineering salaries. Of course they won't: that would reduce the piece of the pie of all the non-technical managers and bureaucrats!
I mean, that's exactly what they do. Any company with good finances can apply for support for R&D to develop new features or tech that they would otherwise not develop or invest in. This comes in the form of direct contributions to employees' salaries listed in the grant application.
I've written and defended these grants for multiple companies and I have been on the receiving end of them, too.
This isn't even specific to this deal, this is just something you can always do, along with literally hundreds of EU and state level support programs.
Exactly. The salaries in EU are pitiful.
The number and quality of available jobs in the SV region was a much bigger factor to everyone I've spoken to that moved from the EU.
In the UK the problem seems to be the company owner/manager class see software people roughly the same as any other office worker, rather than as skilled producers of products. As a result they pay peanuts, and then are surprised when they get less than stellar results. Not sure what the reason might be elsewhere, but across the rest of the continent the pay seems even worse.
At $45,284 the US has the highest household net disposable income per capita in the OECD (http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states/), where "disposable income" (http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=46) accounts for healthcare and government benefits.
You have to specifically want to live in a European city for the culture/walkability/etc or else there is just no reason to take tech jobs there.
Notionally, yes, but in reality it will be the same blighted hellscape of insurance denials, out-of-network complexity, and lack of consistency as everyone else's healthcare in America. You can hire someone to help you navigate it, which is a remarkable economic construct.
Culture is the issue here. EU tries to live, USA tries to earn. If the only thing that interests you is money then yes, probably USA is the right direction. Of all the people that I know that went working outside of their country, they were mostly going to EU companies (or USA companies in Europe), sometimes to the Asia. None left for USA. On the other side I know a CTO that left USA for Europe and bought a small property in France where he lives with whole family.
This shows very well in environmental laws, gdpr, protection of workers, actually having friends, nature, having hill-climbing organizations that aren't only lobist groups to be actually allowed to climb the mountains, public transport, able to drink spring water in center of capital city, most people working 40h/week max, actually do use their vacations in one piece, free education, maternity leave measured in years not months (yes under a year too but not month or two),...
So it depends on the personal cultural preference. Some people just love the money and things they can buy with it, maybe even power that it brings and surely a lot of such people are also in EU. The difference is in the percentage of population although Hollywood did great job at exporting the view of world trough money glasses.
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Regarding the topic. EU was quite satisfied with buying processors from the States, it was also happy with using Windows, Android, Apple thing. The problem is, as in every other thing, USA corporations became vampires that wants to eat you alive from pure greed and systemic addiction to blood (endless growth).
It has become imperative to produce our own processors as you can no longer trust USA or China to not shovel inside some spying equipment. Well the times have changed and it is no longer an option to buy it from USA/China, so EU has moved forward and dont worry, we will have our own chips our own phones and operating system (linux, sailfish or something else...).
EU is an elephant and it needs a lot of coordination of muscles to move its legs but once it starts moving...
I am sorry, I would love to just use the USA/China products and not re-develop hardware (based on what we know now, maybe not dragging 40 years old anchor of previous development with me), not having a need for GDPR, but they have both just screwed everything up from pure greed. Now we need to fix it and a lot of time and resources will have to go that way. But we will eventually fix it.
Now let me give you actual statistics.
In a survey of scientists from 16 countries (http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...), the US is the top destination from 13 of the 15 others and the #2 choice from the other two.
By comparison, only 5% of all American scientists move to another country, of which 32% go to Canada.
Meanwhile (since 2012) Trump happened, race unrest's, police brutality, corona handling fiasco, Google/FB/Amazon public image is going down, USA public depth has roughly doubled [1] and general perception of USA has changed (to the worse[2]), China is hiring, student depth is going trough the roof (and immigrants want to have children someday), no one believes in "war on terror" any more (talking about EU), Snowden, war on privacy,...
This graph is outdated, did you find some that is up to date? Also interesting one would be how many of those in 2012 survey stayed and where.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/187867/public-debt-of-th...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/09/15/us-image-plumm...
But since you did bring up Germany with the deleted mention of Operation Paperclip, I suggest you read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25367731 , in which @bildung and I discuss German migration to the US over the past 30 years (including 2019 data).
I provided statistics in response to your anecdotes. The onus is on you, not me, to prove that a) your anecdotes are actually representative of broader trends, and b) my statistics are, in fact, outdated.
You know not all IT people are senior engineers nor they share vision of the world exported by the Hollywood
There's a catch, though: You have to live in the borderline failed state that is the USA. That's quite the drawback and just not worth it no matter the salary increase, imo.
1. "Disposable income per capita" is irrelevant to normal people, as it does not account for how equally that wealth is actually spread. If the top 1% double their income and the rest halves it, that's still a net increase in "disposable income".
2. "Disposable income" does not at all account for the varying amount of cost required to sustain a given standard of living in different regions, even within a country.
3. "Disposable income" is a purely economic measure. As such, it does not measure a large amount things that impact your quality of life, like time off, stress, job satisfaction, etc. A quick look at those non-economic measures will show those high economic measures don't come for free.
Well, probably the same is true for the "pitiful" salaries in the EU. Just to a lesser degree.
I'd argue that if you got a CS degree from an American college you're probably just forced to work in the US simply because the other prospective employees can accept a lower salary due to a lower debt load. Maybe the best of the best can find a way to earn American salaries overseas but I really don't think that's as common as the HN crowd might assume.
Seattle has a much healthier market both for devs and real estate and is only three hours away.
Only difference in healthcare is while american top devs get it on top of their compensation packages, canadians pay for it with their prohibitive income tax rates. It's pretty easy to take the total spending percentage that goes to healthcare and multiply it by your income tax to see how much a dev is really paying for healthcare.
I'm also not quite sure what you mean with your point about healthcare. MSP premiums were eliminated last year [0], there is now no charge to access medical care. Prescriptions, dental and eye care are all still chargeable, though prescriptions at least are essentially capped through BC Fair Pharmacare [1].
Compared to the US, Canada is much easier for immigration as a tech worker. One can get PR (equivalent of a green card) before landing if they have a sufficient points score, in BC that's fairly easy through the tech PNP [2] and a willing employer.
Additionally Vancouver consistently ranks among the top 10 most liveable cities [3].
[0] - https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/health-drug-covera...
[1] - https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/health-drug-covera...
[2] - https://www.welcomebc.ca/Immigrate-to-B-C/B-C-Provincial-Nom...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Liveability_Ranking
This is what China's doing: offering double salaries to Japanese and Taiwanese engineers to lure them away, because tech salaries in Japan and Taiwan are quite low by global standards (even lower than China's).
It is not necessarily a bad thing either in my opinion. A lot of americans seem so focussed on making money, instead of caring for others around them.
I can understand your concerns. But if you look at mid-range airplanes the European monster Airbus did respectably catch up with incumbent Boeing.
In with the Jumbos they clearly surpassed it engineering-wise but failed in their commercial predictions that such planes would be needed.
So EU is neither a guarantee for failure nor for success.
I do wonder how many people will be involved; it could be like ITER where everyone builds one fab that's truly the best in the world. Or it could be that they want to spread it out amongst the existing incumbents they can find who I am sure will do nothing with it.
Concentrate the funding and I imagine it could do pretty well. Distribute to (more than one) commercial entity (preferably zero to retain public access) and I doubt it will go anywhere.
Boeing should have a clear advantage because they have no such political interference. But it doesn't seem to have prevented Airbus from being a serious competitor. Whether the political interference is older than the EU or from the EU of today should not make a significant difference here.
What often ends up happening is that because it's so "strategically important" and so much money has been directed towards it, you are obligated to have expensive ("experienced") people hired based on past reputation -- which may not be applicable to new technology, roadmaps get laid out which everyone has to say they're meeting successfully, and then at the end you find out somehow that it didn't produce what you wanted.
Versus, a more bottoms-up approach where you hopefully create the conditions that incentivize or make possible some technologies and technologists to succeed -- without knowing fully who exactly or what exactly.
I'm sure that both have some inefficiencies, but the 1st method is sure to pay the people who have already been successful. But then again, maybe for a relatively incremental advance in some technology, there are fewer unknowns and method #1 works ok.
In other words, very different model from what the EU is currently trying.
In 1985 Morris Chang was recruited by
the Taiwanese government to help develop
the emerging semiconductor industry. In
1986 Morris joined the Hsinchu based non
profit research institute ITRI as Chairman
and President and launched what would be
TSMC’s first semiconductor wafer
fabrication plant on the ITRI campus.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company
Ltd. was officially formed in 1987 as a
joint venture between the Taiwan government
(21%), Dutch multinational electronics
giant Philips (28%), and other private investors.
In the context of the EU developing the ability to fabricate state-of-the-art chips, ASML would sell them the TwinScan tools they needed, which are just one species of about 40 that are used for chip fabrication.
Lithography machines are a functioning market that is interfered with for geo-strategic reasons.
All of the world's most profitable companies depend dearly on chips. If they are literally the only company that can provide this critical part of the chip production, why aren't they taking a larger portion of the profit?
I'm sure there is a lot of stuff where 7nm is necessary to get certain outcomes, but it is a small market compared to what could be reasonably done with older process technologies.
I completely agree that consortium-based organizations are less able to respond and react to changes or issues. That's why it needs to be treated as a strategic (defense) matter rather than a government/industry partnership, a-la Sematech in the US.
I'm still so fascinated by our minds' ability to interpolate and extrapolate to the platonic ideal of any ungrounded and unconstrained idea so readily. Yes big bureaucratic mass of brain trust experts going at it nonstop, how can you not yield great returns? I'm starting to awaken more and more to how messy and data dependent this world is. Ideals and declaration and promises just don't go far enough. But it's all so complicated and situational to figure out in advance why they don't go as far as we'd expect.
In practical terms, over 50% of that large (many thousands) organization should not exist. Another 50% of what is left is only needed because EU bureaucracy requires them to cover work that can be avoided. That qualifies for "too much bureaucracy".
Andy Grove, High Output Management, about Intel (at the time when they were successful)
I think there are many, many (not directly) productive functions that successful business needs to have and engineers often underestimate those (I certainly know I often do).
Are we talking about VC and large corporate investment or government investment here.
From my experience with gov trying to do tech investment it’s going to go into the pockets of late career overpaid ‘executives’ with ‘industry experience’ and tons of (also overpaid and underqualified) contractors doing the same thing. Not the brilliant engineers you imagine are going to run it.
I mean I hope it goes to the engineers and smart dudes (who doesn’t want another successful semi competitor and 2nm?) and not the ones who know how to play the political game the best but I’m highly highly skeptical.
We’ll see in a few years I guess.
And I say that fully understanding ASML and the value they currently provide. But let’s hope who ever doles this out understands it as well as (maybe) half the people in this thread.
But even ignoring that giant elephant in the room, it adds the critical question why should ASML care to give special treatment to this one project? They are already killing it globally. Just because they operate in EU and this offers shit loads of money to potentially fleece?