I used to work in semiconductors and transitioned to software when I realized how precarious that was.

This was years ago and not TX. I'm sure it has gotten slightly better but what I see on glassdoor still makes me very glad I listened to the job hunting postdocs in nanofab class and steered clear of this career path.

I wasn't actually suggesting that I return to my former employer, although the thought has crossed my mind...

My reasoning for a move would be about all of the higher-order consequences of having well-compensated technology enthusiasts imported by the thousands.

No worries, I was picturing a young person setting out to 'make their fortune' by moving across the country to make it. I just wanted to share the perspective I left the field with.

That doesn't mean it isn't possible to make it work!

From a North Texas perspective, the communities were already built up. The first integrated circuit was made in North Texas. DFW has some of the highest number of fabs per square mile, tons of small producers around along with some of the big behemoths.

North Texas has been a pretty big semiconductor manufacturer since semiconductor manufacturing has been a thing.

For a historical context of the history of the community of semiconductors in North Texas, JFK was shot on his way going to give a speech at what would become UT Dallas, a school whose entire history is focused on semiconductors.

You’ll work 60 hours a week for shitty pay, and be the Yoda of some tool. In 10 years there will be a new magic tool. Then you start learning the Starbucks menu.

Everyone in a tech field has to retain the ability to learn new things over time. AI might not take our jobs but it will likely change them. I guess it sucks if you have a fear of learning. Admittedly, at first learning a new thing can be kind of uncomfortable, like getting into a cold swimming pool. But once you get over the initial shock and start moving around, it's not so bad.

It's not the worker's fault they can't learn the new tool (they absolutely can learn it). It's capitalism's fault for valuing workers only for the cost of their labor and nothing else.

Sigh. The value you're talking about here is the cost of their labour. This is like a business owner saying that employees should value their jobs differently to their salary.

You're right in the sense that capitalism is fundamentally "people make agreements and decisions within what's available to them" but what's the actual issue you want capitalism to solve, that doesn't create one of the massive downsides that any of capitalism's former rivals has?

E.g. monarchy can reward loyalty, but then so can capitalism. Monarchy can just also tell you to go die on a field if you don't kill the other king's people.

What makes you think that capitalism won't do the same to you? Capitalist[1] societies engage in pointless, bloody wars all the time.

[1] And communist, and other -ist.

Unlike monarchy/communism/fuedalism etc where power and organisation are by necessity mostly centralised, capitalism can (and wants to) be divorced from power. Constant realigning it with power (e.g. regulatory capture) is what corrupts it.

The sort of (limited) power capitalism creates is by creating value in some way: labour, capital, contacts, resources. It's not derived from strength, unlike the other methods.

Of course a government, that is fundamentally derived from strength, and must be, can still fight wars. It can do it much better in fact because its economy was organised by the most efficient manner anyone's ever discovered, and so there's a surplus to tax.

It has been shown time and time again that the majority of the powerful players in a Capitalist economy inherited their wealth or opportunities.

Capitalism can only function in an economy if a government allows it by setting up the necessary structures and allowing private property ownership.

Society can certainly be Capitalist by extension of the economy being Capitalist due to policies and strucutes set up by goverments.

Seeing as it's more or less the de facto world order it should ideally solve global alignment for the long term wellbeing of Earth-borne life

That doesn't align well with efficiency or top-down world political agreements. But it has lifted more people out of poverty faster than any other system in history.

The fact that this problem pops up all over the damn place should tell you something about our relationship to u**ons.

children used to work 10 hours a day and lose hands in machinery. hell, kids are dying in factories now, and the rules just keep getting rolled back further.

miners get black lung or asbestos exposure.

dudes boiled alive in machinery that didn't have fail safes.

company towns that only paid in scrip and then charged you 3x the price of regular goods.

people had to fight and die for an 8 hour workday.

the bourgeoisie programmer types who've never had to work actually dangerous jobs tend to forget just how incredibly brutal working conditions used to be.

Basically, a big, inflexible place is a good unionization candidate. A smaller, nimble org is a lousy place for a union.

"No, we'll hire them away from our competitors. Let one of them invest in training."

Of course this accelerates the business’s desire to adopt the new tool sooner, so they best hurry!

New tool makes a different wavelength of light by shooting high energy beams at molten tin and all your PhD research isn't relevant to that.

It's not like moving from Adobe to Figma, it's like moving from physics to chemistry.

You'll see salaries of around $70-110k in very expensive metros like the Bay, Portland, Dallas, Austin, etc.

Salaries just haven't kept up in the EE space.

They'll probably have a laugh while they're out boating.

I think there might be a bimodal distribution within EE salaries where either you work at an Nvidia/Google/Apple/AMD/TI type company which pays competitively and others which pay subpar wages.

Maybe this is heavily dependent on the subset of EE as well (eg. I'd assume the profit margins for a fabless GPU company like Nvidia are much higher than a company building/desigining ASICs for Telcom usecases like KLA).

That said, you seem to be from North Texas/DFW and EE wages and cost of living seem much more managable compared to those offered in the Bay Area and Portland.

Median home price in Richardson: $478K

Median home price in Garland: $301k

Median home price in Sherman: $308k

Median home price in The Colony: $411k

Median home price in Plano: $520k

Which places are you more likely to be able to own your home with ~$100k/yr income?

I'm just pointing out that EE salaries within the US are depressed due to the (relatively) low wages within DFW (which by DFW levels are competitive).

At the end of the day, you guys are definetly being underpaid compared to SWEs as well as certain specialities of EE (take a look at Nvidia's mid-level TC in the Bay verus TI's in DFW).

DFW has always been a major EE hub in the US, but SV and Portland are similarly sized EE industry hubs and their wages have been depressed.

Since DFW represents around 30-40% of the EE industry within the US, it's a major portion but plenty of industry share is still stuck in higher CoL areas, which incentivizes talent to either switch to SWE or outsource jobs to SK, Taiwan, PRC, India, and Israel where such salaries are more competitive

The pecking order was established in the parking lot. The execs drove BMWs and Teslas, the tenants varied. We were in a special lot.

The worker bees in the fabs drove older Hyundais and Nissans. Except for the trades - fabs require a lot of plumbing and electrical contractors, and those guys were all union, all minting overtime, and all driving fancy pickup trucks.

When the cops are complaining about union-busting...

They're either smart or they're not. Which one is it?

If you're in the 1% of top performers, you have the cognitive ability to learn new things.

> If you're in the 1% of top performers, you have the cognitive ability to learn new things.

I had to stop and admire the subtle self-deprecating humour on display between those two statements. Well played!

So, ok, but anyone thinking about entering the field can see that they’ll be left in a lurch when they hit mid career.

We’ve already run this experiment for a generation or two; anyone smart enough to finish an engineering degree can just go do a programming career afterwards, where the work and career advancement is easier. Now we have imported chips and a million JavaScript frameworks.

He was laid off and unemployable in the field. He survived as a Starbucks manager and sold Herbalife for a year while getting some additional education. I was able to help him get a contract as a tech writer to get out of the retail stuff. Now he’s a director level person in a cybersecurity firm.

The one true path is obvious on message boards, but the reality is people find themselves in bad places sometimes.

I can see why a lot of people hate the idea of semiconductor manufacturing. It is the apex of "by the books" while simultaneously exhibiting the most incredible shiny technology on the face of the planet. Being forced to follow all of these rules and procedures to get at the shiny tech rubs a lot of people the wrong way. "What do you mean I can't take my smart phone into the office? Y'all make its memory here." The pay is also arguably pretty bad unless you lock in for life.

I would say you get what you want out of it, just like anything. If you walk in with an entitlement mindset and expect the knowledge to be forced into your brain, you are in for a really shitty ride just as you describe. If you walk in thinking "I'll bust my ass here for 3-5 years and learn what I can", you will have a much better experience.

I didn't even know I wanted to write software full time until I was sitting in a cubicle at Samsung's ATX office for a few years. In my opinion, if you aren't sure what you want to do but you really love all things tech, why the hell not? Try it out. It was a great stepping stone for me.

I didn’t particularly like the job, but I’m grateful for the opportunities that time and effort has given me.

I definitely don't pretend its all just roses though. It being over 100F every day for the past month or so is definitely a big negative, and a good bit of the politics here is getting ugly. We need to continue to expand the public transit in North Texas and make it more useful to reduce car dependency. More dense housing options need to be available to allow people to choose different ways to live and alleviate rising housing costs. There's a lot of stuff that needs to be addressed, but there's movement in positive directions around here.

A lot of the debate about Texas power grid make things sound way worse than it is. In reality Texas is about average when it comes to reliability in the US. Meanwhile we produce the most renewable energy in the country, we enable people to buy 100% renewable electric plans, and our cost of energy is some of the cheapest in the country. There's definitely challenges ahead for the grid and some of the market strategies we have need to be re-thought, but overall I'm not too worried about the grid long-term. Texas isn't alone with its grid challenges though, most states need to address massively aging infrastructure.

Do you have a source for this? Anecdotally, I felt the need to buy a generator when I lived north of Austin, because outages were frequent enough that it seemed warranted. Since moving to North Carolina (just north of Charlotte), I’ve had exactly one outage in a year, and that was on a mild day, just had some equipment failure.

Never once here have I received notice that I needed to reduce consumption to help the grid.

Here they rank it 30/50 in reliability and performance metrics.

If we're sharing anecdotes, I've never lost power for more than a few seconds in the past decade or so, and before that it was pretty much only because of hurricanes or tornadoes in the area.

[0]: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia861/

A roommate of mine once quipped on something: 'that's like saying my crap smells better than yours'.

Feel free to correct me, I'm not an expert, but Texas runs its own state-only independent grid, it got completely pants in the ice storm a few years ago, and at the time a lot of articles said the Texas grid is fundamentally less resilient that other power companies. Is any of that wrong?

However, Texas is loaded with sun/desert and I believe a ton of wind resources, so it has that going for it for next-generation industry.

Surprisingly, you got to thank George Bush for that

He made renewable wind and solar energy a major part of his energy policy when he was Govenor of TX. [0].

In 1999, he passed a law mandating Texas to get 2,000 megawatts of electricity from renewable energy by 2009. This helped spurt the entire renewable industry in TX

[0] - https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/08/29/70295/george-w-b...

McGraw Hill was founded by the Bush family before they decamped for Dallas in the 1920s.

You can get around this with DC, and grids do interconnect with DC power, but that requires more expensive equipment.

I tried reading this IEEE article about the time the Eastern and Western Interconnections were connected into a synchronous system (1967-1975) to learn more about the difficulties with scaling interconnections. It mentioned frequency oscillations causing voltage variations close to the East-West connection (p11), which sounds like the issue you're describing. If that is the issue though, then Texas isn't the size limit for a grid because the Eastern and Western grids exist and are far larger.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=8594689

Definitely a lot of heavy construction.

Hello from Richardson.

So, if there is a bubble in the chip supply pipeline, auto manufacture doesn't happen. If there is undersupply of precursor chemicals it takes a while to make vaccines at scale...

What you are talking about makes me think of the very long lead product that is skilled people. A significant proportion of fab employees are genuinely highly skilled workers who need a specialised physics degree and then additional training in order to optimize yields and things like that.

I think they can build the buildings and buy the machines but unless a lot of Taiwanese are willing to get on a plane and move to the US, it is going to take a long time to be able to replace their labour at the required scale.

Edit to add:

I've met a few people who are aware of US military supply chain rules, and assume it means "oh, chinese $doodad must be crap, that's why we don't give them to our troops", when the reality is just as you said. Supply chain bubbles can be massively disruptive, so its a real strategic blunder to outsource critical components to the country we have designated as our number one rival. I'm not saying we're set up for a trade war, but we are well past due to calculate the cost of increasing short-term profits. Is a quarterly decrease in operating costs from consolidating fabs worth risking a massive disruption when that single fab is knocked out? Given the volumes that even small fabs do, I argue that quarterly increase is not at all worth it.

For reference PRC after elevating semi to first-level dicipline in 2018 is pumping out about 30k IC graduates per year. They're still about 200k short, ~520k/720k out of what IC talent 2018 white paper estimated PRC needed for complete semi industry. This is PRC that graduates ~5M STEM with huge population to draw from that bias towards S&T in tertiary. Which leads to the other uncomfortable point that a complete semi industry is more than just fabs, there's a lot of critical semi supply chain stuck in TW / East Asia (SKR/JP) that's going to get disrupted anyway in event of conflict. I don't see any indication US is resolving to reshore the entire semi chain.

Or, gee, let's throw this out there: perhaps if the pay wasn't shit, people would go into the field.

You know, just like computer science over the past couple of decades.

There's a few good things that the university offers which is surprisingly strong. When i went back to prepare for a CS masters (military, self-taught) I was surprised at the quality of the undergraduate degree in preparing students for industry, and how quickly the security program was invested in (INL does a lot of investment here).

All that to say: it's a pretty good school, especially for it's price. I only ever had one bad professor, and it was in the supply chain management department. And it was (is still?) the only raptor biology masters in the country.

The dominant ideology in the US, at least until recently, is that there should be no central planning. The invisible hand of the market was all-knowing and would allocate resources far more efficiently than any human planner.

I wouldn't blame central planning, I'd blame the lack of it.

It's an extremely efficient allocator... on a certain timescale, itself determined by the market.

It's an incompetent allocation on different timescales, typically when you get into the 5+ year range.

The ideal blend is when capability is centrally planned, but implementation and tactical scale is market-demanded.

I would say exactly the opposite, the vaccines were made quite quickly and there weren't major supply issues.

The Defense Production Act (er... central planning as you put it) was used to say what was going to happen when with money to back it up and... things happened quickly.

DPA wasn't invoked to build you new cars or supply you toilet paper so... those things had their supply issues.

The US actually can do logistics very well, especially when there's somebody willing to foot the bill for big asks. The lack of corruption and general merit-based placement here compared to so many other places combined with a large degree of vertical integration means that we can accomplish quite a lot and is one of the underappreciated cornerstones of our ability to make war (and why nobody wants to fight us).

We are decimating (and then some) Russia's military by giving away second tier equipment to Ukraine, and the amount we're giving away is basically an afterthought. A one-time superpower is scraping the bottom of the barrel for equipment fighting against largely NATO supplied spare equipment.

Unfortunately, US industrial vertical integration now includes foundations placed in global low-labor-cost countries.

The crash vaccine manufacturing scaling program was possible because we were rich enough to throw mountains of money (of which we have the most) at any international supply problems.

If the Atlantic or Pacific had been hostile to commercial shipping, or countries hadn't cooperated, it would have had a very different result.

> We are decimating (and then some) Russia's military by giving away second tier equipment to Ukraine, and the amount we're giving away is basically an afterthought. A one-time superpower is scraping the bottom of the barrel for equipment fighting against largely NATO supplied spare equipment.

"We" are not. Ukrainians are dying and holding their own against a much larger country, with the help of NATO surplus equipment.

20,000-50,000 Ukrainians now have at least one limb amputated as a result of the war. [0] [1]

And Russia's military is not being decimated. It's holding its own with an elastic defense, that's making progress difficult and costly for a Ukrainian army that's trained halfway between Soviet mass doctrine and Western maneuver warfare.

At some point the Ukrainians will hopefully manage to exhaust Russia's logistics sufficient to break through their defense, but that's in no way a sure thing.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-ukraine-a-surge-in-amputatio...

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/05/19/ukraines-amputee...

1. Russian/Wagner (now admitted to be the same) neocolonialism in African states, most recently Niger. Within days Niger stopped trading Uranium to France. Conveniently, France is the least dependent on Russia for energy and will force the French to buy outside of Niger and then refocus on Russia.

2. The latest naval drone hit on a Russian oil tanker in the Black Sea took place well beyond the expected range of Ukrainian capability, which likely means someone else (Turkey?) helped at least get it into launch range. This coupled with the Ukrainian position that all russian ships, and all ships trading with russia are now targets in the Black Sea is also big for the area.

Currently Russians may not be dying in droves defending their positions. However, the knock on effects for russian military capacity, industrial capacity, and naval capacity are incredible. The longer they flounder and the more they commit to Ukraine, the more their traditional enemies are able to take advantage of their weakness.

If russian gas and oil cannot flow out of the black sea safely, their PMC backed interests in Africa and South American become less effective, and the corresponding governments will look elsewhere for influence/protection/trade.

The naval drone question is especially fascinating.

IMHO, they have to be transported closer to impact site by some other vessel.

Ukraine doesn't have submarines, and Russia has 6(?) Kilo's in the Black Sea, so traditional submarines would be insane in that environment anyway.

And whatever transport method would need to be stealthy with respect to Russia's sensing methods: acoustic, radar, to a lesser degree visual.

Given Ukraine's technical capabilities and traditional shipbuilding expertise, I'd hazard there's a somewhat-stealthy drone carrier boat (probably also unmanned).

They could also be hiding/launching the drones directly from commercial shipping, but that's an awfully big risk for the flag country/ship owner with respect to Russia boarding and searching, or even back tracing launch points.

> IMHO, they have to be transported closer to impact site by some other vessel.

The specifications I have seen is that they have somewhere between a 400km - 800km (I know it's a big spectrum) range.

If they were about mid that, they wouldn't need launching from outside the Ukrainian mainland to hit pretty much anything of military interest.

First of all, other countries managed to develop and produce large amounts of vaccine in very short timeframe during the pandemic. Second of all, the reason nobody wants to fight the US is that the US spends as much on its military as the next ten or so countries. The US makes up 40% of all global military spending.

> We are decimating (and then some) Russia's military by giving away second tier equipment to Ukraine

The total value of NATO aid to Ukraine is on a similar scale as Russia's entire military budget. NATO is not just giving away second-tier equipment. It's giving Ukraine what it thinks Ukraine can use most effectively right away (such as upgraded T-72 tanks, man-portable air-defense and anti-tank systems early on), and some of that is cutting-edge gear (such as the Storm Shadow missile).

> and some of that is cutting-edge gear (such as the Storm Shadow missile).

Storm shadow is 20 years old from first deployment and 29 years since development started. Its replacement is being actively developed since 2017, it’s hardly “cutting edge”.

It’s just new enough that the Russians have trouble countering it.

- treating anyone who isn't "white enough" with dignity and without extreme suspicion of being in the country illegally. Driving in texas and not white enough? You might end up in jail if you don't have sufficient proof on you that you're not "an illegal"

- a reliable power grid, because they petulantly do not want to have to follow federal regulations in how they run said grid (also, electrical pricing that doesn't swing by 4 orders of magnitude or more)

- a well-funded public school system with science-based curriculum to develop their children into a skilled workforce capable of critical thinking, being retrained, etc.

- human rights, healthcare, mental health services, etc which highly skilled technical workers tend to strongly prefer/value (and in case nobody told Texas: there is a long, long history of highly skilled electronics engineers, programmers, etc being LGBTQ, autistic, having mental health needs, etc.)

Anyone who is highly skilled in semiconductors could write their own ticket. Why would they go to Texas?

There are only four states that require you have an ID during a police stop and Texas is not one of them. Obviously if you're driving, a driver's license is required. But for a random stop walking down the road? Nope, Texas does not require that you have ID.

To the rest of your post: I honestly don't know where to start. You're making a lot of assumptions that don't hold. Suffice to say that it's a lot harder to prevail in a case against the police than you realize.

People get arrested/thrown into jail for no reason far more often than you apparently think. I know someone (a software developer actually) who was attacked by an undercover officer in a case of mistaken identity. He fought back not knowing the guy was a cop. To prevent him from being able to sue, they charged him with assaulting a police officer. After months of trying to fight it in court, he finally gave up. City dropped the charges as long as he agreed not to sue them.

This is why people are so pissed and why there have been so many protests in the last few years. Everyone is tired of this shit.

That sounds like a massive conspiracy that all media (left, liberal, conservative) are part of.

Texas ranks about middle of the pack by most statistics in electrical grid reliability while also being one of the cheapest places in the US. Its also expanding renewable energy faster than any other state in the US, by a massive margin.

> electrical pricing that doesn't swing by 4 orders of magnitude or more

Clearly shows you don't actually know what you're talking about. The vast majority of households and businesses in Texas are on fixed rate contracts. The price of my electricity swings every three years or so. The headlines you're reading are spot prices; the vast majority of people don't directly pay those.

> a well-funded public school system with science-based curriculum to develop their children into a skilled workforce capable of critical thinking, being retrained, etc

Eh, PreK-12 35th overall according to US News, not great. 25th for higher education, so exactly middle of the pack. There's a lot worse of places to be education-wise. It really varies from school district to school district though. US News ranks the high school my kids will eventually attend in the top 16% of schools nationally. The smaller college I attended was ranked in the top third of all national universities. Not too bad.

> Why would they go to Texas?

As mentioned, loads of opportunity and comparatively low costs of living to a lot of other places.

all sorts of roles but middling pay and long hours. not quite the Chinese 996 but taking hints from it; the Taiwanese version, essentially