[kragen]

There are ten thousand semiconductor engineers kicking around Silicon Valley and Albuquerque and Portland, and another hundred thousand in Shenzhen and Taipei and Seoul. So conservatively ten million people know a semiconductor engineer.

Instead of focusing on the problem that only one person in a thousand knows a semiconductor engineer, we should figure out how to fix the much worse problem that out of the ten million people who do, only two people have made transistors in their basement, because that leak in the pipeline is apparently about five thousand times worse.

[Taniwha]

There are probably 1000s of logic designers kicking around Silicon Valley, probably not 10s of thousands. These days little semiconductor engineering is happening there, all the new fabs have been built elsewhere for decades now

[kragen]

I'm talking about process engineers, not logic designers, and most of them retired 25 years ago. But a lot of them are still alive.