[carlmr]

>fixing the work ethic of American Semiconductor Factory employees

How do you pinpoint this to be the problem? How are you sure that it's not some narrative used by corporate to excuse outsourcing or putting pressure on wages?

I think an industry where technical knowledge was outsourced for cost cutting reasons for decades now is probably having issues because only the managers are left, and they're not productive on their own. Blaming it on the factory worker seems uncalled for.

[sashank_1509]

Anecdotally I have found it faster to order pcbs and get them shipped from China than get them built locally. I’m not just singling out factory workers, they don’t work hard but their managers and multiple higher levels don’t either and I don’t know why. At times I question their motivation to even do business. I also don’t buy that this is a US wide cultural thing, I’ve had excellent on call responses from AWS, heck even my customer experience from Amazon is more prompt than many of the PCB/ Chip vendors, which is why I’m singling out the semi conductor industry, though I’m sure there any many other industries suffering from the same maladies.

My anecdotal experience aside, there have been quite a few news articles about TSMC’s struggle in Arizona that highlights the difference in work ethic: https://restofworld.org/2024/tsmc-arizona-expansion/

[carlmr]

>Anecdotally I have found it faster to order pcbs and get them shipped from China than get them built locally.

I'm not convinced this is because of the workers still. What you have in Shenzhen is that you have everything in one place to build that PCB. Everything your factory doesn't have, you can get from a neighboring company. The supply chains in the US have been starved for years, so if you want to do the same from the US, you have to wait for parts to be shipped from China. Making quick iteration impossible.

Shipping only the finished PCB is of course faster than if the development of the PCB needs multiple shipments of parts.

I don't have a solution for this, but the US outsourced so much manufacturing, that it can't manufacture efficiently anymore.