[jongjong]

It's ridiculous that a trillion dollar company feels beholden to a supplier. With that kind of money, it should be trivial to switch. People forget Nvidia didn't even exist 35 years ago. It would probably take like 3 to 5 years to catch up with the benefit of hindsight and existing talent and tools?

And anyway consumers don't really need beefy devices nowadays. Running local LLM on a smartphone is a terrible idea due to battery life and no graphics card; AI is going to be running on servers for quite some time if not forever.

It's almost as if there is a constant war to suppress engineer wages... That's the only variable being affected here which could benefit from increased competition.

If tech sector is so anti-competitive, the government should just seize it and nationalize it. It's not capitalism when these megacorps put all this superficial pressure but end up making deals all the time. We need more competition, no deals! If they don't have competition, might as well have communism.

[9cb14c1ec0]

There is a big waiting list for fab tools. You can't just spin that up out of nowhere. Modern chip fabs are the most complex things ever created, and till you spun up your own fab, supply and demand will have balanced out.

Also, how is nationalizing something pro-competition? Nationalized companies have a history of using their government connections to squash competition.

[cgio]

It can be interpreted a different way too. Apple is just a channel for TSMCs technology. Also the cost to build a fab that advanced, in say a 3 year horizon, let alone immediately available, is not one even Apple can commit to without cannibalising its core business.

[weslleyskah]

I know you are maybe joking but I don't think the government nationalizing the tech sector would be a good idea. They can pull down the salaries even more if they want. It can become a dead end job with you stuck on archaic technology from older systems.

Government jobs should only be an option if there are enough social benefits.

[jongjong]

I'm joking yes but as an engineer who has seen the bureaucracy in most big tech companies, the joke is getting less funny over time.

I've met many software engineers who call themselves communists. I can kind of understand. This kind of communist-like bureaucracy doesn't work well in a capitalist environment.

It's painful to work in tech. It's like our hands are tied and are forced to do things in a way we know is inefficient. Companies use 'security' as an excuse to restrict options (tools and platforms), treat engineers as replaceable cogs as an alternative to trusting them to do their job properly... And the companies harvest what they sow. They get reliable cogs, well versed in compliance and groupthink and also coincidentally full-blown communists; they're the only engineers remaining who actually enjoy the insane bureaucracy and the social climbing opportunities it represents given the lack of talent.

[weslleyskah]

I understand completely.

I'm going through a computer engineering degree at the moment, but I am thinking about pursuing Law later on.

Looking at other paths: Medicine requires expensive schooling and isn't really an option after a certain age and law, on the other hand, opened its doors too widely and now has a large underclass of people with third-tier law degrees.

Perhaps you can try to accept the realities of the system while trying to live the best life that you can?

Psyching yourself all the way, trying to find some sort of escape towards a good life with freedom later on...

[irishcoffee]

Maybe consider patent law? I have a friend who worked for the patent office, and the patent office paid for their law school. Now they’re a patent attorney and doing quite well.

[weslleyskah]

Nice advice. I was also considering something to do with cybercrimes, leveraging the initial degree, but your advice got me thinking!

[knowitnone3]

Sounds like you should just leave the company if you are that unhappy

[lovich]

Bruh, with some very rare exceptions like valve, every company is run as a dictatorship or oligarchy. That goes beyond tech, hell big tech at least gives some agency to their engineers.

The only way you don’t need to be versed in compliance or group think at a US firm as an employee is to either be

1) independently wealthy, so your job is a hobby you can walk away from

2) have some leverage on a currently in demand skill, but the second that leverage evaporates they will demand the compliance

Also I realized I undersold it, they aren’t just run as dictatorships/oligarchies, they are usually run as command economies as well.

The whole capitalist competition style behavior only happens with inter firm interactions, not internal ones

[marcus_holmes]

Find a small company with a founder who loves their team and wants them to be happy. They exist, I assure you. They're not even rare.

I spent most of my career working in companies with <50 employees, and only hit a couple of unpleasant founders. The few large companies that I worked in were always bureaucratic nightmares by comparison.

Small companies won't pay FAANG salaries, but they also won't make you feel like a meaningless cog in a vast unsympathetic, unproductive, machine.

[lovich]

> I spent most of my career working in companies with <50 employees

I’ve worked for 3 companies like that. It was really great if your views aligned with the founder. If they didn’t, you got fucked.

I really enjoyed when a bunch of juniors were fired the day before Christmas because the founder heard them discussing the latest movies they watched and decided that they had bad opinions and shouldn’t work at his company since he’d be embarrassed if his peers heard their tastes. Not hyperbole, direct statements. We referred to it as the Red Christmas at the time.

I believe you got lucky, I don’t find your advice actionable.

[marcus_holmes]

I've had a couple of experiences like yours, yeah, it can be a matter of finding the right founder.

I'm sorry you don't find it actionable. Please continue doing whatever you're doing now that is working for you.

[lII1lIlI11ll]

> a bunch of juniors were fired the day before Christmas because the founder heard them discussing the latest movies they watched and decided that they had bad opinions and shouldn’t work at his company since he’d be embarrassed if his peers heard their tastes.

Just out of curiosity, was it something despicable like them liking Marvel movies? Or more akin to disagreeing whether Eyes Wide Shut could be considered a good Kubrick movie?

[delaminator]

> It would probably take like 3 to 5 years to catch up with the benefit of hindsight and existing talent and tools?

Are you talking about TSMC - because that is a single, albiet primary, node in a supply chain, that's also what you have to replicate. AMSL is another vital node.

So many people with "it's just a factory, how hard can it be". The answer is "VERY", as a few endavours have found out already - and they will probably find out even at TSMC Arizona.

I shall illustrate with Adrian Thompson's 1996 FPGA experiment at the University of Sussex.

Thompson used a genetic algorithm to evolve a circuit on an FPGA. The task was simple: get it to distinguish between a 1kHz tone and a 10kHz tone using only 100 logic gates and no system clock.

After about 4,000 generations of evolution, the chip could reliably do it but the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type.

When Thompson looked inside at what evolved, he found something baffling:

The plucky chip was utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops. Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest - with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output - yet when he disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones.

Welcome to building semi-conductors.

https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

[joncrocks]

Do you mean AMSL?

There was a great video recently on the company + techniques used for cutting-edge lithography.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0

[delaminator]

ha, yes I did. - luckily still in the edit window

I was expecting an Asianometry video from your link

https://www.youtube.com/@Asianometry

Pure Silicon Crystals for the wafer is another very specialist supplier you can't just decide to become - your local gravity will probably have an effect you need to tune into

[MangoCoffee]

>If tech sector is so anti-competitive, the government should just seize it and nationalize it.

Trump is using his DOJ to probe Jerome Powell with a bogus lawsuit because the Fed won't lower rates on demand.

An independent Fed is the most important body for the USA. Lowering rates should be based on facts, not dictated by some bankrupt casino CEO. And now you want our government to nationalize the tech sector?

[jquery]

I don't support nationalizing the tech sector, but I believe the reason we have Trump in the first place is because our government refused to nationalize health care.