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Switching Jobs Only to Face Layoffs! Honest Thoughts from Someone Who Moved from TSMC in the US to Intel!

UMC absolutely do not work as hard nor are paid as much.

I don’t buy the integrity. There are and still many engineers, managers and up to VPs that have a value and morality that is among the worst I have seen.

TSMC like Nvidia and Intel once has both a culture and at the time a strategy and execution that was perfect for the opportunity that presented itself.

As to success decades ago Intel and their CE and process cadence with Tick-Tock worked. Today TSMC highly directive and high output from high pressure and customer oriented and delivery to customer and at any and all cost to the employees is hard to beat even if you try and match that at say Intel or Samsung or SMIC. You can copy the stategy but without scale, fanatical top to bottom leadership driving all the technical details with knowledge and beating the employees to deliver I would say Intel has little chance.

The major reason for Intels failure at IFS if it happens will be 1) Leadership lack of technical knowledge that drives employees to get to the right decisions and outcomes 2) driving their employees output and deliver customer focus 2) employee work output and pace.

I agree that though Intel talent is superior to TSMC and Samsung but it is uncontrolled and perhaps not right culture nor enough output
Why would you say that Intel talent is superior? Based on the execution track record, wouldn’t you say that it’s worse than TSMC, Samsung, SMIC and maybe even GF talent?
 
If you talk across the industry I’d say those at the other companies still all acknowledge the working talent is superior there but can that talent be motivated to work the way they need to compete against TSMC in technology and manufacturing and against Nvidia / Apple / AMD / Qualcomm in design is the real question.

Clearly TSMC and others have demonstrated across multiple domains Intel’s failure

Intel squandered the last few decades when they had scale, money and dominance and wasted it on failed things like Itanium, Larrabee, Infineon, McAfee. X86 mobile and on an on.
 
If you talk across the industry I’d say those at the other companies still all acknowledge the working talent is superior there but can that talent be motivated to work the way they need to compete against TSMC in technology and manufacturing and against Nvidia / Apple / AMD / Qualcomm in design is the real question.

Clearly TSMC and others have demonstrated across multiple domains Intel’s failure

Intel squandered the last few decades when they had scale, money and dominance and wasted it on failed things like Itanium, Larrabee, Infineon, McAfee. X86 mobile and on an on.
Is the statement about talent still true today? They lost a lot of key talent in 2016 due to their layoffs then and who knows what kind of damage the latest round of layoffs have done.

I am sure the crew that did high-k MG in 2008 was talented as was the group that did finfet but that was a while back.
 
Is the statement about talent still true today? They lost a lot of key talent in 2016 due to their layoffs then and who knows what kind of damage the latest round of layoffs have done.

I am sure the crew that did high-k MG in 2008 was talented as was the group that did finfet but that was a while back.
when they(INTC) lost Mark liu they are doomed.
kinda like tsmc's loss of liang moonsoon , tsmc almost ship wreck ed.

you are not seeing any senior tsmc executive leaving for other companies after that as well. at the same time intc s senior management shift every two or three years.

The story of Liang Mong-song, semiconductor renegade, is a teaching tale about what is actually important in the industry. It is not about the million dollar EUV machines. It's the people.
 
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I wonder if TSMC employees a corps of compressed work week module engineers in addition to the normal tool owners and 855 module engineers? My experience is that having dedicated night and day shift engineers is a 10x improvement in work-life balance. I think there are some costs in that 855 module engineers can start to drift and become more disconnected from their tools. But hard to say how much of this is COVID and WFH causing that degradation rather than division of labor causing people to become less well rounded. There is also the question of how do you source the talent for these different engineering roles and what do the advancement paths look like. Intel and GF hire straight into the CWW engineer role. Samsung Austin engineers get chucked into a rotation for working the night shift for a quarter (with no day shift). My understanding of Micron USA is they seem to stick you on sustaining for the first 2-4 years until you "graduate" to a development engineer. Some firms seem like handle CWW engineers better than other, but I don't have enough data points to make any definitive claims about who's way is "best". I lean towards Samsung's way as the best at making sure people are brushing up on their sustaining skills and tool knowledge, but is also the worst for work-life balance. The Intel, Micron, and GF systems seem similar for work-life balance. But Micron seems to offer the best career path so people don't get forced to make a lateral move to 855 module engineer just to move forward in their career. I suspect that "graduates" of the Micron system might also on average have stronger tool fundamentals than the average dedicated 855 module and development engineers of the intel or GF systems.
CWW?
855?
 
when they lost Mark liu they are doomed.
kinda like tsmc's loss of liang moonsoon , tsmc almost ship wreck ed.

Nonsense, quite the opposite. CC Wei is a very strong leader, the strongest leader TSMC has ever had. In my 30 years experience with TSMC I have never seen them stronger. I do not credit CC Wei with the failures of the other foundries but I do credit CC for preparing TSMC for fierce competitive storms. The storms did not come but better safe than sorry.
 
when they lost Mark liu they are doomed.
they
are refering to INTC. you might get confused.

Either way it is nonsense. For Intel's failures look at the CEOs:


Bob Swan signed the deal with TSMC that saved Intel and got fired for it. Pat Gelsinger's legacy is still evolving but right now it does not look good. The whole 4 nodes in 5 years thing.... :ROFLMAO:
 
Either way it is nonsense. For Intel's failures look at the CEOs:


Bob Swan signed the deal with TSMC that saved Intel and got fired for it. Pat Gelsinger's legacy is still evolving but right now it does not look good. The whole 4 nodes in 5 years thing.... :ROFLMAO:

Bob Swan's decision led to the realization of the Lunar Lake product line in time to save Intel. Otherwise, Intel could have already sunk into a lake.
 
Bob Swan's decision led to the realization of the Lunar Lake product line in time to save Intel. Otherwise, Intel could have already sunk into a lake.
I don't think BoB swan predicted for lunar lake he just bought capacity that they don't loose so he outsourced to TSMC Meteor Lake was started in 2019 LNL was started after Pat he simply made use of capacity that Bob swan bought
 
Lunar Lake seems to be a niche product for uber expensive energy efficient laptops. Made at a time both Apple and Microsoft have already bailed out on Intel and started using ARM chips for the same purpose. I don't know why people hype it so much. Too little too late.

I think the most impressive thing about it is the small core design. It has a lot of potential if used in future higher volume products.

Would it have killed Intel if they released it in Intel 3 instead? I doubt it.
 
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Lunar Lake seems to be a niche product for uber expensive energy efficient laptops. Made at a time both Apple and Microsoft have already bailed out on Intel and started using ARM chips for the same purpose. I don't know why people hype it so much. Too little too late.
Recent benchmarks show it only barely matches latest AMD on energy consumption, and Qcom on performance
 
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