In June 2014, TSMC launched a "Nighthawk Project" in order to speed up 10nm research and development. Specifically, it is to organize a group of R&D engineers who specialize in small or long night shifts so that technology research and development can be carried out 24 hours a day. The group formed by them is called the "Nighthawk Force."
This plan caused a lot of controversy in the industry in Taiwan, China. Although TSMC offered good benefits, namely a 30% increase in basic salary and a 50% increase in dividends, R&D engineers originally worked a lot of overtime, and now they have to work in two shifts, which lasted two years. Even TSMC, which has more than 40,000 employees, spent a lot of effort to gather this team of more than 300 people.
The explosiveness was the most direct and profound impression the outside world had on the Nighthawks at that time.
Taiwanese media produced data at the time, showing that the overall working hours of workers in Taiwan, China, were already on the high side, with annual working hours reaching as high as 2,174 hours. The most interesting thing is that in 2011, a magazine published a report on TSMC not working overtime. It pointed out that due to Zhang Zhongmou’s promotion, the average working hours of TSMC employees per week has gradually been reduced to 50 hours. The employees have regained their lives, and the company has gained more talents and competitiveness, and there is a prosperous scene.
"For more than fifty years, whether as a grassroots engineer, general manager or chairman, my working hours have hardly exceeded fifty hours a week," Zhang Zhongmou believes. "If a person works such a long time every day, can you believe the quality of his work in the last few hours?"
On one side is the much-publicized fifty-hour work system, and on the other side is the R&D department that operates two shifts every two years. Such a contradictory landscape is so openly displayed. It is said that Taiwan's technology industry knows the most about flexibility and innovation (Flexibility & Innovative), and can exert the most creative use of human resources. It is somewhat ironic.
The siege of young people
Excluding the additional salary of Nighthawk troops, TSMC’s salary can also be described as generous.
A female employee of TSMC who had been employed for one year was involved in a debt dispute. The court required TSMC to announce her salary level. Data shows that during the one year of working at TSMC, the female employee’s monthly salary, including overtime pay, could reach up to NT$70,000, and she also received a quarterly bonus of NT$42,000. Calculated, the average salary for 12 months in a year can reach NT$57,000, which is about 13,000 yuan.
And this is just a newcomer, which is enough to show that the salary of TSMC employees is far above the median salary.
TSMC itself also pointed out in its 2021 financial report that as of the end of 2020, the average overall salary of TSMC's new master's degree graduate engineers includes 12 months' salary, 2 months' year-end bonus, cash bonus and remuneration. The overall salary is higher than NT$1.8 million, which is approximately RMB 419,000. ; The average overall salary of direct employees is more than NT$1 million, and the average monthly income is four times the basic salary in Taiwan.
However, TSMC is like a besieged city. People outside still want to get in, but people inside are fleeing. This is fully reflected in an interview report by the New York Times.
According to reports, 31-year-old Royal Lee worked as an engineer at TSMC for five years before finally giving up his job with an annual salary of US$105,000 due to the high-pressure working environment. When TSMC equipment was paralyzed by a computer virus, he worked for 48 hours in a row just to solve the problem as soon as possible. He answered the phone day and night, and even became afraid of hearing the ringtone of his mobile phone.
After 2021, he left TSMC and chose an American company as a website engineer. The sky-high annual salary may be an enviable figure, but it failed to retain him.
“Young people are now less willing to work hard in foundries,” he said in an interview. “(Semiconductors) are no longer as prosperous as they used to be.”
It’s not easy for non-front-line engineers to go there either. The same report pointed out that as a product engineer and chip designer at TSMC, 30-year-old Frank Lin's work pressure is much less than that of employees who are busy on the front line every day, but he still feels tortured. He has a master's degree from one of the most prestigious universities in Taiwan, China, but he was not given important tasks and repeated mechanical work every day. He eventually left TSMC because of boredom and lack of sense of accomplishment.
"Money keeps getting more and more, and then life is like this?" He remembers often thinking like this while sitting in the sunny office pantry at work. Within three years of working at TSMC, he set up his own business and became an independent financial consultant. “There are too many choices in the outside world now, and people are very pursuing themselves – just because they want to work for themselves,” he said.
The situation outside the siege is not optimistic either. Although there are still many people who choose wafer foundries like TSMC because of their high salaries, these people are decreasing year by year.
According to Taiwanese media reports, in 2022, there will be fewer high school graduates than university enrollment places for the first time in Taiwan, with a shortage of 14,000. TSMC is scrambling for people. The monthly salary of senior interns has been increased to NT$38,000, and even downstream companies have also followed suit to increase it to NT$36,000.
University teachers are filled with lamentations: What is happening to young people in Taiwan? It is clear that semiconductors will have good prospects for 5 to 10 years, and the salary level is also the highest. Students just do not want to study in semiconductor-related electrical, electronic, mechanical and other majors. As a result, the vacancies in the general electrical department have increased sharply this year, and they cannot recruit students. They can only increase the cultivation of "foreign students" to rescue them.
In an interview, the Director of the Admissions Office of Longhua University of Science and Technology admitted that most students are afraid of physics, mathematics, and chemistry and do not want to study science and engineering. Nowadays, many parents only have one or two children and are afraid that their children will suffer. Even if the salary is high, they are also worried that shifts will affect their health. They all prefer jobs like "sitting in an office and blowing air conditioners."
He said that for young people, there is nothing more valuable than "freedom." Some students work as takeaways after graduating from college. "Be serious every month. Earning NT$90,000 is not a problem. The main thing is freedom. You can deliver when you want, and rest when you want."
There is obviously a shortage of people, and the salary is very attractive, but they still cannot find enough talents. This is the dilemma faced by most Taiwanese semiconductor factories. The number of newborns in Taiwan, China, in 2022 is only 138,986, which is a new low since statistics are available. It is also the third year of negative population growth in Taiwan, China. In this aging society where the birth rate is declining year by year, there is a big question mark.
"Leading" culture
At the end of 2016, TSMC's Nighthawk project achieved initial success. It finally breathed a sigh of relief after finally conquering the 10nm node, but it did not completely relax. After 10nm, there will be 7nm, and after 7nm there will be 5nm... The Nighthawk force did not disband in place, but was broken into parts and became a permanent system.
A TSMC engineer also talked about the issue of two shifts in an interview. He said that TSMC employees, especially the R&D (R&D) department, have serious overtime work situations. A few years ago, the chairman called out a 50-hour work week goal, and it is difficult to achieve the goal with R&D work. Therefore, one of the purposes of the Nighthawk Project is to rationalize and institutionalize R&D work hours, but the main purpose is to make some R&D work continue more smoothly.
He gave an example: an equipment engineer has been working for more than ten hours today and is very tired, but the experiment has not been completed yet. What should I do? Therefore, we hope to hand over part of the work to the night shift and complete the work through relays. Even so, due to the differences in different R&D work, overtime is still serious.
The engineer later communicated with Americans who worked at Intel. Seeing that TSMC's business was getting better and better, the Americans asked him, "What do you think is the biggest difference between TSMC and us?" He jokingly replied, "You guys sleep too much."
Although it was just a joke, it also revealed the secret of why TSMC can surpass Intel and Samsung and be unique in the world in advanced processes. It is also a high-voltage industry. Intel does high-voltage work in a relatively relaxed environment, but TSMC does high-voltage work in a high-pressure environment. The engineer admitted that TSMC’s working environment is designed to be quite closed, and the work speed is very fast, so he feels more pressure. In addition, there are too many layers in the company. For an ordinary engineer, a sentence in a meeting may be due tomorrow, which requires him to stay up all night to prepare.
From the outside, TSMC has created a lot of value, including jobs and GDP, and has been hailed as the "sacred mountain that protects the island." But once you get inside the besieged city, you will find that it is all built up bit by bit by engineers working day and night.
Thinking about it this way, young people don’t like to go to TSMC, and the reasons for fleeing from TSMC are readily apparent. As a company with tens of thousands of people, each young engineer is just a screw or even a thread on it. It is only a very small part of the plan. People who follow industry news may think that they are doing great work, but for low-level engineers, they are just doing hard work day after day, year after year.
In July 2021, a post on a forum once again brought TSMC's rotating night shift system to the forefront. The author, who claimed to be a TSMC equipment engineer, wrote that when he first joined TSMC, he knew that the external reputation was good and bad, and when he got the offer, he knew that the department was "shit", but at the time he thought "shifts were made late at night and late at night". What’s the point of working on holidays? There are 46 hours a month under the Labor Standards Law. How can there be a company that doesn’t follow the Labor Standards Law?” Moreover, the supervisor during the interview also told him that he would be on duty every four to six weeks, and there would be two full holidays every month. He asked him to evaluate that if he worked hard, he could gain wealth in advance. “Then just work hard for a few years!”
After I got in, I found out that the outside rumors were true. Handovers in the morning and evening took one and a half to two hours, and I was "emotionally blackmailed" and scolded by my superiors every day. "Throwing things and breaking things is also a common thing." Then every day, there were endless busy broken machines waiting to be processed and repaired. "KPI (key performance indicator) chase, boss chase, report chase, all kinds of chase!" Occasionally I have to hold meetings, and I am often very busy, and there are always new things to do.
What's worse is of course the shift. He said that the moon comes twice in the middle of the night. It's really unbearable and he can only lose weight desperately. "So if you want to lose weight, come to TSMC." As for the original plan to have two full holidays every month, because the newcomers couldn't stay, the old people felt something was wrong and ran to other factories, leaving only one full holiday.
The engineer said frankly that the high salary goes hand in hand with such tiring work. "As long as you can stay, it will definitely give you wealth and freedom." At first, his senior said, "If you don't have dog genes, you won't be able to stay long, and if you don't have enough servility, you won't be able to stay long." At this moment, he finally realized, "So I'm already planning how to be a human being."
In an interview with Taiwanese media in 2016, Zhang Zhongmou made even more shocking remarks: "Labor disputes are the last thing I want to see. American technology companies do not have unions. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft do not have unions, and Intel and TI do not have unions either."
He said that the lack of unions is a big reason why these technology companies are successful. For a company to be successful, everyone must work together. If you have this conflict between labor and management, it will be very bad. It may be a temporary benefit to workers, with higher wages and lower working hours, but in the long run, it will be bad for workers and the entire society.
This view may have come from Intel co-founder Robert Noyce, the inventor of the integrated circuit who once said: "It is critical to the survival of most of our companies to remain non-union. If we had union company work rules, we would all go out of business."
Escape from TSMC?
Semiconductors have never lacked myths. From the initial birth of integrated circuits, to Intel microprocessors, to the Japanese and Korean DRAM industries, and then to TSMC wafer foundry, we have long been accustomed to several well-known names, Shockley, Kilby, Noyce, Moore, Grove, Zhang Zhongmou... today's glorious industry is named after them, and we appreciate their legendary experiences.
Behind these stories, the core of chip manufacturing - wafer fabs - has also gone through an ups and downs migration process, from local production to offshore outsourcing. Today, on a small island like Taiwan, China, there are more than a hundred wafer fabs densely packed, and TSMC is naturally the leader among them. With four 12-inch wafer fabs, it is unique in the world.
Why TSMC and China's Taiwan wafer foundry can succeed is not only the help of the Industrial Research Institute and Zhang Zhongmou's own long-term vision, but also a group of engineers who have continued to work since the 1990s. They have served most of the world's chip manufacturers for more than 30 years and have laid the foundation for TSMC's success.
Zhang Zhongmou even once said that when TSMC asked employees to work overtime in the middle of the night, their wives would not object and continued to sleep.
But now, there are reports that young people are starting to leave TSMC, and employees at the Arizona plant in the United States have also raised questions: Due to factors such as high pressure, overtime, and obedience culture, among 91 reviews of TSMC's U.S. business on Glassdoor (a platform for employees to anonymously evaluate companies), the recommendation rate is only 27%. In comparison, Intel's recommendation rate is 85%, and there are tens of thousands of reviews.
As early as 1999, TSMC engineers published an article that caused a sensation on the Internet - "Wafer foundry: the culprit that stifles creativity". In the midst of praise for the past and future prospects of Taiwan's electronics industry, it was revealed that foundry is not as wonderful as everyone imagined, and ordinary engineers can only do some hard work without creativity.
More than 20 years have passed, and TSMC is still going its own way, but the demographic dividend will eventually come to an end. When engineers burn out like firewood, have we really thought about the retreat of this industry?