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COVID-19: Retrenchments


Albeniz
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16 hours ago, Voodooman said:

A lot of Taiwanese engineers are millionaires, we just didn’t have the semicon clusters needed and or develop the technology despite the import and Temasek $$$ strategies.  Just curious why?

Those employees in semicon or those who have ventured out on their own?

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10 hours ago, CremornePt said:

I suspect we simply didn't (don't?) have critical mass - population was 3-4m in 1990-2000 & how many world class semicon entrepreneurs could we possibly extract from an NUS engineering cohort.

Doesn't help if the government focus wasn't there. They built entire science parks with programs and incentives focused on technology and related manufacturing.

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24 minutes ago, Porker said:

Those employees in semicon or those who have ventured out on their own?

Both i guess. TSMC and others, even foxconn, pay good bonuses every year to their Taiwanese workforce.

Taipei has the highest concentration of millionaires in the world, IIRC. 

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20 hours ago, Voodooman said:

A lot of Taiwanese engineers are millionaires, we just didn’t have the semicon clusters needed and or develop the technology despite the import and Temasek $$$ strategies.  Just curious why?

Over here many millionaires dreamers  when they see their 30 year mortgage loan property😂 

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22 hours ago, Voodooman said:

A lot of Taiwanese engineers are millionaires, we just didn’t have the semicon clusters needed and or develop the technology despite the import and Temasek $$$ strategies.  Just curious why?

When the company don't do well, who has the biggest responsibility??? CEO lah... now he is deputy CEO of temasek... promoted because of his "good" work in chartered semi con?

To me, if you put an accountant as CEO for a Wafer Fab, what do you expect? But there are people who say you don't need to know how to do it at CEO level... I never believed that. A huge majority of CEOs in tech firms are engineering background. For the obvious reason the people you work with are engineers.

TSMC CEO is an engineer. Intel and AMD CEO are engineers. Apple CEO is engineer. The MNC I work in have an Engineer as CEO too. Nvideo CEO is engineer. Qualcomm CEO is engineer. Broadcomm CEO is engineer. I cannot find ANY good semi con companies whose CEO is not engineering background

Our Chartered Semi CEO is Chia Song Hwee who is graduate in accountancy from some unknown Australia university.... what do you expect??? 

To me it is like a no brainer... and yet the government can get it wrong. 

Edited by Wind30
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I hire engineers from Taiwan and we have long discussions about taiwan and singapore.

Engineering in Taiwan is like Finance it seems. The image of engineering in Taiwan is pretty good and they attract the really good students. In Singapore, the main problem is no good students will take up engineering. 

I do think the Rot comes from the top. A lot of these GLCs cannot compete and I see the local start ups getting grants from the government are just horrible... 

You don't manage the company well from the top, you cannot attract good locals at the bottom. You really need to fix both. 

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5 hours ago, Porker said:

Those employees in semicon or those who have ventured out on their own?

there are quite a few semicon millionaires who are employees, probably through stock options, grants. 

Assuming 1million SGD isn't that tough if you join the company at the right time and wait like 5 years holding on to your stocks. 

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5 hours ago, Porker said:

Those employees in semicon or those who have ventured out on their own?

TSMC's annual bonus is way better than Sheng Siong.

I would not be surprised that some TSMC engineers have accumulated millions by now.

 

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(edited)
33 minutes ago, Wind30 said:

When the company don't do well, who has the biggest responsibility??? CEO lah... now he is deputy CEO of temasek... promoted because of his "good" work in chartered semi con?

To me, if you put an accountant as CEO for a Wafer Fab, what do you expect? But there are people who say you don't need to know how to do it at CEO level... I never believed that. A huge majority of CEOs in tech firms are engineering background. For the obvious reason the people you work with are engineers.

TSMC CEO is an engineer. Intel and AMD CEO are engineers. Apple CEO is engineer. The MNC I work in have an Engineer as CEO too. Nvideo CEO is engineer. Qualcomm CEO is engineer. Broadcomm CEO is engineer. I cannot find ANY good semi con companies whose CEO is not engineering background

Our Chartered Semi CEO is Chia Song Hwee who is graduate in accountancy from some unknown Australia university.... what do you expect??? 

To me it is like a no brainer... and yet the government can get it wrong. 

Reminds me of the shopping retail auntie Saw who CEOed MRT some years back.  No relevant railway experience too.

Edited by Albeniz
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Errrr...our Minister of Health is an ELECTRICAL ENGINEER  who came up with terms like Circuit Breaker, Steady State. 

Edited by Fcw75
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19 minutes ago, Albeniz said:

Reminds me of the shopping retail auntie Saw who CEOed MRT some years back.  No relevant railway experience too.

exactly. She did pretty good actually, SMRT under her leadership actually made a lot of money because she converted all the empty spaces in the stations into retail which is a brilliant move for the company. 

I really think our appointment of the CEOs for the GLCs is really bad nowadays... Big Pay but the people we get mostly cannot make it, dunno from where one and how they even get the jobs. This will prove to be one of the biggest problem for Singapore. 

Edited by Wind30
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Turbocharged
2 minutes ago, Wind30 said:

exactly. She did pretty good actually, SMRT under her leadership actually made a lot of money because she converted all the empty spaces in the stations into retail which is a brilliant move for the company. 

 

i fully agree with this... her job was to make $. CEO is business trained. no social moral obligations.

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Turbocharged
54 minutes ago, Albeniz said:

TSMC's annual bonus is way better than Sheng Siong.

I would not be surprised that some TSMC engineers have accumulated millions by now.

 

As long as SG education system is grade based, nothing will change.

SG people are brought up: cannot fail. those who really do R&D, will know, failure is confirmed. hit rate for success is probably about 0.1% to 0.2%. this also the reason why majority sg engineering firms are just ermmmm high class production process firms. no one to push the boundaries.

TSMC key R&D may get much more bonus, but even for them, the rank and file engineers, are pay like dirt. Taiwanese semicon are know to really squeeze on basic and promise you big bonus. if can tahan, yeah, annual may be decent. else, i think they may be worse off than sg engineers.

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14 minutes ago, Vegas said:

As long as SG education system is grade based, nothing will change.

SG people are brought up: cannot fail. those who really do R&D, will know, failure is confirmed. hit rate for success is probably about 0.1% to 0.2%. this also the reason why majority sg engineering firms are just ermmmm high class production process firms. no one to push the boundaries.

TSMC key R&D may get much more bonus, but even for them, the rank and file engineers, are pay like dirt. Taiwanese semicon are know to really squeeze on basic and promise you big bonus. if can tahan, yeah, annual may be decent. else, i think they may be worse off than sg engineers.

of course you are not paying the operators a lot.

The designers you need to pay a LOT. Whether you are designing the IC or the process. You really don't need a lot of engineers to design a chip. I am not sure about Process technology development, my wife is in it so I have some understanding. 

I am surprised how much a monopoly TSMC has now on high end chip manufactuing. They are probably making shitloads of money when you are literally the only player...

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1 hour ago, Wind30 said:

I hire engineers from Taiwan and we have long discussions about taiwan and singapore.

Engineering in Taiwan is like Finance it seems. The image of engineering in Taiwan is pretty good and they attract the really good students. In Singapore, the main problem is no good students will take up engineering. 

I do think the Rot comes from the top. A lot of these GLCs cannot compete and I see the local start ups getting grants from the government are just horrible... 

You don't manage the company well from the top, you cannot attract good locals at the bottom. You really need to fix both. 

For tech industry, you cannot have technocrats and bureaucrats coming in as head honchos. It just doesn't work that way especially for cut-throat semicon. Produce good students first or having competent leaders first to bring up the industry? We did tried on the students part, EEE used to be very hard to get in during the 1990s-2000s, unlike its a dumping ground now.

We just need to relook into the history of where we got it wrong despite having all the right ingredients at the start (nurturing talent pool from university, govt throwing its weight behind the entire industry, tech collabs with other leading foreign fabs etc). 

Chartered Semicon in its early days, it can go toe to toe against TSMC but it failed to scale up on the innovation front during the later years, its just cannot compete as it's stuck with the strategy of cutting costs and producing low cost chips. The death sentence of Chartered was passed as global players started new fabs in China which drives down the prices for low cost chips even further. Charted simply got priced out and it has nothing ahead of the curve in its pipeline. After that, it just faded into oblivion and got sold off to Global Foundries. 

What went wrong? The higher powers decide that an accountant is the ideal CEO who's only strategy is about managing costs and the bottom line. So yes, the rot comes from the top. 

For those who talk about not having critical mass to spark off world beating companies, that has a certain truth in it from the perspective of a numbers game. But there are exceptions. We just need to look at Israel vs Singapore today. In year 2000, both countries are +/- 5 million population. Fast forward today, Israel carved out their niche in the tech industry (software, big tech, military) and its ranked the world's top 10 most innovative countries. Where the F are we?

 

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Turbocharged
6 minutes ago, Wind30 said:

of course you are not paying the operators a lot.

The designers you need to pay a LOT. Whether you are designing the IC or the process. You really don't need a lot of engineers to design a chip. I am not sure about Process technology development, my wife is in it so I have some understanding. 

I am surprised how much a monopoly TSMC has now on high end chip manufactuing. They are probably making shitloads of money when you are literally the only player...

Today's supply crunch is also due to TSMC 😜

invest into R&D => first mover's advantage.

the smaller the nm, the more ICs a wafer can produce. you really dun need many engineers, so have to be the top engineer.

semicon are scared of heat, one of the most impt skill is probably thermal management

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(edited)
14 minutes ago, Vegas said:

Today's supply crunch is also due to TSMC 😜

invest into R&D => first mover's advantage.

the smaller the nm, the more ICs a wafer can produce. you really dun need many engineers, so have to be the top engineer.

semicon are scared of heat, one of the most impt skill is probably thermal management

Not just heat.  Subthreshold leakage current and hot carrier effects too, at high Electric field as device dimension scales down.

Edited by Albeniz
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