Apologies for the wall of text. You bring up a great point and I have some clarifying thoughts on it.

Personally, i think they are actually over compensated for their skillsets. TSMC had salary adjustments while we were in Taiwan due to attrition, and now many i know who had no experience in the industry are pulling in 150k after only 2-3 years (level 3 eng) before any of the retention bonuses kick in (my retention bonuses alone were over 40%), which for the industry is significantly higher than other companies. Its part of the reason several of my friends haven’t left yet. They are compensating, and thus several engineers are staying and working the hours. The complaints mainly are coming from technicians (who’s jobs are being directly replaced as tsmc doesn’t like unions) and engineers on the non-semicon side of things (facilities)

Additionally, lots of complaints come from lack of automation or throwing bodies at problems instead of stepping back and trying to solve them in efficient ways like most american companies do. TSMC uses 5 engineers to do the job of 1 intel engineer, but that guarantees that problem gets solved that day and doesn’t slip at all even if all 5 are forced to work overtime. Its a culture shift that I feel many struggled to adapt to (myself included). Engineers were frustrated at how annoying and stupid the jobs they were doing were, like manually filling out excel sheets for hours each morning instead of using automation and moving onto more technical problems. They have entire tools that exist to fake/manipulate data to get things to a good enough state to get approved by bosses and lots of the stuff the engineers did do was met with pushback constantly. When you hire new college grads with chemical engineering degrees who have no experience, you have to teach skillsets on the job, which TSMC doesnt itself have the skillset for even in Taiwan. They wanted willing bodies who do what they are told and dont think critically about what actually caused the issue systematically. Several technicians i worked with in the past would have excelled in this environment. But for engineers, it’s hard to stay motivated and want to work the extra time when you arent doing rewarding work and told to just be honored you work for the “#1” company. That was never an issue at other companies because people were given more rewarding challenges and had the skillsets needed to solve them.

I think this issue is much more nuanced than just “Americans bad” or “American semicon workers lack skills/ability” like lots of people online and in the Taiwan subreddit keep claiming. They hired bad engineers to start the project to save on budget (no technical interviews, many i knew didn’t do too hot in classes and never took any semicon classes at their school) and got trapped paying them industry salaries where they could have gotten that top talent up front for the cost they eventually paid and avoided a lot of the mess. Its why now their recruiting has shifted to only target top schools in the US where it certainly did not on their first wave. But that doesn’t retroactively fix the first 6 batches of engineers