Cartoonish chip stuff is happening.Last month, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol called the global semiconductor competition “a national all-out war.” As the home country of the world’s two largest chips manufacturers, Samsung and SK Hynix, South Korea is a global semiconductor leader in all respects.
Yoon is the conservative Trump-style president of the Republic of Korea. His government recently arrested Choi Jin Seok for doing work for a Taiwanese company. Like, not in secret. Just the way people consult for companies.
Kevin Xu has examples in his email of when people who were chip engineers did work for countries outside their own without being arrested.
This is so much like something that would happen in a WWII Bugs Bunny cartoon.
In further strangeness:
Having fallen behind after one of its best talents “defected” to a competitor, TSMC entered a crisis period that led to its famous “Nightingale Program” – a three-shift, 24-hour non-stop R&D operation; the “Nightingale” refers to the engineers and researchers who worked the “graveyard shift.”
Can you imagine being a graveyard shift electronics engineer? Can research even be handed from shift to shift effectively? (I do not know how to engineer electronics. Maybe it can!)
Additional surprising thing, I’ve heard this before in passing, but:
(Lest you think that $1 million sum is a ridiculous amount, it is routine for PhD graduates from top schools studying any area of computer science to get million-dollar-plus pay packages from Big Tech.)
Something seems seriously wrong here. On one hand, have ever worked with someone with a PhD in CS? They are not significantly better than someone with no degree at software engineering. OTOH, tech companies, especially those with vast cash reserves, should distribute as much money to non-executives as they can.