TSMC hires 6,000 young engineers despite the recession



Taiwan-based semiconductor giant TSMC has announced a major new hiring wave. The company plans to hire 6,000 young engineers this year. The company's plans were reported by Reuters.e

Based on TSMC's staffing statistics for 2021, the total infusion of "young blood" into the ranks of TMSC will be almost 10% of the company's total workforce. TSMC reportedly employed 65,000 people in 2021.

TSMC hires 6,000 young engineers despite the recession

News about hiring new employees on such a scale looks surprising against the background of incessant reports of layoffs in the ranks of major IT companies. The wave of "optimization" that began in 2022 with managers and junior office staff against the backdrop of an accelerating recession (although top managers are linking layoffs and overhauling during the covid period), by early 2023, has reached the engineering staff of IT-giants. For example, we wrote about Microsoft laying off staff in its Azure division, and the same situation was observed in early 2023 at Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services.

It is possible that the wave of hiring is related to the imminent opening of a new TSMC factory in the United States. Recall that in May 2020 TSMC announced plans to build a new factory in Arizona, which will specialize in the production of semiconductor chips for various products, including cars, artificial intelligence and 5G technologies. The cost of building this factory, according to the company, was supposed to be about $12 billion. However, in the summer of 2021, the U.S. Senate passed a bill to support the semiconductor industry, which provides subsidies to a number of IT giants. The total package of aid to the industry amounted to $52 billion. This allowed TSMC to increase the budget of its future factory to $40 billion a year after the start of the project in Arizona, and in February 2022 the company added another $3.5 billion to the construction. Thus, only the planned budget for production in the U.S. is now $43.5 billion, of which at least 15.5 billion - own (or borrowed under guarantees) funds TSMC.

In the context of TSMC's big infusion and the general tension around Taiwan, investing in new employees is a logical process.

The semiconductor giant plans to hire people with varying degrees of training, including right out of university. For example, an undergraduate engineer right after graduation can qualify for a salary of $65,000 a year with active on-the-job training. More experienced newcomers with a background in commercial development, manufacturing work or other skills can expect more substantial salaries. The average incom of an engineer at TSMC, according to open data, is about $122 thousand, but it is important to stipulate that the statistics include not only production engineers, but also programmers, both software and web developers.

TSMC is now investing in personnel, of which it will need a lot when the Arizona factory is finished. The board of the Taiwanese giant understands that an engineer is not an office manager and it takes more than a month to hire someone off the street and train them in everything they need. According to the company's plan, the next few years will be spent to fully train newcomers, because TSMC is a market leader and is at the cutting edge of technology, to fully learn what they need the company, you can only in her own walls, "ready" specialists for the giant of the market almost none.

In the worst case scenario TSMC will have to cut its capital costs by $4.3 billion to $32 billion this year, while its revenue this quarter is expected to decline by 5%. Thus, we can say that the company has also been hit by the crisis. But since it takes a lot of time to train qualified specialists, TSMC is not only dealing with current problems, but also looking ahead to several years ahead. 





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