TSMC's Arizona factory has started mass production (4nm and 5nm processes) early this year. Although the cost is higher than the Taiwan factory, AMD CEO Su Zifeng recently pointed out that chips from Arizona cost about 5%-20% more than those from Taiwan, but due to higher supply chain resilience, customers (such as AMD, Apple, Nvidia) are still willing to pay to support it.
According to official information, the Arizona factory's (3nm) structure is completed and is accelerating mass production scheduling, planning to enter mass production by 2028, which seems to be gradually getting on track.
However, in this context, an American who claims to have four years of work experience at the Arizona factory and has now left, posted on the Reddit forum yesterday, describing that despite TSMC's generous salary, employees must endure disastrous management, toxic workplace culture, extremely long working hours, and discrimination... The original translation is as follows:
Hello everyone,
I often comment on articles about TSMC's Arizona factory and have received many related private messages. I want to share my experience there, and if you still want to apply and work there after reading this, at least you've been warned.
About my background: I was hired in 2021 and went to Taiwan that summer as one of the first batch of employees. I don't need to elaborate too much, but it was absolutely a disaster. They changed our flight dates multiple times, gave us broken laptops, and lied about our accommodation's size/location, etc. I initially attributed all this to pandemic restrictions and let it go. Then we arrived at TSMC in Tainan, and the disaster continued. They weren't prepared with a training program, hardly anyone spoke English, and my team was refused help because "Americans earn too much money, so we don't need to help them."
Fast forward through a few years of "training" in Taiwan, during which about 20% of people quit due to poor working conditions and style, then we returned to Arizona. Clearly, a new wafer factory will encounter problems, but TSMC always manages to make everything a mess. Engineering progress was delayed because they had no plan at all. They sent Taiwanese employees to clean up the mess because they couldn't handle all the American blue-collar workers. They made engineers support facility work that we weren't qualified or trained for, putting us in extremely dangerous situations. For safety, we had to refuse, with the consequence of "potentially receiving a poor performance review at the end of the year".
So, after experiencing all this, I thought, okay, this is the growing pain of a foreign company opening a new factory in the US, things should improve, right? Wrong! Things got worse. By then, about 70% of my colleagues who started in Taiwan had quit, so we were constantly training new employees. Moreover, all the former colleagues I still kept in touch with said they were better off after leaving.
Every project comes from the Taiwan "mother factory" and must be followed regardless of logic or reason. So there's no room for innovation, not even a chance to think. Work became: show up, be told what to do today, then plans change, modify it, progress severely falls behind, and then repeat this cycle continuously.
I participated in internship/new employee interviews for my team (I guess because English is my native language, and some Taiwanese-conducted interviews were terrible). Anyway, the preparation instructions I received before interviews were very disturbing. I was instructed to prioritize Taiwanese, followed by anyone with a visa, because "visa holders are easier to control". They didn't want to hire Americans without immigration restrictions because they knew Americans would quit once they discovered how bad it was, so they used green cards as a carrot, holding people hostage. I was also told not to hire Indian people, and they even had an impolite term for them, calling them "PhD people".
Among those I interviewed and were hired, two were told by my boss that they had already gotten the job before any interview, and the interview was just a formality. They all had some connection with someone who had worked at TSMC. I understand the "who you know, not what you know" concept, but the extent of nepotism was shocking. I was also told to emphasize "Taiwanese work culture" in interviews, meaning you'll be yelled at daily and deal with impossible deadlines because the new employee turnover rate is extremely high.
Daily work was a nightmare. They expect you to dedicate your life to work. If it were hourly pay, maybe it would be okay, but as a salaried engineer, my pay remained the same regardless of how long I worked. Sometimes working until 9-10 PM. Working 14-16 hours a day was... normal for other engineers in my team.
Most people left around 8 PM, and that was on less busy days. They would deliberately assign "urgent" and "needs to be discussed tomorrow morning" projects at 4-5 PM, meaning you had to stay and work overtime. The work culture itself was very toxic. The Taiwanese salary structure is such that over 50% of income comes from bonuses. These bonuses are not just based on performance but are a popularity contest, most importantly about how many mistakes you can avoid. So, in an environment where so much money depends on not making mistakes, you might choose to hide and avoid causing any trouble, right?
Well, that's exactly what most people do. So, if you seek help from someone, they either ignore you or pass you to someone else because if you mess up something they told you to do, they'll be blamed. This creates a very toxic work style: no teamwork, no one helps anyone, ultimately delaying all projects.
You must also remember that TSMC is not just a Taiwanese company, but for most Taiwanese, it's the company representing Taiwan. They are very proud to work there (as they should be), but as a non-Taiwanese, I didn't have the same level of commitment to the company. I like doing things well at work and learning new things, but I won't sell my soul for the company, which most Taiwanese would. They view work as their first and only life option, with family second, which didn't suit me. I work to live, they live to work.
When it comes to Taiwanese people, their culture is vastly different from American culture. They rarely interact with other races, which may result in becoming highly racist. I've heard them mock others' accents, appearances, and disabilities. They usually do this privately or in Chinese, but since I lived in Taiwan and learned quite a bit of Chinese, I could understand what they were saying. They would mock or speak ill of others right in front of them. They ultimately turn work into something like high school.
Everyone has their own gossip circle, and they date within the company because they have no life outside of work. They are also very gender-discriminatory. When I was in Taiwan, a new girl was about to join, and before she was hired, her manager shared her Facebook/Instagram personal profile with everyone to "rate" her, which was extremely disgusting.
Anyway, she was hired, but had gained some weight and didn't look exactly like her photos. On her first day, a Taiwanese guy walked up to her and said, "Wow, I didn't expect you to be so fat!" Then ran off and giggled with his friends. As a result, she spent the rest of the day crying and took two days off afterward. These were adults aged 25-35... Let me tell another story, a Taiwanese guy walked up to a seated girl, placed a banana near his lower waist, and then put the banana in front of her face, saying, "Hey! Want to take a bite of my banana?" So these are just some interesting experiences you might encounter while working there.
You might ask, what are the benefits of working there? There are two points that most TSMC employees would mention, and I have counterarguments for both.
They don't lay off employees. This is true; I've never heard of anyone being laid off, and it's almost impossible to be fired (unless you make an extremely, and I mean extremely, big mistake). So, you might think this is great, that you have a job for life. While you don't have to worry about being laid off/fired, this also results in generally low-quality employees.
Imagine working in a place that keeps all its worst employees. All the good employees leave or get promoted to other teams, while the worst ones have found ways to survive and endure those ridiculous things. So joining that team means you must do extra work to compensate for all their mistakes. But if you find a decent team and can tolerate it, you can really have a job until you can't stand it anymore. My boss's real quote from when I worked there perhaps best explains this: "TSMC won't fire anyone, they'll just force you to resign."
Salary. Yes, TSMC's salary is indeed high. They initially deliberately pay slightly higher than your market value to attract you. But after working for a few years, the salary starts to plateau, and you'll quickly feel it's too low. However, this might apply to most jobs in this industry, and job-hopping might always be the best choice. For example, when I left earlier this year, I got a 30% raise.
So know that the salary might look great now, but won't always be so. Moreover, they pay more for a reason and expect more. It's like a deal with the devil - if your salary is 5-10% higher than competitors, but your working hours are 50% longer, are you really earning more?
My advice to anyone considering applying is: I think their internship program is actually quite good and can boost your resume. The salary is decent, and you have an end date, which is the best part. They do indeed deceive interns, deliberately being nice to them and not giving them anything too stressful (this was a direct order from my boss when I was mentoring interns).
So know that if you decide to go full-time, the stress/workload will increase dramatically. I would say in some situations, working full-time at TSMC can be viable. If you urgently need a job due to the current poor job market. I also think if you've just graduated and are looking for your first job, if you're single, have no family, no real attachments, it can be a good starting point. You can earn some money, accumulate some experience, and then leave. If you've worked anywhere else before, I'd recommend avoiding it because it will feel like a prison (no personal phone, 24/7 tracking, meetings with roll calls like treating 12-year-olds, etc.).
Also, if you see phrases like "We're recruiting for expansion!!" when applying, this is actually very misleading. They're always expanding and building more wafer fabs, but about 90% of the time, if there's a vacancy, it's because you're filling a position of someone who left, because the personnel turnover is terrible.
Final disclaimer, this is just my personal experience, so like everything on the internet, please take it with a grain of salt. I believe there must be people who genuinely enjoy working there (I've never met any, but they must exist, right?), and who haven't had the same experience as me. This experience wasn't entirely terrible, but I saw it as a place that wouldn't promote my career development or mental health, so I left.
I could go on and on writing a novel about my experience, but if you still want to apply after reading this, feel free to message me anytime. I'm happy to answer any questions or provide more details about anything related to TSMC.
Responses from Taiwanese PTT Users
This post also sparked heated discussion on PTT, with those supporting the original criticism saying: TSMC's workplace culture is "very realistic", especially the high pressure, long working hours, internal cliques, lack of cooperation, and unfriendliness to external employees. TSMC is an extreme example of "slave-like" and "production line culture", with many people simply enduring high pressure in exchange for high salaries.
However, some raised doubts, pointing out that TSMC's success largely comes from employees' "endurance" and "all-out effort", which would be difficult to replicate in the US. They also noted that internal recommendations and nepotism are common in US companies, and not unique to TSMC. Some questioned why the author could stay for four years if they were so dissatisfied, suggesting contradictions in the criticism...
Overall, the author believes cultural conflict is the main reason, as Taiwanese and American work values are inherently different and cannot be simply evaluated by American standards. However, TSMC's blood-and-sweat work culture is well-known, and everyone seems to tacitly accept such behavior for the sake of money. Additionally, a reminder that this is just a personal experience and should be viewed with skepticism, and one should refer to multiple perspectives.
