The world’s largest chip manufacturer turned out to be a vile abuser. His attempt to move from Taiwan to the US fails – he bullies the engineers and they quit

TSMC was not the best employer. She treats the engineers building her factory in the USA very poorly, which is why they flee en masse, and the completion date of the project is constantly postponed. TSMC is the world’s leading contract chip vendor with a market share of over 50%. It produces processors for AMD, Apple and many others.

Keep Eastern management methods to yourself

The Taiwanese company TSMC, the largest contract chip manufacturer in the world (market share more than 50%, customers include Apple, AMD and Qualcomm) has faced severe criticism in the United States. She is building a plant in Arizona, but her usual management methods do not suit American engineers at all.

As CNews reported, in 2020 the administration of the former US President Donald Trump (Donald Trump) agreed with her to build an advanced plant in Arizona. But due to her management methods, construction was greatly delayed, and the deadline for the project’s completion was constantly being pushed back.

The Tom’s Hardware portal writes that TSMC was hit with dissatisfaction from engineers. The criticism touches on a culture of chronic overwork, abusive management styles and poor treatment of engineers that have long taken root in TSMC’s Taiwanese factories but have proven completely out of place in the West.

Specialists involved in the construction of the Arizona factory are leaving their jobs in droves. Tom’s Hardware writes that this is a consequence of abuse on the part of the Taiwanese tech giant.

What’s happening

In its homeland, TSMC is a great corporation that makes a huge contribution to the country’s economy and provides jobs and salaries to tens of thousands of people. Taiwanese people almost idolize her, writes Tom’s Hardware, and they are ready to give her hours of their lives, working 12 hours every day. Such long working hours have long been commonplace in the company, as well as harsh treatment from managers, who often force workers to work after hours and even threaten them with dismissal as punishment for relatively minor mistakes.

This kind of work culture can survive in Taiwan, where TSMC is the pinnacle of the engineering profession, but when American engineers come to work, divisions quickly arise. The problems began back in 2021, when the first group of American engineers arrived in Taiwan to receive training in chip manufacturing directly from TSMC’s existing factories. They were supposed to apply the knowledge gained at a new factory in Arizona, the launch of which was originally scheduled for 2024. A second plant in the state was also announced – it is planned to open in 2026.

However, American specialists were frankly shocked by local working conditions, especially the 12-hour working day and pressure from management. They were also struck by the chaos in prioritization.

When an American engineer asked his Taiwanese manager which of his current tasks had the highest priority, he heard the answer: “Everything is a priority.”

Management’s inability to properly prioritize work led to the “furious intensity” required to complete absolutely any task, no matter how small, writes Tom’s Hardware. Americans condemned TSMC for poor management, leading to inefficiency throughout the enterprise, and for forcing them to sacrifice personal time for work.

Are the Americans to blame for everything?

Problems with American specialists came to the attention of the founder of TSMC Morris Chang (Morris Chang). The creator of the largest semiconductor vendor in the world immediately stated that it’s not about the company itself, but about how Americans feel about their work.

According to Chang, the high expectations of American engineers are a feature of US corporate culture. Rest of World quoted the founder of TSMC: “If [машина] If it breaks down at one in the morning, in the US it will be fixed the next morning. But in Taiwan they will fix it at 2 am” (If [a machine] breaks down at one in the morning, in the US, it will be fixed in the next morning. But in Taiwan, it will be fixed at 2 am).

Nothing changes

Some time after the incident with American engineers at TSMC’s Taiwanese factories, the company began to introduce its usual management practices in the United States. Many American engineers left in 2021 without waiting for the end of their internship, but some of their colleagues still endured until the completion of their training. They returned to their country with their Taiwanese colleagues and were unpleasantly surprised to find that TSMC had begun to repair its Taiwanese ways at American factories that had not yet been built. The company forced engineers not only to overwork, but also to perform the duties of completely different people. In particular, they were required to remove construction waste. There were also complaints about this in 2023.

In 2024, according to Tom’s Hardware, this led to a new wave of layoffs of engineers. Taiwanese managers even had to undergo training on how not to shout at workers in public, but they did not put the new knowledge into practice, continuing to manage staff in their usual manner.

It got to the point where engineers were given tasks that were completely impossible in terms of volume and time frame. As a result, they had to falsify accounts to meet the high expectations of Taiwanese managers.

By the time the material was published, Taiwanese workers, accustomed to such violations of labor rights, and American workers, accustomed to complaining or quitting due to poor working conditions, could not find a common language. Americans complain about “Asian culture,” while Taiwanese engineers consider their Western colleagues arrogant and carefree.