Pros
The experience to live in Taiwan was great.
Cons
The training in Taiwan is in place to gear Americans up to the heavily top down management approach, a sort of “how to” in following orders without question. This is meant to season them to work under Taiwanese work standards while in the US. The “technical training” is a joke and can easily be done in the US. Their automation systems (and I’m not talking AMHS) and database management systems are no match for those at an intel, TI, or micron. Hence why they need to hire 2x the amount of people. The company’s ability to function is based purely by the number of people they hire, in Taiwan this is not a difficult, but in the US this will be impossible. The lack of efficiency is difficult for the American engineers because we are not taught to do menial tasks but rather to make impact in a meaningful way (making it a joke that they prefer PhD and masters degrees). The MES systems are adversarial to its users and the ability to process large sets of data is impossible, this is crazy considering the throughput. None of that matters to the company because the Taiwanese employees will stay there all night crunching data that would take minutes in any other semiconductor fab and formatting PowerPoint slides so that leader can easily understand while using the toilet. For a manufacturing engineer I learned nothing I didn’t already know from previous experience and found that many of the Taiwanese where unfamiliar with the importance of statistics in manufacturing. The company built in animosity between its Taiwanese and American workers which was sad to watch, whether they did it purposefully or out right dismissed the human aspect one will never know. If you want to see truly the lengths a company will go to improve their bottom line ,TSMC is it. The treatment of its employees is terrifying and created serious PTSD for me.