I appreciate your expertise and openness to discussion.
How much of the business/industry cost is HR/wages, would you say? If the industry is already automated, further attempts to automate would not lead to great cost reduction. It seems like a higher ROI approach would be increasing the efficiency of the existing automated processes.
There are areas in the fab that are not fully automated. Lot of backend wafer fabrication (Laser scribing, Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate or CoWoS, a bunch of other wild card assembly steps at wafer level, Wafer-to-Tape & Reel processes, etc.) is not entirely automated in terms of material flow in the Fab.
There are usually bigger fish to fry when it comes to Fab cost-reduction w.r.t labor. For example, if there is a trade off between having space for laborers to move about vs. using OHTs, the favor is almost always for OHTs. Why? Because every square foot of the Fab is big bucks. Floor space is king. You'd rather jam more equipment than to put humans that need 4 ft clearance and a whole bunch of OSHA needs.
It'll be an economic burden for sure. Yes, we'll need some more nurses-- about 25-30% more, during which time the working population grows by several percent.
Makes Japan's push for automated elderly assist technology seem prescient. I wonder how far they are getting and will get in the next 20 years. anybody have any good info?
When you factor in cost of living, they'll probably be better off than places like the US.
20 years from now America might have $8000/month starting wages (pretax) with $5800/month rent for a broom closet and thousands of miles away from family and friends. "Poor" countries may only be paying $2000/month, but with $400 rents, $5 dining, public medical services, plus family nearby to help with any troubles you have.
People really overestimate the appeal of their countries as an immigrant destination. The luster is fading pretty quickly as the world is catching up to western standards and online work helps balance the employment scales globally, plus crime rates and conflict generally leveling out.
> 20 years from now America might have $8000/month starting wages (pretax) with $5800/month rent for a broom closet
Hyperbole. You think, for a US average, that nursing comp is going to go up by 20-30%, but rents will go up by 300%?
> People really overestimate the appeal of their countries as an immigrant destination.
When the waiting list is huge, trending upwards rapidly, and many don't even bother to try because of the difficulty in clearing the list... there's pretty clearly significant demand.
That doesn't mean these trends stay true forever, but it's a fair bit of near to intermediate-term momentum.
Wages for jobs with an influx of cheap immigrant labor don't rise (they drop) and rents have been rising exponentially and inflation is accelerating. My figures were likely a bit too optimistic so I do apologize for that. Places I rented for $600/month 6 years ago are now reaching $2000/month now, so assuming the trends hold for 20 years and factoring in the drop in the value of the dollar, rents may very well more than quadruple.
Immigration has been trending downwards for a very long time in the US[1]. There are far more desirable countries these days (such as Canada), and even then, those will likely lose their appeal as well.
> Wages for jobs with an influx of cheap immigrant labor don't rise
If demand for nursing goes through the roof, wages for nurses will rise.
> factoring in the drop in the value of the dollar
If you're factoring change in the value of currency for rents, you should be considering it for in-demand jobs.
> rents may very well more than quadruple.
You're positing a scenario where the population wanting to rent falls, rents quadruple, and wages decrease markedly in real value. This seems to be self-inconsistent.
> Immigration has been trending downwards for a very long time in the US[1].
Immigrants are a larger share of the US population than any time since 1920, and much, much larger in absolute numbers. Net migration is a bit lower in these past 4-5 years than in years previous-- mostly because of restrictive Trump-era policies and decreased illegal migration from Mexico. And they fell off a cliff for the past couple of years because of, well, COVID.
But the actual queues for immigrant visas are also longer than before.
Living in a country with massive demand for nurses that's being filled by immigrants, wages are plummeting. Demand still far exceeds supply.
You can also look at America's farming industry. Demand is tremendous. Wages are incredibly low and dependent on immigrants who'll work for next to nothing, because it's better to accept missed opportunity than risk setting a higher wage standard.
Looking at what you linked, total immigrant population increased by 12 million from 1990 to 2000, 8 million from 2000 to 2010, but about 5 million from 2010 to 2019. Big dip.
> Looking at what you linked, total immigrant population increased by 12 million from 1990 to 2000, 8 million from 2000 to 2010, but about 5 million from 2010 to 2019. Big dip.
Yes, the sharp hockey-stick rise of number of immigrants and their share of the population cannot go straight up forever. The only way immigrants can significantly increase in share of the population, while the population increases, is for net migration to be in excess of long-term historical averages. This is still happening today!
This number isn't smooth, but the average is basically constrained by legislation. Note 1987-1991 is a special case after the 1987 and 1990 immigration acts provided for the normalization of the status of many illegal immigrants. Indeed, even the post-COVID number exceeds all years 1920-1988.
> Living in a country with massive demand for nurses that's being filled by immigrants, wages are plummeting. Demand still far exceeds supply.
Wages are so much higher than source countries (e.g. the Philippines) that -doctors- are frequently relocating and completing supplementary training to serve as nurses in the US. Remittances are 9% of GDP in the Philippines and the Philippines is building capacity to educate nurses that far exceeds internal demand; they have to go somewhere and compensation in the US outstrips other options. The number of immigrants in nursing is artificially restricted by immigration quotas.
Indeed, nursing wages are so high in the US compared to other US professions that demand outstrips supply of nursing education for domestically educated nurses.
> People really overestimate the appeal of their countries as an immigrant destination. The luster is fading pretty quickly [...]
I dunno, some of the US immigration priority dates are still last century (F3 from Mexico, 15SEP97), so demand still seems pretty high. (I also think our system is pretty rediculous, making some people wait for 25 years)
I think Singapore makes it easy to immigrate legally if you have a job offer (like Canada, Australia, HK, etc.). I don't think they allow for "family based" immigration.
That's basically correct, although the top tiers of the employment pass hierarchy are permitted to bring in dependents and parents. Only on long-term passes, though; becoming permanent residents, much less citizens, is off the agenda unless you're willing to sign up your offspring for at least two years of military service.
They have to leave Singapore before a fuzzily defined boundary between 10 and 12yo, meaning it's the parent who has to make the call. Stay beyond that, and they're a deserter who'll be arrested on sight if they ever return.
One just has to look at wages in Sweden and Germany to decide that its not in your best interests as a tech worker to allow immigration floodgates to open.
Wages for a senior developer can be 250-300% higher in the US, with lower taxes. And no, "free" healthcare doesn't come close to making this huge pay cut worth it.
European developers get shafted badly, with the narrow exceptions of Switzerland and London (they get shafted less).
The "immigration floodgates" is by far not the biggest cause of it. Forget developers, engineer salaries are pretty bad across the board compared to the US. Managers, on the other hand, are doing much better.
It's not different for managers. An L6 manager at Amazon for example will make around USD$170k total comp in Munich while new Seattle offers sit at $380k or more.
You will take at least a 55% pay cut -- and that's just pre-tax. Now consider Germany's 44% effective tax rate versus Seattle's 32% effective tax rate. The chasm gets even wider.
You get the double hit of massively reduced salaries and massive increased taxes.
How about purchasing power? Even more bad news. Local purchasing power in Munich is 40% lower than Seattle. Yet another hit.
Don't forget Germany recently also hiked their sales tax to 19%(!!!), which is almost double Seattle.
The higher you get on the seniority ladder, the worse the comparisons get. You can't get the equivalent of US$500k without being an executive, or for extreme outliers. US$500k is garden variety staff level in most top tier US companies.
Work just as hard as your US counterparts for a MASSIVELY reduced rate. Over 10 years, you've lost literally millions of dollars.
> Don't forget Germany recently also hiked their sales tax to 19%(!!!), which is almost double Seattle.
Not sure I would say that 2007 is that recent anymore (when it was increased from 16 to 19 percent ()). Also keep in mind that the EU minimum regular sales rate is 15% and only 4 countries in the EU have a lower sales tax than Germany.
Most are above 20% with the highest being 27%.
Also there is a second reduced sales tax rate for life-essentials (food for instance), which is 7% in Germany.
() Unless you count the half year 2020 where they temporarily reduced it back down to 16%/5%..
I meant the engineer to manager salary ratio is worse than it is in the US - managers make nearly twice the money for a given level of experience.
Afaik the gap is not as bad in the US, but I may be wrong?
Engineers turned managers would actually be fine, but we're talking traditionally educated managers who are often hired separately/brought in from outside.
Needless to say, they're not all that good, especially with modern startups/software businesses. Which plays a part in making Europe suck at them.
