Purdue University Races To Expand Semiconductor Education To Fill Yawning Workforce Gap That Threatens Reshoring Effort (washingtonpost.com) 56
An anonymous reader shares a report: On a recent afternoon, an unusual group of visitors peered through a window at Purdue University students tinkering in a lab: two dozen executives from the world's biggest semiconductor companies. The tech leaders had traveled to the small-town campus on the Wabash River to fix one of the biggest problems that they -- and the U.S. economy -- face: a desperate shortage of engineers. Leading the visitors on a tour of the high-tech lab, Engineering Professor Zhihong Chen mentioned that Purdue could really use some donated chip-making equipment as it scrambles to expand semiconductor education. "Okay, done. We can do that," Intel manufacturing chief Keyvan Esfarjani quickly replied. Just weeks before, his company broke ground on two massive chip factories in Ohio that aim to employ 3,000 people.
Computer chips are the brains that power all modern electronics, from smartphones to fighter jets. The United States used to build a lot of them but now largely depends on Asian manufacturers, a reliance that the Biden administration sees as a major economic and national security risk. Hefty new government subsidies aimed at reshoring manufacturing are sparking a construction boom of new chip factories, but a dire shortage of engineers threatens the ambitious project. By some estimates, the United States needs at least 50,000 new semiconductor engineers over the next five years to staff all of the new factories and research labs that companies have said they plan to build with subsidies from the Chips and Science Act, a number far exceeding current graduation rates nationwide, according to Purdue. Additionally, legions of engineers in other specialties will be needed to deliver on other White House priorities, including the retooling of auto manufacturing for electric vehicles and the production of technology aimed at reducing U.S. dependence on fossil fuels.
Computer chips are the brains that power all modern electronics, from smartphones to fighter jets. The United States used to build a lot of them but now largely depends on Asian manufacturers, a reliance that the Biden administration sees as a major economic and national security risk. Hefty new government subsidies aimed at reshoring manufacturing are sparking a construction boom of new chip factories, but a dire shortage of engineers threatens the ambitious project. By some estimates, the United States needs at least 50,000 new semiconductor engineers over the next five years to staff all of the new factories and research labs that companies have said they plan to build with subsidies from the Chips and Science Act, a number far exceeding current graduation rates nationwide, according to Purdue. Additionally, legions of engineers in other specialties will be needed to deliver on other White House priorities, including the retooling of auto manufacturing for electric vehicles and the production of technology aimed at reducing U.S. dependence on fossil fuels.
Culture (Score:5, Insightful)
I knew a guy who did chip layout design for an IBM-affiliated company and he complained about the tedium of the work, the complete lack of direction and purpose, and ultimately the management culture of overpromise then Death-March for salaried employees.
He didn't want to move because his network said it was the same everywhere and $75K was a typical salary (low for the industry several years ago).
Based on this I would tell an undergrad that chip designers aren't valued as people and they should look elsewhere.
Maybe Purdue needs to engage its business school in non-psychopathic behavior training.
If both American and Chinese companies drive their designers like slaves then China is guaranteed to win this race.
Fix the culture.
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Re: Culture (Score:3)
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Maybe working in a fab will be the training courses for the vocational programs going foreword. Maybe the university can partner. The university train the engineers, and the vocational school train the workers.
I'd be all for the engineers-to-be spending at least part of a semester alongside the workers in the fab. Having a theoretical understanding of how the process should work is all well and good, but having experience with the realities of the manufacturing environment is better still.
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The USA competes with China, India, Japan, and perhaps Canada and the UK/EU. Like many other disciplines, occupational rewards increases with demand, and the demand today is HUGE.
If you're looking for social camaraderie or team peer development, semiconductor development isn't for you. It's an inter-disciplinary effort combining physics, chemistry, CS-skills, supply chain savvy, fabrication, and documentation skills. This is boring to some, fascinating to others.
Citing IBM anecdotally as a third-party failu
Re:Culture (Score:5, Insightful)
If you asked 100 people to guess what job matched that description I bet 80 of them would say "mine!" Certainly most engineering jobs.
That said, I do think EE in general has a horrible ratio of difficulty to employability within the US, due to overseas competition. I would be nervous about entering the field today on a bet that the US government will keep its finger in the dam to hold back globalization for the next 40 years.
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I accept and agree with your observations, but I'm concerned with the summary:
If both American and Chinese companies drive their designers like slaves then China is guaranteed to win this race.
Fix the culture.
If we accept the premise that we (USA) and China are in a competition (I wish we were not), and by "fix the culture" we would have to make changes to our (USA's) culture, then to compete with China we'd have to "drive our designers like slaves" to be competitive.
I'm not sure I like where this is headed, and please correct me if I'm misunderstanding this.
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On the contrary, we need a culture of excellence that values quality work and the people who produce it. People driven like slaves do not produce quality work, they produce the bare minimum they can get away with.Also notably, people producing quality work can rarely do so for more than 40 hours a week (if that much). If they try, the work suffers.
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On the contrary, we need a culture of excellence that values quality work and the people who produce it. People driven like slaves do not produce quality work ...
To both you and to 'bobby', (the commenter you replied to), I'd say that it's important to define the word "competitive". If you're talking about mature mass-market 'jelly bean' components, or a trade-restriction-and-tariff-free market, then the slave-driver approach is probably going to win. If it's bleeding-edge development and continuous process refinement, or trade policies that heavily favour the home team, then the quality-and-excellence work environment is going to come out on top.
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Maybe Purdue needs to engage its business school in non-psychopathic behavior training.
As long as I can remember I've always looked at cause / effect juxtaposition. I know we're generalizing, but it seems to me that psychopathic people tend toward and into careers where they can, as it's part of their jobs, exert power and control over others.
Again with juxtaposition, and sorry for the pessimism, but I'm doubtful that behavioral training can do much to ameliorate psychopathy. Cynical me thinks those people will just learn to hide it better. I think it needs to be worked on at very early ag
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I think it needs to be worked on at very early ages. Simple things like being polite, considerate, well-mannered, etc., might help. One can dream, right?
Those things will help, but add in teaching how to spot a psychopath and the importance of making sure they have no authority over others.
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Maybe it's me, but in my observation (and these things are not exclusive, generally...) our society rewards aggression, power-hungry people. I think it might be a problem of how things settle out: the most passive of us aren't inclined to fight anyone or anything. The somewhat aggressive want more power, and somewhat help others in their power climb, maybe hoping to get pulled along, maybe just to try to learn the secrets of the powerful. But overall it's a structure and culture of power. You can look a
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Power and aggression need not be coupled with psychopathy. Where they are, it tends to go to a self-destructive extreme sooner or later. That tends to not be good for the surrounding company.
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The market is sociopathic at best, and commonly appears psychopathic, so once a company is public it doesn't really matter what necessarily must be — the masses are what they are.
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Maybe Purdue needs to engage its business school in non-psychopathic behavior training.
Good luck finding teachers...
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Where I've worked analog chip layout is often done by a technician (no bachelor's degree). Digital chip layout is mostly about scripting and optimizing and those engineers usually have a degree. Both analog and digital layout are often outsourced. Doing a little bit of layout work is fun, but full-time layout is fairly tedious. I recently switched jobs and was heavily recruited to work in physical design (layout) because I have experience with it, but I wouldn't even interview for a full-time job in phy
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I used to work for a company that did contract semiconductor design and not a single person who worked there seemed to dislike their tedious job, not even the people who did nothing but layout. Some jobs just aren't for some people.
I've also worked for IBM, though, and they do have a way of sucking the life out of things.
Good luck (Score:1, Troll)
With the right being so anti intellectual good luck getting half the country to agree that higher education is a good thing.
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Nothing screams anti-intellectualism like painting half of your fellow countrymen as rubes. Higher education in STEM is a good thing, yet another deconstructionist theory of gender and history less so. It is nuanced, unlike your sweeping generalization.
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Read this then kiss my ass.
https://arstechnica.com/scienc... [arstechnica.com]
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With the right being so anti intellectual good luck getting half the country to agree that higher education is a good thing.
I'd believe you, but the gig worker with the double masters degree tends to scream otherwise. So does a trillion+ dollars worth of student loans that the well-educated can't seem to find a way to pay back.
If you're not questioning the actual value of higher American education by now, you're a moron. Truly. No one here should be surprised in 10 years when Purdue's coffers are overflowing, and thousands of well-educated chip engineers find themselves out of work because some politician lied about expensive
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That simply can't happen. In the US, most educated people wind up in the (gasp) middle class, where 100k per year is plenty.
Why can't we all make 500k per year, like the streaming shows suggest? Cause the numbers simply don't work out.
By all means, encourage your kids to skip higher education. The end result will
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A higher education is still super valuable. But, society has programmed everybody to expect the BEST house, in the BEST neighborhood, with the BEST looking spouse, driving the BEST car.
That simply can't happen. In the US, most educated people wind up in the (gasp) middle class, where 100k per year is plenty.
Perhaps someone should tell the America marketing department then. You know the ones who have been rambling about the "land of opportunity" for the last couple hundred years. The country has earned that confusion, all while it pumps out more billionaires than any other country on the planet. Tell the Dreamer it "simply can't happen" while JoJo Siwa puts another million in the bank by 10th grade.
And 100K/year is "plenty"? I challenge you to sit down and add up the 2022 monthly cost of a family of four wi
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Double masters in what? If they had gotten a masters in electrical engineering they wouldn't be delivery food for a living. What your degree is in has a big influence on the type of job you can get.
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What your degree is in has a big influence on the type of job you can get.
What your Higher Educational Complex is pimping for a "degree", has a big influence on the amount of highly profitable shit they can sell to the generation no one left behind, and the amount of college debt a country now carries as a result of it.
Also, look to the left and right of those sitting outside of the EE classroom and remember why they're not inside. That said, we see what happens when we elect twenty-something bartenders to Congress, and leave fossils there to corruptly rot. Not everyone can be
Re:Good luck (Score:5, Insightful)
With the right being anti-intellectual and the left being hung up on race and gender education, I guess, well, you're fucked until you find out that the sane people you have left have to start working together and kick out the left AND the right extremist nutjobs.
This is not a partisan problem. Both sides are so full of shit that the only realistic solution is to kick both these bullshit peddlers to the curb and start over with a hint of sanity.
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With the right being anti-intellectual and the left being hung up on race and gender education, I guess, well, you're fucked until you find out that the sane people you have left have to start working together and kick out the left AND the right extremist nutjobs.
This is truly our single biggest problem today. Everyone in government at the national level is too blinded by partisanship and ideology to be capable of solving actual real-world problems.
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As long as reality is a trigger word, and I mean for BOTH sides of the political fence, this won't change.
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This is not a partisan problem. Both sides are so full of shit that the only realistic solution is to kick both these bullshit peddlers to the curb and start over with a hint of sanity.
Pretty much applies across the spectrum of politicized issues today, not merely education.
You solution suggests one of two outcomes in America; either a third party stands up with enough force and financial backing to win over both incumbents, or you eradicate the concept of bipartisan politics and go with one party.
And to be honest, sanity was actually something the country was once concerned about in leadership before. Then we elected a bit too much corruption who now refuses to even recognize the 25th A
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It doesn't take a new party. It needs new people. Or rather, it needs peoplw who finally wake up to these parties bullshitting them into engaging in petty turf wars about nothing at all so these parties could line each other's pockets with the people's money.
And the VP has been an assassination stopper ever since Kennedy. Take a look at the VPs (or hell, running mates, let's not discount the losers) and tell me there has been a single one that wasn't picked for his/her "I could cap the prez, but then THIS b
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...tell me there has been a single one that wasn't picked for his/her "I could cap the prez, but then THIS bozo takes over... better not" quality.
And yet THAT bozo VP, became President four short years later, and managed to double-down on your theory here, being practically pre-qualified for the 25th Amendment and armed with that VP providing the worst kind of schoolyard triple-dog-dare.
And forget enemies...Mother Nature could "cap" the Prez with ease at this point. Kinda already started, so "bozo" VPs doesn't exactly scream valid succession planning in the event Major General Shit Happens suddenly decides to come out of retirement.
It's the system [Re:Good luck (Score:2)
You solution suggests one of two outcomes in America; either a third party stands up with enough force and financial backing to win over both incumbents...
Just a reminder, Duvager's law is that our "plurality-wins" method of counting ballots drives the US toward a two-party system. If you want a third party to be viable, you need to start pushing for a voting system that works better when there are three or more candidates.
I am an advocate of approval voting [electionscience.org] personally (it is easy to implement and required no change in current voting methods), but there are many options that are better than plurality wins.
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With the right being anti-intellectual and the left being hung up on race and gender education
People keep saying that, and maybe this was once true, but it isn't today.
Today, Republicans are the ones hung-up on race and gender education. We have Republicans showing-up to school board meetings screaming about how we need to ban teaching CRT in schools, even when it isn't actually taught there. Republican governors are attacking corporations if they publish a story with a gay character in them, or banning historical accounts of racism. I have a Republican relative who rails about how school teacher
need an trades track as well + lower school costs (Score:2)
need an trades track as well + lower school costs
use the subsidies to lower the cost of school! (Score:2)
use the subsidies to lower the cost of school!
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use the subsidies to lower the cost of school!
Why, so American Greed can de-value the shit out of that technical worker even more?
Hell, why not make school free? You could pay them barely more than minimum wage then. Not like they paid for that education or anything, so it's basically worthless from a salary perspective.
Re: use the subsidies to lower the cost of school! (Score:2)
This assumes that employers care or even know what their employees debt obligations are. Basic economics needs to be taught early, like in high school. So every prospective EE student (and every other degree program*) can evaluate the return on investment. And colleges will have to respond with lower prices. The end effect will on be that many h.s. graduates will do the math and choose a profession in some trade. Better pay, hard to offshore (but watch out for the people hanging around the Home Depot parki
and then people with 200K+ student loans are just (Score:2)
and then people with 200K+ student loans are just fucked for life with that min wage job if there is no Income-driven repayment and even with one there may be big tax bomb at the end that may also count as income that may also kick them off any public aide they may be on.
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Not like they paid for that education or anything, so it's basically worthless from a salary perspective.
Boomers paid almost nothing for their education, because it was subsidized. Making it free would make it only slightly cheaper than it was for them, compared to what it costs now.
It's all a shit show (Score:3)
We are critically short on employees in a number of positions. The ones that come immediately to mind are tool & die makers, doctors, and nurses. No effort whatsoever has been made to increase the supply of the former, the way the latter is treated is indistinguishable from an attempt to drive people out of the workforce, and the supply of doctors is artificially restricted by AMA-driven protectionism. (The AMA, while it is nothing but a professional organization, has lobbied for the whole system to weed out physicians who could make a valuable contribution somewhere other than an ER.) The situation with teachers, BTW, is just the same as that with nurses.
Money ruins everything.
Re: It's all a shit show (Score:2)
Politics ruins everything.
FTFY.
The supply of new employees coming north across the border to fill this demand is decidedly right wing. The domestic help, construction workers and landscapers are smart enough to recognize unions and labor regulations (employee vs contractor) as the gatekeepers of a patronage system. They may not be able to vote but their (American) children can.
Er... (Score:1)
"Leading the visitors on a tour of the high-tech lab, Engineering Professor Zhihong Chen..."
Ho ho ho.
A niche job that doesnâ(TM)t pay well (Score:3)
Zhihong Chen (Score:1)
Haha. Zhihong Chen is Chinese. She is from China. That is where America needs to get its engineers now that wokeness has taken over everything in the US educational system. But don't think that China is not working on pressuring Zhihong Chen to help China. Does she still have family in China? Right.
So, I guess Purdue needs to recruit more students from China. But these days they go back to China. This is where we have ended up after decades of idiots being in charge.
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Haha. Zhihong Chen is Chinese. She is from China. That is where America needs to get its engineers now that wokeness has taken over everything in the US educational system.
If you think that this is a new thing happening in the woke era, you don't know anything about anything. America has literally always had to get many of its engineers from other countries because the education system here has literally never produced enough of them, even when it was of much higher quality than it is now — with smaller class sizes, and less students needing to work while going to school.
Total school overhaul starting with kindergarten (Score:2)
Yawing (Score:2)
Why do chip design, when you can do software? (Score:4, Interesting)
Digital chip design requires a very similar skill set to software development. Being a software guy makes it easier to find a job just about anywhere and pays better too. Additionally, digital chip design has a soft master's degree requirement nowadays, which isn't true at all in software. And chip designers have to take all of those hard math and physics classes while CS students are doing fun coding projects. I can't complain about how my life has turned out, but if I could redo college, I would probably go CS instead of EE.
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I should have mentioned that CS enrollment at most colleges has skyrocketed in recent years. To a certain extent, college students follow the money.
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One of the things that seems to separate the really good programmers from the ones who merely more or less know the language is that they made it through "all of those hard math and physics classes" instead of just the minimum like the copy and paste guys like me :)
What I'm saying is that it's probably not too late for you to switch it up.
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Term papers for engineering studies (Score:1)
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Purdue University Races (Score:1)