[HN Gopher] The Extreme Shortage of High IQ Workers
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The Extreme Shortage of High IQ Workers
Author : Bostonian
Score : 20 points
Date : 2023-01-09 22:07 UTC (54 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (marginalrevolution.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (marginalrevolution.com)
| jleyank wrote:
| I thought the smarts were required to do the material science,
| chip design, and factory automation involved in fabs. Once this
| is done, it's just clean room and careful repetition. Overly
| bright people are potentially damaging for manufacturing as they
| might get bored thinking big thoughts. And how many chip
| designers are actually needed?
|
| Cost of workers, cost of manufacturing, regulatory and
| governmental overhead.... These influence fans more than smarts.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| From the outside, chip design looks a lot like writing
| software. So that's loosely equivalent to asking how many
| software engineers are actually needed.
|
| Credible chance regulation and overhead influence software more
| than intellect does. I'd certainly believe that as a premise.
| jleyank wrote:
| Downvoted this quickly? Touched a nerve, eh? Face it, pretty
| much all of us are pluggers who know how to deliver. Little of
| what's done is "how the f*ck did they do that" work.
| h2odragon wrote:
| If you're bright enough to be useful where there's this shortage,
| you're bright enough to see how much those jobs suck.
|
| "We need more suckers willing to do incredible hard things for
| little reward beyond the work of doing them. while the management
| and their consultants reap millions in ongoing profits for
| bringing a diluted, not-quite-good-enough version of that work to
| market"
|
| edit to add: These jobs are often at places founded by "genius
| motivated by love", but now its the second generation or more on
| from that. the management wants that kind of success but they
| want it on their schedule (gotta make the quarterlies). they want
| it without the risk of failure and need for multiple attempts and
| extended effort, which made the original company work as much as
| the genius, but no one recalls that part now. they want meetings
| and reports and rigidly regulated routines more than they
| actually want the genius level output.
| jmartrican wrote:
| Maybe there is such a thing as combined IQ of groups. That
| working together can achieve better results.
| version_five wrote:
| Are people able to read this? I'm getting a 403 error
| jjgreen wrote:
| You're not missing much, a bit thin ...
| vsskanth wrote:
| > More specifically, although not everyone in semiconductor
| manufacturing requires a PhD, pretty much everyone has to be of
| above average intelligence and many will need to be in the top
| echelons of IQ.
|
| I'm not convinced high intelligence is a necessary condition to
| get into chip design. You just need to be willing to spend the
| time to finish advanced degrees in university and get trained.
| This is mostly taken up by foreign students because citizens can
| earn well becoming an SWE right after bachelor's.
| [deleted]
| mjfl wrote:
| Semiconductors are a low margin business. There's a reason why
| it's not in the USA anymore, even though it started in the USA,
| and it's not the lack of smart people - the profits were competed
| away. Now the profits are in design - NVIDIA, AMD, Apple etc.
|
| Edit: this is not to say that the USA should not develop its own
| semiconductor industry again - the issue there isn't profit, it's
| supply chain and security, prevention of backdooring or denial by
| China.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| I was under the impression that TSMC are very profitable and
| Intel used to be. It has really strong winner take all
| dynamics.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Very profitable with what margins? You can make a lot of
| money with a 1% margin on $50 billion in revenue.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| I don't know offhand. Google reckons 42% "net profit
| margin", but for an industry which leans hard on
| reinvesting to stay ahead of the competition 'profit' is
| quite flexible.
| fairity wrote:
| Some people who don't identify as "high IQ" might get offended by
| this article, but I think the primary argument is valid. Many of
| our brightest and most ambitious minds go into finance &
| consulting simply because it pays the most. If we want more
| innovation & progress in certain fields, the financial incentives
| need to be aligned. In the case of semiconductors, I'm guessing
| there needs to be some sort of government funding due to huge
| startup costs and marketplace dynamics.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Who's to say finance and consulting aren't creating the most
| value?
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Ages ago I had a slightly sad conversation with a manager in
| high tech mechanical engineering about this. We/they wanted
| good engineers but not enough to compete with the city over.
| Most of the expertise was very in-house, difficult to hire
| experienced people from other companies who would know the
| right things, so training up and retaining graduates was
| important. Hopefully that was a carefully reasoned choice.
|
| Employee compensation economics don't make much sense to me.
| There's some factor in favour of maximising headcount which
| argues for many people on low pay instead of few people on high
| pay.
|
| It's also considered _better_ to have your long term engineers
| occasionally notice the gap between their pay and the open
| market, leave, and then be replaced by new ones who cost what
| the open market predicted.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| What did the brightest and least ambitious do?
| h2odragon wrote:
| Built a shack in the woods and raised dogs.
| fairity wrote:
| At my alma mater (MIT), the bright and lazy people actually
| went into finance also. Not sure what it's like now, but 10
| years ago, many hedge funds basically just gave IQ tests as
| their interview.
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(page generated 2023-01-09 23:02 UTC)