Corporate Culture Clash ▉

Viola Zhou, writing for Rest Of World.org:

But over the next two years, Bruce came to realize that the reality of working at TSMC wasn’t exactly what he had envisioned. While working on nanometer-level processes to make state-of-the-art chips, he struggled with language barriers, long hours, and a strict hierarchy. Bruce soon began second-guessing what he had signed up for. The plant, which was originally set to begin operating in 2024, fell woefully behind schedule; production at the facility is now set to start in 2025. Bruce, who said he signed a confidentiality agreement with TSMC, requested anonymity for this story.

Over the past four months, Rest of World spoke with more than 20 current and former TSMC employees — from the U.S. and Taiwan — at the Arizona plant. All of them requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media or because they feared retaliation from the company. In February, Rest of World traveled to Phoenix to visit the growing TSMC complex and spend time with the nascent community of transplanted Taiwanese engineers.

The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company; Taiwanese TSMC veterans described their American counterparts as lacking the kind of dedication and obedience they believe to be the foundation of their company’s world-leading success.

Some 2,200 employees now work at TSMC’s Arizona plant, with about half of them deployed from Taiwan. While tension at the plant simmers, TSMC has been ramping up its investments, recently securing billions of dollars in grants and loans from the U.S. government. Whether or not the plant succeeds in making cutting-edge chips with the same speed, efficiency, and profitability as facilities in Asia remains to be seen, with many skeptical about a U.S. workforce under TSMC’s army-like command system. “[The company] tried to make Arizona Taiwanese,” G. Dan Hutcheson, a semiconductor industry analyst at the research firm TechInsights, told Rest of World. “And it’s just not going to work.”

Like Bruce in this article, I ran into the same sort of thing upon working at my soon to be former employer HCLTech. Fortunately language barriers were not as common as Indians tend speak pretty good English. It’s just the occasional odd word or phrasing that probably makes sense in either in either Hindi or whatever language the other person speaks regularly¹. It’s common with a lot of multi language speakers. Otherwise, this sounds eerily similar to HCL.

TSMC is also considered Taiwan’s most important company, with Taiwanese people dubbing it a “divine mountain that guards the nation.” The world’s dependence on TSMC, locals reason, could even incentivize the West to defend Taiwan from a potential invasion from China. The loss of Taiwan and with it TSMC — the thinking goes — would result in a global tech meltdown.

This is not hyperbole. I will remind you of the price of cars and GPUs skyrocketing during the height of Covid. That was just a slowdown in manufacturing. I do not want to find out what it would be like if China invaded and TSMC went away. Everyone besides Intel and maybe Samsung have their chips made at TSMC in Taiwan. You think iPhones are expensive now….

“They really are trying to push this narrative that Americans are slower because of lower technical ability, but I really don’t believe that’s the truth,” an American engineer who recently left TSMC told Rest of World. “The Taiwanese create this false sense of urgency with every single task, and they really push ‘you need to finish everything immediately.’ But it’s just not realistic for people that want to have some normal work-life balance.”

Several former American employees said they were not against working longer hours, but only if the tasks were meaningful. “I’d ask my manager ‘What’s your top priority,’ he’d always say ‘Everything is a priority,’” said another ex-TSMC engineer. “So, so, so, many times I would work overtime getting stuff done only to find out it wasn’t needed.”

This again is not so different than what I’ve experienced at HCL and it isn’t a healthy work environment. If everything is a priority then nothing is. The whole thing becomes a mess. I can’t tell you how many times I was asked to do something that was due that day at the last minute when the team had weeks if not months to get it done or bring it to my attention. It comes across as unfocused, counter productive, and makes management look inefficient.

At my last client I worked according to their hours so I worked Pacific time². That’s fine, and I know what I signed up for. When there was a change in the contract it was requested that I start joining a call with my offshore team at 8:30 in the morning here in New York. When I asked if my working hours were changing to reflect this new start time the response was “Well we’re remote so we can be flexible.” In other words it was implied that now I was expected to work work 12 hrs a day instead of 8. It was never explicitly said probably because my manager at the time realized that would not go over well.

Americans don’t mind working overtime, we actually do it quite often. When there is a need for it. We work to live. We do not live to work. My girlfriend once warned me “they work like donkeys” when discussing her time working in India and that I, for now, work for an Indian tech firm. It took me a very long time to understand what she meant.

Sitting in a room together, the engineers admitted that although they had made some progress in acclimating to life in the U.S., TSMC had yet to find a balance between the two work cultures. Some Taiwanese workers complained that management was being too accommodating in giving Americans less work, paying them high salaries, and letting them get off work early.

Another engineer said the company babied Americans. “If local hires are not ready, this is our opportunity to apply for a green card,” he joked.

Another engineer said he sometimes shared the Americans’ frustration with the hierarchy, discipline, and long hours. But these things, he believed, had enabled TSMC to surpass its competitors to become the chip leader.

“Everything comes from working hard. Without this culture, TSMC cannot be number one in the world,” he said with passion. “I want to support TSMC to be great. It’s my religion.”

While we here in The West have always known that our Japanese counterparts worked all the crazy hours and things as part of their culture, this brings to light the idea that this is the norm in that part of the world in general. TSMC is not mainland China but is, however, culturally Chinese³. In China and other parts of the world people treat not just their jobs but the companies they work for as, to quote the engineer above, religion. This is a perfect example of Culture Clash. Yes, some people here in The West also sometimes think of the companies they work for as “religion” but it’s not the norm.

In reading this and thinking about my own experiences within HCL, I was reminded of Huntington and his Clash of Civilizations thesis. While we don’t quite fit into the divisions that Huntington makes in his argument, the differences between the Taiwanese and The West do. The main difference between my experience and this article is that Huntington pulls India out into its own civilization whereas I’m aligning it more broadly into Asian culture. Either way, the clash between American work culture and Taiwanese is similar to others.

It seems that what happened here with TSMC is that each side expected the other to bend to its norms and when this is the expectation nothing is ever truly going to work. You’ll just end up with more stories both like mine and like Bruce’s in the article. It was always my understanding growing up that when you went to or hired workers in a foreign country you respected their cultural norms and that doesn’t seem to be what happened here.

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