What the fuck needs to get done by a chop engineer on short notice at midnight anyway
Or are they just calling line workers engineers to avoid paying overtime
ErikDegenerik@lemmy.world 1 year ago
“If an engineer [in Taiwan] gets a call when he is asleep, he will wake up and start dressing,” he said. “His wife will ask: ‘What’s the matter?’ He would say: ‘I need to go to the factory.’ The wife will go back to sleep without saying another word. This is the work culture.”
Fuck that shit, that’s not work culture, that’s exploitation.
gramathy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
SgtSilverLining@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
When I worked in electronics manufacturing, production engineers were frequently out on the floor. Common issues were:
- a machine was placing a part incorrectly
- assembly workers couldn’t understand blueprints
- materials were getting damaged in a process that shouldn’t have been a problem
- a custom design tool/rig was not acting like it was supposed to If anything major (or potentially major) came up, production completely stopped until the problem could be assessed by an engineer. Assembly workers weren’t allowed to fix things and they couldn’t estimate the cost of continuing to run a job with defects. Our engineers didn’t work 2nd/3rd shift though, so every time a job had issues we’d have to drop it amd leave it for first shift.
A downed line for 8+ hours is a LOT of money and for a bigger company would warrant calling someone in. (I think the bigger issue is not “work ethics” like the article said or “need” like you said, but that the US has rules and pay requirements for on call employees)
lagomorphlecture@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Call me an engineer and you need to pay me a lot more though so that doesn’t really make sense.
marmarama@lemmy.world 1 year ago
What? Tech companies the world over have people on 24/7 on-call rotas, and it’s usually voluntary.
Depending on the company, you might typically do 1 week in 4 on-call, get a nice little retainer bonus for having to have not much of a social life for 1 week in 4, and then get an additional payment for each call you take, plus time worked at x1.5 or x2 the usual rate, plus time off in lieu during the normal workday if the call out takes a long time. If you do on-call for tech and the conditions are worse than this, then your company’s on-call policies suck.
I used to do it regularly. Over the years, it paid for the deposit on my first house, plus some nice trips abroad. I enjoyed it - I get a buzz out of being in the middle of a crisis and fixing it. But eventually my family got bored of it, and I got more senior jobs where it wasn’t considered a good use of my energies.
Your internet connection, the websites and apps you use, your utilities - they don’t fix themselves when they break at 0300.
MaybeItWorks@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Yeah, but tech workers get paid six figures and TSMC doesn’t want to pay the workers. This issue isn’t that Americans lack the skills. The issue is that TMSC doesn’t want to pay for skilled American labor. In Taiwan they don’t have to. This whole situation is why Thomas Friedman’s theory on globalization was wrong.
ieatpillowtags@lemm.ee 1 year ago
They mentioned employees being discouraged from claiming overtime, so I do wonder how they handle on call.
DigitalWebSlinger@lemmy.world 1 year ago
A SaaS startup I used to work for tried to implement on-call rotations for their salaried engineers. No additional compensation was offered for the time you were on-call, and if you did get called, the policy was going to be essentially “take the next day off” - when we already had unlimited PTO. I was not happy, and made it known at the time. My manager mentioned that, being in a senior role, I might have the opportunity to excuse myself from the rotations. Ew.
The effort didn’t end up going anywhere, but that’s been my sole experience so far with on-call efforts in software engineering.
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
whataboutshutup@discuss.online 1 year ago
Honey, I’m waiting you tonight.
Sorry, I’m busy.
I made something special…
No, I can’t.
Please, just say you cheat on me. I beg.
Sorry, sug. It’s just work. Again.
What a moodbreaker. Fifth time in a row. Fuck your boss.
Actually, he promoted me and said you can move with me there.
Where?
Our quarters within the facility. We can have our time on my breaks. They can even hire you too! They’ve even built a kindergarten there, so we are full served as a young family.
Divorce. Now.
average650@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That depends on pay and other obligations.
maporita@unilem.org 1 year ago
Our company is like that, but you’re not going to get a call every night. Each person in our (small) support group does a rotation of standby one week every two months. During that week you need to be available after hours and have your cell phone on. The upside is that we get time off for working after hours and we get extra days off just for being on standby which more than compensates, plus we get good overtime pay.
sturmblast@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I work in the US and I’m on call 24 hours a day basically doing it work it’s not that crazy
agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 1 year ago
Unless you let yourself get fucked over, you’re not on call 24/7/365 and for the time you are on call, you should get some sort of compensation.
They want to pay you shitty for 8 hours and than let you work 12-14 plus being on call for the rest of the day.
Damage@feddit.it 1 year ago
Here in Italy “being on call” is a contract clause, it’s often a rotation roster between multiple similar employees, and requires extra compensation
BastingChemina@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
I have no problem with that, as long as you pay for what is worth.
I know engineers who had work where their had to be on call like that. However they were doing rotation and they were being compensate for all the time they had to be on call.
From what I remember they were getting 0.3 days of paid holidays for each 12h they were being on call. This was on top of their 5 weeks+ of paid holidays (France).
I think the issue is not the work ethic of the employees, but the ethics of the employer in this case.
donut4ever@lemm.ee 1 year ago
So that’s what this is about 😂 Enslave workers and require them to be on call 24/7? GTFO with this shit, skills and work ethics they say.
ErikDegenerik@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah and TSMC complains about US workers but at the same time keeps opening new plants there. It’s pretty obvious what it’s like to work for TSMC.
donut4ever@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Yup, no joke, thinking about it made me stressed for the people who work there. Damn, must be hell on earth. Yikes. I’m ok with being an IT working from home. They can keep their jobs.
jws_shadotak@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Not much IT work without semiconductors, which is what Taiwan is known for producing en masse. A lot of these decisions to open new factories elsewhere are because of China’s constant threats to invade Taiwan.
Yendor@reddthat.com 1 year ago
You know the US government is paying TSMC hundreds of millions of dollars to open plants in the US, right?
assassinatedbyCIA@lemmy.world 1 year ago
TSMC is likely opening new plants in the US for geopolitical reasons. I.e. they open a plant in the US and get some us domestic silicon manufacturing underway and the US gives them security guarantees.
lagomorphlecture@lemm.ee 1 year ago
They want to bring their own workers over so they can do exactly that.
donut4ever@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Yup, it’s kind of sad that that shit is actually considered a “culture” thing. Exploiting workers should never be that. Wtf