My understanding is that it’s a lot more complicated than that.

For one thing, apparently chip manufacturing is, for the most part, a blue collar job pretending to be white collar. You don’t really need to know what everything does, you just need to know what buttons to push and levers to pull. There are some things that require advanced education, but only a few workers actually need it, the rest could likely do the job without any college education at all. However, tsmc requires a master’s or PhD to work for them.

Additionally, there’s apparently an expectation that Americans have to put their job first, before everything else. If your boss says, “we need you here right now” you drop everything and show up, even if you’re on vacation. That works in Taiwan, where people see tsmc as a “savior”-type company because they’re vital to Taiwan’s continued independence from China, but it doesn’t go over so well in the US, especially when the level of education they demand could easily get you 2x what they’re offering if you work on the firmware/driver side of things.

Yeah, if they don’t want them undercutting the local workforce, that’s fair enough.