Having seen a few 'high tech' places myself: there's high tech, and then there's _high tech_.
Assembling a motherboard is to semiconductor fabs as flying a toy drone is to landing a Boeing 747. One you can learn in an afternoon; the other takes years to learn.
> Assembling a motherboard is to semiconductor fabs as flying a toy drone is to landing a Boeing 747.
I disagree. I live next to a fab and have coworkers that have worked the fabs.
Humans in fabs are taken out of the loop as much as possible. That's because when dealing with nanoscale structures, human error is simply too common.
One of my coworkers worked at the fab during a period where they had humans running the forklift that moved the wafers from one stage to the next. That was cut out because the tiny bumps caused by a human operating the controls caused imperfections in the chips that decreased yield (the metric that matters most for a fab). They ultimately removed that work and job and replaced it with robots to carefully move the wafers.
What's complex about a fab ends up being not the frontline work, but rather the layer or 2 in the back (like designing the lithography filter for a given chip). That stuff happen outside the actual plant.
> Humans in fabs are taken out of the loop as much as possible.
This. We are talking about Atom scale here. I have as much admiration for skilled mechanics as the next guy. I heard about a lathe operator at Patek Phillip who could turn an arbor to within 1 micron precision, just by listening to the pitch the cutting tool made when trimming it down.
And when chip features were on the micron scale, humans in the loop made sense. But chip feature are ten thousand times smaller than that now--4 orders of magnitude. Anything that doesn't need a Ph.D. in solid state physics to do is going to be automated.
I'm probably revealing exactly which fab, but one issue the fab had is when it was built it was placed fairly close to the interstate. That did no matter when they were at something like 500nm. However, as they slowly pulled the node size down they started noticing random errors within their chips. It took a while to track it down but it turns out semi trucks driving past the interstate were causing defects in the chips.
They ended up installing shock absorbers everywhere to counteract this problem.
There are still, though, lots of working fabs at much larger process sizes. And some for things that won't ever modernize to a smaller one. Like parts that handle lots of power, or chips for RF purposes, etc.
I think we agree? The point is that a semiconductor fab (like a 747) is so highly automated that you don't need a bunch of low- or medium-skilled folks to drive forklifts; you need a few high-skills folks to design, monitor, debug & optimize the huge system(s).
I think you underestimate the amount of people with high school education doing very precise, skilled work right now. Do you think skilled machines tend to have PHds or even bachelors?
Im not saying its as simple as CNC. I am saying that I doubt you need an IQ of 130 or a PHD. Start investing in the people whose labor were undercut. In fact a skilled machinist or technician seems like a much closer match (in terms of skill and willingness to do the job) than some with an electrical engineering PHD or something.
One of the most critical aspects of engineering is making it so advanced high tech things can be manufactured by the least skilled and least number of skilled people possible.
Don't confuse that with the workers not being skilled - many are, but just like good software, you want your designs to run well even when executed by the worst hardware.
Actually engineering often means need more skilled workers as the unskilled work was replaced. 1 person running the machine who understands more of the engineering as opposed to 100 with a saw.
Making PhD engineers operate/maintain/monitor a wire bonding machine seems expensive.
I worked in an R&D fab (albeit, as an intern, many years ago) with an abnormal number of PhDs around (the fab was essentially a small scale test bed for new products and processes - everything tested there first before scaling up overseas). I think we had a 5:1 ratio of techs to engineers. This was in a fab that basically did nothing but R&D and low volume manufacturing for defense.
It's comparable to any kind of high-tech manufacturing where you have engineers designing/testing stuff (and designing the tools to make and test the stuff in the first place) while there have to be techs/mechanics/machine shop workers to actually do the work of making it. It's inefficient and expensive to put the engineers on that task, while they'll still need to do it from time to time.
You cannot learn to assemble a motherboard using modern manufacturing equipment in an afternoon. Pick-and-place operation is a week-long course alone (specific to that machine, and assuming you are already familiar with the process), and there are at least a screen printer and reflow oven involved as well.
> Assembling a motherboard is to semiconductor fabs as flying a toy drone is to landing a Boeing 747. One you can learn in an afternoon; the other takes years to learn.
What are the conditions and steps necessary to engage autopilot during landing? What are the failure conditions, and the steps necessary during a malfunction when autopilot is engaged?
On a clear day with perfect conditions ground control can probably get you on the ground and you walk away safely. The plane may not be safe to fly again, but you walk away. When there is bad weather (common) or other mechanical issues you need a lot more training, and of course if you want the plane to survive to fly again you want some more training.
The only hard part is contacting ground control in the first place. Radio frequencies change all the time.
Assembling a motherboard is to semiconductor fabs as flying a toy drone is to landing a Boeing 747. One you can learn in an afternoon; the other takes years to learn.