H1B will put up with a lot of shit to keep their jobs, they're the perfect employee.
The people I know that have been contacted locally by Intel state that they want people who can work 12 hour shifts. That doesn't work when you have, oh I don't know, anything else going on in your life?
I went through long multi-month periods of 12 hour workdays. We used to joke that we were only working half days. I know so many guys that should have been home having quality time with the wife and kids but instead were at work busting their ass after hours to keep up with outrageous product schedules in order to guarantee they kept their jobs and their managers/directors (who worked 8hr days) got the extra special bonuses only available to those exempts above staff engineer. Many guys ended up divorced, and/or had kids that didn't respect them because they weren't around during their formative years. Work-life balance was a common discussion but no one had any good solutions. I loved the work but management made the expected volume untenable if one wanted a balanced life. Unfortunately the semiconductor expertise made it very hard to find other, less demanding non-semiconductor related work that paid similar or better wages.
That really sucks, I've done the 10h/7d thing, and that just about damn near killed me - when I was a lot younger.
I'm not hearing good things about what Intel is asking for here, so it probably hasn't changed at all.
TSMC expects the same or more from their employees (and from an article I think you posted last month) TSMC was "shocked" that American fab workers don't want 12 hour days and so they have had a hard time finding employees and the fab start up schedules are way behind plan. Intel must expect similar in order to compete with TSMC. I've always said the semicondictor industry was one of the most highly managed industries in history. Virtually no deadweight. They have perfected methods to squeeze every ounce of productivity from their workforce.
(post is archived)