TSMC reviews

- Wages: Employees at this company are underpaid relative to positions elsewhere in the industry. Taiwanese hires especially get the short end of the stick when it comes to salary, many getting paid less than half of their American-born counterparts in the same role. On top of this, TSMC overvalues degrees, and severely undervalues experience when determining wages. - Advancement: Management positions are reportedly not given to those without a masters degree, regardless of fit. some managers claim the benefits to Fab 21 is its opportunity for promotion, but others explain that promotion is unlikely. - Training Program: Often, trainings were hampered by Covid-19 in-person limitations and overloaded trainers. Local experienced engineers were not given a reduced workload to allow for time to build the training program, instead it was an additional task to be done in parallel. In addition, the trainees were often made to feel like the training was a barrier to navigate when completing their assigned tasks, resulting in minimal effort on both sides. - Work Culture: Projects are often adversarial, rather than cooperative, racing on tasks to claim credit. It is not uncommon to discover multiple other individuals were working on your project in parallel after the fact. Employees very often have tasks stolen from them without their knowledge, wasting their time and losing their credit. Interdepartmental relations are especially adversarial. The roles of Manufacturing, Integration, Yield, and Module are inherently antagonistic to each other by design. Information is often withheld and obfuscated, and communication is ignored. The excuse often given is IP, but the truth is the more you share, the more the other department will use against you in the future. Regarding management, it often feels like most of the friendliness and offers for help can be lip service. I have observed coworkers bringing complaints to management regarding work-related health issues, obstinate teammates, and overloading that were not fully addressed, and sometimes shrugged off. Employees are often left to sort out their own problems. - Work/Life Balance: Early on during my stay in Taiwan, there was a presentation in which someone told us that, "It is not about balancing work and life, its about finding a way to live through your work." This about sums it up, as the hours prohibit you from living anywhere other than inside the Fab. I cannot stress to you enough how brutal the work/life balance is here. I know people who slept in the office for a month straight. 12 hour days are standard, weekend shifts are common. Many locals come in on the weekends even when they're not scheduled, just to catch up on the work that their 60+ hours that week could not cover. TSMC provided its AZ hires lodging during their "training" stay, but failed to mention during the interview process that it would be an hour commute. This turns 60+ hours of work into 70 hours of time sunk into the company. Even meals are often not sacred, It is stressed to employees that they are not to eat away from their desk, and that they are not to talk to each other during meals, under threat of lower performance reviews. It is common to receive work calls in the middle of the night, or 6am on the weekends, and so even when you leave the company, you must keep your phone with you at all times. - Human Resources: Understandably, they work on behalf of the company. Less understandably, it seems that they work against the employees. Policies change on email by email bases and differ by sender, recipient, and hiring date. Important information is often danced around with vague and indirect language that leaves many in the dark, and requests for transparent baseline policies are met with directions to send an email that will be ignored. one incident like this can be forgiven, a few can be seen as incompetence, but operation to this degree feels almost malicious. Part of the strain with HR is a result of their high turnover, causing remaining employees to be overloaded and have less patience. A few months into our stay, HR pushed us to sign a document saying we would pay the company roughly $20k USD. They claimed this was to "prevent us from paying taxes any differently than we would in the States," regardless of the fact that this payment was not to the government. When resisted, they attempted to claim it was mandatory. We had multiple info sessions with contracted accountants in which they would explain how most of us would definitely lose money to TSMC by signing the form, but TSMC still recommended it. We were told the money would help "compensate TSMC for training expenses." Many trainees preferred to give HR the benefit of the doubt until this point. Overall, I'm incredibly disheartened. I was very excited to learn about the cutting edge technology we create here, and I really have met some terrific coworkers. The hardest part has been seeing all those friends lose excitement alongside me.

1. The average working hour is too long and highly unbalanced. The working hour in some of the FAB departments is definitely in violation of regulation under authorities. 2. Employees put too much focus on KPI reviews, regardless of the formation of business culture. 3. The deadline of project is always so tight that there's insufficient time for team members to make their judgment. Those who couldn't meet the target deadline were usually punished by PMD reviews and be forced to transfer to other department, while the successors take all the benefit once the projects delivered. 4.Many of the employees are abused verbally by their supervisor on a daily basis, and the atmosphere in the office is highly uncomfortable.