> Eventually Chang is approached by a manager who tells him that he could eventually rise to the position of Vice President of R&D, but to do so he would need to get a phD, and that TI will pay for Chang to get one ... Chang applies and is accepted into Stanford’s electrical engineering graduate program. He again works hard and graduates in 3 years
3 years for a EE PhD is extremely impressive.
creer 18 days ago [-]
> 3 years for a EE PhD is extremely impressive.
Sure, but to this day, it depends on the school. At some universities that's right out, at Stanford that's common (after a Master or two).
That wasn't the case for Chang but I feel that for some foreign students, it's due to them simply not recognizing that they could actually take their time and enjoy life and the out of this world campus and region. Some students feel pressure, of funding, of potential missed opportunity, of legal status, of acting on a bet that's WAY out of their home professional path, etc. Meanwhile some US students with no major funding problem often feel that there is all the time in the world, if only the university would let them.
For that matter, I bet Chang felt pressure to not be away from this career track at Texas Instrument for too long. He was doing this PhD as a requirement for a specific promotion.
hinkley 18 days ago [-]
At my college if you were rich and driven you could get a Masters in around 1/2 or more reasonably 2/3 the normal time. The thing was most people were spending half their time on a research assistantship, which traded a ton of brain cells to a professor’s agenda in exchange for a heavy discount on tuition. You spent half your time working on the professor’s ideas and half taking classes.
huijzer 17 days ago [-]
> it's due to them simply not recognizing that they could actually take their time and enjoy life
Ah sure he went on to work extremely hard and build a whole foundry business just because he didn’t recognize that he could actually take his time and enjoy life? I think you’re sort of right but also wrong. Telling an extremely ambitious person to “just enjoy life” is, I think, like telling an autistic person to “just be social”. It’s not as simple as that.
creer 17 days ago [-]
Did you miss my "That wasn't the case for Chang"?
Chang had a specific reason to be quick anyway: his promotion at Texas Instrument would wait only so long.
As for other more common, younger foreign Stanford students - they can be autistic but they can also simply be young and not made aware of what the options really are. Believe it or not but university programs (credit system, years allowable for this or that, costs), school stipends, TA-ships, available scholarships, school schedule, even credit and banking or friendship expectations are completely different in their home country. They didn't think to find a mentor and nobody sought them out to point out what they really should be aware of. So yes, "simply not recognizing".
markus_zhang 18 days ago [-]
Many people do enjoy hard work over simple pleasures. It is very prominent in Asians I think.
486sx33 17 days ago [-]
That’s pretty racist. What does race have to do with personal preference?
I'm not sure if that's true, but it's presumably what the other person was saying they observed. Though I think in casual conversation, the reality is that P(racism | <such a sentence>) is likely higher than "baseline", I'd prefer to give the benefit of the doubt on HN.
Also, much prefer a place where mentioning "race" doesn't immediate trigger strong reactions. "Race" being in quotations, because I think the original sentence has more to do with the culture of (certain parts of?) Asia rather than actual race.
A side analogy: I think that Asians are more likely to like Hello Kitty than non-Asians.
samatman 17 days ago [-]
I cannot stress hard enough how tired every sensible human being is of this kind of crimestop knee-jerk anti-contribution to discussions.
Stop working so hard to make the word racist useless. We need that word. Thank you.
markus_zhang 17 days ago [-]
I don't think this is racist. Why do you think it is a negative thing? I'm Asian myself and I admire those who achieve. Way better than spending youth in BS activities.
winwang 17 days ago [-]
Although I agree, I think there is a mild hazard with the label of "model minority". Not saying a reaction like that is really warranted in this case, though.
gaoryrt 16 days ago [-]
We Asians would take that as a compliment.
LAC-Tech 17 days ago [-]
I get the impression one year masters, 3 year PHDs, etc, were much more common in the mid 20th century.
I presume financial incentives dragged out how long degrees like this take now. That, or everyone is dumber, which seems unlikely.
CorrectHorseBat 17 days ago [-]
Or there's more to learn now and all the "easy" PhD subjects are already taken?
LAC-Tech 17 days ago [-]
Yeah that could be it. (I'm idly speculating without any knowledge or research. It's just unlike a lot of people here I admit it)
Maybe there's some ideal ratio between "current novelty levels" and "number of PhD candidates".
rvba 18 days ago [-]
That paragraph also sounded a bit like they wanted to get rid of him
creer 17 days ago [-]
They did pay for the PhD - perhaps even in addition to his salary. He was also rather successful and useful at TI.
hinkley 18 days ago [-]
Exploitation can look like rejection if you have self worth.
wslh 18 days ago [-]
I think the world unique TSMC 3nm technology is even more impressive though.
mfrommil 18 days ago [-]
For those interested in the story, this is a fantastic podcast episode on the history of TSMC.
Acquired never disappoints. For folks reading this comment, there are many episodes which overlap with HN interests.
asciimike 18 days ago [-]
Having recently listened to TSMC as well as Costco, LVMH, and Hermes, there's something available to every member of the HN audience in every episode, no matter how "unrelated" you may think it is.
On the other side of the table, as a former sponsor of a season or two: it was the best marketing we (Crusoe) could have done. We had more high quality inbound from our audience than any other channel, by a long shot. They deeply understand their audience and target appropriately. Strongly recommend to anyone trying to reach a decision making audience (customer and investor).
dcsan 17 days ago [-]
How did you measure that? Podcast ads seem almost like old school TV in that a lot of listening is offline, with no call to action or method of measurement. Despite racing and resonating deeply with an audience.
asciimike 17 days ago [-]
Two things:
1. I believe they require that you have an acquired specific landing page (e.g. crusoe.ai/acquired), which we saw directly as conversions through to our waitlist. The volume was lower than other channels, but the signal was much, much higher.
2. To @scarface_74's comment, "you talk to customer and you can ask them where they heard about you from" is mostly why I made the claim. In particular, when fundraising, basically everyone I talked to said, "I heard about you on Acquired, really interesting business model that I hadn't considered, let's talk more about it."
Sponsorship isn't cheap (I would go so far as to call it expensive), but relative to spending an equivalent amount on search or display ads/billboards on 101/etc., I think it was the right choice at the time.
My only analogy for this is what I call "cruise missile marketing" where you're investing a lot of time/money in building something that is very specifically targeted at high value buyers. It works really well for large, infrequent transactions (raising capital, selling GPU clusters, etc.) and less well for commodity SaaS or B2C products where volume >> everything.
scarface_74 17 days ago [-]
You’re thinking about B2C ads. B2B has long sale cycles where you talk to customer and you can ask them where they heard about you from.
1123581321 18 days ago [-]
It’s not for everyone. Relative to the length, the level of detail is fairly glossy and the narratives about the companies aren’t complex or surprising. It’s frustrating already knowing a fair amount if not in the mood for entertaining banter.
If they had separate behind-the-scenes episodes with B-side detail and research discussion, they’d be the total package.
Not saying it isn’t well done! And it’s clearly landing with an educated audience. I know many fans.
creer 18 days ago [-]
> Chang’s immense success with TSMC looks obvious only in hindsight; nobody at the time [...] saw it that way.
That's fair but we can also recognize the pattern! We are now familiar with this one. Chang had noticed the need for fabs as a service to all. And he further noticed that it was at the intersection of others' needs: Taiwan looking for local industry, Philips looking for a local boost, established chips and design companies struggling to find the fab space they were ready to pay for, his ITRI mandate. There are no sure thing but we can see the good call and well done to put all the players together - that was plenty as grounds for a new business with good chances.
hinkley 18 days ago [-]
The other pattern we see is the manufacturing ladder, which has played out in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and now is underway in mainland China.
You can make a factory to make low end products. People copy you. Some employees bubble to the top, and can start making moderately decent products or quit to start on their own ideas. Eventually the low end stops being a good investment of money or people and it fizzles out in favor of luxury and specialty goods.
LG used to make the bottom shelf VCRs that you would find at Best Buy. The VCRs were branded Goldstar, the company Lucky Goldstar. When they went up market they rebranded to distance themselves from their bargain product lines. Now they have fridges that cost more than high end computers.
An LG Signature (the absolute top end) dishwasher caused $20,000 of damage to my kitchen two months ago.
Now have Meile.
LG sill makes the best Televisions, though.
ksec 17 days ago [-]
>LG sill makes the best Televisions, though.
They may make best TV Panels, I would disagree they make best TV. That honour and title stills belongs to Sony. Although LG is getting close with image processing as seen in 2024 TVs.
486sx33 17 days ago [-]
I ran a 30 year old Maytag up until last year. No problems at all. Funny how things change
klelatti 18 days ago [-]
Kudos to Brian Potter for getting hold of a copy of Chang’s biography and translating it (with some machine assistance) himself!
barkingcat 18 days ago [-]
It's kind of ridiculous that the actual title of the book isn't mentioned.
For those interested, "The Complete Autobiography of Morris Chang (Volumes 1 and 2)" is the machine translation of the above.
9front 17 days ago [-]
Google translates using his Chinese name The complete autobiography of Zhang Zhongmou (volumes 1 and 2)
pm90 18 days ago [-]
> TSMC has a fascinating origin story: it was founded in 1985 by Morris Chang, who, after working in the US for Texas Instruments for more than 20 years, was enticed to go to Taiwan and help develop their high-tech industries as head of Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI).
How much of this was because of Racism? How many people like that, with the right technical, operational knowledge, experience and drive are prevented from transforming their American company because they don’t fit the mold of what Americans consider to be “leaders”.
- "When Chang arrives at Texas Instruments (TI), he’s immediately impressed. Almost everyone is young, less than 40, and everyone works very hard, 50 hours a week or more."
- "Some employees work so much that they bring cots into the office to sleep. And while there’s an obvious chain of command, there’s few trappings of status or hierarchy"
- "...executives and workers eat together in the cafeteria, and high-level managers and production-line workers converse freely"
- "...everyone at TI seems to be an expert on them (semi conductors)."
1972+:
- "His immediate boss, Fred Bucy, has no semiconductor background"
- "...the knowledge of the executive leadership is increasingly out of date (something they seem to be ignorant of)."
- "Chang tries to convince leadership to start buying manufacturing equipment from outside vendors, which is more advanced and can achieve higher yields than TI’s internally-designed equipment, but he’s unsuccessful."
- "He also fails to convince them to increase R&D spending, which Chang views as a short-sighted decision to prioritize short-term profits over long-term competitiveness."
chollida1 18 days ago [-]
Where did you hear that he left because of racism? He worked at the place fro more than 20 years and rose pretty darn high in the company.
What specific claims of racism has he made?
mlinhares 18 days ago [-]
Morris said it himself that the top execs didn't think he was the "right person" for the job and this was the main reason he left, as he knew no amount of work or brilliance was going to make them change their minds as they clearly saw him as lesser.
magic_man 18 days ago [-]
He wanted to be CEO and they said no. He went a different American company that said they would let him be CEO, but he realized he didn't want to be the CEO there.
OP didn't make any claims, merely asked the question. I don't think we can ever know how well this exact person would have done with a different racial background.
NonEUCitizen 18 days ago [-]
"rose pretty darn high" but not high enough.
Cumpiler69 18 days ago [-]
None. It's the modern victimisation mentality.
dgfitz 18 days ago [-]
Seems curious to me he would make decisions based on racism. There is a lot of xenophobia around those parts.
Perhaps you’re incorrect?
rbanffy 18 days ago [-]
That's more or less the opposite of what was said - that he would be the victim of racism, perhaps not evident as such, but, maybe, misconceptions about his ability to perform due to his cultural background.
mytailorisrich 17 days ago [-]
He is a Chinese Nationalist and was recruited by the Nationalist government of the time (and remember that in 1985 the KMT still ruled in Taiwan with an iron fist under martial law) so it would not be that surprising if helping China develop and helping the Nationalist side against the Communists were significant contributing factors, not racism.
next_xibalba 18 days ago [-]
> Racism
Huh? How did you make that leap? As others have pointed out, Chang was a bigwig at TI.
etse 18 days ago [-]
We don’t need to overstate racism, but “bigwig at TI” is a down leveling for Morris. Doesn’t seem right to limit greatness if it’s about race and not based on track record or other meritocratic signals.
NonEUCitizen 18 days ago [-]
not bigwig enough for morris.
alephnerd 18 days ago [-]
> How much of this was because of Racism
From what I heard from peers from that era, not significantly.
Taiwan's ITRI gave Morris Chang a blank check to implement his vision, which is something no ambitious person would turn down.
Why become yet another rich but nameless CEO (who remembers Bucy at TI) when you can become the next Jack Kilby or William Shockley.
China did the same thing for Liang Ming Song (former head of R&D at TSMC) at SMIC and India for Randhir Thakur (former head of foundry services at Intel and Applied Materials) at Tata Electronics.
--------
Stop being so combative to OP - he asked a fair question about the bamboo ceiling.
Looking at you Chollida1, next_xibalba, and Cumpiler69 (classy name /s)
next_xibalba 18 days ago [-]
It reads to me like it is you who are being combative by calling me out by (screen)name. It was quite reasonable to find the GP comment inexplicable given that 1) the article doesn't make any explicit or implicit mention of racism, 2) Chang rose to group VP at TI after having had his PhD sponsored by the same company [1], and 3) as you say, he was given an astounding offer by Taiwan. In other words, the leap to racism and racial discourse is quite a big one.
Whether or not you view my comment as combative, I utterly reject your belief that you have the right to police my content or tone. This isn't Reddit.
How? Morris didn’t get the job because he was born in the wrong country?
LAC-Tech 17 days ago [-]
Very cool read. One thing stuck out to me:
In 1973 Taiwan founded the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) to help develop its industrial and technological capabilities. Taiwan’s industrial policy playbook was largely based on what had worked in Japan and Korea, and ITRI was based on similar institutes that had been founded in those two countries.
As a frequent visitor to Taiwan I note that they've tried to do the same thing several times since then, in other technical fields, and have yet to replicate the success they had with semi conductors. They to be fair they're only 23.6 million people so to be technical world leader "only" in semiconductors is already a huge achievement.
HardikVala 17 days ago [-]
An interesting coincidence is that the first fabless semiconductor company, Chips and Technologies, was also founded in 1985, by Dado Banatao and Gordon Campbell. They didn't partner with TSMC but contracted with companies like Hitachi that had excess fab capacity to manufacture their semiconductors. Wild. They eventually sold the company to Intel, which obviously didn't appreciate the insight of de-verticalization in the semiconductor supply chain.
ngneer 18 days ago [-]
There is no shortage of material on the topic, but I would recommend "Chip War" by Chris Miller as a complementary read.
wslh 18 days ago [-]
He was around 55 years old when he founded TSMC.
Regarding the translation from Chinese to English, I think it is a case for community funding. What is the budget required for this?
osnium123 18 days ago [-]
Great question about the budget/funding required. Tyler Cowen’s
Emergent Ventures fund has funded it but I don’t know how much time/money is required.
Morris Chang wasn't some rando - he was a Group VP at Texas Instruments (reports to CEO) and COO of General Instruments (a major CMOS manufacturer from the 70s-90s - found in Spellovision).
This is the equivalent of Sheryl Sandberg being tasked by a government to found a multi-billion government funded competitor of Facebook.
rmk 18 days ago [-]
Sheryl Sandberg does not have a technical background. A better analogy would be Eric Schmidt or Adam D'Angelo.
alephnerd 18 days ago [-]
Eric Schmidt sure, but not D'Angelo, as D'Angelo was never a C-Suite who climbed the ladder but was one of the earliest employees at FB when it was being built.
At the C-Suite level - even at a deeply technical company like TSMC - the job is mostly investor relations and arbitrating between various business units internally, so while a technical background is nice to have, the business chops are more critical than technical chops.
Look at Hock Tan at Broadcom for example - he started out as a line level EE in the semiconductor space (Malaysia is THE packaging and testing hub for semiconductors), but he is notorious for being extremely dollar driven (I've heard him unironically say "Show me the money" a couple times).
NonEUCitizen 18 days ago [-]
You also need permission from the copyright holder.
3 years for a EE PhD is extremely impressive.
Sure, but to this day, it depends on the school. At some universities that's right out, at Stanford that's common (after a Master or two).
That wasn't the case for Chang but I feel that for some foreign students, it's due to them simply not recognizing that they could actually take their time and enjoy life and the out of this world campus and region. Some students feel pressure, of funding, of potential missed opportunity, of legal status, of acting on a bet that's WAY out of their home professional path, etc. Meanwhile some US students with no major funding problem often feel that there is all the time in the world, if only the university would let them.
For that matter, I bet Chang felt pressure to not be away from this career track at Texas Instrument for too long. He was doing this PhD as a requirement for a specific promotion.
Ah sure he went on to work extremely hard and build a whole foundry business just because he didn’t recognize that he could actually take his time and enjoy life? I think you’re sort of right but also wrong. Telling an extremely ambitious person to “just enjoy life” is, I think, like telling an autistic person to “just be social”. It’s not as simple as that.
Chang had a specific reason to be quick anyway: his promotion at Texas Instrument would wait only so long.
As for other more common, younger foreign Stanford students - they can be autistic but they can also simply be young and not made aware of what the options really are. Believe it or not but university programs (credit system, years allowable for this or that, costs), school stipends, TA-ships, available scholarships, school schedule, even credit and banking or friendship expectations are completely different in their home country. They didn't think to find a mentor and nobody sought them out to point out what they really should be aware of. So yes, "simply not recognizing".
I'm not sure if that's true, but it's presumably what the other person was saying they observed. Though I think in casual conversation, the reality is that P(racism | <such a sentence>) is likely higher than "baseline", I'd prefer to give the benefit of the doubt on HN.
Also, much prefer a place where mentioning "race" doesn't immediate trigger strong reactions. "Race" being in quotations, because I think the original sentence has more to do with the culture of (certain parts of?) Asia rather than actual race.
A side analogy: I think that Asians are more likely to like Hello Kitty than non-Asians.
Stop working so hard to make the word racist useless. We need that word. Thank you.
I presume financial incentives dragged out how long degrees like this take now. That, or everyone is dumber, which seems unlikely.
Maybe there's some ideal ratio between "current novelty levels" and "number of PhD candidates".
https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/tsmc
On the other side of the table, as a former sponsor of a season or two: it was the best marketing we (Crusoe) could have done. We had more high quality inbound from our audience than any other channel, by a long shot. They deeply understand their audience and target appropriately. Strongly recommend to anyone trying to reach a decision making audience (customer and investor).
1. I believe they require that you have an acquired specific landing page (e.g. crusoe.ai/acquired), which we saw directly as conversions through to our waitlist. The volume was lower than other channels, but the signal was much, much higher.
2. To @scarface_74's comment, "you talk to customer and you can ask them where they heard about you from" is mostly why I made the claim. In particular, when fundraising, basically everyone I talked to said, "I heard about you on Acquired, really interesting business model that I hadn't considered, let's talk more about it."
Sponsorship isn't cheap (I would go so far as to call it expensive), but relative to spending an equivalent amount on search or display ads/billboards on 101/etc., I think it was the right choice at the time.
My only analogy for this is what I call "cruise missile marketing" where you're investing a lot of time/money in building something that is very specifically targeted at high value buyers. It works really well for large, infrequent transactions (raising capital, selling GPU clusters, etc.) and less well for commodity SaaS or B2C products where volume >> everything.
If they had separate behind-the-scenes episodes with B-side detail and research discussion, they’d be the total package.
Not saying it isn’t well done! And it’s clearly landing with an educated audience. I know many fans.
That's fair but we can also recognize the pattern! We are now familiar with this one. Chang had noticed the need for fabs as a service to all. And he further noticed that it was at the intersection of others' needs: Taiwan looking for local industry, Philips looking for a local boost, established chips and design companies struggling to find the fab space they were ready to pay for, his ITRI mandate. There are no sure thing but we can see the good call and well done to put all the players together - that was plenty as grounds for a new business with good chances.
You can make a factory to make low end products. People copy you. Some employees bubble to the top, and can start making moderately decent products or quit to start on their own ideas. Eventually the low end stops being a good investment of money or people and it fizzles out in favor of luxury and specialty goods.
LG used to make the bottom shelf VCRs that you would find at Best Buy. The VCRs were branded Goldstar, the company Lucky Goldstar. When they went up market they rebranded to distance themselves from their bargain product lines. Now they have fridges that cost more than high end computers.
Now have Meile.
LG sill makes the best Televisions, though.
They may make best TV Panels, I would disagree they make best TV. That honour and title stills belongs to Sony. Although LG is getting close with image processing as seen in 2024 TVs.
I believe it is 張忠謀自傳全集（上下冊) (for both parts)
https://www.books.com.tw/products/0011005571?sloc=main
How much of this was because of Racism? How many people like that, with the right technical, operational knowledge, experience and drive are prevented from transforming their American company because they don’t fit the mold of what Americans consider to be “leaders”.
1958:
- "When Chang arrives at Texas Instruments (TI), he’s immediately impressed. Almost everyone is young, less than 40, and everyone works very hard, 50 hours a week or more."
- "Some employees work so much that they bring cots into the office to sleep. And while there’s an obvious chain of command, there’s few trappings of status or hierarchy"
- "...executives and workers eat together in the cafeteria, and high-level managers and production-line workers converse freely"
- "...everyone at TI seems to be an expert on them (semi conductors)."
1972+:
- "His immediate boss, Fred Bucy, has no semiconductor background"
- "...the knowledge of the executive leadership is increasingly out of date (something they seem to be ignorant of)."
- "Chang tries to convince leadership to start buying manufacturing equipment from outside vendors, which is more advanced and can achieve higher yields than TI’s internally-designed equipment, but he’s unsuccessful."
- "He also fails to convince them to increase R&D spending, which Chang views as a short-sighted decision to prioritize short-term profits over long-term competitiveness."
What specific claims of racism has he made?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wEh3ZgbvBrE
Perhaps you’re incorrect?
Huh? How did you make that leap? As others have pointed out, Chang was a bigwig at TI.
From what I heard from peers from that era, not significantly.
Taiwan's ITRI gave Morris Chang a blank check to implement his vision, which is something no ambitious person would turn down.
Why become yet another rich but nameless CEO (who remembers Bucy at TI) when you can become the next Jack Kilby or William Shockley.
China did the same thing for Liang Ming Song (former head of R&D at TSMC) at SMIC and India for Randhir Thakur (former head of foundry services at Intel and Applied Materials) at Tata Electronics.
--------
Stop being so combative to OP - he asked a fair question about the bamboo ceiling.
Looking at you Chollida1, next_xibalba, and Cumpiler69 (classy name /s)
Whether or not you view my comment as combative, I utterly reject your belief that you have the right to police my content or tone. This isn't Reddit.
[1] https://engineering.stanford.edu/news/stanford-engineering-h...
Apparently the concept of “bamboo ceiling” (similar to glass ceiling) has its own Wikipedia entry:
TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_ceiling
In 1973 Taiwan founded the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) to help develop its industrial and technological capabilities. Taiwan’s industrial policy playbook was largely based on what had worked in Japan and Korea, and ITRI was based on similar institutes that had been founded in those two countries.
As a frequent visitor to Taiwan I note that they've tried to do the same thing several times since then, in other technical fields, and have yet to replicate the success they had with semi conductors. They to be fair they're only 23.6 million people so to be technical world leader "only" in semiconductors is already a huge achievement.
Regarding the translation from Chinese to English, I think it is a case for community funding. What is the budget required for this?
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/12/em...
This is the equivalent of Sheryl Sandberg being tasked by a government to found a multi-billion government funded competitor of Facebook.
At the C-Suite level - even at a deeply technical company like TSMC - the job is mostly investor relations and arbitrating between various business units internally, so while a technical background is nice to have, the business chops are more critical than technical chops.
Look at Hock Tan at Broadcom for example - he started out as a line level EE in the semiconductor space (Malaysia is THE packaging and testing hub for semiconductors), but he is notorious for being extremely dollar driven (I've heard him unironically say "Show me the money" a couple times).