The Taiwan Salary Increases Thread

Your suspicions were reasonable given the brevity of my statement but the overwhelming circumstantial evidence is COVID originated from bat to human transmission.

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Also in the area of tea Taiwanese are incredible innovators.
And I’m not talking just about bubble tea though it is probably the fastest growing and most lucrative and most innovative mass market food and drink sector worldwide right now outside of vegan food.

I’m talking about loose leaf tea. Taiwanese farmers and the Taiwan tea institute have introduced major new tea varieties over the last thirty years. You cannot find these new tea varieties anywhere else they take decades of work . Now they have innovated new types of high end black tea production after dominating high mountain tea. Tea farmers here can produce five batches a year . Chinese and Japanese are constantly trying to get Taiwanese to teach them how to make better tea. Before that they invented oolong ball tea along with the Japanese

Then there is the seed and veg production industry here. Massive, advanced and very lucrative .

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It isn’t.
It might be in just some parts or sectors you deal with.

For any given industry in any given country we can look at it and say…Why are they doing things like that ? I know examples in tea production that I scratch my head at, but I guess they are easy to operate and low cost and low maintenance . You might invent a better machine but it needs to be reliable and economic too.

I don’t think that is anything to do with Taiwan , except for I hate that Motor scooters are still so bloody common here when electric is a much better option . But even there…Gogoro innovated a better product overall.

Isn’t that not what half the companies do in Taiwan, OEM and ODM?
You are just one small part of a huge sector.

There is, of course, plenty of improvement innovation in mature industries here in Taiwan. It’s fun to encounter the many incremental innovations. Just don’t show too much interest or you’ll get shown the door. When I say innovation though I’m not talking about the type that comes from hands on experience but the type that leaps straight from the imagination and founds a whole new industry that didn’t exist before. Real, industrial scale innovation.

I agree you can’t really find that here (perhaps you mean real groundbreaking technical and scientific innovation ?) but then again that is rare anywhere and it seems to me to be the kind of stuff that comes from large industrial nations with massive budgets for research and the military and health .

So if we look at quantum computers where is that coming from ? Which type will be the first commercial success ? It will be interesting to see but probably from the US I’m guessing .

But that doesn’t stop TSMC or others from figuring out better ways to make the parts to run those things and make them practical and ubiquitous .

To be fair the increased profits should show itself in the bonuses which were paid in Jan or Feb. Guess we have to wait and see.

He’s just a grumpy person pissed off at the world.

Incomes in the electronics sector have increased, coupled with deflation. Non-industrial sectors saw salary declines.

The DGBAS attributed the increase to an annual 0.23 percent fall in the consumer price index and salary hikes by electronic component companies.

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Companies with the top five monthly average salaries the past five years (in NT):

  1. Mediatek ($84,068)
  2. Turendo Maikuro ($69,108)
  3. Micron Taiwan ($57,322)
  4. Cyberlink ($53,490)
  5. TSMC ($50,501)

Two thoughts:

  1. Of course a fabless designer with no factory will make more than a foundry, on average.
  2. Someone here explained that software gets paid less than electrical engineering because Taiwan is an EE powerhouse and weak on software. True on average. But two of the top five are software companies.
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Does that include bonuses? From what I’ve heard Micron would be way lower on the list if bonuses were included.

This is a survey of large companies only right ?

Also it should indeed be very clear if bonuses were included or not.

Average? How is it weighted? Or is this the raw data? If it’s raw data it is very low. Or the bosses in Taiwan get paid low wages like the workers. Giving the mode or median wage would give a better view but as is always the cases wages are heavily skewed so any one measure does not tell the whole story. You need some way of comparing the ranges.

If it also includes bonuses it’s low.

It definitely does not include bonuses. Anecdotally I know many people at Micron and have a close friend at TSMC. The TSMC friend said that every 3 months or so he gets a bonus of 4-5x his monthly salary. At Micron the minimum starting salary for engineers is $50-70k depending on what school you went to.

Or, alternatively, it could be including all the employees, in which case TSMC and Micron are naturally going to be much lower and Mediatek much higher due to having tons of people working the fabs. If you only looked at the engineers for Micron I’d expect average salary to be closer to $70k.

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We want to see pay across the whole company, not just engineers.

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I don’t think so. After they presented these numbers, the reporter said “…But TSMC gets bonuses worth 31 months of salary.”

I have no clue.

The actual name of the company is an antivirus software, a word that is blocked on Forumosa.

If the average TSMC engineer gets 31 months of salary (or bonuses worty 31 months of salary), he’d be living large with a six-digit annual salary American money.

That’s plush even in the USA.

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Depends on where one lives in the US. Not so plush in NYC or SF.

If he earns 60K and gets bonus every 3 months 4x his salary that would be an average of 140k a month. Does that sound correct?

That sounds right the video says they receive 31 months of salary a year.

I had it half right - I’m blaming the Taiwanese tradition of making your pay structure as complicated as possible. What I have been told is at TSMC the starting engineer salary is $55k/mo. Your first year you get ~24 months’ salary, second year you get 31, starting the third year you get 34. At Micron if you started in 2019 or 2020 you get a $200k sign-on bonus and starting salary of ~60k/mo. These are not including personal performance-based bonuses or stock options. I may still have some specifics wrong but the general range and structure is right.

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