No. of Recommendations: 10
I won't question those numbers. I have only anecdotal evidence. Which is probably why you asked me. :-) We also assembled our chips (mostly), which was overseas (cheaper, dirty process, Asian countries have lax environmental standards), and employed a lot of non-college people because injection molding doesn't require a degree in physics or electrical engineering. Domestically, I'd say at least half of employees at my company were degreed. Probably more.
It is true that there is a lot of automation. Intel (and maybe TSMC? never been in one of their fabs) wants as little human intervention as possible. This somewhat is for cost, but probably the overriding consideration is that humans are filthy. If you have them wandering around, even in "bunny suits" or self-contained isolation suits, the risk of contamination increases significantly. And contamination is death in a clean room (especially a Class 1 clean room, which I believe all Intel's fabs are. Ours were mostly class 10, except for one Class 1 fab (which we didn't operate at that level...we bought it from another maker that was going under). I won't go into the weeds here, but there's also a difference between the room and the work surfaces. Immaterial for this discussion.
Automation is everywhere, and expanding. Dope mentioned that EV lines are heavily automated (Elon was very proud of that fact when I owned some TSLA), but conventional lines also are heavily automated, as well. If you want to run 24/7/365, machines don't get tired, don't need lunch breaks, and don't need to be switched out after 8 hours, and don't need paid vacation and healthcare. If you can hire one person to oversee 20 machines, that's better than hiring three shifts of 20 people each. If a job can be done by a machine, it inevitably will be done by a machine. So automated lines are not a good argument against a business, because all of them that can do it, are doing it.
Remember the company that was going to lay-off over 1000 workers and ship operations overseas (IIRC)? Pence gave them a grant of sorts. The company ended up automated their facilities, and laying off most of the workers anyway. I don't blame them; it was a smart business decision. I do blame the people that think this trend can (or should) be halted.
And that's also coming for degreed jobs. While I was at my company, we replaced most of the layout people with "auto place and route". A computer generated the layout of a design schematic for the most efficient use of space (on the chip). Previously, it was "hand-packed" (i.e. engineers did it by hand). As a side note, doing failure analysis on a APR chip was a nightmare because the routing wasn't based on modules, so everything was scattered everywhere, and it was difficult to identify individual functions just by looking. Made my job harder. Just as an example. Even degreed persons can be replaced by machines now.
