Current Issue An Independent Journal Dedicated to the Advancement of Chip - Scale Electronics October 2001 Email the editor

By Ron Iscoff, Editor

If you were among the cast of the hit television sitcom "Friends," you would be counting your per show income at about $1 million. Now that's compensation! (Courtesy NBC Television)

When we decided a year ago that it might be informative (and even fun) to conduct a salary survey of IC packaging people, we had no inkling that the semiconductor industry would be mired in the doldrums.

Let's turn the clock back to August 2000, when we began constructing our editorial calendar for 2001.

Record Earnings

At the time, almost every company was reporting record earnings-including Amkor Technology and Kulicke & Soffa Industries-to name just two. Money was flowing: money for new hires, for raises, for capital equipment, for expendables, for travel, for pizza parties, etc.

Now, back to the future. We're not keeping track, but the dot.com/dot.bomb failures, a depressed PC market and the sudden and precipitous decline of the market for telecom and computer networking ICs has cast a giant shadow over salaries and salary expectations.

Sadly, few companies, large or small, in the IC packaging area have escaped layoffs, including the largest, Amkor, and Singapore's STATS. If you were to take the number crunchers at the packaging foundries aside, you might be able to get them to admit that unit capacity demands are off by at least 30 percent over last year.

Since we believe in that old axiom, "Figures lie and liars figure," beyond keeping the survey anonymous, we made no attempt to achieve statistical validity-whatever that is.

It may not be true of the industry as a whole, but the majority of the people who answered our survey earned degrees in mechanical engineering (Table 1). Holders of degrees in chemical engineering and EEs were a distant second.

Does the size of the company you work for matter to your wallet? Within reason, the answer is probably "yes." From what we could divine from our surveys, moderate to large companies pay better for comparable jobs (Table 2).

We also asked our survey participants if they received company-paid medical, dental, life insurance, stock options and retirement. We've decided not to show the responses in tabular form, however, because medical and dental plans are now almost universal, even with smaller companies. Retirement plans and stock options, though, were a different story. Many respondents said both were missing from their benefit plans.

Table 3 shows salary by job title. Managers tended to do better, as expected, than rank-and-file engineers-except for those in package design and engineering. Program managers scored at the top, with all three posting annual salaries of more than $100,000.

The majority of you-at least those who completed our survey-worked from 41 to 60 hours a week, as shown in the pie chart. A few of you worked 40 hours or less. Two of our respondents worked from 61-80 hours. One person, who said he is an assembly manager, worked more than 80 hours.

Overall, packaging people are generally well paid, and receive pretty decent benefits, when compared to other industries.

If They Had It to Do Over Again ...

According to our survey, people in IC packaging earned respectable incomes and benefits comparable to other fields. Still, even where our respondents said they were "satisfied" with their compensation and benefits, several said they would try another field if they could start over. (We've dropped out certain identifying data.) The operations manager at a California company said if he had it to do over again, he would enter the field of "energy engineering because it offers greater responsibility." A person involved in packaging at an eastern firm, now earning $50,000-64,999, said he would "enter finance for the higher income." A packaging program manager, with a yearly salary of more than $100,000, said he "would become a veterinarian because it provides faster job advancement, is more prestigious, offers greater responsibility and requires less travel." The purchasing manager at a California-based company said he would "enter another field, because it would be less of a rat race." A senior process engineer, earning $65,000-79,999 at a mid-western company said he would become a doctor, if he had it to do over, for the higher income. Two of the most "unsatisfied" surveys came from China. One respondent, who earns less than $25,000 a year and manages 20 people, told us that he typically works from 61-80 hours per week and "was not very satisfied" with his salary. The most popular alternative field was computer science, and the reason given was-you guessed it-more money. - R.I.

Hours Worked per Week

While reviewing the surveys, I was struck by the fact that most of the respondents who said they would elect a field outside IC packaging, if they had it to do over, were among the highest paid!

That tracks with what a former boss told me when I went to him for a raise. "Don't you know money is a poor motivator!" (Yeah, sure, tell that to Bill Gates!)

That's all until next year, when we'll tweak the questions for our second annual salary survey.