EXPOSED
The modal technician gowns up, loads and unloads wafer carriers, runs recipes on deposition/etch/litho tools, monitors SPC charts, and clears alarms — most of the monitoring, logging, and chart-reading layer is already software's job, and modern fabs move wafers by overhead robotics without human hands. What persists is physical: crawling into a tool during a down event, swapping chamber parts, chasing particle sources, and making the judgment call to hold a lot. The threat here is industrial automation and fab-design consolidation more than language models, and it has been eroding this role for two decades even as CHIPS-funded fabs add headcount.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. At 9 the split is real: recipe execution, SPC charting, alarm logging and wafer transport are already handled by the tool's host software and OHT rails, but preventive maintenance on a chamber — breaking vacuum, replacing a focus ring or showerhead, wet-cleaning a quartz tube, requalifying with monitor wafers — still needs a gowned human in the bay, which is why this sits mid-band rather than at 4.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments. The work is bodily — bunny suit, gloves, hours standing at the tool, reaching into an etcher during a down event, handling HF and solvent lines — but it happens inside a Class 1 cleanroom with interlocks, SOPs and a shift lead, not on a roof or a roadside.
No licence, no signature requirement. No state licence gates this bench: employers hire on a high-school diploma plus an associate degree or fab-specific training, and any credential (SEMI courses, an MSSC or community-college certificate) is a hiring preference — the process engineer's name, not yours, is on the released process spec.
Anonymous artifact production. Your output is a wafer lot indistinguishable from every other lot that ran that recipe; the customer never learns which shift ran it, and the only relationship that carries weight is your reputation with the process engineer who decides whether to believe your particle call.
Meaningful discretion. An 8 reflects the daily latitude that OCAPs and SPC rules do not cover — deciding a chamber is drifting before it trips a limit, putting a lot on hold, calling out an equipment engineer at 3 a.m., choosing to rework or scrap — but the escalation path is short and engineering owns the disposition, so the ambiguous million-dollar calls end up above you.
Has AI actually changed your work?