S06-E01 Joey is a Equipment Engineer at Micron

In this episode of Talking Technicians you’ll meet Joey, an equipment engineer at Micron in Boise, Idaho. Joey details his professional journey from being a technician to an engineer, the operations at Micron, and the skills required to excel in the semiconductor industry. Joey shares insights on salary expectations, benefits, and the importance of both technical and soft skills in the workplace. Hear Joey’s insightful advice for aspiring technicians and engineers.

The Talking Technicians podcast is produced by MNT-EC, the Micro Nano Technology Education Center, through financial support from the National Science Foundation's Advanced Technological Education grant program.

Opinions expressed on this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Science Foundation.

Join the conversation. If you are a working technician or know someone who is, reach out to us at info@talkingtechnicians.org.

Links from the show:

Episode Web Page:

https://micronanoeducation.org/students-parents/talking-technicians-podcast/

Careers at Micron: https://www.micron.com/about/careers

Transcript

Peter Kazarinoff  0:00  
From MNT-EC, the Micro Nano Technology Education Center, this is Talking Technicians. The podcast about technicians: who they are, what they do, and where they come from. I'm your host, Peter Kazarinoff. I teach technicians and engineers at Portland Community College. In each episode, you'll meet a working technician and hear their story. That means real interviews, with real technicians, about real jobs. At the end of each episode, you'll hear actions you can take if you want to be a technician too.

In this episode, we're talking with Joey. Joey is an Equipment Engineer at Micron in Boise, Idaho. Joey, welcome to Talking technicians.

Joey  0:43  
Thank you very much. Peter, happy to be on.

Peter Kazarinoff  0:46  
Joey, you're an Equipment Engineer at Micron in Boise. How long have you been in the Boise area for?

Joey  0:54  
That is correct. I've been here in Boise Since 2016 I came here after I graduated high school to go to Boise State and haven't quite left, found a job after graduation, and they're holding me around, which I'm not too upset about.

Peter Kazarinoff  1:09  
And did you grow up in Idaho, or did you come to Boise State from somewhere else?

Joey  1:14  
I came to Boise State from somewhere else. I grew up in the Silicon Valley, front of the peninsula, right between San Francisco and San Jose. I spent most of my time so I grew up there, went to high school down in San Jose, and then after that, came out here to Boise for university.

Peter Kazarinoff  1:31  
So Joey, right after working at Boise, state is that when you moved on to Micron?

Joey  1:39  
Yep, yeah, it was the the last semester I did, I was taking some industrial engineering courses, and one of those was a really small project with Micron. So they took four students for a semester give them a huge data set of a bottleneck issue they have in their assembly line, and say, hey, please use this data and solve the issue. So for a whole semester, we were working with Micron, essentially doing some side engineering work for them. And that was the whole class. There's no tests or quizzes. It was just deliverables and giving meetings each week. And Micron took that as a long form interview. So they saw for a whole semester how we worked, and then at the end of that project, they gave everyone a job offer. And so usually once or twice a year, if we do a fall semester one, we'll pick up three or five students from Boise State via that program, and that's how I snuck my way in.

Peter Kazarinoff  2:37  
So let's talk a little bit more about Micron. Joey, so Micron's based in Boise, Idaho. What does Micron do? What do they make?

Joey  2:47  
So Micron makes only memory chips. We make computer chips. We have a semiconductor fab here in Boise, Idaho. We've got a bunch all around the world, but our headquarters is here, and we have our reach research and development fab, and that's where I work here in Boise, Idaho, but thankfully, we just got some chips Act money, so we're building a high volume manufacturing plant here in Boise, Idaho as well, and those are for parts that we'll actually complete and then send to customers. And we're opening up a new fab over in Syracuse, New York as well, but finally, bringing a little more manufacturing stateside. But yeah, only only memory, but memory that goes the memory goes everywhere, from your cell phone to your computer to your car to your washing machine to an AI server farm. We find a memory to make for those

Peter Kazarinoff  3:42  
So, Joey, you're an Equipment Engineer. Can you talk to me a little bit about what you do day to day at work? Like, what do you do at the beginning, middle and end of the day?

Joey  3:52  
Yeah, so I work as a shift engineer. So there's on my team. There's four different shifts. So 24/7, 365, were in the fab in a it's a full ISO 1000 clean room, so we're in a bunny suit. So in the morning we'll be in there getting passed down so hearing what night shift went through, what issues they've been working on, what they what jobs are half done that they need us to finish. And we'll spend the first half hour an hour addressing our priorities, figure out what's broken right now that we need to fix, and then the rest of the day we'll go around putting out fires and fixing those broken equipment. We also do a lot of preventative maintenance, so like how you take your car and every once a while for an oil change or get their tires rotated. The equipment we work on need checks every once in a while, so we'll go through and check everything make sure it's dialed in and able to run for another 12 months straight.

Peter Kazarinoff  4:55  
And Joey, besides Equipment Engineer, did you have any other roles at Micron?

Joey  4:59  
I, yeah, I - before, I was an Equipment Engineer, right out of the university project I did we I was a manufacturing technician, so that is someone that has a little higher view of the assembly line and sees all of our work in progress and make sure it's chugging along accordingly. It's not quite a Ford model, a factory where it's there's a booth right next to each other, and it all falls in line. We have equipment spread out across this huge clean room that's probably the size of three Costcos strapped together with a huge ceiling that we've got little robot cars driving around, and those bring the work in progress from one tool to another. So as a manufacturing technician out and make sure that everything is processing accordingly, that there's everything's there's no faults or issues during processing. But also to make sure that there's no no lots sitting around longer than they need to, and that everything's processing as fast as it can as well. We don't want stuff sitting around for weeks with nothing being done. So that gave me a really good view of kind of a higher level, how Micron makes memory, understanding how the assembly line works. Because to make a chip, it could take anywhere from 800 to 2000 manufacturing steps. So there's a lot of individual steps that goes into it. And being a manufacturing technician, kind of seeing the scheduling of it all, gave me a better respect for the assembly line. Now that I'm in there, standing right beside the equipment and making those work again, I get to understand why some things are priority and some are not.

Peter Kazarinoff  6:40  
So. Joey, it sounds like there's opportunities for professional growth at Micron. If you started as a manufacturing technician and now working as an Equipment Engineer, how did you go between those two positions?

Joey  6:54  
So those two positions work side by side, as the manufacturing technician sees an issue, they'll net they'll inform someone in the clean room to go get eyes on this, take a look and see if, if it could be resolved, or if we need to rework that part. So they the manufacturing technician has a much bigger lens that they could see the factory through. I could only see through my toolbox and that one piece of equipment I'm repairing, but they'll tell me, all around me what needs addressed first, and what could be sitting for a while. And I moved to a Equipment Engineer in the fab because I've always loved tinkering with things, worked with my hands, doing projects and as a manufacturing technician, you're sitting at a desk for an equal 12 hour shift during that same time, but watching, we use a custom program, but just seeing little widgets go through your desktop to be completed, then they go onto someone else's screen. So that was tough to find motivation after working enough night shifts of staring at your own screen, but I love to work with my hands. So soon as there was an opportunity, took a job shadow. So it was only for three, three months just to learn how the two teams interact together. Moved over into the fab as an Equipment Engineer, and then after that, I was through our rotation. Was meant to go back to my manufacturing technician role, but ended up putting in an offer, saying, Hey, I would love to do this full time. And I found it a lot more gratifying if you get a broken piece of equipment and you can make it running again, there's a lot more smiles on people's faces. So as a happier drive home at the end of the day with that role.

Peter Kazarinoff  8:44  
Joey, can you provide a ballpark for the salary for the job of a technician in the semiconductor industry in the Boise area? If somebody does come out of community college and become a technician like you were, what might they expect to make?

Joey  9:00  
Yeah, so we've, we've arranged, I would say, when I started, was closer to $25 an hour, but could go very north of 30 or 40. We also work a lot with all the piece of equipment I work on are owned by a different company or manufactured by a different company, and we work with their own factory experts that are in our fab as well. And they they usually earn a little more than us, I would say, up to $45 an hour. And those are field service engineers for semiconductor equipment manufacturers. And right now I moved over to salary. So I'm not making any hourly rates right now, but it's in the around the middle of the 80s mark right now. But again, still plenty of room to grow, but it's a lot. They usually increase the wages based on experience. And semiconductors are pretty small, small world. Yeah, so as long as you've got, if you're new, they'll happy to take you and train you up. But you're usually stuck in that industry for a while, until you're making the higher end of those wages.

Peter Kazarinoff  10:11  
And Joey, besides hourly wage, are there other benefits, included things like health care or retirement that go along with these jobs?

Joey  10:20  
Yeah, there's, there's lots of benefits to working at Micron. So we have full healthcare benefits, vision, dental healthcare. They have on site, medical clinic and gym. They do four 1k matching to, I want to say 4% they have an employee stock purchase program to allow employees to buy discounted stocks. And they have a lot of other things that I don't take full advantage of. They have pet insurance that you could get through them, lots of life insurance, some other stuff, but a lot of really good resources that they provide to their employees.

Peter Kazarinoff  11:04  
Joey, do you remember what it felt like your first day of work? Your first day going into Micron? You mentioned that it was like as big as three Costcos put together? What did it feel like going into the fab, into the factory for the first time?

Joey  11:19  
I felt like a little kid in a big world, always in awe of any manufacturing equipment. Would love watching, like CNCS run, or 3D printers, simple things, but going into that is just that times 1000 It's massive. There's always something to look at. That's why I love the industry. There's always something you could learn. You're never going to be a master of all of it, just because there's so much information there. But the first day was just being purely overwhelmed. Everything's huge, everything looks dangerous, everything's really intimidating, everything's expensive, and I'm never going to learn it. They also have what I call micro knees. They love to abbreviate little sayings or words. There's a lot of acronyms to learn. Yeah, it was being purely overwhelmed. And I think it's similar for a lot of people that go into that industry. It took me six months before I knew entirely what my role involved, and how to do it. It took me probably another six months. So after a year my role that I was adequate or starting to get good at my job. But there's so many small, small attributes to the semiconductor that's it's really interesting and something I was happy to learn. But yeah, a long, long runway of education to be had in there.

Peter Kazarinoff  12:43  
So Joey, let's shift gears a little bit and talk about education and work experience before starting at Micron, you mentioned that you were doing the school project, and that was a good way to get your foot in the door. What did you study at Boise State, and how did that prepare you for your work?

Joey  13:02  
So I had a slightly different Boise State process than most. I entered in knowing that I love and want to do engineering for the rest of my life. So went in as a mechanical engineer to try to get a really broad scope of engineering that I could use in a lot of different facets. And I got about pretty much finished my GES for that, I want to say about year and a half, maybe two years in. But I've I failed chemistry, and I think calc one and two, so I already had three retakes stacked up, and that was before there was fluid dynamics or thermo or differential equations, and the mechanical engineering program only allowed for retakes throughout your whole life cycle. And I knew I was going to take more retakes than that. So I learned about an awesome new program that they introduced. The Dean of it is Amy mole, who I adore, but the pro the I guess a college is called Engineering Plus, so they'll give you a BS in engineering, but they really want you to get a plus. So I describe it as pick your own adventure engineering. They'll throw the whole course catalog at you and say, hey, you need this many credits of lower level, this many level of upper level if you want to specialize in that. Even better. And I did, I described as mechatronics. It was half and half mechanical and electrical. But I also did a minor in industrial engineering to learn a little bit more about economics, about business, about the supply chain, because that was right at the start of COVID when I was getting into that. So I ended up graduating with a BS in engineering, with a minor in industrial engineering. But that Engineering Plus program was excellent. Most people have a maybe one semester long senior design project, where in that program, we had three semesters to really iron out our project make sure that. Customer was happy, and that was a blast. We ended up making a small desktop mounted six degree of freedom robot arm that would go into care homes, where there would be maybe 20 residents there and only two or three nurses able to feed them, and they all need help feeding. So we added a robot or two in there to help speed things up. So the last person was finishing their food before it got cold.

Peter Kazarinoff  15:26  
Wow, what a cool project. So Joe, you mentioned a whole bunch of different technical skills and technical courses, things like thermodynamics or building robots. Did you also learn things that sometimes we call soft skills, or professional skills that you use in your work?

Joey  15:42  
Now, yes, I think the one of the biggest, I wouldn't say the biggest, but a really important thing I learned was in that last project where I had Micron as a customer, and once a week, I had to hold a meeting with them. I had to send them a email a day before, with the agenda, figure out what I wanted to go over. There were pretty lax working meetings, but I still had to prep stuff to bring there. Had to be able to lead a meeting, send out minutes afterwards, in which in the professional environment, is a very normal thing to do, and it's not the hardest, but as a student, I was always a person in the back of the room, in the or at least getting lecture two, I wouldn't really have to bring much to it, other than a notebook and my knowledge. So that was really nice to learn. Another huge thing that I like to press upon a lot of modern engineering students is that project I worked on, just being able to take an idea, put it down on paper, get some blueprints together, and then make it all the way to what your final deliverable is. Is really important. I think there's a lot of engineers nowadays that are really good on paper, but they can't quite turn the screwdriver just right to make it function at the end of the day. So some of the biggest things I worked on were those projects, and I did some other clubs as well. The Society of Automotive Engineers has two different projects they do, but a Baja or a Formula team, and so it's making a either off road go kart or a little track car that goes on the asphalt. But that was a big project I worked on that by a certain due date, by the time competition came around, we needed a running car. I worked on other projects. Whereas kind of competition robots, you got six weeks between what you six weeks from the time you heard what your robot had to do before your first competition. And I think that taught me great things. Of, Hey, you don't have all the time or all the resources in the world, but you have a deliverable, you have to meet, bring something to the table. So I think those were some of the most helpful things that I learned was learning how to lead, I wouldn't say lead people, but learning how to interact with them on meetings and how to have professional communications, as well as learning how to manage your project and get it done on time.

Peter Kazarinoff  18:10  
Right? So Joey, it sounds like these experiences involved working with a team, having a long term deliverable and also having something measurable at the end that you've got to compare against. That sounds like good preparation when you went on to become a technician Now, ultimately an engineer. Joey, what's something unexpected about working as a technician after you Boise State and you started at Micron, that you only learned about after you started?

Joey  18:40  
One thing that I love to say is you better get comfortable being uncomfortable. There's you're never going to know everything. There's always going to be a co worker that comes up to you and asks a question that you do not know the answer to, that you might not even know where to go to get the right answer. And that happens a lot, and I think it's just an opportunity to be a subject, maybe not a full subject matter expert on something, but you could learn something from that. So learning from, you know, what are they actually asking about? Is it a system? Is it a data network? How can you better understand that and then help solve problems or help answer questions that people have about that in the future. But also networking. You get to learn who, who's in charge of that. Who do I go to when I have questions, even if I only have maybe one question every two years, at least, I know the right direction to go from that. But being comfortable, being uncomfortable is huge, and also learning how to, I feel like it's, it's hard to say nowadays, but you can't let too many things stress you out in our fab everything's really important. Everything's really expensive for the equipment we work on. When, when that equipment goes down, we could lose a quarter million dollars an hour, or if that. A piece of equipment breaks a wafer inside of it that could be a really expensive wafer that's been being worked on for months and months and has been someone's pet project the whole time they've worked there. It is the nature of the beast, and sometimes you gotta kind of roll the punches, and you gotta be able to go home at the end of the day being happy and interact with those around you with your life, but not to get too stressed out. We've had a couple peers, unfortunately that didn't quite make it, because they took everything really personally, and when they weren't able to fix it, that weighed heavy on them. And as a joke, we got to learn how to do it and be better at the end of the day, but you gotta learn that sometimes you're not going to be the master of everything. You can't fix every single piece of equipment in there, and you gotta lean on your peers when those times come up, and not take it all on yourself.

Peter Kazarinoff  20:52  
Right, to have some flexibility and some resilience, and also just to make sure that you don't take everything personally when some things go wrong at work. That's really good advice. So Joey, we're kind of finishing up now, but I'd like to ask you just a couple more questions. How did your life change when you became a technician at Micron and you finished at Boise State? What was different once you were a technician compared to when you were a student?

Joey  21:20  
I - I say the biggest changes I had after I graduated and became a technician were how I used my free time, and then what I was doing between work and then when I was at Boise State, I was still a sleep deprived college student, but on my time off would be spent doing homework, and the biggest change that surprised me was a technician works 12 hours a day. You're either three or four days a week. You don't give yourself a lot of time to socialize after, to get exercise, to get the right amount of food, to get eight hours of sleep. It taught me that I really have to balance my schedule accordingly, and also at Micron, how we do with our technicians and only a few roles. But to balance it out, everyone will work day shift and night shift. So I'll work four months of day shifts, and then I'll rotate over to four months of nights. So I was not working night shift when I was a student, and that was a big change to me for the amount of sleep I got and how I interacted with those around me. So I'd say those were some of the biggest changes that I was not expecting come graduation day or the day I accepted that offer.

Peter Kazarinoff  22:38  
And Joey, how did your life change when you move from the technician role to the engineering role. Did you have the same sort of schedule after that?

Joey  22:46  
Yeah, so I had the same same schedule. Was expected to do the same work and then some. So I'd just say it was more of an N plus one. So anytime something broke, instead of just replacing it, hitting start and walking away, take that broken piece and then do failure analysis on it. Try to figure out what went wrong. How do we prevent this from happening in the future? It turned into a less reactive role, into more of a proactive role. So trying to rub your crystal ball and see what's going to break next. What can I plan for? And then also looking back at some of the bigger failures we had, and how can we mitigate those from happening in the future.

Peter Kazarinoff  23:28  
So to finish up here, Joey, what advice would you give to current students or people who want to transition their career and work in the semiconductor industry as a technician or ultimately, as an engineer, what advice would you give to those current students?

Joey  23:44  
The advice I would give is be open accept every offer you can in terms of, if it's a small project, something you could put on your resume, or a job offer somewhere else, I would say, get as much experience as you can and also be comfortable being uncomfortable. It's a weird industry that there's not many education paths for, and everyone in that industry knows it. So you're not going to be alone. But also get get some hands on experience. Some of the best co workers I've had actually came from the military, where they were technicians working on tanks or helicopters or night vision goggles. They're familiar with working with hand tools, and I would say just knowing the basics, if you know how to use a screwdriver or a ratchet or a multimeter, your odds are better, better than a certain amount of mechanical engineering graduates, so I'd say, be comfortable with that, and then if you can put it on your resume, maybe make a portfolio of, Hey, these are projects I've worked on that don't quite line up right, even though it's not the norm in the US. Seems like a CV where you could put all those projects together and say, Hey, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this. Yes, instead of just saying I could do a lot of calculus, I don't use a lot of calculus in my work, but I use a lot of hand tools, so I value someone with a lot more hands on experience in classroom.

Peter Kazarinoff  25:12  
Well, Joey, thank you so much for being here and sharing your story with me and Talking Technicians.

Joey  25:18  
You're very welcome. Peter, thanks for having me.

Peter Kazarinoff  25:21  
Please keep in touch.

Joey  25:25  
Will do.

Peter Kazarinoff  25:27  
Talking Technicians is produced by MNT-EC, the Micro Nano Technology Education Center through financial support from the National Science Foundation's Advanced Technological Education grant program. Opinions expressed on this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Science Foundation. Join the conversation: If you are a working technician, or know someone who is, reach out to us at info@talkingtechnicians.org. We're always looking out for great guests to share more stories with you.