Pick 'n place board stuffers.
I think the semiconductor industry has been one of the most highly managed industries in the world. It was a fun ride for me. I still feel incredibly lucky to have found and held onto a front row seat (with white knuckles). In my 25 years in the industry I saw 31 layoffs at our facility but I was never laid off.
The only large place I worked, everyone was laid off.
I saw whole departments disappear, never the whole site. I was on pins and needles many, many times. Lots of great, talented people in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was involved in fab process transfers and product requalification in the early 1990s, I visited fabs that were on their last breath as we sucked their processes into our facility. Lots of unhappy faces at those soon-to-be-mothballed fabs.
Mine was Lucent Technologies. The plant I was at, Columbus Works, went from 5000 to about 200 to none in 2008 when the last stuff was moved to Richardson. The front offices were taken over by a local hospital system as admin offices, and the factory was torn down in 2014. There was a Bell Labs outpost next door, that's now generic office space.
That was a fascinating place, everything from modern manufacturing to people using pneumatic tape drive wirewrappers.
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