Essentially yeah. R&D at Intel/AMD/NVidia is 9-5 work.

TSMC and SMIC are different beasts entirely. They push way harder on the gas and never let up.

A lot of ex-TSMC are at SMIC now. They aren't doing cutting edge nodes for now but expect crazy things out of SMIC in 5-10 years.

Considering the overall investment goes into dozens of billions, it seems a little hard to believe they wouldn't source worldwide talent to make it 24/7 as well. Also they probably source top talent. I'm always skeptical of those "we just work a little harder" explanations.