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ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions

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Re: ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions

#121

Post by tripledry »

articulatepang wrote: post #88
ygouzerh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the company perspective, performing buyback when market is high is just throwing cash by the windows to over-priced shares. If they wanted to distribute cash, they could just use dividends

Three things: 1. From the perspective of shareholders, and for the moment ignoring taxes, buybacks and dividends are exactly economically equivalent. If a dividend happens, you get some cash. If a buyback happens, the value of your shares goes up. Crucially, the amount by which each share's price goes up is equal to what the per-share dividend would have been . It's a useful exercise to work this out and convince you…

> In other words, if you want 10% of your savings to be in X, and they do a dividend, then you have to take the cash and buy shares of X.

Wouldn't the inverse of this be true in buybacks though? If it's economically equivalent then buyback should increase the price and similarly increase the proportion of X in your portfolio - which would force you to rebalance (might have tax implications).

Generally agree with the main point.

Re: ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions

#122

Post by nagisa »

tietjens wrote: post #119
joe_mamba wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing. You know what's ironic about Qimonda? China bought their IP after they went under, and used it to build two domestic NAND and DRAM manufacturers that are set to become giants. Funny how China has the vision to use, finance and monetize where western governments keep failing. That's what hurts the most to see. EU says they want a strong domestic electronics industry, but with the exception of ASML,…

Can you name these two manufacturers?

CXMT (dram) and YMTC (nand).

Re: ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions

#123

Post by joe_mamba »

tietjens wrote: post #119
joe_mamba wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing. You know what's ironic about Qimonda? China bought their IP after they went under, and used it to build two domestic NAND and DRAM manufacturers that are set to become giants. Funny how China has the vision to use, finance and monetize where western governments keep failing. That's what hurts the most to see. EU says they want a strong domestic electronics industry, but with the exception of ASML,…

Can you name these two manufacturers?

Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp. (YMTC) (NAND)

ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) (DRAM)

Re: ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions

#124

Post by jansan »

joe_mamba wrote: post #65
kabes wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a big Belgian technology company in the past. It was surprisingly lean in terms of management structure. Then Philips television, which had a big division not too far away, went bankrupt and a lot of those people got absorbed into our company. Within a couple of years the Philips people were able to transform the company to be very management/top heavy until nothing worked anymore.

> Within a couple of years the Philips people were able to transform the company to be very management/top heavy until nothing worked anymore You see the same pattern with Siemens and a lot of their spinoffs: Continental(VDO), Infineon, Qimonda, Gigaset, Healthineers (yes, that's a real name that somebody got paid to come up with), etc THe ones without some major moat like trains or energy, got slowly run into the gr…

Siemens Energy (which meanwhile is completely separated from Siemens) did a massive cleanup of their management overhead two or three years ago. They cut several layers and a lot of managers got downgraded or let go. Looking at their stock performance it seems they did the right thing.

I really hope that other German enterprises will use this as an example.

Re: ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions

#125

Post by gpvos »

swiftcoder wrote: post #30
canpan wrote: post #12

Can someone explain, why this is done? I get a feeling, it's normally done when a company is in trouble or will soon? But they should have more money than ever. They say it is to focus on innovation, but if you are a smart young person in NL, would you want to work where they just fired 1700 people? And if you already work there and are a top player it is a good time to rethink? A company I know wanted to focus, inst…

> would you want to work where they just fired 1700 people Firing 1700 managers is somewhat different than firing 1700 ICs. Whether managers will want to work there is an open question, but quite a lot of ICs will see the trimmed management layer as a good sign that they'll be free to get shit done

IC = individual contributor. Wikipedia translating management speak:

> Individual contributor, a business role for an employee without management responsibilities

Re: ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions

#126

Post by hcfman »

microtonal wrote: post #39
canpan wrote: post #12

Can someone explain, why this is done? I get a feeling, it's normally done when a company is in trouble or will soon? But they should have more money than ever. They say it is to focus on innovation, but if you are a smart young person in NL, would you want to work where they just fired 1700 people? And if you already work there and are a top player it is a good time to rethink? A company I know wanted to focus, inst…

Actually, they are eliminating 3000 of the 4500 engineering manager positions. However, of those 3000, they are moving 1400 to an engineering position. The article also says that engineers are spending 35% of the time coordinating with their managers and that they want to cut the red tape with this move. Of course, it's hard to tell how much is PR and how much reality. However, if there is substance to it, it would w…

So are you saying that there are not new positions open for engineers that were actually doing engineering and that instead some managers that were not doing engineering will now suddenly have to pick up the thread again and start doing engineer?

That would be disappointing for engineers that were actually doing engineering, as yet again their grade increases would be taken by management types.

Re: ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions

#127

Post by yomismoaqui »

joe_mamba wrote: post #104
alias_neo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Qimonda Sorry for the tangent, I haven't heard this name in over 15 years, I interviewed with them the summer before the final year of my BEng, and was offered a job in China to allegedly built a real-time voice/video communications system between what they said were their three facilities in beautiful looking part of China I can't remember the name of now. Looking through my Gmail, it was 2008 they offered my the…

Thanks for sharing. You know what's ironic about Qimonda? China bought their IP after they went under, and used it to build two domestic NAND and DRAM manufacturers that are set to become giants. Funny how China has the vision to use, finance and monetize where western governments keep failing. That's what hurts the most to see. EU says they want a strong domestic electronics industry, but with the exception of ASML,…

Say what you want about China's monoparty system, but it enables planning that spans decades.

Our 4 years terms is short slighted by design.

Re: ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions

#128

Post by joe_mamba »

retired wrote: post #118
joe_mamba wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty generous, even for EU standards. In Austria for example, unconditional unemployment is 60% of your income and only lasting for a dozen or so weeks, after which you are forced to accept any job offer thrown at you or risk having your unemployment taken away.

Unemployment benefits is something you build up during your career, not just your current employer. For each year in employment you get one month of unemployment. The limit is 24 months. And with the current job market, someone with ASML on their resume probably isn't on the bench for more than six months.

>And with the current job market, someone with ASML on their resume probably isn't on the bench for more than six months.

I think that heavily depends. If they're just a laid off manager without a strong network or industry connections at other major semi companies, then they might be shit out of luck since in the current economy, there's little to no demand for companies to hire more management.

On the contrary, many companies now are laying of their own managers too and not hiring new ones. If they need management tasks they tend to give them to existing IC staff instead of hiring dedicated managers from outside, which IMHO might be a good thing.

Re: ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions

#129

Post by gpvos »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #105
any1 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a company that went through 2 cycles like this and I can report that it had zero effect on us engineers. My impression was that people were constantly being promoted into management and at some point we just had too many managers and that's why it was done. Of course, when you know this, the question becomes: why allow things to get to this point in the first place?

Presumably because people expect to be promoted periodically, so they pile up on the high end until the symptom gets corrected all at once. A realistic (but quite controversial) solution might be to emulate other companies that have done away with most of the promotion hierarchy. Different roles but more or less standardized pay across all employees and an understanding that promotions aren't a thing. Rather than cli…

Just have the possibility for pay increase without taking on management responsibilities.

Re: ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions

#130

Post by muzani »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #106
romanovcode wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, they are equals. The salary is not equal.

in many tech companies they are, an IC6 is paid the same or similar to an M6 The difference is there will probably be a lot more M7+ than IC7+ so getting to the higher ranks is easier as a manager

I thought it's the other way around. A manager needs people to manage.
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