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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

#141

Post by themafia »

devsda wrote: post #131
PunchyHamster wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What products ? They lost battle for office software, they can't even exist in chat space, despise trying to make chat that sticks for 2 decades now, they squandered on video chat space and office space too. IF Alphabet was actually efficient they should own office space, but 365 ate their office productivity and even the utter turd that is MS teams is beating them out on chat. Even their search gets worse and only p…

I think they sort of failed upwards in chat space with their RCS push.

> failed upwards

"became monopolistic entities."

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

#142

Post by apexalpha »

nialv7 wrote: post #77

It's insane to me how the manager culture is. Somehow going from an engineer to a manager is a "promotion"? No, they are equals. Just different people doing different kinds of jobs. There should be two tracks and people should be able to choose. If engineers feel they have to become managers to grow their careers, all you are getting will just be unhappy engineers and bad managers.

There's a rather famous saying by ASMLs former CEO:

"There are no important people at ASML. Only roles with more responsibilities."

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

#143

Post by IshKebab »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #90
ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen a company that ... You have not seen Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft? Where are you looking? They all did tens of billions of share buybacks every year for many years now. Example: Alphabet has started share buybacks in 2015 and increased those every year. $70B in 2025 alone. And they are firing on all cylinders product-wise.

What products ? They lost battle for office software, they can't even exist in chat space, despise trying to make chat that sticks for 2 decades now, they squandered on video chat space and office space too. IF Alphabet was actually efficient they should own office space, but 365 ate their office productivity and even the utter turd that is MS teams is beating them out on chat. Even their search gets worse and only p…

Search, Android, Chrome, Chromebooks, Maps, Gmail, Youtube, Gemini.

They definitely have embarrassing failures (chat especially), and some are not as successful as you'd expect them to be (Gsuite, GCP). But overall I'd say they are doing pretty damn well.

Compare to Amazon for example. They've only ever had two really successful products: shopping and AWS. Alexa could have been too if they hadn't spent a gazillion dollars trying to monetise it.

Or Facebook. They've only ever had one successful product - the rest they bought after they were already successes.

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

#144

Post by vachina »

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…

My guess is German labor laws do not allow hustling. Progress will be slow if everyone kinda just coast on cruise control.

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

#145

Post by rocqua »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #132
petters wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes no sense. Buybacks and dividends are how companies give money to investors

> This makes no sense. Buybacks and dividends are how companies give money to investors Dividends are totally fine (from my perspective), while. buybacks are problematic from a place where executives are bonused on share price and earnings per share, both of which can be manipulated by buybacks. More philosophically, I think that dividends are better for society as they allow investors to realise a stream of value fr…

Why does it matter if people have to sell their shares to unlock value? Is it just the friction of small orders?

Buybacks for manipulating share prices and earnings per share are indeed silly. But they should also be trivial to compensate for by normalising on market cap instead of a single share.

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

#146

Post by hayvan »

skrebbel wrote: post #13

The press release ( https://www.asml.com/en/news/press-releases/2026/strengtheni... ) seems remarkably to the point, for CEO press release standards. I'm impressed by their ambition to fire 1700 managers (!) That's a lot of managers! I interviewed with ASML a decade and a half ago and while there was plenty to complain about (eg their tens of millions of lines of absolutely unmaintainable C code), I didn't feel at th…

Interesting. I had an interview with them around the same time frame. It was 3-hour interview with 3 managers (1-hour each) with zero technical questions. When I pointed that out they said technical skills are less important and can be gained on the job, they needed to see if I matched company culture. Apparently I didn't.

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

#147

Post by [deleted] »

nialv7 wrote: post #77

It's insane to me how the manager culture is. Somehow going from an engineer to a manager is a "promotion"? No, they are equals. Just different people doing different kinds of jobs. There should be two tracks and people should be able to choose. If engineers feel they have to become managers to grow their careers, all you are getting will just be unhappy engineers and bad managers.

[deleted]

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

#148

Post by _the_inflator »

I rose from Dev to Senior Management in a 100k+ global banking enterprise.

I don't want to trash anyone. Having said that, I always kept my engineering approach as opposed to being a manager in the sense that what I did became an end in itself.

I was more of a renegade within corporate, and used this unique position to achieve fun and results way above everyone else. I got proof, this ain't no bragging. It was easy mode, I used the top notch devs I could hire and automated everything, build a platform, that became internally the de facto standard, which caused 600+ Mio EUR cost savings within 4 years and counting with a headcount of 8.

Long story short: I was a bit Googly, knowing them a bit and having been there.

Here is the gist: To this day I could never grasp what my manager collegues or their peers and directs were doing. I asked many and many times of any rank, because I wanted to learn.

Most things were related to administrativ stuff like vacations permissions, performance reviews, budget "planing" - and of course meetings, meetings, meetings.

95% of what the HIPPOS with high 6figure and 7figure incomes in the room were doing could easily been done by an intern, except for the people affais.

Only requirement is discipline to sometimes just sit still in a chair and jumping via Zoom from meeting to meeting every 30 minutes from 8:00/9:00 to 19:00. Monday to Thursday.

All you have to do is rely on these phrases: "What are the next steps?", "I will delegate this to...", "Now start the reports please."

These people were IT managers - of course no one except me had any (!) Computer Science background.

Google taught me, that it is totally easy to train a computer scientist business skills, but impossible to train any non-IT person Computer Science. This holds true.

So yes, I can totally relate to these news here, however I feel sorry for the people anyway. Good faith in most cases has to be used. That they do everything to appear irreplaceable and therefore cause havoc along their "career" is only the flipside of human behavior and dysfunctional settings.

Take care of your craft and be proud, if you are in need.

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

#149

Post by hayvan »

tehmillhouse wrote: post #38
stingraycharles wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a signal that the finance people are becoming more important to the company, but not necessarily a bad thing; it's effectively a more (tax) efficient form of dividends, which isn't very controversial. ASML is a fairly old company (40+ years), and they have been doing share buybacks since 2006: https://www.asml.com/en/investors/why-invest-in-asml/share-b...

Every time I can remember that the finance people have become more important to a company, it has led to the disappearance of the internal culture geared towards excellence that got a company to that point in the first place.

Indeed, finance people becomeing important is how you get 737-MAX disasters.

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

#150

Post by arethuza »

skrebbel wrote: post #41
renewiltord wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Great Manager Flattening has definitely spread down the chain to other organizations. Irrespective of the difference between organizations they hired after Meta hired and they fired in the same way as Meta after Meta fired. The children did not know that they were following the piper. The piper knew. Everyone thinks themselves unique and historic. e.g. Balenciaga will say their new logo is inspired…

I'm not convinced ASML leadership is very focused on what's going on at Meta. The organizations are incomparable, except if you zoom out so far that all you see is "big" and "tech" (plus I'd wager that the average ASML'er would chuckle at calling Meta a technology company at all).

Management consultant firms propagate these ideas - even if they had nothing to do with the original implementation.
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