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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

#181
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you are not wrong, many of the cases I observed had managers from all over the world. I think it's just a symptom. As a manager, you contribute nothing by yourself. You are useful if you have a useful team (ICs) with a good project. To have that, you need to defend yourself against other managers who will take this from you. If you then also want to get prompted, your task is also to vacuum in all sorts of soft…

Having ICs with no organization, synchronization or shared vision creates chaos, toxicity and a lot of technical debt. You can easily create negative value. ICs need direction to be successful, and well managed people are much happier in my experience than non-managed people.

> Well managed people are much happier in my experienced

Emphasis on the well-managed. If the management actually helps the tram achieve their goals and doesn't stifle them, then great. Otherwise, you end up with bloat.

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

#182
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a small German company. Some time ago the owner sold it to big bloated company. At the time under the owner the management circle was 6 people, now it’s 17!!!!! And the revenue is lower with bigger headcount, because managers manage and do not work. I almost cry at work from sadness. So much potential wasted, the company has great market access and still good name. Polishing old products would make this ho…

I know. I work for a mid sized German company in the auto industry, and when our SW project was going to shit due to insufficient resources and mismanagement from the start, what they did to address it was not to add more developers, but add two managers from other projects to our daily standup, which became a 45-60 minute daily, and I'll let you guess if that improved the product deliverables and team morale. German…

“ which became a 45-60 minute daily”

I remember at one company I worked they had figured out how to get a project back on track: standups twice daily and justifying everything you did in the few hours before.

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

#183
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> any forced firings they will be well taken care of under Dutch labour laws Yes. Notice period stays in tact. Transition payment is 1/3rd of a monthly wage per year worked. And then your unemployment runs for up to 24 months at 70% of your income capped at €4500. Unemployment benefits are unconditional until you find a new job.

> Unemployment benefits are unconditional until you find a new job. They are quite conditional: you must be applying for a new job while receiving them, and after the first six months any job you can do is eligible (not just the jobs you would want to do). You must report your job applications to the unemployment agency, and you can get called in and cut off from benefits for not earnestly seeking a job.

That is what I meant with “until you find a new job”. You must indeed be actively looking for a job.

But they are unconditional in that they are not means tested or have other clauses that could cause you to not get paid. You do not have to eat your savings, house or car. You are allowed to keep those.

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

#184

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…

So many companies came from Philips.

ASML, NXP, and TSMC was largely boosted by Philips.

My Dad was in the finance department of Mullards-> Philips Electronics for 30 years, seemed like part of the family.

But Philips does seem to have given rise to many companies.

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

#185
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Labour laws have much less of an impact than the work or overall culture. Sweden has quite strong labour protection but can be much more innovative than Germany because there's much less emphasis in respecting titles, seniority, and authority than the Germans. German education has a big emphasis on bowing down to authority from early age, Sweden is much more lax (and even though Jantelagen isn't a big thing in modern…

>German education has a big emphasis on bowing down to authority from early age Ah, good ol' legacy of the education system implemented by Prussia, who wanted an army of conformist soldiers following orders, and not free thinkers risking to upset the apple cart. Great mentality if all you want is waging war though :) And this mentality persist to this day, where given a set of rules, other successful related cultures…

> Great mentality if all you want is waging war though

Arguably not; in the end it produced a brittle general staff who could not accept that they needed to rethink all their war plans based on the political constraints of time (ironic since Clausewitz came out of that exact tradition).

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

#186
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This but unironically. I'm hoping I can get into the skilled blue collar labor before it gets flooded by the hordes of unemployed AI researchers circa the 2030s (likely 2028 lol). No I'm not even kidding

I wouldn't sweat about it. In my ~40mln country the construction sector (that includes renovation, landscaping etc.) outnumbers the IT sector 3:1. Lead times for having things done around here are ridiculous, which is why I believe the former can absorb half of the latter with little change in salaries.

Yeah skilled blue collar labor is insanely stupidly expensive. I do want a flood of them so that the current scammers in most of the skilled blue collars get devalued.

No, you do not get to charge 500 USD to change an anode rod on a water heater if I have the damn rod. That's a 20 min job MAX and the only reason I'm calling you is that putting on the stupid plumbing tape at the end is annoying for me

I understand guild warfare and the hatred of labor unions the moment that I have to deal yet another actually-should-be-in-jail levels of scamming from yet another dentist.

Y'all think that AI researchers should go to jail for hallucinated citations? Dental surgeons should go to jail for selling homeopathic remedies (ask me how I know!)

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

#187

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,…

Same as it ever was.

China is going through the burgeoning phase previous countries have gone through. Although China’s scale is far larger, once there’s a couple of economic troughs things will be different.

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

#188
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, white-collar work at all levels is eliminated, as are creative pursuits (art, music, etc), and we can finally return to humanity's true calling - manual labour.

This but unironically. I'm hoping I can get into the skilled blue collar labor before it gets flooded by the hordes of unemployed AI researchers circa the 2030s (likely 2028 lol). No I'm not even kidding

Who will need your labour if everyone else is unemployed?

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

#189
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…

Notionally there's not a difference between dividends and buybacks. (That's somebody's theorem... Modigliani maybe?) The fact that our tax laws treat them so differently doesn't make much sense.

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

#190
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How is stock performance any indication of a company having too many managers.
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