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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

#191

Post by timmg »

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…

> Dividends are totally fine (from my perspective)

FWIW, companies are now opting for buybacks because it is more "tax efficient".

Stockholders have to pay taxes on dividends (immediately) but only pay capital gains on share price increases and only when they sell.

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

#192

Post by saidinesh5 »

joe_mamba wrote: post #99
lnsru wrote: 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…

Wow. That reflects my experience with another mid sized German company in a similar industry.

Their original roadmap for their next gen products was not good and the product was getting delayed by a few months.

They brought in a new manager to fix the timeline. Instead she increased the bureaucracy. OKR tracking every other week. Hired a scrum master. Brought in external "certified code reviewers", delayed the project a little more and ended up cancelling the project within a couple of months. "Hardware products are not as profitable as proprietary cloud software as a service company anyway".

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

#193

Post by chronid »

zwaps wrote: post #73
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…

Many large corporations in Europe, especially in sectors of prior consistent growth and profit, are chock full of too many managers. These are people who primarily create work for themselves and each other. I have sat in meetings about meetings for actions that, ultimately, have zero impact, in teams where managers involve outnumber people who actually execute anything three to one. It's staggering. I believe the bes…

I work for a very big US company. My team (10 people) has something like 4 PMs and every task is essentially priority 0. They're coming up with a new way to split tasks that seems inspired to a gatcha to prioritize between priority 0 tasks, this is their contribution and solution to the issue, any attempt to make them see how crazy that is has failed.

There are daily syncs for things that take weeks to do due to compliance, endless war rooms to solve things that would be done offline in half the time, and random bullshit process and committees introduced by management which generate even more meetings...

It's common all over the world, motion instead of progress. It's incredible to me how all those companies don't realize where their money is spent. But alas you cannot make people see a problem if their salary depends on it, and I may be no different.

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

#194

Post by joe_mamba »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #182
joe_mamba wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I figure that is sarcasm.(I hope).

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

#195

Post by lonelyasacloud »

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…

> There's something with the management from these massive German conglomerates that just lacks any sort of vision.

It's a universally hard tendency to resist as enterprises grow into big organisations.

Company starts small and lean; people involved in making product also do most of everything else. Over time specialist HR, Finance, Legal, Marketing etc functions are added. All try to do their best but all with their own non-product agenda. All usually hired and sitting at or close to the same top table decision making process, all diluting and distracting from the vision/mission of what was important to the organisation in the first place. Eventually, the company's top-level decisions becomes more about that than the product.

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

#196

Post by joe_mamba »

megablast wrote: post #190
jansan wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It isn't. Stock price just measures investor confidence. Sometimes firing managers leads to more investor confidence. Most of the time it's a crapshoot but it's the best objective indicator we have for comparison.

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

#197

Post by ako »

joe_mamba wrote: post #134
yomismoaqui wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think this case has much to do with the mono party system but with the state taking interest to support a local industry at a loss but for future security. Like for example the French government massively supported its aerospace and nuclear industry, and German government gave massive support to its legacy auto industry and they're not a mono party totalitarian system. So it can be done even in democracies, b…

So bailing out large corporations is a good thing?

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

#198

Post by joe_mamba »

saidinesh5 wrote: post #192
joe_mamba wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wow. That reflects my experience with another mid sized German company in a similar industry. Their original roadmap for their next gen products was not good and the product was getting delayed by a few months. They brought in a new manager to fix the timeline. Instead she increased the bureaucracy. OKR tracking every other week. Hired a scrum master. Brought in external "certified code reviewers", delayed the projec…

>external "certified code reviewers"

That's another big issue with Germany, is they obsess over certifications when hiring, as if they're some confidence of high quality hiring bar, when a lot of those certifications and degrees in the IT industry are just scams.

I think it's caused by the fact that firing a bad hire is super difficult past the probation period, and since HR/recruiters are clueless on screening what makes a good SW dev, so they just go with filtering for credentials to cover their asses, in case of a bad hire they can say they followed the process and screened for the ones with credentials.

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

#199

Post by coolgoose »

budgefrankly wrote: post #171
cmiles8 wrote: post #165

I’m generally supportive of the tech industry’s move to rid itself of too many mangers. Most managers are no longer technical, and just create bloated middle layers that slow everyone else down. The only managers that are decent are the ones that have kept their technical skills sharp. Most others just seem to be able to say “my team will follow-up” and “my team will look into this” and are beyond useless. Few are sh…

> Most managers are no longer technical, and just create bloated middle layers that slow everyone else down. > The only managers that are decent are the ones that have kept their technical skills sharp. Alex Ferguson was a terrible footballer when he was managing Manchester United. Yet they won the premiership in 6 of his last 10 years in that role, and have never won it since he left. The skills that make one great…

But he was a footballer, some managers in it are like Alex Ferguson was baking goods, not knowing football
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