Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

asml.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 366 posts

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

#251

Post by consp »

cbolton wrote: post #214
Freak_NL wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm curious how that works in the extreme... Isn't prostitution legal in the Netherlands? A brothel can offer you a job and you have to accept?

> Isn't prostitution legal in the Netherlands? A brothel can offer you a job and you have to accept?

It's in a somewhat comparable job but without regard for payment level or educational/promotional equivalence so you have to accept lower pay. The most extreme is a temp job but you have to be far gone to get there and even then there are limits.

Also, switching from a desk job to a physical job (which in this case is very physical) is not something the UWV (the goverment part which handles this) will try to bring up to a judge if you refuse as Dutch law has a "reasonability" principle and you can very easily argue that would be unreasonable.

The again, this is the UWV we are talking about. They task people with chronic fatigue syndrom to work for 20 hours a week in the fields because "their sheet says so".

The length of unemployment benefits is calculated in work years: 3 months are guaranteed, for every year worked you get 1 extra month up to 10, then 0.5 per year (changed in 2016 because the right has been in power for over 15 years).

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

#252

Post by consp »

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.

That changed in 2016 to 0.5 months per year.

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

#253

Post by nntwozz »

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.

What would you say...you do here? — Bob Slydell

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

#254

Post by joe_mamba »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #249
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,…

I'm glad the EU isn't subsidising European DRAM and NAND. Those are typically very low margin business. It's unlikely the EU could have competed with China because of labour costs/rights. Today we have a shortage in this sector and margins are good so it seems like a good idea. But it's likely a European company would have regularly lost money over the last 20 years and become an unpopular drain on EU finances.

>Those are typically very low margin business. It's unlikely the EU could have competed with China because of labour costs/rights.

Well, you can apply this logic to a lot of other industries, like cars for example, they're also quite low margin products now when you ignore the stealership price gouging and artificail protectionism. The problem is if you just let all your manufacturing industry die out of greed and ship it aboard to cheaper labor, you're leaving yourself exposed to geopolitical rivals or even to allies who decide not be your allies anymore because they know they got you by the balls now and can squeeze concessions out of you.

Then what do you do?

China is willing to play and loose the short game in order to win the long game, while EU is only focused on the short term gains while it's been slowly bleeding leverage and influence to rivals in critical sectors that you can't easily reshore back on a whim in case of another once-in-a-lifetime pandemic or "special military operation".

China's EV success didn't come out of nowhere, it just leveraged all the low margin electronics industry the west didn't want anymore and shipped to CHina, and look at their EV industry versus the EU one today.

Same with Taiwan's success in the semi industry. They started by manufacturing on the cheap dated processes acquired from Philips and RCA, and look at TSMC now.

We're not talking about outsourcing manufacturing of cheap clothes and sneakers here. DRAM, NAND and micro-electronics in general is quite an indispensable part of or modern civilisation and defense now, even without the AI bubble. The longer you ignore your domestic capabilities because the profits aren't as high as you want, the harder it's gonna bite you in the ass later when the shit hits the fan.

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

#255

Post by Wurdan »

zwaps wrote: post #230
Wurdan wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an engineering manager (and one who's slowly starting a job hunt) these comments don't make for comfortable reading. What we'll never know from a press release like this is whether this is a change that employees wanted, or one which senior leadership wanted. Sure there are companies where management is overly bloated or inefficient. And maybe I'm just flattering myself by thinking that my teams' lives wouldn't be…

They indicate that this is something engineers want. Further, half of the 3000 with transition back to engineering, indicating that they think they will be more valuable as engineers. Middle management has this self-replicating dynamic of becoming bloated and inefficient. Most companies probably do not have good middle management, because they have too much of it.

They indicate that engineers want to spend less time on (slow) processes. That isn't necessarily the same thing as that they want less (middle) managers. I can say that at my current and previous companies (both over 30,000 employees) most of the processes/bureaucracy aren't things that the horizontal middle layers came up with. Most processes are imposed by vertical corporate functions like HR, finance, legal and compliance.

I'm not the reason my teams need to do software supplier risk assessments, or fill in at least 4 different surveys about their wellbeing and functioning as a team, or provide forecasts of their cloud spend for the year, or manage data usage agreements for the consumers of their data in our data lake. Nor is my people leader. But I am accountable if we don't stay on top of these responsibilities which are expected of all teams.

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

#256

Post by gosub100 »

npstr wrote: post #238
101008 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not fan of managers, but these are people with families behind them. 1,700 is a lot of families that may go into stress and who knows what. Let's just now talk about them as if they were just rows in a database. (I am not saying OP is talking like that about them, but I am seeing some responses that do...)

Sorry, but the empathy is misplaced. These people working bullshit jobs are dragging down the whole organization. If bullshit jobs are allowed to proliferate, they risk the even larger number of jobs (and families) of the people doing the actual work.

It's not a foregone conclusion that they are bullshit jobs. What's likely to happen is that work or risk management will now be foisted on other staff that will not receive extra compensation for handling or will get marked down or dismissed for not completing.

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

#257

Post by consp »

m000 wrote: post #248
cbolton wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how that works in the extreme... Isn't prostitution legal in the Netherlands? A brothel can offer you a job and you have to accept?

"Any job you can do is eligible" is highly inaccurate. I went through this after my PhD funding in NL ran out, which is considered a layoff. I only had to demonstrate that I made some applications to relevant jobs. No pressure whatsoever to go work in some unrelated job. Yes, the UWV [1] unemployment benefits are not perpetual (I don't recall the exact formula used to calculate the eligibility length). But even after…

Do note that you could be in the active group of an experiment if you had WW in the past 5-6 years. There was (is?) an experiment where they check some people less and even not force you to look but let you work it out on your own.

> Overall, it is a very pro-worker system

Having had to deal with parts of the Dutch system, I'm positive it's rigged against you. And you pay for it, it's literally a tax (WW premie, part of the "werknemersverzekeringen" aka employees insurance).

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

#258

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

timmg wrote: post #191
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah I know, I just think that's a poor use of tax policy. The only case where buybacks make sense to me is for companies that give employees RSUs, in which case buybacks compensate for the dilution.

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

#259

Post by Havoc »

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.

> No, they are equals.

People want this to be true but it just isn’t in reality and can’t be. Companies are pyramid shaped and the higher up you go the more managing you do and correspondingly less engineering.

It’s baked into the structure that seniority and power is biased towards managers

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

#260

Post by ragebol »

Magmalgebra wrote: post #31
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…

I think the press release is actually clear that they felt this was necessary to retain talent: > Engineers in particular have expressed their desire to focus their time on engineering, without being hampered by slow process flows I'm guessing ASML had a lot of regrettable attrition and heard this in the exit interviews.

It's well known here in the region around ASML that they are very process heavy and things move slow. I'm not keen on working for them
Post reply on HN