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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

#271

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

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…

ASML has 42k employees.

I wonder how many mangers they have.

They probably shouldn't have more than 4k. It's kind of shocking they have almost 2k they can fire.

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

#272

Post by jansper39 »

anal_reactor wrote: post #216
Der_Einzige wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gui…

I'm wondering if I get fired from my corporate middle-do-nothing job I could become a skilled blue collar worker. My point is, someone who both at the same time can put tiles and won't fuck up the pattern could be very valuable. I assume one year maximum to learn ins and outs.

Why would you assume you can become a skilled blue collar worker in a year?

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

#273

Post by speleding »

Wurdan wrote: post #217
kaon_2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Phillips and ASML share the same regional and cultural heritage. Many ASML employees will have first-hand experience of Phillips' downfall. They certainly do not want to repeat that mistake.

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…

When I worked as a strategy consultant in the Netherlands (albeit decades ago), the rule of thumb was that any organization that had not seen a reorganization for five years would accumulate at least 10% of dead weight. (Mainly due to very strict labour laws that make it very costly to fire someone.)

ASML has 44,000 staff total, not sure how many are managers, but the 1,700 number does not strike me as particularly ambitious for a reorg in a company that size.

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

#274

Post by JeremyNT »

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…

A good manager understands the tech and what it takes to implement it on a high level, at least enough to not get BS'd.

This instinct can be developed due to direct experience as an engineer, but it can also be due to experience as a product manager or something else, as long as they have some curiosity to actually learn the big picture stuff.

Now with AI chatbots there's little excuse for a manager to be completely clueless about this stuff, but still there are a class of these people who just can't be bothered to care about anything other than moving units of work around boards.

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

#275

Post by whizzter »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #245
tripledry wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was in a company that didn't promote engineers (never saw this happen), only hired managers externally. Resulted in a management layer clueless about the work and product. Good management is rare.

Good management is rare partly because nobody wants to take risks and hire inexperienced management. This leads to a reluctance to promote people without previous experience into management roles. This in turn leads to a shortage of experienced managers.

Good management is rare because it's the wrong people doing it. The bigger problem is that we're all always told that we need "professional" management, implicitly people who's been to "management" schools, this dissuades promoting from within (that honestly can be equally disastrous).

The upside of people from within is that they know what the bottom line comes from, there's been some highlighting of the effects in terms of the founder-mode discussions.

https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html

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

#276

Post by bruce343434 »

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…

> If the value of your shares goes up, you don't get taxed that year. Instead, you get taxed whenever you sell, which might be later when you retire and are in a lower tax bracket, or after a period of some years when you get a lower capital gains tax rate.

This is actually not true in the Netherlands, which taxes unrealized gains on wealth. Quite unique. But NL also features a dividend tax, which politicians tried to get rid off but didn't succeed because it was such an unpopular plan.

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

#277

Post by mahrain »

What’s more surprising is the fact that the seem comfortable letting go of 1700 people with knowledge of the company and processes.

Dutch government stepped in last year to help facilitate a anticipated growth by fast tracking infrastructure and housing investments, as ASML is building a new campus for 20.000 employees. Then do they expect the 1700 to wait and come back in 2-3 years when the new campus is planned to be operational?

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

#278

Post by f1shy »

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…

The problem now seems to be that that kind of management is in charge in the government...

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

#279

Post by sofixa »

IshKebab wrote: post #143
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…

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 do…

> They've only ever had two really successful products: shopping and AWS

AWS is not "a product", it's a suite of hundreds of different ones. You're also forgetting Kindles which are fairly popular.

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

#280

Post by f1shy »

joe_mamba wrote: post #198
saidinesh5 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That plus the german system of "Zeugnisse", which if you squint you will see that is totally against GDPR and even constitution: whereby you get marked (for life) by your employer with a document that has the same validity as any other public document, they "document" your performance (according to you current boss, anyway, in case you do not have a good relation you don't get a good certificate) in a language which is absolutely in code and not meant to be read by you.

A bad "Zeugniss" could leave you out of the work market for years, and all is needed for that is a boss that does not like you. Moreover, you can only understand that the document implies you are not good by decoding it with special tools in internet.

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