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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

#301

Post by abigail95 »

zmb_ wrote: post #222
abigail95 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a mechanism to distribute profits to shareholders. Do you invest in companies that don't distribute profits - does this get you some kind of higher return?

It’s effectively the company saying that they believe the shareholders can get a better return by investing that money elsewhere. So when a company starts doing major buybacks it’s a signal that they have reached an inflection point.

If you want 100x returns - do you find a $500B company or a $5B one?

All ASML is doing is raising the share price. The investors that don't want a better deal somewhere else don't have to do a thing - they just have to not sell their shares. ASML is not deciding anything or signaling anything about future returns.

The market is the one sending the signal that there are better deals elsewhere. You can go from $5B to $500B. You can't go from $500B to $50T. There is no amount of R&D that will do that. If you picked a $5-6 billion company in 2008, and it was ASML, congratulations you now have >100x returns.

The inflection point isn't a point where buybacks increase, it's the slow/fast ride up to $500 billion.

The investors chasing 100x returns have already left. Whether the company buys its own shares or sits on its own cash, the net equity value is the same. The only signal it gives to investors is that they have more cash than they want to spend.

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

#302

Post by abigail95 »

themafia wrote: post #155
abigail95 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a mechanism to distribute profits to shareholders. Do you invest in companies that don't distribute profits - does this get you some kind of higher return?

> It's a mechanism to distribute profits to shareholders With different consequences and historical outcomes to more commonly used mechanisms. > Do you invest in companies that don't distribute profits Does every company that distributes profits do so with buybacks? > does this get you some kind of higher return? Do all companies payout the same ratio of market cap as dividend?

You've missed the point of my questions. The GP here thinks they're giving away their monopoly status by doing buybacks.

I think there's zero point to having a monopoly if you don't distribute the profits.

If you have some argument that dividends are better than buybacks I don't care.

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

#303

Post by uxcolumbo »

menaerus wrote: post #298
uxcolumbo wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes we in the tech community need to poke our heads out of our tech silos. Once you do, you will see how much societal damage Meta has caused under Zuck's leadership.

In that regard I fully agree. My view was merely from a technical perspective.

And I agree with you. There are many great tech folks at Meta who released some great open source projects.

It's the leadership that's the problem.

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

#304

Post by jansan »

mns wrote: post #289
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.

As I was following Siemens Energy in these years, I remember them getting a huge bailout, or you can call it help or whatever, at one point and from there on the stock price started going up.

It was a government guarantee in November 2023, which was never used, but allowed them to borrow money from banks for new projects. Demand was never a problem, but they were on the brink of collapse due to hidden quality problems at their subsidiary Gamesa. Somehow they seem to have solved this.

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

#305

Post by yobbo »

piva00 wrote: post #170
vachina wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

"Law of Jante" (jantelagen) is a double edged sword and can work in favour of innovation. In good cases, it means both subordinates and bosses intuitively understand that titles are theatre, and anyone can present new ideas and challenge old ideas.

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

#306

Post by bpodgursky »

Havoc wrote: post #259
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

Sort of. There's a distinction between "managing" and "using people as resources" in many tech companies.

Many senior ICs at tech companies DO have teams assigned to them for technical tasks, but they don't have to deal with giving feedback, managing compensation, giving bonuses, hiring, etc etc. Basically they get assigned extra hands and arms to do their tasks but aren't responsible for their growth or happiness.

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

#307

Post by Gud »

repelsteeltje wrote: post #76
tehmillhouse wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess it's simply the externalities issue. Finance people optimize finance, which among other things results in improved efficiency. But despite best intentions to map out all incentives that matter, it always fails to consider some aspects. Focusing on short-term profits, ignoring privacy, security or pollution because it's free, lobbying for favourable legislation that hampers competitors, etc. These are things t…

Why does "optimizing finance" improve the efficiency in an engineering company? Seems to me like "optimizing finance" could be absolutely detrimental for the bottom line.

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

#308

Post by WarmWash »

chronid wrote: post #193
zwaps wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

The reality is that once you reach a high enough level, your worth can be justified in smaller windows of time. The higher your role, the more impact your decisions have, and the more money small (but important) decisions can generate.

Think of a dev paid $250k/yr that comes up with a clever database scheme that saves the company $5m/yr in cloud costs. If nothing else, the company is in the green for years on that investment in that dev even if the dev just piddle paddles along with small fixes 99% of the time.

The part that sucks though is the general optics of these positions. Humans just instinctively want to correlate high pay with high busy work load, rather than high pay with high impact, which is how it actually works.

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

#309

Post by Nevermark »

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…

> Healthineers

I love the name! It makes me laugh!

Might not be the branding they were going for, but they should lean in. Lot's of spontaneous singing and dancing. :)

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

#310

Post by Slartie »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #174
Slartie wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is mostly the result of clever engineers that produced a machine no other company in the world can assemble, but that is absolutely crucial to businesses valued at double-digit trillions of dollars. You don't really need an army of sales managers to sell such a product. Going lean on management and more heavy on engineering is therefore a good idea if you want to keep the lead you have.

No, but ASML's product is so complicated that they do need a lot more than just engineers - they have 5000 suppliers apparently, coordinating that takes a lot more than clever engineers.

Clever engineers are usually able to pick up basic supply chain management capabilities. At least as long as it's about suppliers of things in their technical domain.

For non-technical supply chain managers to pick up enough technical chops to understand the stuff they are supposed to manage the supply chain of is comparatively more difficult.

Especially when fierce negotiations to push the price down are not the highest priority, but robustness of supply chains, having alternative options that technically work, and ensuring quality according to tight specs are paramount. Which is how I assume ASML supply chain management to work.

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