ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by mdemare » Thu, Jan 29, 2026, 6:06 PM UTC

articulatepang wrote: post #209

mdemare wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not quite correct. If a dividend happens, the market capitalisation drops by the amount of the dividend, the number of shares remains constant, so the share price dips by the amount of the dividend per share. All investors get the dividend. If a buyback happens, the market capitalisation drops by the amount of the buyback, and the number of shares drops by the same ratio, keeping the share price initially con…

> The money goes to the investors who sell. The investors who sell are wealthier by amount $X because now they have fewer shares and more dollars. The investors who don't sell are wealthier by the same amount $X because the shares they kept are worth more, because prices go up. > keeping the share price initially constant. This statement is definitely incorrect, unless you're being very technicaly and pedantic about…

No, this is incorrect. Investors like buybacks, so when the buyback is announced, share prices may rise, but certainly not by the amount of the buyback. They don't go up when the buyback gets executed, unlike dividends, which decrease the share price at the moment when they get distributed.

The equations are: nr_shares * share_price = cash_of_company + value_of_company_excluding_cash.

In a buyback, cash_of_company decreases by the buyback, and nr_shares decreases by buyback / share_price.

Consider the extreme case, a lemonade stand with a bank account with $1M. 1000 shares outstanding, share price $1000. After a buyback of $900K is announced, 900 shares are sold for $1000. $100K remains in the company's bank account, 100 shares remain outstanding, at ... $1000 per share.

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

#362

Post by tedggh » Thu, Jan 29, 2026, 6:56 PM UTC

kabes wrote: post #62

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…

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.

Former Siemens employee here. There was a point in time my engineering team was 5 people and we had 3 project managers. No joke. If you have watched Office Space that’s pretty much how it was. They would stroll (very slowly) around with a mug asking how was going and timesheets. The thing is at many of these organizations there’s really no way to increase your hourly rate and bonuses unless you get into management. My team put a lot of overtime that was not always compensated. We often made more take-home money than PMs but worked disproportionately more too, so at an hourly rate we were much lower. There’s also a stigma about being in engineering by 40, so you see many experienced engineers in their 30s getting their PMPs and pushing in their performance review for management positions. Leadership in engineering once you reach principal is director, and there’s usually one director per BU. Principal vs Senior doesn’t have a life changing salary difference either, about 20-30% and you stay there until you retire or die. There are exceptions like Microsoft that offers partnerships, which are incredibly difficult to reach, but at least the possibility is there if you want to stay in the tech side and make a lot of money.

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

#363

Post by danpalmer » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 5:44 AM UTC

pseudalopex wrote: post #347

danpalmer wrote: post #70

Can we change "firing" to "laying off", it's a big difference to perception and legal status. Plus it's literally the title of the article as per HN guidelines.

> Can we change "firing" to "laying off", it's a big difference to perception and legal status. Firing does not mean what you thought probably.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45733016

As someone replied to your other comment with, this is not correct. Firing does indeed refer to termination, which is different from redundancy. It's a colloquial term rather than a legal one, but firing is to termination as laying off is to redundancy.

These distinctions may mean less in countries without robust worker protections where the lines between the two might be blurred, but in a lot of the world these are quite distinct concepts.

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

#364

Post by alfiedotwtf » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 10:19 AM UTC

yobbo wrote: post #300

joe_mamba wrote: post #65

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…

> bureaucracy and stagnation while the same staff ends up flourishing and producing top notch tech when under a US company like Apple Apple orders a widget from them which can be sold in an established product with existing customers. The magic was creating the Apple brand and iPhone product. I think the problem with old European "conglomerates" is that no one has the mandate/legitimacy to make a multi-year/decade te…

> It fails when templates for decision-making don't exist.

I've noticed a strong signal throughout my career - a sure-fire way to abandon ship - when a company focuses most of its energy on branding and treats selling and building as a nuisance!

Pro tip: when a company cares more about changing its company logo rather than finding Product Market Fit, it's time to update your LinkedIn profile and reach out to hiring managers.

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

#365

Post by alfiedotwtf » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 10:29 AM UTC

tedggh wrote: post #362

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.

Former Siemens employee here. There was a point in time my engineering team was 5 people and we had 3 project managers. No joke. If you have watched Office Space that’s pretty much how it was. They would stroll (very slowly) around with a mug asking how was going and timesheets. The thing is at many of these organizations there’s really no way to increase your hourly rate and bonuses unless you get into management. M…

The telco space is weird... I've been on a team where we had a Delivery Manager, Scrum Master, Project Manager, Software Tester, Performance Tester, Integration Tester - all to "manage" 2 ICs - one developer (me) and one devops.

... the saddest bit was that apart from me and devops, everyone else had nothing to do all sprint and so instead created multiple mandatory meetings throughout the sprint to which we had to spend half a day creating slides when the meetings could have all instead been done over email.

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

#366

Post by hcfman » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

mcny wrote: post #8

theanonymousone wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean half of those managers will become engineers?

If I were a betting person, I'd bet that's the number of engineers who were previously forced to become managers in order to get a promotion.

So if that is the case. The guys that stays as engineers because they valued doing the real work that now suddenly ASML values, but didn't get the promotion have been screwed for years right? Without any real chance of getting this corrected.