7 ms·

The press release (https://www.asml.com/en/news/press-releases/2026/strengthening-focus-on-engineering-and-innovation https://www.asml.com/en/news/press-release

The press release (https://www.asml.com/en/news/press-releases/2026/strengthening-focus-on-engineering-and-innovation 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 the time feel like it was a very top-heavy organization. It was very engineer-y, and I loved that about them. This press release (when taken at face value) suggests that this has changed a lot over time and they're now trying to correct it. I gotta say, if true and not code for general "cheese slicer" cost cutting, I think that this is rather ballsy. Philips (which ASML spun out of) famously never did anything of the sort and gradually cramped into an extremely management-heavy organization where most people just write reports for other people with scary few people actually moving the needle. I think it's cool that ASML has identified that they're risking becoming like Philips and trying to do something about it, even if the method seems rather crude. I think the risk is real. ASML's fast-moving culture formed in a mad multi-decade survival-crunch, but they've been a near-monopolist for a while now and that means those pressures are long gone.

kaon_2 9mo ago
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.
- Wurdan 9mo ago
  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 any easier if I got axed. But I'd like to think that "good middle management" is not a self-contradictory notion.
  - zwaps 9mo ago
    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.
    - Wurdan 9mo ago
      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.
  - speleding 9mo ago
    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.
    - Scarblac 9mo ago
      This is about the engineering department, which apparently has 16000 employees now. With 4500 managers! They're going to 1500, 1300ish can become engineers, 1700 are let go.
joe_mamba 9mo ago
>I interviewed with ASML a decade and a half ago and [...] I didn't feel at the time feel like it was a very top-heavy organization True, but here's the real kicker: when you add almost 15 years of ZIRP hyper growth since when you applied, you'll then see the same pattern in most big tech companies: overhiring, empire building and management bloat with no proportional increase in innovation or productivity, just hiring to signal to investors that you're growing and make stonks go up. And 15 years is a long enough time for that extra weight to accumulate towards the top, since some FAANGs doubled their headcount during Covid alone. Just let that sink in. So yeah, I'm sure your assessment from 15 years ago is fully accurate, however a lot has changed in tech the last 15 years for better and for worse, and now many of those companies in tech are doing a great reset also for better and worse.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- skrebbel 9mo ago
  Yep! That's kinda what I said, no? :-)
  - pseudalopex 9mo ago
    I could not find where you said the same pattern was in most big tech companies. Or connected ZIRP.
renewiltord 9mo ago
Mark Zuckerberg’s Great Manager Flattening has definitely spread down the chain to other organizations. Irrespective of the difference between organizations they hired after Meta hired and they fired in the same way as Meta after Meta fired. The children did not know that they were following the piper. The piper knew. Everyone thinks themselves unique and historic. e.g. Balenciaga will say their new logo is inspired by Modernism and so on, but really Apple made what is considered modern mass-market premium and this so-called pioneering fashion brand is just an Apple brand copycat as far as their logo. Everything is downstream of American culture. It's why people the world over kneel before football games. Sadly, this is even true of American culture.
- bayindirh 9mo ago
  Mark's and Meta's total business knowledge and experience is comparably a small drop w.r.t. ASML's ocean of knowledge and heritage (considering Philips' involvement in it, too).
- skrebbel 9mo ago
  I'm not convinced ASML leadership is very focused on what's going on at Meta. The organizations are incomparable, except if you zoom out so far that all you see is "big" and "tech" (plus I'd wager that the average ASML'er would chuckle at calling Meta a technology company at all).
  - uxcolumbo 9mo ago
    ASML is a net positive for the world. Scientists pushing technology forward. Read about how they achieved EUV lithography, what an amazing feat. META is a net negative for the world. Its leadership prioritizes profit over user safety (e.g. not protecting children), it allowed democracies to be undermined by boosting misinformation and social division.
    - flyinglizard 9mo ago
      Whatsapp is a strong net positive. This is the world’s communication network (I’m counting US out because it is counting itself out)
Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
I want to say "it's because they're Dutch lol" but it's signed by Cristophe (Fouquet), who is French. 1700 managers is a lot, but also, it's a huge multinational so I'm not surprised they have that many. They will be alright I'm sure - one, if there's any forced firings they will be well taken care of under Dutch labour laws, and two, ASML will look very good on a CV.
- retired 9mo ago
  > any forced firings they will be well taken care of under Dutch labour laws Yes. Notice period stays in tact. Transition payment is 1/3rd of a monthly wage per year worked. And then your unemployment runs for up to 24 months at 70% of your income capped at €4500. Unemployment benefits are unconditional until you find a new job.
  - joe_mamba 9mo ago
    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.
    - retired 9mo ago
      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.
      - joe_mamba 9mo ago
        >And with the current job market, someone with ASML on their resume probably isn't on the bench for more than six months. I think that heavily depends. If they're just a laid off manager without a strong network or industry connections at other major semi companies, then they might be shit out of luck since in the current economy, there's little to no demand for companies to hire more management. On the contrary, many companies now are laying of their own managers too and not hiring new ones. If they need management tasks they tend to give them to existing IC staff instead of hiring dedicated managers from outside, which IMHO might be a good thing.
kabes 9mo ago
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.
- joe_mamba 9mo ago
  > 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 ground becoming irrelevant or stagnant, or ended up being shuffled between various foreign PE groups as they couldn't make them profitable. Bizarrely, even Healthineers which should be booming due to healthcare being a super profitable industry with a massive regulatory moat, has hit a 5 year low in its stock price. Remember how Siemens used to make mobile phones? Yeah, well ironically, Apple's in-house modems are the former cellular modem division of Siemens-Infineon that Intel bought and then sold to Apple. There's something with the management from these massive German conglomerates that just lacks any sort of vision, and over time end up producing bloat, inefficiency, bureaucracy and stagnation while the same staff ends up flourishing and producing top notch tech when under a US company like Apple. Wondering if it's what they teach in business schools over there or if it's the culture, or both.
  - lnsru 9mo ago
    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 hockey stick revenue growth. But with management explosion everything is being wasted. Meetings about meetings, no product upgrades and total stagnation. While managers fight over parking spots near front door for VIPs.
elric 9mo ago
> 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) How is one exposed to tens of millions of lines of unmaintainable code during an interview?
- KellyCriterion 9mo ago
  I understood that this was what they (interviewers) complained about and he got an impression about this by hearing their stories?
  - skrebbel 9mo ago
    Yeah I knew plenty people at ASML at the time. I wrote my comment a bit too condensed there, the interview wasn't my only exposure to the place. At the time it was very chaotic (for good and bad), the codebase was awful, there was plenty armwrestling but to my understanding it was mostly armwrestling about the tech, not about island building and the likes. Like just as an example, they made sure that by every coffee machine there was a whiteboard for general use. The idea was that if you ran into someone at the coffee machine and got talking and suddenly got an idea together, you could immediately jot it down and geek out about it together and work it out in more detail, right there and then. No meeting to plan, no project manager to involve, just work out your idea together. That's not what you'd expect in a company with lots of managers protecting their little islands.
- AmbroseBierce 9mo ago
  Making the right questions when they ask if you have any questions
  - bryanrasmussen 9mo ago
    yeah, I've gotten this kind of knowledge from an interview before. They let slip a little something as to the project you will be working on, you start asking given the project you described I wonder if... and then they tend to tell you how it is.
zwaps 9mo ago
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 best way to kill a company is to have middle management beyond the absolute minimum you might need. So, ASML is extremely on point here.
- moffkalast 9mo ago
  As soon as you let some Germans into your company they will turn the bureaucracy up to 12 if allowed to, tale as old as time. It's a national culture more or less.
  - zwaps 9mo ago
    While you are not wrong, many of the cases I observed had managers from all over the world. I think it's just a symptom. As a manager, you contribute nothing by yourself. You are useful if you have a useful team (ICs) with a good project. To have that, you need to defend yourself against other managers who will take this from you. If you then also want to get prompted, your task is also to vacuum in all sorts of soft power, visibility, decision rights and being-in-the-roomness. It's even efficient, in that case, to destroy efficiency with processes (under your involvement) As an IC, you are always valuable as you can always create value. Hence, by having enough managers, you ensure that their competition will destroy the company.
    - flyinglizard 9mo ago
      Having ICs with no organization, synchronization or shared vision creates chaos, toxicity and a lot of technical debt. You can easily create negative value. ICs need direction to be successful, and well managed people are much happier in my experience than non-managed people.
      - 9mo ago
hayvan 9mo ago
Interesting. I had an interview with them around the same time frame. It was 3-hour interview with 3 managers (1-hour each) with zero technical questions. When I pointed that out they said technical skills are less important and can be gained on the job, they needed to see if I matched company culture. Apparently I didn't.
- skrebbel 9mo ago
  Woa madness. Was that at the D&E department?
zeristor 9mo ago
So many companies came from Philips. ASML, NXP, and TSMC was largely boosted by Philips. My Dad was in the finance department of Mullards-> Philips Electronics for 30 years, seemed like part of the family. But Philips does seem to have given rise to many companies.
- apexalpha 9mo ago
  Philips was the European Samsung. They spun-off their divisions and now operate independently. Even the OG division: lighting, has been spun off.
101008 9mo ago
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...)
- npstr 9mo ago
  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.
  - gosub100 9mo ago
    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.
    - npstr 9mo ago
      What are you basing this on? The announcement literally says the people doing the work want to focus on the work and not the bullshit, so they are firing the bullshit people. > Engineers in particular have expressed their desire to focus their time on engineering, without being hampered by slow process flows, and restore the fast-moving culture that has made us so successful.
  - 101008 9mo ago
    Even if what you are saying it's true (which is hard to prove), that may not be their fault either. Sometimes the context doesn't allow you to do what you want, what you think it's best, etc. You would say "Resign and find somewhere where you could", and that isn't easy either. So again, please let's try to be more empathic, we are not talking about terrorist or really bad guys. These are employees of companies, with familires, who probably need those salaries to live in these weird times.
onlyrealcuzzo 9mo ago
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.
expedition32 9mo ago
Dutch company. Nobody is walking out with boxes. They will get a nice severance package and up to 2 years of unemployment benefits.

kaon_2 9mo ago

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.

Wurdan 9mo ago
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 any easier if I got axed. But I'd like to think that "good middle management" is not a self-contradictory notion.
- zwaps 9mo ago
  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.
  - Wurdan 9mo ago
    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.
- speleding 9mo ago
  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.
  - Scarblac 9mo ago
    This is about the engineering department, which apparently has 16000 employees now. With 4500 managers! They're going to 1500, 1300ish can become engineers, 1700 are let go.

joe_mamba 9mo ago

>I interviewed with ASML a decade and a half ago and [...] I didn't feel at the time feel like it was a very top-heavy organization True, but here's the real kicker: when you add almost 15 years of ZIRP hyper growth since when you applied, you'll then see the same pattern in most big tech companies: overhiring, empire building and management bloat with no proportional increase in innovation or productivity, just hiring to signal to investors that you're growing and make stonks go up. And 15 years is a long enough time for that extra weight to accumulate towards the top, since some FAANGs doubled their headcount during Covid alone. Just let that sink in. So yeah, I'm sure your assessment from 15 years ago is fully accurate, however a lot has changed in tech the last 15 years for better and for worse, and now many of those companies in tech are doing a great reset also for better and worse.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
skrebbel 9mo ago
Yep! That's kinda what I said, no? :-)
- pseudalopex 9mo ago
  I could not find where you said the same pattern was in most big tech companies. Or connected ZIRP.

renewiltord 9mo ago

Mark Zuckerberg’s Great Manager Flattening has definitely spread down the chain to other organizations. Irrespective of the difference between organizations they hired after Meta hired and they fired in the same way as Meta after Meta fired. The children did not know that they were following the piper. The piper knew. Everyone thinks themselves unique and historic. e.g. Balenciaga will say their new logo is inspired by Modernism and so on, but really Apple made what is considered modern mass-market premium and this so-called pioneering fashion brand is just an Apple brand copycat as far as their logo. Everything is downstream of American culture. It's why people the world over kneel before football games. Sadly, this is even true of American culture.

bayindirh 9mo ago
Mark's and Meta's total business knowledge and experience is comparably a small drop w.r.t. ASML's ocean of knowledge and heritage (considering Philips' involvement in it, too).
skrebbel 9mo ago
I'm not convinced ASML leadership is very focused on what's going on at Meta. The organizations are incomparable, except if you zoom out so far that all you see is "big" and "tech" (plus I'd wager that the average ASML'er would chuckle at calling Meta a technology company at all).
- uxcolumbo 9mo ago
  ASML is a net positive for the world. Scientists pushing technology forward. Read about how they achieved EUV lithography, what an amazing feat. META is a net negative for the world. Its leadership prioritizes profit over user safety (e.g. not protecting children), it allowed democracies to be undermined by boosting misinformation and social division.
  - flyinglizard 9mo ago
    Whatsapp is a strong net positive. This is the world’s communication network (I’m counting US out because it is counting itself out)

Cthulhu_ 9mo ago

I want to say "it's because they're Dutch lol" but it's signed by Cristophe (Fouquet), who is French. 1700 managers is a lot, but also, it's a huge multinational so I'm not surprised they have that many. They will be alright I'm sure - one, if there's any forced firings they will be well taken care of under Dutch labour laws, and two, ASML will look very good on a CV.

retired 9mo ago
> any forced firings they will be well taken care of under Dutch labour laws Yes. Notice period stays in tact. Transition payment is 1/3rd of a monthly wage per year worked. And then your unemployment runs for up to 24 months at 70% of your income capped at €4500. Unemployment benefits are unconditional until you find a new job.
- joe_mamba 9mo ago
  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.
  - retired 9mo ago
    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.
    - joe_mamba 9mo ago
      >And with the current job market, someone with ASML on their resume probably isn't on the bench for more than six months. I think that heavily depends. If they're just a laid off manager without a strong network or industry connections at other major semi companies, then they might be shit out of luck since in the current economy, there's little to no demand for companies to hire more management. On the contrary, many companies now are laying of their own managers too and not hiring new ones. If they need management tasks they tend to give them to existing IC staff instead of hiring dedicated managers from outside, which IMHO might be a good thing.

kabes 9mo ago

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.

joe_mamba 9mo ago
> 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 ground becoming irrelevant or stagnant, or ended up being shuffled between various foreign PE groups as they couldn't make them profitable. Bizarrely, even Healthineers which should be booming due to healthcare being a super profitable industry with a massive regulatory moat, has hit a 5 year low in its stock price. Remember how Siemens used to make mobile phones? Yeah, well ironically, Apple's in-house modems are the former cellular modem division of Siemens-Infineon that Intel bought and then sold to Apple. There's something with the management from these massive German conglomerates that just lacks any sort of vision, and over time end up producing bloat, inefficiency, bureaucracy and stagnation while the same staff ends up flourishing and producing top notch tech when under a US company like Apple. Wondering if it's what they teach in business schools over there or if it's the culture, or both.
- lnsru 9mo ago
  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 hockey stick revenue growth. But with management explosion everything is being wasted. Meetings about meetings, no product upgrades and total stagnation. While managers fight over parking spots near front door for VIPs.

elric 9mo ago

> 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) How is one exposed to tens of millions of lines of unmaintainable code during an interview?

KellyCriterion 9mo ago
I understood that this was what they (interviewers) complained about and he got an impression about this by hearing their stories?
- skrebbel 9mo ago
  Yeah I knew plenty people at ASML at the time. I wrote my comment a bit too condensed there, the interview wasn't my only exposure to the place. At the time it was very chaotic (for good and bad), the codebase was awful, there was plenty armwrestling but to my understanding it was mostly armwrestling about the tech, not about island building and the likes. Like just as an example, they made sure that by every coffee machine there was a whiteboard for general use. The idea was that if you ran into someone at the coffee machine and got talking and suddenly got an idea together, you could immediately jot it down and geek out about it together and work it out in more detail, right there and then. No meeting to plan, no project manager to involve, just work out your idea together. That's not what you'd expect in a company with lots of managers protecting their little islands.
AmbroseBierce 9mo ago
Making the right questions when they ask if you have any questions
- bryanrasmussen 9mo ago
  yeah, I've gotten this kind of knowledge from an interview before. They let slip a little something as to the project you will be working on, you start asking given the project you described I wonder if... and then they tend to tell you how it is.

zwaps 9mo ago

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 best way to kill a company is to have middle management beyond the absolute minimum you might need. So, ASML is extremely on point here.

moffkalast 9mo ago
As soon as you let some Germans into your company they will turn the bureaucracy up to 12 if allowed to, tale as old as time. It's a national culture more or less.
- zwaps 9mo ago
  While you are not wrong, many of the cases I observed had managers from all over the world. I think it's just a symptom. As a manager, you contribute nothing by yourself. You are useful if you have a useful team (ICs) with a good project. To have that, you need to defend yourself against other managers who will take this from you. If you then also want to get prompted, your task is also to vacuum in all sorts of soft power, visibility, decision rights and being-in-the-roomness. It's even efficient, in that case, to destroy efficiency with processes (under your involvement) As an IC, you are always valuable as you can always create value. Hence, by having enough managers, you ensure that their competition will destroy the company.
  - flyinglizard 9mo ago
    Having ICs with no organization, synchronization or shared vision creates chaos, toxicity and a lot of technical debt. You can easily create negative value. ICs need direction to be successful, and well managed people are much happier in my experience than non-managed people.
    - 9mo ago

hayvan 9mo ago

Interesting. I had an interview with them around the same time frame. It was 3-hour interview with 3 managers (1-hour each) with zero technical questions. When I pointed that out they said technical skills are less important and can be gained on the job, they needed to see if I matched company culture. Apparently I didn't.

skrebbel 9mo ago
Woa madness. Was that at the D&E department?

zeristor 9mo ago

So many companies came from Philips. ASML, NXP, and TSMC was largely boosted by Philips. My Dad was in the finance department of Mullards-> Philips Electronics for 30 years, seemed like part of the family. But Philips does seem to have given rise to many companies.

apexalpha 9mo ago
Philips was the European Samsung. They spun-off their divisions and now operate independently. Even the OG division: lighting, has been spun off.

101008 9mo ago

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...)

npstr 9mo ago
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.
- gosub100 9mo ago
  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.
  - npstr 9mo ago
    What are you basing this on? The announcement literally says the people doing the work want to focus on the work and not the bullshit, so they are firing the bullshit people. > Engineers in particular have expressed their desire to focus their time on engineering, without being hampered by slow process flows, and restore the fast-moving culture that has made us so successful.
- 101008 9mo ago
  Even if what you are saying it's true (which is hard to prove), that may not be their fault either. Sometimes the context doesn't allow you to do what you want, what you think it's best, etc. You would say "Resign and find somewhere where you could", and that isn't easy either. So again, please let's try to be more empathic, we are not talking about terrorist or really bad guys. These are employees of companies, with familires, who probably need those salaries to live in these weird times.

onlyrealcuzzo 9mo ago

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.

expedition32 9mo ago

Dutch company. Nobody is walking out with boxes. They will get a nice severance package and up to 2 years of unemployment benefits.