ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions
asml.com
asml.com
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.
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.
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.
Germans just don't seem to get that successful SW was built by empowering the geeks working in "the trenches", and not by suits with business degrees in running conveyor belt assembly factories where everyone is a fixed cog that needs to follow a strict process thought out by someone above them.
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 project a little more and ended up cancelling the project within a couple of months. "Hardware products are not as profitable as proprietary cloud software as a service company anyway".
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.
That's what you do if your goal is to blame developers for the project failing, and you double-down on management to underline the root cause as developers going off rails and thus the fix is to reign them in with management. The managers jumping on board have no downside as the project was either doomed or they flexed their superior management skills to revive the project.
It's a universally hard tendency to resist as enterprises grow into big organisations.
Company starts small and lean; people involved in making product also do most of everything else. Over time specialist HR, Finance, Legal, Marketing etc functions are added. All try to do their best but all with their own non-product agenda. All usually hired and sitting at or close to the same top table decision making process, all diluting and distracting from the vision/mission of what was important to the organisation in the first place. Eventually, the company's top-level decisions becomes more about that than the product.
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 tech investment equivalent to the iphone. "Decision makers" are likely to have been promoted from other professions than engineering/products, and people promoted through management/sales lack competence and legitimacy. Their job is to apply old and approved templates for decision-making, while paying dues and respect to appropriate people.
It fails when templates for decision-making don't exist. Spin-offs or acquisitions based on new tech, rather than existing products/markets, can't work with this type of management.
I have also gotten the sense that management positions are given as rewards for "long and loyal service". It is effectively an incentives program, with the implicit assumption that management decisions don't really matter. This is not far from the the truth in old industrial companies with few but huge returning "captive" customers, which is typical in Europe eg Siemens, or high value luxury brands in fashion/jewellery/liquor/etc.
The meaning of the word "verwaltung" is different from the American "management". Verwaltung implies "preservation of stability" whereas "business management" implies something like "figure out how to sell more stuff".
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.
I really hope that other German enterprises will use this as an example.
Sorry for the tangent, I haven't heard this name in over 15 years, I interviewed with them the summer before the final year of my BEng, and was offered a job in China to allegedly built a real-time voice/video communications system between what they said were their three facilities in beautiful looking part of China I can't remember the name of now.
Looking through my Gmail, it was 2008 they offered my the position; and looking at the Wiki page, I'm glad I didn't take the offer, as it appears it didn't last much longer?
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, they really don't do nearly enough to grow it or even to maintain it.
It's really quite interesting thinking back to that time for me in University, every few years something happens that sparks a memory; right now, it's that roughly 2007-2008 my professor was telling me about this "rollable" screen technology that was going to enable rolling/folding phones at some point in the future; a little earlier he'd been telling me about this funky new thing called 'Organic LED' that was going to enable "printing" flexible circuits
He's an FREng (Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering) and was one of the people involved in the invention of the silicon chip.
Had a Gandalf look to him and was a real fountain of knowledge, I lucked out to get the guy as my professor.
Our 4 years terms is short slighted by design.
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.
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 modernity it still can affect modern Scandinavia in general).
Blaming labour laws for issues arising from culture is a tired jab, it's not the culprit. You can find that out by working for a German company vs a Swedish one, it's starkly different.
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. :)
Some actual problem solving at the top, communicated in a way that makes sense, instead of waves.
To get dangerously close to political topics: I love Pete Buttigieg for being a wonk but likable and understandable. And cool as a cucumber. All that is so rare, when it should be pervasive.
(Whatever his other pros or cons - I am not an expert on him.)
More of that, please.
... 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.
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.
There are daily syncs for things that take weeks to do due to compliance, endless war rooms to solve things that would be done offline in half the time, and random bullshit process and committees introduced by management which generate even more meetings...
It's common all over the world, motion instead of progress. It's incredible to me how all those companies don't realize where their money is spent. But alas you cannot make people see a problem if their salary depends on it, and I may be no different.
And another layer I've seen frequently - people somehow need to make their work meaningful to make it part of their core identity, even if its literally moving one pile of dirt to next pile and then reverse, or just adding friction to progress. Strong ego game.
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.
As an engineer who 'jumped' to middle management: yes. 100% yes.
It's kinda disheartening and also a little bit insane to sit in a room with 12 people who learned CISSP and ISO27001 by heart but could not explain what SSH is or what a container does.
Everything has to first be abstracted away from tech into 'risks' and then 'controls' and then these controls have to be re-translated into actual changes in IT systems.
However, at every layer and every abstraction so much detail is lost that they're essentially steering blind.
Last week one of them suggested that we should whitelist the entire IPv4 range of AWS to allow some SaaS (Jira?) to connect to our internal Git.
The policy said to do whitelisting and so they all approved it until I challenged it.
Crazy to watch and honestly so disheartening that I might go do something else. Trying to affect change feels like leaning against a wall.
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.
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.
They're going to 1500, 1300ish can become engineers, 1700 are let go.
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.
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.
1500 managers of 14400 employees sounds a lot more normal to me.
For the past year I've only had three direct reports, which would have been too few to keep me occupied if I wasn't also acting tech lead.
IMHO, if you want engineering managers who can occasionally do hands-on things, you probably want a ratio around 6/7:1
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.
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.
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.
But they are unconditional in that they are not means tested or have other clauses that could cause you to not get paid. You do not have to eat your savings, house or car. You are allowed to keep those.
And with the current job market, someone with ASML on their resume probably isn't on the bench for more than six months.
How is one exposed to tens of millions of lines of unmaintainable code during an interview?
This kind of stuff during interviews is a lot of learning in itself especially if you’re working already in the same area.
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.
You ... ask? I've gotten answers like this just by asking in the interview.
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.
Even the OG division: lighting, has been spun off.
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.
(I am not saying OP is talking like that about them, but I am seeing some responses that do...)
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh boy. This fills me with dread. I've never seen a company that starts doing buybacks not become a financialized hollow shell within a decade. Being an irreplaceable monopoly on the commanding heights of the digital economy makes this even worse.
ASML is a fairly old company (40+ years), and they have been doing share buybacks since 2006: https://www.asml.com/en/investors/why-invest-in-asml/share-b...
These are things that don't show in a spreadsheet unless you're explicitly incentivized to look at them. But that's never the case because the number of KPIs is always finite while there are infinitely many aspects that could potentially be subverted.
Then over the span of a few decades, what’s left is a shallow organization without real innovation.
Intel and Boeing are good examples of this.
Then again, this has been going on for decades. Businesses used to be about being the best for your customers and personnel. But it's all become about sticking it to everyone for the benefit of the shareholders.
Dividends have only existed since the 1960s and stock buybacks only became mainstream in the 1980s. Stocks have existed in some form since the 1600s.
There will never be an increase in the value of the stock if there is no expected return.
If you go back to the 1600's then shareholders got their return from liquidation payouts. Someone would invest in a voyage and when the ship returned the spoils were the paid out and the company was liquidated. Not so different from a dividend really and it clearly wouldn't work for a modern industrial economy.
very common: a small company with a couple shareholders of that aren't employees
without dividends, how can the shareholders get THEIR profits out of THEIR company, without giving up control?
just leave them in there forever?
I've never seen a company that ...
Example: Alphabet has started share buybacks in 2015 and increased those every year. $70B in 2025 alone. And they are firing on all cylinders product-wise.
And on the side they built the best AI and the best autonomous ride service.
Not bad for a "hollow shell" of a company.
And both products are arguably worse than they were ten years ago.
Sure Android might be worse from a pure Linux perspective, but what shareholder has ever cared about that.
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 places where they actually have progress is AI.
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 dollars trying to monetise it.
Or Facebook. They've only ever had one successful product - the rest they bought after they were already successes.
AWS is not "a product", it's a suite of hundreds of different ones. You're also forgetting Kindles which are fairly popular.
> Search, Android, Chrome, Chromebooks, Maps, Gmail, Youtube, Gemini.
There is a single thing there that's not at least 10+ years old. And Search if anything is getting worse
"became monopolistic entities."
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 from well run companies rather than needing to sell their share to acquire this value.
This is obviously just my opinion though, I don't know if it matches to what the OP cares about.
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.
The only good reason to pay out dividends instead of announcing buybacks is a view that your shares are overpriced. Then you can't buy them back without facing a potential lawsuit (you are making a company buy something you know is overvalued).
Buybacks for manipulating share prices and earnings per share are indeed silly. But they should also be trivial to compensate for by normalising on market cap instead of a single share.
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?
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.
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.
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 yourself that it's true.
2. Now let's stop ignoring taxes. If a dividend happens, you get taxed that year. 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.
3. Now let's think about the effect of dividends vs buybacks on the allocation of your portfolio as a shareholder. Neither changes the total value of your portfolio -- that was point number 1, plus just plain old conservation of dollars, modulo taxes -- but a dividend increases the proportion of your investment that's in cash, while a buyback keeps it constant. Let's say you auto-invest all dividends in the S&P 500 or equivalent index fund. Then dividends reduce your ownership stake in the company, while buybacks keep it constant.
For these reasons, most investors prefer (or ought to prefer) buybacks: they have the same economic effect as dividends but allow you to defer taxes to whenever is optimal for you. Also, and this is a smaller point, if a company does a dividend then you have to actively do something (that is, buy stock) in order to maintain the same proportion of your portfolio in that company. In other words, if you want 10% of your savings to be in X, and they do a dividend, then you have to take the cash and buy shares of X. The reason this is a smaller point is that at least in theory you can get your brokerage to do this for you automatically.
There are some nuances where point number 1 fails to hold: signaling, bad execution of the buybacks, and principal-agent conflicts. The big example of that final point is executive compensation tied to specific share prices. I'm not an expert in this area so I don't know, off the top of my head, if there's real evidence either way that this effect is very large, but it's one that people will bring up so everyone who thinks about this ought to know about it.
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 constant. The money goes to the investors who sell.
Buybacks are nevertheless good for investors who hold. They now have shares in a company whose market cap is 100% growing enterprise, instead of 90% enterprise and 10% bag of money. That means that if the company keeps doing well, the share price will increase faster than it would have done otherwise (it will also drop faster - it's no longer anchored to an inert pile of cash).
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.
Wouldn't the inverse of this be true in buybacks though? If it's economically equivalent then buyback should increase the price and similarly increase the proportion of X in your portfolio - which would force you to rebalance (might have tax implications).
Generally agree with the main point.
So I don't think it's going to be executed at the absolute peak. But it does imply that the finance people in ASML believe that the stock is undervalued even if the market as a whole is at all time highs.
ASML's bet paid off and for now at least their business is very sustainable.
And ASML has been paying out a dividend for a long time.
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 shedding a tear at cleaning that up.
> 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 at doing work on ones own aren't necessarily the skills that make a _team_ of 3, 6, 12 people all collaborate with one another, and with the other teams within the company.
Good management is rare, due to the tendency to promote engineers into the role instead of hiring people specifically trained in that discipline, but when you're in a well-managed -- and hence highly focused -- team the results you can all obtain together can be impressive.
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.
Tech is very different… given the pace of change you quickly no longer have any clue what’s happening unless stay technical. Imagine being dropped in to manage an AI team in 2026 when you have no experience with LLMs and the last time you coded was Pascal. 1) Teams some respect you, and 2) You’ll have no clue what you’re doing. And yet there are tons of “tech leaders” that fit this profile.
Good management is rare.
This leads to a reluctance to promote people without previous experience into management roles. This in turn leads to a shortage of experienced managers.
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.
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.
There are companies that promise this, but it is rarely done. For whatever reason, management is universally convinced that ICs have lower value and are more replacable than managers.
It's also a distinctly European trait that European executives can look at US tech companies, who have IC roles on all levels, see that they are the most successful and innovative companies in the world, and conclude that yes, maybe capping IC benefits and adding another level of management is the way to go!
The issue is, even with two tracks, there's every chance that more people end up taking the management path because it's seen as an easy way to climb the ranks. Your success can be built from your teams success, rather than your own individual contribution.
Well, yes. That's what good managers are: a force multiplier.
A bunch of rockstar devs reporting to a poor manager may never move the needle in an organisation. A bunch of below average devs reporting to a stellar manager will definitely move the needle.
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
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.
If you disconnect the people in the trenches from the giving feedback & managing people then you need a whole army of people with elaborate systems and KPI scoring in background trying to reconnect the dots again so that comp and feedback have some linkage to reality.
i.e. it's done yes but it's an aberration in terms of company structuring.
Except the manager is the decider, and controls the fate of the IC. That makes them unequal, even if IC salaries were higher.
"There are no important people at ASML. Only roles with more responsibilities."
IDK, where I am its always been that managers specifically have power over ICs
The salary is not equal.
The difference is there will probably be a lot more M7+ than IC7+ so getting to the higher ranks is easier as a manager
In my ~40mln country the construction sector (that includes renovation, landscaping etc.) outnumbers the IT sector 3:1.
Lead times for having things done around here are ridiculous, which is why I believe the former can absorb half of the latter with little change in salaries.
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 guild warfare and the hatred of labor unions the moment that I have to deal yet another actually-should-be-in-jail levels of scamming from yet another dentist.
Y'all think that AI researchers should go to jail for hallucinated citations? Dental surgeons should go to jail for selling homeopathic remedies (ask me how I know!)
Same here. A friend of mine had some interior finishing done by two guys - one was a drinker, the other - a smoker (not tobacco).
After several missed deadlines and significant cost overruns, the drinker had to go, because he would go AWOL too often. The smoker stayed, because he responded to yelling and threats of lawsuits.
> Y'all think that AI researchers should go to jail for hallucinated citations?
I don't want to start this conversation because to me if we were a proper branch of engineering, a lot of us would be in jail already.
> Dental surgeons should go to jail for selling homeopathic remedies
I respect the hustle, but he could have just went with vitamin C supplements like my guy. He's a doctor(like all denstist here) and those pills legitimately contain proper amounts of vitamin C. Only difference is that I can get the same thing for 1/4 of the price at any pharmacy.
“ ASML plans to eliminate approximately 3,000 of its 4,500 management positions in engineering. The expectation is that approximately 1,400 people will be able to move into new engineering roles.”
https://www.dutchnews.nl/2026/01/after-record-year-asml-is-t...
See also the statement from ASML (linked to in that article):
https://www.asml.com/en/news/press-releases/2026/strengtheni...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-28/asml-plan...
ASML wil zo’n 3000 van de 4500 banen van managers in de engineeringtak laten vervallen. De verwachting is dat ongeveer 1400 mensen een nieuwe functie als engineer kunnen gaan vervullen. „Van ongeveer 1700 mensen verwachten we afscheid te moeten nemen”, stelt financieel topman Roger Dassen in een toelichting.
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, instead of firing, they sold the parts of the company they felt did not fit their future vision for money.
Of course, it's hard to tell how much is PR and how much reality. However, if there is substance to it, it would want me to work there even more, since they value engineering culture over management culture. Having more velocity is good.
Interesting. In old companies the only way to climb the ladder (get a raise) was to get into management. And then if they were a bad manager, they might get 'sidemoted' into some position where they could still contribute. Anyway, back in the old days, it was not uncommon to see 'managers' or even 'directors' with no direct reports.
That would be disappointing for engineers that were actually doing engineering, as yet again their grade increases would be taken by management types.
> 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.
Firing 1700 managers is somewhat different than firing 1700 ICs. Whether managers will want to work there is an open question, but quite a lot of ICs will see the trimmed management layer as a good sign that they'll be free to get shit done
> Individual contributor, a business role for an employee without management responsibilities
They've also done another thing:
>ASML also announced a new share buyback programme of up to €12 billion, to be executed by 31 December 2028.
They have €12 billion they don't know what to do with with so they will give it to shareholders, for a nice gain of less than 1% per year for the next 3 years. Assuming the annual salary costs of each of the 1700 employees is 150K (likely much much lower) those 12 billion could have paid for their employment for the next 47 years.
My impression was that people were constantly being promoted into management and at some point we just had too many managers and that's why it was done. Of course, when you know this, the question becomes: why allow things to get to this point in the first place?
I actually am curious why this isn't a more commonplace practice. Why would we build systems that keep accumulating managers at the expense of skilled senior engineers?
Layoff --> increase short term valuation --> increase value per share --> owner of shares happy during buyback.
After, it's true that having a lot of middle management can slow things down. On the other side, they could have indeed created new entities, new projects, re-qualify employees,...
I wonder what correlation will exist between the set of people who end up leaving the company, and the set of people responsible for setting up those "slow process flows" in the first place.
[1] https://www.asml.com/en/news/press-releases/2026/strengtheni...
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?
The US is pretty dynamic. So is every country. To the extent it appears not to be there is usually some entity with it's thumb on the scale.
I don't want to trash anyone. Having said that, I always kept my engineering approach as opposed to being a manager in the sense that what I did became an end in itself.
I was more of a renegade within corporate, and used this unique position to achieve fun and results way above everyone else. I got proof, this ain't no bragging. It was easy mode, I used the top notch devs I could hire and automated everything, build a platform, that became internally the de facto standard, which caused 600+ Mio EUR cost savings within 4 years and counting with a headcount of 8.
Long story short: I was a bit Googly, knowing them a bit and having been there.
Here is the gist: To this day I could never grasp what my manager collegues or their peers and directs were doing. I asked many and many times of any rank, because I wanted to learn.
Most things were related to administrativ stuff like vacations permissions, performance reviews, budget "planing" - and of course meetings, meetings, meetings.
95% of what the HIPPOS with high 6figure and 7figure incomes in the room were doing could easily been done by an intern, except for the people affais.
Only requirement is discipline to sometimes just sit still in a chair and jumping via Zoom from meeting to meeting every 30 minutes from 8:00/9:00 to 19:00. Monday to Thursday.
All you have to do is rely on these phrases: "What are the next steps?", "I will delegate this to...", "Now start the reports please."
These people were IT managers - of course no one except me had any (!) Computer Science background.
Google taught me, that it is totally easy to train a computer scientist business skills, but impossible to train any non-IT person Computer Science. This holds true.
So yes, I can totally relate to these news here, however I feel sorry for the people anyway. Good faith in most cases has to be used. That they do everything to appear irreplaceable and therefore cause havoc along their "career" is only the flipside of human behavior and dysfunctional settings.
Take care of your craft and be proud, if you are in need.
There is only one kind of person that I look down upon life, its MBAs with no other qualifications. I would consider a medieval dung hauler a more skilled and important member of modern society than a modern MBA-only holder. I just don't see how anyone can get such a degree and see their skills as valuable, but they all like to build each other up off of everyone else's backs and somehow it works.
Ive never had a good manager that wasn't just another worker in the trenches for a decade or more beforehand.
You could say it is restructuring, eliminate positions or laid off but firing to me means something very different.
I’ve had some amazing managers that were engaged and did more than go to and from meetings. And I’ve had some that improved things vastly just by leaving the room.
And yes, wondering how many of these employees will be hired by Chinese counterparts.
How many are left when you are done? Same number, just in different branches.
The advent of AI should be making deeper cuts in management areas than in engineering.
But even the knowledge on its own is enough - after all, a lot of that is in published scientific papers already. ASML works because they combined everything. China can't just build a copy of their EUV machines without also having a copy of their suppliers.
I'm pretty sure those aren't even a consideration if you relocate to a different economic superpower.
And besides, while in the Netherlands people do sign no-compete clauses, in practice they're not enforceable by law. Or so I've heard.
If you don't reach your targets it's not the engineers fault.
It's bad management ;)
ASML understands what most big companies don’t: if you hit all your targets you weren’t setting yourself tough enough targets.
There we go.
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.
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.
This reminds me of a company I worked for recently, that, at the yearly meeting talking about the financial situation were all depressed as if we were broke since the profit (and revenue) was slightly less than last year, which was significantly higher than any other year in history with the year prior also being a record. This was essentially when the interest rates jumped after covid and businesses had to adapt so I'm sure it would have been another record if the economy in general wasn't doing worse that year.
Of course, they want to keep people from asking for raises and bonuses, but I found it very weird to see them act worried with the profit/revenue graphs at a crazy peak still.
Firing does not mean what you thought probably.[1]
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.
> The cuts will mostly impact employees at leadership level in the Netherlands and will also affect operations in the US. The planned reductions represent about 4% of the company’s workforce.
[1] Source: https://www.ed.nl/binnenland/vakbonden-woedend-na-keiharde-i...