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

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

by dep_b • 6 months ago

339 352 6 months ago

dep_b3• 6 months ago

Apologies for the Dutch source, but I couldn’t find any source in English yet.

“ 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.”

dep_b3• 6 months ago

Bloomberg also has a link, but doesn’t mention ASML is actually adding 1400 engineers while cutting 4500 managers:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-28/asml-plan...

microtonal3• 6 months ago

I (native speaker) read it as cutting 3000 of the 4500 managers (keeping 1500) of the engineering arm. Of those 3000, ~1400 will move to an engineering position (probably because they are actual engineers promoted to management) and the rest is let go.

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.

SJSque• 6 months ago

Here's an article in English on DutchNews.nl:

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...

theanonymousone• 6 months ago

Does that mean half of those managers will become engineers?

mcny• 6 months ago

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.

swiftcoder2• 6 months ago

I've worked with a number of people who made the IC -> manager conversion because it was represented as the best way forward in their career, only to find out it made them miserable, and convert back after a few years. I think you'll find that sort of conversion back to IC is not all that uncommon.

operatingthetan• 6 months ago

Are we seeing big engineering manager cuts in the US too?

culi2• 6 months ago

From the Bloomberg article

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.

noosphr2• 6 months ago

ASML also announced a new share buyback programme of up to €12 billion, to be executed by 31 December 2028.

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.

stingraycharles2• 6 months ago

It's a signal that the finance people are becoming more important to the company, but not necessarily a bad thing; it's effectively a more (tax) efficient form of dividends, which isn't very controversial.

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...

tehmillhouse• 6 months ago

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.

jorvi2• 6 months ago

But both dividends and stock buybacks are terrible and really shouldn't exist. In a proper market, competition is so fierce that you cannot afford dividends / stock buybacks because your competitors will put all their money towards R&D and retaining & attracting the best personnel.

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.

londons_explore• 6 months ago

It's a European company. They run a bit different.

whazor• 6 months ago

ASML did two extremely big bets on the future. Both futures are now.

Cthulhu_7• 6 months ago

And they can look forward too, their order book has tens of billions in there for the coming years. And that's orders, on top of that comes the maintenance and support for all the machines in operation - in 2023 they delivered 449 machines (not just their top of the line stuff), which means that there's thousands of machines in operation requiring regular maintenance etc.

ASML's bet paid off and for now at least their business is very sustainable.

abigail953• 6 months ago

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?

ygouzerh2• 6 months ago

From the company perspective, performing buyback when market is high is just throwing cash by the windows to over-priced shares. If they wanted to distribute cash, they could just use dividends

themafia4• 6 months ago

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?

zmb_• 6 months ago

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.

petters• 6 months ago

This makes no sense. Buybacks and dividends are how companies give money to investors

disgruntledphd22• 6 months ago

This makes no sense. Buybacks and dividends are how companies give money to investors

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.

burnt-resistor3• 6 months ago

Yup. If CEO and C-suite TC go up, then it's a lawn dart screaming towards Earth.

xbmcuser2• 6 months ago

Their major revenue growth potential was blocked by the US for the previous gen systems. Whereas newer gen is so expensive that its biggest customer TSMC is trying to do without. So cutting expenses and share buy backs is the way for major stock holders to decrease their positions without share prices tanking.

ArtTimeInvestor2• 6 months ago

    I've never seen a company that ...

You have not seen Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft? Where are you looking? They all did tens of billions of share buybacks every year for many years now.

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.

noosphr2• 6 months ago

I'm happy you made my point for me.

anonymous9082132• 6 months ago

Has anyone in the last 10 years praised Google for anything, ever? They've been engaged in enshittification the entire time. Search is getting worse, Youtube is getting worse, Android is getting worse, Chrome is getting worse. They are indeed a hollow shell of the company that originally established themselves, but now that they have such a wide-ranging monopoly they can freely debase the value of their products to extract as much from customers as they can.

PunchyHamster2• 6 months ago

What products ?

They lost battle for office software, they can't even exist in chat space, despise trying to make chat that sticks for 2 decades now, they squandered on video chat space and office space too.

IF Alphabet was actually efficient they should own office space, but 365 ate their office productivity and even the utter turd that is MS teams is beating them out on chat.

Even their search gets worse and only places where they actually have progress is AI.

rocqua2• 6 months ago

A buyback is almost the same as a dividend, with minor differences around tax and effects on derivative pricing.

And ASML has been paying out a dividend for a long time.

thrance• 6 months ago

Buybacks should be illegal again. They're like drugs for companies, they can't help but do them and divest capital that would help them thrive and put it into their shareholders' pockets.

philipallstar• 6 months ago

Of course they can. Issuing shares and going public is the exact opposite of that and they do that all the time.

alecco• 6 months ago

That money would be better spent in R&D, investing, or acquisitions. Why.

zhouzhao• 6 months ago

ASML understands what most big companies don't.

If you don't reach your targets it's not the engineers fault.

It's bad management ;)

culi2• 6 months ago

ASML just set revenue records and its stock is surging due to the Q4 results

arjie• 6 months ago

Fortunately, one can supply LinkedIn grade insights that fit any facts. For instance, try this one:

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.

Slartie2• 6 months ago

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.

lan321• 6 months ago

This is entirely unrelated to ASML, but:

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.

zwischenzug• 6 months ago

Engineers can definitely contribute to the problem too, in my experience.

Rygian• 6 months ago

Engineers in particular have expressed their desire to focus their time on engineering, without being hampered by slow process flows [1]

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...

sigmoid10• 6 months ago

Probably not that much, but I expect the middle layer that actually enabled these process flows to be cut quite heavily. You need tons of people if you really want to keep eyes on these things. So there will be more free-roaming engineers by necessity.

canpan• 6 months ago

Can someone explain, why this is done? I get a feeling, it's normally done when a company is in trouble or will soon? But they should have more money than ever.

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.

ygouzerh2• 6 months ago

It sounds like:

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,...

xdkyx• 6 months ago

They trimmed the managerial layer. A smart young person isn't immediately affected by it and (at least to me), this signals focus on actual work and flattening of the structure of an organization.

swiftcoder2• 6 months ago

would you want to work where they just fired 1700 people

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

gpvos4• 6 months ago

IC = individual contributor. Wikipedia translating management speak:

Individual contributor, a business role for an employee without management responsibilities

Magmalgebra• 6 months ago

I think the press release is actually clear that they felt this was necessary to retain talent:

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.

ragebol• 6 months ago

It's well known here in the region around ASML that they are very process heavy and things move slow. I'm not keen on working for them

microtonal3• 6 months ago

Actually, they are eliminating 3000 of the 4500 engineering manager positions. However, of those 3000, they are moving 1400 to an engineering position. The article also says that engineers are spending 35% of the time coordinating with their managers and that they want to cut the red tape with this move.

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.

flomo• 6 months ago

of those 3000, they are moving 1400 to an engineering position

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.

hcfman2• 6 months ago

So are you saying that there are not new positions open for engineers that were actually doing engineering and that instead some managers that were not doing engineering will now suddenly have to pick up the thread again and start doing engineer?

That would be disappointing for engineers that were actually doing engineering, as yet again their grade increases would be taken by management types.

throw20251220• 6 months ago

Where do you know the details from? It’s not in the press release. Is that some insider information?

any1• 6 months ago

I worked for a company that went through 2 cycles like this and I can report that it had zero effect on us engineers.

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?

fc417fc8024• 6 months ago

Presumably because people expect to be promoted periodically, so they pile up on the high end until the symptom gets corrected all at once. A realistic (but quite controversial) solution might be to emulate other companies that have done away with most of the promotion hierarchy. Different roles but more or less standardized pay across all employees and an understanding that promotions aren't a thing. Rather than climbing a ladder you're there to get shit done.

bboreham• 6 months ago

Why? Bad management. Perhaps even bad leadership.

bodegajed• 6 months ago

One reason, maximizing investor value. CEO and executives usually get bonuses after layoffs.

krelian• 6 months ago

It is done because management needs to show that profits are increasing or they themselves will lose their jobs. Since they do not want to lose their jobs and they do not know how to increase profits they decided to fire 1700 employees with the hope that less expenses will translate into larger profits.

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.

skrebbel5• 6 months ago

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 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• 6 months 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.

Wurdan3• 6 months 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.

joe_mamba20• 6 months 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.

skrebbel5• 6 months ago

Yep! That's kinda what I said, no? :-)

renewiltord• 6 months 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• 6 months 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).

skrebbel5• 6 months 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).

Cthulhu_7• 6 months 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.

retired5• 6 months 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.

bux93• 6 months ago

Those holding a "highly skilled immigrants" visa that get fired will have 3 months to find a new job, or their residency permit expires. ASML hosts quite a few expats. The internal competition won't be pretty.

kabes• 6 months 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_mamba20• 6 months 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.

tedggh• 6 months ago

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.

elric• 6 months 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• 6 months ago

I understood that this was what they (interviewers) complained about and he got an impression about this by hearing their stories?

AmbroseBierce• 6 months ago

Making the right questions when they ask if you have any questions

lelanthran3• 6 months ago

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

You ... ask? I've gotten answers like this just by asking in the interview.

zwaps6• 6 months 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• 6 months 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.

consp4• 6 months ago

Pretty much due to there being no path forward with h respect to earnings if you are "just an engineer". There are some niches but mostly to make money you have to be management. Resulting in a massive Peter-principle issue and bloated layers of middle management to handle the extra managers. For what i know this is solidly entrenched into Dutch working culture.

chronid• 6 months ago

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 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.

apexalpha4• 6 months ago

Many large corporations in Europe, especially in sectors of prior consistent growth and profit, are chock full of too many managers.

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.

hayvan2• 6 months 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.

skrebbel5• 6 months ago

Woa madness. Was that at the D&E department?

zeristor2• 6 months 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.

apexalpha4• 6 months ago

Philips was the European Samsung. They spun-off their divisions and now operate independently.

Even the OG division: lighting, has been spun off.

1010082• 6 months 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...)

npstr4• 6 months 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.

cm20122• 6 months ago

These guys are going to get huge severance packages.

onlyrealcuzzo• 6 months 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• 6 months ago

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

BoredomIsFun2• 6 months ago

My semi-tin-foil speculation: The laser research facility is in US (San Diego); Europe is on the brink of a divorce from the US; there is an expectation of scaling down.

aurareturn3• 6 months ago

No. US can't make these machines. Laser facility in US would suffer too.

fc417fc8024• 6 months ago

Doesn't currently manufacture at commercial scale is not the same as can't make. I don't know what the patent situation is but I assume there are at least a few in the way.

BoredomIsFun2• 6 months ago

It does not negate my point though.

themafia4• 6 months ago

US can't make these machines.

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.

rvz• 6 months ago

ASML has achieved "AGI" internally.

maciejzj2• 6 months ago

Guys, is the current narrative that, due to AI, pure engineering is gone and we’re all supposed to be “managers”, or is it the other way around? I kinda lost the plot here.

burnt-resistor3• 6 months ago

Magically, spending money on datacenters and gear makes working code fantastically appear from the aether and so engineers can be paid the same as janitors. That's what the suits believe now.

Cthulhu_7• 6 months ago

They can believe whatever they want but the reality will hit them soon enough.

maciejzj2• 6 months ago

Yeah, irony put asisde, I believe that the reality is that people who already have power will consolidate it even more. Regardless if you were an average engineer, mid-level manager, consultant, whatever, you will be thrown under the bus any day. People can make up any identity and philosophy of entrepreneur/vibe engineer/manager/hardcore engineer/guy who run away to trades/anything but it doesn't change the fact that an average Joe is economically not viable in the current setup and he can't do anything particular to turn the tides.

Nition• 6 months ago

As I understand it, white-collar work at all levels is eliminated, as are creative pursuits (art, music, etc), and we can finally return to humanity's true calling - manual labour.

Der_Einzige2• 6 months ago

This but unironically. I'm hoping I can get into the skilled blue collar labor before it gets flooded by the hordes of unemployed AI researchers circa the 2030s (likely 2028 lol). No I'm not even kidding

pezgrande• 6 months ago

My theory: AI is making companies move faster or be left behind. Too many managers usually means bigger red tape.

johannkrugell• 6 months ago

Can't really see the details so many ads

joecool1029• 6 months ago

Wonder if China will make some of them offers?

Cthulhu_7• 6 months ago

Possibly, but there's no-compete clauses (which are hard to enforce), plus these are mostly managers, not engineers, definitely not engineers that have the deeper knowledge of the systems.

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.

fc417fc8024• 6 months ago

but there's no-compete clauses (which are hard to enforce)

I'm pretty sure those aren't even a consideration if you relocate to a different economic superpower.

Black616Angel• 6 months ago

I was completely caught off-guard, because initially I read the headline as "ASMR of firing 1,700 people, mostly managers" which I would listen to

ragazzina• 6 months ago

Yeah I also like the sound of people getting their lives ruined, especially when it makes a company leaner and more profitable.

ksec• 6 months ago

May be the word is used somewhat differently across the world. But I assume this isn't "Firing" but actually "laid off" ?

You could say it is restructuring, eliminate positions or laid off but firing to me means something very different.

danpalmer3• 6 months ago

The translation I'm reading says that it's laying off.

xbmcuser2• 6 months ago

rawxtl• 6 months ago

Why the fuck do I need to give them my email to read something??????. Don't even try posting it if all you want is to send emails to me.... Why is the first on hacker news?

danpalmer3• 6 months ago

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.

pseudalopex2• 6 months ago

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

danpalmer3• 6 months ago

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.

nialv72• 6 months ago

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.

Aromasin• 6 months ago

I know it's ironic to say this about Intel, a notoriously management heavy company, but they did do the dual tracks which I always appreciated. A principal engineer was functionally on par with a senior manager, and a fellow with a VP. This meant that good engineers weren't forced into roles they weren't interested in, and why many stayed there 20+ years.

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.

lelanthran3• 6 months ago

Your success [as a manager] 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.

romanovcode• 6 months ago

No, they are equals.

The salary is not equal.

shawabawa3• 6 months ago

in many tech companies they are, an IC6 is paid the same or similar to an M6

The difference is there will probably be a lot more M7+ than IC7+ so getting to the higher ranks is easier as a manager

nialv72• 6 months ago

they should be

apexalpha4• 6 months ago

There's a rather famous saying by ASMLs former CEO:

"There are no important people at ASML. Only roles with more responsibilities."

zwaps6• 6 months ago

A weakness of European companies is that with very few exceptions, there is no equivalent IC role to managerial roles beyond maybe junior management.

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!

dada216• 6 months ago

It works well in finance, that's about it. It makes no sense, as you say, everywhere else where the core business has to do with anything that needs engineering.

aitchnyu• 6 months ago

In your (great) fantasy, are managers allowed to keep secrets from their reports?

w10-1• 6 months ago

Just different people doing different kinds of jobs

Except the manager is the decider, and controls the fate of the IC. That makes them unequal, even if IC salaries were higher.

Havoc2• 6 months ago

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

bpodgursky2• 6 months ago

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.

p_v_doom• 6 months ago

No, they are equals.

IDK, where I am its always been that managers specifically have power over ICs

DebtDeflation• 6 months ago

Given that they have around 44,000 employees in total and they surely aren't firing all of their managers, it would seem they have a lot of managers. The press release indicates most of the reduction is in IT, so internal operations, not Engineering/Product or Sales/Marketing.

jedilance• 6 months ago

https://archive.is/DWEFw

SilverBirch• 6 months ago

This is fascinating. Whenever I heard about matrix management it always seemed a bit weird that you have essentially two organisational structures in tension with each other - the function group lead is always going to be in tension with the product managers over how their products are resourced. I guess an obvious failure mode is you end up just stripping on direction out which is what they're doing here. One thing that goes unsaid in these situations is often the decision making for how that's done is quite political.

gpvos4• 6 months ago

https://archive.is/foO7l

meindnoch• 6 months ago

Top signal. Short everything!

gigatexal• 6 months ago

Lots of true things about do-nothing managers in this thread. There are, however, managers that help teams achieve more than they would without them. People leadership and stewardship is a soft skill that’s still important so long as we have people doing the engineering.

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.

_the_inflator• 6 months ago

I rose from Dev to Senior Management in a 100k+ global banking enterprise.

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.

zipy124• 6 months ago

The class system is embedded within corporate structures. These management roles are simply a way for those higher up the class structure to extract money from the productive workers. You'll notice when nepotism happens and senior leaders kids or associates are hired it is usually in a management capacity. It's very rare to see them hired in an IC role. For example look at Jensen Huang's children at NVIDIA, and their children who have done internships....

cmiles82• 6 months ago

I’m generally supportive of the tech industry’s move to rid itself of too many mangers.

Most managers are no longer technical, and just create bloated middle layers that slow everyone else down.

The only managers that are decent are the ones that have kept their technical skills sharp. Most others just seem to be able to say “my team will follow-up” and “my team will look into this” and are beyond useless. Few are shedding a tear at cleaning that up.

budgefrankly• 6 months ago

Most managers are no longer technical, and just create bloated middle layers that slow everyone else down.
The only managers that are decent are the ones that have kept their technical skills sharp.

Alex Ferguson was a terrible footballer when he was managing Manchester United. Yet they won the premiership in 6 of his last 10 years in that role, and have never won it since he left.

The skills that make one great 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.

coolgoose• 6 months ago

But he was a footballer, some managers in it are like Alex Ferguson was baking goods, not knowing football

tripledry2• 6 months ago

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

Good management is rare.

ghosty141• 6 months ago

Not all good footballers are great managers but many great managers were good footballers. Playing in the first or second division is already good in my books.

JeremyNT• 6 months ago

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

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

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

mns2• 6 months ago

He still had a decent player career, and anyhow, this is a completely different field. The issue is that good engineers are not promoted to management positions because their skills are needed or they don't want to get promoted because of politics. But one of the things that I noticed a lot is people "specifically trained" to be managers. Our company is full of project managers and POs that never built anything their entire life, they never led a team, they never did anything except start with something like an assistant or QA and then all of the sudden they want to manage people. This is what I find frustrating, people that never in their life did something productive or build or contribute to something, but their expectation is to be a manager, just because they were "specifically trained in that discipline"

cmiles82• 6 months ago

Not a great example. Football doesn’t change much. You don’t need to actively play football to know how to lead a football team well.

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.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 6 months ago

My company dumped a bunch of managers and now we are all stuck doing their manager work but we aren't managers

piokoch• 6 months ago

Well, interesting, I would say they should grow, not shrinking, giving the demand for better and better processors.

menaerus3• 6 months ago

They are optimizing their organization for throughput by cutting off the fat so they do expect to grow, it's just that they want to be ready for it, and having a loath of managers doesn't help with it. I figure this move must have something to do with the China labs potentially coming out with their own litography system.

mrs6969• 6 months ago

Asml was eating the Dutch It sector. They were hiring like crazy. I know shit ton of people left their company and moved the asml in last 3-4 years. Even I guessed this was coming.

And yes, wondering how many of these employees will be hired by Chinese counterparts.

andy_ppp2• 6 months ago

If I was the EU I'd provide capital for ASML to build a 18A fab in Europe, the way the world is going we need our own capacity here...

joe_mamba20• 6 months ago

ASML doesn't build fabs, they just built one tool for the job. That's like saying you're contracting Milwaukee to build you a house.

andy_ppp2• 6 months ago

They build the most complicated bit no? Are you saying if the price was right they couldn't do it?

mahrain2• 6 months ago

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

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

thegreatpeter• 6 months ago

why aren't people outraged?

mahrain2• 6 months ago

Local news sources[1] show that the unions and works council are outraged. That's only a start.

[1] Source: https://www.ed.nl/binnenland/vakbonden-woedend-na-keiharde-i...

midtake• 6 months ago

Absolutely based. Middle managers just get in the way. Middle management is the quintessential bullshit job.

The advent of AI should be making deeper cuts in management areas than in engineering.

lgleason• 6 months ago

You have a tree that is full of monkeys that you want to get out of the tree. So you shake the hell out of the tree to get rid of them.

How many are left when you are done? Same number, just in different branches.

AngryData• 6 months ago

My utopian ideal is that management skills are by themselves considered completely useless, and that management skills should be considered add-on skills to add onto an already useful base set of skills and experiences.

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.

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

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