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.
I worked for a big Belgian technology company in the past. It was surprisingly lean in terms of management structure. Then Philips television, which had a big division not too far away, went bankrupt and a lot of those people got absorbed into our company. Within a couple of years the Philips people were able to transform the company to be very management/top heavy until nothing worked anymore.
> Within a couple of years the Philips people were able to transform the company to be very management/top heavy until nothing worked anymore
You see the same pattern with Siemens and a lot of their spinoffs: Continental(VDO), Infineon, Qimonda, Gigaset, Healthineers (yes, that's a real name that somebody got paid to come up with), etc
THe ones without some major moat like trains or energy, got slowly run into the 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 work for a small German company. Some time ago the owner sold it to big bloated company. At the time under the owner the management circle was 6 people, now it’s 17!!!!! And the revenue is lower with bigger headcount, because managers manage and do not work.
I almost cry at work from sadness. So much potential wasted, the company has great market access and still good name. Polishing old products would make this hockey stick revenue growth. But with management explosion everything is being wasted. Meetings about meetings, no product upgrades and total stagnation. While managers fight over parking spots near front door for VIPs.
I know. I work for a mid sized German company in the auto industry, and when our SW project was going to shit due to insufficient resources and mismanagement from the start, what they did to address it was not to add more developers, but add two managers from other projects to our daily standup, which became a 45-60 minute daily, and I'll let you guess if that improved the product deliverables and team morale.
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 factories where everyone is a fixed cog that needs to follow a strict process.
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?
Thanks for sharing. You know what's ironic about Qimonda? China bought their IP after they went under, and used it to build two domestic NAND and DRAM manufacturers that are set to become giants.
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 certainly been interesting to watch over the span of my career so far.
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.
It seems to me (and maybe I'm wrong), but it seems to me that "a lack of IP" increasingly means "we have no leverage to get the licences that we need" in China, and "we have no idea how they used to do it" in the west.
I don't think this case has much to do with the mono party system but with the state taking interest to support a local industry at a loss but for future security.
Like for example the French government massively supported its aerospace and nuclear industry, and German government gave massive support to its legacy auto industry and they're not a mono party totalitarian system.
So it can be done even in democracies, but you need visionary leaders to spend money wisely on future bets and not just on buying votes from pensioners.
Labour laws have much less of an impact than the work or overall culture.
Sweden has quite strong labour protection but can be much more innovative than Germany because there's much less emphasis in respecting titles, seniority, and authority than the Germans. German education has a big emphasis on bowing down to authority from early age, Sweden is much more lax (and even though Jantelagen isn't a big thing in 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.
>German education has a big emphasis on bowing down to authority from early age
Ah, good ol' legacy of the education system implemented by Prussia, who wanted an army of conformist soldiers following orders, and not free thinkers risking to upset the apple cart. Great mentality if all you want is waging war though :)
And this mentality persist to this day, where given a set of rules, other successful related cultures like Dutch, Brits or Swedes will first use common sense when interpreting and applying them, whereas Germans will tend to blindly follow those rules by the book even if they don't make sense in that specific context.
It's difficult to uproot people from their ways, when they've only lived in Plato's cave allegory.
Siemens Energy (which meanwhile is completely separated from Siemens) did a massive cleanup of their management overhead two or three years ago. They cut several layers and a lot of managers got downgraded or let go. Looking at their stock performance it seems they did the right thing.
I really hope that other German enterprises will use this as an example.
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.
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.
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.
While you are not wrong, many of the cases I observed had managers from all over the world.
I think it's just a symptom. As a manager, you contribute nothing by yourself. You are useful if you have a useful team (ICs) with a good project. To have that, you need to defend yourself against other managers who will take this from you.
If you then also want to get prompted, your task is also to vacuum in all sorts of soft power, visibility, decision rights and being-in-the-roomness. It's even efficient, in that case, to destroy efficiency with processes (under your involvement)
As an IC, you are always valuable as you can always create value.
Hence, by having enough managers, you ensure that their competition will destroy the company.
Having ICs with no organization, synchronization or shared vision creates chaos, toxicity and a lot of technical debt. You can easily create negative value. ICs need direction to be successful, and well managed people are much happier in my experience than non-managed people.
> Well managed people are much happier in my experienced
Emphasis on the well-managed. If the management actually helps the tram achieve their goals and doesn't stifle them, then great. Otherwise, you end up with bloat.
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.
> 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?
Recently I got to know at an interview how company A (big western company) acquired another company years ago and are now working on redeveloping code that was an important part of the acquisition which fails to scale beyond the original use case.
This kind of stuff during interviews is a lot of learning in itself especially if you’re working already in the same area.
yeah, I've gotten this kind of knowledge from an interview before. They let slip a little something as to the project you will be working on, you start asking given the project you described I wonder if... and then they tend to tell you how it is.
Yeah I knew plenty people at ASML at the time. I wrote my comment a bit too condensed there, the interview wasn't my only exposure to the place. At the time it was very chaotic (for good and bad), the codebase was awful, there was plenty armwrestling but to my understanding it was mostly armwrestling about the tech, not about island building and the likes.
Like just as an example, they made sure that by every coffee machine there was a whiteboard for general use. The idea was that if you ran into someone at the coffee machine and got talking and suddenly got an idea together, you could immediately jot it down and geek out about it together and work it out in more detail, right there and then. No meeting to plan, no project manager to involve, just work out your idea together. That's not what you'd expect in a company with lots of managers protecting their little islands.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
That is what I meant with “until you find a new job”. You must indeed be actively looking for 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.
That's pretty generous, even for EU standards. In Austria for example, unconditional unemployment is 60% of your income and only lasting for a dozen or so weeks, after which you are forced to accept any job offer thrown at you or risk having your unemployment taken away.
Unemployment benefits is something you build up during your career, not just your current employer. For each year in employment you get one month of unemployment. The limit is 24 months.
And with the current job market, someone with ASML on their resume probably isn't on the bench for more than six months.
>And with the current job market, someone with ASML on their resume probably isn't on the bench for more than six months.
I think that heavily depends. If they're just a laid off manager without a strong network or industry connections at other major semi companies, then they might be shit out of luck since in the current economy, there's little to no demand for companies to hire more management.
On the contrary, many companies now are laying of their own managers too and not hiring new ones. If they need management tasks they tend to give them to existing IC staff instead of hiring dedicated managers from outside, which IMHO might be a good thing.
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.
>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.
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.
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).
ASML is a net positive for the world. Scientists pushing technology forward. Read about how they achieved EUV lithography, what an amazing feat.
META is a net negative for the world. Its leadership prioritizes profit over user safety (e.g. not protecting children), it allowed democracies to be undermined by boosting misinformation and social division.
WhatsApp was not developed by Meta. They just bought it. That said, I don't think Meta/FB is a net-negative, far from it. They contributed back to the community with high quality infra-level software.
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).
> 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.
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.
Every time I can remember that the finance people have become more important to a company, it has led to the disappearance of the internal culture geared towards excellence that got a company to that point in the first place.
I guess it's simply the externalities issue. Finance people optimize finance, which among other things results in improved efficiency. But despite best intentions to map out all incentives that matter, it always fails to consider some aspects. Focusing on short-term profits, ignoring privacy, security or pollution because it's free, lobbying for favourable legislation that hampers competitors, etc.
These are things 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.
It’s largely true. I believe Steve Jobs had some talk about this phenomenon; basically, at some point, the scale of an organization means the product people make less of an impact than the sales / finance people, and they slowly take over.
Then over the span of a few decades, what’s left is a shallow organization without real innovation.
That's what they're afraid of, and that's one of the reasons why they're doing the big management reorganization - too many managers leads to lots of overhead instead of excellence.
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.
I'm not sure what the point is wrt ASML, they made good bets, they won their monopoly, their shareholders who funded the bets get to enjoy monopoly pricing. If they start cutting R&D and lose their crown, yes it's shame I guess but that's all there is. To expect a company to sell their goods cheaply when they are the only ones in the world who can them is asking for too much. It's great that they and their investors took the punt on EUV all those years ago, we probably would not have the chips we have today and all the economic benefits around it
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.
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.
Google is still the best search engine. YouTube is still the best video site. Android is still the best operating system. Chrome is still the best browser.
And on the side they built the best AI and the best autonomous ride service.
Youtube and Android particularly are completely garbage and are not the "best" on any technical merits. To the extent they are used, it's solely because people are locked into using them by network effects. If you as a viewer use a technically superior video website, you will have no content to watch. If you as a content creator use a technically superior video website, you will have no viewers to watch your content. Similarly, if you as an OS developer want to make a new phone OS -- tough luck, nobody will produce hardware that is open and accepts anything other than an existing OS, and you can't sell a phone people will buy without modern hardware. This is why monopolies are terrible for humanity, and why Google's ongoing success has absolutely nothing to do with its technical capabilities or complete lack thereof.
> 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.
Why does it matter if people have to sell their shares to unlock value? Is it just the friction of small orders?
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.
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?
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
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.
This is not quite correct. If a dividend happens, the market capitalisation drops by the amount of the dividend, the number of shares remains constant, so the share price dips by the amount of the dividend per share. All investors get the dividend.
If a buyback happens, the market capitalisation drops by the amount of the buyback, and the number of shares drops by the same ratio, keeping the share price initially 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).
> 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.
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).
Dividends and capital gains have different treatment in a number of tax codes. In the UK for example when you have high income the dividend marginal tax is 39.35% but CGT only 24% with a higher tax free allowance (500 for dividends 3000 for cgt)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
The problem is that decision-makers/owners are often too far away from the essential operations of the value chain and instead seek confirmation based on vibes and copying what others are doing.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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
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?
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.
Once engineering starts out earning them by a wide enough margin management will become insecure. /s
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,...
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.”
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nah, worst that can happen is you get arrested if you try to go back or are in a country with an extradition policy, but that's only if it's considered a criminal case (e.g. espionage instead of no-compete) or there's a warrant out, else a no-compete clause is a civil matter.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Which is mostly the result of clever engineers that produced a machine no other company in the world can assemble, but that is absolutely crucial to businesses valued at double-digit trillions of dollars.
You don't really need an army of sales managers to sell such a product. Going lean on management and more heavy on engineering is therefore a good idea if you want to keep the lead you have.
No, but ASML's product is so complicated that they do need a lot more than just engineers - they have 5000 suppliers apparently, coordinating that takes a lot more than clever engineers.
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?
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.
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.
I worked for a big Belgian technology company in the past. It was surprisingly lean in terms of management structure. Then Philips television, which had a big division not too far away, went bankrupt and a lot of those people got absorbed into our company. Within a couple of years the Philips people were able to transform the company to be very management/top heavy until nothing worked anymore.
> Within a couple of years the Philips people were able to transform the company to be very management/top heavy until nothing worked anymore
You see the same pattern with Siemens and a lot of their spinoffs: Continental(VDO), Infineon, Qimonda, Gigaset, Healthineers (yes, that's a real name that somebody got paid to come up with), etc
THe ones without some major moat like trains or energy, got slowly run into the 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 work for a small German company. Some time ago the owner sold it to big bloated company. At the time under the owner the management circle was 6 people, now it’s 17!!!!! And the revenue is lower with bigger headcount, because managers manage and do not work.
I almost cry at work from sadness. So much potential wasted, the company has great market access and still good name. Polishing old products would make this hockey stick revenue growth. But with management explosion everything is being wasted. Meetings about meetings, no product upgrades and total stagnation. While managers fight over parking spots near front door for VIPs.
I know. I work for a mid sized German company in the auto industry, and when our SW project was going to shit due to insufficient resources and mismanagement from the start, what they did to address it was not to add more developers, but add two managers from other projects to our daily standup, which became a 45-60 minute daily, and I'll let you guess if that improved the product deliverables and team morale.
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 factories where everyone is a fixed cog that needs to follow a strict process.
[delayed]
> Qimonda
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?
Thanks for sharing. You know what's ironic about Qimonda? China bought their IP after they went under, and used it to build two domestic NAND and DRAM manufacturers that are set to become giants.
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 certainly been interesting to watch over the span of my career so far.
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.
It seems to me (and maybe I'm wrong), but it seems to me that "a lack of IP" increasingly means "we have no leverage to get the licences that we need" in China, and "we have no idea how they used to do it" in the west.
Say what you want about China's monoparty system, but it enables planning that spans decades.
Our 4 years terms is short slighted by design.
I don't think this case has much to do with the mono party system but with the state taking interest to support a local industry at a loss but for future security.
Like for example the French government massively supported its aerospace and nuclear industry, and German government gave massive support to its legacy auto industry and they're not a mono party totalitarian system.
So it can be done even in democracies, but you need visionary leaders to spend money wisely on future bets and not just on buying votes from pensioners.
EU has 7 years planning interval. Is not bad and tends to overlap the usual 4 years legislature in member countries.
Can you name these two manufacturers?
Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp. (YMTC) (NAND)
ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) (DRAM)
CXMT (dram) and YMTC (nand).
My guess is German labor laws do not allow hustling. Progress will be slow if everyone kinda just coast on cruise control.
Labour laws have much less of an impact than the work or overall culture.
Sweden has quite strong labour protection but can be much more innovative than Germany because there's much less emphasis in respecting titles, seniority, and authority than the Germans. German education has a big emphasis on bowing down to authority from early age, Sweden is much more lax (and even though Jantelagen isn't a big thing in 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.
>German education has a big emphasis on bowing down to authority from early age
Ah, good ol' legacy of the education system implemented by Prussia, who wanted an army of conformist soldiers following orders, and not free thinkers risking to upset the apple cart. Great mentality if all you want is waging war though :)
And this mentality persist to this day, where given a set of rules, other successful related cultures like Dutch, Brits or Swedes will first use common sense when interpreting and applying them, whereas Germans will tend to blindly follow those rules by the book even if they don't make sense in that specific context.
It's difficult to uproot people from their ways, when they've only lived in Plato's cave allegory.
Siemens Energy (which meanwhile is completely separated from Siemens) did a massive cleanup of their management overhead two or three years ago. They cut several layers and a lot of managers got downgraded or let go. Looking at their stock performance it seems they did the right thing.
I really hope that other German enterprises will use this as an example.
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.
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.
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.
While you are not wrong, many of the cases I observed had managers from all over the world.
I think it's just a symptom. As a manager, you contribute nothing by yourself. You are useful if you have a useful team (ICs) with a good project. To have that, you need to defend yourself against other managers who will take this from you. If you then also want to get prompted, your task is also to vacuum in all sorts of soft power, visibility, decision rights and being-in-the-roomness. It's even efficient, in that case, to destroy efficiency with processes (under your involvement)
As an IC, you are always valuable as you can always create value.
Hence, by having enough managers, you ensure that their competition will destroy the company.
Having ICs with no organization, synchronization or shared vision creates chaos, toxicity and a lot of technical debt. You can easily create negative value. ICs need direction to be successful, and well managed people are much happier in my experience than non-managed people.
> Well managed people are much happier in my experienced
Emphasis on the well-managed. If the management actually helps the tram achieve their goals and doesn't stifle them, then great. Otherwise, you end up with bloat.
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.
> 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?
Making the right questions when they ask if you have any questions
Recently I got to know at an interview how company A (big western company) acquired another company years ago and are now working on redeveloping code that was an important part of the acquisition which fails to scale beyond the original use case.
This kind of stuff during interviews is a lot of learning in itself especially if you’re working already in the same area.
yeah, I've gotten this kind of knowledge from an interview before. They let slip a little something as to the project you will be working on, you start asking given the project you described I wonder if... and then they tend to tell you how it is.
I understood that this was what they (interviewers) complained about and he got an impression about this by hearing their stories?
Yeah I knew plenty people at ASML at the time. I wrote my comment a bit too condensed there, the interview wasn't my only exposure to the place. At the time it was very chaotic (for good and bad), the codebase was awful, there was plenty armwrestling but to my understanding it was mostly armwrestling about the tech, not about island building and the likes.
Like just as an example, they made sure that by every coffee machine there was a whiteboard for general use. The idea was that if you ran into someone at the coffee machine and got talking and suddenly got an idea together, you could immediately jot it down and geek out about it together and work it out in more detail, right there and then. No meeting to plan, no project manager to involve, just work out your idea together. That's not what you'd expect in a company with lots of managers protecting their little islands.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
That is what I meant with “until you find a new job”. You must indeed be actively looking for 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.
That's pretty generous, even for EU standards. In Austria for example, unconditional unemployment is 60% of your income and only lasting for a dozen or so weeks, after which you are forced to accept any job offer thrown at you or risk having your unemployment taken away.
Unemployment benefits is something you build up during your career, not just your current employer. For each year in employment you get one month of unemployment. The limit is 24 months.
And with the current job market, someone with ASML on their resume probably isn't on the bench for more than six months.
>And with the current job market, someone with ASML on their resume probably isn't on the bench for more than six months.
I think that heavily depends. If they're just a laid off manager without a strong network or industry connections at other major semi companies, then they might be shit out of luck since in the current economy, there's little to no demand for companies to hire more management.
On the contrary, many companies now are laying of their own managers too and not hiring new ones. If they need management tasks they tend to give them to existing IC staff instead of hiring dedicated managers from outside, which IMHO might be a good thing.
The current job market for managers does not look great since Elon let that sink in.
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.
>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.
Yep! That's kinda what I said, no? :-)
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.
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).
Management consultant firms propagate these ideas - even if they had nothing to do with the original implementation.
ASML is a net positive for the world. Scientists pushing technology forward. Read about how they achieved EUV lithography, what an amazing feat.
META is a net negative for the world. Its leadership prioritizes profit over user safety (e.g. not protecting children), it allowed democracies to be undermined by boosting misinformation and social division.
Whatsapp is a strong net positive. This is the world’s communication network (I’m counting US out because it is counting itself out)
WhatsApp was not developed by Meta. They just bought it. That said, I don't think Meta/FB is a net-negative, far from it. They contributed back to the community with high quality infra-level software.
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).
> 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.
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...
Every time I can remember that the finance people have become more important to a company, it has led to the disappearance of the internal culture geared towards excellence that got a company to that point in the first place.
I guess it's simply the externalities issue. Finance people optimize finance, which among other things results in improved efficiency. But despite best intentions to map out all incentives that matter, it always fails to consider some aspects. Focusing on short-term profits, ignoring privacy, security or pollution because it's free, lobbying for favourable legislation that hampers competitors, etc.
These are things 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.
It’s largely true. I believe Steve Jobs had some talk about this phenomenon; basically, at some point, the scale of an organization means the product people make less of an impact than the sales / finance people, and they slowly take over.
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.
And, indeed, Apple.
That's what they're afraid of, and that's one of the reasons why they're doing the big management reorganization - too many managers leads to lots of overhead instead of excellence.
Indeed, finance people becomeing important is how you get 737-MAX disasters.
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.
I'm happy you made my point for me.
I'm not sure what the point is wrt ASML, they made good bets, they won their monopoly, their shareholders who funded the bets get to enjoy monopoly pricing. If they start cutting R&D and lose their crown, yes it's shame I guess but that's all there is. To expect a company to sell their goods cheaply when they are the only ones in the world who can them is asking for too much. It's great that they and their investors took the punt on EUV all those years ago, we probably would not have the chips we have today and all the economic benefits around it
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.
I think they sort of failed upwards in chat space with their RCS push.
> failed upwards
"became monopolistic entities."
Search, Android, Chrome, Chromebooks, Maps, Gmail, Youtube, Gemini.
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.
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.
When you say "worse" shareholders will say: "globally dominant in multiple platforms".
Sure Android might be worse from a pure Linux perspective, but what shareholder has ever cared about that.
Google is still the best search engine. YouTube is still the best video site. Android is still the best operating system. Chrome is still the best browser.
And on the side they built the best AI and the best autonomous ride service.
Not bad for a "hollow shell" of a company.
Youtube and Android particularly are completely garbage and are not the "best" on any technical merits. To the extent they are used, it's solely because people are locked into using them by network effects. If you as a viewer use a technically superior video website, you will have no content to watch. If you as a content creator use a technically superior video website, you will have no viewers to watch your content. Similarly, if you as an OS developer want to make a new phone OS -- tough luck, nobody will produce hardware that is open and accepts anything other than an existing OS, and you can't sell a phone people will buy without modern hardware. This is why monopolies are terrible for humanity, and why Google's ongoing success has absolutely nothing to do with its technical capabilities or complete lack thereof.
Gemini maybe? (and before that the alpha fold and alpha go), they do have things they are good at
This makes no sense. Buybacks and dividends are how companies give money to investors
> 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.
Why does it matter if people have to sell their shares to unlock value? Is it just the friction of small orders?
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.
It's a mechanism to distribute profits to shareholders. Do you invest in companies that don't distribute profits - does this get you some kind of higher return?
> It's a mechanism to distribute profits to shareholders
With different consequences and historical outcomes to more commonly used mechanisms.
> Do you invest in companies that don't distribute profits
Does every company that distributes profits do so with buybacks?
> does this get you some kind of higher return?
Do all companies payout the same ratio of market cap as dividend?
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
Three things:
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.
This is not quite correct. If a dividend happens, the market capitalisation drops by the amount of the dividend, the number of shares remains constant, so the share price dips by the amount of the dividend per share. All investors get the dividend.
If a buyback happens, the market capitalisation drops by the amount of the buyback, and the number of shares drops by the same ratio, keeping the share price initially 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).
> 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.
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.
Dividends and capital gains have different treatment in a number of tax codes. In the UK for example when you have high income the dividend marginal tax is 39.35% but CGT only 24% with a higher tax free allowance (500 for dividends 3000 for cgt)
> to be executed by 31 December 2028
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.
Buybacks and dividends are economically equivalent. They mostly differ in tax treatment.
Funny how "company does tax evasion to avoid paying their share" is praised :P
Are you sure you know what 'tax evasion' means?
One could argue share buybacks are more tax-efficient.
Dividends are taxed. No company is going to argue they are overvalued either.
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.
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.
ASML did two extremely big bets on the future. Both futures are now.
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.
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.
It's a European company. They run a bit different.
Yup. If CEO and C-suite TC go up, then it's a lawn dart screaming towards Earth.
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
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.
> 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.
My company dumped a bunch of managers and now we are all stuck doing their manager work but we aren't managers
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.
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!
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.
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.
There's a rather famous saying by ASMLs former CEO:
"There are no important people at ASML. Only roles with more responsibilities."
In your (great) fantasy, are managers allowed to keep secrets from their reports?
> No, they are equals.
The salary is not equal.
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
I thought it's the other way around. A manager needs people to manage.
Only in American tech companies
they should be
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.
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.
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
I wouldn't sweat about it.
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.
Wait for the robots taking manual labor. Maybe there is some value in nursing them?
My theory: AI is making companies move faster or be left behind. Too many managers usually means bigger red tape.
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.
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.
They can believe whatever they want but the reality will hit them soon enough.
The problem is that decision-makers/owners are often too far away from the essential operations of the value chain and instead seek confirmation based on vibes and copying what others are doing.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
IC = individual contributor. Wikipedia translating management speak:
> Individual contributor, a business role for an employee without management responsibilities
Thank you, I was lost reading the comments. Funny that all the comments shitting on managers are speaking their language.
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?
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.
Just have the possibility for pay increase without taking on management responsibilities.
Once engineering starts out earning them by a wide enough margin management will become insecure. /s
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?
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,...
One reason, maximizing investor value. CEO and executives usually get bonuses after layoffs.
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.”
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...
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...
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.
Does that mean half of those managers will become engineers?
If I were a betting person, I'd bet that's the number of engineers who were previously forced to become managers in order to get a promotion.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
https://archive.is/foO7l
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.
The translation I'm reading says that it's laying off.
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.
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.
https://archive.is/DWEFw
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.
No. US can't make these machines. Laser facility in US would suffer too.
> 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.
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.
It does not negate my point though.
Top signal. Short everything!
Wonder if China will make some of them offers?
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.
> 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.
Nah, worst that can happen is you get arrested if you try to go back or are in a country with an extradition policy, but that's only if it's considered a criminal case (e.g. espionage instead of no-compete) or there's a warrant out, else a no-compete clause is a civil matter.
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.
Can't really see the details so many ads
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.
Are we seeing big engineering manager cuts in the US too?
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.
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.
ASML has achieved "AGI" internally.
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 ;)
ASML just set revenue records and its stock is surging due to the Q4 results
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.
Which is mostly the result of clever engineers that produced a machine no other company in the world can assemble, but that is absolutely crucial to businesses valued at double-digit trillions of dollars.
You don't really need an army of sales managers to sell such a product. Going lean on management and more heavy on engineering is therefore a good idea if you want to keep the lead you have.
No, but ASML's product is so complicated that they do need a lot more than just engineers - they have 5000 suppliers apparently, coordinating that takes a lot more than clever engineers.
Engineers can definitely contribute to the problem too, in my experience.
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?