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.”
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
As someone replied to your other comment with, this is not correct. Firing does indeed refer to termination, which is different from redundancy. It's a colloquial term rather than a legal one, but firing is to termination as laying off is to redundancy.
These distinctions may mean less in countries without robust worker protections where the lines between the two might be blurred, but in a lot of the world these are quite distinct concepts.
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.
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.
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.
41 comments
[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 50.2 ms ] thread“ 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.”
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.
If you don't reach your targets it's not the engineers fault.
It's bad management ;)
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...
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.
I'm impressed by their ambition to fire 1700 managers(!) That's a lot of managers! I interviewed with ASML a decade and a half ago and while there was plenty to complain about (eg their tens of millions of lines of absolutely unmaintainable C code), I didn't feel at the time feel like it was a very top-heavy organization. It was very engineer-y, and I loved that about them. This press release (when taken at face value) suggests that this has changed a lot over time and they're now trying to correct it.
I gotta say, if true and not code for general "cheese slicer" cost cutting, I think that this is rather ballsy. Philips (which ASML spun out of) famously never did anything of the sort and gradually cramped into an extremely management-heavy organization where most people just write reports for other people with scary few people actually moving the needle. I think it's cool that ASML has identified that they're risking becoming like Philips and trying to do something about it, even if the method seems rather crude. I think the risk is real. ASML's fast-moving culture formed in a mad multi-decade survival-crunch, but they've been a near-monopolist for a while now and that means those pressures are long gone.
You could say it is restructuring, eliminate positions or laid off but firing to me means something very different.
Firing does not mean what you thought probably.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45733016
These distinctions may mean less in countries without robust worker protections where the lines between the two might be blurred, but in a lot of the world these are quite distinct concepts.
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.
IDK, where I am its always been that managers specifically have power over ICs