HN Reader

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.”

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

ASML has achieved "AGI" internally.

Can't really see the details so many ads

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

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 ;)

why aren't people outraged?

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

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

> 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...

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

There is only one kind of person that I look down upon life, its MBAs with no other qualifications. I would consider a medieval dung hauler a more skilled and important member of modern society than a modern MBA-only holder. I just don't see how anyone can get such a degree and see their skills as valuable, but they all like to build each other up off of everyone else's backs and somehow it works.

Ive never had a good manager that wasn't just another worker in the trenches for a decade or more beforehand.

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.

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.

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

Wonder if China will make some of them offers?

Top signal. Short everything!

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?