ASML dethrones Applied Materials, becomes largest fab tool maker (opens in new tab)

The hiring process I like to have in place is:

1. HR Interview: see if there is a fit with the company 2. Skill check. Do you have the problem solving, hard skills and communication skills needed for the job. 3. Team fit. Do you like to drink a beer (or non alcoholic) with us and we with you. Can you hold a conversation about something else than work.

6 people are involved. 2 per step. Everyone has a veto. I as a manager do not have special power. I've had people fail most of the time on #3. E.g. a guy that did not talk the woman of the team. She veto-ed. We were really looking for his skills, but he was a jerk.

I don't think you would have passed #3 either. You can have l33t coding skills, but if you cannot make it work in a team it is basically useless for anything of size.

Slightly kidding, but only slightly because I kind of agree with the idea that people shouldn't be writing software but designing systems. All this big talks about unit testing, management styles etc. and at the end we have this software all around with huge security holes and terrible bugs. Maybe the people partying on Fridays right after pushing untested code to production are having it right. Their machines work.

They are just a domestic flight away from Eastern Europe. And just a train ride away from London.

I don't care about parties either but if I'm going to have to work with you I need to know you fit in a little, creating software is collaborative. In real life, in real companies you are not solving leetcode problems all the time - so why hire based on that? Person A is super intelligent but abrasive and person B is half as smart but super easy to work with. 100% of the time I pick person B.

> having awareness of software principles is really worthless

This is nonsense, you are already expected to know this

> I've seen files with 13k lines of if/else/switch, how do you test that shit .-.

I've seen those too, but don't pretend that's unique to a specific country. There are shitty software developers everywhere.

I used to work in automotive and all unit tests didn't require the finished car, just the SW.

Nasa doesn't hava another Voyager probe in their lab floating around in zero gravity to run unit tests on before sending the SW patches, they use simulators.

For calibration you do need the final production HW, but unit tests shouldn't, so maybe there's a confusion here about the type of tests ran.

It’s really unique for such a competent machine builder to not have this, and it’s 100% due to their excellence being in physics and mechanical engineering, a culture of treating software as an afterthought for too long. Note, I don't think ASML still treats software as an afterthought, but they did for a long enough to make it really hard to catch up.

The price would probably drop slightly if they made 10x more machines, but they would still end up earning more. And the world would be a better place, too.

So I am left wondering ... what is capping their output? What is the bottleneck?

ASML is impressive because they managed to ship despite the code having been a mess. It’s a mad accomplishment of both engineering and organization (they solve the messy code problem by simply employing 10x the programmers than they might need if the code was better, and somehow that actually works! That’s impressive organization, cause conventional wisdom eg Mythical Man Month suggests you can’t do that)

I think it’s more that not many ASML people are on HN.

As with all large companies there will be great bits and bits that can be done better and the larger the company gets and the more critical the software is the slower some parts will be done. There's always room for improvement. And ASML has improved immensely over the last 10 years. In the teams that I've worked in the caliber of the people has been extremely high. The code reviews are rigorous and that's a good thing. There are a lot of extremely smart people working for ASML. To call it Dutch is interesting, most of the teams I've worked in are international with less Dutch than foreign people in them.

ASML has changed from a much less interesting company when I joined to a very interesting company with respect to the software stack. Yes, I believe there's still lots of room for improvement but that's the case with all big companies.

But heck, I don't know about everything, I've only worked there 12 years.

Why? Because they're hot on the stock market since the pandemic? Nokia's SW was the same kind of shitshow when it was dominant. IIRC a long time ago someone on HN wrote here that compiling Symbian OS at Nokia took 2 whole days and Nokia management saw no problem with that.

To me, it's exactly what I expect from a HW company, from personal experience. SW is seen just as a necessary evil, another item on the BoM. Oh, and there's a bunch of useless processes designed as jobs programs to keep some useless managers employed, where each of them needs to review your change and give their green light despite them not being up to date on the technical side for >10 years.

I know this because it's exactly the same at another major Dutch semiconductor spin-off from Philipps I was at in a past life.

Just because ASML is hot right now, doesn't mean they value and employ top SW talent, because they don't sell SW, they sell HW and that's what their customers value, and so ASML values physicists and traditional engineers, not SW devs.

I won't rule out a direct competitor, but they have a substantial moat.

They face some pressure from indirect competition like Canon Nanoimprint though.

Oh favoritism and bribery! More like, small market that can deal with the fact that the vendor can only promise small deliveries. But also Intel trying to land a whale.

There is some truth in parody ;-)

In the long term you don’t think the stock price is a function of a company’s success? Surely while a a company does very well financially and the financial outlook is very good, the stock price would be higher than when the fortunes change?