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0 pointsWurdan1mo ago0 comments

As an engineering manager (and one who's slowly starting a job hunt) these comments don't make for comfortable reading. What we'll never know from a press release like this is whether this is a change that employees wanted, or one which senior leadership wanted. Sure there are companies where management is overly bloated or inefficient. And maybe I'm just flattering myself by thinking that my teams' lives wouldn't be any easier if I got axed. But I'd like to think that "good middle management" is not a self-contradictory notion.

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speleding1mo ago

When I worked as a strategy consultant in the Netherlands (albeit decades ago), the rule of thumb was that any organization that had not seen a reorganization for five years would accumulate at least 10% of dead weight. (Mainly due to very strict labour laws that make it very costly to fire someone.)

ASML has 44,000 staff total, not sure how many are managers, but the 1,700 number does not strike me as particularly ambitious for a reorg in a company that size.

Scarblac1mo ago

This is about the engineering department, which apparently has 16000 employees now. With 4500 managers!

They're going to 1500, 1300ish can become engineers, 1700 are let go.

zwaps1mo ago

They indicate that this is something engineers want. Further, half of the 3000 with transition back to engineering, indicating that they think they will be more valuable as engineers.

Middle management has this self-replicating dynamic of becoming bloated and inefficient. Most companies probably do not have good middle management, because they have too much of it.

WurdanOP1mo ago

They indicate that engineers want to spend less time on (slow) processes. That isn't necessarily the same thing as that they want less (middle) managers. I can say that at my current and previous companies (both over 30,000 employees) most of the processes/bureaucracy aren't things that the horizontal middle layers came up with. Most processes are imposed by vertical corporate functions like HR, finance, legal and compliance.

I'm not the reason my teams need to do software supplier risk assessments, or fill in at least 4 different surveys about their wellbeing and functioning as a team, or provide forecasts of their cloud spend for the year, or manage data usage agreements for the consumers of their data in our data lake. Nor is my people leader. But I am accountable if we don't stay on top of these responsibilities which are expected of all teams.

Scarblac1mo ago

Apparantly ASML had 4500 managers of 16000 employees in the engineering department, and engineers spent a third of their time in meetings.

1500 managers of 14400 employees sounds a lot more normal to me.

WurdanOP1mo ago

At a ratio of 10:1, at least in my experience, there's no time for those managers to be hands on with the work and keeping their engineering skills current. I don't personally feel that's a problem, but reading other comments on this post it seems like many HN readers do have an issue with engineering managers who don't keep their tech skills sharp.

For the past year I've only had three direct reports, which would have been too few to keep me occupied if I wasn't also acting tech lead.

IMHO, if you want engineering managers who can occasionally do hands-on things, you probably want a ratio around 6/7:1

Scarblac1mo ago

Yes, I have no idea what the expectation of a manager in de engineering department of ASML is.

Personally, my "manager" has about 35 reports and also other duties. Basically as long as everything is going OK I don't have much to do with him. This is a company of 75 people, there are no managers except for two of the four directors. Not quite like ASML :-)

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speleding1mo ago

ASML has 44,000 staff total, not sure how many are managers, but the 1,700 number does not strike me as particularly ambitious for a reorg in a company that size.

Scarblac1mo ago

This is about the engineering department, which apparently has 16000 employees now. With 4500 managers!

They're going to 1500, 1300ish can become engineers, 1700 are let go.

zwaps1mo ago

They indicate that this is something engineers want. Further, half of the 3000 with transition back to engineering, indicating that they think they will be more valuable as engineers.

Middle management has this self-replicating dynamic of becoming bloated and inefficient. Most companies probably do not have good middle management, because they have too much of it.

WurdanOP1mo ago

Scarblac1mo ago

Apparantly ASML had 4500 managers of 16000 employees in the engineering department, and engineers spent a third of their time in meetings.

1500 managers of 14400 employees sounds a lot more normal to me.

WurdanOP1mo ago

For the past year I've only had three direct reports, which would have been too few to keep me occupied if I wasn't also acting tech lead.

IMHO, if you want engineering managers who can occasionally do hands-on things, you probably want a ratio around 6/7:1

Scarblac1mo ago

Yes, I have no idea what the expectation of a manager in de engineering department of ASML is.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse