Agreed. Actually - maybe no? Maybe the hourly wage is the problem. It's been too low for too long so there was no pressure to innovate. Denmark and Switzerland are big manufacturers with high wages that are continuously innovating. Maybe the Euro was a curse for Germany afteral? Without it their wages would have been higher.
Artificially increasing wages to get a better product is like Cargo Culting. Some people see successful companies paying their employees a ton, then assume that's what created the successful company when it's so obviously the other way around. But the politicians/union heads benefit from selling it the other way. This conversation just always gets derailed by pointing out how paying substantially below market is also bad, as if it were a counterpoint.
That's my point in France also: industries complain about the cost of workforce, therefore they've moved everything offshore for the last two decades and they are lobbying heavily for lowering the wages and taxes in order to "invest".
But there is nothing to invest into anymore, France's industry is dead (partly because of Germany with the Hartz agreement btw, lowering demand for italian or french goods which were already less competitive than german ones on export and domestic market because of the euro) and if they didn't care to put capital on automation when wages were high, why would they do it when work becomes cheap?
>That's my point in France also: industries complain about the cost of workforce, therefore they've moved everything offshore for the last two decades and they are lobbying heavily for lowering the wages and taxes in order to "invest".
100% exactly the same in Austria and I can speculate Italy as well.
I am hearing rumors that B2B sales is rebounding back to more in-person meetings. Cold emails don't work anymore. I've heard similar tales of current teens early-twenties that there is a trend of doing things in real life again. But... more likely if you start measuring it people are more reclusive than ever, and doing things that used to be normal is now considered "niche and trendy". Our sales process at least is very online-meeting oriented...
I was born in 1989. The most impressive sudden technological advance I have experienced have been LLMs. This video is a good candidate for second place. I am mindblown... That they even dare having children dance with them. The trust they must place. An acquantance bought a chess board with a robot arm, and it accidentally broke his finger because he picked up a piece that the robot arm wanted to pick up. China isn't just a few hours in the future, more like decades it feels like.
You were born in 1989 and don't consider the internet the most impressive sudden technological advantage you have lived through? Wireless communication? Jesus.
Someone born in 89, in many countries, would've grown up with the internet and non-smart cell phones, at least, no?
They'd only have been 10 in 1999 when cell phones were pretty ubiquitous among adults. I'd say they were basically past it already.
I was born ten years earlier and I'd agree that the internet is likely the biggest change in my lifespan, but I'm not sure I'd say it was as sudden as the past 2 years of AI.
Sure those are impressive. But they weren't sudden. It was already there before I was born and slowly evolved.
If I look at the most useful technologies around me, then Google Maps ranks high. But it wasn't sudden. It was on the desktop first. And then slowly crept through mobile.
LLMs on the other hand, suddenly just kind of appeared.
Not to take away from the seriousness of the moment, but I feel compelled to share my feeling shere: My inner teenager was hoping to see TeamSpeak and Ventrilo listed just to honor the good old days. Between 2005-2008 it felt as if Ventrilo had about 90% of the market, with TeamSpeak having the rest. I guess the hopeful message is that nothing lasts forever and alternatives come and go.
Mumble is similarly old (3 or 4 years newer), and free software unlike the other two (the trick to longevity). Still around and updated. I used it just a couple days ago.
Am I the only one that is simply scared of running your own cloud? What happens if your administrator credentials get leaked? At least with Azure I can phone microsoft and initiate a recovery. Because of backups and soft deletion policies quite a lot is possible. I guess you can build in these failsafe scenarios locally too? But what if a fire happens like in South Korea? Sure most companies run more immediate risks such as going bankrupt, but at least Cloud relieves me from the stuff of nightmares.
Except now I have nightmares that the USA will enforce the patriot act and force Microsoft to hand over all their data in European data centers and then we have to migrate everything to a local cloud provider. Argh...
Do you have a computer at home? Are you scared of its credentials leaking? A server is just another computer with a good internet connection.
You can equip your server with a mouse, keyboard and screen and then it doesn't even need credentials. The credential is your physical access to the mouse and keyboard.
I mean people are nowadays are really scared of using microwave oven too. What happens if I heat my coffee 1 min too long. Could be near death experience. Thats why I always drive down to Starbucks for coffee!
Urgh... Elon is famous not for things he's done, but for saying things he is going to do. Do people still buy in to this? Elon Musk always promises things far in the future but doesn't make good on them. He hasn't succeeded in self driving cars. He is never going to mars. He is not solving the LA traffic problem with tunnels. His robots are the equivalent of the Metaverse. He's a phenomenal businessman, and understands that a story is part of that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 :-)
Not strange at all! If you want to go by car you must build even more tunnels. Mountainous regions favor rail just like urban areas do. Furthermore, 19th century investments into rail still pay off in mountainous regions, because once you build a railway bridge or tunnel, you are kind of dumb not to use it. In the USA competition from trucks or cars is much tougher.
Note the US has the number one freight rail system in the world by most measures (there are lots of ways to measure this depending on how you want to abuse the statistics). Some of this is Europe has better river routes to work with (I don't know Asia), but some of this is Europe has focused more on passengers to the point where freight is unable to get through forcing trucks.
Is Atlas Shrugged really that bad? Heh, I started reading the fountainhead in my mid 30ies. The natural way you get introduced to new characters is great, but man I got so angry with the unrealistic robotic personalities I kept putting the book away and after 200 pages I really just could not continue. So Atlas Shrugged is similar? What a disappointment!
Anybody here that loved the books and would care to elaborate it speak to them so much?
As a teenager who went through quite a similar journey back in the day, it wasn't as much the books (which are quite badly written, I still have PTSD from that monologue) and more about the story very plainly supporting the view of the world I had back then... Champions of industry, unshackled by free enterprise, freed from the stagnation of governance etc.
Here's a story about how the mere perception of "regulations exist and are strict" is dragging down my european AI start-up:
Our product makes it easy to capture and share knowledge on the factory floor, which is very important when many of your workers about to retire. Interest is enormous. It is a simple SaaS. You'd think selling would be easy. And it is: In the USA. In Europe the mere existence of the regulations (not what's in them) delays us by 6 months at least per deal.
No european executive really understands what is in the GDPR, and eventhough we are 100% compliant, there is nothing we can do to take away this fear. This means that when we talk to European companies, IT and Legal departments always have to be closely involved, leading to all sorts of political games; each department conjures up non-existing risk by talking vaguely about data privacy, just so they appear important. Half a year later when the dust has settled, the executive buys the product, or their mind has moved to other things.
My point is this: What is in the laws is not important to me. What is important is that current perception of laws turn companies into slugs. I want us to mentally move back to 2018 where we could "just buy SaaS" without worrying endlessly about data privacy. I understand hesitency when it comes to cyber security, but that is not what is slowing us down.
One of our workarounds currently is simply never to mention we use AI.
