Those machines are our breakthrough, we worked on making them for very long years, he is the ceo since some months ago, he doesn't get to own OUR success and fire the actual owners of it.

We deserve a better leader.

We are way more important than the entire board of management, I mean an entire country like Belgium did not have a government for 2 years, and they are still a country.

No forced layoffs.

The results are announced, social plan is 1 month per year, extra payments for higher age group, voluntary leaving scheme, support with finding work and training budget..

How do you feel about it?

Long years ago, I had just landed my very first job, the salary was far from satisfying.

I was a fresh masters graduate, so I approached my salary question the way a naïve post grad student would, define an academically backed clear path for earning a much higher income, I later found myself in an endless rabbit hole, and got deeper and deeper into market dynamics, and man, it’s a dark world.

With the current layoff epidemic, you might frequently hear "They pay well, those laid off have no further claim", "Employees are not married to the company", "They absolutely can cut people", oh well, lets talk about the famous worker/engineering compensation problem.. 

Who actually created the value?

The question is obvious: If workers built it, why do they earn only a small fraction of what they built?

This is one of the most debated problems in labour economics. Scholars have spent decades trying to figure out how value is really created, captured, and distributed.

A tech company generates huge profits from engineering work that required decades of accumulated knowledge and thousands of individual contributions. The executives and board members sit far away from the actual product.

Still, the financial returns flow mostly upward to a class of people whose main job was capital allocation and governance.

Compensation for time vs compensation for value:

Workers get paid for their time -hours, availability, compliance, and being replaceable. The people who produce the actual technical breakthroughs are on salary, compensated for their time rather than for the value they create.

When you sign the contract, you hand over the rights to your output for a fixed wage. The company keeps the surplus.

Executives, on the other hand, get paid for outcomes - share price, profits, firm performance. Nobody asks if they worked exactly 43.5 hours.

But WHY?

Why is “value-based pay” concentrated at the top while everyone else gets time-based pay?

Traditional economics says value creation comes mainly from financial capital and decision-making at the top. They love citing marginal productivity theory.

This 19th century theory with a sophisticated name basically argues that if we add exactly one worker, we will only achieve a small extra revenue, It then concludes that the payment of each worker is approximately the value they contribute.

There is over a century of debate around the limitations and the economical validity of this theory, which is used as a standard economic basis for payment schemes, here I list some of the most famous arguments:  

1. If compensation is based on the value, then compensation would track value creation pretty closely.

It doesn’t.

When a senior engineer with 20 years of knowledge leaves, the real cost (lost productivity, knowledge gaps, onboarding) is usually much higher than their salary. Research on replacement cost has been consistently showing that it could significantly exceed that engineer’s salary.

2. The value comes from "the system": value is deeply, irreducibly collective, and generational.

This is the lifetime work of Herbert Simon, he was awarded a Nobel prize for his significant contributions. (I encourage everyone to read Herbert Simon).

Simon famously introduced the bounded rationality theory, he argued that human decision making is quite limited by information availability/quality, time constraints and cognitive abilities.

Simon estimated that roughly 90% of what we earn in modern economies comes from social capital -the accumulated knowledge, institutions, and systems built over generations- not from pure individual effort.

a. Individual contribution is impossible to isolate and compute:

Drop a brilliant engineer into a pre-industrial society and they won’t produce anywhere near the same output. The value creation of a worker is massively amplified by civilization-level inheritance and cross organization coordination built over centuries.

b. The created value propagates endlessly and recursively:

An individual contributor's impact is hard to calculate, one engineer who built a smart pipeline or algorithm in 10 hours, could have saved 1000 hours work of multiple other engineers.

The impact could even be global, an engineering team that improved googles' ad ranking by 1% added a global impact.

Thats not all, the value gets deeply embedded into the system and amplifies everyone else’s work. It’s almost impossible to isolate any single person’s contribution.

c. The decision making quality of an executive is largely a product of the system and the workers: 

Traditional economics rewards executives for decision making because it assumes they’re calmly calculating the absolute best outcome. Simon basically rejected that. He showed that humans can’t possibly evaluate every option -we’re limited by time, bad information, and our own brains.

That means an executive’s “brilliant decisions” are actually heavily dependent on the quality of information they get. And most of that information is gathered, filtered, and improved by the people working below them.

An engineer at the bottom of the ladder is creating real value every time they cut through complexity, make something clearer, or speed up how fast and how well decisions can be made higher up.

 d. Accumulated knowledge a primary value asset:

If you dropped infinite money into a pre industrial society and brought along the best executive team in the world to make all the “optimal decisions,” they still wouldn’t produce anything close to what a modern tech company can output.
That’s exactly why competitors can’t just copy a high-tech company by buying expensive machines or throwing unlimited capital at the problem. They’re still missing decades of accumulated knowledge.

And this is why companies aggressively protect patents and push hard for legal systems that put those patents in the company’s name -not the individual engineer who actually created them. It’s a perfect example of how the real value created by workers gets legally taken by the employer and then credited to the “brilliant decision making” of the executives.

3. Executives can influence their income, other workers can not.

CEO-to-worker pay ratios have exploded over the decades. Lucian Bebchuk’s research shows CEO compensation is often set through friendly committees and peer benchmarking that just keeps inflating it upward.

Meanwhile, people at lower levels have almost no power over how their contribution gets priced.

4. The ownership question — who should capture the returns from technical work?

The traditional answer is: shareholders own the company, so shareholders capture the returns. Others are compensated for their time and they have no further claim.

But in a knowledge economy, that story is getting outdated. Knowledge itself is a major productive asset now. People who generate and hold that knowledge arguably have a legitimate claim.

The stakeholder vs shareholder theory

Edward Freeman (Another scholar i would highly recommend), argued that on the long run a business would be more sustainable and successful if it creates value for all stakeholders -ex: customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and shareholders- rather than focusing only on shareholder profit, this is called the stakeholder theory, and it is the opposite of the shareholder theory — introduced by Milton Friedman —which is the idea that a company should be run for the benefit of shareholders alone.

Some countries like Germany and the Netherlands already require worker representation on boards for exactly this reason.

The modern debate is not whether workers "labour capital” has a legitimate claim -European law has already answered that. The real question is how large that claim should actually be, and how realistic it is to enforce it when the power gap is so massive.

Even though shareholder theory gets quite debated in academic circles, it still sounds like THE common sense to most people. It’s deeply baked into how many workers think about their own rights, even when they’ve never heard the academic name for it.

Which is why I will end this post with this beautiful quote by Nietzsche:

All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

Every time people here express frustration with what’s happening, there will be a comment like:

- their company, their rules.
- If you don’t like it, just leave.
- company has no commitment to keep people.

Sounds like common sense. It isn’t. It’s actually a remarkably shallow position that collapses the moment you apply any serious thinking.

1. Corporations exist inside society — not above it.

A company isn’t a sovereign entity. It operates under licenses issued by the state, uses infrastructure built by taxpayers, depends on a legal system created by the public, and employs people who are citizens with rights. These people's skills, education and health is the collective product of society and tax payers.

The collective society builds the infrastructure and the people, major aspects defining the ability of a corporate to create value.

When a company does layoffs, those workers don’t just disappear from the economy. They go on unemployment and draw from social insurance systems (WW — werkloosheidswet), so the cost of corporate decisions is socialised and externalised, even when the profit is private.

The “their company, their rules” argument quietly assumes that corporations operate in a vacuum. They don’t. They are embedded in a social contract. The Netherlands — like most of Western Europe — has made a deliberate political choice that this contract includes protections for employees: notice periods, severance (transitievergoeding), etc.

These are not charity. They are the price corporations pay for the collective social product they consume.

2. Workers lose market mobility as a direct result of their work inside a specialised corporate

"Just leave" argument only makes sense in a frictionless hypothetical market with perfect information, zero switching costs, and infinite equivalent opportunities.

Lets talk about real world:
• ASML is one of the most specialized employers in the world in one of the most specialized industries on Earth. Many of the people affected have spent years building expertise that doesn’t just transfer anywhere, this deep expertise contributed to the success of asml.
• Moving jobs means disrupting housing, children’s schools, pension accrual, visa status (a significant portion of ASML’s workforce are international), etc

To build the corporates' success, workers lost ability to move, laying them off is throwing the cost on the society.

3. Collective grievance IS how rights were built

Every single labor protection they benefit from today — weekend, 8-hour workday, paid leave, sick pay, wrongful termination protections — exists because people didn’t just leave.

They organized. They complained loudly. They stayed and pushed back.

The logic of “if you’re unhappy, leave” — applied consistently throughout history — would have prevented every labor reform ever achieved. Because the alternative to complaining isn’t always individual exit. Sometimes it’s collective voice. And collective voice is how power imbalances in labor markets get corrected.

This is just basic political economy and is has a name. Albert Hirschman called it exit vs. voice. Exit (leaving) is one response to institutional failure. Voice (speaking up, organizing, demanding accountability) is another — and often the more socially productive one, especially when exit costs are high.

4. "Their rules” — promoting a one-sided power relationship

"Just leave" implicitly means that companies should have unchecked power over the people who work for them, and that workers who object have no legitimate standing to do so beyond leaving.

But why should capital have more rights than labor in a democratic society? Why should a shareholder’s claim outweigh the claim of thousands of people who spent long years contributing to the success of that company?

These are the exact questions that produced the EU’s worker consultation directives, that produced the Dutch works council legislation, that produced every collective bargaining agreement ever signed.

The “their rules” crowd is essentially arguing that decades of democratic labor policy were a mistake.

5. “Their company” — the delusion of defined ownership

What is called ‘ownership’ at corporate scale is far less academically settled than the ‘just leave’ crowd assumes — even in mainstream economics.

When people say “their company, their rules,” the implicit picture is a founder-entrepreneur who built something from scratch and gets to run it however they like. That’s a romantic story, and it occasionally applies to a small business. It almost never applies to a publicly traded multinational.

ASML is owned by institutional investors — pension funds, index funds, asset managers. A meaningful portion of the shares are held by funds that manage retirement savings of ordinary workers, including, likely, some of the very workers being laid off. The clean line between “the owners” and “the workers” is largely a fiction.

What creates this fiction is a governance structure that concentrates decision-making power in the hands of a small executive class, while dispersing both risk and cost across thousands of employees and — later — the broader society.

6. The compensation gap, deliberate measure to feed the fiction

Economists have been debating executive pay for decades, and the academic literature does not support the idea that C-suite compensation reflects proportional value creation.

Lucian Bebchuk at Harvard, Thomas Piketty’s work on capital concentration, and the extensive research on CEO pay ratcheting all point in the same direction: executive compensation is largely a product of power and negotiation leverage.

The people setting CEO salaries are often sitting on each other’s boards. This is a well documented and studied governance failure — and it is precisely what the “their company” crowd is defending without realizing it.

The ratio between median worker pay and CEO pay in large corporations has gone from roughly 20:1 in the 1960s to over 300:1 today in many cases, not because executives produce 15 times more value, the balance of power simply shifted — toward capital and shareholders, and it will only shift more.

It shifted as a result of the original imbalance accumulating wealth and power — which was then used to lobby for tax structures, shape corporate governance rules, and influence the very boards that set executive pay. A self-feeding loop that will keep tilting the system toward those with more power.

7. Labor rules exist for one reason: power imbalance — and everyone knows it

Labor law, collective bargaining rights, works council legislation, etc exist because, without them, the power imbalance between an individual employee and a large corporation can have significant destructive impact on a society.

The corporation has capital reserves, legal teams, the ability to wait, and the ability to replace any individual worker. The individual worker has their labor, their mortgage, and in most cases, no realistic ability to withstand even a few months without income. This is not a moral failing of either party. It is a structural condition.

Labor law is not a courtesy extended to workers by enlightened corporations. It is a democratic correction to an otherwise unbalanced system. It exists because concentrated power without institutional counterweights produces outcomes that would externalise costs onto public systems — and democratic societies decided to build constraints against that.

Disagreeing with that architecture is a legitimate political position. But dressing it up as common sense is not honest about what it’s actually defending.

8. Complaining IS a legitimate form of social participation

Expressing dissatisfaction with how a major employer treats people is not whining. It is a form of democratic participation.

ASML is not a small startup. It is a company of thousands of people, critical to the global semiconductor supply chain, operating in a country with strong civic traditions around corporate accountability. When large institutions make decisions that affect thousands of livelihoods, public discourse about those decisions is not just acceptable — it’s healthy.

The people saying “stop complaining and leave” are essentially arguing that workers should be silent or absent. Neither option serves a functioning society.

To summarize:

The “just leave” argument fails on multiple levels:

Legally: Corporations operate inside social contracts, not above them.

Economically: Labor mobility is not frictionless, especially in specialised industries.

Historically: Worker rights came from people who didn’t just leave.

Politically: Collective voice is a legitimate and necessary counterweight to institutional power.

Academically: “Their company” is a fiction at scale — built by thousands, owned by institutional funds, governed by a managerial class with asymmetric compensation that academic literature does not justify.

Philosophically: A democratic society doesn’t require citizens to be silent stakeholders in the institutions that shape their lives.

You can think a company’s decision is within its legal rights AND think it’s worth criticizing, worth discussing, and worth collectively pushing back against.

P.S: The “just leave” crowd means well, I think. But they’re accidentally defending a model of corporate-labor relations that most of the developed world has deliberately — through democratic process — moved away from.

The reorganisation's argument is our complexity, well, indeed asml is complex, but after long years here, I know one thing: what we build is insanely complex too.

So, a huge part of our organisational complexity is the direct consequence of building arguably the most complex industrial machine humans ever made.

EUV machines are not “one product", right? They are:
- optics at near-physics limits
- nanometer precision mechanics
- plasma physics
- advanced vacuum systems
- thermal stability
- multiple software layers to handle all that
- supply chain orchestration across hundreds of specialized suppliers
- integration tolerances where tiny errors can have a significant impact

I think that cannot run like a startup.

So when Christophe says: “we became too complex,” I have a question:

Do we know how much complexity is waste, and how much is simply the unavoidable cost of operating at this technological frontier at scale?

ASML is a monopoly for a reason. This level of complexity is incredibly hard/expensive to replicate.

There are different failure modes:

Too much bureaucracy: engineering slowed down, endless approvals, duplicated roles, conflicting priorities, ..

Over simplification: critical knowledge disappears, coordination breaks, expertise gaps pop up, integration quality slips, ..

I wonder whether removing “redundancy” could accidentally remove some invisible glue holding critical parts together?

And they are striking to demand more..

I have nothing to say..

As a foreigner living here, I believe I haven't explored the Netherlands nearly enough — and honestly, it surprises me that even my expat colleagues tend to plan vacations *outside* the country rather than discovering what's right here.

From what I've seen, the Netherlands is genuinely breathtaking in places. I want to experience more of that.

Looking for suggestions — preferably:
- Nature & greenery (not city trips)
- Kid-friendly
- Not too pricey
- Actual accommodation (not camping)

I've done the usual Google + AI searches of course, but from enough mistakes led by google i realised that locals know their country significantly better — including the hidden gems that don't show up on the first page of results.

Where would *you* take someone who wants to explore more of the fascinating beauty of this country?

Given the software engineer:
- has 15 years of experience
- does system level architecture and validation
- worked on electronic circuit simulators for years
- has a post grad degree in simulating and modelling complex electronic circuits
- modelled and built systems from scratch
- studied electronics engineering
- worked on software interacting with PLCs and sensors

can that person apply for a senior plant simulation position leveraging the modelling and simulation experience they have although in a different domain? -IC and circuit design-

The position is to model manufacturing processes, collect and analyse data that enhances business performance and reduce cost.

The software engineer is also quite experienced with data analysis.

Given the software engineer:
- has 15 years of experience
- does system level architecture and validation
- worked on electronic circuit simulators for years
- has a post grad degree in simulating and modelling complex circuits
- modelled and built systems from scratch
- studied electronics engineering

can that person apply for a senior plant simulation position leveraging the modelling and simulation experience they have although in a different domain?

I notice the number went down significantly from around 20k to 13k.. its strange, can a moderator explain what happened?

Is it possible to apply to a position where the JG is 1 or 2 higher than my current JG? In that case how will the JG difference will be handled?

Example: an architect at D&E with JG08, and openings outside D&E for a technical project lead at JG09 and JG10, would it be possible to apply?