I work for a small German company. Some time ago the owner sold it to big bloated company. At the time under the owner the management circle was 6 people, now it’s 17!!!!! And the revenue is lower with bigger headcount, because managers manage and do not work.

I almost cry at work from sadness. So much potential wasted, the company has great market access and still good name. Polishing old products would make this hockey stick revenue growth. But with management explosion everything is being wasted. Meetings about meetings, no product upgrades and total stagnation. While managers fight over parking spots near front door for VIPs.

> There's something with the management from these massive German conglomerates that just lacks any sort of vision.

It's a universally hard tendency to resist as enterprises grow into big organisations.

Company starts small and lean; people involved in making product also do most of everything else. Over time specialist HR, Finance, Legal, Marketing etc functions are added. All try to do their best but all with their own non-product agenda. All usually hired and sitting at or close to the same top table decision making process, all diluting and distracting from the vision/mission of what was important to the organisation in the first place. Eventually, the company's top-level decisions becomes more about that than the product.

> bureaucracy and stagnation while the same staff ends up flourishing and producing top notch tech when under a US company like Apple

Apple orders a widget from them which can be sold in an established product with existing customers. The magic was creating the Apple brand and iPhone product.

I think the problem with old European "conglomerates" is that no one has the mandate/legitimacy to make a multi-year/decade tech investment equivalent to the iphone. "Decision makers" are likely to have been promoted from other professions than engineering/products, and people promoted through management/sales lack competence and legitimacy. Their job is to apply old and approved templates for decision-making, while paying dues and respect to appropriate people.

It fails when templates for decision-making don't exist. Spin-offs or acquisitions based on new tech, rather than existing products/markets, can't work with this type of management.

I have also gotten the sense that management positions are given as rewards for "long and loyal service". It is effectively an incentives program, with the implicit assumption that management decisions don't really matter. This is not far from the the truth in old industrial companies with few but huge returning "captive" customers, which is typical in Europe eg Siemens, or high value luxury brands in fashion/jewellery/liquor/etc.

The meaning of the word "verwaltung" is different from the American "management". Verwaltung implies "preservation of stability" whereas "business management" implies something like "figure out how to sell more stuff".

> Healthineers

I love the name! It makes me laugh!

Might not be the branding they were going for, but they should lean in. Lot's of spontaneous singing and dancing. :)

> Qimonda

Sorry for the tangent, I haven't heard this name in over 15 years, I interviewed with them the summer before the final year of my BEng, and was offered a job in China to allegedly built a real-time voice/video communications system between what they said were their three facilities in beautiful looking part of China I can't remember the name of now.

Looking through my Gmail, it was 2008 they offered my the position; and looking at the Wiki page, I'm glad I didn't take the offer, as it appears it didn't last much longer?

The problem now seems to be that that kind of management is in charge in the government...

Siemens Energy (which meanwhile is completely separated from Siemens) did a massive cleanup of their management overhead two or three years ago. They cut several layers and a lot of managers got downgraded or let go. Looking at their stock performance it seems they did the right thing.

I really hope that other German enterprises will use this as an example.

My guess is German labor laws do not allow hustling. Progress will be slow if everyone kinda just coast on cruise control.

The reality is that once you reach a high enough level, your worth can be justified in smaller windows of time. The higher your role, the more impact your decisions have, and the more money small (but important) decisions can generate.

Think of a dev paid $250k/yr that comes up with a clever database scheme that saves the company $5m/yr in cloud costs. If nothing else, the company is in the green for years on that investment in that dev even if the dev just piddle paddles along with small fixes 99% of the time.

The part that sucks though is the general optics of these positions. Humans just instinctively want to correlate high pay with high busy work load, rather than high pay with high impact, which is how it actually works.

It suddenly starts making sense when you realize that most people are stupid. My strategy here is that I just adjust my schedule to have tasks take literally 10x time than they should and enjoy my free time while managers argue about shit.

While you are not wrong, many of the cases I observed had managers from all over the world.

I think it's just a symptom. As a manager, you contribute nothing by yourself. You are useful if you have a useful team (ICs) with a good project. To have that, you need to defend yourself against other managers who will take this from you. If you then also want to get prompted, your task is also to vacuum in all sorts of soft power, visibility, decision rights and being-in-the-roomness. It's even efficient, in that case, to destroy efficiency with processes (under your involvement)

As an IC, you are always valuable as you can always create value.

Hence, by having enough managers, you ensure that their competition will destroy the company.

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.

> Unemployment benefits are unconditional until you find a new job.

They are quite conditional: you must be applying for a new job while receiving them, and after the first six months any job you can do is eligible (not just the jobs you would want to do). You must report your job applications to the unemployment agency, and you can get called in and cut off from benefits for not earnestly seeking a job.

That's pretty generous, even for EU standards. In Austria for example, unconditional unemployment is 60% of your income and only lasting for a dozen or so weeks, after which you are forced to accept any job offer thrown at you or risk having your unemployment taken away.

Recently I got to know at an interview how company A (big western company) acquired another company years ago and are now working on redeveloping code that was an important part of the acquisition which fails to scale beyond the original use case.

This kind of stuff during interviews is a lot of learning in itself especially if you’re working already in the same area.

yeah, I've gotten this kind of knowledge from an interview before. They let slip a little something as to the project you will be working on, you start asking given the project you described I wonder if... and then they tend to tell you how it is.

Yeah I knew plenty people at ASML at the time. I wrote my comment a bit too condensed there, the interview wasn't my only exposure to the place. At the time it was very chaotic (for good and bad), the codebase was awful, there was plenty armwrestling but to my understanding it was mostly armwrestling about the tech, not about island building and the likes.

Like just as an example, they made sure that by every coffee machine there was a whiteboard for general use. The idea was that if you ran into someone at the coffee machine and got talking and suddenly got an idea together, you could immediately jot it down and geek out about it together and work it out in more detail, right there and then. No meeting to plan, no project manager to involve, just work out your idea together. That's not what you'd expect in a company with lots of managers protecting their little islands.

Even if what you are saying it's true (which is hard to prove), that may not be their fault either. Sometimes the context doesn't allow you to do what you want, what you think it's best, etc. You would say "Resign and find somewhere where you could", and that isn't easy either.

So again, please let's try to be more empathic, we are not talking about terrorist or really bad guys. These are employees of companies, with familires, who probably need those salaries to live in these weird times.

Sure, but mass layoffs do not necessarily mean that they are laying off the people not doing anything.

It's not a foregone conclusion that they are bullshit jobs. What's likely to happen is that work or risk management will now be foisted on other staff that will not receive extra compensation for handling or will get marked down or dismissed for not completing.

Management consultant firms propagate these ideas - even if they had nothing to do with the original implementation.

ASML is a net positive for the world. Scientists pushing technology forward. Read about how they achieved EUV lithography, what an amazing feat.

META is a net negative for the world. Its leadership prioritizes profit over user safety (e.g. not protecting children), it allowed democracies to be undermined by boosting misinformation and social division.