[nn3]

Relevant HN comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18463181

Apparently their software development processes are terrible.

[lnxg33k1]

I've lived in NL for a while, few years, changed few companies, it's a place where processes are more important than actual code quality, where people stay in the same job for 10-15 years and everything below that is seen as a bad thing, people is hired for the culture primarily, having awareness of software principles is really worthless. I ran away as the last company I interviewed with, after solving a coding puzzle in 30 seconds, finishing in 15 mins something which had to take 45 mins, asked "Are you available to come at the office on Friday for company parties?". So I can only have nightmares about software practices in NL companies

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

[smooc]

I'm a hiring manager in the Netherlands. I would be happy that you ran away, because you would not have passed the bar.

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.

[mrtksn]

Good thing that soon all the software would be written by AI then.

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.

[nroets]

This is a company with over 40,000 employees and a market cap of over $100b. Surely they would have opened offices in different countries if Dutch culture was holding them back.

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

[YorickPeterse]

This seems like a very one-sided opinion/experience. While I've certainly had my own share of odd experiences and heard similarly odd stories, this doesn't really strike me as specific to The Netherlands as a whole.

[midasz]

I'm going to defend this method of hiring a little bit. To me, having at least a bachelor of IT already proves you have software engineering skills. The coding tests are just a quick check if you haven't lied or anything. The first month is trial basis anyway (both ways) so if the candidate is not on-par technically it's a quick goodbye.

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.

[konschubert]

I thought that the dutch would be more ... modern?

[jessriedel]

Tbc, based on the comment that looks to be driven almost completely by the fact that they are making a tiny number of incredibly expensive bespoke machines, so they can't just keep extra machines lying around to do unit tests with (both because each machine is expensive, and because the results wouldn't necessarily generalize to other machines). So it sounds like a constraint of the field, not bad choices.

[FirmwareBurner]

Why do you need the actual production machine for unit tests? Why can't you build a SW simulator for them and run unit tests on them?

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.

[skrebbel]

Many other machine builders in the area have large parts of the hardware replicated as a software simulator so they can test the code as much as they wish. It’s not uncommon to begin load testing the software (incl lots of error scenarios, simulate a robot arm getting stuck etc) before the first prototype of a machine got put together.

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.

[nextaccountic]

The build taking 8 hours doesn't seem to be consequence of the field they are operating

[yau8edq12i]

I love these threads. Everyone will chime in about how they know better how to run the company, with suggestions on the processes that they don't know and so on. Meanwhile the story is "business is #1 and booming". Elegant software stacks aren't always the most important part of the business.

[leokennis]

Exactly. ASML made a profit of about $2,050,000,000,- in 2023. I doubt they are very interested in complaints about how some random dude expected more time to run his tests.

[random_walker]

Exactly, I guess that's because HN has quite software-heavy crowd. Most of them like to see software changing the world.

[skrebbel]

Note that I wrote that in 2018 based on hearsay from well before that (I live in the area and have friends who worked at ASML at the time). Things might’ve changed in the ~10 years since then (for better or worse!).

EDIT: there’s a commenter named hcfman here in the thread who works at ASML and says that my comment is garbage (which I take to mean that it’s way outdated). Consider updating your impression accordingly, I see no reason to doubt what they’re saying. Last I checked ASML really did want to improve the software situation, looks like they did.

[svilen_dobrev]

i advised one of their software-making vendors on software-organisation+culture and similars, about 10y ago. It went pretty well, but the funny thing was, The tools and environment they had to use (because of ASML) to check/test stuff, was same as it was in Motorola 25 years ago (Sun CDE /Common Desktop Env? something like that). I felt like dropped in a time machine :/

[1123581321]

From that comment I concluded that software patching speed isn’t a bottleneck there. It sounds frustrating but to be terrible it needs to significantly impede the product or business relationships, which isn’t at all happening.

[away271828]

Stability and long product lifecycles are incredibly important to them. They're pretty much the opposite of move fast and break things or deploy early/deploy often.

[konschubert]

I find it strange that they are making so few machines.

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?

[midasz]

There's not going to much meaningful pushback on this comment because any (ex-)ASML employee is going to be super hesitant to share anything. So feel free to think what you want.

[skrebbel]

Are you sure? Every ASML person I know loves sharing these stories at parties. It’s not a secret or anything. Stock wont go down if people find out that the code is a mess, everybody who cares about this already knows it.

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.

[gostsamo]

Former employee of an ASML contractor and the software is terrible. Here, you have it.

[seper8]

They don't just test software on the machines. Inaccurate comment at least in 2024.

[hcfman]

The comments in that post are full of untruths. ASML is a huge company so no one person can talk about all of it.

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.

[hcfman]

Except that link is to a story with a lot of garbage in it.

[ziddoap]

Do you have other insight? A counterpoint? Anecdote that supports a different narrative? Anything, at all, that would contribute to the conversation and support your "garbage" comment?

[newprint]

Lol, thank you for link. I was expecting the opposite from this company, but for some reason, after reading this, I'm not surprised at all.

[FirmwareBurner]

>I was expecting the opposite from this company

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.

[bee_rider]

They are physicists and hardware folks, right? I would expect messy code written by convoluted processes for nightmare applications, that somehow works.

[themerone]

I expect that if their costumers had to choose between ASML keeping machines around for software testing or shipping every machine the can build, they would want the hardware.

[olejorgenb]

Linked comment is from 2018.

Not really that old on this context though.

[karmasimida]

I don't think so. Any update that is as complex, expensive and critical, to equipments such as ASML's, should be carefully examined to the teeth.