Ah yes, ASML. I have a number of friends and ex-colleagues who work there. Unsurprisingly, due to their importance, ASML are extremely well-known inside of the Netherlands. It's one of those companies that spun out of Philips Electronics and became very successful (NXP is another good example).
A lot of research and development is still going on in the area where Philips had their research labs. If you're curious to see what kind of high-tech is being worked on in the "Dutch silicon valley" I suggest you Google "Brainport Eindhoven" or "High Tech Campus Eindhoven".
Kinda off-topic but what's it like working at ASML? They are hiring for a lot of software roles at the moment. I've been mulling about applying there but from the outside it looks very bureaucratic (at least that's what the Glassdoor reviews seem to indicate).
As someone who currently works there it is indeed bureaucratic. But I also feel like it is an environment that focuses less on cost/money and optimizes for the highest quality. I.e., there is room to explore the best way of doing something and there is less pressure to do it ASAP or for the lowest price.
Ah fair enough, thanks for the insight. I've worked in a heavily regulated domain for the past few years and just wanted a change to something different. Perhaps I'll still give it a shot if nothing else turns up.
I applied there, they asked me what I would do if there was too much work for the week. Of course I answered I would just work nights, np. No, they said: Go to your team lead tell her/him you can do one thing and discuss what to choose. They don’t want people getting burned out, they are too important. I liked that.
In most interview situations, the interviewer is looking for someone who will "go the distance" to deliver no matter what, i.e. someone who will work nights
You can use this question to show your strength, you can say if its a one off situation you will go the distance but if its happening regularly then you will try to raise questions like why are projects always going into crunch mode, are we not estimating the tasks properly etc.
This shows that you are a team player but also willing to push back.
Did it seem to you as if they "held that against you"?, I mean, that you said you'd work (a lot?) extra? Maybe they could look at that as indicating some lack of life experience,
Or was their intention with that part of the interview primarily informational, I mean, that they wanted you to get to know their company better?
They immediately told me it was a sort of trick question and explained why (they value my sanity and health). Perhaps it was also a way to advertise themselves to me? They sure made a good impression with this.
If it happens once or twice a year, I still wouldn't be bothered by it. In fact, I'm such a procrastinator that I sometimes do it because of my own tendency to postpone things.
I love working at night, but not in addition to working the previous day. Has a bad impact on everything unless it's truly a one-off emergency or something.
You have to clock your hours there and are pushed to take time off for any overhours you have made.
On the other hand, customer escalations are expected to be handled relatively quickly.
It really is. The machines are highly sophisticated and downtime is very costly. Code bases are heavily documented and have a bureaucratic process to protect them. ASML does have less crucial software projects that have a more normal process.
Some of the jobs look pretty cool, can you share what is the salary range to be expected? The website is silent about that, which in Europe almost always means underwhelming numbers.
I am a contractor who works for them, but have lots of friends working as direct employee. (Netherlands, software engineer mostly)
They pay you 12+1 salaries (1=you get half of your salary as bonus 2 times per year, as vacation bonus).
You get 40 days of vacation (Netherlands has 25 days of vacation standard, %99 of companies)so people are very relaxed.
ASML is able relocate you from another country, moving all your house (I think it was up to €5.000 costs). Bringing family etc. They show you around city, assign a guide to explore city, help for municipality stuff etc.
They also give a temporary (2months) accommodation until you find a place, or until they move your house.
They always hire because they are growing all the time.
They have people working since 20 years or even 25 years.
To me, frankly, it's like the Google of the Netherlands, because some people try to get hired by them and retire there. It's a good company in my experience.
Thanks for elaborating on all the perks, but frankly your posts misses the most important bit of info, namely the salary ranges. I don't care about vacations or relocation package if the salary is mediocre and I have to work there until I'm old (i.e. if they don't pay enough for me to save money and retire early/earlish).
Unrelated to this thread, but I always found 'optiver' such a weird name for a Dutch company. Sounds to me like "optiefer". "Optiefen" is a Dutch way of saying "fuck off".
Optiver works in a vastly different and super tiny sector (in employee count) which is renowned for having higher salaries than any other sector (including tech) and is a massive outlier.
Yes, though there's also a couple other examples. In my experience the biggest barrier to europeans getting fairly compensated is just that people believe it's impossible and so don't seek out the industries that do.
Of course you will just get help when you get cancer and homeless people get help when they need it. It takes some money away from the higher paying jobs, and may make the salary underwhelming compared to the US. But then again, you won’t need a million dollar house in the right neighborhood to get your kids into a decent school.
The US has taxes too (and their government does plenty of throwing money at things.) And many companies there still pay for health insurance. I think this argument doesn’t really make sense: taxes or other costs of doing business don’t sufficiently explain the difference in pay.
The wealth gap is a lot bigger in the US and here you can walk into a hospital even when you’re homeless and leave debt free. Anyone can apply for social security of about 1000 eur/month. People are only homeless when they have mental issues preventing them from following the steps to get them out and they can get help at any point. This is pretty different from the US.
I don’t disagree with what you wrote but I don’t understand what it has to do with differences in software engineer salaries between the US and the Netherlands.
I think GP meant more taxes to cover for country infrastructure (roads, power, etc) , schools, universities, health insurance, pensions, ie the 'all inclusive for everyone' package which is more common in Europe than in the US.
Some of these taxes are paid for by employers.
Edit:and they cover costs for everyone, including non employees (they're generic taxes, not employer-funded health insurance). So you have 'not the whole population' funding the whole population.
Basically, it's more expensive for the company to hire you, so you get less.
I remember talking to a company which could hire me either in the US or in the EU. US paid better because cost of employment was lower, but at the expense of an overall less complete package for me and my family which I would have had to complete with my own money .
In the end, you can't really compare raw salaries - you need to look at what's included, and what kind of cost of living you will incur.
The GP suggested that wages are lower in Europe because of higher taxes. So to be clear, I am only arguing about the former thing and what the taxes are used for is basically irrelevant to me.
My complaint is that the argument about tax just isn’t good at explaining the difference. Eg, choosing basically at random from a quick search[1], one might pay $100k in employee taxes on $265k gross (37%) in the Bay Area. I don’t have a good idea of the employer payroll taxes but if I guess about 8% that’s another $20k the employer needs to pay. Then they pay health insurance (rough guess at $20k per year, but not sure about this average numbers were like this including employee contributions so I’m assuming that plans are good but maybe employees are healthier than average and have smaller families bringing down the costs).
So that comes out to $305k from the employer and $165k to the employee.
Suppose a company spends the same amount in Berlin. That’s €260k. Let’s say there’s 20% or so of employer payroll taxes[2], and we’ll bump it up to 25% for extra private health insurance (no idea if that is reasonable; the 20% includes some compulsory insurance) giving a salary of €208k. And then at 50% effective tax rate[3] that comes to €104k = $120k net, which isn’t really so different from the Sam Francisco example. But you don’t (I think) see many salaries like that in Germany. They would look more like €100k gross[4], so where is all that other money going? I don’t believe there are 160% employer payroll taxes, and businesses generally pay taxes on profits not revenue. So there must be some increase in other costs for the business but I don’t understand what could explain such a big difference
I think the actual argument must be about competition and demand for labour. But I don’t really have a strong argument. Salaries are higher not far away in Switzerland. There is some theory that salaries are high (at some companies) in the US outside of coastal cities because one could believably threaten to move to one, but Europeans can’t typically make such a threat. But many Germans could surely threaten to move to Switzerland, and many do commute across the border. So I don’t see how it works.
Edit: I realise I picked Germany instead of the Netherlands. But I think tax rates are higher in Germany?
[3] made this number up. I suspect it is actually hard even with a relatively high income to pay such a high effective tax rate. I tried pulling out an online tax calculator but there are a lot of options and I didn’t know what was reasonable. 50% feels like a reasonable overestimate to me.
[4] this is mostly coming from HN. Maybe the Germans earning €200k don’t write comments complaining about salary differences between the US and Europe.
In the US, the rule of thumb seems to be that employer cost is about 1.3 what the employee gets. So using your quora example, if the employee got 265k (165k after all taxes) , it cost the employer 345kusd.
In France, the same 345kusd will turn into 172kusd for the employee, and after income tax, assuming single, no children, will become 120kusd.
Basically, for the employee to land the extra 45k (and match the us salary) , the employer will have to pay an extra 140kusd.
Now, this is a factor, but maybe not enough. I'll speculate that it's a combination of :
- lower cost of living in some parts of Europe (housing in the bay area vs German cities say) means less demand for for higher salaries. It's worth noting that gafas wanting to lower wages for remote workers seem to imply exactly this.
- some things are already paid for by your taxes (university, unemployment insurance, health, retirement, public transportation, etc), which will tend to keep wages lower as well because you don't need to take the money from your post income tax salary. This is why where your tax money goes matters. If tax money went entirely, say, to a pelican conservancy associations or waging war instead of all of the above , I would definitely want to be paid better.
- productivity questions aside, more vacation time so employer wants to pay less
- people commute, but very few people leave their country (language, culture, etc). Germany is a rich country, it's not obvious that your life will be spectacularly better in Switzerland (it might be though!). Sure, Switzerland has very high wages, but cost of life is very high, hence the commute. I will also venture a cultural aspect, which is purely speculative and based on my observations : Americans tend to move a lot more than Europeans.
Yes, pre-tax income is also different, even if you use "pre-tax" in the broadest sense (cost per employee, but without expenses like office space that happen to scale worth employee count but are not related at all to the contract). But if you look at cost per employee you still see much higher numbers in the US, that's what you were talking about, right?
I think the explanation is that the US simply has enough global dominators in their field (e.g. Google basically eating up the non-Chinese ad market over the whole range from local business directories to the brand awareness stuff that used to make TV stations a big business) that they define the market, pulling up the bids of weaker bidders, whereas in other places outliers looks ASML are so much of an exception that the bids they need to get whoever they want hardly influences market rate.
Well to counter that, when comparing similar employees within my international company between the US and the EU, the US employees are about 1.5 times more expensive (this is the money that an FTE will cost a project). Not sure why that is, perhaps it is really an inequality issue and maybe the cleaners are cheaper in the same company in the US than in the EU? I don't know those details.
> People are only homeless when they have mental issues
Not to say there's not a relative greater share of the homeless population who has "mental issues", but it's definitely not the only factor at play. Many situations can lead to homelessness.
I "walked the city" with some former homeless people with my colleagues as part of a societally relevant activity. They explained us that most cities have places where you can get a free postal address, then you can ask for "bijstand" (lowest level of support here), and for rent subsidy and care subsidies. Then you can apply for a social rent housing, which by then you can definitely afford. But going through these steps requires some level of focus and dedication. What you see is that people with severe ADHD (and a plethora of other issues) for example, simply can't sleep in a public sleeping place (like at the Salvation Army), too much crowd and strange people. They prefer the streets. Often they don't trust the state or the healthcare system and avoid seeking help even with festering wounds. One woman we spoke with was a raging alcoholic, one of her kids murdered the other one. These are tragic, heartbreaking stories. These people are completely locked up in their trauma.
I have a group of friends who all worked there (San Diego office, formerly Cymer), half of whom have quit. They complained of massive inefficiency (very bureaucratic, lots of meetings), relatively low pay, difficulty moving around, feeling overworked but still shipping buggy software, and some difficult colleagues.
I also happen to know a project manager there who had a bit of a rocky time getting started (overworked), but I think is now happy there.
To be honest, my friends have put me off from working there, but who knows, it could just be a biased impression and maybe the company is working to turn things around.
My major background is in electron microscopy. Eindhoven is also a massively important microscopy center. This is because Philips used to build great TEMs once upon a time, which was spun out as Philips Electron Optics in the mid 90s.
That company merged with FEI of Portland, OR to become one of the largest electron microscope company. FEI a few years back was bought out ThermoFisher to become a group company. They still command a huge portion of the electron microscopy market.
Philips history in 6 chapters, written up by RF engineer with 30 years at Philips/NXP https://www.maximus-randd.com/technology-history.html TLDR Commodore level management. It ends with picking inferior but marginally cheaper third party components for TVs instead of using own internal products developed specifically for the role, in effect sinking R&D budget and destroying market leader position.
WSP (World Standard Pinning) "standardization" story with management naive dreams of selling own products in Asia without cannibalizing home European market while simultaneously moving Consumer Hardware Development to Asia .. where all the hardware was thereafter designed with Asian parts first was priceless.
Philips TV division deciding to second source, skipping Philips Tuners division thus eroding own company market share and profit. Then in turn Philips Tuners division commissioning a cheaper clone of Philips MOPLL from Siemens with a huge minimal volume quota, consequently eroding Philips Semiconductors market share by 25% and forcing Tuner division to manufacture inferior products with already obsolete part. Just beautiful, <Chef's Kiss>, Pure genius!
> The most devastating development, however, was purely internal and of severe structural impact.
They are focusing on healthcare and personal care products and are doing pretty well there. Their MRI scanners are well regarded, for instance.
Other electronics like televisions are still produced under the Philips name, but that's just TP-Vision making them in China and slapping the Philips name on it.
Lighting has also been spun off into a separate company (https://www.signify.com/global) which has a license to produce Philips branded products - similar to the TPVision - Philips TV arrangement. Philips itself is fully focused on healthcare these days (and some consumer adjacencies like Toothbrushes and Baby care stuff).
A lot of research and development is still going on in the area where Philips had their research labs. If you're curious to see what kind of high-tech is being worked on in the "Dutch silicon valley" I suggest you Google "Brainport Eindhoven" or "High Tech Campus Eindhoven".