ASML

ASML is a solid company; profit sharing is good.

Okay benefits and pay (better than for the average person, but the worst of the few tech companies I’ve worked for).

I don’t have anything good to say about HMI. It's probably okay if you’ve never worked anywhere else or are fluent in Mandarin.

Reading some of the reviews on here from years ago, nothing has changed. Working for HMI is rough. Most of the people who enjoy working for HMI have not ever worked for another company and/or are fluent in Mandarin.

• If you do not speak Mandarin, you are treated like an outsider and do not have access to the same knowledge and training as those who do. If you find yourself struggling to learn or understand things because of this, you’ll be treated as though you are incompetent or lazy as opposed to experiencing very real and significant language barriers.

• Work life balance is generally not good. It seems to be an expectation of the Taiwanese workers to work 10-12 hour days 7 days a week. If you protest this grueling and completely unreasonable schedule, your reputation will be negatively affected. There is no work life balance drafted into policy and therefore it is abused (e.g. it is not written policy that workers who go above 40 hours can take comp time, which is something other companies do to avoid these types of abuses, nor is it written in that there are paid or required breaks). HR policies need to be more robust to protect workers; they are the least clear/protective of any company I have worked for in this industry.

• The level of chaos and disorganization is astonishing. It is an accepted part of the culture that training and documentation is extremely low quality. Specs are not well studied or understood. Something being “good” is often completely subjective. Couple this with a language barrier and it is not difficult to see why there is a lack of quality for products and installation in general. This company does not have a quality mindset and yet blames individuals for its systemic failures.

The long-term strategy seems like it is to wing it and make it work. When you work in an industry that is reliant on consistency, quality, and data-driven decisions, it is no surprise HMIs customers are frequently unhappy. It makes it even more difficult as a first-line engineer to feel the wrath first and be blamed for strategic and quality failures that come from the factory and management.

Most of the people in senior positions have been there a long time. They have no concept of what things are really like in a fab or ebeam experience other than what they know from HMI, and they expect people to follow orders. Some of the technical aspects of the tool are simply incorrect because there is no diversity of thought or experience, or they are sloppily designed, making it difficult to use because there is no forethought. If you have suggestions to change something, you need to know the right person, and even then it goes into a black hole. From typos to misnomers to bugs, it’s a mess.

They hire a lot of PhDs who don’t have much practical experience and not many people with actual semiconductor fab/process experience. There’s a lot of arrogance, and arrogance is the bane of good engineering. Most of the time, people cannot give you a good, coherent answer as to why they designed something a certain way. It’s disappointing to see ASML comment on these complaints and request people to escalate these things individually. There is a lack of accountability across the board. There is an enormous problem at HMI, and the change needs to be drastic, and it’s not going to come from submitting an anonymous complaint. ASML should take more ownership of understanding the fundamental issues at HMI and improving them.

Get real employee feedback and actually act on it. Have integrity and be accountable. Commit to continuous improvement and change and adopt a growth mindset. Provide better leadership training and hold managers accountable for being good leaders. Execute higher quality products. Hire translators and technical writers, and create a robust technical writing department and document management system. Literally just have actively tracked KPIs and cycle times. Never seen any at the local site. If it can’t be measured, it can’t be improved. Incredible how poorly understood and implemented this concept is for a company that makes metrology equipment. Implement 360 reviews to prevent the problem of seniority/race factoring into your assessment. Hire external lean Six Sigma Black Belts to overhaul the organization. Engineer the system at every level, from equipment to organization to workflow to documentation, to limit variance and uncertainty. Be transparent about the problems at this company and the steps being taken to address them. Adopt a quality mindset and demand quality documentation and execution. Hold the people creating poor and incorrect documentation accountable for the problems and huge monetary cost that results at customer sites. Have real specs for the tools that have been studied and actually make sense. Provide robust cultural awareness and sensitivity training to mend the distance between workers speaking different languages and with different cultural expectations.