ASML

Good colleagues Safe job Promising future Very complex and intriguing domain

I will tell my story about working at ASML as a contractor that I wish I had read here at Glassdoor before I switched to that company in Veldhoven. If you are not going to work as a contractor, skip item 1.

1. CONTRACT LIFE I came from out of Europe to work as a contractor in ASML. That was a 1-year contract after which you may or may not be converted to an ASML employee, and I was converted as "promised". Anyway, if you are coming in the same situation, here are some points you should consider: (a) If you are entitled to the 30%-ruling, double-check with your contractor whether you will receive this tax advantage upfront (my case) or later on when it gets approved (the majority of cases fit this situation, and then you should receive it retroactively, ask this). (b) Be prepared for errors in your payslip. I found several errors throughout a year in my payments and only found that because I always checked all calculations. (c) If your agency/contract promised you a relocation allowance of a certain amount X, just know that such allowance will not get to your account/salary like you might think. Rather, the meaning of allowance to them is different: it's just a tax deduction of X, meaning that you will just not pay taxes on the allowance amount that you agreed. Simply put, take your salary and subtract X, you will then pay tax on the result. So, allowance for them is not allowance; it's just a tax deduction mechanism. Don't be fooled as I was.

2. INTERVIEWS I did several interview sets at ASML. By "sets" I mean different teams, because one team was pushing me to the other with some hidden help from the agency, of course. The agency wants you there because that's how they make money. I also did a preliminary technical exam (the very first one, I think) totally set up by the agency. It was a 3 or 4-hour long exam in C++ because that was the language requested by the position, which was a big lie that I will tell more about below.

3. TECH STACK Other reviews already stated that the tools are very specific to ASML. Back in the day when I read that, I said to myself, "Ah, that's ok." What an immature and naive guy I was! The seduction of working in a very complex environment blindfolded me. Well, of course, it will depend on where you land in ASML, but not only will you work with specific tools but also be shielded away from knowing what's behind it, how it works, and why it is there. Also, be careful that the job posting may advertise a programming language is necessary, but that doesn't mean you are going to work with it. It's just that you must know it because 10% of the codebase uses that language. So, you are an expert in Ruby and the position requires that, but in reality, you will work with Javascript (no offenses; it's just to get the idea). Don't assume anything; ask during your interview. If you like the freedom to work with any open-source stuff or new cutting-edge tech, forget it.

4. DOCUMENTATION I got traumatized about the amount of (test) documentation I had to write. I will have to skip this topic to prevent bad remembrances. Want to have a glimpse of the magnitude of this? In one year, I wrote/fixed 10 lines of code that went to production. I haven't misspelled; I wrote 10. Yes, I wrote lots of test code, but it was in an ASML proprietary and specific language that is not used anywhere else. By the way, integration tests take ages to run.

5. BUREAUCRACY I read a lot about this in previous reviews and didn't think that it was going to be a big deal for me, but it was. If you are a hands-on person who likes a lean process, just work with the possibility that you may end up in teams that have a super heavy software process. Besides that, it is also old and nobody else out there uses it. I worked in bigger companies, and I can tell that bureaucracy is not about the size of the company, but about mentality and legacy way-of-working. To give an example about coding: the whole software process enforced by ClearCase requires that you get grants from other team tech leaders before you can even check out files. If the code you want to touch actually belongs to another department, you better find those tech leaders before they go on vacation. And all this chain of people that you have to go and ask "physically." The process is so heavy, and yet there is no automatic way of requesting approvals or easy ways of asking for code reviews. A few projects use Git and thus pull requests, but then there is this ClearCase in the middle which drives the whole deployment process, but then you have to synchronize Git and ClearCase, arghhh.

6. GENERAL I heard some colleagues from other departments telling better stories (and others worst stories), so the message I want to pass is: ask everything. Don't take for granted. And don't do like I did when I read the reviews here in Glassdoor thinking that it was just a one-person thing and that I wouldn't face those problems. I ended up leaving the company even after knowing that I was going to be converted to a full-time ASML employee. Too bad and too sad.

It's very nice that SAFe is being adopted, but please use it with a new mindset.

People are using SAFe as almost like a façade but still using their legacy way of working in their daily efforts.

The process will only get heavier and productivity lower.