Harassment: ASML, group lead team composition fuck-up

Sat, Feb 22, 2025 ❝The group lead was asked to compose a team, created problematic team against seniors' advice.❞

Contents

My group lead is a Romanian that migrated into the Netherlands years ago and has (apparently) worked for ASML for a while.

I started out with another, but he had planned to switch to a different department before we even had the first meaningful conversation. Although I think I would have liked that group lead, it doesn’t matter practically as I had just barely started.

On curious thing: this “manager switching away wherever I first join”-thing, is a pervasive “quirk” for virtually every employer I’ve been at. (“Completely coincidental”, I’m sure..) And I always seem to end up with a less capable lead, though that part is based on impression and thus hard to qualify.

During my first few months in the first team, the department started to acquire some near-shoring support with a company that provides Romanian developers. Well, in this case near-shoring with Romania. Maybe calling it “provides Romanian developers” is too simplistic, but you’ll get the point I’m trying to make. These developers usually started out as additions to existing teams. The idea being that by adding members to existing teams, it was easier to maintain the company culture that ASML strived for. (As I was told.) Recently, two Romanian developers had joined our team, as well as joiners for several other teams. The two senior developers in my team were going to leave the team within a short time, but that moment had not arrived yet, or maybe it was just underway.

Group lead composing new team

I started hearing some comments regarding a new team being formed. It was desired to grow the department more rapidly, and apparently our group lead was also in the process of forming a team. Now, several senior ASML employees (and IIRC multiple enterprise architects, though I am not sure) had very explicitly advised my group lead NOT to go with an all-Romanian dev-team. The idea being that there was no awareness or transference of company culture as there would be with existing (mixed) teams where Romanian developers would join. This had been the practice until that point. My group lead apparently decided otherwise. Supposedly, though I’m going off rumors, to prove it was possible to construct full near-shoring teams.

In the mean time, the two senior ASML developers switched teams to each start their own adventure. Both had something specific for them and as such were no longer part of the team. So, me and the other developer that had joined ASML around the same time, were now some of the more experienced team members, with the two Romanian developers being new arrivals. (Obviously we spent time and effort to integrate them, transfer knowledge, etc. I shouldn’t have to mention this, but just in case.)

A while later..

So, fast-forward a few months. In the mean time a third Romanian developer has joined our team. The other two manage to find their way quite well. I start getting some comments regarding being too “oppressive” (for lack of me coming up with a better word) concerning other people’s ideas, and first mentions surface about a team lacking some seniority. Later, it turns out, it isn’t quite the seniority. The scrum master is Dutch and most of the time cannot figure out what they’re doing because apparently all “on-the-floor” conversation is in Romanian. They are also not performing well and as such the whole team has become a problem. And, I think I am accurate in saying that it has become known as a “problem-team”.

Reluctantly switching teams

So, I get these comments essentially stating dissatisfaction, and conveniently I am asked – several times actually – to join the other team. Now, there are some subtle issues there:

1. by this time my PO would probably like to see me leave (See other story..),
2. one member of that team is the same person who couldn’t properly configure and integrate Proguard for obfuscation, which I had fixed in matter of hours (See interim Proguard),
3. one member of that team was not quite that happy with me because I “failed to inform her” while she had shown lack of participation (or bothered to send a cancellation email 4 times in a row for her planned presentation) in an initiative that was (me for significant proportion) set up for knowledge-sharing (See other story..). Now to be clear, I had explained to her already, that I understood if there were work pressure and priorities at play, and simply a (timely) email to inform me would’ve given me time to find another solution. Even an email was too much. (In hind-sight, this is one of many efforts that just happen to contribute to sabotaging successful initiatives.)
4. as I reluctantly agree to switch teams, it just so happens that that team is put in a high-priority position for a project concerning Intel who had requested to provide a desktop-application first, i.e. before server-support, to prove the idea and have more insight into the intermediate configurations and controls.

So, as I prepare to join the team:

1. my original PO starts making shitty comments, pushing for me to move with no regard/respect for me, virtually no time to transfer knowledge,
2. no comment … he probably doesn’t like me but then, as was later acknowledged, there were significant “rumors” that I was supposedly a problem and (almost?) all are from the same foreign consulting company,
3. they “conveniently” expected a senior that wouldn’t have any influence just some more experience or perhaps “do some more of the work”,
4. the switch in team focus meant that (by request of several layers of managers) I was to join the meetings with 2 other teams who all were put on this high-priority project and my focus would be on making sure I got the essentials of the project and to start learning the specific subdomain and start preparing requirements and designs, such that the team would be able to transition into work items concerning this new high-prio project. (Note, for context, that this new subdomain was partially new to the team I was about to join too.)

Consequently, as soon as I join this project, the team is behind at a slight delay due to finishing up scheduled maintenance, while I’m in meetings with other seniors on the plans and directions for the new application. There are a number of different concerns regarding this application, including integration of a new UI framework as the first application.

That first week, I meet up in every available minute and occasionally full hour that I can find, to update the team, get to learn some of the (sub)domain they are in and are about to move into. (Knowledge which is shared very reluctantly if at all.) Now, to point out that I wanted to gradually include one of the team members in my meetings, but for one: she had already proved not to be very reliable, and for two: knowledge sharing did not go that well. So the friction was there from the start and all my effort to update them in the spare time I had managed to make, was not sufficient or accepted.

As rumors go, I got blamed for trying to “take all the credit for myself”, and “leaving the whole team out of the loop”, and “making the switch to a different team to up my status/reputation or whatever”. I identified early that something wasn’t quite right from several responses of team members, and I had notified my group lead of this. Of course, he dismissed it. (Much later he would “joke” that they hadn’t expected that the “seniority” would come with some other consequences, like me needing to take a more leading position.)

Lack of support

I had later, several times, asked him to clarify how and why my position and the change of project, and why I needed to join these meetings, etc. It was clear that this was now – either misinterpreted or used as malicious excuse – to attack me for “taking the lead” for myself, while I was virtually pushed into the role, and team members most definitely acted to oppose this perceived situation. That is, they were most definitely being deliberately counter-productive on occasion.

After much insisting, I get the group lead to send an email to explain that this is the point and they are expected to show some support to this extent. This is after many sprints of “reluctant cooperation”. I know of at least one instance where they without a doubt refused to share information, then later challenged me to “show the domain knowledge I had gathered” by asking me to share the acquired knowledge in a meeting with 40+ participants on the multi-team progress of the high-priority project. (I had simply refused. But the point is, this confirms the malicious action. This is literally interfering with progress out of spite.)

In a personal meetings, I tried to explain the circumstances and that there isn’t a problem and this change was by explicit request of management and only due to special circumstances, they just don’t believe me. So, I’m essentially trying to lead a team known to be a problem-team, caused by my group lead, while I am put in a high-priority situation where the team actively opposes cooperation, with the “excuse” that I’m acting solely in my own interest. All the while, I am in meetings to align requirements and designs at least ~30 out of 40 hours a week, in an attempt for us seniors of the three teams to acquire and stabilize requirements and designs in time for a full next sprint of work for 3 teams of developers, interoperable/compatible with each-other, (ideally) without inter-team blocking dependencies. (I’ll probably go a bit more into 2nd team project concerns in another story..)

Note: that means essentially: writing down requirements, writing stories by title, filling in fleshed-out details with proper characteristics/properties, intentions, goals, with sufficient detail to be actionable to developers. At least to the point that they can be discussed such that further details can be filled in.

Let me be clear: the group lead is not impartial (in this instance, but likely over-all given his other decisions), because I am essentially asked to fix his fuck-up in the first place. I pointed out I had rather not switch and that my 1st team wasn’t ready yet. My original scrum master confirmed that switching teams was essentially “to the benefit of ASML”. I think he said “ASML needs to fix a problem”. So, to the detriment of me and my original team. (My original team’s performance then dropped significantly, that’s another story..)

The group lead was very reluctant to communicate what my expected role was, such that these conflicts were always present. At some point, he decided to rather put another senior developer in the team. He presumably opted to “prove me bad” rather then support me. Cooperation with this other senior was perfectly fine. It provided some counter-balance to an otherwise all-Romanian team that is already opposing me. It did create a somewhat complicated power balance. I’d like to think that we managed to sort that out fine between the two of us. (Also, I had always said that I didn’t need partiality to my side. I needed impartiality to counter a team that is deliberately oppositional.) Then later, meaning several months later, I got the group lead to agree reluctantly, to send an email to explain the situation.

Given all the opposition, at one point I recorded meetings to have a record of the agreements. Now, let me be clear about this: a recording device (an old MP3 player with a mic hole), that was activated in their presence, only during the meeting, and clearly visible at all times. This later got maliciously twisted into the false claim that I “covertly recorded all conversations, all the time”. They also forgot to mention one other detail: I had announced after 6 or so meetings, that I had deleted the content and stopped recording. The reason: good people were having concerns and one asked outside of a meeting whether I was recording. And the other team-members were being a PITA anyways. So it didn’t make much sense. Additionally, with the extra senior developer, there was a bit more balance, i.e. it was no longer me against the rest of the team (of foreigners, all from the same company) who were predisposed to oppose me from the start.

Harassment

Again, as I also mentioned in other posts, I have been attacked en masse over all kinds of false accusations.

• Another story goes into more detail on my supposed “oppression of ideas” that I got attacked over, a lot. This story has a different focus. The accusation itself is unjustified.

• I have been attacked on many points on this, of which a very significant one was that I was not “cooperative” with the team. Which was made completely impossible given the circumstances, the opposition of the team, and the need (pressure) to act fast to get our requirements and designs ready and to have work aligned between teams.

• The team started out with the wrong “team culture”, namely a foreign one to begin with, which frustrated the process.

• One of the senior members of their original team, the one who had made the flawed Proguard contribution, left soon after. At the time there were a few hints towards me as if they wanted to say: he gets an intesting project because he did good work, or something along those lines. (There have been more such “jabs”, which isn’t much of a problem, but it shows the pervasive attitude to oppose me even by ASML employees themselves, for essentially no reason.)

• I was accused of being “never present”, “intransparent”, etc. 1.) my agenda was shared with the team, 2.) we had a number of fully reserved rooms available so they knew where to find us when preparing requirements and designs, 3.) in the presence of several other (senior) developers.

• Without going into much detail here, one Romanian team member had later joined the other team that would cooperate in development of the desktop application. He told me right before I left, that there were always rumors that spoke quite negatively of me. He also added at the time, that he thought I had never acted unreasonably in situations where he was present, i.e. had the possibility to judge for himself by first account. (This also confirms what I identified and pointed out to my manager very early: that there is active opposition of the rest of the team, that it would be a stumbling block for the project.) Note that I identified this essentially at the start, and had the manager acted in any way, all of it had most likely been prevented.

Changelog

This article will receive updates, if necessary.

• 2025-02-22 Initial version.