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Harassment: ASML, miscellaneous events

Mon, Apr 28, 2025 ❝Discussing miscellaneous independent events.❞
Contents

This post will be updated with additional stories as need arises. I will update the publication date and changelog (at the bottom) accordingly.

Following are a series of miscellaneous remarks and scenarios that didn’t quite fit in with the larger stories, or risked side-tracking the main story too much with all the tangents.

Clarification: documenting my experience

There have been several attacks on the validity of these harassment stories. I have no intention of making up stories. Furthermore, given the relentless, repeated attacks, certain people should find many recognizable elements in all of these stories. These are events as they occurred.

It also deserves to be pointed out, that I document my experiences. If there are long-term coordinated efforts to make certain events look like something else, I am still documenting my experience of it. Arguably, it doesn’t matter what “their fancy plans” may have be, because I am concerned with documenting the things I know and experienced.

Consequently, it is also meaningless to say “yeah, well, that’s just your story”. I don’t care about some made-up bullshit narrative or that I supposedly do not know how many and exactly which people are involved and in which capacity. I care about what is relevant to me, i.e. what I experienced. For example, it does not matter if there are 10x more (possible) beneficial actions. If these actions never come to fruition, I will still have experienced only the negative actions and consequences.

Note that I try to indicate how sure I am of uncertain/unclear situations. I am not claiming to possess the ultimate truth, but I can document and explain what happened and what parts I am sure about.

Tool to generate progress indication

During the first months at ASML, there were many moments that people went for coffee. It was regularly necessary to do full builds, and a full build would easily take more than an hour. I wrote a small Go program to pipe Maven output into, such that it could parse and derive build progress from it. (Of course this is not the “best possible solution”. It was a quick, simple, practical experiment.) I tried sending the progress to my phone, such that I could at least have some indication of when the build process was finished, such that we wouldn’t waste even more time if the process finished while at the coffee machine. Now, note that the time at the coffee machine wasn’t fully wasted. We would regularly discuss or explain various matters both technical and functional. Still, it is nice that if the conversation is not relevant or if you’ve already heard a part of an explanation, that you know a build finished (or finishes soon) such that you can plan accordingly.

I went into somewhat more detail in an early story on the state of the code-base. Suffice it to say, the set up needed improvements. Predominantly, shortening build times was hard, because the build of the application would fail if we even just skipped building tests.

Apparently, someone noticed the communication stream, because the progress update got cut off. So I considered the idea a failure and dropped it. Nobody ever asked me a single question about it.

Later I got all kinds of ridiculous attacks. However, there is something fishy about this situation. I strongly suspect this didn’t concern a misunderstanding. On several occasions afterwards, I got attacked over matters that only make sense if taken out of chronological order. As is the case with this situation, because I got attacked over “stealing data” and visiting China. Now, the visit to China was an arranged business trip proposed by the 3rd team’s PO. The experiment with the build progress happened in first month(s). There is no way the two are related, unless someone fabricated a story. Note also STI’s threat during the last few days.

Also, people knew I wrote this build progress tool. It was no secret. And I got no further questions about this. Given that I wrote this tool myself, there was no risk of “unknown or undocumented features” or “ulterior motives” of the tool used. The experiment only used the standard library. The only “doubt” one can have is of the Go toolchain itself. Very little time was wasted writing the tool, given that this merely involved basic text-based line processing, and it would fill in for build waiting times anyways. Yes, I did bother to consider this when trying out this experiment.

Helping devs with puzzles concerning several parametric types (Java)

On several occasions, I have helped other team members with rather complicated set-ups of parametric types. This mostly involved a module in the code-base that represented domain types for a particular functional (sub)domain. Consequently, there was some need for generics. The pitfall one can easily make, is to be too “generic” with the expression of the domain-types. It takes some consideration to correctly select which parts need to be variable, thus represented with parametric types. Consequently, on several occasions, I was asked to fix the more complicated “programming puzzles” that people couldn’t solve themselves on first try. Usually this ended up with somewhere around 4-6 parametric types, depending on the attempt and the amount of variability expected. Of course, less is usually better.

Note that in the third team, one Romanian developer tried to challenge me on several occasions. Essentially, trying to prove me incompetent. He got a similar puzzle concerning several parametric types as I had solved in the first team during at one moment in the first few months. This developer was asked to check the abstractions of the UI component library, which required some use of parametric types. It’s essentially a module with domain-types similar to the ones expressing functional domain representations of scanner or metrology. After several sprints of trying, he failed and the visualization developer eventually solved it himself. (After stating that it was getting ridiculous.)

On the floor below ASML

So, I have this awesome sense of humor, where we’re waiting for the elevator and, mostly out of boredom, I look at the elevator floor-sign which states that the floor directly below ASML houses SPIE. My humor telling me: “huhuh, that’s funny. SPIE ("spy” or “spy-eeeee”, depending on your preferred pronunciation) is conveniently located directly below ASML. 😂" So I mention this to a team member, obviously in jest.

For several years, I got attacks and other bullshit about SPIE and this joke I made a few times. Even to the point where I would “just happen to”, “purely coincidentally I’m sure” encounter SPIE cars while driving. (Several on a single trip.)

To specific people: so, yeah, fuck you! The joke was awesome! I don’t care what bullshit story you make of it.

LDAP-issues

Now, for context: I suspect this was initiated from the start to include several hints towards an earlier company, where I later discovered they tried to (falsely) accuse me of “hacking a server”. During a security presentation with the previous customer, it would “conveniently” discuss “hacking a company by targeting their Primary Domain Controller”. Now, on a few occasions they would ask me to check on one LDAP-server that was set up for the development department, given that there were some problems with establishing connections from within the software. It seems an awful lot like recreating the desired scenario and narrative, to falsely represent the situation at this first company.

Except, I didn’t “hack” anything at that first company. I used credentials that were provided to me. However, they didn’t know that apparently. Or, better said, I know some people knew, so they have likely misrepresented the situation from the start, deliberately, with bad intentions. And I know several people knew, because I was in a room with several colleagues, as I was explaining my steps to one person. So anyone who listened, knew that I explained how I used credentials given to me.

So, there were these “sudden” problems with the LDAP connection. The desktop-application establishes connection with an LDAP-server for some spurious use. (I don’t even remember exactly for what reasons.) I was asked to have a look. I downloaded Sysinternals’ ADExplorer. A nice and comfortable power tool that works well to test the connection with the LDAP-server. We tested the login credentials and those seem to work fine. I don’t even remember what I did, maybe just enter the credentials again, but we could establish a connection aftewards and the problem seemed to have been resolved.

Note: at the next customer, there was also a need to check LDAP for the credentials of a new team member, who had trouble logging in. Also, “purely coincidental”, I’m sure.

Use of AGPL-licensed dependencies

At some point, someone pointed out that there were some dependency libraries in use that were released with the AGPL-license. These libraries were in use by some Litho InSight server teams. Consequently, various teams would need to tackle this for themselves.

This was a rather minor issue for me, at the time, given that there were many other issues and conflicts ongoing. I don’t know the exact nature of the issue. I think there was a build-plugin in use that scanned for various “approved” or conversely “rejected” licenses, and the plugin was not properly configured for this one particular license-type. Consequently, there were a few releases that must have been shipped with AGPL-licensed dependencies present.

There is little point in obfuscating public libraries: there would be risk in obfuscating them too strictly, with no gain as these libraries were publicly available anyways. So these libraries would have been untouched by the obfuscation process, making them fairly easy to identify. (Also, why take the risk to obfuscate a publicly available library of which you have no knowledge of the exact internals, that may break subtlely.)

Note that I did not discover this. This was pointed out to me. There is no point in attacking me for “keeping this knowledge secret”. For one, this was a bad decision made by other teams. For two, I wasn’t the first one with the knowledge anyways. (Granted, I know this hasn’t stopped people in the past from attacking me for even completely fabricated events and circumstances, but it can’t hurt to point it out anyways.)

In terms of “suspiciously coincidental” timing, if my memory serves me well, this happened rather soon after discovering an important issue in the otr4j code-base, after which the Jitsi team decided it would want to change the license. In part, this was decided because the most significant contributions that weren’t easily attributable to real people, also happened to contain some suspicious code, i.e. the bug(s) I found. They figured that they wouldn’t be back to protest. 😋 (Note that I didn’t mind them changing the license. It’s just that it makes things harder for the community-fork that was by then already created. I do not mind the LGPL-2 license. However, contributing back would be impossible due to my inability to change the license in the community-fork.)

Attack/restrict use of GPL-licensed tools

The department used a number of different tools, some basic and some quite advanced. Some of these tools were publicly available, open-source tools, such as Notepad++. These tools are offered with GPL license. Consequently they are useable essentially without any restrictions. The GPL license ensures that there are no restrictions for a user.

At some point, the department or a related department, decided in all of their combined wisdom, that the GPL license was a problem, therefore the tools shouldn’t be used anymore. There was no other purpose than plain and simple harassment, to frustrate an otherwise already very busy development department.

… I don’t know where to start with this kind of bullshit.

No obfuscation of symmetric encryption key

Some ASML document-types worked with sensitive information that they didn’t want to disclose directly to the users who worked with these documents. For that reason, some documents contained “protected” sections, sometimes most of the document. In order for the software to access these documents, a symmetric key was embedded in the software.

The first time I had encountered these protected documents, was in the first team. Later there were other occurrences. I had noticed during one of the later occurrences that the code-base seems to have multiple occurrences of the same symmetric key, because two or more modules of the code-base independently stored the symmetric key. I checked with some people on this, traced it to an outstanding issue on some team architect’s backlog, and discovered that this was (again) a known problem with low priority to fix. I knew about the limitations of the obfuscation, so I considered fixing it, but given that PO wasn’t interested, this remained unsolved.

I later found out a third (or more) occurrence was about to be inserted as a new module was added by another team. I don’t remember exactly how I found out though the team might have contacted me for some reason, but checked up with them and let them know there were other occurrences and maybe they could reuse one of the other modules. As this was otherwise none of my business or concern, I left it at that.

I had my concerns because this 16-byte (128-bit) key was stored as raw bytes, meaning that the obfuscation process, in its current configuration if at all, wouldn’t obfuscate this field. And it is a known fact, that one may find significant values, for any flavor of significance, because they might occur multiple times and thus stand out.

Note that, unlike the people who relentlessly attacked me for 8 years, I did not operate with bad intentions. Therefore, I did not store or memorize or write down the symmetric key. If I had bad intentions, it would have been insanely easy to write down the 16 hexadecimal values on a piece of paper and keep it somewhere.

Romanian near-shoring

ASML wanted to grow their departments and scale up the development of the desktop-application significantly. They started to get, comparatively-by-ratio, many more Romanian developers in a near-shoring construction. These were bound to certain limitations with how many months they could be in the Netherlands. However, ASML used to always emphasize, at least when I was there, how important the company culture would be for the quality of work and cooperation.

Many interruptions and problems with Microsoft Teams

With the vast number of foreign developers, that were present as part of this near-shoring construction, there came a need for regular communication and alignment among team members not currently at the ASML office. Microsoft Teams became “the” solution for communication. Microsoft Teams was a significant pain-in-the-ass for most of the time. There were regular interruptions of the video stream, issues with connecting, or concerns whether either side would be able to hear the other side. You get used to testing the connection, but it doesn’t make it pleasant. Furthermore, the surprise connection drops would interfere with meetings currently in progress and cause delays.

I, but also others, had mentioned several times to the group lead that Microsoft Teams was being a persistent pain and that it severely interrupts smooth operation and collaboration of the team. Group lead, on a few occasions, traveled to Romania to test connections from their end. There never seemed to be a clear problem or solution, to my knowledge.

I had considered, at several occasions, whether it would be possible to set up a Jitsi Meet instance to verify if that would offer a more reliable video-conferencing solution. However, given with how much was already going on at the company, this idea never crossed over into serious action. I did on occasion have a quick look at whatever was already available, but knowing that there would be additional effort needed to arrange for outside access, I didn’t think I could make enough time to seriously tackle this. Now, to note that the issues “started” predominantly (if not solely) in the 3rd team, so that was also the moment when I had a lot of other concerns going on.

Complaints by remote Romanian team members

There was also the regular complaining by Romanian team members who were forced to work from Romania. The complaints were often concerning having trouble aligning with team members at ASML. (However, they also indicated that they earned more when in the Netherlands, at ASML.) There were certain restrictions by the Dutch tax authorities concerning maximum allowed time in Netherlands for such near-shoring constructions.

At one point I proposed having intermediate alignment with team members through Microsoft Teams, keep an open connection for a while, to at least keep updated and/or having some more team interaction if lack of team interaction proved problematic. This was, of course, not the kind of solution that they wanted.

I later got “comments” about forcing them to keep a persistent open communication line. That was never the proposed solution. I simply said that if there was this sense of being out of the loop, or lack of team interaction, that one could set up a video-call to make communication more interactive than mere plain-text messaging.

Failing to deliver Display Port converter 3 times

At around the start of the 3rd team, of my assignment at ASML, there came an initiative to (re)place displays at meeting rooms. This required that laptops have an HDMI-port available. The laptop I worked with, didn’t have it. I ordered a converter, for Display Port to HDMI, 3 times and this IT department failed to deliver the right converter 3 times.

Eventually, I bought one myself. It proved extremely reliable and was able to flawlessly use it during the remaining time for meetings and presentations. This was also the time that I needed to do a lot of alignment, including the various sizeable meetings with progress updates, plans, requirements and analysis reports, etc.

The visualization developer had ordered the same converter some two weeks later, and he did get a correct delivery at first try. He made a point to let me know, but not in a way that I considered malicious. I don’t think it was his intention. Rather, I suspect he wanted to let me know there was malicious intent.

This is just another one of the many malicious activities that were ongoing. This didn’t stop with 1 person, or with 1 department.

No clear reason for persistent harassment

During my last months at ASML, so well into the 3rd team assignment, I had indicated to plan to leave and wanting to align on the appropriate time to do so. This had already gotten delayed a few times for various reasons. I had, in the mean time, already told some members that I was planning to leave, including visualization developer. Of course, it was obvious to team members that I had a lot of conflicts and other bullshit to deal with, so my leaving wouldn’t have come as a surprise. Similarly, it wouldn’t make sense to make up arbitrary lies on why I was leaving. We worked together most of the time, so they knew what was going on. Furthermore, they knew I was bothered by the endless conflicts and harassment that was constantly present. I had asked some team members for advice given that I did not have any clue why all the harassment was going on.

I always wanted to have this resolved peacefully, but there was no way to resolve this peacefully. The attacks were relentless, persistent, continuous. It was abuse, plain and simple. This continued on for 6 years afterwards too, with no further explanation. In hind-sight this is the obvious start and by no means “bad luck” on my part.

Good people leaving

There were several instances of good, capable people leaving soon after me. It seems that both the mess at ASML and the way I got treated, didn’t go unnoticed.

Visualization dev leaving

Visualization developer was unexpectedly off during summer, then later during my last weeks. We said goodbye somewhat earlier. It later turned out he was planning his own departure. He pointed out how I was treated and seemed rather concerned and dissatisfied with how things were going.

Now, it is clear that I don’t know even 5% of all the bullshit that had been going on. Given the amount of deception, lies and false accusations, I have been pretty much constantly under attack with no further clarification. And now, 8 years later, it turns out that the overwhelming majority of these (false) accusations are indeed false. So, this whole department and more, essentially participated in targeted harassment and abuse, overwhelmingly (if not completely) for no reason.

There are hints (maybe with malicious intent) of visualization dev also having bad intentions. I do not know whether this is the case. I have been attacked by many people for many idiotic reasons that are all based in some way or another in fiction. Maybe he did have bad intentions, maybe he didn’t. However, I did not see his efforts deliberately blocking progress, and in part his task for needing to redesign the abstractions for the ASML (JavaFX) UI library helped to prove the incompetence of the Romanian developer who was constantly challenging my competency. He later transferred the knowledge of the UI library to me, which I was able to transfer to the team in his absence, to continue work. I was able to understand it sufficiently within the short knowledge-transfer period that I was able to transfer it further without my (lack of) understanding becoming a problem.

Lead PO from 2nd team high-prio project leaving

The lead PO, who in my opinion proved quite capable, also left soon after me. Again, dissatisfaction with how the same stupidity keeps popping up and how consequently he keeps running into the same bullshit with never any chance of improvement.

Again, these kinds of concerns are very noticable to capable people. Given that he, as a scrum master, is focused on the process and keeps finding the same unwillingness (I’m trying to be kind in my choice of words), predominantly by stakeholders/business to improve, one essentially has to put out fires constantly.

Note that by this time, scrum is applied with some success but also sabotaged as I described in earlier stories of 1st and 2nd and 3rd teams. However, we also did several large-scale projects with the process supported by the guiding principles of SAFe. This is essentially scrum but raised to the (abstraction) level of several interoperating departments. This was deemed necessary for larger-scale projects, but consequently good, capable scrum masters got more responsibility, while departments provided more stubbornness and ignorance of the process. (And then there are certain individual outliers who show even more arrogance than some departments.)

A few other people left

There were a few other people that I noticed had also left. Some stating better opportunities outside of ASML, others left with some dissatisfaction. One noted a better opportunity, and I remember trying to point him out to my group lead as a possible replacement for me in the team.

At the time, I mentioned that given that I had had to deal with numerous conflicts, he would possibly be a better candidate as he would likely be less confrontational. At this point, it is obvious that there attacks were deliberate. This had nothing to do with me being “confrontational”. The whole thing was coordinated harassment and abuse.

I get blamed for people leaving

On several occasions I have been attacked about “complaining” and about “scaring people away”, and other such bullshit accusations. Essentially, first I get attacked relentlessly, then I get blamed for being dissatisfied and voicing complaints that are in no way addressed, then I get blamed for “scaring people away” with my justified complaints.

I’m such a horrible person. 😋

Then later, I get to hear from my own employer that I supposedly had chased people away. Nobody apparently considered that the shitshow at ASML could have just been obvious.

At one later moment, I get further attacked at a medical centre with clearly deliberately planned/staged people involved, about “complaining”.

And, I guess, now I’m complaining again. Although, it seems to me that I am documenting the various “normal” situations at ASML. Also, I’m documenting because I haven’t been solely negative. The point isn’t to complain. There’s just a lot of negatives to mention.

Rants by team member

Maybe I should address this as part of 2nd team group lead fuck-up or high-prio project story, but I didn’t properly do that, so I’ll shortly touch on it here.

The same opportunistic, problematic team member who tried to benefit off the knowledge-sharing sessions success, who wanted to be part-time scrum master (presumably thinking that made her team lead), who wanted a senior but then proceeds to sabotage their efforts, decided that harassment and attacks were necessary.

At some point, the conflict escalates in frustration and nasty words. I try, with presence of scrum master, to have this conflict resolved. She wants to “speak her mind”, so I let her voice her criticism. However, I mistakenly thought this meant actually discussing the criticism and come to a productive conclusion. That wasn’t the case.

The process involved ranting out 10+ unfounded attacks liberally voiced and volumed, with no further clarification. When I tried to stop her after the first point to try and respond, I get attacked for “interrupting”. She proceeds to rant about 10 or 12 or so items in one continuous stream, then refuses to discuss them, refuses to clarify.

So essentially, I had to stand there while I get barked at for a while, with no further clarification. I am quite sure this was essentially just verbal abuse “explained as voicing criticism”. It turned out later, that there were “misunderstandings” (highly unlikely) and accusations of trying to better myself at their cost. As mentioned before, the whole project was “high-priority” from the start.

Note that one can also not claim that “upper management tried to drive the team apart”, because 1.) the team asked for a senior, 2.) I never strictly adhered to demands from management but team members also proved unreliable, and showed severe reluctance to share information during first weeks, and challenged me on several occasions to attack me during sizeable meetings (40+ people). I decided not to involve untrustworthy people during the start, and it likely would’ve caused many more problems than it would’ve solved. 3.) As pointed out earlier, I never strictly believed the story from management, but team members gave me no choice. I had tried to involve them early from start at every opportunity. And also, I already had different experiences than the “management narrative” during the first team, so it isn’t justified to claim I simply “chose the wrong side”. 4.) Also early opinion from 1st team’s scrum master indicated problems in the that team. 5.) Also some of team members admitted to lack of seniority.

Unproductive tester

On several occasions we were in need for someone who could provide dedicated test support. This included both some development of tests and coordinated running of tests. First time, as noted in a previous story, was in the first team, then later again in the second team.

The tester was very unproductive. If anything, the tester had held us back more than he helped us. Now, this wasn’t due to our unwillingness to cooperate. We tried to include him on many occasions, tried to establish some more ongoing dialog to keep aligned in both directions, to help him get started where needed. It just wasn’t working out. There were few mentionable results in the first team. I am quite sure he eventually left the first team, because he didn’t contribute any value.

I had addressed this issue with team member and later with scrum master. Namely, that I noticed there were few results. I got comments that it wasn’t appropriate to discuss. I wonder now, whether the other team member would have addressed this with group lead in my stead.

In the second team, we asked for test-support because of this high-priority project and we could do with some dedicated effort to set up more elaborate testing. The same guy showed up. I wasn’t too happy about it, but was willing to give him another chance. (I don’t think it’s up to me to immediately attack someone for it if someone apparently decided it was still okay.)

Note: There might be a relationship between this “tester” and the STI department who have been a persistent pain-in-the-ass for a while. It wouldn’t surprise me given all the other “surprises”.

During the second team, there were efforts underway by other parties to introduce Behavior Driven Development. This was facilitated using Cucumber and its Gherkin-script. This started to be introduced, therefore this tester was also expected to work with it. Additionally, there was the idea to set up the basic mechanisms of testing, BDD and development, and a dedicated person would be beneficial.

Granted, tester was a bit more productive in the second team. Well, he would have needed to be given the urgency of this project. Still, I was never happy with how things played out. My complaints aren’t about a single concern or aimed at this one individual. My concerns were based on the fact that several issues combined: little willingness to integrate in the team, lack of communication, lack of results, (seemingly) little effort, …

“Productivity metric”

On several occasions metrics have been discussed. There were some metrics in quality gates for the code-base and build analysis tooling. We have with a number of senior developers, regularly evaluated what these gates should be, because seemingly arbitrary metrics will needlessly block team progress with no benefit.

Now, at one (‘1’) point, I discussed the number of lines of code “produced” in the team, which then happened to be negative, because I was cleaning up a lot of old legacy code that had either been dropped or converted.

That’s the only time lines of code was ever relevant in a conversation. I strongly suspect that this “sample size of 1” was used as an excuse to claim low productivity or whatever bullshit excuses there might have been, of my work.

Stolen notepad

This is, again, one of these confusing situations to me. I suspect it is started by lies and deception by other people.

At one morning, when I had to leave for a meeting, I left a notepad in my backpack. After returning from the meeting, i.e. somewhat later in the morning, I discover that the notepad is missing.

In the past few years, there have been several “hints” to try and “implicate” South-Korea local office employees during trip to South Korea. I am absolutely sure that the notepad was not lost during that time. I have no reason to suspect bad/improper behavior from the people at that local office. Regardless, I know the notepad didn’t get lost there. In part, these relentless attacks were attempts to confuse me and at confusing and misrepresenting facts. (Taking facts out of chronological order, seems to be popular/“useful”.)

Note that I cannot be certain on which morning I discovered the notepad stolen. However, I strongly suspect it was around Wednesday/Thursday. At which point, nobody but my parents would have had access to the notepad during evenings. Consequently, there is high likelihood that the notepad was stolen at the office. (A conclusion I would also come to intuitively, even if intuition can be tricky at times.) Either that morning, which was likely because I went to an early meeting without it, or possibly the previous end-of-day.

Some time after loss of the notepad, some other developer drops some comments about “their notepad having been stolen”. It just happens to coincide with this prior event. I have been over the years absolutely littered with attacks for which I am attacked over things that actually happened to me. I cannot claim that my memory is perfect, but I strongly suspect it was one of the Romanian developers. This would not be surprising given the many, many other events and comments that have been made since.

Regardless, whoever it was, the notepad was stolen. Then, with some backstabbing comments claim that I did this thing. Subsequently, I get attacked over some stolen notepad.

For a period of time, there were several quite insistent attacks concerning keeping notes. This is ridiculous. First of all, they were smaller-sized notepads, so I would regularly dispose of a full notepad in the proper way at the company. Secondly, taking notes on a laptop during meetings is not efficient and quite distracting at times. Thirdly, laptops have their own set of risks.

Now, one can argue that I should have been more careful. However, that doesn’t solve anything about the risks to all other documents, works and results this person may get in contact with. In my view, it is a highly unusual situation that offers little value other than petty excuses to attack me over.

False accusation: “stealing” documents / “not properly disposed of”

There are several related instances concerning stolen documents. They might form one narrative or were intended to be distinct, deliberately related. One such narrative seems to have formed around my busines trip to China.

There have been many attacks about documents being stolen. This likely originated from people coordinating to maliciously represent my statements from other conversations and/or misrepresent a plain and simple, non-malicious, obviously benign situation. I have always responsibly disposed of documents in the appointed “secure documents” containers.

Afterwards, during the several years of relentless attacks, I hinted at “whether the timing might allow for another explanation?”. I have some indication that some of these attacks were based on information at the time of my trip to China. So, whether I left a few remaining documents at home (in a locked drawer) or took them with me to China, people would always have an “excuse” to “attack”. Obviously, nothing was “stolen”. These remaining few documents were stored, such that I did not need to take them with me to China.

The business trip to China involved a trip requested by PO, approved by group lead, arranged at ASML using their facilities. There were several comments regarding bad intentions, but these equally “forgot” to consider that it could itself be a business trip.

In this same fashion of reverse-order occurrences of events, the business trip to China was likely planned to “satisfy” a missing piece in the (false) accusation to “justify” (excuse) that I “tried to steal data” when I wrote the small tool for progress indication on full builds. (See section.) I suspect several departments were informed of this and from basically the start of my working at ASML, they have made significant effort to frustrate my successes and attack me. This would also explain the shitty attitude and threat of STI department, the shitty tester who (IIRC) also originated from STI (See “Unproductive tester”.), the replacement PO retracing all my steps and decisions in last months, the rather unexplained sudden need to visit China and the relentless misrepresented attacks afterwards, etc.

There were other attacks concerning “stealing company secrets” that were equally false and based on easily explainable events already discussed in earlier stories. Some of the relentless attacks also manifested as “strong emphasis on comments regarding HSM so the secrets were also safe from malicious employees” and other suck backstabbing comments.

Departure, delayed several times

I had requested in february, possibly very early start of march, to finish up the assignment at ASML. On several occasions, I’m guessing 3 or 4 times, there were certain requests and circumstances to delay finishing up my assignment. Given that I didn’t want to be a selfish asshole, I tried to reasonably accomodate these delays. Towards the end, there was the sudden departure of the (3rd) team’s PO, which necessitated another delay of 2 months or so. All in all, I had delayed for 7 or 8 months, finishing up my assignment at a duration of 2 years and 8 months, of the maximum allowed 3 years. (Due to business rules, for whatever reason.)

During the last two months, i.e. with the introduction of the replacement PO, there was this “sudden” “interest” to retrace all my steps for decisions I made and work preparation I had done and business needs that were planned/analyzed. I never got any further clarification of this, and I never heard of any doubts or concerns.

It is notable that the persistent, constant harassment and abusive practices had intensified during these months. This was likely part of the preparatory harassment that would afterwards be followed up with the massive number of false accusations, lies and other kinds of attacks. These attacks would concern anything to frustrate me or put me in a bad light: interrupt during presentations, interrupt during scrum meetings, asking stupid questions that they know are bullshit, scrum master being an asshole and interfering with content meetings, scrum master giving bad advice and derailing valid conversations, etc. It’s not hard to imagine: just anything you can think of to harass a person, while this person is trying to do a good job and take team members and other people (their roles) into account.

(Supposedly) “distrusting” local office employees

During several trips to local offices and occasional customer in foreign countries, it came to our attention that in some cases the cultural and social expectations for local office employees would be somewhat conflicting with expectations of the company. So, during an ad-hoc conversation –I think it was with UX dev from first team– I mentioned that we may also help them by considering these circumstances in the way we support them with tools and information.

For example, local office employees visit customers for various kinds of support and communication. It may help if we design tools such that we don’t have to disclose secrets but instead can make them part of a local office support-tool, such that employees cannot be put into conflicting positions where such secrets may become a problem. Another example, was to provide them with both tool and secrets, such that they have plausible deniability concerning these secrets, i.e. they don’t need to know because there are support tools for this purpose.

I got attacked over this many times both directly and indirectly. I got attacked for “not trusting local office colleagues” or “having called local office colleagues untrustworthy”. These are lies. Furthermore, I think I am being quite respectful in considering their cultural or social situation, instead of ignorantly expecting their participation if it puts them in unreasonable or difficult situations, and to consider possible solutions where it is within our (my) ability to (easily) facilitate them.

Trying to be grown-up during conflicts and persistent harassment

Over the course of ~3 years, there have been plenty of “conflicts”. In hind-sight it is easy to reframe them as coordinated harassment, but I didn’t know it at the time. On several occasions, I tried to be the grown-up and apologize as reasonable. For example: after one conflict with particularly problematic UX team member that clearly acted unreasonably, I apologized to the team as a whole for disturbing the peace. However, this then got “conveniently interpreted” as “taking all the blame” for what I can now say was literally abuse with this exact malicious intent all along.

Now, that’s not to say that I was unclear in the reason for my apology. I clearly stated that I wasn’t happy about the peace in the team being disturbed, but that I thought (and still do) that the team member was wrong and unreasonable. Of course, those details “get conveniently forgotten” when I got attacked for years afterwards.

This is an insult to my willingness to keep the peace, to my willingness to stand up and fight for what is right. If it was up to me, I would have kicked the UX member out of the team after the first few occurrences. She caused more problems than she solved. She did NOT cooperate. Everything she did was with a toxic attitude and she caused frustration in the team time and again. The only “acceptable” situation to her, was to give her all she demanded, and then she also refuses to understand the process according to which the department works, which has proved on multiple occasions to be to the benefit of the development teams and developers.

If we would have kicked her out of the team, either the visualization developer or another team member could have functioned as contact with UX competence. Someone who understands the process and understands the complexities of doing the work and being unreasonable pushed or pressured into situations, and they would’ve appreciated the process in the way it offers protection against that. Now, we get a toxic person with a manipulative agenda constantly harassing the team if UX doesn’t get what they demand.

General: attacked for many good/beneficial actions

In general, I have been attacked over many, many positive/good/beneficial actions. In some cases, one might claim ignorance, but in many cases there were extensive discussions in which I had explained my exact reasons and made considerable effort to look for solutions in collaboration with the other party/-ies. This cannot have gone completely unnoticed.

The general pattern is: fabricate some bullshit reason why my beneficial efforts are for “other reasons”. Attack me for all of it, again and again, trying to force me to explain every single action or otherwise default to “I am the bad guy”.

Note that this is not an exageration. It was disclosed after 6 years, that the attempt in the 2nd team fuck-up that everyone “assumed” and gathered all the reasons and excuses to make every action into a negative, and then “by their grace”, “maybe”, the would eventually turn it into the positive explanation that always was the truth.

Note that I also got attacked for swapping teams therefore freeing myself (“early”) from an (near-)abusive situation, with most of the team in (conspiring) opposition.

Note also that it was also admitted that there was deliberate opposition, as admitted by one of the later additions of the Romanian team members in the final days before I left/finished the ASML assignment.

Afterwards: attacked over business trip

For about 5 years straight, in various ways with messaging and shitty attitude of people, there were hints of being called a “traitor”. There was never any further explanation. It seems that the lead for this is the trip to China. That trip was a business trip at request of 3rd team’s PO, organized at ASML.

Now, it is useful to point out that nobody every checked anything with me concerning these attacks. I have no clue why a business trip wasn’t considered.

Afterwards: attacks over “wasted time”/“inefficiency”

“I don’t [value?] a man who talks about ethics while he’s emptying my [wallet/pockets].” (or something very much resembling this statement)

There were repeated “attempts” for several years to “confront me” with “my demons”, i.e. throw numerous false accusations in my face persistently, constant, repeatedly for several years on end.

One of these in particular, they decided that would be especially suitable for further harassment and abuse, apparently. For about a decade I did some fairly irregular, occasional system administration with a small psychology firm. Given the amount of effort spent to “confront”, i.e. throw massive number of references in my face in several ways:

In reality

In reality, this is the story:

I had done some server and network management for a long time already. The work helped me to make some money during my studies. I was steadily reducing the frequency and extent of my involvement in sys-admin work. (Not wanting to drop everyone instantly and leaving them to figure it out for themselves.) We, as in me and customer, agreed informally to keep the fee low, given that I could make very little guarantees on timeliness and I was “just” doing this in my spare time.

He was helped with it, because him already being fairly knowledgable with computers could do some of it himself. I would tackle the more difficult parts. And during the time I am referring to now, we were already in the process of transferring responsibilities. The understanding of priority was based very much on a mutual understanding that we knew I would do what was within my ability given the circumstances.

Consequently:

  1. the “low amount of income” for income tax, is due to low fees, i.e. “not much moneyz incoming”.
  2. the claim that I was wasting time and doing a bad job due to supposed “split priorities” is bullshit, because there were no “split priorities”. Employer/customer, in this case customer is ASML, would have priority over this “left-over”-in-process-of-being-dissolved sys-admin work.
  3. there wasn’t even incentive for “split priorities”, because most of people reading probably wouldn’t even get out of bed for the fee I charged. I earned significantly more at my day job.
  4. it wasn’t the kind of work I preferred doing. I was more interested in engineering. Thus also a reason to reduce the work. However, there is benefit to having knowledge on sys-administration/networking, as I am more knowledgable than the typical developer in a significant number of areas.

Urgent situation

At one point, some anti-virus product severely disrupted Windows Server operations after a successful firmware-upgrade (and wouldn’t resolve with firmware-downgrade), to the point where the server could no longer even boot in the “safe” environment.

I had bought myself time by setting up a linux server for necessary network services and the most urgent other services and file-sharing, such that even in the case of this serious event I could do without having to further prioritize. (I think we discussed beforehand what was needed in case this would fail.) Granted, being in the process of reducing dependence on me helped, and during the same period there was also a migration of some services to centralized and/or nationalized connected services. The local server would have a severely reduced role to play.

It was all part of the consideration of circumstances and feasibility.

It’s funny isn’t it? How Windows Server installs, in this case Small Business Server in particular, take a shitload of time to install and set up, force unwanted (even incomplete) updates down your throat, absolutely wreck your newly bought machine with fuckloads of unnecessary extras, eat all the memory and SERIOUS AMOUNTS of storage space before you even install the server software that’s most relevant to your business. Then you need a replacement, so you set up linux on old hardware that was a spare workstation, in about 1.5 - 2.0 hours, and that could provide the most urgent services. (In case you’re wondering: yes, I was smart enough to anticipate the remote chance that the server would break after the firmware-upgrade, so I did that immediately at the start of the planned time-frame. Then when I couldn’t fix it in time, set up the substitute machine to buy time. It’s not ideal, but it should have been an extremely remote chance encounter.)

I figured out the anti-virus software was the problem during a more extensive investigation, at a later time. And, to be clear: the “anti-virus interfering” was a driver-level blocking disruption that blocked almost everything, occurring very early during Windows operation. IIRC, it probably was a driver-level issue that blocked any further file-system access, most likely due to a live-/deadlock for any and all file accesses while waiting to be scanned/approved by anti-virus. So this is by no means a trivial “UEFI/Secure Boot says no” issue.

Design of solution for dropping a message

There was a tentative exploration for whether we could construct a solution that would allow a client to drop a message for someone in the company. We only explored the idea with me exploring a very basic design. We stopped exploring when they realized it may not be such a trivial matter, so it didn’t go past an early inception phase.

Note that this was not intended to be full-blown bi-directional messaging. The idea was to make it possible to drop a message as encrypted payload such that internet-connected server only needed to contain the public key. The idea being that the messages would reside on the server only as encrypted payload and inaccessible after sending. That they would stay on the server only until transferred, and only be decrypted by employees.

I saw a lot of mentions of “storing the encryption key next to the ciphertext”. I would NOT be surprised if that was yet another invalid, misrepresented attack. I never said to “store the encryption key”. I said to “store the encrypted key (ad-hoc generated, one-time symmetric key, encrypted with the public key on the server, of which the private key is NEVER present on the server, and possibly only ever present in hardware-tokens.)”. (Note that this was many years ago, so quantum-computing concerns were not an urgent matter yet.) Now, to be clear: I do not feel like defending an incomplete, abandoned idea of which I knew there were further iterations to be made, and there were many concerns to consider. I do feel like pointing out the attitude present with this malicious bullshit.

I mentioned on several occasions that we would need to take this seriously and get a proper company involved. I also mentioned that infrastructure would still be a concern, as this would also need to be trustworthy. I am well aware that I am not an expert on these matters, but I also know enough to know that there are certain critical decisions that can greatly reduce risk. A very simple “trick” is to be very careful and considerate of what you want/need a (part of a) system to do. You can avoid immense complexity and risk by NOT having it do too many things (“everything”). And, yes, that would mean a client couldn’t re-read the message after sending it. That was part of the consideration. The idea being that whatever needed discussing, could be discussed during a next meet.

I also got attacked over this. In very indirect fashion. In such a way that it took a long time for me to figure out why I was being attacked in this way. The absolutely sickening attitude with which I was attacked over absolutely EVERYTHING by constantly misrepresenting the situation is ridiculous.

Of course, the irony is, that while I am relentlessly being attacked in many ways, on every possible opportunity people found to call me incompetent, stupid, idiotic, useless imbecil for considering an idea such as the one described above. And now people are dumping fuckloads of personal information on A.I. bots who send it back to their owners and learn from it to the point that they’re able to reproduce their source content. So, even though I am attacked relentlessly over an incorrectly represented, incomplete, in-progress solution, reality by now is worse than what I started designing already. And people feel like they are excused for already 8 years of abuse over my attempts to do some good for society.

In case someone’s wondering whether this isn’t just email. I don’t recall the exact considerations at the time, but it would avoid going through the interconnected email infrastructure. Again, I don’t recall all the details. It was many years ago by now.

Afterwards: “burning notes must be malicious”

When, after finishing the assignment at ASML, I started to get attacked in multiple ways and in many individual encounters, it became pretty obvious that there was malicious intent at play. As noted also in the previous section, I did a little bit of system administration for a few small companies. Given the multitude of attacks, including harassment, the first abusive practices (if I do not count the shitshow at ASML) and distinct clear attacks and “hints” at many false accusations, I decided to take precautions and burn the notes I had kept for system administration. The overwhelming majority consisted of extremely insignificant temporary notes and checklists that I used as I was doing the work. Sometimes this included some stray comments for follow-ups that were needed, e.g. to look up something or investigate some issue or question. I did not want to take any chances.

The delusional, malicious people involved in the many abusive activities, immediately took it upon themselves to shape this into a story about me burning documents that I had stolen from ASML. This, of course, matches completely with earlier attempts at all the false accusations already at play. Everything about this attack centers around “only evil people need to burn notes” prejudice. This was followed up in all the usual harassment channels such as the messages on-line on social media, the other attacks in interactions with other companies and individuals, etc.

To be clear: I don’t care if the only thing you learn from these notes is how I changed the style of my self-drawn smileys. If I want to keep it private and decide to burn the notes, it’s none of your fucking business!

Afterwards: attacks over 20yo false accusation

A short clarification is in order, in case it wasn’t quite clear from previous stories. There seems to be a concerted effort in exposing me to “information that somewhat relates to past events” with the idea that “if I recognize the event, then it must be real, i.e. from the past”. This is misleading in that, with sufficiently similar information and a lot of repeated insistent effort, I will also recognize incorrect/misrepresented “events”, i.e. lies, twisted circumstances, misrepresented situations, etc.

For the last ~8 years, there was a clear on-going effort to try and attack me over something that happened ~20 years ago. (I could go into detail, but there is a different story lining up that goes into a lot more detail, as this involves another company, conflict of interest, abusive and malicious behavior.) This also happened at ASML, with several stories and mentions in this vain. In particular, the abusive, oppressive UX team lead that has been a pain-in-the-ass during the whole time, had several stories that could reasonably be related to this past event. Note, I say reasaonably because it doesn’t have to perfectly resemble and may not be possible to perfectly resemble given lack of detailed information, but it must resemble the past event sufficiently that my brain can piece together all the (unjustified) attacks retroactively.

Around this same time period, there were also other mentions by colleagues from my own employer. Maybe not exactly same, and maybe some really were a coincidence (but more likely selected to be real but also sufficiently similar to be “useful” for the attacks), but there were plenty of occurrences and at one point the malicious intentions are clear.

There were prior attempts at earlier employers too.

Afterwards, there were also “events” during work and in home town, such as people that just happened to show up at the right place with similar “hints”, etc. These clearly had threatening characteristics and all blindly assumed these (false) accusations were true. Again, the “he recognized it so he did it” excuse, does not hold when the attempts were persistently present for 20 years, and intensified in the last 8 or so years.

I don’t go into detail here, because there is a lot of story surrounding this and would massively extend and side-track the story, which is not the purpose of this post. However, it is significant to understand that ASML is willingly and knowingly complicit in this coordinated abuse and very much planned for this abusive outcome.

Afterwards: attacked over “bad” decisions and team “mistakes”

I have been relentlessly attacked over team “mistakes” (essentially any outcome potentially undesirable) as if it would all be my (personal) responsibility. This seems to have taken the same approach as described in the previous section’s starting clarification about “recognizing events”. This included several things that might have gone wrong or were undesirable, including the use of MongoDB. Ironically, right before I left a certain team was in the process of upgrading to the next major release of MongoDB, so if it truly was undesirable, they would/should have migrated to some other solution.

At this point, it means that after 3 years of which a significant time was spent with arbitrary harassment, was followed up by 5 years of throwing just any and all events in my face, trying many times to attack me over them. Of which, anything that may have any “undesirable” characteristic is of course a potential candidate. If you persistently, constantly throw messages in my face for 5 years straight, of course I will respond to them. Eventually, the intentions become clear and obvious. This is then used, incorrectly, as an excuse to blame me for any of these remaining events.

This didn’t end with ASML events. I noticed one very particular event about my first internship at a bank where at one point two people walked past me and talked about documents being leaked. This is what concerns me: there should be no reason why this conversation was of any significance. I only remember that conversation-in-passing because of the relentless, repeated attacks. The fact that this shows up, means that this whole undertaking is an effort that is ~15 years in the making. ASML also partakes in this, in part with similarly insignificant mentions, such as the use of the MongoDB software, which was a decision taken outside of my control and partly prior to me starting at ASML. In part, by relentlessly confronting me with circumstances of conflicts or other events. To be clear, even the most simple situations are recognizable when for 5 years continuously, these mentions show up, week after week, or every two weeks, or several times per week. Especially if one gets attacked over several events known to not be their doing, but that keep showing up. It very strongly implies that there are other attempts one might not have recognized at first.

In the section that describes the false accusations over stealing documents, I deliberately hinted at whether the timing would allow for other explanations, which was followed up with some response that led me to derive that they probably referred to the time period I was on the business trip to China. (Hence some documents stored at home, which were therefore NOT taken to China.) In one confrontation of what strongly resembed the in-passing-conversation-topic at my first internship, (There were several false accusations of that time period. Some strongly hinting at prejudice.) I responded similarly with a response that was later followed up with “oh yeah, they just assumed the intern would have done it”, or something similar. In both cases, these attacks were based on bad assumptions or premature conclusions (i.e. false accusations) that due to my attempt at a somewhat considerate response exposed some hint of what is going on. And how I figured out that a lot of this was very imprecise, often maliciously so. Even though I am not at fault, I recognize the event because I have some knowledge of (something resembling) it.

I’m sorry if this description is somewhat vague. I am not sure how to describe this properly, as it is such a sickening, abusive way of harassing an individual. I want it to be mentioned/documented, somehow. There is likely need for a more general post to document this kind of abusive and manipulative behavior. (In the same document, I need to, for example, also document that one does not “negotiate” about truths. It isn’t “truth” if you get to change it at will but historical narrative.)

In the same vain, my responses are explained as “fighting my inner demons”. Let me be clear about this: being persistently harassed over a 20-year time-frame worth of (maliciously reframed) facts, continuously by many people in social media, in my home town, during job interviews, in news articles, etc. is far more than “(incorrectly) recognizing a past event in a stray comment”. It is other people pushing another narrative down my throat. A more persistent problem is people who, I know with absolute certainty, participate in this and keep denying it. This is a stumbling block in figuring out the extent of the malicious intent.

Changelog

This article will receive updates, if necessary.

This post is part of the Coordinated harassment series series.
Other posts in this series: