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I digitalized Berlin's registration form

nicolasbouliane.com

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Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#251

Post by dmoy »

gwright wrote: post #241
jupp0r wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is largely impossible in Germany due to government pay rates being a fraction of what a competent person would earn in industry. There is very little flexibility in this due to equality principles. Sports is an exception, so they could fix it if they wanted to.

> There is very little flexibility in this due to equality principles. I can imagine a lot of ways to interpret this but none really make sense in the context of your post. What "equality principle" leads to a conclusion that a government employee doing X must be paid a fraction of what a private employee doing X is paid? I'm confused.

Equality among tiers of government employee. A similar though less pronounced issue exists with the US and the General Schedule. Entry level SWE who get lucky and enter at like grade 9 make maybe 50% of what they could at FAANG as a new grad. For seniors it's even worse.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#252

Post by pzduniak »

cromka wrote: post #246
mawadev wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true and in the end the Chief-Executive-Intern-Junior-Fullstack-Developer from hungary/poland/croatia/romania will do it for the german consulting company bc in-house german developers are too expensive.

Can’t speak for others, but Polish engineers aren’t and haven’t been cheaper than German for a while now.

Perhaps you're comparing _good_ engineers. That's not who we're talking about here :)

There's tens of thousands of fresh IT graduates working 2.5k EUR/mo jobs (or less) - and you can replace any engineer with a finite amount of these guys.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#253

Post by ralferoo »

flurdy wrote: post #143
throwaway_no wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am certain had it been shipped the other way the post office in Norway would have rejected it immediately for not being 100% by-the-book. The postal office in Norway tries hard to deliver to the correct destination. I've heard of similar stories where they only had a name and a city to go on, and it was delivered at the correct location. During Christmas, they even have a team of dedicated "detectives" who tries…

Maybe, but Norway do make it harder for themselves by having just a 4 number postcode that could include many thousands of addresses. A UK postcode is often down to just one street or similar size. Once, someone I knew in Norway (ok, my sister again...) somehow managed to combine her old and new address when ordering something online. And that parcel back and forth between 2 cities for a long time... :)

> A UK postcode is often down to just one street or similar size.

It's even better than that. Unless you are incredibly rural or the street is tiny, most streets have at least two postcodes - one for the odd side and one for the even side. In most cases, there's only about 15-30 houses in a postcode, any more on a road and it's split up into smaller chunks.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#254

Post by carlosjobim »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #245
carlosjobim wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What frightens me is comparing the snail-like rate of progress in the post-modern era with the rapid progress during the 20th century, regardless of economic and governmental system. It's like the a hand brake was simply engaged. I get it that people in power want to stall things so that they can skim money for their own purposes, but doesn't anybody else get just bored by the lack of progress?

> but doesn't anybody else get just bored by the lack of progress? Be the change that you want to happen. Where possible implement it in software with your friends and publish it on the internet. Thus: I am not bored by the lack of progress, instead I am rather overworked by implementing parts of this in my free time after work.

Of course! My comment was not about software since I'm no programmer, but about progress in the general sense. Why don't the people who are involved and take decisions within large civic projects get bored with the slow rate of progress. Like after they've stolen maybe a few millions for themselves and their friends, why not get on with it and actually start working? Is it necessary to stall progress for years and decades just for the joy of stealing? At least when it comes to IT, the rulers have very few means available for them to stall progress in general, so it becomes very obvious when they're doing it within the places they can control.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#256

Post by epups »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #189
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The German authorities have no incitive to digitize and fix the broken bureaucracy because for one, in their mind there's nothing wrong with it because Germany is Europe's wealthiest country so it can never be wrong, and secondly, digitizing bureaucracy means increased efficiency which means less public servant jobs and they don't want that. What they want is more bureaucracy and more cushy public servant jobs pushin…

> She took that at work and proudly showed it to her boss hoping for some recognition and he said "if you wanna keep your job, don't bring stuff like this at work, we don't need it, there's nothing wrong with the way we currently do things", and then it hit me that current German software innovation culture is completely FUBAR. This seems like a very justified reaction and could happen in any sane company in the worl…

Your thinking is very common in Germany. It is correct in a primitive sense: change is costly. But it misses an additional layer of thinking, which is that not changing is even more costly sometimes. The problem was not that the company was happily using Excel and VBA, it is that the process was clunky and required expensive humans in the middle. If it could be easily automated in Python, it could also have been easily automated somehow else, and that change was worth exploring.

With your logic, Germany has justified maintaining fax machines and printing online forms. Embracing change is an uncomfortable process, but not doing that is even worse.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#257

Post by jona-f »

nicbou wrote: post #107
Escapado wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone thinking this is satire: It's suprisingly close to the truth. We have Elster for electronically submitting taxes. Apparently the Elster Project started in 1996. And all it is, is a digital version of the manual tax forms. It's entirely stupid. When I file my taxes I still have to leave out 12 random pages (instead of Elster figuring out that I don't need to file them and simply not show them to me). And la…

Elster is still among the best digital products Germany has to offer. Pretty much everything else is worse.

Can anyone tell me why it is named after a bird known for stealing? Is this a deliberate joke? How did that get approved?

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#258

Post by PaulHoule »

I spent a year living in Germany and I am pretty certain that if I had overstayed my visa one day somebody would have shown up at my door to check in on me.

Contrast that to the US where I had a neighbor who was always bringing people in from Poland who were overstaying their visas and there didn't seem to be any effort to stop this. (e.g. despite all these strange schemes to make sure people get photographed, scanned, probed, etc. when they leave.)

(There was that time one of his "guests" was out in the road with an associate and revving the engine of a pickup truck while it was up against a thick wood beam that was braced against a tree. I asked him what he was doing and he said "I'm trying to make straight the bumper", and in that case broken English was the least of his problems.)

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#259

Post by PaulHoule »

nforgerit wrote: post #102
2716057 wrote: post #70

No, no, it's all wrong. Here's how we digitize our administration in Germany the proper, Germanic way: A fixed sum for digitization is allocated and the local government publicly advertises a project. A bureaucrat higher up the foodchain has a friend/cousin/former colleague who runs an IT service business side gig. Guess who will win the contract. The friend/cousin/former colleague starts building by outsourcing the…

German here. I'll have to dissent on the buddy-business part. That's not how Germany works. It's the opposite, which turns out to be even worse: As a bureaucrat that wants to solve a specific problem, you form a project and are required to make a public submission. Those submissions have to adhere to very formal predefined legal standards (in order to omit corruption) which make them incredibly time-consuming paperwo…

This Youtube describes how that scenario plays out in defense contracting in Germany

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jDUVtUA7rg

"Perun" used to be a video game streamer but thanks to the Russia-Ukraine war he now one of the best warbloggers and even does appearances together with top generals and pros like Anders Puck Nielsen.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#260

Post by alistairSH »

Do Germans have to repeat the process to update their driver's license or other paperwork upon changing address?

Here in the US, we would normally... register the new address with the postal service (online), update the address on our driver's license and car registration (online if same state, in-person if new state), send an email to employer with new address details.

So as long as it's a move with a state, it's not too bad. Name changes (marriage, etc), gender changes, out of state moves, and other "edge" cases can be quite a bit more painful.

And of course, updating addresses with utilities/ISP and other non-governmental entities varies quite a bit.

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