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How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

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Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#761

Post by mk89 »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #206
mk89 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany and "digital" payments have a history due to old reasons. We don't appreciate its meaning anymore, but cash is literally the only anonymous payment method you can have in this lifetime, and people in Germany tend NOT to trust any entity/company/government holding your data for no particular purpose. The downside of this is the split brain problem that you have with distributed systems: a state knows something…

> We don't appreciate its meaning anymore, but cash is literally the only anonymous payment method you can have in this lifetime, and people in Germany tend NOT to trust any entity/company/government holding your data for no particular purpose. Exactly. This is the eperience from two dicatorships on German soil in the 20th century of which one ended less than 35 years ago (many of its crimes still have not been prose…

I heard of people being sent ... far away ... just because of jealous neighbors spying on you.

That's some level of f** up.

No wonder that cash is the only accepted payment method in a world that tries at all costs to sneak into your private stuff.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#762

Post by mfiro »

nicbou wrote: post #114

I document German bureaucracy for a living,[0] and everything is like that. Every life event - immigrating, getting a job, getting married, having a child, buying a car - is mired in slow, paper-based bureaucracy. It is a constant, significant impediment to life in the country. Just last week, I was telling people that the best way to get married in Germany is to get married in Denmark. I cannot overstate how terribl…

I've been living in Germany for more than 7 years and I can only verify this. The offices in big cities are overloaded with requests and getting an appointment for things like renewing documents can takes weeks if not months. Not to mention the naturalization process which can take up to two years[0].

A solution for this in my opinion would be to centralize these processes and make them online, like making a government portal for the whole country. But for that many rules should be changed, which is highly unlikely.

[0] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/zwei-jahre-warten-auf-die... (German)

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#763

Post by hackeraccount »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #752
SeanLuke wrote: post #735

For those of you griping about German bureaucracy I urge you to come to Italy to learn just how good you have it. My wife is Italian and wanted to get married in her small home town. In order for her to get married to an American in her home town required paperwork that bordered on the Kafkaesque. We had to show up at the Italian embassy in Washington DC (fortunately we live there!) with proof and witnesses that I wa…

> and then even though I wrote the vows myself in Italian, just because I am American we had to have it translated by someone else back into English, by hand, just so I understood the vows I had myself written. Are you a native Italian speaker? If not, this makes perfect sense. It is routine for someone to attempt to say one thing in a foreign language while actually saying something completely different.

What the difference between a solution and an elegant solution. A solution will fix the problem even if that means creating another problem. An elegant solution fixes the problem without creating another problem.

I can see how a non-native speaker might get themselves in trouble. I admit I have no idea what the correct solution is but I don't think this is it.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#764

Post by miracle2k »

SeanLuke wrote: post #735

For those of you griping about German bureaucracy I urge you to come to Italy to learn just how good you have it. My wife is Italian and wanted to get married in her small home town. In order for her to get married to an American in her home town required paperwork that bordered on the Kafkaesque. We had to show up at the Italian embassy in Washington DC (fortunately we live there!) with proof and witnesses that I wa…

It's actually somewhat similar in Germany. You need a Ehefähigkeitszeugnis, essentially that document proving that you are not married yet. You would have needed to get this from the US.

Because most countries don't have that sort of document (including the US), you then instead need to apply to your local Oberlandesgericht (Higher Regional Court) for an exemption.

All the way, any foreign government documents need to be notorized by the German embassy in that country.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#765

Post by tbyehl »

nicbou wrote: post #114

I document German bureaucracy for a living,[0] and everything is like that. Every life event - immigrating, getting a job, getting married, having a child, buying a car - is mired in slow, paper-based bureaucracy. It is a constant, significant impediment to life in the country. Just last week, I was telling people that the best way to get married in Germany is to get married in Denmark. I cannot overstate how terribl…

I once saw a survey, possibly from the Annals of Improbable Research, asking how many people constitute a bureaucracy. My favorite response: One German.

See also: The Checkpoint Charlie scene from the 1985 movie Gotcha!

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#766

Post by hnbad »

nicbou wrote: post #114

I document German bureaucracy for a living,[0] and everything is like that. Every life event - immigrating, getting a job, getting married, having a child, buying a car - is mired in slow, paper-based bureaucracy. It is a constant, significant impediment to life in the country. Just last week, I was telling people that the best way to get married in Germany is to get married in Denmark. I cannot overstate how terribl…

Another fun example: if you have a child, you won't automatically get Kindergeld (child benefits) even though you have to sign paperwork for the birth certificate. You have to apply for child benefits and parental leave and maternity compensation and you have to notify each relevant institution individually yourself.

There are good and important reasons certain public institutions aren't allowed to share data by default but instead of making that data sharing opt-in, it's completely offloaded to you personally.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#767

Post by Aeolun »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #752
SeanLuke wrote: post #735

For those of you griping about German bureaucracy I urge you to come to Italy to learn just how good you have it. My wife is Italian and wanted to get married in her small home town. In order for her to get married to an American in her home town required paperwork that bordered on the Kafkaesque. We had to show up at the Italian embassy in Washington DC (fortunately we live there!) with proof and witnesses that I wa…

> and then even though I wrote the vows myself in Italian, just because I am American we had to have it translated by someone else back into English, by hand, just so I understood the vows I had myself written. Are you a native Italian speaker? If not, this makes perfect sense. It is routine for someone to attempt to say one thing in a foreign language while actually saying something completely different.

Marriage generally has a fixed definition by law, anything else would be madness.

The vows shouldn’t matter.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#768

Post by tpm »

mfiro wrote: post #762
nicbou wrote: post #114

I document German bureaucracy for a living,[0] and everything is like that. Every life event - immigrating, getting a job, getting married, having a child, buying a car - is mired in slow, paper-based bureaucracy. It is a constant, significant impediment to life in the country. Just last week, I was telling people that the best way to get married in Germany is to get married in Denmark. I cannot overstate how terribl…

I've been living in Germany for more than 7 years and I can only verify this. The offices in big cities are overloaded with requests and getting an appointment for things like renewing documents can takes weeks if not months. Not to mention the naturalization process which can take up to two years[0]. A solution for this in my opinion would be to centralize these processes and make them online, like making a governme…

You can't centralize them, as in, it's simply not possible because Germany is decentralized. It's not that many rules would have to be changed, the Constitution would have to be changed. It's completely impossible.

The processes are going to be online, this is mandated by law, it will take years, but it is being worked on (some are already available online). They will still be provided by the respective municipality.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#769

Post by constantcrying »

ben_w wrote: post #734
constantcrying wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the German government did "austerity" they wouldn't need half my wage to spend on literal nonsense. Look at the budget over the last decades, as if there wasn't enough money...

One person's Schwachsinn is another's Vernunft. I've never actually looked at the German budget (quasi B1 deutschkenntnisse and no training in economics, what would I get from reading them?), what I can say is that it's very easy to fall into the trap described by Chesterton's fence and call for the removal of things because you don't understand them, not because they're actually bad. For example, someone I used to k…

The data is published in English as well. https://www.destatis.de/EN/Home/_node.html

>For example, someone I used to know in the UK said much the same about his taxes paying for schools, just because he personally didn't have kids.

This isn't what I said. If I pay half of my wages to the state I would expect them to manage to staff government offices. Maybe besides defense, basic administration has to be the most important function of the government, as nearly every other activity relies on it. There is zero doubt in my mind that there is something less important in the budget than performing the core functions of any government.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#770

Post by [deleted] »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #610
mike_hearn wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone who is extolling how simple the UK is, that's lovely. What a shame about brexit though. A part of the argument for Brexit was to enable simplifications of bureaucracy (obviously not for the specific case of someone in the EU migrating there, but for everything else). So that's not necessarily a great argument. It hasn't been capitalized on to any great extent yet because the current government is weak and…

What exactly did EU law block in the UK that wasn't blocked in other EU countries?

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