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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

#951

Post by askonomm »

usr1106 wrote: post #922
askonomm wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why does everyone on HN think that Estonia is Eastern Europe when it is actually Northern Europe ( https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Europe ). All of the Baltic countries are Northern.

East and West used to be be not only a geographical distinction, but also political one. Estonia belonged to the East, even though not voluntarily. They actively left the Eastern block when they had the chance (like most of the others, so the block is no block anymore), but the terminology lives on, especially used by people who did not suffer from it. A couple of years I went to a technical event. The event T-shirts…

To me it's just about what was taught in schools to me, and what I can find on my own. If you Wikipedia Estonia, it says right in the opening paragraph that it is Northern Europe. It's also what was taught to me in schools. Admittedly, being born in '92, I am a first-generation free Estonian and never experienced the soviet union so I don't have any strong feelings of East or the color red, but it is true that Eastern Europe is often talked with the vain of ex-soviet block countries that are corrupt and stuck in time, which is simply not the case with Estonia and I feel just minimizes the work we've done since.

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

#952

Post by thaumasiotes »

hackeraccount wrote: post #763
thaumasiotes wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How could the solution be anything else? If the problem is "we want this person to understand this document", what are you going to do besides translating the document into the person's language?

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

#953

Post by thaumasiotes »

rtpg wrote: post #368
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 got married in Japan so was curious about the differences. The two differences seem to be needing to schedule an appointment and needing proof of income. Doesn’t seem really much worse than most countries (tho I can get Denmark being easier) I do place some blame on embassies not issuing documents in local languages. I’m not asking for proof I’m not married for fun! Extremely unhelpful, tho a good job generator for…

> which leads to the US government saying stuff like “well we don’t know if you’re married but you can sign an affidavit in front of us”. The American Empire, barely capable of a proper census!

How would a census help? That's just you declaring your marital status in front of them, without having to sign anything; it has even less probative value than what you're presenting as a stopgap measure that wouldn't be necessary if the census worked better.

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

#954

Post by hnbad »

data_maan wrote: post #482
OtherShrezzing wrote: post #15

Minimum initial share capital of €12,500 to found a company where liability is limited to the firm seems like a very regressive impediment to business. For comparison in the UK, there's a £12 registration fee, and a £1 (one pound) minimum initial share capital. It must put limited liability out of reach of so many people.

Reading a lot on Germany business culture, my takeaway is that Germany is not made for lean founders who start small but aim big, i.e. your typical startup. It seems to be aimed either at well established business magnates who want to open yet another business (and 25k€ is nothing in that case) or small bakery-on-the-corner businesses who will go for GmbH anyways (and hence no reason to cough up 25k€). There's no pat…

A lot of German law is based around the unstated assumption that business owners are 19th century industrial tycoons and all workers are employees. There are a lot of protections for employees (dependent workers) but practically zero for freelancers, for example. The concept of co-owning a business with your spouse is also alien to German law as in almost every situation it's more beneficial for one of both to either be an employee or primarily work elsewhere.

And don't get me started on being a business owner and wanting to become a mother. A lot of women business owners abandon their companies to get hired as regular employees when they want to have children.

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

#955

Post by data_maan »

pezezin wrote: post #925
samus wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't they still faxing documents all over the place? (AFAIK, you might have to do that from time to time in Germany as well)

They are, and they still rely on hankos ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_(East_Asia)#Japanese_usag... ). There has been a recent push for "digital transformation", but it is still in the early stages.

True all.

At the same time, they had an early form of mobile Internet since they year 2000 (when most of the West didn't have internet at all, let alone mobile internet): https://www.wired.com/2000/06/its-a-wireless-world-in-japan/

Japan is ranked 4th/20th vs Germany's 23th/35th for mobile/fixed internet speed, so much better overall (and anecdotal evidence is that internet in Germany's countryside is rock bottom).

So Japan rather seems to me to _want_ to do their own thing (at least when it comes to preference for cash, although I agree that still faxing things is strange), compared to Germany which _cannot_, for various reasons.

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

#956

Post by shiroiushi »

pezezin wrote: post #931
shiroiushi wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAICT, Japan has the easiest immigration for skilled professionals, by far. However, this has been the case for less than 10 years, as they totally revamped their immigration laws in the 2010s sometime to try to attract more such people, so of course it's going to take time to see the difference. Japan is also somewhat difficult for foreigners to live in because of the language barrier, but Germany isn't that differ…

> Japan is also somewhat difficult for foreigners to live in because of the language barrier, but Germany isn't that different here In the case of Japan, you also have the insanely difficult writing system, probably the most difficult writing system in current usage. The German language might be difficult, but at least it uses an alphabet with a somewhat consistent spelling.

The writing system isn't that big a deal. For daily life, it's more important to be able to converse in basic/conversational Japanese, not to be able to read literature, and you don't have to read kanji to talk to people. Just learning katakana is enough to read all the foreign loanwords (which are everywhere these days), and knowing hiragana + some basic kanji is really plenty to get by. For reading anything more difficult, just use Google Translate's camera ("Lens") function.

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

#957

Post by hnbad »

nicbou wrote: post #937
hnbad wrote: post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 defa…

Sometimes Kindergeld makes less sense than the income tax reduction. The best option can be calculated automatically, but the state still won't do it. Kindergeld is a fantastic example of bureaucracy that could be abgeschafft.

Kindergeld is a fantastic example of something that should be a UBI. It's intended to go to the child and be spent by the parents on the child's behalf - legally, it's considered income of the child, not the parents. That's literally a basic income already and it's paid from birth until the child is 18-25 years old (depending on employment status or if the child is in education).

Of course because the FDP conveniently forgot that its "Bürgergeld" was supposed to be a form of UBI and decided to simply rebrand social welfare (aka Hartz IV) instead, we're now in a perverse situation where the thing that was supposed to be a universal basic income is instead very much not universal and even takes Kindergeld into account if the child is part of the household.

That said, turning the Kindergeld into a UBI would also mean abolishing the Kinderfreibetrag which acts regressive (i.e. in effect, higher income families receive more benefits per child than lower income families). It would also make it easier to justify closing the loophole of migrant workers collecting child benefits for children in their home country given that a UBI could reasonably be restricted to national residents rather than all EU residents (which is the concern with limiting child benefits the same way).

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

#958

Post by fransje26 »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #904
fransje26 wrote: post #897

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know of that's the cause, but it could be an interesting theory to look into. But taking job offshoring, as an example. It could be fairly straightforward to determine how much tax revenue a car produced in, say, Germany, contributes to the economy, vs the same car imported from abroad. But where it gets complicated is that, German unemployment being low, the worker that lost his or her job to offshoring didn…

* >So what is the loss?* Less bargaining Power and less wages therefore less revenue for the state and spending power for the people. Decades ago a factory worker could support a family. That's not the case anymore. Offshoring doesn't automatically result in mass unemployment.

Less bargaining power, that's a fact. But I'm not certain about the lesser wages.

I've been looking at the inflation + CPI index in Europe [0] over the 1990-2020 period. The result is that for an equivalent €100 in 1990, you would need to earn about €200 in 2023. According to [1], the wages in Germany have not increased enough (due to the well known wage stagnation of the 2000-2008 era). But the wages in France [2] (with data over the 2000-2023 period) have. Over the 2008-2019 period, the wages in both countries were increasing at the same rate.

The inflation + CPI index is not perfect, but it gives an indication of the costs changes of a "representative" consumer basket. With our sample of 2, this means that those basic costs have not increased disproportionately w.r.t. wages over the 1990-2023 time period. The pill was a bit harder to swallow for the Germans, but they also started at a higher level.

But what the inflation + CPI index totally fail to take into account is the explosion of other costs that now put single-income families in great difficulties w.r.t. a few decades ago. And the mechanism behind those costs increase is the one that would be interesting to understand and analyze.

[0] https://www.inflationtool.com/euro

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/416207/average-annual-wa...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/416204/average-annual-wa...

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

#959

Post by fransje26 »

araes wrote: post #856
fransje26 wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Austerity ideology dictates that there simply must be inefficiency in public services, and cuts are the cure to this disease Over time I developed a more cynical theory. As politicians have extremely short-term understandings and targets, they abuse the latent momentum of public services to surf on the inherent delayed response before service quality goes down and gets noticed. By then, they can blame the cause on…

Excellent description, and further additions for the cynicism. (opinion) Human society large rewards narcissism. Diligence is usually rewarded with exploitation. There's actually academic supporting the 2nd. Therefore, most politicians are largely selfish and mostly interested in being on TV, being the center of attention, and holding sway over other citizens. (Not all, just the majority). The only metric is "what ge…

> Quietly also nationalize the debt to the public in a line item somewhere that nobody writes about. Squander resources for years. Sell back to industry claiming the salvation of capitalism.

Ah, the privatization switcheroo.

1) Have a state develop and pay for expensive and necessary assets

2) Preach that privatization is necessary because -something-something-government == inefficient.

3) Take prized assets at a bargain price. Under-invest chronically and strip valuable assets

4) Get paid again when company is re-nationalized

5) Goto 2)

To make the different steps smoother, you can add a good government-industry revolving-door policy. Nothing helps capitalism efficiency more than a bit of cronyism.

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

#960

Post by SeanLuke »

gspetr wrote: post #835
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…

>in Italy, a wedding is a contract Last time I checked it is a contract just about anywhere, including the United States. Marriage rights are primarily property rights. (or "liabilities", ask any divorce lawyer).

It's not the same. In the US marriage issues are handled in civil court via contract law, that's true. But in Italy, a marriage literally involves an actual contract that you write in longhand and sign. You wedding vows are part of that contract. AFAIK infidelity etc. is a breech of contract.

In the US marriage involves submitting a marriage application (a short form) and appearing before a clerk. Marriage is a license from the state. At any rate, the difference in bureaucracy could not be more stark.

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