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The deindustrialization of Germany

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Re: The deindustrialization of Germany

#131

Post by tetris11 »

jareklupinski wrote: post #51
kachurovskiy wrote: post #50

We're definitely huge fans of paperwork here and it hurts a lot. Want to sell something? Company registration takes months, just getting a business tax ID was 6 weeks for me. To sell electronics, register with Stiftung EAR, then find an intermediary to get you a WEEE-Nummer and report monthly (!) sales figures of all your device types. Just that registration costs 1k and 8 weeks. And don't forget your battery and pac…

> We're definitely huge fans of paperwork here and it hurts a lot. > society is healthy no pain, no gain :) there's probably a terry prachett quote attributing bureaucracy to the stability of a large-scale civilization

It has a nice, horrifically frustrating, but nice way of slowing things right down. Its inefficiency is one of it's perks in my opinion. It buys people time to think before a piece of legislation is enacted, and when it finally is, people are already over it.

Re: The deindustrialization of Germany

#132

Post by mmarq »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #128
mmarq wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t have an informed opinion, but with my limited interactions with Germans, the problem with software engineering is that it is not considered a high status profession. The smart German would rather go into law, medicine, accounting (!!) or teaching, than into software development. It is true that before Brexit salaries were much lower compared to the UK, and that only recently, after Covid, they skyrocketed. So…

>It is true that before Brexit salaries were much lower compared to the UK And people from the UK say the opposite, that engineers are not respected and paid in the UK the way they are in Germany. I think the low/high PoV of your salary depends in which bubble you hang around. Every market is flooded with low pay offers, but yes, I feel like in Germany, unless you work for big-tech, SW engineering is pay way less com…

> And people from the UK say the opposite, that engineers are not respected and paid in the UK the way they are in Germany

I was referring to software developers. Before 2016-17, a software developer in London would make twice as much as in Berlin. Now it seems you’d make slightly more in Berlin than in London.

> I see most companies rarely hire and when they do they exclusively want skilled seniors for mid-level pay.

I know that Zalando, Delivery Hero, Hello Fresh and other similar companies pay more on the entire scale (from junior vs junior to principal vs principal) than comparable companies in London. Salaries skyrocketed in the sense that just a few years ago they would be lower than in London. I know Meta pays higher salaries in Germany than in the UK for fully remote roles (I was told by an internal recruiter last year).

It’s possible, though, that if one is in the lower part of the distribution their salary may be higher in London, but I haven’t investigated.

Re: The deindustrialization of Germany

#133

Post by brazzy »

wernercd wrote: post #101
brazzy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine working harder that you can possibly imagine to guarantee a good future for your children, and yet not being able to because the deck is stacked against you, or you're just unlucky - and having the state step in to at least give them a fair chance. Then imagine someone saying that's bad because it's important for other people's kids to be able to live in luxury without ever having to work a day in their lives…

Imagine saying that you working hard, providing for your kids and doing good in life is less because someone else has it better/easier/"doesn't deserve it". Imagine saying that the only way things can be fair is if you steal from others you think have too much to make things 'equal'.

I am not saying at all that it is "less" (in what way do you even imagine that?),

I am saying that in cases where it has nothing to do with working harder and everything with profiting off the work of others, which is invariably the case with multimillionaires, there must be a limit

If you're gonna play games with framing things as "stealing", the everyone whose income is from investment is stealing from the people who work to produce these returns.

Re: The deindustrialization of Germany

#134

Post by huijzer »

still_grokking wrote: post #122
HackOfAllTrades wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. It reads like a huge list of cherry-pickings. You'd think that quoting facts would strengthen ones argument, all these tiny and sometimes very specific facts with no context had the opposite effect.

The article was obviously about the big picture. You get that only when you look at a bunch of "unrelated", "small" facts. If there are a lot of facts pointing in one direction, maybe there is something to it. The other point is: That was not cheery picking. There are no other facts that would point in the opposite direction… More or less everything in Germany is in decline. That's just true. Source: I'm living here…

As a Dutch person who is often in Germany, I agree with you that Germany feels in decline, but we need stronger arguments for or against it. For example, not the whole of Germany is about manufacturing cars. Carl Zeiss, for example, is a big company doing state-of-the-art work.

Do you know by the way why Germany and software don’t go well together? What do you think?

Re: The deindustrialization of Germany

#135

Post by brazzy »

wernercd wrote: post #100
brazzy wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? It's not billionaires who "earn" money by doing nothing who are greedy, but those who think such greed should not be allowed to perpetuate across generations? That is the position you're trying to defend?

[flagged]

Your position is simply wrong, and absurdly intellectually dishonest.

It starts with "greed is wanting that which you didn't earn". No, that is not what greed is by any stretch of imagination.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/greed

"a very strong wish to continuously get more of something, especially food or money"

It is, by definition, the rich who are greedy. Those who want to limit generational wealth are fighting greed

Re: The deindustrialization of Germany

#136

Post by FirmwareBurner »

mmarq wrote: post #132
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It is true that before Brexit salaries were much lower compared to the UK And people from the UK say the opposite, that engineers are not respected and paid in the UK the way they are in Germany. I think the low/high PoV of your salary depends in which bubble you hang around. Every market is flooded with low pay offers, but yes, I feel like in Germany, unless you work for big-tech, SW engineering is pay way less com…

> And people from the UK say the opposite, that engineers are not respected and paid in the UK the way they are in Germany I was referring to software developers. Before 2016-17, a software developer in London would make twice as much as in Berlin. Now it seems you’d make slightly more in Berlin than in London. > I see most companies rarely hire and when they do they exclusively want skilled seniors for mid-level pay…

> Now it seems you’d make slightly more in Berlin than in London.

Out of curiosity, got any sources to back this up?

> Zalando, Delivery Hero, Hello Fresh [...] pay more on the entire scale [...] than comparable companies in London.

The thing is London has a lot more tech jobs than just overrated web-shops and shitty food delivery apps that depend on underpaid bicycle delivery workers from abroad to be profitable (basically modern salve labor).

In London you have big-oil, big-real-estate, all the FAANGs, finance, HFT, AI, med-tech and many opportunities to be a contractor for 600 pounds/day in the City, opportunities far above what working for some web-shop and food-delivery app pay in Berlin, as those are mostly body-shop visa factories anyway that burn people out (from what I've heard).

I'm not advocating for one or the other, I don't have a dog in this fight, but the upper end salaries in London vastly overtake the upper end spectrum in Berlin. And anecdotally, the last salaries offers I got in Berlin were all laughable. I got better offers in the semiconductor industry in Dusseldorf working less hours.

Re: The deindustrialization of Germany

#137

Post by gmerc »

nradov wrote: post #33
Michelangelo11 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I have the same impression -- it's really all over the place. Anyway, the absolute key issue seems to be energy costs. If they hadn't skyrocketed, this wouldn't be happening.

Not just energy but specifically access to natural gas. Even when not burned for power and heat it acts as an essential feedstock for much of the German chemicals industry. With flows from Russia being reduced or eliminated there is no choice but to relocate production.

And the reason would be that profits were frontloaded and needed reforms were delayed.

Germany had a pretty audacious but absolutely achievable renewables plan 15 years ago but Schroeder & Merkel canned it for cheap Russian Gas and now that the price for that has become apparent there wailing and screaming. It’s just normalizing - if the original plan had been pursued, profits would not have been that great but the cost of adapting would have been staggered too.

Now the bill is due.

Re: The deindustrialization of Germany

#138

Post by badpun »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #103
badpun wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most speak better German than English. That's not true, at least not in Poland. Also, current German take-home salaries for coders are lower than Polish (gross amounts are similar, but in Poland a lot of coders are self-employed, with very lox taxes), with vastly higher costs of living. If anything, Germans programmers should emigrate to Poland - they're not getting a great deal in their country.

I’m intrigued — can you provide some numbers, e.g. some typical hourly rates and/or monthly wages for some typical programming jobs? Or maybe you have some sources (I’ll be able to help myself with Google Translate if they are Polish).

Bog-standard seniors in Poland typically make 18k-25k PLN per month, which translates to 216k-300k PLN per year. If you're self-employed in software, you will pay roughly 2k of flat fees per month (health insurance, social security etc.), plus a flat 13% tax. So, your net take home pay will be 163k-237 PLN, or 13.5k-19.75k PLN per month. That's 3k-4.43k EUR take home pay per month. My understanding is that it's not that much lower than what you can get in Germany, while real estate and other costs of living in Poland is much cheaper than in Germany (real estate in Germany is probably easily twice the price in Poland).

The main advantage of Western Europe is the lucrative contract market, where you can make much more money than in usual full time employment. A lot of these contracts are non-remote, so you have to live in a big city in Germany, UK, Sweden etc. to get them. However, some are remote friendly and still pay 500-600 eur per day. I personally work these contracts from Poland, pay my 13% flat tax rate, and am the wealthiest person I know in my age group thanks to it. The disadvantage of this strategy is that, if the economy is in recession (like right now), the contracts dry up first.

Re: The deindustrialization of Germany

#139

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

There is a similar recent article in German from the "Berliner Zeitung"

https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/wirtschaft-verantwortung/dei...

The linked article is mentioning additional factors:

  - tax incentives and favorable legislation offered in the US and China.
  - drawn out planning and approval procedures in Germany
  - no more cheap natural gas from Russia (i guess that was a big hit for the chemical industry)
  - cheaper energy (also cheaper green energy) in the US and China.
However just last year Tesla opened a big plant in Brandenburg, near Berlin, go figure... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_Berlin-Brandenburg

... and Intel is building one big fab in Magdeburg - that one is costing 17 billion euro: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibi...

So maybe not all of industry is leaving.

Re: The deindustrialization of Germany

#140

Post by 9dev »

wernercd wrote: post #58
badpun wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The childred didn't earn it either.

But the parents did and, as such, get to decide where to put that money. Again: Always time to take money you didn't earn. Greed is an ugly emotion and socialism/marxism/theft is a fail no matter how you try to dress it up.

I always found this way of thinking too shortsighted. No matter the millions on your bank account, being rich isn’t fun if the rest of the populace is poor, uneducated and bland, the economy void of investment opportunities, and the environment decaying.

All of those are problems related to lacking education, which is related to poor living conditions in the lower social classes.

By distributing wealth more equally, you improve the world your children are going to live in, and by extension their own lives.

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