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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) - cheape…
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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?
Sure! But it's a really substantial part. If this branch of "Germany-AG" gets into trouble this will have noticeable consequences.
> Carl Zeiss, for example, is a big company doing state-of-the-art work.
There is always some company which makes good money and is important. The point was about the big picture. And by now even the usual big players, which are "too big to fail" and are strongly supported by the state, start to get nervous. The article cited quite some of the most important players and some of the most influential economy think tanks.
> Do you know by the way why Germany and software don’t go well together? What do you think?
Complicated question. I don't know, to be honest.
It's not like we don't have any SW industry. But it seems not to catch up.
From the global viewpoint Germany has SAP, but else?
I don't think it's because we "can't do software". But it seems we can't do any relevant software.
Two points come to mind:
We don't have a culture of "pure software products". Most SW is in industrial applications. But this SW isn't very visible, and most of the time it is considered just a secondary or even tertiary part of a product. In the eyes of the management it's often still "just a byproduct" or even "pure cost". The car people for example really didn't get it until just lately that SW is now a primary sales argument. They're still trying to catch up. But actually it's quite laughable what they're doing because they still think you can "produce SW as any other car part"… Same goes for a lot of other companies. SW is just a matter of expense. They don't try to innovate here, they preferably would order somewhere some box with the "needed parts" in it and "concentrate on their business".
Likely related: People who "built mostly machines until now" don't really know how to build SW. So even if they realized that they need SW to make their products competitive they don't know how to get there.
The other thing is: Nobody here really tries to compete with the leaders on the world market. There is no motivation to do so. Even the state buys everything from US companies.
There is at the same time almost no support for local SW companies.
The only exception I know of is actually gaming. Germany invests some (imho symbolic amounts of) money in local game developers. But there are no (proper) big state financed projects that try to create something in the business and/or mass market related sectors.
There are some projects but all the money gets wasted on feeding the big industry players like Siemens or Telekom—which won't produce anything in the end, like always here when it comes to this kind of projects.
In my opinion Germany could actually do something about the software industry issue. We were able to build high-end machines (at least in the past). Software is "just" a different kind of machine… But as long it's politically not wanted to compete with the US software industry nothing will happen, imho.
Germany could inhabit a quite interesting niche, if they would take it serous: High-quality, actually secure, and privacy oriented software, in the high-price segment. This is an area currently under explored. Everything else from the competition is optimized to be cheap, just about bearable from the quality standpoint, and of course it's very insecure. We can't compete with that. But we could compete with the others doing the opposite. (Biggest problem would be to create a market with demand, as most buyers currently also only look at the price tag. One would need to change that, with really outstanding quality. We have here still some good foundational research, also when it comes to IT and software. So we could try to tackle this from that angle.)
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I help German immigrants for a living. It's currently one of the hardest countries to settle in due to the archaic and labyrinthine bureaucracy. Berlin's immigration office is completely unable to handle its workload, delaying immigration to the point people just give up and leave. I've been here long enough to apply for citizenship, but Berlin has a backlog of 26,000 applications and literally refuses new ones until…
Maybe Berlin has just reached maximum occupancy? I mean, we'd all like to live in our favorite dream city, but how long is that sustainable long term, if we all move to one city? Germany seems like it wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants more migration to put downward pressure on wages and upward pressure on housing prices, but that's it, it does nothing to actually make life pleasant and attractive for th…
I found the article quite good but has missed a couple of points that need to be mentioned: 1. The attitude of the average German consumer It seems to me that one of the national sports in Germany is to find cheaper deals for pretty much anything (and then brag about it). Even if it's fractions of a euro! After trimming down on everything that they could, the manufacturers and service providers had to finally reduce…
I don’t mean to be disrespectful in any way, but (there’s always a but after that opening) if that’s you’re experience working in Germany, I’m afraid you’re either ignorant of culture in other countries, or not working in a job with a lot of impact, or responsibility. The German work culture is distinctly the opposite, namely people being blunt in what they say and brutally honest with their superiors.
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i would not be so hopeful. A big problem is that germany does not operate in the global lingua franca - English. This really shows when countries like Australia and Canada - combined, both have a population less than germany’s - are able to attract the best and brightest from around the world. Another problem is one that plagues all old world countries - societies are based around ethnicity. These combine to mean tha…
Since when is it a problem for a country to operate in its own language? Especially one which is spoken by 100 million people? Have you considered that people who migrate to a new country for work might even try to learn the language? Who says English must remain lingua franca in Europe? But beside all that, everyone with a basic education in Germany does speak good English if needed.
If you want people to learn then offer a migration path in English and offer a state funded language course similar to Sweden’s SFI. Some Germans still really delude themselves into thinking they’re language is relevant outside of German speaking countries.
Keep in mind that politico is a subsidiary of Axel Springer, which is largely controlled by a man that has recently been exposed to have actively ordered chief editors write in support of the party of economic liberalism (FDP) before the last election in Germany. I.e. it is entirely possible that this article is also politically motivated.
I keep seeing people saying this about Politico and it's total FUD. I have friends who work there and it's pretty firewalled from Axel Springer. This conspiracy theory for the Politico portion seems to have started in r/Europe and r/WorldNews a couple months ago and kept getting repeated since.
The political corruption and and election meddling done by Axel Springer is a known fact. [0]
Excerpt from [0] translated with DeepL:
"Our last hope is the FDP. Only if it becomes very strong - and that may be - the green-red disaster will be avoided. Can we do any more for them. The only ones who are consistently positioned against the Corona Measures madness. It's a patriotic duty."
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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?
Yeah, but how many middle class families, can these niche super-high end sectors making state of the art optics for the semiconductor industry, feed vs the automotive and industrial sector.
What will happen to Germany's famous manufacturing sector based middle class? Have you seen the job requirements for working at a company like Zeiss? It's MSc and above. All those factory workers can't go get a PhD in optics and physics and switch to designing mirrors and lenses.
It will mean a speedrun of UK's deindustrialization which itself went horribly, with dead cities, homelessness, unemployment and drug abuse. Or it will be like current day France with constant rioting and looting as all those cheap migrant workers Germany invited for their factory work, will be left without jobs.
So the way I see it, the German gov is stuck between a rock and a hard place, needing to use taxpayer money to subsidize a manufacturing industry that depends on cheap labor and cheap energy, to stay in Germany and not off-shore immediately and create mass unemployment.
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> 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 (ba…
In Delivery Hero and Hello Fresh, I know seniors making 100K, staff engineers making 150K, so I suppose principals would make 200K. This is more than similar roles make in London. Also, talking to people that work there, I wouldn’t call these places body shops, rather they seem to work less than I do (maybe you could argue they are visa factories, because they don’t employ many Germans, even though EU citizens don’t need visas).
I think I am in the upper end of the spectrum in London (>200K), and I am exploring the possibility of leaving the UK. The only offers that come close to my current compensation are from Germany or the Netherlands. Taxes are also lower than in the UK, which was surprising to discover. Hedge funds aside, in London I get worse offers, around half of my current income, like in Spain.
Finally Berlin is relatively poor, I wouldn't be surprised if salaries were higher in Bavaria, Hamburg or North-Rhine Westfalia.
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> 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 (ba…
I’m not arguing the morality of food delivery platforms (and I’ve only mentioned one because some friends work there), I’m saying that they pay better than in London. In Delivery Hero and Hello Fresh, I know seniors making 100K, staff engineers making 150K, so I suppose principals would make 200K. This is more than similar roles make in London. Also, talking to people that work there, I wouldn’t call these places bod…
Question, are these salaries documented anywhere or is it your insider knowledge? Also, I don't doubt people with such wages exist in Berlin at these companies, but how many seniors and principals are those food companies hiring now in this economy? I sense it's not easy now to get one of those six figure jobs.
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Germany has SAP, ...
But that's just 1 champion (well, actually 2 because Siemens has a robust R&D presence) whereas there are multiple in France. In general, R&D in the software and electronics space seems stronger in France due to the robust MIC, Aviation, and Telco sector spending a lot of money on R&D