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Or they don't want to pay more than that so they don't find developers. I saw friends moving from Italy to the UK, Germany and the USA because of that. Maybe developers from Germany move to other countries as well.
Germany recruit and attracts a lot from Eastern Europe, specifically Romania. This definitely helps keep salaries lower
I was just listening to a podcast last night, in which a financial analyst who identified problems with Wirecard was harrassed for years, both online and IRL. Interesting story: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/868001948
We really never learn. If I were a regulator I would be taking short seller statements extremely seriously when it comes from one of the proven reliable ones.
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Or they don't want to pay more than that so they don't find developers. I saw friends moving from Italy to the UK, Germany and the USA because of that. Maybe developers from Germany move to other countries as well.
Germany recruit and attracts a lot from Eastern Europe, specifically Romania. This definitely helps keep salaries lower
Basically, I was quite impressed with their brilliance and almost insane work ethic.
The ones I worked with were kind of unorganized, but that was a small sample.
it baffles me that it had to come this far. There were warning signs all over it. The German BaFin messed up so badly that one must either fundamentally doubt theircompetence or question their integrity.
Agreed - there were glaring red flags since as early as 2008. Here's an account from one of the earliest critics: https://valueandopportunity.com/2020/06/19/wirecard-the-germ... The fact that something this obviously fraudulent dragged on for over a decade is nuts.
You need to convince the rest of the market that the company is fraudulent - and that is a very expensive and complex process.
...but it does illustrate the value of short contracts in finance. They incentivize investors investigating and raising the alarms for the rest of the market. This company was particularly aggressive in defending themselves publicly, so it didn't happen until their market valuation was high enough to make it worthwhile for the big shorts to come in and crush it.
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There is a profound lack of developers to start. I was in a German startup and it was awesome. Product didn't pan out for the mass market (medical devices) but the few devices we build by hand are now used for studies in clinics. So it wasn't at all wasted. Software sucks though because I wrote it shortly after finishing my studies with negligible experience. But it works at least. I got support from another develope…
>There is a profound lack of developers to start. I don't think so. Judging by the low salaries most companies are offering in parallel with the huge number of devs on reddit from outside of the EU wanting to move to Germany it doesn't look like there's a shortage of developers, quite the contrary. If there was a shortage, pretty shore we'd see higher salaries being offered.
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And yet, people manage to buy houses and fly on vacations on that income.
Trust me, in Germany with that income you can either buy an apartment (not a house, at least not in a place where you will find a software developer job nearby) or fly on vacations, but not both...
I am coming way late to this story. Is there a good backgrounder on this whole thing?
I'd recommend this HN post [0] which links to a good background story [1]. It literally starts with "For those who just came back from a 15 year space mission: Wirecard is a German company that..." haha. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23598824 [1] https://valueandopportunity.com/2020/06/19/wirecard-the-germ...
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At least BaFin boss Felix Hufeld admitted they messed up and that the whole thing was the biggest debacle he ever witnessed. This is rare, and I find it respectable. But yeah, how they missed that is hard to comprehend.
Yeah, he did admit that. Difficult not to. Bafin would look a lot better, IMHO, if in addition to investigate the FT and British short sellers, they also had a closer look at WC. They didn't.
The same people with large shorts in Wirecard like Chanos also have large shorts in Tesla. Just saying.