Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

Post by sneed_chucker » Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 8:37 PM UTC

iforgotpassword wrote: post #37

treprinum wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say the main problem is "leadersh*t", incompetent captains of industry. It's so pervasive and prevalent that I really don't see any hope for them. People are also getting more and more unprofessional and expect high pay for subpar results. Devs on the other hand are hugely underpaid and the country operates in a two caste system of managers vs everybody else though not as badly as the UK. There is also a high ave…

Any traditional industry/company in Germany approaching "computers", "the web", "smart something" doesn't want to pay properly for devs. Mostly because the leadership in their late 50s (at best) has some nephew who is "good with computers" so it can't be that hard. You get senior electrical engineers laying down some bonkers architecture for how the software side is gonna work, and then two BSc CS graduates thrown at…

Post by Borg3 » Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 8:49 PM UTC

fakedang wrote: post #75

JKCalhoun wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that we need to keep what you call here mid-skill jobs. Too often I see people say to the disappearance of manual labor jobs: good, retrain people to use computers. I have slowly come to the belief that there are some people for whom working with their hands is the only kind of sane work they can do. You can call them blue-collar, or working class (these are the people incidentally that raised me, the people…

> Too often I see people say to the disappearance of manual labor jobs: good, retrain people to use computers. I have slowly come to the belief that there are some people for whom working with their hands is the only kind of sane work they can do. The people who say these kinds of things are usually pathetic specialists with a sole focus on their singular task, without looking at the big picture. They have limited in…

Post by snapplebobapple » Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 9:06 PM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #73

snapplebobapple wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you and the op are both missing that the vast majority of those mid skilled jobs still exist, they just exist in countries whose labor costs are drastically lower. When you realize that, you then realize that betting that your workers will be able to maintain a quality gap large enough to justify keeping them around is extremely questionable over the medium to long term because you are assuming some combinati…

I'm not sure waiting for the rest of the world to catch up is a good strategy as there always seems to be somewhere else that is still willing to work for less. I suspect if manufacturing ever did come back it would be automated manufacturing.

Post by mendigou » Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 9:31 PM UTC

nwellnhof wrote: post #70

jillesvangurp wrote: post #52

I've lived in Berlin for fifteen years now. My view is very different from what this article is portraying. Germany definitely has issues. Some of them are short term issues. Some of them self inflicted. And others have been issues for a long time. But all of these are fixable. All it takes is change. Change is hard for Germans but if you look at their history, you see that that wasn't always the case. They are hard…

> They are hard workers Where does this cliché come from? Germans work less than any other country on the planet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...

Post by petre » Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 9:36 PM UTC

The_Colonel wrote: post #82

_heimdall wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that prices haven't increased noticeably sure seems like a sign that sanctions against Russia were largely toothless and their oil is making its way into the global supply all the same. Russia is responsible for something like 12% of all global crude oil. If sanctions actually worked and global demand for oil went unchanged prices would have increased, likely quite a bit as the demand is very sticky and not…

Sorry, but you don't understand the western sanctions on Russian oil. The goal is to keep it flowing (so that the prices don't explode), but to squeeze the Russian profits. Make their (e. g. transportation) costs high and sale price low (price cap).