"Companies operating in Germany have to make sure that data is anonymized and stored in accordance with the law. These data rules are a big reasons why German companies have to stick with their old tools."
Pardon my German, but that is utter and complete Büffelscheiße on multiple levels. Firstly, how does data protection and privacy law prevent you from using those tools? Secondly, the German law in these matters is not a hindrance to innovation, that is a lame excuse: If the only business model you can come up with is grabbing as much data as you can and then sell it to advertisers, that is not innovative at all.
I think the problem more has to do with a general resistance to change that is very common in German companies and public institutions. "Was der Bauer nicht kennt, frisst er nicht", as we say in Germany ("What the farmer doesn't know, he won't eat"). Large institutions and bureaucracies develop a huge inertia as they grow. The three rules why things do not change: 1. We have always done it like this; 2. We have never done it like that; 3. Once we change this one thing, where does it lead to?
As a German I'd say it's especially larger enterprise companies that are averse to change. For example having worked for clients in the medical sector in the past it was widely held wisdom that if you were observing a new trend in technology it'd take at least five to ten years before you could even think about convincing those companies to adopt them. They were the ultimate late adopters.
Smaller companies experiment more, but investors are equally risk-averse so they tend to prefer startups that are cashflow positive (as opposed to Silicon Valley's growth mindset) or that follow tried and true business models. So a lot of innovation has to be bootstrapped or rides on the back of existing companies -- the product company spun out of an agency seems to be a fairly common.
But all in all I'd say if something is holding German companies back from innovating it's the risk aversion, not the privacy laws. The strict privacy laws actually creates a market for domestic solutions to problems solved by US companies with no regard for privacy (i.e. nearly all of them). Sure, it makes certain business models impossible but many would say that's for the better -- many problems actually end up not being impossible but simply requiring less obvious solutions than blatantly violating your customers' rights.
And looking at the German economy, especially in contrast to other European countries, I'd say calling it a failure is incredibly dishonest. Risk aversion may limit innovation but it also creates a strong healthy economy that is incredibly stable because it rests on a large number of medium sized companies rather than a small number of unicorns and a constant Cambrian explosion and mass extinction.
> Once we change this one thing, where does it lead to?
I can definitely confirm this! Being a foreigner in Germany, a country I've come to love very much, has been eye-opening in this regard.
Never in my adult life have I observed such an obvious, visceral, inexplicable, omnipresent fear to change. It's awe-inducing, really.
Alas, it is perhaps the only thing keeping one of the things I love about Germany: it's café culture.
However, I can also understand those who are highly skeptical of "innovation" and "change" in general. Some of us just plain suck at explaining our ideas and creating the kind of logical, reality-based enthusiasm that gets Germans on-board.
I like to think that Germans have learned to question change beforehand, wanting to scrutinize policies before they are implemented. This is only half the truth, but one can only dream...
Depends. Some companies are rather paranoid about privacy issues and using services like Slack or GMail is a clear liability risk, especially when discussing customer data or confidential information. I'm not sure what the GDPR has to say about this but my understanding is that some privacy experts consider services like Slack problematic.
However this depends on the scale and type of company. In practice many smaller companies don't even have a Betriebsrat despite fitting the requirements. I'm also sure not everyone is aware of the details of legal requirements around privacy if it isn't the core of their business and some are even blatantly unaware of basic labor rights.
Some companies do use Slack but I know several examples where the introduction of Slack was prevented for compliance reasons. If these reasons are sound I cannot tell, but dismissing this argument as laughable doesn’t hold either.
I think the author misses a key ingredient when he talks about the “lack of skills”: German companies are notoriously stingy (or frugal, however you want to call it) when paying their engineers. Combined with a hesitation to greatly differentiate pay between great and average staff (due to culture and also the “Gesamtarbeitsverträge” between employers and unions), this means that really great and innovative employees will be able to earn far more in nearby Switzerland or far Silicon Valley. I’m always a bit sceptical when (allegedly free-market loving) managers talk about a skill shortage: remember, economic theory states that in a free market there will be no shortage, because prices will rise to accommodate supply and demand.
As a freelancer in Germany, I can add to that: it's not only that companies are stingy with employees. From what I had observed, a growing number of software engineers found out how tax calculations work, and decide to go freelance by the numbers. In my current team of less than 10 software developers, 2 has just recently decided to take the plunge.
This comes however with increased risk, as the contracts are usually limited to 6 months, and because of "Scheinselbstständigkeit" (appearing to be employed, even though you are contracted out to your own company, or DBA) companies are prohibitted from prolonging those contracts, unless they want to pay horrendous penalties.
All is good and great, I understand why those laws were put into place (mostly to protect unskilled workers, like drivers or manufacturing line workers from being forced to sign more beneficial - to the company - contracts instead of work agreements), but the software engineers, with the employment gap will in most cases easily find a replacement job somewhere near, yet the companies necessarily undergo a brain drain, and the know how gets leaked out.
Just imagine, you need a couple of weeks to be able to actually productively add features to the product, then take a bit time off, some workshop, a ton of meetings, and basically your 6 months are off, and unless your client is willing to take the risk, your starting your offboarding - just mabye transferring all that you had learned in the meantime to somebody else.
I'm a freelancer, too. But, I don't think this leads to massive "brain-drain" within a company, when working with lots of freelancers.
Let's take a look at our jobs and how we treat our clients.
Mostly we'll be (somehow) integrated into a team of developers.
As a freelancer, I'm hired, because I'm an expert in my field of profession. So while working with the team, I'll share my knowlegde with them, so they can profit from my expertise in longer terms.
What I miss in germany, is developers of ability, sharing their experience in public.
Whenever I look for inspiration/learning/ressources, it's guys like Robert C. Martin, Martin Fowler or Kent Beck with the best material.
I can't believe that our country doesn't have a few of such minds, too.
Also freelance taxes are not so much better than regular ones. Usually at the end of the year I take holidays, just because I know that if I earn more, my profit will be deducted by the taxes.
This is a double-penalty. First you "take the risk" of being on your own and second after around 60k [1] income 1/3 of what you earn goes for taxes, so you can't "save money for rainy days". At this point is becoming demotivating and you better take some months off.
Absolutely spot-on. Companies here usually hire the best people for their budget, not for their bottom-line.
The positive side of this comes to my mind too however, which is also a very German trait. There ARE a lot of very successful digital companies in their niches (even global players) - just right now Adjust, Remerge, Sociomantic and others come to my mind. However, German companies often times for a lot of cultural reasons stop growing at some point and lacking the ambition for total world domination, explaining the lack of showing up at the very top of the list, as measured by the OP. I do observe a lot of the tradition of the German Mittelstand continuing in the mindset of current start-ups. Through the usually frugal, social and grounded approach that Germans are taking, you rather get a lot of successful medium sized companies, rather than a few A players. What you need for those is usually a single, ultra-ambitioned founder investing decades of their life. The American make-or-break mentality and winner-takes-it-all attitude is much better at producing those - but also at the cost of leaving lots of smaller companies and lesser skilled people behind.
What would you guess explains the difference between the world domination pursuit in eg the luxury auto market, versus technology companies? Or with a company like Bayer (which just ate Monsanto) and other industrial giants like Siemens?
As someone working in Germany, yes, this is a serious problem. I don't think German managers don't understand economics, but instead they pay journalists to write about skills shortages to get cheaper immigrants here.
The drive to cheap instead of good is what's holding a lot of us back though. Engineers are still seen as a cost instead of something which can (and does) earn money. But bad (and cheap) engineers cost money.
Dean Baker often complains about this, most recently here [0]
> Apparently German employers don't understand basic economics. Their ignorance is jeopardizing the whole economy, according to the DIHK Chambers of Industry and Commerce.
I'm German and I work in Silicon Valley and we get plenty of visitors from the German legislature. One of them always tends to ask me about what it would "to get people like me to come back to Germany". I usually just tell them my approximate salary and ask them if I could earn even half of that as an Engineer in Germany. Usually I don't get an answer.
Other things I often hear:
- "They probably monitor how often you go to the arcade!" (usually followed about how they were in the opposition in the former East)
- "So who usually tells you what to do?" (they don't get self organizing teams or lack of hierarchies)
- "So how many hours a week do you usually work?" (they vastly over-estimate that)
- "This is all nice, but they just want to stay at work longer!" (after I told them my usual hours)
They are all reasonably nice people, but it's somewhat demotivating to see who actually runs Germany and how little they understand about other parts of the world. Maybe the visits help.
The "supply and demand will equilibriate" position only works in an entirely elastic scenario. It rarely works out that cleanly. London is a good example; wages are already extremely high in tech - to the point that many companies cannot hire. But supply is still not there, for a bunch of different reasons - e.g. people unwilling to continue/make a new life in the UK due to Brexit. Wages would have to rise _even further_ to offset that, way beyond the point it makes economic sense for a company to do that.
You can have very high prices and still insufficient supply. The prices are supposed to attract supply; but e.g. when a country is not seen as being welcoming to immigrants (or, in fact, has legal restrictions in place) the only flex is in people training/retraining, which is a many-years response to an immediate problem.
What are those 'extremely high salaries in tech' you speak of, outside of a select few Canary Wharf positions? UK salaries in tech are abysmal from what I see - and just last year I heard a UK 'entrepreneur' brag about how cheap engineers are in the UK at a software business conference. Also keeping in mind CoL - who wants to take a London job when it means 2 hour commutes one way in order to have some disposable income left?
If you are making north of 100k, a two hours commute (each way) is not attractive. I would deem this a more limiting factor and is one reason I'd never would move to a company in Munich (I am living in Germany).
Some people here seems not to realize that German salaries come with 30 days paid vacation, a year of parental leaves, first grade medical coverage in a relatively cheap country to live in.
If your life goes wrong, due to illnesses, unforeseen circumstances or unemployment, or if you plan to have a family, you're better off in Germany than in silicon valley with 160k.
Pretty sure I have to pay for health insurance with my actual salary in Germany, the employer does however cover half the cost of it. It does not come included (e.g. 100% payed by the employer) like with the national insurance system in Sweden. Also, I might be mistaken but only 20 vacation days are required by law and I have 24 days currently.
I do agree with the first grade medical card and the general cheapness of the country.
The point is, that in US the second you stop paying your medical insurance as a result of financial problems caused by job loss/illness/family issues/whatever, you don't have health insurance anymore. Sure, you can go to an emergency room and will be helped, but you are still going to get a bill for it. In Germany(and most of EU) even if you are paying nil towards the national health insurance, you are still fully covered for everything - no bill will ever be produced for any treatment that you receive. Various EU countries have the payments for national insurance structured in different ways - so in Sweden, the employer pays 100% - maybe in Germany it's split in half. It doesn't matter - the point is, you are covered regardless of your personal situation.
For these rights people literally kill themselves to come to Germany.
Unfortunately with the decentralised IT industry, having the same benefits it's just a matter of negotiation. On top of that the amount of taxes that you pay for having "cheap" country to live in always averages those benefits.
Having a family here would be great as well, if they don't charge me a percentage of my income for kindergarten [1], a percentage of my income for health insurance, a percentage of my income for religion tax ( happily I'm an atheist ). Those all sound fair for low-skilled jobs, but not so much when you are heavily in demand IT-person ( the tax-bracket is too steep ).
No it is not 30 it is minimum 25.
Parental leave with a 60% paycheck than normal.
Medical is not first grade, it is notoriously horrible to get a doctor appointment for specific things as you hope to hop from practitioner to practitioner while they refer you.
Dental is not even considered.
I was under impression that in SV 160k barely covers your expenses, including insanely expensive rent. is it really possible to save 60k out of such salary?
health is yes cheap and problematic. it is not a full "health heaven" when you can't get any specialist appointment within 4 weeks. at least in berlin. same "termin" bulls* is valid for almost all services. i would rather pay more and get faster service.
and if you are not german or eu citizen, second part is also not valid. so qualified immigrants can't feel secure here. so berlin is a stop for me until i find some better place, not a city to settle in with my family and future kids.
30 days? I got 25 and something in the range of 25 to 28 is the most common. 30 is unusual, if you're not in a unionized job, older, negotiated hard for it etc.
> If your life goes wrong, due to illnesses, unforeseen circumstances or unemployment, or if you plan to have a family, you're better off in Germany than in silicon valley with 160k.
Am I going to benefit from these as a foreigner not fluent in German language and having trouble navigating the bureaucratic maze of public healthcare and social support? My impression is that even the natives can get confused (see number of homeless and mental people on the streets or occupying the transport infrastructure).
Bureaucratic it can be at times. Public healthcare though is very different from social support. Public healthcare is really simple compared to anything I've seen abroad, you sign up once and that's it. You only need to contact your (public) health care provider if your address changes or you marry, have children etc. At the doctor you present your health care ID, you usually don't have any interaction with your health care provider aside from that. Your monthly payment is automatically deducted from your salary (50%)/paid by your employer(50%).
There are many edge cases which _do_ get more complicated, as (public) health insurance premiums depend on your reported salary. Let's say you have different income streams from different countries, have to pay alimony but also support your parent financially.
"If I move to the US will I be able to navigate the bureaucratic maze of healthcare costs and private health services that cover only every other thing?"
Isn't part of Germany's success in manufacturing their conservatism when it comes to large changes in the way we do business? To take an example, there are still companies that make pencils profitably in Germany (the two biggest, Faber-Castell and Staedtler, are local rivals that have been recently arguing in court over who is older [1]; both are at least 250 years old). Both companies are examples of Mittelstand, small-medium sized German manufacturing businesses that grow organically over decades instead of undergoing explosive growth (and explosive failure). This is in part probably due to managers not fearing missing out on The Next Big Thing and trusting in their capital, intellectual property and people. Maybe they think the same about digital innovation right now - let's wait and see where it goes, and when the time comes, throw everything we have at it.
>managers not fearing missing out on The Next Big Thing and trusting in their capital
From an inside perspective I can assure you they're shitting their pants. But they also don't know why they want digital innovation. It's pure buzzword bingo.
One thing about having people who are trained is that the Germans are probably a bit more strict than the Anglos about whom they consider trained in a given field.
I've worked in the UK, where a history graduate can learn to be a derivatives trader. An engineering grad can with little problem get a job coding software (I did both of those jobs with a MEng).
Contrast that with my experience in the Germanic world, and I found the only place that ever asked for my degree certificate. My German friends have degree titles that are pretty much their job titles. I met people who were out of work, and when asked what job they wanted, they responded with a pretty narrow range of jobs fitting their degree.
Recruiters also seemed to take buzzword bingo more seriously, whereas London recruiters seem to be happy to put forward someone who says c# is like c++. Not without its own issues, but if you have a skills shortage, maybe take someone who is close enough?
Yeah, I just applied for a job in Germany where I tick 90% of the boxes. Yet the one box I didn't have they immediately excluded me on, even if it was skills I could learn easily given my previous experience.
That job has been open for almost a year now, I wonder why.
Not every employer is like that. When I started at my first developer job, I only had a degree in physics. (I've since completed a part-time B.Sc. in CS.) They hired me because of my open-source portfolio. Now I'm at SAP, which according to a common joke is an abbreviation for "Sammelplatz arbeitsloser Physiker" (assembly area for unemployed physicists), and one of my friends from university (with a doctorate in laser physics) now also works as an SAP consultant.
i second this. having finished my studies in 2009 and worked at corporate + startup, I couldn't help but laugh when an HR lady asked for my diploma scan. she took a step back when i simply emailed "are you sure you need this?".
I can tell you that I have seen people working in software for automotive companies, who earn that much for very little work that I still wonder how this is possible.
I have seen that as well. The automotive industry (in IT in the few companies I've seen) though seems to move at glacial pace, yet in the right direction. Contrasting that with experience in telecommunication providers I've worked with, where the pay was similar, most worked under a lot more stress, but effectively accomplished less as projects were much more based on the manager's career goals than company goals.
As recent transplant to Germany from Sweden (moved here about 2 years ago) I observe these things daily. Cable connection being 'state-of-art' for Internet access and bad phone reception more or less everywhere. Not being able to count on good speed LTE walking around in the second biggest city in the country, is weird.
I would say large parts of this is cultural. Germans are not so quick to hop onto new things and are suspicious what problems new technology brings, especially with regards to privacy and 'Datenschutz' / data protection. Swedes on the other hand love new things and with a national number given out by birth privacy is not that big of a deal.
German companies also have a large accessible market of German speakers (~100 million) so the need to go global is not as acute as for companies from smaller economies.
I'm not sure how the speed of home internet connections relates to being innovative. Are 50Mbit/s not enough to learn how to code or deploy your stuff to the cloud?
The problem isn't that 50Mbit/s might be enough. The problem is, that 50Mbit/s isn't everywhere.
Germany is a country which spoutes aloud, that it wants to be one of the leading countries in IT, but in reality, Germany is a developing country in that regard.
Most of the time, only city centers have access to higher bandwidth, the outskirts, smaller cities and most of the country side have very low or no bandwidth at all. The last decades Telekom hat the monopoly with providing connectivity to homes and everyone else was a reseller. But Telekom didn't see the need to modernize their old DSL infrastructure and were happy to let you pay 50 euros per month to provide you 16Mbit/s.
The TV companies could provide higher bandwidth with their newer infrastructure with up to 100Mbit/s, but the country is split between them. So when you were in a bad area, you might have Primacom as a provider and they did stop at 25Mbit/s for a long time.
Now the situation is, that Telekom with all their money is asking the Government to pay for the renovation and they got away with it until the beginning of the year, when they finally said, that DSL will not be supported anymore. Only the fiber will now be supported. But this comes years after some villages got couple 100k Euro together to get at least 50Mbit/s and they still pay a monthly fee of 50Euros.
And the Telekom is not alone with wanting support money from everyone. The southern Rheinland saw multiple providers wanting to connect villages for huge prices, which leads to the weird situation, that southern Rhineland now gets support from a Swiss company. That company doesn't need any money and is still laying fiber through the woods to long forgotten villages.
Compare that with most other European countries, where you can get a fiber connection for the same money with synchronous 100Mbit/s or more. The northern countries with their hard rock grounds did get it working in a much better way than Germany.
And don't rely on LTE, as the LTE tarif were bound to lower GB/month traffic limits and huge costs, as the LTE frequencies were auctioned of between the providers. And the winners couldn't build where they wanted, they had to provide LTE at first where there was no mobile internet available at all, which means on the acres.
Germany is in a sad state in regards to connectivity. And this has nothing to do with people being afraid. If you let the monopolist do whatever it wants and not enforce the modernization, then this is what you can expect.
- ability, willingness, etc to tweak and upgrade your infrastructure
- how competition-friendly and pro-consumer your market is
- the type of grants, contracts and industry ties your environment has (think special, prototype, maybe even government subsidized hardware, for example)
- reflects the amount of mastery over geography or nature itself - this is what successful countries pull
- is the economy market-driven or just a pocket bubble?
There might be others, but this is already quite damning imo. Also I need gigabit because that determines the size of my erection and i'd go to lengths such as paying FAIR prices for it.
Sure, that should be enough for home user. But even in my part of the woods (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern) which is quite rural with smaller villages lacking even these type of connections. There was a story in the local newspaper of a stonemasonry in a smaller village which was having problems perform work for clients in Berlin and Hamburg since the upload speed to the companies machines was to slow. So it's not only "innovate" companies suffering from the lack of infrastructure.
How about, say, 20-30Mbit/s upstream and long-lasting IP addresses? A couple of people on WebRTC conferences can easily use >10Mbit/s and the conferences work best if noone's IP address changes in the middle.
Most users are dreaming of 50Mbit/s. In small villages 2Mbit/s are the norm. For me the bad internet in rural areas is one reason that I wouldn't move my business back to Germany.
> Companies operating in Germany have to make sure that data is anonymized and stored in accordance with the law. These data rules are a big reasons why German companies have to stick with their old tools. But every day that we Germans obsess about data, thousands of businesses elsewhere merrily and creatively forge ahead without us.
As a citizen of the United States, I wish my country valued privacy 1/4 as much as Germany.
In the wakes of Edward Snowden's revelations (where Merkel's phone was tapped, they lied to the public that it was not and the next day it was confirmed that it was indeed being tapped) it was shown, that the BKA and other parts of German government gladly sent over all the data they have collected to our "friends" over the pond.
Whilst I and many truly appreciate the data protection, there are other laws, that force you to save data over a certain period of time, see the
"Voratsdatenspeicherung" debate.
There are so many beyond retarded laws, that make an internet based startup in Germany a very bad gamble.
One of those retarded laws was "Störerhaft", which up until the end of 2017 made offering free WiFi basically illegal. Now you are required to identify and collect every real name within a Network. Now offering WiFi isn't straight up a guarantee for trouble, but you are forced to use a login page, which saves the name of the user.
Readit News
Pardon my German, but that is utter and complete Büffelscheiße on multiple levels. Firstly, how does data protection and privacy law prevent you from using those tools? Secondly, the German law in these matters is not a hindrance to innovation, that is a lame excuse: If the only business model you can come up with is grabbing as much data as you can and then sell it to advertisers, that is not innovative at all.
I think the problem more has to do with a general resistance to change that is very common in German companies and public institutions. "Was der Bauer nicht kennt, frisst er nicht", as we say in Germany ("What the farmer doesn't know, he won't eat"). Large institutions and bureaucracies develop a huge inertia as they grow. The three rules why things do not change: 1. We have always done it like this; 2. We have never done it like that; 3. Once we change this one thing, where does it lead to?
Smaller companies experiment more, but investors are equally risk-averse so they tend to prefer startups that are cashflow positive (as opposed to Silicon Valley's growth mindset) or that follow tried and true business models. So a lot of innovation has to be bootstrapped or rides on the back of existing companies -- the product company spun out of an agency seems to be a fairly common.
But all in all I'd say if something is holding German companies back from innovating it's the risk aversion, not the privacy laws. The strict privacy laws actually creates a market for domestic solutions to problems solved by US companies with no regard for privacy (i.e. nearly all of them). Sure, it makes certain business models impossible but many would say that's for the better -- many problems actually end up not being impossible but simply requiring less obvious solutions than blatantly violating your customers' rights.
And looking at the German economy, especially in contrast to other European countries, I'd say calling it a failure is incredibly dishonest. Risk aversion may limit innovation but it also creates a strong healthy economy that is incredibly stable because it rests on a large number of medium sized companies rather than a small number of unicorns and a constant Cambrian explosion and mass extinction.
I can definitely confirm this! Being a foreigner in Germany, a country I've come to love very much, has been eye-opening in this regard.
Never in my adult life have I observed such an obvious, visceral, inexplicable, omnipresent fear to change. It's awe-inducing, really.
Alas, it is perhaps the only thing keeping one of the things I love about Germany: it's café culture.
However, I can also understand those who are highly skeptical of "innovation" and "change" in general. Some of us just plain suck at explaining our ideas and creating the kind of logical, reality-based enthusiasm that gets Germans on-board.
Companies do use Slack and other similar services
However this depends on the scale and type of company. In practice many smaller companies don't even have a Betriebsrat despite fitting the requirements. I'm also sure not everyone is aware of the details of legal requirements around privacy if it isn't the core of their business and some are even blatantly unaware of basic labor rights.
This comes however with increased risk, as the contracts are usually limited to 6 months, and because of "Scheinselbstständigkeit" (appearing to be employed, even though you are contracted out to your own company, or DBA) companies are prohibitted from prolonging those contracts, unless they want to pay horrendous penalties.
All is good and great, I understand why those laws were put into place (mostly to protect unskilled workers, like drivers or manufacturing line workers from being forced to sign more beneficial - to the company - contracts instead of work agreements), but the software engineers, with the employment gap will in most cases easily find a replacement job somewhere near, yet the companies necessarily undergo a brain drain, and the know how gets leaked out.
Just imagine, you need a couple of weeks to be able to actually productively add features to the product, then take a bit time off, some workshop, a ton of meetings, and basically your 6 months are off, and unless your client is willing to take the risk, your starting your offboarding - just mabye transferring all that you had learned in the meantime to somebody else.
What I miss in germany, is developers of ability, sharing their experience in public. Whenever I look for inspiration/learning/ressources, it's guys like Robert C. Martin, Martin Fowler or Kent Beck with the best material.
I can't believe that our country doesn't have a few of such minds, too.
Also freelance taxes are not so much better than regular ones. Usually at the end of the year I take holidays, just because I know that if I earn more, my profit will be deducted by the taxes.
This is a double-penalty. First you "take the risk" of being on your own and second after around 60k [1] income 1/3 of what you earn goes for taxes, so you can't "save money for rainy days". At this point is becoming demotivating and you better take some months off.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Germany#/media/Fil...
The drive to cheap instead of good is what's holding a lot of us back though. Engineers are still seen as a cost instead of something which can (and does) earn money. But bad (and cheap) engineers cost money.
> Apparently German employers don't understand basic economics. Their ignorance is jeopardizing the whole economy, according to the DIHK Chambers of Industry and Commerce.
[0] http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/reuters-says-german-emp...
Other things I often hear:
- "They probably monitor how often you go to the arcade!" (usually followed about how they were in the opposition in the former East)
- "So who usually tells you what to do?" (they don't get self organizing teams or lack of hierarchies)
- "So how many hours a week do you usually work?" (they vastly over-estimate that)
- "This is all nice, but they just want to stay at work longer!" (after I told them my usual hours)
They are all reasonably nice people, but it's somewhat demotivating to see who actually runs Germany and how little they understand about other parts of the world. Maybe the visits help.
You can have very high prices and still insufficient supply. The prices are supposed to attract supply; but e.g. when a country is not seen as being welcoming to immigrants (or, in fact, has legal restrictions in place) the only flex is in people training/retraining, which is a many-years response to an immediate problem.
If your life goes wrong, due to illnesses, unforeseen circumstances or unemployment, or if you plan to have a family, you're better off in Germany than in silicon valley with 160k.
I do agree with the first grade medical card and the general cheapness of the country.
Yes, that part is mainly relevant when comparing net income.
> Also, I might be mistaken but only 20 vacation days are required by law and I have 24 days currently.
You're right, but 24 is really low. 28 to 30 are very common.
Unfortunately with the decentralised IT industry, having the same benefits it's just a matter of negotiation. On top of that the amount of taxes that you pay for having "cheap" country to live in always averages those benefits.
Having a family here would be great as well, if they don't charge me a percentage of my income for kindergarten [1], a percentage of my income for health insurance, a percentage of my income for religion tax ( happily I'm an atheist ). Those all sound fair for low-skilled jobs, but not so much when you are heavily in demand IT-person ( the tax-bracket is too steep ).
1: https://www.expatica.com/de/education/Preschool-in-Germany_1...
Also do you remember that this costs you 40-50% of your salary? http://www.parmentier.de/steuer/steuer.htm?wagetax.htm
With the same amount of money you can get a normal private insurance in other countries that bring you a golden spoon.
and if you are not german or eu citizen, second part is also not valid. so qualified immigrants can't feel secure here. so berlin is a stop for me until i find some better place, not a city to settle in with my family and future kids.
Edit: fixed no. of days
> § 3 Dauer des Urlaubs > (1) Der Urlaub beträgt jährlich mindestens 24 Werktage.
https://www.arbeitsrecht.org/gesetze/burlg/
Edit: I was wrong! Working days are Monday to Saturday. If you only work 5 days per week you only have 20 days per year.
Am I going to benefit from these as a foreigner not fluent in German language and having trouble navigating the bureaucratic maze of public healthcare and social support? My impression is that even the natives can get confused (see number of homeless and mental people on the streets or occupying the transport infrastructure).
Basically nobody here will be able to avoid the healthcare system.
There are many edge cases which _do_ get more complicated, as (public) health insurance premiums depend on your reported salary. Let's say you have different income streams from different countries, have to pay alimony but also support your parent financially.
There aren't that many in Germany, comparatively speaking.
[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/business-13019777
From an inside perspective I can assure you they're shitting their pants. But they also don't know why they want digital innovation. It's pure buzzword bingo.
I've worked in the UK, where a history graduate can learn to be a derivatives trader. An engineering grad can with little problem get a job coding software (I did both of those jobs with a MEng).
Contrast that with my experience in the Germanic world, and I found the only place that ever asked for my degree certificate. My German friends have degree titles that are pretty much their job titles. I met people who were out of work, and when asked what job they wanted, they responded with a pretty narrow range of jobs fitting their degree.
Recruiters also seemed to take buzzword bingo more seriously, whereas London recruiters seem to be happy to put forward someone who says c# is like c++. Not without its own issues, but if you have a skills shortage, maybe take someone who is close enough?
That job has been open for almost a year now, I wonder why.
They will gladly pay :
- 10k for missed opportunities ( I've seen companies looking for devs for more than half an year )
- 10k for a recruiter
- 80k for the employee
Not to mention I've seen consulting companies "renting" good freelancers to conglomerates, for double the price of what they are paid.
And the consulting companies business is huge here. They're paying more even than for internal employees.
I would say large parts of this is cultural. Germans are not so quick to hop onto new things and are suspicious what problems new technology brings, especially with regards to privacy and 'Datenschutz' / data protection. Swedes on the other hand love new things and with a national number given out by birth privacy is not that big of a deal.
German companies also have a large accessible market of German speakers (~100 million) so the need to go global is not as acute as for companies from smaller economies.
And the Telekom is not alone with wanting support money from everyone. The southern Rheinland saw multiple providers wanting to connect villages for huge prices, which leads to the weird situation, that southern Rhineland now gets support from a Swiss company. That company doesn't need any money and is still laying fiber through the woods to long forgotten villages.
Compare that with most other European countries, where you can get a fiber connection for the same money with synchronous 100Mbit/s or more. The northern countries with their hard rock grounds did get it working in a much better way than Germany.
And don't rely on LTE, as the LTE tarif were bound to lower GB/month traffic limits and huge costs, as the LTE frequencies were auctioned of between the providers. And the winners couldn't build where they wanted, they had to provide LTE at first where there was no mobile internet available at all, which means on the acres.
Germany is in a sad state in regards to connectivity. And this has nothing to do with people being afraid. If you let the monopolist do whatever it wants and not enforce the modernization, then this is what you can expect.
Oh! Found a Deutsche Telekom representative!
- ability, willingness, etc to tweak and upgrade your infrastructure
- how competition-friendly and pro-consumer your market is - the type of grants, contracts and industry ties your environment has (think special, prototype, maybe even government subsidized hardware, for example)
- reflects the amount of mastery over geography or nature itself - this is what successful countries pull
- is the economy market-driven or just a pocket bubble?
There might be others, but this is already quite damning imo. Also I need gigabit because that determines the size of my erection and i'd go to lengths such as paying FAIR prices for it.
How about, say, 20-30Mbit/s upstream and long-lasting IP addresses? A couple of people on WebRTC conferences can easily use >10Mbit/s and the conferences work best if noone's IP address changes in the middle.
As a citizen of the United States, I wish my country valued privacy 1/4 as much as Germany.
It's "Störerhaftung". I tend not to be picky about these words, but "Haft" (imprisonment) and "Haftung" (liability) is a huge difference.
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