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Comment by iamctobitch | Hacker News Reader

>I'm surprised how these behemoths still function.

You haven't seen Brazilian or India companies in comparison with same level of buercracy and lacking in resources and technology.

German companies are still working because rest of the world is soo bad in comparison.

But this is changing as China/US will compete directly head to head in EV segment and both of them already have massive software ecosystem which did not thrive under German executive mindset for now.

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Do those companies really have a problem with software? I’d imagine most of the software in cars is embedded, for controlling different mechanisms for the brakes, steering, cooling, etc. For those, I would prefer a stuffy bureacratic process rather than a Tesla, SV style move-fast attitude, even if that is more productive. I want software in a car to be finished and tested fully when the car is delivered, and then to disappear, I would consider it a failure if the company has to fix or alter safety critical parts of the software after it has been delivered, and I’d prefer that process to happen through some highly controlled process linked to servicing or recall, and not through random frequent OTA updates which are being thrown out. I really can't see how monthly updates can be properly checked for safety.

Yes, they do. I am working in a huge company (top 50) where the software we use is from ~ 2000 with upgrades that gets it to ~ 2008-2010. I was offered a higher management position in an automotive company in the embedded software division, I have a friend working there in a peer position and I am going to decline based on the information I received not just from my friend, but from the interviewers: it is corporate incompetence at its finest, with managers with no IT knowledge running IT like a plant floor, choosing external suppliers to do key work based on God knows what (definitely not competence, value or anything useful), paying egalitarian salaries to all developers with no differentiation to productivity, skills or experience. Perfect storm is the perfect description of the situation.

...based on God knows what...

My suspicion based on time spent in a different industry would be trips to gentlemen's clubs with all expenses paid by the sales team...

> with managers with no IT knowledge running IT like a plant floor, ...

So why don't you join and try to change things for the better?

Munich?

Most of these companys dont even have expertese in software. Software is something that is produced outside by the cheapest vendor.

All good german software devs are either in the swiss - or in the valley.

I don't know exactly how it works at VW or BMW, but large enterprises may have a big in-house software engineering unit which is focused on internal software systems (manufacturing management, supply chains etc) and the effort put in it can be even bigger than in the embedded software. This kind of enterprise software may boost or slow down the transformation of the company, depending on how the development and deployment is executed.

As a freelance dev one of my clients is the official distributor (seller) of one of the german giants in another country. They force us to use their erp. Just querying a 1M row table took more than 5 minutes. I inspected the DB and what did I find? Tables in german and english. No indexes for PKs. A lot of PKs that were pure strings... We suffer from bad data, strange bugs and awful performance. Really surprising of a sw coming from Germany

Bmw develops everything external. They do not have internal software competence. The software development center basically is just a hub for creating product requirement document and reviewing functional specification documents for software packages. Everything else is in a eco-system of small competing software developers- this worked great when you thought detail knowledge to be replaceable and you wanted those external devs to bid each other into the ground. Today, the external developer firms are bleeding people to the swiss and the valley or turn to other- more lucrative industires/projects.

Its also why those car software projects always have such subtle bugs and almost never updates. The final integration step of those packages into a whole is basically bitching to the various supplier about unspecified stuff until the time runs out.

I worked for a small SaaS that accidentally DOS’d MB’s entire ERP system, while requesting vehicle specs based on vin via their provided API.

I've seen "The Big Short" movie lately and I was flabbergasted about how the finance industry works. I'm beginning to realize that this pattern is universal in all industries. I also see that we as a species are suffering from the same mechanism. We won't learn until it is too late. I want to understand the pattern so I can find a way out of it somehow.

BTW: where do you work as a CTO?

I think with software specifically it's less dysfunctional in the tech industry.

True, big organisations are always dysfunctional in a way or another. It's surprising to see how successful companies can be, simply by not being too dysfunctional.

That being said, I do believe some of the German automakers are pretty high on the inefficiency scale.

Often success in military affairs translates into who makes the fewest fatal mistakes. I think this can apply as well to business.

> German companies are still working because rest of the world is soo bad in comparison.

Not any more. In the most recent Consumer Reports car reliability rankings German car manufacturers are nowhere near the top. The top three are Lexus, Toyota, and Kia (sic!)

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