Comment by t8sr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by t8sr | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Thanks for taking the time to provide some local perspective.

As a fellow European, what I find fascinating about this is that we all mostly want to accomplish similar things:

1) The government shouldn't go on fishing expeditions for citizens breaking the law

2) Avoid oppressive laws

3) Avoid unexplainable, opaque and secret laws, of which arguably "ML model says no" is a really nasty example

In most countries, the debate about this is only tangentially related to privacy, but in Germany it's all about privacy.

By being so obsessed with privacy, Germany seems to avoid a lot of nasty effects of technology. On the other hand, y'all still don't have Street View, couldn't buy VR headsets for multiple years and getting two government offices to exchange your information is basically impossible. (And I always forget that I need to have physical cash when in Germany, like in 1992.)

I am guessing that the German POV is that those things were worth it to avoid the bad side effects, but it's also the case that other European countries have avoided the bad side effects without having such blanket bans on large scale data processing.

Germany does, in fact have street view. There were delays and pauses, and more places blurred than in most countries but it's available, at least for major cities.

https://goo.gl/maps/MDRCK7upDPPiPKqa6

Minor nitpick: I'm not sure having some places with 15 year old footage counts as "having streetview"

I have no comparison when it comes to statehood and legislature with other EU countries, but I can definitely tell you that German federal bureaucracy as well as civil servant system is insanely complex and the absolute primary reason for absolute drag on technology adoption.

Essentially it's death by a thousand cuts (or bureaucracies) plus powerful career civil servants appointed for live and not incentivized to change at all.

The root of these systems is directly attributable to the horror of the Third Reich and seeing how the Nazis corrupted centralized power and weak bureaucracy.

By design, things like large scale technology adaption in public administration is hard in Germany.

It is 100% intentional and not driven by the economy etc. but mostly the legal setup.

I don't particularly mind it in the case of Street View or VR headsets, the world does imo not need either to function properly.

It sucks in general though of course.

It also will only ever change at a glacial pace, unfortunately.

I've thought about emigrating more than once. :D

> plus powerful career civil servants appointed for live and not incentivized to change at all

Hum... My experience is that if you appoint good people and give them confidence they won't get fired, that people will go out of their way to make things change (into whatever is in fashion for a bureaucracy, today we are moving from strict legalism into formal cost/benefit based decisions).

Are you sure there isn't any strong systemic effect incentivizing them not to change?

> Are you sure there isn't any strong systemic effect incentivizing them not to change?

There's a strong incentive not to make any decisions, because decisions could be wrong, and being wrong could get you blamed. You'll never get fired for being wrong, but you might get moved to a different post that is somewhere else where nothing ever happens (and you can't do damage, I suppose).

German bureaucracies are trying to cover each and every single case so that state employees don't have to think and will reliably return the same result given the same inputs. Unfortunately, you rarely ever have the exact same inputs, so you'll need to add more code to fix edge cases, and at some point one person can't keep all your rules in their head, so you need two people, now they need to communicate and it goes on and on.

The other part is very much a cultural thing, state administrations are well-known for being cushy jobs where you won't have to do much and attract the kind of person that wants that job. Every now and then someone will see the state of bureaucracy in Germany, think "I'll help!" and get themselves hired, and then burn out within half a year of trying to change the culture around them.

I'm only half joking: the best thing to happen to most small-ish bureaucracies in Germany would be to have a team building exercise with an accident that leaves everyone unable to work for 2 years so that there's enough time to build up a new team, install a new culture and clean up the processes. When the old ones are ready to come back, you can slowly introduce them into healthy teams, so that they'll take on the new culture.

> German bureaucracies are trying to cover each and every single case so that state employees don't have to think and will reliably return the same result given the same inputs.

Hum, yes, that's strict legalism. It was the fashion a few decades ago.

Do you have insight on the inner working of your local bureaucracy? Because it's hard to believe in a country as large as Germany people are so outside of the curve. Maybe you are seeing the outside appearance of a power structure that evolved in some past decades, and that won't tell you anything about what people are trying to do, just about what people are allowed to.

(Or maybe Germany public service is almost all composed of people nearing their retirement and with old ideas. It's not that unlikely that an entire government is skewed in age.)

I don't have any insight in my local branch (I've only lived here for two years, but from the little contact I did have, it doesn't look different from where I've previously lived). I've done some consulting for a trade union that covers parts of public administrations and what I learned from helping them organize files surrounding the labor environment in ministries and local agencies looked like it could've well been the inspiration for that Asterix comic dealing with Roman bureaucracy.

I have a friend who works on a large federal digitalization project and he's ready to quit because it drains the life out of you for those same reasons (rules abound, nobody wants to make a decision, and expensive consultants and lawyers who are brought in to take the blame -- only they don't care for taking the blame, they want to bill as much as possible, and so everything takes forever). Yet he won't, because he believes that it's important work and will help make things better, and so he'll suffer and probably snap in a few years down the line.

To me, it looks like a culture issue. I'm a freelancer and have worked with quite a few teams over the past 20 years and some teams are just broken because of culture. They're places where nobody cooperates willingly and nobody takes ownership of anything, where fear stalks the offices and ideas go to die. And then you have places where people are proactive, and will handle a task and when an additional thing pops up a week later, they'll say "I've anticipated that and made sure it's easy to add" and things just work, because everybody works so that the team's future version has an easy time. I'm sure a broken culture can be fixed somehow, but I don't know if you can do it gradually because new members will adapt to the existing culture and perpetuate it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com