But you haven't mentioned China... For last 20 years Germany have been riding a wave of Chinese manufacturing and modernization.
With Chinese slowdown (lockdowns etc.) and automotive industry (15 % of Germany's GDP) facing green evolution (which is a problem as Gemans can't code) it seems like Germany have lost both engines of growth. Energy crisis seems like the last drop....
What's the factual basis for that claim? I'm German and I can code.
EVs aren't inherently more difficult to program.
You could make the argument for autonomous driving. But that's a different topic.
Modern cars have a lot of embedded systems in them. A small fraction of them is drivetrain related, like battery controller and inverter control on an EV.
Actually ICE is way more complex than EV.
But I think people get confused with EV and autonomous driving.
Me, too.
But software engineering is definitely not on par in Germany with other important branches, e.g. car manufactoring.
There are huge successful non-IT companies that fail to transform into digital age. They have problems to hire good software engineers.
In the home computer era in the 80s I saw a lot of people in Europe produce nice software. But somehow we did not make the jump into PC-era.
Though I don't consider this to be a bad thing. There's a considerable amount of startups advertising their seed funding on here with products that I don't think would have a market fit outside the valley right now.
Then, IT talents: In 2020 Informatik (computer science) made it to the second-most studied university discipline after BWL (business admistration). Which is very interesting since it was not even TOP 10 for decades and still is a male-dominated field. Tradionally Germany has great apprenticeships, so there are multiple vocational schools you can go to learn something in IT, backed by IHK (chamber of commerce and industry). We'll need them, because we somehow fail to attract many foreign talents, compared to Switzerland.