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Comment by treprinum | Hacker News Reader

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 aversion to risk; a friend of mine who built a successful company told me that in order to get 1M from a bank they essentially had to pay them 1M upfront.

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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 the job, representing the whole dev department.

Anecdotal!

This was about a decade ago, suddenly ran into a guy I knew from highschool who studied CS in another city. Told me he dropped out during his master's because he failed math, then got hired by a medium-sized company making sensors and actuators, who now wanted to enter the smart home business. Remote controllable relays for power outlets basically, energy meters, door-open sensors, not much more at that point. He was basically the only dev for the first six months, then got promoted to team lead and had two other devs working for him.

He was inexperienced and had quite the ego when I talked to him back then. He was smug about using Arch Linux while I was on debian. He then went on and excitedly told me "did you know!? you can't just use ssh to get a shell on another computer, but tunnel arbitrary data over it!" I guess you don't learn much just copying commands from the Arch Linux wiki all day. Anyways, when I told him I don't think this project will go anywhere and will pretty much be done once Google or any other big player decides to enter that space, he just brushed it off because "they will have been there first". Needless to say, he's not with that company any more, but not after suffering some burnout... Two years after college!

Yeah it's not just computers. Germany is full of educated high IQ people working for, in my opinion, peanuts.

But software and technology is especially poorly compensated there.

If grandparent's example is representative, German education is not teaching people what they actually need to know. The ssh stuff you can get in five minutes' reading of the man page.

100% this. In order to become a company leader in Germany you have to do things in a conservative way how 'it's always been done'. Be male, older and have a Ph.D. Just look at an average board of directors and you'll see 90% PhDs. No, they aren't any more intelligent or better educated nor trained. They just sucked up for more and more years to a professor at uni to get their PhD in something business. Doesn't help at all in actually RUNNING a business, but that's just how it's been done to get ahead.

> People are also getting more and more unprofessional

> the country operates in a two-caste system

I don't know for today but I remember in the 1980' some German engineers playing games on their computers during work at Deutsch Telecom.

An accounting professor of Turkish origin in my MBA program in the US was making fun of Germany after the Wirecard scandal that he could have imagined such crime in Turkey but never in Germany and then shrugged his shoulders.

Just look where Marsalek comes from: We import our criminals from Austria.

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