It'll probably be very German, meaning overly bureaucratic. But the basic idea of financing R&D in small companies to grow them more competitive seems legit to me.
As an example of what was funded by similar German government grants, you can look at voize, which is (by now) also a YC company: https://en.voize.de/uber-uns
EDIT: Here's some German info on the 1.98 mio € research grant from early 2022 (meaning it was awarded shortly before they joined the W22 YC batch): https://www.interaktive-technologien.de/projekte/pysa
It is perhaps not a good idea to apply to that many in such a short time frame, unless you have nothing else to do: the individual efforts need to be really excellent to succeed, so focus should be on quality rather than quantity. Why? There is a funding threshold, and you can have 5 proposals that get 13/15 ("good enough to fund"), but you still don't get any of them funded because there enough competing grants with 15/15 score, and after they receive their funding, the pot of money is already empty (the funding is in order of merit).
In my experience, most applications that fail to get the perfect score required are incomplete: To get excellent scores it is vital to FULLY address ANYTHING mentioned in the call. And to squeeze all that into 40 pages is an art. (There are folks that provide consulting support, which I have not used yet, or you could collaborate with someone who has worked on the other side to learn more about what is important.)
While getting grant money remains hard, I was pleasantly suprised about the judging effort and the EC's personnel energy put into the evaluation process and in making it fair; for each call, their is a special rapporteur going around and documenting that everything that should be done gets done the way it should be, and the EC take great pains to find experts that are diverse across multiple dimensions (gender, country, industry/academia, seniority, field of expertise etc.).
edit: typos
100%. That can also sometime save you a ton of work of putting together information that they may not care about.
Germany has got a well deserved reputation for its bureaucracy and lack of flexibility. We were dealing with the tax office at the same time we were dealing with grants. One part of the government trying to give us money, another taking it away. We had our first deal with not enough revenue to even pay ourselves. That was calculated as "profit". As a bootstrapped company, we got very close to emptying our accounts a few times. And stuff like this isn't helpful. But we survived and we're still around. Partially thanks to these grants.
I think this incoming government is saying the right things and looks like they are planning to do things that sound like they are good ideas. Making the process of founding a company easier, incentivizing R&D, etc. There's a lot of potential in this country in terms of companies that are very specialized and high tech, well educated people, etc. They are definitely over dependent on older companies that are a bit past their prime, e.g. in automotive.
Germany mainly needs to deal with it's risk averse bureaucracy and culture. People that want to take risk here need to move more freely and faster. It shouldn't take months to found a company. Or thousands of euros to deal with all the bureaucracy (which it does if you add it all up).
Germany tends to stifle innovation by bureaucracy, restrictive & complex rules, and a finance climate that actively discourages investment and taking risk. Especially foreign investment. If you look at a lot of big name scale ups in Germany, you'll find that they have headquarters in places like Dublin, London, or Amsterdam. There's a good reason for this: if you want foreign investors to invest, a Gmbh is simply a somewhat toxic legal construction. These companies are German in all but name. That's about more than just taxes.
That needs to change. I think people are well aware. Merz certainly seems to be. But bureaucracies have a way of pushing back and this country is run by bureaucrats, politicians, lawyers, notaries, etc. that all benefit financially from the system being the way it is. They actively resist change and insist how crucial they are to the whole thing. Everything they touch tends to get more complex and convoluted. My worry is that they'll just end up adding to the problem instead of solving it.
On all levels, once you really breathe that there is a human person you are directing your inquiry to, and that you can help them do their job, they will be happy to direct money towards you. That principle applies from local startup funds to federal grants to EU level project officers. The “bureaucracy“ can be annoying in the sense of feeling like a waste of time (which, since you should factor in the cost of application into your later grant, is simply not true. It is actually really well paid boring labor.), but it’s really not complex or hard. If you believe they are hard for you (“hell“), you are engaged in negative self talk.
If you approach these things as highly annoying, and direct your annoying energy to the people who are handling your application, you will annoy them, which will make you feel like they are there to annoy you. The alternative is to approach them with the understanding that they’re not trying to make your life hard but are simply doing their job. They know much better than you that some things should be changed but it’s not up to them to change them, and they are not the right target to lobby for change.
Anyway, Fraunhofer gets recurring tax funding. What voize got is a one-off research grant to a group of companies:
- voize
- Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin (a medical university)
- Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH, Berlin (a government AI research lab)
- Connext Communication GmbH, Paderborn (a tech company)
- Kleeblatt Pflegeheime gGmbH, Ludwigsburg (a retirement home, i.e. potential end user)
- Pflegewohnhaus am Waldkrankenhaus gGmbH, Berlin (another retirement home)
For this grant type, it's quite common that you pay the inventors, some assistant companies, some researchers, and some end users a lump sum to force them all to work together on commercializing the invention.
https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/about-fraunhofer/profile-struct...
Funding for everyone except you.
At least that's how it is in the US. I'm unsure how different, if at all, it is in Germany.
E.g. if you look at PhD graduates only one in a few hundred (even in STEM fields) will end up on a path that commercializes their research, with most of the other ones moving into industry and likely not working on a directly related subject to their thesis. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
Am i interested in progress? Of course. Am i not smart enough to see or think long term, most likely. Give me a robo advisor, that helps me distribute my money. Give me best practises. I do not need a bloated government and their politics and interest groups for a simple decision, what i do with MY money that I have earned by working. Govt is the middle management that everyone complains about. A black hole.
And the other thing: yeah, people know, what charity is. But there is no big charity, if the welfare state already takes half of your money. The responsibility to take care of people around you is offloaded to an anonymous entity.
The argument about charity and tax levels is not substantiated by any research as far as I can tell. There is however research showing that rich people give LESS to charity proportionally, compared to poorer people.
Making charity donations tax deductible, that does help though.
About charity or tax level and who gives more, that question i do not ask. I would not ask anyone, what are you are willing to give and how much? Little, more, much, welcome. I just would not allow free-riding on things others have paid and worked for and their life blood is in it.
Unless your country is a war, that means they can focus entirely on stealing your money. You're never going to be able to change that. The only thing you can do is protect your money outside their reach. Then you can decide freely how it is used.
Everything that isn't dross in the computer world is either a well designed standard, or a well designed algorithm. If the German government adopted a sensible standard for government documents, for example, and mandated that all documents must be saved in it, that would already make a huge difference.
I'd like to see more innovation in general and if this leads to that its good. But I don't personally think that innovation needs to happen in Germany, so long as it happens somewhere and Germans can do what they do best with it.
> Uncertainty Avoidance Cultures
Extremely thick irony here
I say that as a German doing a startup in Germany. There's upsides as well but it's true.
It's a sad frustration, as there is so much potential here.
Hmm... So if people struggle in life and have live from hand to mouth in multiple jobs to support their family and loved ones, they are more innovative?
Also, plenty of people in Germany live hand to mouth now. Poverty has been on the increase due to CoL.
From what examples I can think of right now, innovation actually appears to require a certain level of coziness. I'd say great ideas come from curiosity, and if you're struggling to eat, that's usually limited. The trick is, perhaps, to be cozy, but not so cozy that lifting a finger seems pointless.
They still have the automotive / electrical engineering mindset on computers and software. Software in Germany is built to achieve a means to an end. It is never the end goal itself.
Well, that's how it should be, I don't write software to worship any software deities, I use it to get a job done. If you don't you end up with that 700 dollar useless gadget that was basically a python API wrapper in a box that everyone rightfully made fun of.
We can do a lot of things better in software in Germany but treating it as an engineering discipline is a good thing, I think even the US is probably past the peak of the zero interest free money toy product phase and people are focusing more on real industry again.
Technology coasted for a few decades gaining public’s trust as an unquestionable improvement over the past. That reputation is wearing out faster than I’d like to admit.
I hear from friends and family that SV big tech are increasingly equated with surveilence, credit card leaks, and destructive games of billionaires detached from reality. I had a long potluck talk with a stranger that was convinced ChatGPT is analogous to another crypto scam. It blew my mind and opened my eyes that could be a popular opinion.
I agree Germans are less susceptible to SV bullshit artists, but they also miss out on the upside for game changing ideas. Whether this is a net negative or net positive is yet to be determined. Up to this point, it has been Germany’s financial loss to over index on the engineeriness. Maybe it is America’s loss to over index on the financial outcomes and the truly world changing ideas and those very same ideas can be a net negative. I would have said 2 months ago that you would be hard pressed to find people on this message board who would agree with the latter, but I think that may have changed significantly recently.
Almost all the science fiction and cybernetic work of the last 75 years came either out of the Eastern block, or out of the US. There is basically no German sci fi vision, and there is extreme reluctance to speculative, big picture thinking as it is pursued in Silicon Valley. Software companies grow quickly and need a very different approach. Silicon Valley mostly understands this scaling aspect and winner take all markets really well. German investors are cheap and extremely risk averse, I tried to build a software company in Germany and it is hard.
While a lot of the current AI work was also done in Germany, e.g. by Schmidhuber, Germans are stuck in their business model. I recommend Münchau's book "Kaput" (or one of his podcast interviews) on how poorly Germans have adapted to the non-industrial aspects of a modern economy (read: "services"). I really hope that more tech founder thinking like Benz, Bosch or Siemens returns to Germany in a modern form. But I don't see it yet, and Germans are still super reactive and conservative to larger changes. The Greens tried to think a bit out of the box, and were heavily punished for it. In general there is basically no political representation for building a new successful economy. At best there is this nice little narrative about the long established "Mittelstand", which has produce almost zero software companies. The first step right now would be to own the idea of the EU, and wanting to win instead of complaining.
But if that is indeed true, I find it equally interesting the Germany has been an important center for the development of electronic music. Berlin in particular is "arguably the world capital of underground electronic music" (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/21/arts/music/women-djs-berl...)
> Software in Germany is built to achieve a means to an end. It is never the end goal itself.
You must be hanging out in a different part of the computer world.
What I see is that most standards reflect evolved systems, and those standards usually have many amendments. Most algorithms are generation descendants of broken predecessors. I love hearing about a singular talent coming up with something new and getting the world to listen, but the story is usually way messier than that.
However, the basic point about a standard is not that it's perfect: it's a coordination mechanism. Companies go bust all the time, technology changes all the time, but if you have standard components, large parts of complex systems can be maintained indefinitely. Like, I have a rolling press that was made in 1840, and I can still replace the bolts for it, because the standard thread gauge has not changed.
I guess the nice thing about both algorithms and standards are they are the two places where the software world is not just burning people's lives on relentlessly reinventing the wheel. If you contribute even a fraction to the study of an algorithm, your work will be part of software in a thousand years. If you contribute to a standard, you are producing the conditions for a thousand other programs. Both of these things are basically common goods, and they help everyone. I think a culture of programming where it's less about founding the next over-capitalized unicorn, and more about creating a mutually supportive ecosystem, would produce very good software.
This allows most Germans to sleep soundly at night knowing some company won't show up at the door selling the same product they do, but better and cheaper.
This is a well know playbook, and is appealing to bureaucrats who conflate a stack paperwork with actual quality, and is not exclusive to Germans (why does FDA approved medicine cost 100x of chemically indentical stuff sold in other countries etc.)/
germany is a country on the rapid decline. the recently decided investment effort and the new government are a step in the right direction but wont halt or revert that decline. the country needs a BIG shock and be rebuilt from the ground up. the new ministry is just pandering / virtue signalling and won't have any effect.
some examples:
1) legacy financial holes like the pension scheme, no bandaid will save this
2) public workers safety & pension "beamtentum" - wrong incentives, wrong people, wrong mindset
3) workers rights are too strong (betriebsrat, unflexible hiring & firing)
4) taxes are ridiculously high, there's zero incentive for global talent to come here
5) bureaucracy is absolutely insane, a country run by risk averse lawyers stuck in the 1980s
6) immigration was botched so bad, they wont recover from this for another generation
7) the rise of the far right afd was handled so terribly, the trauma from ww2 is still too big to deal with it rationally, rather than calling the strongest party in the country "antidemocratic" (which ironically IS antidemocratic in itself). if they dont get a grip on this, afd will lead the country in 4 years.
8) no common identity / goal except for wanting to show being the "good guys", see misincentived sustainability initiatives, handling of israel / palestina, etc
9) weak leaders / politicians. they are all bureaucrats
10) regulation first, innovation never. see AI
2) don't ask for "strong" leaders -> look at the mess going on in america, don't spill the baby with the bath
3) afd is the stupid people party. no one knows how to get a grip on the those idiots, don't loose your cool.
subtract your 10 points with mine and we are in agreement.
you disagree and so implied both i and the biggest voter block in germany are "idiots". that's not discourse.
Germany is being held hostage by pensioners.
Everything comes down to finances and finances comes down to pensions. It's more than 100 billion euro of tax money going to pensions (on top of high and increasing social-insurance contributions). Retired people are the majority of voters, you can't run on politics to their disadvantage. It's politics for old people, by old people. They indebted the state for their benefit when they were young, ignored the demographic crisis for decades, and now they won't forgo a dime for their children's future.
We will get civil war, before pensions are touched. Without that money, we debate scapegoats, instead of investing in existentially necessary reforms, building houses and fixing the infrastructure debt.
Handling AfD by inviting them to a talk show where the audience/presenters were mostly people with Greens/Left background is emblematic of how this country has been delegating the ability to think democratically to someone else. No wonder we have extreme parties on the rise. (Both Left and AfD are extremes, no matter what)
Instead of listening, they made fun or criticized a party of monkeys that should have never reached 22%. Because that's all they could do. Make fun, minimize, claiming you're racist, etc.
Burning Tesla factories, breaking their cars while they are parked, ... letting protesters glue themselves on the streets blocking you from reaching whichever place you planned to (be it an office or a hospital). This is daily life in Germany in the last 3-4 years. Wtf!
I am personally sad that all the good things will change because the last 20 years I think Germany really became a great country, unlike all the criticism that people like to throw at it. All just because people couldn't confront the facts. And yes, this means making hard decisions where needed.
According to the German constitution (Grundgesetz), schools and universities are (mainly) the responsibility of the individual German states, not the federal government.[1] (A hybrid is the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology that has a university branch under the supervision of the state of Baden-Württemberg and a research centre branch under federal supervision.) The educational tasks of the federal government therefore basically relate to extracurricular and non-university education, such as early childhood education or adult further education.
At the level of the individual states, higher education and research are generally combined in one ministry and school education in another.
[1] Actually the Grundgesetz states in Art. 30: "The exercise of state powers and the performance of state duties shall be a matter for the individual states (Länder), unless otherwise provided for or permitted by this Basic Law." The authority of the federal government in education policy is therefore derived from what is explicitly mentioned in various places in the Basic Law. A short overview what that involves can be found here: https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/416682/db04b405a48dbe... (PDF, 2009, in German).
The WissZeitVG falls within the competence of the federal government due to the exemption regulation of Art. 74 I Nr. 12 GG for labour laws.
The "Exzellenzstrategie" and the Tenure Track Programme are cooperations between the federation and the states based on Art. 91b Abs. 1 GG: "The federation and the states may co-operate on the basis of agreements in cases of supra-regional importance in the promotion of science, research and teaching. Agreements focussing on higher education institutions shall require the consent of all states. ..." (original: "Bund und Länder können auf Grund von Vereinbarungen in Fällen überregionaler Bedeutung bei der Förderung von Wissenschaft, Forschung und Lehre zusammenwirken. Vereinbarungen, die im Schwerpunkt Hochschulen betreffen, bedürfen der Zustimmung aller Länder. ...")
The latest revision of the administrative agreement for the "Exzellenzstrategie" can be found here: https://www.gwk-bonn.de/fileadmin/Redaktion/Dokumente/Papers... (PDF, 2022, in German).
And here the same for the Tenure Track Programme: https://www.gwk-bonn.de/fileadmin/Redaktion/Dokumente/Papers... (PDF, 2016, in German)
What Germans can do is create layers of bureaucracy.
Nobody's stopping a local mid-market manufacturer from automating workflows. Or hindering a utility company from offering a better service process.
The problem is corporate leadership.
German companies tend to be run by people who are inflexible, uninspired, and cheap. Maybe it's in the culture. Compare this to Austria, where there's a cultural flair for the dramatic (and therefore an eagerness to stand out, even if it's weird) or Switzerland where enterprises, public or private, are not afraid to place big bets.
It absolutely is. Try to open a company in Germany. Then try to do your tax. Then try to close your company.
After that, let's talk again about bureaucracy.
Oh, and the new government just announced plans that non-employeed people (freelancers, business owners, ...) are now forced to pay into national pension (with few exceptions). And don't get me started on that one. Just as an example, national pension charges based on your income. But they have a different way to calculate income than the tax office.
Let me say it in other words if it's not clear yet: If someone is practically unable to do all the above without an accountant then the bureaucracy is absolutely out of hands.
It's totally possible that it's easier in other countries, I don't know that.
But if you're serious about building a company, this is the least of your challenges.
Hire a tax advisor and accountant through a payroll and tax service provider and you'll spend 1-2 days a year dealing with this stuff.
And this is exactly how you kill off lots of innovation by adding unnecessary hurdles. Tax advisors are Hella expensive and hard to contract even. I'm speaking from experience.
Like I said, you'll be facing a lot of substantially greater challenges.
The point is that relative to everything else you need to get right to build a successful company in any country, taxes, payroll and accounting in Germany frankly don't even register.
Like I said, it's 1-2 days out of a year for me.
If that seems like a big hurdle, it wasn't the reason you didn't build a business.
There are challenges with building a business that are specific to Germany that actually matter.
By contrast, the concerns about bureaucracy are a tired stereotype. There's a grain of truth to them, but if they really pose a challenge to you, you didn't want to do this in the first place.
Americans constantly complain about the tax system and, like them or not in practice, a lot of US citizens on both sides of the aisle believe in one of the stated goals of DOGE (previously named the US Digital Service).
No, and in the context of the thread I care little about the US. This thread is about Germany and is specifically about "they [the companies] are drowning in bureaucracy" and "The problem is not the bureaucracy". And my post was a response to that. The US might be worse (I doubt it) but it has basically no relevance imo.
I quit my last job because of bureaucracy and I’m considering moving to Germany, so as individual, it is very important to me. Thanks for explaining to me that my life and major factors in my decision are irrelevant. Very helpful.
I'm no expert by any means, but have you ever actually worked with Germans?
The existence of Betriebsräte (Workers' Councils, as implemented in Germany), while not necessarily 'bad', comes with a mountain of bureaucracy...
Betriebsräte are actually a really sane measure once you think about it. And the more intelligent managers take them as an asset.
You took in my opinion unfortunately the worst example you could. Unions are by definition bureaucratic because they need to be...
The biggest issue with German bureaucracy is that it's largely paper-based and has little to no automation. In many cases, digitalisation when it happens just means sending documents digitally instead of delivering them during an in-person appointment. This leads to very long processing times that are constrained by available labour.
Against all expectations, German bureaucracy is very "vibes-based", specifically because it's full of humans. It's predictably unpredictable. You rarely get the downside of digitalisation where "computer says no", because a human is deciding your fate and can be convinced to give you leeway.
The bigger issue at least for me is speed. The uncertainty of human decisions is magnified by the weeks-long delays. A missing document is a big issue when bureaucracy has a 4-8 week ping. That is of course if the case worker doesn't shrug and give you what you want anyway.
My experience when it mattered was that my rights were not recognised by the human in the loop. It was solved by going above their heads.
If you aren't willing or able you might just get the short end of the stick.
When you get the short end of the stick, a letter from your lawyer can make it abundantly clear that giving you what you want (and faster) is the path of least resistance.
This. I have worked in a Germany university and in all the supporting administration, nobody wants to make choices or take responsibility. E.g. I had some blatant cases of plagiarism and when going to the examination office (where it should be reported), they would do nothing. And when I asked whether there shouldn't be any repercussions, their answer was "there ought to be repercussions", the subtext being: but I'm not going to be the one enforcing them, because if I do and the student files a complaint, I'm going to have to defend my choice.
Or sometimes we had to order GPU servers for the department. We requested quotes from multiple companies (since we knew what we need) and would then send them to the financial administration with our preference (good price + service options). Rather than saying: LGTM, seems you did your work, they would spend four (!) weeks asking new quotes and processing them. And then they would happily come and say, "we found a cheaper option" and the cheaper option would be saving 100 Euro on a machine that cost something like 25,000 and was most likely just the natural reduction in prices in four weeks. At any rate, it is this weird mix of needing to assert themselves, following whatever rules to the letter, and not wanting to make 'bold' choices etc. Meanwhile a whole research group is under compute capacity for a month and the work of the financial department certainly cost more than 100 Euro in hourly wages.
Also, every process uses paper. Heck, once I got my tax number, to my surprise the person from the administration pulled my personnel file out of a filing cabinet!
I wish that this was just the university, but from friends that went into industry, I hear that a lot of German corporations are pretty much the same.
The system needs to be designed in a different way: “We guarantee processing within x hours (weekdays) from the point you’ve provided us a full-kit.”
This, in turn, requires thinking backwards from the result through all steps, resulting in a definition of what a full-kit entails. Of course this requires a different (system) thinking which is contradicted by the rigid hierarchy (and no, doing away with the hierarchy isn’t a solution either).
Work force would not be busy 80% of their time = capacity to go back and forth to figure what’s missing and switch around cases. When starting with full-kit, 80% of their wasted time becomes processing time. In turn, their throughput was 20%, it goes up to 100%, or x5.
Cheap as in no investments in people or software quality. Salaries are also not competitive in a lot of places.
Disregard for the user and disregard for usability.
Unfortunately most software shops locked in their customers and the lack of any technical merit pays well and is disconnected from product quality.
Only lots of bankruptcies might help. I have nothing but disdain for these people in leadership.
I've surely not seen all but I've seen enough. It's that bad.
> Salaries are also not competitive in a lot of places.
Can you call out with some examples for those of us unfamiliar with those 'big bets'?
Switzerland sits between Germany, Italy, and France, and was getting choked by road traffic, so voters have approved the largest tunnels in the world to get goods around and through Switzerland without using roads.
The problem is definitely bureaucracy. Any German founder will agree with this.
Or having to carry cash coz a lot of places don't even give you the option to pay by card (even though this seems to come to an end, hello 2025!)
I had to contact customer support to send me one... by post. They only activate and send eSIMs by mail. This will take another week.
I would be surprised if you're talking about an eSIM service that give you a phone number.
They kind of are. Somebody would have to go and steal the physical letter and then read/scan it to make any use of it. That excludes pretty much all attacks on the process --- at least such where criminals might hope to make a larger profit than most other criminal enterprises available to them.
Whether that makes the letters a good idea is a different discussion...
There's a saying for that in German involving "feeding trough" and "pigs".
The problem with germans in general is that they are unwilling or badly trained in „thinking things to the end“. The will start a „Digitalisierungsministerium“ without a clear goal of what they want to achieve let alone how to get there. In the end they will waste a lot of money on ipads and businesses lock them into their ecosystems so the can‘t get out. It all goes back to the culture and a rigid educational system where everyone is supposed to stay where they are.
If this obliquely refers to anything, then to a scandal under the last german government, where the minister of science and education had demanded to know whether any signatory to an open letter received funding from the ministry[1].
[1]: https://www.forschung-und-lehre.de/politik/foerdermittel-aff...
but first regulated to death
a) don’t fund risky things
b) don’t believe Europe can create unicorns so it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy for their investments
c) try to cash out too quickly from potentially huge businesses
d) valuations are half the investment for double the equity, so of course the companies have half the runway and half the upside.
Do you even disagree that investors try to take a larger equity position in companies in the EU than in the US?
There sure would like though. What I've followed in the Horizon program was a fixation of chasing "last years" technology.
Problem was , that for all those funding programmes they had quite stingent company requirements which stopped startups and small companies from having a go at it. Larger companies had no issue navigating this process and chewing the cash without actually delivering good or innovative products.
[1] https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2024/03/27/germanys-rea... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_economic_crisis_%282022...
For example there is increasing consensus that Merkel's "black-zero" budget requirements set the stage for today's collapsing German infrastructure and lack of productivity growth due to decreased public investment.
And wait till the EU starts paying it's own defense bills without the US, which is what it wants to do. But with money from where? Education? Healthcare? Welfare?
https://www.wsj.com/world/europeans-poorer-inflation-economy...
Think Siemens, Orange S.A., Technikon, Philips N.V., T-Systems, but also (!) IBM, Accenture, Deloitte, McKinsey.
black_13 11 minutes ago [dead] | parent | context | unvouch | favorite | on: Germany creates 'super–high-tech ministry' for res...
The cynicism in these comments is telling, but misses crucial realities about Germany's capabilities and social achievements. Yes, Germany creates bureaucracies. Yes, Dorothee Bär's digital infrastructure record isn't impressive. And yes, German bureaucracy can be stifling. But this myopic focus on administrative inefficiency overlooks Germany's formidable strengths.
Germany maintains world-class engineering and manufacturing excellence through their Mittelstand network while America has hollowed out its industrial base. German research institutions like Max Planck and Fraunhofer consistently produce breakthrough innovations in renewable energy, advanced materials, and chemical engineering. Their aerospace contributions through Airbus and DLR deliver real technological advances.
More importantly, Germany excels precisely where America falters. Their dual education system creates exceptional technical competence without requiring college degrees. Germans enjoy comprehensive public transportation infrastructure, universal healthcare without administrative bloat, and urban planning that prioritizes livability over speculation.
The results speak for themselves: Germans live significantly longer (81.1 years vs America's 76.4), face virtually no gun violence (2 deaths per million annually vs America's 120), and don't suffer from the manufactured scarcity that plagues American housing, healthcare, and education markets.
Critically, Germany isn't now teetering on becoming a police state. While America expands surveillance powers, militarizes police forces, and faces growing authoritarianism, Germany's post-war constitutional framework continues to prioritize civil liberties, privacy protections, and democratic norms. Their painful historical lessons have created institutional guardrails against authoritarianism that America increasingly lacks.
Let's be honest about who's posting these dismissive takes - primarily privileged tech workers disconnected from the material realities faced by average citizens. While you mock German bureaucracy from comfortable positions, their social systems deliver concrete benefits that many Americans can only dream of.
Germany's approach allows for longer, healthier lives with dramatically less precarity than what Americans experience. Their new ministry may face bureaucratic challenges, but it builds on foundations of technical excellence and social achievement that deserve genuine consideration rather than facile mockery.
This can't be further from the truth. This is probably written by an American, and US is a very car-centric, but German infrastructure is a shitshow.
Also healthcare is absolutely stiffled by bureaucracy. I have a friend who is a cardiologist. He says that exactly half of his work time is paperwork. And not just paperwork, but German paperwork, where you manually type PDF fields one by one, then print, then sign, then scan and so on.
Saying you can not get care by a qualified doctor in the UK is a completely false statement.
I just know that this is a comment from a German person who has little experience with public transport in any non-top-class country. Yeah, it could be better, but it could also be so much worse.
> Also healthcare is absolutely stiffled by bureaucracy
This I agree with.
Maybe what you are talking about is true for some very pour Asian/African countries, but many middle-income countries have more reliable public transportation, than Berlin. Not to mention developed ones and China.
I've been to Central America, Egypt, Istanbul, Sicily, Spain and many more candidates that take a more lax attitude to daily life. Their public transport could certainly be better.
> but many middle-income countries have more reliable public transportation, than Berlin
Berlin is not Germany. Berlin is badly run, constantly out of money (especially for infrastructure) and very different than the rest. Still, inner city public transport is generally reliable, if dirty and sometimes full of questionable people.
Wait. That's exactly how paperwork has always worked for me in America. What am I missing?
I can walk to the grocery. Or ride a bike. Or take the bus. Or take the train into the city. There are options in transport and in the stores. Never, ever had those options in the States.
Yes, I've had some doctors I didn't care for. So I found another one and they've been great. Same thing happens in the States. You must advocate for yourself. Nothing different.
The big difference is the complete lack of fear going in because you know you won't have to pay an arm and a leg. And yes, it's not "free". It comes out of your paycheck. 110% better. Never had to wait an excessive time, even for specialists. No more than in the States; you schedule it out. Yet, I can go to the emergency room when there's a concern and be greeted with compassion and receive care. So much better, it's hard to convey and hard for Americans to believe. I didn't until I lived there.
As for "digitalization", yeah, it'd be nice to submit some forms online rather than through paper. But it's not a big deal. Howwver, it's super nice to talk to human beings on the phone! Haven't run into too many "your call is very important to us. Please listen as our menu may have changed" and then have to deal with a 1kbsp mega compressed audio line. Also, while I've had bad experiences with clerks, many more have been very patient and gracious. Again, contrast that to the DMV. Not much difference.
Doctors in the US also deal with tons of paper work...has your friend also worked in the States?
Pity this happens, I was looking at his posts, and most of them seem to have a higher degree of original thought than most other HN posters.
> Germany maintains world-class engineering and manufacturing excellence through their Mittelstand network - small companies are not unique to Germany. But you'll be surprised how many German industrial automation companies (a domain I know something about), basically haven't changed their product portfolio in the past 10-15 years. Research institutions aren't unique to Germany. The fact you're banking on the clout of having invented MP3 40 years ago is weakness masquerading as strength.
> Their dual education system creates exceptional technical competence without requiring college degrees. - they do have excellent training for skilled technicians, I do give them that.
> Germans live significantly longer - the 28th longest life expectancy in Europe
> Germany isn't now teetering on becoming a police state. - no comment on this, because I don't want to turn this into political mudslinging, but needless to day, this isn't an uncontroversial take. It'd be more accurate to say Germany isn't becoming a kleptocracy/plutocracy like the US.
Germans are also masters at criticising Germany. You just read more defence online than what happens in real life.
/s ?
Got to point out a nuance here.
Americans living shorter are partly the result of America's success. An aggressive big pharma and a health care system that over medicates the population and give them bad advise ( eg nutrition) is one reason why they live less. Often more technology/business is not necessarily good. Germany's overall better outcome with result to life expectancy can be attributed to their incompetence/bureaucracy but certainly not a conscious decision to be better.
Tell me you have never lived in Germany without telling me...
The first time the public transportation infrastructure was very decent, certainly better than in most countries, even if not comparable with something like Japan.
The second time, 10 years later, there was a visible degradation in their railways, because the trains were almost never on time. I have lost a flight and a very large number of train changes because of train delays. However when going by car on their freeways I have not noticed anything worse and with a good car one could travel easily with a speed much above 200 km/h for a long time without problems, though there were also some congested segments.
I have never been ill, so I cannot comment about the state of healthcare.
I have never been in USA, but all the descriptions of the transportation system that I have seen, even of the infrastructure for cars, appear inferior to even the last version from Germany, which was degraded in comparison with the older one.
Unless you do your Ausbildung in a job where you can learn mostly all the skills within a couple months, after which you'll just be shamelessly exploited by your employer for the remaining duration of it.
> Germans enjoy comprehensive public transportation infrastructure,
Yeah, our train systems are pretty cool (can reach most places.) But if your expectation is anything more than 'hopefully arrive by the end of day', you'll regularly be disappointed.
> and don't suffer from the manufactured scarcity that plagues American housing
Have you tried renting in any bigger city in the past 10 or so years?
> Critically, Germany isn't now teetering on becoming a police state. While America expands surveillance powers, militarizes police forces, and faces growing authoritarianism, Germany's post-war constitutional framework continues to prioritize civil liberties, privacy protections, and democratic norms.
I disagree with the claim that Germany is currently on a path strictly "prioritiz[ing] civil liberties, privacy protections, and democratic norms."
Not only did German politicians in 2021 broaden the scope of §188 StGB to include insults against politicians, even at the local level[1], the new coalition contract also has some pretty dystopian views on how to approach opinions/statements they categorize as 'disinformation'[2] (ministry of truth anyone? - ah nevermind, they sidestep that by letting NGOs do the dirty work for them.)
Pair that with the fact that they plan to (again) try to introduce data retention laws without cause[3], I do not personally believe that claiming we strictly prioritize civil liberties etc is a correct assessment of the overall situation here in Germany.
Overall I suspect the post has been written with the aid of LLM, I wonder who/why would do such a thing though. There's just something off about the tone.
1. https://www.buzer.de/gesetz/6165/al144303-0.htm
2. https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/politik-gesellschaft/kampf-g...
3. http://golem.de/news/koalitionsvertrag-bundesdigitalminister...
I am German myself and I get where you're coming from, but there are worlds between German rent prices and American or even London, Amsterdam or Dublin rent prices.
What do you mean by 2BR? 2 Bedroom capable apartments? I have 1BR one living room for 1470 (1670 with heating & co) in Munich.
Germans are smart and capable, but the German lifestyle is not for "super high tech" industry
Being a self-employed is a living hell in Germany, as well as receiving any money outside of employment. Esp. if money are small (but > than hobby money, 500 euro iirc) and don't justify the hurdle of dealing with Finanzamt, tax pre-payment, possible regulations with upfront Formulars etc.
German passionary patriotism has been artificially subverted and shut down, and the nation instead has been flooded with non-Germanic elements, thus completely destroying the very definition of German.
Ask any German on the street, and nobody will be able to answer: What defines being a German, who are the Germans, what is their history, and what awaits German people in the future.
Complete void of any ideology, national idea, any energy that could propel the nation in the great leap forward.
> Ask any German on the street, and nobody will be able to answer: What defines being a German, who are the Germans, what is their history, and what awaits German people in the future.
I don't think so, you will meet plently people that will be able to tell you about Germany's history, or at least recent history. And what defines being German, you might get different answers, but is that so bad, and where wouldn't you? Hasn't multiculturalism just become a big part of Germany's identity, and not destroyed it as you claim? Döner just as the simplest example.
Your post highlights all the problems with modern Germany
... doesn't sound very desirable, with how things by that name have gone historically.
I sincerely wish Germany luck. They'd better do a good job of securing their IP, though...
https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details?pubid=1098...
In 2023...13.5 percent (18.0 million households) were food insecure. Food-insecure households (those with low and very low food security) had difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all their members because of a lack of resources...5.1 percent of U.S. households (6.8 million households) had very low food security...
Coincidentally, the collection of such detailed and useful data is at risk from the indiscriminate USDA firings.
This is not evidence that people are going hungry, though it is clearly designed to give that impression.
Here's collaborating trends for the same calendar year:
https://www.feedingamerica.org/research/charitable-food-assi...
Feeding America estimates more than 50 million people received charitable food assistance sometime in 2023
I'm guessing you'll respond that charities that feed people have a vested interest and are not to be trusted... (yes, I'm aware of cases of charities committing fraud; no there is no evidence that is the norm). Probably again without presenting data to support your assertion that there are no Americans who go hungry.
I'm curious what actually obtainable data you would accept as a counterfactual to your statement/belief?
1. USDA data on food insecurity
2. Food bank usage data
If you wanted to understand the extremes of food insecurity, than data on malnutrition related deaths in the US would also apply:
• Mostafa, N., Sayed, A., Rashad, O. et al. Malnutrition-related mortality trends in older adults in the United States from 1999 to 2020. BMC Med 21, 421 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-023-03143-8
From the paper above -- "Despite some initial decrements in malnutrition mortality among older adults in the U.S., the uptrend from 2013 to 2020 nullified all established progress. The end result is that malnutrition mortality rates represent a historical high...Effective interventions are strongly needed. Such interventions should aim to ensure food security and early detection and remedy of malnutrition among older adults..."
If you wanted to explore malnutrition related deaths for other groups / time periods you could query the CDC Wonder data base using ICD-10 Codes E40 – E46 (as was done in the paper cited above; see also https://www.icd10data.com/ICD10CM/Codes/E00-E89/E40-E46).
• https://wonder.cdc.gov/ -- Search CDC Wonder for underlying cause of death
I did the query for 2023 and found were >22,000 malnutrition related deaths recorded by the CDC.
If this number went down significantly I would see that as evidence of a decrease in malnutrition in the US. If this number was near zero I would accept your assertion that no/few Americans are starving.
Given the preponderance of data, the notion that one could argue with a straight face that food insecurity in the US is of no concern seems shocking to me.
> no Americans, rich or poor, black or white, are starving. Frankly, we could all use a little more starving.
You responding by providing evidence that some people had difficulty, at least once per year, in putting food on the table. This in no way contradicts the original claim, as having difficulty doing a thing is not synonymous with being unable to do a thing.
> Here's collaborating trends for the same calendar year
This shows that people are getting food. As presented, this is not evidence that people are going hungry.
> I'm curious what actually obtainable data you would accept as a counterfactual to your statement/belief?
If you want to contradict the claim that Americans aren't starving, you would want to provide evidence that Americans are starving.
• Mostafa, N., Sayed, A., Rashad, O. et al. Malnutrition-related mortality trends in older adults in the United States from 1999 to 2020. BMC Med 21, 421 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-023-03143-8
In the US, immigrants make a point of showing their patriotism by immersing themselves into American culture. We don't have a similar cultural phenomenon in Germany.
> consider Germany only as a source of welfare to extract and transfer elsewhere
You would be surprised how many natives share this viewpoint. This can only work for so long before something collapses...
(Just for the record I don't vote AfD. I do like being German and I like what little culture we have left. You can be patriotic and at the same time left leaning.)
Some countries are approximately 50% national flag by surface area, fist pumping and chanting the country's name at every opportunity despite being run by people making Nazi salutes, but "it's okay to like your country's culture" is instantly equated with Nazism? Come on man...
Tho when the median voter is 55 and national motto is "that's how it was always done" and "Pensions are secure" - I don't put much hope. I still remember the outcry when the digital health cards were introduced.
Your other points are more or less true, I just like to think that people complain a lot and media obviously makes it worse.
Digital health cards, online tax declaration, etc. These things did happen. People complained, but these decisions were not reverted. That's the most important.
By many things at once: Datenschutz, (over- and premature) regulations, bureaucracy, laws favoring old ways (e.g. broadcasting licenses for streamers), active sabotage from workers who don't want to learn things (and can't be fired) etc.
But all stems from risk averseness and active unwillingness to learn new ways.
As you say, (some) things did happened, but way too slow and way too little. Compared to its peers or especially developing countries German Digitalisierung is a joke, a not so funny one.
In the end Technicolor / Thomson, Exalead, SAP, France Telecom (Orange) got most of the funding if I remember right. Other than a few university, museum digitalisation projects nothing consumer facing ever so the light of day.
>Friend of The Merkler
>Protested nuclear energy
>Invited a million illiterates to an all-inclusive life in Germany, none who ever had an encounter with the technology of literacy
And so forth.
[1] Wikipedian Protester:
Germany wants to preserve Airbus and stay relevant in European space programs, but without cheap energy and raw materials this is a pipe dream. Quantum computing/hydrogen is theoretically promising, but they're already behind China and the US. Trying to catch up to Russia in drones and EW, but without energy independence or microelectronics it won't work.
Without Russian gas or nuclear power, high-tech manufacturing is unprofitable. Germany's best engineers are already in Shanghai and Silicon Valley. Russia/China/the US are sprinting ahead in hypersonics, AI, and 6G, while Germany is just forming a ministry.
Germany's move isn't a breakthrough, it's desperation. They're trying to save face, but they lack energy for advanced tech w/o Russia, have no military shield w/o the US, can’t manufacture at scale w/o China.
Accretive policy is strong there and in their Anglo-Saxon descendants.
Seems to be a truth: inventiveness moving to moribund navel-gazing.
That's the curse in Europe. Every European country has it's own ministry of digital innovation who's role is the grift of allocating taxpayer money to the right politically connected pockets while pretending to do innovation. Case in point, German fiber optic infrastructure is still lightyears behind Romania despite much higher costs. Means, somebody in Germany is making good money form that, even if there's nothing to show for.
Meanwhile the actuality innovative companies in Europe get real VC money from the US, then get incorporated in the US and become American companies, then EU has the audacity to complain about lacking tech sovereignty.
Apartment I stayed in while in Germany had annual Kabelgebühr of 100 EUR. It was not related with the ISP internet subscription of course. Any negotiations or questions were responded with "IT'S KABELGEBÜHR YOU HAVE TO PAY IT".
Funny that outsiders like US and Russia and probably others behave as it is one country :) It is kind of some "body" but not a well functioning one: fusion ? Unser! Spy satelites ? Notre!
So I guess Germany is one of those countries which reorganize their government on a brainstorming board by just throwing up concepts. And then it takes years for all the bureaucracy to move around and get back to work.
> Germany needs a new alignment of defense policy and research policy, but “we do not yet know how to do this,”
I learned in middle school that you were once really good at it. There is also a consensus it got quickly out of control and destroyed Europe.
All of this sound more like an Onion or Babylon Bee piece...
This will never happen. At some point they will notice that fusion is something with "nuclear" and "atoms" and they will immediately jump to "scary", "dangerous" and "verboten".
All gone now.
but also god forbid you arrive to Germany with <C1 German. ABH office is waiting with guns fully loaded
It's like saying a cargo ship can't keep up with a speed boat.
What is the point of the ministry, and why does the current global leader of super-high-tech (USA) not seem to be in need of such?
I think you are a couple of decades late for that claim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothee_B%C3%A4r
Sounds like her only non-political experience is working as a journalist.
It's arguable that the "corrupt" part was scrubbed off Wikipedia. But her credentials to lead a research / technology / aerospace ministry certainly sound underwhelming.
https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2013-04/baer-csu-geh... https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/csu-politikerin-d...
She hired her future husband as an employee until immediately before their wedding. This position was paid by the federal German parliament, i.e. the taxpayer. It's illegal to hire a relative in such a position.
germany's digital infrastructure is a global laughing stock, this doesn't bode well.
The recent rapid improvements even diminished Romania's lead to less than 250%.
Of course this is only up to the Telekom speedtest server, beyond that nearly all of Germany's 50-100Tbps get funneled through 362Gbps of interconnections onto the open internet.
Digital infrastructure was part of traffic ministry.
Her role was coordinating the government's mostly internal digital strategy. Thus reviewing new bills, looking at processes inside the administration etc. most of the work outside the public eye.
Notable recent examples of corruption are the Maskenaffäre [4] or Julia Klöckner and Nestlé ("Julia Klöckner and Nestlé show how the greasy closeness between politics and business can go too far" [5]).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Scheuer: "Scheuer's ministry is said to have broken budgetary and public procurement law when concluding the multi-billion dollar contracts with the operators and "deliberately deceived" the Bundestag about the real costs of the car toll."
[2] Söder (party leader of CSU) said about Scheuer: "I don't know not many ministers that bring so much money to bavaria as Andreas Scheuer" [3]
[3] German: "Bei allem, was der ein oder andere kritisiert an dem Andi Scheuer: Ich kenne wenige Minister, die so viel Geld nach Bayern holen, wie der Andi Scheuer. Auch das muss man einfach mal in der Bilanz ehrlicherweise bitte nach draußen sagen."
[4] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maskenaffäre
5] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/julia-kloeckner-und-nestle-ze...
Your source 3 is not saying what you think it does. State government can apply for federal funding. Söder and his ilk have mastered this. There is nothing corrupt here.
„Source 3“: Well, if you are a minister for infrastructure in germany it is not part of our job description to bring money to bavaria. Maybe my definition of corruption is of but the minister has some saying in how to use its funds and if your home state benefits more than other parts of germany… I would call this a form of corruption
That is an unfortunate case of nepotism that happens in the entire political spectrum. I was especially disappointed of the Greens setting up cozy positions for friends and family at the end of their term. I really thought they'd do better..
> Well, if you are a minister for infrastructure in germany it is not part of our job description to bring money to bavaria
Why not? If you think Bavaria is the largest net benefactor of this measure you might as well do so. It's one out of many possible strategies.
> Maybe my definition of corruption is of
I think it's something else but I can't think of a word.
I must say as a bavarian citizen that this "abuse" has lots of benefits for us. Of course I am aware of my bias here. I can't find an interview but Söder has said that a lot of other states don't even apply to all Fördergelder they could possibly get. That always striked me as odd.