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As a German, I am quite happy about this. What you must know is that German organisations are extremely hierarchical, with little information flowing from front

by l4u532 8y ago

As a German, I am quite happy about this. What you must know is that German organisations are extremely hierarchical, with little information flowing from frontline management to to top management. Hence, change only happens top down and only if the top managers in their ivory towers deem it necessary. But it’s incredibly important that our automakers reinvent themselves. And here we have the necessary angst to drive this long-needed transformation of our automotive sector.

ahartmetz 8y ago
Not all German organizations are like that. The car industry is especially dysfunctional. I've been watching them fail at software for years now. The problem, as far as I can tell, is as follows: top management is able and motivated to increase the size of the money bag. Developers just want to do a good job for a good salary. Middle management can't change the size of the money bag too much, so it just wants to grab as much as possible for itself. How does a middle manager expand their empire? Certainly not by leading a small, effective organization. The head count needs to grow, so the middle manager wants ineffective developers. It only works because no one above knows enough about software to fairly evaluate the work of these petty empire-builders. One time I wanted to gauge how far the car industry has come from realizing the problem to implementing a solution, so I typed something like "automotive software crisis" into Google. Among the first few hits a presentation of a German CS professor stating that there is a crisis... and that the solution is model-driven development. It's the exact shit that they are already doing that is not working. If good software is produced in Germany, it's despite subpar academic CS and dysfunctional large companies. Much of Germany's economy is medium-sized companies - fortunately, I guess. I do expect the German car industry to fix its software but only when it's really suffering financially. Car industry outsiders will be heavily involved in the solution.
- adrianN 8y ago
  Academic CS in Germany is world-class.
  - ahartmetz 8y ago
    Yeah, which areas?
    - ryanlol 8y ago
      The academic side of things? :)
    - skrebbel 8y ago
      "model-driven development"
- timmyla 8y ago
  as someone who worked at a German car company, I agree with this. There's a lot of middle managers who don't really understand what problem needs to be solved first in order to ship high-quality software. There has been a lot of movement internally, though. I sure hope they move fast enough to stay relevant in the next 10 years.
- ivan_gammel 8y ago
  The main reason middle managers hire ineffective developers in Germany and elsewhere is that the job market is in a state of permanent crisis: the demand is so high that now everyone calls "senior" the people who cannot even estimate the performance of an algorithm or didn't bother to learn something new in the last 5 years. This applies both to developers and to managers and is complicated by the fact, that large and medium corporations usually don't speak English (so cannot benefit from European open labor market) and thus cannot easily import talent from abroad. Another part of the problem is that in many industries there's a strong lobby of local companies which like medieval guilds block any new competitors from entering the markets. APIs and open standards still barely exist - you cannot simply plug in your new fancy service into an enterprise environment, but you have to pay plenty of money to some Verband to get some crazy XML specification for file exchange. After all I've seen in IT in Eastern Europe (most of all in Russia) and USA, I'm feeling like I'm still in XX century.
  - ahartmetz 8y ago
    There are quite a few good German developers who know enough about the car industry to stay far away from it because it's so broken. As a lowly developer, you can't fix it - you'll just get chewed up.
    - jeena 8y ago
      I've been working in the car industry for 5 years and the last 2 with a big German car manufacturer which gave us a lot of money to set up something on the side which would work better. Once we showed that we probably can do it (after 1,5 years) they started getting interested in the project and that's where the problems started. Long story short they are forcing us to do things as they always been done even though they asked us to change them in the first place.
      - ahartmetz 8y ago
        That happens all the time. German car companies are buying working companies and messing them up or starting new daughter companies to "do it right this time" but the contagious rot always kills those attempts surprisingly quickly. I guess that is what another poster mentioned as the changes that are currently happening. But it's not helping yet.
- etaerc 8y ago
  > If good software is produced in Germany It is not. I worked in 3 people startups, 15 people web shops, 50 people IoT shops, and very very big enterprise software corps in Germany and I can tell you what you say can be copy&pasted into any of them. The only advantage of smaller companies is that they can't afford to have as much middle management. Therefore the "visionaries" are forced to live closer to reality and work with small teams. But they certainly don't like it and move to your model as soon as possible.
  - mpweiher 8y ago
    I think we actually did a pretty good job at 6wunderkinder with wunderlist.
  - ahartmetz 8y ago
    Well, I know of at least one highly effective development company that twice erred on the side of introducing a new management layer too late because nobody particularly wanted another layer.
- dirtylowprofile 8y ago
  I wonder what’s the majority of the source code in German like? Is it mostly in English or German?
  - ahartmetz 8y ago
    English
  - bunkerbewohner 8y ago
    Based on what I've seen source code is almost exclusively English, apart from a few identifiers here and there that are hard to translate, e.g. legal terms.
  - kitten_mittens_ 8y ago
    European English for code. It's sufficiently different from American that it's sort of got its own rules at this point. It's difficult to understand sometimes. Most docs at my >200 dev shop including contractors are in German though. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-02/the-english-language-no-longer-belongs-to-britain-and-america https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-02/the-en...
  - ben_w 8y ago
    Where I’m at, the source code is English even though I’m the only non-German in the company (and I have been learning German for a while). Documentation is a mix of English and German.
  - tatami 8y ago
    Majority I would suspect in English, but there is plenty of "German" source code, including hilarious mixes of both languages in method names etc.
- _visgean 8y ago
  > subpar academic CS There is a lot of really good CS/math research coming from German uni's, I would not call it subpar.
- Udik 8y ago
  > How does a middle manager expand their empire? Certainly not by leading a small, effective organization. The head count needs to grow, so the middle manager wants ineffective developers. I've seen this in every company I've worked in. Importance of projects is measured in how many people work on them; you'd think that creating efficiencies and managing the work in an extra small team would be valued, instead you fall into complete irrelevance.
_the_inflator 8y ago
Absolutely second that as a German as well. Disruption is desperately needed and I am glad that a 16 year old company kicks the German complacency out of business. Reinvention? What sort of? They don't get software, they don't get new business models. That's why they stick to politics who should save their models - which is protectionism. Germany's car makers were never customer first. What kind of innovation did Germany establish besides ABS? The cars still drive forward, backwards and can turn around - AWESOME! This has been done for almost 100 years. Germany's car makers are great at marketing. "Drive a M5 and feel the power of 500+ horsepower on the Autobahn" - that's exactly why they are struggling with the idea of autonomous driving: how can you reinvent the story from being an Autobahn race car driver to calmness in your car with millions of other people? Same goes for Porsche: "Reinventing the classic" It still has enough HP to accelerate you from 0 to 100 km/h in roughly 4,2 seconds - and then comes Tesla and beats the sh*t out of Porsche without even hard work. Germany's car industry is like the National Rifle Association. They won't change without hard disruption. And in Germany it finally arrived.
- paganel 8y ago
  > What kind of innovation did Germany establish besides ABS? Not sure why you got downvoted, afaik the most important technological breakthroughs when it came to cars in Europe were made by the Italians (Fiat, mostly, but Alfa Romeo too), the French (the Citroen DS is one of the best technological products ever) and the Swedes (Volvo and its emphasis on security). Somehow the Germans navigated the ‘90s and early 2000s a little better, not sure exactly why (maybe because they invested in China earlier?), and that’s why right now they’re seen as the car companies to beat.
  - ahartmetz 8y ago
    They have design and feel figured out. Somehow the rest of the world mostly doesn't produce cars with as nice interior and exterior design or that are as fun to drive.
  - lazyjones 8y ago
    > afaik the most important technological breakthroughs when it came to cars in Europe were made by the Italians Carl Benz - invented and patented the first "motorcar" Gottfried Daimler - also independently built an automobile the same year as Benz. Siegfried Marcus - 131 patents, first petrol-powered vehicle. etc.
PinguTS 8y ago
You never hear such stories about the French car industry. Didn't you? I know engineers how left Opel after the merger with PSA because PSA is that what you describe. At Opel it was much different. It used to be also different at Mercedes. Engineers are leaving right now Mercedes because they "streamline" their engineering. Which basically means cutting cost in terms that engineers who worked for the next generation cars now have to develop as well for the series production. THAT is killing innovation. Because developing for series production means developing with cutting costs in mind, like can we spare this resistor or that memory. Al the engineers I worked with are not working for the series production but always thinking 10 years ahead and planing, developing and testing new ideas. Apple killed its "automotive business" not without a reason. Because automotive is very much different than IT software. Automotive systems are highly connected embedded device. The next BMW 7 series released in 2021 will have 20 different CAN bus based networks. Automotive development means also development with preventing bugs in the first place. Because finding bugs by testing in these highly complex systems is next to impossible. This development style makes development slow. Because it is not the mind set "we can fix that later". Updates are expansive. Previously it meant they need to pay the service stations. Today with OTA it means to pay the telecoms. Automotive development means also thinking about obsolesce. Yes, people get every 2 years a new phone. But what it with old once. An iPhone 4 these days is almost completely unusable. While some people have their cars new every 3 years, the average car usage is 16 years, in the US, IIRC. That means the average car is older than the smartphone as we know it. Automotive development means to develop with predicting the future 15 to 20 years ahead. Parts needs to be available, because people want to have their car serviced. I just want to remind that Teslas with AP1 don't get no more updates. That is breaking his promise that all Teslas, all as in ALL, will improve by OTA. That is how old? I know that other OEM are going the same route. But I don't see this as a disruption or innovation at all. It just means more land fill and is an environmental disaster. BTW: My truck for pleasure is over 44 years old with no electronics at all. My car is a 18 year old Volvo, the first were Volvo introduced CAN and LIN, and I know the engineer who where responsible for that at that time.
- vinay427 8y ago
  > I just want to remind that Teslas with AP1 don't get no more updates. That is breaking his promise that all Teslas, all as in ALL, will improve by OTA. That is how old? This is simply incorrect. Their Autopilot software doesn't really get updated, but the majority of recent feature additions are probably not Autopilot-related. All of these changes are still provided to Teslas from 2012, for instance.
iamctobitch 8y ago
This is what happens when industry is supported by government and whole ecosystem is created around it, this does give competitive advantages but induces complacemenement. Their final resort is politics (protectionism) to preserve their competitive advantage. In Germany, there is no way for an engineer to become very wealthy through entrepreneurship. Even if you bought a house, you can't make much money from it through renting or appreciation. Because whole country is optimized for cheap labor. Okay, labor is not that cheap but upside is rather very limited unlike US or China! You worked hard at university and became engineer? Well someone fucked up and became a highschool teacher yet makes same wage as you. Suck it up and that's what kill motivation of engineers. Blue collar laborers also make same wage. Management always have upper hand and laughs you out of door when you suggest anything. Here you can't even get funded and supported to go against a company and compete against them. It's even worst than US because here companies can bring labor from East Europe to replace you and you won't even get funding to start a new company so game is over. Also, Germany has weak property rights. Housing is kept cheap, to make labor competitive and cheap. So, you will always stay a poor labor in this country Germany. China/US atleast have clear path to mega wealth.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  >In Germany, there is no way for an engineer to become very wealthy through entrepreneurship. Yet Germany is often held up as the example of valuing engineers and scientists. Isn't the current chancellor a Scientist. >Even if you bought a house, you can't make much money from it through renting or appreciation. That is a good thing. >Because whole country is optimize for cheap labor. Which is why the country is in such a strong position within Europe now, IIRC they are the only country in the EU with a positive balance of trade with China. >You worked hard at university and became engineer? Well someone fucked up and become highschool teacher yet makes same wage as you. Suck it up and that's what kill motivation of engineers. You might well look down on teachers but education is far more important than most of the crappy startups people here are working on.
  - iamctobitch2 8y ago
    >Which is why the country is in such a strong position within Europe now, IIRC they are the only country in the EU with a positive balance of trade with China. Yes they are only because of EU. They convinced other countries to join EU and massively profited off it, while some other EU countries have been destroyed by wage stagnation and brain drain. Go to any German hospital you'll see many nurses/doctors from East Europe. Even key infrastructure is maintained by East Europeans. This country is piggybacking on top of weak EU countries. It doesn't surprise me that they do better by skimming off the top from the neighbors. Being bad and still being ahead only means that either others are more bad or you are playing dirty. >You might well look down on teachers but education is far more important than most of the crappy startups people here are working on. I don't disagree but education in Germany isn't doing bad! It's software which is doing bad, so we must incentive it and make it better.

by l4u532 8y ago

ahartmetz 8y ago

Not all German organizations are like that. The car industry is especially dysfunctional. I've been watching them fail at software for years now. The problem, as far as I can tell, is as follows: top management is able and motivated to increase the size of the money bag. Developers just want to do a good job for a good salary. Middle management can't change the size of the money bag too much, so it just wants to grab as much as possible for itself. How does a middle manager expand their empire? Certainly not by leading a small, effective organization. The head count needs to grow, so the middle manager wants ineffective developers. It only works because no one above knows enough about software to fairly evaluate the work of these petty empire-builders. One time I wanted to gauge how far the car industry has come from realizing the problem to implementing a solution, so I typed something like "automotive software crisis" into Google. Among the first few hits a presentation of a German CS professor stating that there is a crisis... and that the solution is model-driven development. It's the exact shit that they are already doing that is not working. If good software is produced in Germany, it's despite subpar academic CS and dysfunctional large companies. Much of Germany's economy is medium-sized companies - fortunately, I guess. I do expect the German car industry to fix its software but only when it's really suffering financially. Car industry outsiders will be heavily involved in the solution.

adrianN 8y ago
Academic CS in Germany is world-class.
- ahartmetz 8y ago
  Yeah, which areas?
  - ryanlol 8y ago
    The academic side of things? :)
  - skrebbel 8y ago
    "model-driven development"
timmyla 8y ago
as someone who worked at a German car company, I agree with this. There's a lot of middle managers who don't really understand what problem needs to be solved first in order to ship high-quality software. There has been a lot of movement internally, though. I sure hope they move fast enough to stay relevant in the next 10 years.
ivan_gammel 8y ago
The main reason middle managers hire ineffective developers in Germany and elsewhere is that the job market is in a state of permanent crisis: the demand is so high that now everyone calls "senior" the people who cannot even estimate the performance of an algorithm or didn't bother to learn something new in the last 5 years. This applies both to developers and to managers and is complicated by the fact, that large and medium corporations usually don't speak English (so cannot benefit from European open labor market) and thus cannot easily import talent from abroad. Another part of the problem is that in many industries there's a strong lobby of local companies which like medieval guilds block any new competitors from entering the markets. APIs and open standards still barely exist - you cannot simply plug in your new fancy service into an enterprise environment, but you have to pay plenty of money to some Verband to get some crazy XML specification for file exchange. After all I've seen in IT in Eastern Europe (most of all in Russia) and USA, I'm feeling like I'm still in XX century.
- ahartmetz 8y ago
  There are quite a few good German developers who know enough about the car industry to stay far away from it because it's so broken. As a lowly developer, you can't fix it - you'll just get chewed up.
  - jeena 8y ago
    I've been working in the car industry for 5 years and the last 2 with a big German car manufacturer which gave us a lot of money to set up something on the side which would work better. Once we showed that we probably can do it (after 1,5 years) they started getting interested in the project and that's where the problems started. Long story short they are forcing us to do things as they always been done even though they asked us to change them in the first place.
    - ahartmetz 8y ago
      That happens all the time. German car companies are buying working companies and messing them up or starting new daughter companies to "do it right this time" but the contagious rot always kills those attempts surprisingly quickly. I guess that is what another poster mentioned as the changes that are currently happening. But it's not helping yet.
etaerc 8y ago
> If good software is produced in Germany It is not. I worked in 3 people startups, 15 people web shops, 50 people IoT shops, and very very big enterprise software corps in Germany and I can tell you what you say can be copy&pasted into any of them. The only advantage of smaller companies is that they can't afford to have as much middle management. Therefore the "visionaries" are forced to live closer to reality and work with small teams. But they certainly don't like it and move to your model as soon as possible.
- mpweiher 8y ago
  I think we actually did a pretty good job at 6wunderkinder with wunderlist.
- ahartmetz 8y ago
  Well, I know of at least one highly effective development company that twice erred on the side of introducing a new management layer too late because nobody particularly wanted another layer.
dirtylowprofile 8y ago
I wonder what’s the majority of the source code in German like? Is it mostly in English or German?
- ahartmetz 8y ago
  English
- bunkerbewohner 8y ago
  Based on what I've seen source code is almost exclusively English, apart from a few identifiers here and there that are hard to translate, e.g. legal terms.
- kitten_mittens_ 8y ago
  European English for code. It's sufficiently different from American that it's sort of got its own rules at this point. It's difficult to understand sometimes. Most docs at my >200 dev shop including contractors are in German though. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-02/the-english-language-no-longer-belongs-to-britain-and-america https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-02/the-en...
- ben_w 8y ago
  Where I’m at, the source code is English even though I’m the only non-German in the company (and I have been learning German for a while). Documentation is a mix of English and German.
- tatami 8y ago
  Majority I would suspect in English, but there is plenty of "German" source code, including hilarious mixes of both languages in method names etc.
_visgean 8y ago
> subpar academic CS There is a lot of really good CS/math research coming from German uni's, I would not call it subpar.
Udik 8y ago
> How does a middle manager expand their empire? Certainly not by leading a small, effective organization. The head count needs to grow, so the middle manager wants ineffective developers. I've seen this in every company I've worked in. Importance of projects is measured in how many people work on them; you'd think that creating efficiencies and managing the work in an extra small team would be valued, instead you fall into complete irrelevance.

_the_inflator 8y ago

Absolutely second that as a German as well. Disruption is desperately needed and I am glad that a 16 year old company kicks the German complacency out of business. Reinvention? What sort of? They don't get software, they don't get new business models. That's why they stick to politics who should save their models - which is protectionism. Germany's car makers were never customer first. What kind of innovation did Germany establish besides ABS? The cars still drive forward, backwards and can turn around - AWESOME! This has been done for almost 100 years. Germany's car makers are great at marketing. "Drive a M5 and feel the power of 500+ horsepower on the Autobahn" - that's exactly why they are struggling with the idea of autonomous driving: how can you reinvent the story from being an Autobahn race car driver to calmness in your car with millions of other people? Same goes for Porsche: "Reinventing the classic" It still has enough HP to accelerate you from 0 to 100 km/h in roughly 4,2 seconds - and then comes Tesla and beats the sh*t out of Porsche without even hard work. Germany's car industry is like the National Rifle Association. They won't change without hard disruption. And in Germany it finally arrived.

paganel 8y ago
> What kind of innovation did Germany establish besides ABS? Not sure why you got downvoted, afaik the most important technological breakthroughs when it came to cars in Europe were made by the Italians (Fiat, mostly, but Alfa Romeo too), the French (the Citroen DS is one of the best technological products ever) and the Swedes (Volvo and its emphasis on security). Somehow the Germans navigated the ‘90s and early 2000s a little better, not sure exactly why (maybe because they invested in China earlier?), and that’s why right now they’re seen as the car companies to beat.
- ahartmetz 8y ago
  They have design and feel figured out. Somehow the rest of the world mostly doesn't produce cars with as nice interior and exterior design or that are as fun to drive.
- lazyjones 8y ago
  > afaik the most important technological breakthroughs when it came to cars in Europe were made by the Italians Carl Benz - invented and patented the first "motorcar" Gottfried Daimler - also independently built an automobile the same year as Benz. Siegfried Marcus - 131 patents, first petrol-powered vehicle. etc.

PinguTS 8y ago

You never hear such stories about the French car industry. Didn't you? I know engineers how left Opel after the merger with PSA because PSA is that what you describe. At Opel it was much different. It used to be also different at Mercedes. Engineers are leaving right now Mercedes because they "streamline" their engineering. Which basically means cutting cost in terms that engineers who worked for the next generation cars now have to develop as well for the series production. THAT is killing innovation. Because developing for series production means developing with cutting costs in mind, like can we spare this resistor or that memory. Al the engineers I worked with are not working for the series production but always thinking 10 years ahead and planing, developing and testing new ideas. Apple killed its "automotive business" not without a reason. Because automotive is very much different than IT software. Automotive systems are highly connected embedded device. The next BMW 7 series released in 2021 will have 20 different CAN bus based networks. Automotive development means also development with preventing bugs in the first place. Because finding bugs by testing in these highly complex systems is next to impossible. This development style makes development slow. Because it is not the mind set "we can fix that later". Updates are expansive. Previously it meant they need to pay the service stations. Today with OTA it means to pay the telecoms. Automotive development means also thinking about obsolesce. Yes, people get every 2 years a new phone. But what it with old once. An iPhone 4 these days is almost completely unusable. While some people have their cars new every 3 years, the average car usage is 16 years, in the US, IIRC. That means the average car is older than the smartphone as we know it. Automotive development means to develop with predicting the future 15 to 20 years ahead. Parts needs to be available, because people want to have their car serviced. I just want to remind that Teslas with AP1 don't get no more updates. That is breaking his promise that all Teslas, all as in ALL, will improve by OTA. That is how old? I know that other OEM are going the same route. But I don't see this as a disruption or innovation at all. It just means more land fill and is an environmental disaster. BTW: My truck for pleasure is over 44 years old with no electronics at all. My car is a 18 year old Volvo, the first were Volvo introduced CAN and LIN, and I know the engineer who where responsible for that at that time.

vinay427 8y ago
> I just want to remind that Teslas with AP1 don't get no more updates. That is breaking his promise that all Teslas, all as in ALL, will improve by OTA. That is how old? This is simply incorrect. Their Autopilot software doesn't really get updated, but the majority of recent feature additions are probably not Autopilot-related. All of these changes are still provided to Teslas from 2012, for instance.

iamctobitch 8y ago

This is what happens when industry is supported by government and whole ecosystem is created around it, this does give competitive advantages but induces complacemenement. Their final resort is politics (protectionism) to preserve their competitive advantage. In Germany, there is no way for an engineer to become very wealthy through entrepreneurship. Even if you bought a house, you can't make much money from it through renting or appreciation. Because whole country is optimized for cheap labor. Okay, labor is not that cheap but upside is rather very limited unlike US or China! You worked hard at university and became engineer? Well someone fucked up and became a highschool teacher yet makes same wage as you. Suck it up and that's what kill motivation of engineers. Blue collar laborers also make same wage. Management always have upper hand and laughs you out of door when you suggest anything. Here you can't even get funded and supported to go against a company and compete against them. It's even worst than US because here companies can bring labor from East Europe to replace you and you won't even get funding to start a new company so game is over. Also, Germany has weak property rights. Housing is kept cheap, to make labor competitive and cheap. So, you will always stay a poor labor in this country Germany. China/US atleast have clear path to mega wealth.

tonyedgecombe 8y ago
>In Germany, there is no way for an engineer to become very wealthy through entrepreneurship. Yet Germany is often held up as the example of valuing engineers and scientists. Isn't the current chancellor a Scientist. >Even if you bought a house, you can't make much money from it through renting or appreciation. That is a good thing. >Because whole country is optimize for cheap labor. Which is why the country is in such a strong position within Europe now, IIRC they are the only country in the EU with a positive balance of trade with China. >You worked hard at university and became engineer? Well someone fucked up and become highschool teacher yet makes same wage as you. Suck it up and that's what kill motivation of engineers. You might well look down on teachers but education is far more important than most of the crappy startups people here are working on.
- iamctobitch2 8y ago
  >Which is why the country is in such a strong position within Europe now, IIRC they are the only country in the EU with a positive balance of trade with China. Yes they are only because of EU. They convinced other countries to join EU and massively profited off it, while some other EU countries have been destroyed by wage stagnation and brain drain. Go to any German hospital you'll see many nurses/doctors from East Europe. Even key infrastructure is maintained by East Europeans. This country is piggybacking on top of weak EU countries. It doesn't surprise me that they do better by skimming off the top from the neighbors. Being bad and still being ahead only means that either others are more bad or you are playing dirty. >You might well look down on teachers but education is far more important than most of the crappy startups people here are working on. I don't disagree but education in Germany isn't doing bad! It's software which is doing bad, so we must incentive it and make it better.