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As of today we still use shared network drives for everything in major German company. We don’t use slack/irc/Skype/zoom/whatever. Phone calls and conferences(!
by lnsru 7y ago
As of today we still use shared network drives for everything in major German company. We don’t use slack/irc/Skype/zoom/whatever. Phone calls and conferences(!) from the middle of open office is normal. Asana/Trello/Jira are not known at all. GitHub is paid for, but never used. I am single weirdo in multi department project using github ticket system. The code with prefix is copied for colleagues to project’s shared folder. PostIt tickets on the table works good enough for others. Talking about bugs is impossible since nobody knows what’s fixed and what’s not, the bugs have date in the best case. Everything else is done in Excel sheets using in house written scripts. They usually end in a mess since some people use German regional settings and other English ones. That’s state-of-art situation in very rich and big company today. I don’t see any possible changes in future. Old boy club fights all the time against proposed improvements. You can forgot topics like information security, phishing, being silent about work topics outside the office. Hackers are known from the American movies only.
On the other hand I also worked in opposite unhealthy paranoid environment. I was hired to design Ethernet camera, but Wireshark usage in their office was prohibited. Packet analysis was seen as the worst thing in the company. I quit after few months trying to explain, that I need to analyze the packets during design phase. I think, it’s very normal, that other countries abuse illiteracy of German industry.
- ChuckNorris89 7y agoGermany's tech illiteracy is a self-inflicted consequence of its pitiful salaries in this field, treating IT like a cost center that has to be outsourced to wherever is cheaper and companies' tradition of rewarding management incompetence over technical competence. Consequently, Germany's most brilliant tech minds leave for The Valley, Zurich or London. You reap what you sow.
- mschuster91 7y ago> treating IT like a cost center that has to be outsourced to wherever is cheaper As if outsourcing wasn't a common trend across Western companies "thanks" to globalization and the utter dominance of US-american neoliberalism. > and companies' tradition of rewarding management incompetence over technical competence Again, quite common - the "old" Soziale Marktwirtschaft moguls with decades-long visions would not let today's next-quarter-only shit fly for long. > Consequently, Germany's most brilliant tech minds leave for The Valley, Zurich or London. Care to have a source for SV and London? People avoid SV/USA due to the current President and London due to the Brexit uncertainity - in fact, whoever can flees from the UK before Johnson drives everything into the ground. Only correct point is Switzerland but that's not surprising since their wages run way, way higher than Germanys across the board...
- mbeex 7y ago> People avoid SV/USA due to the current President _some_ people do. Others allow themselves different opinions to this president and even to their prospects in SV > and London due to the Brexit uncertainity True > before Johnson drives everything into the ground ... but also here there are different opinions concerning the nature of this uncertainty
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y agoAaaand some people care more about their life than they do their country's politics, thankfully. IMO, politics and stuff is necessary, but I really wish we could argue /debate respectfully without the damn flame wars everywhere of late. It seriously puts me off.
- mschuster91 7y agoThe point is that the current Trump administration has a massive problem with immigration - that may or may not have consequences if you want to emigrate to the US. Or Brexit - if Johnson really delivers a no deal Brexit then UK economy is getting fucked over hard plus the right of free movement for EU citizens vanishes so you can get deported overnight. Politics at this scale are life changing matters, and unfortunately with both the US and the UK governments it is clear that they are not run by competent people with a plan but by people who literally don't have any fixed opinion except nationalism - and that means that, as an immigrant, you're rock bottom of the ladder.
- mbeex 7y agoYou are certainly entitled to your opinion, but other people may make a difference in what "is clear" to them.
- est31 7y agoI'm a German soon to be CS graduate and right now my favourites are SV and London. I'll try to get into a company that can sponsor L1 visa for SV first and then I'll try London. The German job market is precisely as described by GP: you are competing all the time with remote people in countries with much smaller cost of living and the wages are super low compared to aforementioned places. Germany has great schools, and medical system and I think when/if I want to raise a family I'll come back. But until then I want to make money and you do this while it's easy to move around. You can say this is a cultural problem but I think the problem is different: there is just no big software industry in Germany. It's mostly SAP salespeople, development of various custom ISV software and a small startup scene in Berlin. Most German companies don't need good software for the stuff they are doing.
- adrianN 7y agoI don't think that's the case. I believe the problem is that large German companies tend to be hardware companies. They're used to development cycles that take years and extremely conservative in adopting new methods. Management and company culture is not used to dealing with fast changing development methods (where fast is anything that changes more often than once a decade). Rigid processes for compliance with external regulations over time where adopted for internal rules as well, making any change a bureaucratic nightmare. Salary for developers really isn't that much of an issue. In Berlin for example a developer gets two or three times the median salary easily. That's enough for attracting people who are talented enough to choose, e.g. git and JIRA over whatever crusty system of shared folders and zip files or IBM crap you'd see for projects in many companies.
- kriro 7y agoPretty much agree with this sentiment regarding hardware/culture. Also the salaries are acceptable (imo) compared to fairly high paying US jobs if you compare real working hours (vacation time, real 40h workweeks etc.). With a family there's even more benefits. Cost of living also tends to be fairly low (with a high quality of life) compared to higher paying places.
- TulliusCicero 7y agoHigh paying American bigcorps mostly have perfectly fine work life balance. Getting double the vacation time (6 weeks instead of 3) when I moved from the US to Germany was very nice, but going back I'll have 5 weeks, which isn't too bad.
- oblio 7y ago> Getting double the vacation time (6 weeks instead of 3) when I moved from the US to Germany was very nice, but going back I'll have 5 weeks, which isn't too bad. I keep hearing this. Yes, you will get 5 weeks. But what about your wife, your uncle, your friends? In Germany they're all guaranteed to have the same number of days off, access to healthcare, etc. When you have kids you have a bunch of weeks/months off before the child is born and more after. In the US, as long as you're young, healthy, rich and selfish, life is grand :D
- DangerousPie 7y agoBased on what I have heard from friends in London and Germany salaries are actually a lot better in Germany. Especially once you account for cost of living.
- kayoone 7y agoThis. Salaries of 70-90k EUR for Senior devs in Berlin are absolutely achievable and combined with the quite low cost of living in Berlin you probably have more fun money than anywhere in Europe as a developer.
- tpush 7y agoBut not nearly as much as you'd have in the US, probably.
- ionised 7y agoThe US has its own downsides though. It's all about what trade-offs you're willing to make, and raw salary is not the only factor.
- adrianN 7y agoRents are a lot cheaper in Berlin. You don't need a car either. It's also a nicer city in general, I feel a lot safer in Berlin than in San Francisco.
- TulliusCicero 7y agoGerman cities themselves are definitely much nicer than American cities. In fact, "much nicer" is an understatement, American cities usually feel like they were designed by people who hate cities and want everyone in them to suffer. That said, US lifestyle/culture has its own set of advantages compared to Germany. German culture is surprisingly backwards for consumer software/internet stuff, for example.
- colinmhayes 7y ago
- mehdix 7y ago> companies' tradition of rewarding management incompetence over technical competence I witnessed this and moved out of the large rich corporate to a small startup to keep my sanity.
- madez 7y agoCare to share your experience?
- southerndrift 7y agoTo add to this: The CDU (conservative party) turned back the decision to role out a fiber network across Germany that would have been constructed from the 80ies until the millenium [1]. If you actively burn your fields, then there is nothing to reap. [1] https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Missing-Link-Der-Kampf-um-die-Glasfaser-oder-Der-verpasste-Breitbandausbau-in-Deutschland-3952581.html https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Missing-Link-Der-Kam...
- robocat 7y agoI really don't get the argument about fibre to the home being good for business. For working from home, VDSL is pretty much good enough for most working needs (from what I have seen). Fibre really shines for the consumer - especially video. We have fibre to the home in New Zealand, and it doesn't make us an IT nation, or meet any of the gushing political waffle about our IT future. It suspect the costs have a reasonable timeframe for payback as a tax payer: the government "invested" about 500€ per household to cover 80% of the population (1000€ if only 40% of households use it). I would be interested to see numbers to justify it, but is smells ok on the surface.
- Faark 7y agoI tend to agree and german political discourse about network development seems to generally be focused on broadband for rural areas with shitty if any internet available right now. Thus it's probably more addressing class divide than maximizing overall GDP or something like that.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- maze-le 7y ago>> Packet analysis was seen as the worst thing in the company Wow, that is just insane... "We want you to put a nail in that board but, by god do not even think of using a hammer". That must be the worst case of "security" by obscurity I have ever heard. Was this one of the bigger companies or a smaller firm? I wonder what kind of decision making process leads to such policies.
- lnsru 7y agoA big company doing mainly nice white fridges and yellow construction machinery. But they also do parts for planes. After quitting I heard, they were having some military project and had strict rules for it... Same building, same strict rules for everybody.
- C1sc0cat 7y agoIf its the same building its not that secure I went for a job at hauntings (aerospace and weapons) years ago. I wasn't even allowed inside the main plant for the interview - they had a room attached to the gate house they used.
- iserlohnmage 7y agoI did internships at some top companies in the automotive industry. I can only confirm that.
- kriro 7y agoI think there's a pretty big gap between "software first" companies and engineering driven ones (car companies, "Maschinenbau" etc.). Sometimes the cultural gap is pretty shocking to me. I made a career decision to avoid engineering driven companies for software related jobs because the situations are usually similar to your scenario.
- paganel 7y agoThe state of the German IT industry outside of a few select places (Berlin, mostly) is what makes me very pessimistic about the future of its car industry. They (meaning the big 3: VW, BMW and Mercedes) apparently still think that building the best engines/transmissions and being the best at putting them all together is all it takes in order to make a modern car, unfortunately I think EVs will be more about software and the way said software can best manage the car's power resources. From far away Tesla looks like it's doing quite a nice job with its EV software, the Germans, not so much. If it matters I've never worked in Germany but as an IT person/programmer living in Europe I've followed the German IT industry pretty constantly as Germany is one of the best countries in terms of quality of life (I know it's not perfect, but it sure beats my Eastern European country). Unfortunately for me its backwards IT industry (again, as seen from the outside) keeps me away from it.
- fibers 7y agoThis explains why one of the major tier 1 suppliers has an absolutely horrendous workflow in processing financial data. We do a lot of business with them and when processing invoices sent to them, almost every division outside of Germany accepts invoices by email, but for one of the central German plants, they only accept invoices by mail to a foreign PO Box, so we're effectively giving a discount due to international shipping per each shipment/invoice can get high. As far as I can tell this seems more like an IT issue rather than a financial one (very large firms are geniuses in pushing out which vendors to pay, but if this was a universal case then every international plant would only accept invoices by mail)
- odiroot 7y ago> The state of the German IT industry outside of a few select places (Berlin, mostly) If Berlin IT industry is a golden standard I'm really not very hopeful for Germany.
- ulfw 7y agoIt is. And yes, there is no reason to be hopeful.
- sveme 7y agoIn my major German company, mostly living off hardware, we seem to be at least living with a decent stack (though mostly using the MS copycats of Slack, Jira and Github). Interesting that it seems to be different at other companies. However, describing the automotive companies of being unaware of the need for more software devs is simply false - living in Munich, all the companies are doing is investing in software devs (car media, autonomous driving, electric cars, digital business models, apps, car sharing,...)
- ahartmetz 7y agoGerman car companies have absolutely recognized their problem with software several years ago (from what I can see 5-10 years ago), but they are still varying levels of bad at implementing the solution. One of the things they are doing is starting daughter companies that only do software... but still get infected by the awful development and management culture of the parent.
- rollulus 7y agoThat's not just in Germany. The €3bn Dutch energy company I've worked for was glued together with a shared network drive. It was effectively their poor man's event bus. Pure anarchy, a house of cards of excel sheets and legacy software writing to and consuming from it. Controlling serious infrastructure like the major power plants of the 18th largest economy of the world in 2012 [1]. The result of IT managers who failed to see how the world was changing and came and go, to do things like "agile transformations" instead. I've learned valuable but painful lessons there. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Netherlands
- stefan_ 7y agoThis is a recurring flawed observation when young grads enter industry and expect continuous integration, test-driven development and $buzzword framework. What you describe is simply the reality in a vast majority of companies, Germany or elsewhere.
- noir_lord 7y agoEngland checking in, that all sounds strangely familiar even down to the network shares. Honestly security at this point is a myth, we can't close the door after the horse bolted as the barn is currently on fire and the horse has been gone so long it's settled down and raised a family.
- WouterZ 7y agoThanks for checking in England
- L_226 7y agoWe're hiring for software at Stenon, we make a portable soil analysis device for real time agricultural nutrient analysis [0][1]. Based in Potsdam, Brandenburg (30 minutes on the train from Berlin), and yes, we use git :) [0] - https://stenon.io https://stenon.io [1] - https://stenon.io/en/career/ https://stenon.io/en/career/
- bigred100 7y agoAside from localization issues this was how it worked at a very large tech (not software) US company I worked at