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can you explain a bit more about "German conservative company structures" for us non-Germans?

by pca2 7y ago

juangacovas 7y ago
Here in Mallorca island some call germans "cap quadrats" (being "square heads") for a reason. I'm sure they also call us names...
mr_overalls 7y ago
In a nutshell: Germans seem to love bureaucracy, process, and red tape. https://www.dw.com/en/germans-and-bureaucracy/a-16446787 https://www.dw.com/en/germans-and-bureaucracy/a-16446787
- jacobolus 7y ago
  There is a trade-off. German society (compared to some others) seems to do much more enforcement of industry-wide and society-wide standardization (e.g. of measurement systems, part compatibility, common procedures, ...), with an expectation that everyone should “follow the rules”. This has the advantage of increasing interoperability and compatibility and making many things more predictable and easier to assess/audit, at the expense of sometimes fixing poor choices and forcing them into contexts where they should be discarded. * * * As one example, most of the design features of computer keyboards sold worldwide from the 1980s–1990s were forced to conform to a (not especially well considered, in my opinion) German standard, which was adopted by IBM and then copied by everyone else, and later became the basis of an ISO standard. Beige or gray color with matte surface texture and dark labels (no colors allowed), cylindrical keytops with primary symbols in one corner to make room for standard German labels, low keyboard height (which did not fit many of the keyswitches from the 1970s), a shape precisely accommodating the standard German key layout, ... At some point companies started ignoring this standard (e.g. producing black keyboards), and I don’t think there was ever enforcement. But we are still stuck with many of those design choices now, a dramatic difference from the extreme diversity of designs from the 1960s and 1970s. Arguably many of the keyboards of the 1970s were better than almost anything produced at mass scale since.
close04 7y ago
It's basically procedural rigidity. Everything is formalized and has to work in a specific way. This may be an asset sometimes when reproducibility or accountability are key. But the crippling lack of flexibility is a serious downside many other times.

can you explain a bit more about "German conservative company structures" for us non-Germans?

by pca2 7y ago

can you explain a bit more about "German conservative company structures" for us non-Germans?

Here in Mallorca island some call germans "cap quadrats" (being "square heads") for a reason. I'm sure they also call us names...

mr_overalls 7y ago

In a nutshell: Germans seem to love bureaucracy, process, and red tape. https://www.dw.com/en/germans-and-bureaucracy/a-16446787 https://www.dw.com/en/germans-and-bureaucracy/a-16446787

jacobolus 7y ago
There is a trade-off. German society (compared to some others) seems to do much more enforcement of industry-wide and society-wide standardization (e.g. of measurement systems, part compatibility, common procedures, ...), with an expectation that everyone should “follow the rules”. This has the advantage of increasing interoperability and compatibility and making many things more predictable and easier to assess/audit, at the expense of sometimes fixing poor choices and forcing them into contexts where they should be discarded. * * * As one example, most of the design features of computer keyboards sold worldwide from the 1980s–1990s were forced to conform to a (not especially well considered, in my opinion) German standard, which was adopted by IBM and then copied by everyone else, and later became the basis of an ISO standard. Beige or gray color with matte surface texture and dark labels (no colors allowed), cylindrical keytops with primary symbols in one corner to make room for standard German labels, low keyboard height (which did not fit many of the keyswitches from the 1970s), a shape precisely accommodating the standard German key layout, ... At some point companies started ignoring this standard (e.g. producing black keyboards), and I don’t think there was ever enforcement. But we are still stuck with many of those design choices now, a dramatic difference from the extreme diversity of designs from the 1960s and 1970s. Arguably many of the keyboards of the 1970s were better than almost anything produced at mass scale since.

close04 7y ago

It's basically procedural rigidity. Everything is formalized and has to work in a specific way. This may be an asset sometimes when reproducibility or accountability are key. But the crippling lack of flexibility is a serious downside many other times.