9 ms·

I think the two first points are more specific to Germany than to the old world as a whole. Up here in Scandinavia, we often laugh at how much Germans interact

by gspr 6y ago

I think the two first points are more specific to Germany than to the old world as a whole. Up here in Scandinavia, we often laugh at how much Germans interact with humans, send letters and faxes, and make phonecalls in their business lives. They are woefully far behind. From what I understand the same is true for the south. While I agree with the basic premise of the last point too I think you maybe underestimate the value of quality of life over salary for many of those people.

heipei 6y ago
You're right, and I'm glad I started by saying that I'm German because lots of smaller European countries run circles around us in terms of tech adoption. I don't underestimate the value of quality of life, and I don't blame anyone who knowingly works for a stable, "boring", old-school German company which has been the world-leader in its niche for the past 100 years. But I think many people here are not aware that there even is a radically different approach to building up a business (the US/VC/growth model), and that this might be the only model to create modern tech companies to rival the US players. You won't compete with AWS by creating a family-owned business over a few decades where your primary objective is to provide stable and fair employment to people, often for their entire working lives. I'm not saying either one is better, just that I think that's the reality.
- davedx 6y ago
  Yeah in the Netherlands here, and I’ve spent some time recently integrating a German fintech vendor. The cross of new and modern and old beurocratic way of doing things has been almost dystopian and really slowed everything down. Contrast to similar vendors in the UK is quite something.
  - dukeyukey 6y ago
    Can you go into more details on this? I've only worked closely with UK/USA companies and I'm really interested how they compare to German/French ways of doing things. Does the Netherlands more closely align to the Uk/USA on this?
    - j4yav 6y ago
      In my experience the Netherlands is quite a bit like the US. Not as much VC available, but businesses tend to be pretty agile and willing to pivot to get results. All normal day to day government interaction is digital and works well. ING is a good example of a very big Dutch company that seems to do pretty well with innovation.
    - davedx 6y ago
      Germans have a lot of legal requirements, red tape, old ways of doing things. Netherlands and UK are more streamlined, more parts of govt and daily life are digital, bank systems are more modern.
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    When Europe does do fintech it’s just really sleazy and exploitative, like Revolut, so better off without. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23416169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23416169
- joelbluminator 6y ago
  There's a lot of criticism of the US/VC model, sure it brought tremendous success stories but it's not clear if the model actually works.
  - bergstromm466 6y ago
    According to some: "It works great!" Thanks to Intellectual-Property-Monopoly Valley the US government has access to all computers all over the world (Intel ME etc.), as well as backdoor access into Google, Facebook etc. [1] [2] [3]. And Palantir works to 'support Homeland security'. [1] https://books.google.nl/books?id=9aamDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT142&dq=%E2%80%9CIt%E2%80%99s+not+just+the+Internet%E2%80%99s+infrastructure+that+I%E2%80%99m%22 https://books.google.nl/books?id=9aamDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT142&dq=%E... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/11/crypto-ag-cia-bnd-germany-intelligence-report https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/11/crypto-ag-ci...
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    Ye I’m not a fan. All it does is entrench existing inequality. A few new millionaires are minted but I’m interested in solutions that provide an economic floor for everyone so we can all bootstrap if we want to instead.
    - Nasrudith 6y ago
      The distribution is a result of VC being a lotto that pays out well enough that not only is it not a bad idea to play it in terms of return on investment. Unfortunately it takes a lot of money to "buy every ticket". Which means to "win" for a VC they need to win big enough to outweigh their massive pile of failures. Except instead of a lotto board paying out it is growth of a successful company. The second desire? Prepare for disappointment as it isn't a goal. A goal implies a workable path even if it is far fetched like "try to research a way to become immortal". Providing an economic floor is not only not a strategy for advancement (let alone a workable one) it would fail even if you had a magical no knowledge or possession prerequisite requirement provider of infinite "basics" to be unscarce like air or file bit combinations. Economics deal with the scarce - while rendering things irrelevant would be good a floor implies an actual use to build upon into the scarce.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  >family-owned business where your primary objective is to provide stable and fair employment to people, often for their entire working lives Maybe that was the case in the '50s to '80s but I recently worked at two small family owned German companies that were leaders in their niche and their primary objective was to make their owners rich, not their employees happy(Kununu employee reviews reflected that). After that, I learned my lesson and moved to $BIG_CORP where at least I know it's all about the profits and they don't pretend to be your family as an excuse to pay you peanuts.
fauigerzigerk 6y ago
It's not just Germany though. The UK is absolutely obsessed with making phone calls. Lots and lots of completely useless phone calls. Most of them could easily be replaced by an online booking system. Others serve no purpose at all, because all that's required is for them to take some action. Same with US corporations. I recently tried to sign up for Microsoft's partner network because that's required for an Office 365 integration I was interested in. But I wasn't able to complete their byzantine signup process because there's a bug in the user interface that prevents me from confirming the tax status of my company. It's a simple bug, completely unrelated to the specifics of our company. I wrote to them asking them to fix the bug so I can proceed. Predictably, they want to talk on the phone. They left some unintelligible message on my voicemail. Then they sent me an email saying they needed additional information from me without saying what that information was. They just want me to reply to arrange a time for a phone call. I lost interest.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  Believe me, the UK is ages ahead of Germany in terms of digitization.
  - KineticLensman 6y ago
    Can't comment on the UK / Germany comparison directly, but I still continue to be pleasingly surprised by the quality of access to functions provided by gov.uk. E.g. I recently renewed my passport wholly online, registered my car, checked that the Govt had a record of my car's MOT (roadworthyness) certificate, etc.
    - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
      I agree, gov.uk works really well.
    - _Wintermute 6y ago
      I never really appreciated gov.uk until I moved to France. Here nothing is online, you need to take days off work to stand in line and collect paperwork.
f6v 6y ago
Milage varies in Europe. In Germany, opening a bank account "over internet" means sending paper letters back and forth, while in Belgium I didn't have to sign or send anything by post.
- 411111111111111 6y ago
  That depends on the bank. Some allow you to sign the papers online and only require you to authenticate yourself to make the contract binding. This authentication can be done by letter as you said, it in person in the post office or with a video call in which you show your Ausweis. Your bank just might not support these options, but some do.
  - sandravlado 6y ago
    Also, it depends on country. When I was opening a bank account in Czech Republic, they required a passport and that's it. In Ireland though, you need to wait until you get registered for taxes, then you need to show the proof that you work, then an accommodation contract in order to open a bank account. I spent a month without a bank account.
- LeanderK 6y ago
  I recently opened a bank account on a major german bank (commerzbank). It took 15 minutes and I didn't have to send a single letter!
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  I opened an n26 account via their app in Germany. Took me 10 mins including the kyc process
- dathinab 6y ago
  Na, you can do it all online for many Banks with some of the id check methods. It's just legally preferable for Banks to have a physical signed contract as there are a lot of responsibility on both parties sides so many Banks require you to sign and send them a contract. So it's not because they technically/legaly can't, it's just because they prefer not to for legal liability reasons.
ardy42 6y ago
> Up here in Scandinavia, we often laugh at how much Germans interact with humans, send letters and faxes, and make phonecalls in their business lives. They are woefully far behind. From what I understand the same is true for the south. I wouldn't necessarily call it "being ahead" to embrace increased isolation from other human beings.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  It's not about the isolation. It's about enabling absurd business models by all sorts of outsourcing, promising to simplify, but in reality complicating things by having to implement all sorts of intrusive anti-fraud checks, because anything automatic can and will be defrauded. Which in turn leads to misery of all involved legit parties, loss of quality of life, by being reduced to some cog in some machine. Oh, of course jobs! The bullshit ones. With the exception of the few at the top. /me snorts...
- gspr 6y ago
  > I wouldn't necessarily call it "being ahead" to embrace increased isolation from other human beings. Yeah, sorry, I wasn't clear. I was referring to stuff like this in GP's comment: > Article about Gaia-X in major German newspaper FAZ explained that on AWS you can spin up your own infrastructure, "sometimes even without talking to anyone from sales", from your home! I personally love human interactions, but the idea that I'd have to call Joe in sales to spin up a VM for a few hours is ludicrous. Likewise for a lot of routine mundane stuff that is easily automatable. I think the world will be poorer if we move humans out of our daily interactions, but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot to gain by moving the humans to where they can what they do best - namely be human!
  - dathinab 6y ago
    It should be noted that FAZ is not a tech news paper but a local to Frankfurt one. So the article was written by a person having closer to no tech understanding for persons without tech understandings. There are proper tech news paper in which you will not find such thinks. ;). Edit: They do have a technical section but that is 70% cars and the rest are other physical tech thinks like kitchen utensils and vacuum robots.
etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
I find this interesting, but which South are you referring to? Southern Europe or Southern US?
pnako 6y ago
How far behind they are... Imagine having to talk to humans instead of interacting with scripts. I've always known that Germans are barbarians. /s
- brnt 6y ago
  May the inventor of the customer service chatbot burn in hell. By being forced to communicate through heaven's customer service chatbot.

by gspr 6y ago

heipei 6y ago

You're right, and I'm glad I started by saying that I'm German because lots of smaller European countries run circles around us in terms of tech adoption. I don't underestimate the value of quality of life, and I don't blame anyone who knowingly works for a stable, "boring", old-school German company which has been the world-leader in its niche for the past 100 years. But I think many people here are not aware that there even is a radically different approach to building up a business (the US/VC/growth model), and that this might be the only model to create modern tech companies to rival the US players. You won't compete with AWS by creating a family-owned business over a few decades where your primary objective is to provide stable and fair employment to people, often for their entire working lives. I'm not saying either one is better, just that I think that's the reality.

davedx 6y ago
Yeah in the Netherlands here, and I’ve spent some time recently integrating a German fintech vendor. The cross of new and modern and old beurocratic way of doing things has been almost dystopian and really slowed everything down. Contrast to similar vendors in the UK is quite something.
- dukeyukey 6y ago
  Can you go into more details on this? I've only worked closely with UK/USA companies and I'm really interested how they compare to German/French ways of doing things. Does the Netherlands more closely align to the Uk/USA on this?
  - j4yav 6y ago
    In my experience the Netherlands is quite a bit like the US. Not as much VC available, but businesses tend to be pretty agile and willing to pivot to get results. All normal day to day government interaction is digital and works well. ING is a good example of a very big Dutch company that seems to do pretty well with innovation.
  - davedx 6y ago
    Germans have a lot of legal requirements, red tape, old ways of doing things. Netherlands and UK are more streamlined, more parts of govt and daily life are digital, bank systems are more modern.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  When Europe does do fintech it’s just really sleazy and exploitative, like Revolut, so better off without. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23416169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23416169
joelbluminator 6y ago
There's a lot of criticism of the US/VC model, sure it brought tremendous success stories but it's not clear if the model actually works.
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  According to some: "It works great!" Thanks to Intellectual-Property-Monopoly Valley the US government has access to all computers all over the world (Intel ME etc.), as well as backdoor access into Google, Facebook etc. [1] [2] [3]. And Palantir works to 'support Homeland security'. [1] https://books.google.nl/books?id=9aamDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT142&dq=%E2%80%9CIt%E2%80%99s+not+just+the+Internet%E2%80%99s+infrastructure+that+I%E2%80%99m%22 https://books.google.nl/books?id=9aamDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT142&dq=%E... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/11/crypto-ag-cia-bnd-germany-intelligence-report https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/11/crypto-ag-ci...
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  Ye I’m not a fan. All it does is entrench existing inequality. A few new millionaires are minted but I’m interested in solutions that provide an economic floor for everyone so we can all bootstrap if we want to instead.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    The distribution is a result of VC being a lotto that pays out well enough that not only is it not a bad idea to play it in terms of return on investment. Unfortunately it takes a lot of money to "buy every ticket". Which means to "win" for a VC they need to win big enough to outweigh their massive pile of failures. Except instead of a lotto board paying out it is growth of a successful company. The second desire? Prepare for disappointment as it isn't a goal. A goal implies a workable path even if it is far fetched like "try to research a way to become immortal". Providing an economic floor is not only not a strategy for advancement (let alone a workable one) it would fail even if you had a magical no knowledge or possession prerequisite requirement provider of infinite "basics" to be unscarce like air or file bit combinations. Economics deal with the scarce - while rendering things irrelevant would be good a floor implies an actual use to build upon into the scarce.
ChuckNorris89 6y ago
>family-owned business where your primary objective is to provide stable and fair employment to people, often for their entire working lives Maybe that was the case in the '50s to '80s but I recently worked at two small family owned German companies that were leaders in their niche and their primary objective was to make their owners rich, not their employees happy(Kununu employee reviews reflected that). After that, I learned my lesson and moved to $BIG_CORP where at least I know it's all about the profits and they don't pretend to be your family as an excuse to pay you peanuts.

fauigerzigerk 6y ago

It's not just Germany though. The UK is absolutely obsessed with making phone calls. Lots and lots of completely useless phone calls. Most of them could easily be replaced by an online booking system. Others serve no purpose at all, because all that's required is for them to take some action. Same with US corporations. I recently tried to sign up for Microsoft's partner network because that's required for an Office 365 integration I was interested in. But I wasn't able to complete their byzantine signup process because there's a bug in the user interface that prevents me from confirming the tax status of my company. It's a simple bug, completely unrelated to the specifics of our company. I wrote to them asking them to fix the bug so I can proceed. Predictably, they want to talk on the phone. They left some unintelligible message on my voicemail. Then they sent me an email saying they needed additional information from me without saying what that information was. They just want me to reply to arrange a time for a phone call. I lost interest.

ChuckNorris89 6y ago
Believe me, the UK is ages ahead of Germany in terms of digitization.
- KineticLensman 6y ago
  Can't comment on the UK / Germany comparison directly, but I still continue to be pleasingly surprised by the quality of access to functions provided by gov.uk. E.g. I recently renewed my passport wholly online, registered my car, checked that the Govt had a record of my car's MOT (roadworthyness) certificate, etc.
  - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
    I agree, gov.uk works really well.
  - _Wintermute 6y ago
    I never really appreciated gov.uk until I moved to France. Here nothing is online, you need to take days off work to stand in line and collect paperwork.

f6v 6y ago

Milage varies in Europe. In Germany, opening a bank account "over internet" means sending paper letters back and forth, while in Belgium I didn't have to sign or send anything by post.

411111111111111 6y ago
That depends on the bank. Some allow you to sign the papers online and only require you to authenticate yourself to make the contract binding. This authentication can be done by letter as you said, it in person in the post office or with a video call in which you show your Ausweis. Your bank just might not support these options, but some do.
- sandravlado 6y ago
  Also, it depends on country. When I was opening a bank account in Czech Republic, they required a passport and that's it. In Ireland though, you need to wait until you get registered for taxes, then you need to show the proof that you work, then an accommodation contract in order to open a bank account. I spent a month without a bank account.
LeanderK 6y ago
I recently opened a bank account on a major german bank (commerzbank). It took 15 minutes and I didn't have to send a single letter!
rorykoehler 6y ago
I opened an n26 account via their app in Germany. Took me 10 mins including the kyc process
dathinab 6y ago
Na, you can do it all online for many Banks with some of the id check methods. It's just legally preferable for Banks to have a physical signed contract as there are a lot of responsibility on both parties sides so many Banks require you to sign and send them a contract. So it's not because they technically/legaly can't, it's just because they prefer not to for legal liability reasons.

ardy42 6y ago

> Up here in Scandinavia, we often laugh at how much Germans interact with humans, send letters and faxes, and make phonecalls in their business lives. They are woefully far behind. From what I understand the same is true for the south. I wouldn't necessarily call it "being ahead" to embrace increased isolation from other human beings.

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
It's not about the isolation. It's about enabling absurd business models by all sorts of outsourcing, promising to simplify, but in reality complicating things by having to implement all sorts of intrusive anti-fraud checks, because anything automatic can and will be defrauded. Which in turn leads to misery of all involved legit parties, loss of quality of life, by being reduced to some cog in some machine. Oh, of course jobs! The bullshit ones. With the exception of the few at the top. /me snorts...
gspr 6y ago
> I wouldn't necessarily call it "being ahead" to embrace increased isolation from other human beings. Yeah, sorry, I wasn't clear. I was referring to stuff like this in GP's comment: > Article about Gaia-X in major German newspaper FAZ explained that on AWS you can spin up your own infrastructure, "sometimes even without talking to anyone from sales", from your home! I personally love human interactions, but the idea that I'd have to call Joe in sales to spin up a VM for a few hours is ludicrous. Likewise for a lot of routine mundane stuff that is easily automatable. I think the world will be poorer if we move humans out of our daily interactions, but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot to gain by moving the humans to where they can what they do best - namely be human!
- dathinab 6y ago
  It should be noted that FAZ is not a tech news paper but a local to Frankfurt one. So the article was written by a person having closer to no tech understanding for persons without tech understandings. There are proper tech news paper in which you will not find such thinks. ;). Edit: They do have a technical section but that is 70% cars and the rest are other physical tech thinks like kitchen utensils and vacuum robots.

etaioinshrdlu 6y ago

I find this interesting, but which South are you referring to? Southern Europe or Southern US?

pnako 6y ago

How far behind they are... Imagine having to talk to humans instead of interacting with scripts. I've always known that Germans are barbarians. /s

brnt 6y ago
May the inventor of the customer service chatbot burn in hell. By being forced to communicate through heaven's customer service chatbot.