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When I was growing up in Germany I remember hearing this exact same complaint about lack of entrepreneurship a good 30 years ago. My dad, who is a solid state p

When I was growing up in Germany I remember hearing this exact same complaint about lack of entrepreneurship a good 30 years ago. My dad, who is a solid state physicist, was a kind of cheerleader for modern technology and was exasperated how companies were not adopting and adapting more quickly. His predictions that the economy was going to go down the tubes while the rest of the world pulled away still ring in my ears. Yet here we are and looking around my neighborhood in Oregon I see VWs, Audi's, Mercedes and Porsches, our dishwasher is a Bosch and any serious Oregonian owns a Stihl chainsaw. While I agree that a shocking number of young Germans (and likely other Europeans) are looking for the security of a "Beamter" (civil servant) job, there are definite pros to the German system and I think to keep the balance maybe it's not so bad we have countries with different systems. Here in the USA almost everyone is an amateur at almost everything we do and that breeds excellence from a few but also a lot of shoddy work. In Germany it's the opposite, the general skill level in industry, science and even culture is relatively high but there are few international standouts. I think software and software entrepreneurship is particularly well suited to the American system. Interestingly, in my work as an embedded systems engineer there are a lot of German companies offering development tools (Keil and Hitex come to mind) and other specialty hardware. Not everyone has to develop the next Groupon or Facebook, there are a lot of other possibilities.

davidw 15y ago
> any serious Oregonian owns a Stihl chainsaw. Well, depending on which bit of Oregon they're from, they might abhor the idea of a device to "denude mother gaia's old growth forests" or something to that effect... Said as someone who grew up in Oregon.
- ghurlman 15y ago
  Not when that old growth is blocking the road after a storm.
- forkandwait 15y ago
  I think about 53% of OR wants to dance naked in the old growth forests, and about 47% wants to cut it all down and go to church 3 times a week. Said as someone who has lived in Oregon and absolutely LOVES both its hippies and its hicks.
  - zwieback 15y ago
    Brilliant - my sentiments exactly.
jerf 15y ago
I am reminded of the concept of differential advantage. It's OK for the US to be entrepreneurial and for Germany to have a lot of craft-focused artisans who can take technology and refine it unto the nth degree. The world is richer for having the both. It's part of the reason I think a lot of people over the decades(/centuries) who call for the US to be more a clone of Europe are calling for a really bad idea; it's more than just OK for there to actually be different types of countries, but they actually support each other and make each side wealthier. Diversity, real diversity involving significant differences, is good.
- FrojoS 15y ago
  THIS I think the American system is more for me. But I'm happy there is both. Unfortunately there is also a trend in Germany to become more American.
- rubashov 15y ago
  This American mentality of "the big entrepreneurial idea" that produces some millionaires is why we have such a lousy unemployment rate and low skill workforce compared to Japan and Germany, not to mention huge trade deficits. The problem is that the first generation idea stuff isn't where the jobs and long term money are. The long term social benefits and sustainable jobs are in perfecting and iterating products and production methods. http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjune11/manufacturing-finance6-11.html http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjune11/manufacturing-finance6-...
forkandwait 15y ago
Not only do we buy Stihl chainsaws, etc, but Germans have excellent social services, (I think) the basic level of human capital (education, politeness, etc) is much higher, and it is really safe. And it isn't like lots of Americans aren't looking for safe/ boring/ long term/ moderate payoff jobs either.
rektide 15y ago
To talk briefly about one item here, embedded systems dev kits; They strike me as a ludicrous 'pay to play' scheme. The old standard is that you have to buy a $2500 dev kit for every developers, and that standard has kept the individuals and enthusiasts out. OEM's ought have full design files for multiple reference board available, and sell implementations for something like cost. Much of this trenchant multi-level commercialism (developer kit company, silicon company) was natural for the way the software tooling used to work; one off debugging interfaces (also frequently $1000+) talking to each vendor's proprietary compilation/debugging toolchain, booting each vendor's own bootcode and running drivers developed by the vendor. Thankfully the open source stack is getting better. Another commenter discussed a sustainable bicycle part company ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2629346 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2629346 ), and I see a similar parallel in that chip companies ought be investing in sustainable openly accessible tooling. SoC and high speed serial radically simplify many aspects of board design, chip companies ought be actively promoting the other side of easy accessibility & be working to produce open source drivers, facilitate tool support from the likes of OpenOCD, uBoot, &c, and doing every thing they can to reduce barriers to entry.
- zwieback 15y ago
  True but the situation is improving. A lot of the latest crop of ARM-based dev kits are around $100-$300 and come with complete schematics. Full-featured, size limited toolchains tend to be available for free so it's pretty easy to assess what you would get for your $1000-$1500 investment. Eclipse-GCC-GDB with open-source JTAG dongles is a great way to get started for very little investment. So is Arduino for the lower end. The big investement tends to be around high-end debug tools like trace probes and debuggers. It would be great to have an open-source trace probe for Cortex.

davidw 15y ago

> any serious Oregonian owns a Stihl chainsaw. Well, depending on which bit of Oregon they're from, they might abhor the idea of a device to "denude mother gaia's old growth forests" or something to that effect... Said as someone who grew up in Oregon.

ghurlman 15y ago
Not when that old growth is blocking the road after a storm.
forkandwait 15y ago
I think about 53% of OR wants to dance naked in the old growth forests, and about 47% wants to cut it all down and go to church 3 times a week. Said as someone who has lived in Oregon and absolutely LOVES both its hippies and its hicks.
- zwieback 15y ago
  Brilliant - my sentiments exactly.

jerf 15y ago

I am reminded of the concept of differential advantage. It's OK for the US to be entrepreneurial and for Germany to have a lot of craft-focused artisans who can take technology and refine it unto the nth degree. The world is richer for having the both. It's part of the reason I think a lot of people over the decades(/centuries) who call for the US to be more a clone of Europe are calling for a really bad idea; it's more than just OK for there to actually be different types of countries, but they actually support each other and make each side wealthier. Diversity, real diversity involving significant differences, is good.

FrojoS 15y ago
THIS I think the American system is more for me. But I'm happy there is both. Unfortunately there is also a trend in Germany to become more American.
rubashov 15y ago
This American mentality of "the big entrepreneurial idea" that produces some millionaires is why we have such a lousy unemployment rate and low skill workforce compared to Japan and Germany, not to mention huge trade deficits. The problem is that the first generation idea stuff isn't where the jobs and long term money are. The long term social benefits and sustainable jobs are in perfecting and iterating products and production methods. http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjune11/manufacturing-finance6-11.html http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjune11/manufacturing-finance6-...

forkandwait 15y ago

Not only do we buy Stihl chainsaws, etc, but Germans have excellent social services, (I think) the basic level of human capital (education, politeness, etc) is much higher, and it is really safe. And it isn't like lots of Americans aren't looking for safe/ boring/ long term/ moderate payoff jobs either.

rektide 15y ago

To talk briefly about one item here, embedded systems dev kits; They strike me as a ludicrous 'pay to play' scheme. The old standard is that you have to buy a $2500 dev kit for every developers, and that standard has kept the individuals and enthusiasts out. OEM's ought have full design files for multiple reference board available, and sell implementations for something like cost. Much of this trenchant multi-level commercialism (developer kit company, silicon company) was natural for the way the software tooling used to work; one off debugging interfaces (also frequently $1000+) talking to each vendor's proprietary compilation/debugging toolchain, booting each vendor's own bootcode and running drivers developed by the vendor. Thankfully the open source stack is getting better. Another commenter discussed a sustainable bicycle part company ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2629346 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2629346 ), and I see a similar parallel in that chip companies ought be investing in sustainable openly accessible tooling. SoC and high speed serial radically simplify many aspects of board design, chip companies ought be actively promoting the other side of easy accessibility & be working to produce open source drivers, facilitate tool support from the likes of OpenOCD, uBoot, &c, and doing every thing they can to reduce barriers to entry.

zwieback 15y ago
True but the situation is improving. A lot of the latest crop of ARM-based dev kits are around $100-$300 and come with complete schematics. Full-featured, size limited toolchains tend to be available for free so it's pretty easy to assess what you would get for your $1000-$1500 investment. Eclipse-GCC-GDB with open-source JTAG dongles is a great way to get started for very little investment. So is Arduino for the lower end. The big investement tends to be around high-end debug tools like trace probes and debuggers. It would be great to have an open-source trace probe for Cortex.