5 ms·
> In many ways this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. An organization thinks software engineers aren't very important. And it doesn't pay the sort of salaries you
by rad_gruchalski 4y ago
> In many ways this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. An organization thinks software engineers aren't very important. And it doesn't pay the sort of salaries you need to get the top talent. So it doesn't have any top-tier software engineers, and their software team struggles to deliver valuable projects.
And you can see this in their hiring. All full of interns. I remember when VW was advertising a “software school”. They were bragging about teaching dozens of “software engineers”.
The people who run these businesses think that writing software is like being a mechanic. That there’s some “end state” in software. These companies have no software culture. All that matters to them, and especially in Germany, is phds. They don’t care about software, they care that they employ a high number of phds.
Funny story. I remember attending an event at Telekom some years back. People from Fraunhofer ISST were on the panel discussing how to bring quality to a major European software initiative that is currently often on the news. Another point was to come up with an idea how to run an org that can maintain said sovereign platform in a transparent manner.
I asked them a question: why not to hand it over to the universities? Why not set up a number of working groups and use it as a platform to teach competent people on a real world, high profile system. You know: r&d, devops, monitoring, service, bug fixing, new features. Sounds like a great opportunity to teach future software generations, no?
You know what was the reaction of the ceo of Fraunhofer, the said man who was running that panel? He laughed and replied: “do you know how bad German universities are?” He said that in public in front of dozens of attendees. I was left speechless.
So if add 2 and 2, you understand what is happening. Everybody is happy with the status quo.
- brianwawok 4y agoAnd the US will continue to eat their lunch. How many high impact software companies are coming out of Germany?
- petre 4y agoSAP. But you wouldn't want to work with SAP anyway. Death by a thousand cuts.
- pjmlp 4y agoPay and benefits are good, 40 h/w + extra when overtime happens, 30 day vacation,....
- martin8412 4y agoThat's the default for everyone working in Europe
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoIt's not. Most jobs in most countries get less than 30 days vacation. Germany's German speaking neighbors it's 25 days.
- rolisz 4y agoEurope is composed of a lot of countries, which all have different laws. In Romania, minimum vacation days are 20 days and very few companies give more than that, except maybe for seniority.
- PicassoCTs 4y agoIs it really though? I ve been going around european companies and its all work till you drop 80h culture and no holiday, cause we need a guy on standbye. That stuff only ever exists on paper.
- ahartmetz 4y agoWhich companies in which countries? I'm in Germany and I have never ever seen or (from friends and acquaintances) heard of vacations not taken due to pressure from the employer. It's about as common as an employer arbitrarily deciding to transfer less than the agreed amount of salary at the end of the month - maybe some very dubious employers have done it at some point, but it's not something to worry about. What is fairly common is employers reminding employees to take their vacation days before they expire. Vacation days from year n expire in April or so of year n+1. That is intended to prevent postponing vacations to never (maybe until switching jobs).
- aksss 4y agobut free, ammaright?
- rad_gruchalski 4y agoI don’t understand your question. What do you mean by “but free”?
- chihuahua 4y agoI think the parent comment can be interpreted as "German universities are bad, but free" (the students don't pay tuition fees, or only a trivial amount)
- MrBuddyCasino 4y agoLack of market forces leading to mediocrity I suppose?
- jfim 4y agoOr lack of a profit motive leading to not trying to game metrics as much. If an entity is ranked by some metric, and the better they are that metric, the more profitable they are, then they have an incentive to game it as much as possible.
- WalterBright 4y agoMetrics are gamed in every organization.
- jfim 4y agoSure, but I would assume that the priorities for a private university are different than a public one. A private university might optimize for profitability and university ranking, while a public one might optimize for providing the most accessible and highest quality education while staying within budgetary guidelines. It's like saying that American universities are the best on the "amount spent on American football facilities per student" ranking. It's true, but the other universities might not be competing on that particular metric and focusing on other ones.
- gumby 4y agoThis is the model for the tron/itron os in Japan. Most devices you buy from Japan run itron.
- rad_gruchalski 4y agoYeah, I still cannot get over that answer. I mean, Fraunhofer is a major German research org and it should be in their business to promote such solutions. To fire something like this out, in front of the people who definitely attended those universities, that was shocking. To this day I don’t know if I was simply naive or if my question was stupid in any way.
- Nathanba 4y agoIt sounds like you were in a meeting discussing how to set up a separate organization and your suggestion was to give the work to people who are doing a poor job already and then you are hoping that they'll suddenly stop failing if you give them access to private company details, work projects, even research. I think the mindset in these parts of Europe is that the companies are where you do real work and anyone who is actually good will find their way into a company anyway. Everyone who attends these universities knows that they are bad, it would not be a shock. They are there not because of the university but because of their own work ethic.
- ahartmetz 4y agoTo be fair, German universities are really bad at software engineering. CS in Germany is highly theoretical.
- Gravityloss 4y agoif Fraunhofer also a competitor to universities?
- arghnoname 4y agoBy and large, the 'best' research institutes in Germany are not the universities, but Max Planck and institutes like Fraunhofer. They may be loosely affiliated with the universities, but the University faculty and the research faculty are not one and the same. Students getting a doctorate may have that doctorate minted by the affiliated university, but all real work actually happens at the research institute. Students can get doctorates directly from German universities and research is done there, but it's just not organized like American universities. Prime prestige centers are research institutes and they're spread around the country.
- zxienin 4y ago> do you know how bad German universities are? I am surprised from this quoted comment. Are German unis really bad? Why is there such a perception?
- foepys 4y agoFraunhofer Society is a conglomerate of various research institutions. A lot of research in Germany is being done not at universities but at dedicated institutions like the Fraunhofer Society, the Max Planck Society, and many more. The Fraunhofer CEO probably meant that the research part of German universities is bad, which is their main "competitor". This is still a ridiculous take and I attribute this to the general arrogance that was already mentioned by GP.
- gumby 4y agoGerman universities are mostly so-so but that is true everywhere. There are some very good professors all over Europe as well.
- mellavora 4y agoI have been involved in several comparisons of German to US universities. The good German ones are ahead of most/all US ones in terms of several academic measures. Though most of those measures are about research output (# papers published, # high-impact papers, # awards won by faculty weighted by award prestige, # post-docs placed to tenure-track positions, # conferences chaired, # journal editors...)
- selfmodruntime 4y agoYea, I am German myself and I really do not get this comment. I‘ve studied abroad and US universities / colleges are laughably easy in comparison. Grade inflation is a real thing and the result of inflated college fees. Most US courses did not count as credit for my masters because they are too easy to get 100% in and they rarely cover even half of the average course load at TUM.
- fabian_shipamax 4y agoAgreed