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I work in the German healthcare sector, which is partly public and partly private, and I have been doing so for a little over a year. The level of bureaucracy i
by submeta 10mo ago
I work in the German healthcare sector, which is partly public and partly private, and I have been doing so for a little over a year. The level of bureaucracy is staggering. There is no shortage of good ideas or genuine innovation, but most of them drown in administrative processes long before they reach implementation and are eventually abandoned.
Deutsche Bahn is a useful parallel. It was once fully public and later privatized, yet it still carries much of the old organizational DNA. The result is a company that adapts painfully slowly to changing market needs, compounded by chronic mismanagement.
Germany’s problem is not a lack of innovation or talent. It is structural: excessive bureaucracy, risk-averse management, and incentive systems that reward process compliance over outcomes. Until those change, progress will remain slow regardless of funding or good intentions.
- lysace 10mo agoPrivatized implies private ownership (not the case). Perhaps a better word would be corporatized.
- dmix 10mo ago> Deutsche Bahn is a useful parallel. It was once fully public and later privatized A joint stock company fully owned by the government isn’t exactly privatized either. It’s still controlled and staffed by the government and is financed by government budgets, with tons of decision making constrained by being a public interest. In practice it just means the management and financial structure operate as a pseudo corporation.
- baxtr 10mo ago100%. The focus on non-value adding activities is very high since it is rewarded. People don't even grasp the difference between value creating activities people and activities that don't.
- tsss 10mo agoI also work in the German healthcare sector (as a contractor) and all of my permanently employed colleagues there have at least 4h of meetings per day. Some are closer to 6 hours. I also know people who worked at DB and they report the same thing. Large automotive companies (BMW, Mercedes, VW, etc.) are not much better. External contractors are the only reason any actual work is still getting done there because we have no access to anything on account of all the security red tape and thus don't get roped into as many meetings. Right now the German government is doing its best to destroy even that last bit of efficiency because they can't accept that the self-employed are trying to escape their greedy hands and are essentially outlawing freelance software development. I, for one, am learning Polish and will leave this shithole country as soon as I can.
- submeta 10mo ago100%. They run from meeting to meeting. Nobody questions the practice even. Btw, I‘d leave this country as well if I didn’t have aging parents.
- argiope 10mo agoCould you please elaborate on how freelance software development is being outlawed in Germany?
- tsss 10mo agoBasically, it is illegal for German companies to use freelancers in the same way as they would use permanent employees. For software developers this means you're not allowed to work for one client for a long time, not allowed to attend regular scrum meetings, not allowed to have the same access to servers and internal knowledge systems (confluence), etc. To be safe from the law, you'd have to essentially negotiate a fixed price offering per work order. This is completely antithetical to the modern, agile software development process and thus amounts to a prohibition on software development freelancing. The justification for this law is ostensibly to protect gig workers like Uber drivers, delivery drivers and so on. Big companies like Uber or DHL like to outsource that stuff to independent sub-sub-contractors because it allows them to doctor their statistics and circumvent labor laws: Freelancers do not get minimum wage, sick pay, PPE, vacation days and so on. Of course, this is all just a pretense. Low-skill work like parcel delivery is exactly the kind of work where it is easy to have multiple clients at the same time and negotiate fixed-price-per-work-order, so the law does nothing to protect those workers that need it. In reality, this law exists to fuck over high-skill workers like software developers to force them back into a permanent employment contract where they can be more easily controlled by the government. Then they can no longer work from outside Germany and they have no choice but to pay into the horrible government pension pyramid scheme. It's quite obvious because this law has existed for a long time but only recently the government started to make it more strict and enforce it more as the collapse of the government pension system becomes imminent and they are desperately searching for suckers to prop it up for a few more years.