zlacker

>>nicbou+(OP)
This is a pretty specific problem to solve, but I thought you might have a laugh at our desperately broken bureaucracy on our behalf.

I built a digital form filler for a poorly-designed that every Berliner must deal with. I explain what I did to make it clearer and easier to fill.

>>nicbou+1
The German authorities have no incitive to digitize and fix the broken bureaucracy because for one, in their mind there's nothing wrong with it because Germany is Europe's wealthiest country so it can never be wrong, and secondly, digitizing bureaucracy means increased efficiency which means less public servant jobs and they don't want that. What they want is more bureaucracy and more cushy public servant jobs pushing pencils on great benefits. If they wintered to fix bureaucracy they would have don it already.

In German state and traditional company culture, digitization is seen as a threat, not an asset. I remember a few years agon when my gf at the time was working at a big German industrial automation company and she was struggling a lot with some horribile ineficient work process involving copy and pasting shit to and from Excel and some VB scripts. So being still locked down to a degree and bored out of my mind, I replaced all her Excel madness with some python scripts that streamlined everything. She took that at work and proudly showed it to her boss hoping for some recognition and he said "if you wanna keep your job, don't bring stuff like this at work, we don't need it, there's nothing wrong with the way we currently do things", and then it hit me that current German software innovation culture is completely FUBAR.

>>Firmwa+72
I'm sorry, but that's just complete nonsense.

> in their mind there's nothing wrong with it because Germany is Europe's wealthiest country so it can never be wrong

There's literally not a single political party that doesn't admit that Germany is being too slow here or that doesn't admit that it's embarassing. On a national and on a local level. You can Google that if you don't believe me.

> digitizing bureaucracy means increased efficiency which means less public servant jobs and they don't want that

Also wrong. There's plenty of unfillable public servant jobs in every city. Public servant jobs are not what they were in the 70s.

> In German state and traditional company culture, digitization is seen as a threat, not an asset.

Also wrong. Germany just upgraded too early, then let everything run and stopped upgrading because the current system works. That's all there is to it. It's also the reason why Romania has faster internet than Germany, for example.

> work process involving copy and pasting shit to and from Excel and some VB scripts

You're in for a wild ride when you find out what kind of IT infrastructure the world uses.

Your whole post is anecdotal and when you try to get to your own interpretation of German culture or why problems exist, you're wrong.

Don't get me wrong: Germany's digital infrastructure _is_ horrible. Just not at all for the reasons you mentioned.

>>snehk+Q3
Romania has better and cheaper internet because of the wild Wild West when everybody and every firm were allowed to pull cables anywhere they pleased. People would buy a 100-200mbit b2b connection for 40 euros and would split it between 15-20 people for 3-5 euro each. It was deregulated for so much time that when the regulations finally came everybody was already connected to fast and cheap internet and they were so used to it that whichever company tried to increase the price and lower the speed would see really shitty returns.

That’s why Digi exploded and Telekom (Romtelecom) needed years to take off. The Greek CEO of Romtelecom would hold meetings in 2008 with upper management where he would dictate loudly that Romanians only want stable internet with great customer care and that’s the direction he is leading the company. That proved not to actually be the case and he unceremoniously left the company afterwards.

Source: I lived all this and was close with the domain