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
As someone that haven’t ever been to Germany or interacted with any German government, but works with different governments a lot, it has really become apparent that Germans love telling the rest of the world how bad their bureaucracy is, then go on to describe something that sounds entirely common. It’s like New Yorkers telling you how good and unique bodegas are, and it turns out they either grew up in New York City or some one-traffic-light town and just haven’t had any worldly exposure.

Your personal anecdote as another commenter pointed out says much more about your lack of consulting and general workplace experience than it does about German bureaucracy. It all sounds very typical and again what I’d expect as someone that can count on one hand the number of people in Germany I’ve talked to professionally.

>>tmpX7d+P6
It might be common, but the German bureaucracy is a lot worse than what Germany's reputation of structure and order would lead foreigners to believe.

And while it might be common around the world, Germany is playing in a lower league than for instance the Scandinavian countries.

In Germany, you need to make appointments and do things in person.

In Sweden, you can change vehicle ownership or register your move to a new address online in minutes.

>>fl7305+Z9
It's nice to know that here in the US we're closer to Sweden than Germany.

I think in most places the buyer of a vehicle still has to mail in a paper form (though if you buy from a car dealership, they'll take care of it), but at least in California, the seller can do their part of the transaction online (which is mainly to inform the DMV that someone else has the vehicle, so you won't be held responsible if something bad happens involving it).

And we don't have to register our moves at all; the government mostly doesn't care if we tell it where we live. Some agencies like the DMV do want to know our address so they can mail us a new driver's license or ID card when the old one expires (but these address changes and license renewals we can do online). The Postal Service will forward our mail to our new address for 3 months if we ask them to, but we don't have to if we don't care.

Obviously the government can and will eventually find out where you live if they need and want to, but there's generally no registration requirement.