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's much worse than you think here. Germany is in the stone age when it comes to digitalization. As an example, most immigrants will be waiting months to hear back from the Auslanderbehorde - and the only way to get them to reply to you within 2 weeks is to send them a fax.

>>calmoo+Ug
While I seriously sympathize with some of the above (and below) descriptions of byzantine German bureaucracy and its broad lack of digitization, there's another side to it all that's hard not to appreciate slightly in the context of our creeping, already vast, global surveillance state of constant digital monitoring by thousands of actors both private and public, or both and feeding off each other's surveillance carrion...

>>southe+En
A wonderful excuse that German people like to wheel out to try to put a positive spin on being stuck in the 20th century.