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.
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.
> 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.
We're talking about people, not parties, and I've definitely met people who have this view. To them, the German way is the proper way, and any way that's easier must be cheating or skipping something.
Of course they want digitalization, but they want a German digitalization. A good and proper German one, and not a flimsy foreign one.
Of course this is nationalistic cope, but it's pretty common.