> And to the haters: Show me any company or product from Germany in IT that is Top 100 globally.
Also I wouldn’t want to disagree with you outright, there are still a few important German companies in the IT sector (or related): Siemens, Infineon, Deutsche Telekom, Bechtle, TeamViewer come to my mind.
What Siemens exemplifies is that the strength of German industry is not pure software, but high-tech machinery. While Siemens and most of its spin-offs are doing somewhat okay, the stocks of its spin-off Siemens Energy have risen by ~700 % in the last 3 years.
Where Siemens really shines, is in their fanatical devotion to after sales.
I rely on Siemens automation products at work. They give me end-of-life warnings a couple of years ahead - and maintain a spares inventory for a decade and change after EoL.
That basically ensures I am never caught out, and makes me more than happy to (grudgingly) accept all their ideosyncracies...
I assume it makes you a loyal customer when upgrading/replacing equipment too... knowing what to expect and that you're going to have all of that support.
So many product companies fail to think about that -- they're all thinking about this quarter and very few take a long term approach and really try to have customers for life. They all say that want that of course, but too few are really committed to it. There are a few brands that I buy that are committed to quality, and they usually cost more (initially, but probably not in the long run). I'm fine paying more know that they really tried to do their best and didn't let nickels and dimes get in the way of an otherwise great concept.
Of course; I will jump through just about any hoop in order to keep buying their products precisely as I know that will buy both me and the end customer long term peace of mind.
Industrial automation as a market is like that. Those products are expected to be long lived and supported for decades because the machinery they are attached to often has a similarly long lifespan. A company I worked at was still supporting 20 to 30 products and in some cases building new hardware from 30 year old designs (including the exact same electronics).
>a few important German companies in the IT sector (or related): Siemens, Infineon, Deutsche Telekom, Bechtle, TeamViewer come to my mind.
None of them famous or being praised by customers for having amazing UI/UX though, because they're not consumer products, they're targeting engineers who either don't care about UX, or don't have a choice in the matter because their company is buying it, not them.
Cars on the other hand ARE consumer products and do need great UX, and German companies long forgot how to do that since they operate everything as a cost center and outsource everything they perceive ads no value.
>the strength of German industry is not pure software, but high-tech machinery
Yeah but there's more margins in pure software and more buyers in the world for consumer devices than for high tech machinery. Apple can probably buy all of Germany's machine tool makers if they wanted to. It's the perk of selling to 7 billion consumers in the world.
> the stocks of its spin-off Siemens Energy have risen by ~700 % in the last 3 years.
Just like every energy and defense stock in the world right now, but that's to be expected and somewhat offtopic for SW and UX.
If we look at some of their other consumer and healthcare spin-offs like Gigaset or Healthineers, they are doing insanely poor, which is embarrassing.
They havent totally forgotten. I drove a 2025 BMW last week and noticed many similarities to my favorite car, the '92 325IS. The speedo and tach both aligned in top gear, the thumb hooks were still perfect, and the cluster still dimmed enough for night driving. Someone at BMW remembers how to do UI.
>and outsource everything they perceive ads no value.
In their defense, if they know they have no inhouse competence and their existing org structure is not good for building software, then doesn't it make sense to contract people who do and can?
Also, if Germans admittedly are not great at building good UX, and/or software, there are countries/companies who definitely don't suffer from that shortcoming.
And I'm not sure why German cars suck == Europe is doomed, what about the infotainment on Renaults?
In fact, you can run any form of European legal entity from any country. I.e., I can create an spółka z ograniczoną odpowiedzialnością (sp. z o.o.) in Poland, but run the business in Germany. It would be complicated and stupid, but legal.
You can! A foreign EU company just needs to get a "Betriebsnummer" (company number) from "Bundesagentur für Arbeit", which doesn't even require a Betriebsstätte (permanent business establishment, a branch that is not legally independent) or a "Zweigniederlassung" (branch office, legally semi-independent, but still part of the same entity) - and certainly not a subsidiary that has it's own legal persona.
SAP is basically the core of the German compliance machine. Most of the time, people get onto SAP not because its good, but there's a bunch of compliance regs, which basically say 'use SAP'. Noncompliance results in firms basically not doing business with you.
You could try to be boneheaded and comply with whatever standards they need your own way, but that would mean your business partners would need to do more due diligence and expose themselves to risk of what happens if regulators are not happy with the way you conduct your business. So you use SAP.
Is this based on actual experience? Because at a place I worked in the past we did business with BMW, Allianz, Siemens, Munich Re and others and never had to use SAP. Maybe it depends on what part of the delivery chain you are.
For instance with Munich Re you have to "pass" their compliance gate which is comprehensive but still has a lot of leeway.
On 9 July 1537, Martin Luther wrote in a letter to Wolfgang Capito about a lost golden ring: "Pro annulo aureo gratias tibi agit mea Catharina, quam vix unquam magis indignatam vidi, quam ubi sensit, cum vel furto sublatum, vel sua negligentia (quod nec mihi verisimile est, licet usque ingerenti) amissum, quod persuaseram ei, hoc donum esse felix omen et augurium ei missum, tanquam nunc certum esset, vestram Ecclesiam cum nostra suaviter concordare; id mire dolet mulieri."[1]
When Luther's house in Wittenberg was excavated about 20 years ago, a golden ring[2] was found that must have been deposited there before 1540. It is therefore quite likely that this is the ring mentioned by Luther in 1537.
My Catherine thanks you for the golden ring, whom I have hardly ever seen more indignant than when she realized that it had been stolen or lost through her own negligence (which is not likely for me, although I still insist on it), which I had persuaded her that this gift was a happy omen and augury sent to her, as if it were now certain that your Church would agree pleasantly with ours; this grieves the woman wonderfully.
This article made me think how I could use similar techinques to colour code the data in database tables. Has anyone here tried that and has some recommendations where to start, etc.?
the reproductive incompatability, is based on physiological range.
in general, there are multi organizational levels of reproductive incompatability.
in this case, the geographic distance, orogenic blockade, and ecological confounds of arctic conditions preclude easy mingling of U.arctos x U. maritimus.
> If an old coin is deemed to not be historically significant, it probably belongs to the landowner.
According to § 984 BGB, a historically insignificant find belongs to the finder and landowner in equal shares.[1] If the find is so important that it is considered a "cultural monument" (Kulturdenkmal), the law of the individual German state determines who owns it and whether or how much of a compensation is payed to the finder.[2]
Afaik Germany is one of the most expensive countries for employing white collar jobs?
The gross income to the employee might be 75k in Germany, but the cost to the employer is roughly twice that amount in turn.
In my (very naive) mental model, US salaries are higher, have less "overhead" for the employer, but leave more responsibility (healthcare, retirement) to the employee.
Employer cost is not 2x, more like 1.2x, employer overhead is mostly insurance related stuff. We had salaray to employer cost tables at my previous job.
What true though is that after taxes you might just receive 60% of your total salary once you deduct taxes and insurances.
> In my (very naive) mental model, US salaries are higher, have a lot less "overhead" for the employer, but leave more responsibility (healthcare, retirement) to the employee.
Unfortunately this time, AI does not have vacations, healthcare, retirement or bills to pay and is available 24/7, 365 days on demand.
Many companies only see this as an opportunity to cut down on employees in 2026 and Session will do the same.
So that is why to answer your question:
> ...Germany is one of the most expensive countries for employing white collar jobs?
The main reason why the downsizing will continue until "AGI" is achieved internally.
Yeah , but the German pension system is unfortunately a scam .
Therefore everyone is responsible for their own retirement (private investments e.g etfs) .
If you are getting 60k EUR as a senior developer in Germany, you are getting ripped off. Look for a place with an IG Metall contract, friends - if you would like to be making significantly more than $75k USD full time as a senior developer, anyway.
German citizen here. I find this attitude horrible and threatening. You are working on sacrificing yet another part of our digital sovereignty to a US company. There are trillions of better things to do with your life.
What's wrong with verifiable credentials? It's an important thing to have it seems? Your passport or a bank card are verifiable credentials, or at least are designed to be.
Can the experiment be summerised by saying that training the model is a kind of probabilistic pre-calculation that converts the Stockfish expert system into a different, rather distinct representation that is worse than Stockfish, but still quite good?
It is a very visible indicator of the quality of the whole. If the spelling is frequently not correct, which a reader can detect relatively easily, how many more mistakes are hidden in the content, which a reader can not detect easily? Are these completely independent variables? I do not think so. Therefore, I also assess the reliability of an article based on the frequency of careless mistakes.
What is an even larger warning sign, are cliches used to spice up an article. Ars Technica is hardly to blame here, but the Smithsonian magazine is full of it.
My mother[0] was a scientific editor, and she was brutal. She was a stickler for proper English, as well as content accuracy.
She once edited a book I wrote. It was humbling as hell, but it may be the only "perfect" thing that I've ever done (but it did not age well, and has since gone the way of the Dodo).
Also I wouldn’t want to disagree with you outright, there are still a few important German companies in the IT sector (or related): Siemens, Infineon, Deutsche Telekom, Bechtle, TeamViewer come to my mind.
What Siemens exemplifies is that the strength of German industry is not pure software, but high-tech machinery. While Siemens and most of its spin-offs are doing somewhat okay, the stocks of its spin-off Siemens Energy have risen by ~700 % in the last 3 years.
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