Comment by Rinzler89
1 year ago
>So everyone is just ass-covering all them time and not taking any risks.
Heaving lived and worked in Germany for a few years, I realized that's the reason behind all the excessive bureaucracy and processes for everything: extensive ass covering. If something goes to shit under your watch then it's not your fault because you did everything by the book and you have the extensive paper trail to prove it.
And nobody wants to go around the processes or change them, even if they know they're broken because then they would be the ones liable for the outcomes, so the entire society revolves around preserving the status quo even if the ship is heading towards the iceberg.
Change to processes is usually exclusively top-down where a boomer detached from the work in the trenches but with connections, a laundry list of a academic credentials and a pompous CV of management positions at large consultancies/companies, makes the decisions and those below execute without question while mumbling at the canteen lunch how stupid and out of touch the decisions are.
That's just my opinion as an outsider, it's not a fact I can provide citations for in case anyone asks, so it can be incorrect as all opinions go, feel free to disagree or correct me.
>Heaving lived and worked in Germany for a few years, I realized that's the reason behind all the excessive bureaucracy and processes for everything: extensive ass covering. If something goes to shit under your watch then it's not your fault because you did everything by the book and you have the extensive paper trail to prove it.
I've heard it said that the idea that Germans are efficient is a myth. (The new Berlin airport is one example.)
Germans are, rather, *rule followers*.
How about we merge the two definitions: efficient rule followers. Which is great when the rules are okayish (see older German cars, highways, handicraft...) and abysmal when they're random (bureaucracy, forced optimizations solely for the yearly bonus...).
You are missing the cause for this: liability attaching to people. Germany is very good with looking for individuals to be liable.
>Germans are, rather, rule followers.
Which is very good when the rules are sane and up to date, and very bad when otherwise.
There are whole regions of the world where nobody follows any law,besides the absolute minimum for society to exist.no institutions, no state, no laws, no companys..it all merges into "family" which is a little bit of everything. Not ideal, not very german.
not arguing but .. in systems theory, "good" and "bad" are too simple to be useful. Systems with many parts, have balance, efficiency, productivity .. and also the opposite of those.. in large amounts across many interactions.. from a physics point of view "stability" is also very real. Changes in system characteristics come from the actions and interactions of many individual parts, each one can change, or each class can change.
All of this is important in describing and understanding complex systems. The "rule following" is not simply "good" or "bad" using this analysis framework.
I worked technical support at a mid sized company that sold some equipment that had very expensive support contracts. These support contracts made up a large % of the company income and our customers were happy to pay them.
When I joined the team first thing the director told me was "everyone fucks up, you will to, just tell the truth and you'll be good". I learned quickly that there was no finger pointing allowed in that team. If something went wrong we'd figure it out later and in the meantime do the right thing to help the customer.
It was a great culture in that group. There was surprisingly little bureaucracy in the tech support team. You could do what you needed to to get things done / got the help you needed. Almost every call that came in was immediately answered, and our customers loved us.
Later (after a series of other acquisitions and etc) we picked up a company that had more than 4x the number of support techs and they solved less than half the number of tickets. Even the tickets weren't "solved" as much as they went through the motions and they hit their metrics.
That group was all about finger pointing, they didn't seem to know how to do anything else. They weren't even good at finger pointing. One manager who loved to come up with theories as to why our team was "cheating". He somehow triggered an "investigation" into his theory as to why his team didn't solve tickets and others did. That investigation found found that his very specific theory as to how other teams were messing with the number of closed tickets .... that his team was the only one playing that game. It was so bizarre.
Unfortunately, due to the bad acts / crappy culture from the new team we ended up with a slowly evolving / massive bureaucracy too all designed as CYA type setups where everyone "did what they should have done" but really never solved any problems.
I feel like that's often the source of bureaucracy.
> One manager who loved to come up with theories as to why our team was "cheating". He somehow triggered an "investigation" into his theory as to why his team didn't solve tickets and others did. That investigation found found that his very specific theory as to how other teams were messing with the number of closed tickets .... that his team was the only one playing that game. It was so bizarre.
People tend to accuse others of things they would do if they were in that position.
It seems to me the underlying issue is that mistakes are punished and taking initiative to solve problems is not rewarded.
> It seems to me the underlying issue is that mistakes are punished and taking initiative to solve problems is not rewarded
This.
Context: born and grew up in Germany. Worked abroad for many years. Now living in Berlin, would still never work for an established German company for that reason.
Startups are usually better; until they're not startups any more.
Asking first "wer ist schuld?" ("whose fault was this?") is deeply rooted in German culture somehow though and sooner or later takes hold again.
It's the best way to ensure processes do not get improved but the paper trail attached to them grows steadily.
>Now living in Berlin, would still never work for an established German company for that reason.
What's wrong with traditional German companies besides burocracy? I see many have happy lives there with very good WLB and great job safety, contrary to start-ups.
>Startups are usually better; until they're not startups any more.
True, but also start-ups are better when you're part of the early founding crew who know each other, and get some sizeable equity for the effort. Otherwise, if you're one of the later joiners outside of the founder inner circle, you get nothing in rewards but get all the pressure and stress of working at a start-up. I'd much rather be at a traditional German company than a start-up like that, especially now that I'm past my prime youth years.
How is that different from US corporations
Well for one US corporations are not a monolith (or at least not yet) but yes some US corporations are like the same is this example, some German ones too, also Chinese, British, etc., and in all of these case this type of work culture is terrible and unproductive. But in this case we are very specifically discussing the German train company Deutsche Bahn so what other corporations are or aren't doing is complete irrelevant to the conversation, if you would like to discuss what other corporations with this same business culture I would suggest starting a new discussion thread. I hope this helps clear up any confusion you may have.
My company goes as far as awarding teams that have epic failures. Corporate goals often include more risk taking, and leaders communicate that.
One thing that helps is I am an industry where failure is common and where project failure often has a clear root cause outside the control of the team.
What dies that have to do with anything?