Comment by BloondAndDoom

That sounds a lot like industrial safety culture: blame the process, not the worker, so we can iterate on the safety built into the process if there is a failure, because doing so lessens the chance of future failures. It’s a great way to build airplanes.

My favorite part of German work culture is watching an excel sheet together and going over the numbers.

My actual favorite part of German work culture is that meetings always have an agenda, that part is a delight when doing business with German customers.

>If you follow the procedure, even if the outcome is disaster, you are not at fault; you were just implementing the rules, and you cannot be held accountable. It's the fault of whoever came up with the rules, except that is usually not a single person, but some amorphous entity that ran through some decision making process years in the past. So, no one is really at fault or can be held accountable.

Worse. You can't even take responsibility even if you want to, that's usually against the rules too.

... I had to take out a special insurance when working from home as a freelancer, and share evidence I had done so with my client as -- if someone slipped outside my house because I'd not swept up the snow somehow the company who was paying me would be liable for the insurance claim...

... Yep.

It's for similar reasons why everyone is up at the crack of dawn frantically shovelling snow outside their homes.

Rather spoils the fun of towing the kids to school on a sled when every 5 meters there's a perfectly swept bit you have to drag it across.

Reminds me of the "we can only send helmets" to Ukraine thing ... that apparently wasn't a real hard and fast rule but when originally presented you would have thought it was some magical rule set in stone.

TIL the entire German work culture is literally the Nuremberg defense. A bit on the nose.

Didn't the Germans get in trouble for "just following the rules" back in the mid-20th century?

> you were just implementing the rules, and you cannot be held accountable

That kind of explains why they tried to pull it of at Nuremberg. And why some nazis that weren't sentenced internationally got good jobs in post-war Germany. For Germans they weren't really at fault if they were just following procedures.

The privatization of the train system in Germany was a particularly insane disaster that is only now, 30 years later, being undone/repaired.

If you look at an org chart of the DB these days, the most fascinating part is that DB consists of almost 600 separate corporate entities that are all supposed to invoice each other.

Speaking with insiders, it appears that when the privatization happened, the new corporate structure took what was essentially every mid-size branch of the org chart and created a separate corporate entity, with cross-invoicing for what would normally normal intra-company cooperation. I think the (misguided) goal was to obtain some form of accountability inside a large organisation that had been state-funded and not good at internal accounting.

This fragmentation lead to insane inflexibility, as each of the 600 entities has a separate PnL and is loathe to do anything that doesn’t look good on their books.

Add to this a history of incompetent leadership (Mehdorn, who also ran AirBerlin into the ground, and who was also responsible for the disastrous BER airport build-out), repeated rounds of cost-cutting that prioritized “efficiency” over “resiliency of the network” etc. etc.

DB is currently undergoing a massive corporate restructuring to simplify the 600+ entity structure, but there has been a massive loss of expertise, underinvestment in infrastructure, poor IT (if you see a job ad for a Windows NT4 admin, it’s likely DB), etc. etc. — it’ll take a decade or more to dig the org out of the hole it is in.

>invest more relative to their passenger load.

For Switzerland does this account for the almost double salaries or only absolute spending?

If you spend 1€ in Switzerland I imagine you get much less work output than for 1€ in Germany.

That's the crux: we must invest in trains instead of planes.

The German rails network went downhill when they decided to socialize the losses and privatize the profit. Failure is blamed on the grunt workers, which are absolutely not interested in taking responsibility as a result of this. The fact that there are rotting railways everywhere and the DB waits until it gets so bad for cities to step in and take over part of the cost is a wonderful example of this. The new ICE's speed is actually lower than previous generations.

I have seen this systemic problem in other domains I worked in. The problems are very similar, and at the end of the day I can somewhat relate to the workers attitude of "why should I lean out of the window if I get punished anyway". But in some cases the workers are unfireable and oftentimes it is exactly that attitude that let the management get away with the terrible working conditions (most of the times more psychological than physical abuse) so it feeds into each other.

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Some cultures are more sticklers for creating and following rules and bureaucracy than others, though.

A good example: Here in North America I'll jaywalk without a thought if there's no traffic. In Germany, you'll get grandmothers calling you a child-killer for setting a bad example if you did the same.

Another example: Both France and Germany spend roughly the same amount (in raw Euros) on their militaries. France (which ALSO spends and develops a lot of their own kit) has a functional and effective military, including the only non-American nuclear aircraft carriers, and a bunch of nuclear attack and ballistic submarines and it's own nuclear deterrent. Germany is barely able to maintain their much smaller infrastructure because of its ineffective bureaucracy (there was a scandal a few years ago where over 80% of their euro fighters were combat ineffective due to lack of maintenance).

The best strategy I've found with such bureaucrats is to bike shed them with an obvious but easy problem that you fix with much adieu so they can feel like they've found you out and feel like they've done something. Meanwhile they will ignore all the subtler things that might be much harder for you to deal with.

Reminds me of being en route with Lufthansa to Germany, needing an emergency landing in Turin, being shepherded onto a new working plane by Italians, then continuing to Germany where the whole plane load arrived without tickets from Turin...

The gate people tried to tell us it was impossible to be there without tickets, as if we were somehow collectively hiding them and a bit of persuasion would convince us to find the non-existent tickets! Not one person found they had a ticket, despite this allegedly being impossible.

Oh yes. Driving over from Copenhagen to Malmoe (10 km) it's like you've entered the land of the robots. It's nice and clean though.

I worked in the Swedish office of a multinational for a couple of years and the one experience I had where Swedes were selling a complex multi-million euro project to Germans was one of the most bureaucratically filled initiatives I’ve ever experienced in my life. Not sure if the project ever really took off, but I’m thankful I was able to avoid it beyond the initial week of discussions.

It is certainly my biggest dislike factor with my stay in Germany, and I'm still struggling to come to terms with it: do I dislike it enough to compel me to move away? is this something I can accept? How much can I influence and improve things that I directly interact with?

It seeps in everywhere too, with almost all aspects.

Day-to-day with restaurants, cafe, shops. Almost all interaction feels like it's actively checked if it's in their process or job description. Shop staffs are typically disengaged and can't really help you with anything outside the normal process.

Healthcare, both receptionist and doctors. You can see the rushed service because they are only compensated for limited amount of time by the state insurance. This took me a while to figure out; the process really defines what treatment you get, with what equipments, as well as the duration, and they have to do their best with the constraints put by the process.

An example: with Wurzelkanalbehandlung, the process says (at least back then) only 1 hour of Laborkosten can be compensated by the state insurance. This means if the dentist took more than 1 hour to work on you, that would be done at their personal loss, and thus the incentive to rush the procedure.

Going private helps (they tend to be more relaxed after the mention of of Privatzahler, and gives you access to newer equipments not yet acknowledged by the state insurance processes), but you still have to research, find, and pick the right practice.

Bureaucracy, administrative. You often have to deal with clerks that just go "I just work here", the rules says this and there's nothing I can do, throws hand in the air. Goodbye, next person please!

In day-to-day work, I can also see it. New hires tend to be more into the work, and questions things, but the system does push everyone to just follow the process and not do anything more. I've seen my colleagues slowly shift into this mode, delivering what is outlined, nothing more, not questioning the intent behind the work (or at least, doing it much less than before, because the system does not incentivise that).

American bus drivers wouldn't do this either, at least not in the cities I lived in.

First World was US/NATO aligned. Second World was USSR/Warsaw Pact aligned. Third world was unaffiliated with either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World

People in the USSR at least had the good fortune of already living in a world where they were highly adept at recycling and barter and maintenance, and in the case of the chechens also community self defense.

I think most of America would be fucked as most people don't know to how to do anything but their job plus buy things with money from their job. The top 25% of handy people might be able to change their own oil and that is it (not that they can't learn more, but it takes time).

https://old.reddit.com/r/fifthworldproblems/top/?sort=top&t=...

Collapse is the other end of the spectrum. This is an institution whose practices/policies only serve itself instead of its customers/purpose.

It's progress, taken to its extreme. From a certain point of view it's effectively the same as collapse.

Safety failures are not the only type of failure.

The train worked, the railway did not.

Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall are fourth world stateless nations.

And quite frankly, they don't give a fuck. They have been conditioned not to give a fuck from an early age; the system works 99% of the time, so nobody really has to care about each other. There is literally no benefit in giving a fuck about another person, in fact it is quite possible that you'll end up being punished by the system for breaking the rules. It is a Leviathan whale state swimming through the sea with millions of little fish sucking on it, and they sure as hell don't care about the few who fall off during the trip.

My point is that, in a country where people act like well, people (and not robots), someone would be bothered by this and might try to solve the problem in some creative and unexpected way. Someone might think "damn, we're ruining these peoples' christmas, let's do something" and then fix it somehow. Here it's more like "well bummer, deal with it" in both cases. I doubt that a bunch of adult, highly-skilled people could not have a conversation over the phone and arrange for a train to stop 5 minutes on a track so people could get off. Are you saying that there are so many trains in the same track at the same time that stopping for 5 minutes would cause an accident? I think that a lack of willingness to give a fuck is much more likely.

The most important thing is to learn to expect and plan ahead, so that you don't get caught by surprise as much as it is reasonably possible. I do not expect anyone to act with humanity, so I start playing the system as early as possible. If I think something might be a problem in two weeks, I start calling them today, knowing that it'll take them two weeks minimum to take me seriously. If I go the the ER, I take movies and games with me (and lots of paracetamol) because I know it'll take several hours for anyone to even say hello to me, let alone do something concrete. I also, maybe more importantly, do not expect anything from the human side. Basically I see them as robots, so I deal with them as robots: explain everything calmly, repeat myself 100 times, and even more importantly, do not get angry. You get angry, you lose. It doesn't matter if you have an internal bleeding and you're dying, the moment you start screaming, nobody will take you seriously anymore. You have to be slow, strong, and systematic: repeat yourself, call again in 1h, then in 4h, then next morning, then next morning, until at some point something happens.

It's not orthogonal. If you look at societies that industrialized early, their social development diverged hundreds of years before industrialization actually happened. When my dad was born in 1951, 90% of the population of Bangladesh lived in villages in extended kinship networks and multi-generational households. In such an environment, the informal rules of families dominate society. Bangladeshis have a very relaxed attitude towards time and rules. It's not a big deal if you're late in my dad's village, because everyone knows you and that you'll arrive an hour or two after the official time and will plan accordingly. If you inconvenience someone, it's not a big deal, because you're all family and you'll reciprocate the accommodation another time. (That's a key point! Kinship bonds form a kind of collateral that ensures that accommodations will be reciprocated in the future.) Plus, the country is blessed with three growing seasons, so nobody is in a hurry anyway! And if you're persistently causing problems, it will percolate to higher ups within the families and they'll set you straight through informal processes.

Contrast somewhere like England, where, for whatever reason, extended family networks began breaking down as far back as the middle ages. People in England were living in small nuclear family units back in the 14th century. When your neighbors aren't related to you, that forces people to rely on formal rules and procedures. You can't count on future reciprocity backed by the collateral of kinship ties. And if someone is causing problems, you need formal systems, based on rules and procedures, to deal with them.

These formalized systems are, in turn, far more scalable! You can plan and organize civilization building when everyone is socialized to follow formal timetables in a way that you cannot when people are socialized to follow the informal timing consensus. And the lack of individual accommodation is a feature when you scale from small networks of a dozen or so related individual to millions of people moving through the London Tube every day.

A small amount of rule breaking is tolerable, even beneficial, within a society where everyone otherwise rigidly adheres to rules.[1] But there is no developed society that isn't rule-based at the baseline level. In some places, like England, this rule-focused culture developed organically. In other places, like Japan, there was a deliberate effort to destroy extended family networks and clan structures and replace those frameworks with systems of formal rules and procedures.

[1] America is a good example of a society that is less rules-oriented than say Japan, and arguably derives some benefits from that. But even in America, we pay a price for that. Americans just aren't as good at large scale social organization as the Japanese or Taiwanese, and we compensate by structuring our society in a more decentralized way where less such organization is required in the first place. Ronny Chieng has a funny bit about how New Yorkers try to force open subway doors that have already closed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifX0oafDe3Q. This behavior, multiplied by thousands of occurrences per day, slows down the whole system.

Right, but Germany has stations every few miles. Here in America the next station might be hours and hundreds of miles away. Better to stop ¼ mile away instead; people will hardly know the difference. The point is that if for any reason they cannot reach the station then they’ll always stop at the nearest safe place instead. The crew always have an alternate stop.

For really long construction work they’ll actually build an entirely separate train station, like they did in Denver Colorado a few years back. They knew that the construction of the new station downtown would take a few years, so they built a really cheap platform a few miles away on a siding and moved all the arrivals and departures there for the duration.

Lol, most Amtrak platforms are at track level! I think the cars are 8” above track level, not waist high.

Every car has a metal step that will be placed in front of the door by the attendant.

Edit: Oh, except for a few lines on the East Coast where the trains are only single–level. Those are 48” above the top of track.

The trains carry a step that can be placed on the ground outside the door, so you can step down from the car.

See "An Excessive Explanation of North American Platform Heights": https://youtu.be/duASHyreTRg

And now you tell me how those doors function at 110cm height instead of ground level ;)

https://media.amtrak.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Autumn-1...

> bit of a safety issue

OK, so you disgorge however many people, at what age, with or without babies in ipushchairs or people in wheelchairs, onto the tracks, and they avoid the passing 100mph trains, they then walk along in the dark and rain for a few miles looking for a gap in the fence?

Sure, just a "bit" of an issue.

Usually the train driver is in radio contact with central control and can request changes to the points, signals etc so they can make unscheduled stops. For example if there's a medical emergency on board and a passenger needs to be transferred to an ambulance.

Of course doing this can have ripple effects on other services, and if a common factor has severely delayed dozens of different trains, the central control room might not have enough staff to deal with dozens of unscheduled stop requests.

Yes that was my point.

France has a reputation of being permanently on strike, but is perhaps the only European country that is simultaneously northern European and Mediterranean at the same time.

>Yes. That is a good reason to not stop without a platform. But I tell you one even better. Look at the layout of the Troisdorf station. There are tracks with platforms, and there are through tracks. The trough tracks are surrounded by live tracks on both sides. If the train stops there, unlocks the doors, and somehow coaxes the people to climb down those people are immediately on a live track. To get off of it they have to cross the track and climb up a raised platform. And who knows when is a train coming on that track. The risk here is not breaking the nose of one old lady (which by the way, can easily kill an old person) but forcing hundreds of passengers into a meat grinder. But go on with your snark.

This is unfortunately exactly an example of the type of take I was complaining about.

Just let the people who are actually there and can actually see the situation use some judgement.

Arbitrarily halting traffic on an arbitrary section of track isn't something the parties involved don't know how to do. It's something that happens somewhere in the rail network every day for some reason or another. It's a supported function. I trust them to be able to invoke it.

No, I don't mean that at all. I've had to complain about things before and they accuse you of shouting (when you're not). They almost want people to swear, and rile them up, because that gives them the excuse to do nothing.

They did this for me once on an Intercity or whatever they call them these days. I fell asleep and woke up to my Mum waving at me from the station platform in Lancaster or somewhere wondering why I had not gotten off the train as it pulled out of the station. The conductor was kind enough to stop the train at some random cattle grid barely-even-a-platform in the middle of nowhere and radioed the train coming the other direction to pick me up. Bless.

Germany does actually have station fees. And DB isn't the only operator. The RRX trains, one of which OP talked about, are operated by DB and National Express, ordered by the RRX group comprised of VRR, go.Rheinland, NWL, SPNV-Nord and NVV, running on tracks and stations by DB InfraGO.

Transport for Wales has nationalised its trains. A lot of the infrastructure is paid for by the state as well.

By the way, I can remember the state run British Rail and that was bad too. Neither nationalisation nor private operators have done well with British trains over the past fifty years.

The current UK government is re-nationalising the railways. Several operators are currently nationalised (and the train fares have dropped!), and the plan is for all of them to be, once the contracts run out.

There was a post on hn by someone who built a model to predict which trains are going to be late to get ticket refunds and travel for free (albeit slower).

At the end of the day you have to actually shoot someone from time to time to keep everyone in line.

It's way cheaper to not wrong people or to not walk up so close to that line than it is to secure the full stack and pay everyone what you'd need to pay them to compensate them for the risk of being the unlucky guy who gets scalped on livestream or whatever form sloppy retribution takes.

Was that the situation?

Of course it does. So it also makes sense that if you are operating that train, you make sure you don't end up on tracks 3, 4 or 7. You stop and verify that the signalling and routing is in place to let you stop at that station before it becomes too late and that option becomes impossible.

This is basic management, it's basic competence.

The train was misrouted because nobody cared about routing it properly: the driver, the conductor, the signallers, the routers, the management. Something weird happened and everyone shrugged and started to hum "Que sera, sera" to themselves, rather than committing to doing a job in the passengers' interests.

in switzerland it’s amazing. france is way more efficient too because the low and high speed rails are largely physically separated. in germany everything shares everything and they rely on proper scheduling to make it work. which is never proper

In some places, European trains are decent. I don't have much experience with US trains other than them having very high steps to get onto.

Europe is a big place

I have no idea, but don't you think that the driver would have rather stopped at that station, instead of traveling an additional 50km or whatever?

The situation is rather an indicator of how bad public transportation has become due to lack of investments, maintenance, expansion, etc. For years they didn't care a bit about this.

Why should a driver risk his life and/or job to save the day, when the issue is bigger than him/her?