Comment by vachina
10 hours ago
My guess is German labor laws do not allow hustling. Progress will be slow if everyone kinda just coast on cruise control.
10 hours ago
My guess is German labor laws do not allow hustling. Progress will be slow if everyone kinda just coast on cruise control.
Labour laws have much less of an impact than the work or overall culture.
Sweden has quite strong labour protection but can be much more innovative than Germany because there's much less emphasis in respecting titles, seniority, and authority than the Germans. German education has a big emphasis on bowing down to authority from early age, Sweden is much more lax (and even though Jantelagen isn't a big thing in modernity it still can affect modern Scandinavia in general).
Blaming labour laws for issues arising from culture is a tired jab, it's not the culprit. You can find that out by working for a German company vs a Swedish one, it's starkly different.
>German education has a big emphasis on bowing down to authority from early age
Ah, good ol' legacy of the education system implemented by Prussia, who wanted an army of conformist soldiers following orders, and not free thinkers risking to upset the apple cart. Great mentality if all you want is waging war though :)
And this mentality persist to this day, where given a set of rules, other successful related cultures like Dutch, Brits or Swedes will first use common sense when interpreting and applying them, whereas Germans will tend to blindly follow those rules by the book even if they don't make sense in that specific context.
It's difficult to uproot people from their ways, when they've only lived in Plato's cave allegory.
> Great mentality if all you want is waging war though
Arguably not; in the end it produced a brittle general staff who could not accept that they needed to rethink all their war plans based on the political constraints of time (ironic since Clausewitz came out of that exact tradition).
"Law of Jante" (jantelagen) is a double edged sword and can work in favour of innovation. In good cases, it means both subordinates and bosses intuitively understand that titles are theatre, and anyone can present new ideas and challenge old ideas.
Yup, that's my experience after 10+ years in Sweden. It's a double-edged sword in case its tenets are used to shut diverging opinions but overall, and again in my experience, I've seen it much more as a pervasive culture of listening to others, considering their opinions even if they are below in the totem pole, and even the "consensus building" culture that many despise I've experienced in the form of convincing others why your opinion is sound.
It feels to me a decent approach for equalising anything that could devolve into hierarchical thinking. As you mention it also has another edge which can indeed be a hindrance but I haven't experienced that side (at least not yet).
German people have strict laws but, especially hackers, they do not always follow them.