Comment by pcurve
4 hours ago
"if you've ever driven a German car, you'll realize that the car was built for engineers and not for end users "
cracks me up. I once leased a BMW for 3 years. By the time I returned the car, I still didn't what all the cryptic buttons for HVAC and other controls. They just refused to follow established automotive ergonomic conventions.
Anyway, my father used to do business with Germans for a long time. He had many interesting stories to share, but one that has always stayed with me is, his disdain for how cheap / penny pinching his German companies and their employees were when doing deals. This was in the 90s, so definitely passed the West Germany glory days.
My take is, in the era of global competition, Germans didn't know how to strike the right balance and effective allocate resources. Where to compromise, and where not to. I don't know if it's sheer stubbornness or they're just wired differently.
As a German I believe it's more about demographics. The country and all large companies are run by older people who only saw rising prosperity their entire life. They all have settled in a comfortable place and do not seriously care about the future anymore. They just want to keep the system running until retirement.
There is no long-term strategic thinking anymore , only feel-good policies and short-term cash burning for their respective clientele.
As a young person it infuriates me but there is nothing we can do.
>how cheap / penny pinching his German companies and their employees were when doing deals
I think most people(Americans mostly) don't have the faintest idea how true that is right now. Here's a comment of mine from a few weeks ago giving such a present-day example that will blow your brains of how cheap german companies are. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47018023
I feel like German companies know they lost the innovation race (I mean companies that aren't Zeiss), they lost the cheap manufacturing race "thanks" to Russian gas dependence and ideological denuclearisation before enough renewables were built, so all that's left for them now to stay afloat is reducing labor and operating costs by offshoring and pinching all the pennies they can find, but even that it not enough since from where I stand there's weekly corporate bankruptcies and layoffs and that's including the fact that the government has been speeding like crazy the last 3+ years to make sure the private sector industry doesn't completely collapse.