It hasn’t but it’s on the right track. I am working as a developer in one of the federal agencies and have direct contact with the efforts.
It helps a lot that public agencies can now offer a so called IT Zulage of a few hundred euros to 1000 per months that brings salaries on par with the private sector. In my team, this worked wonders and we managed to get some really good people.
On the other hand, the task is enormous, we were discussing last week that if we had double the man power, we would still have the same workload, because we push back on a lot of things. We have about 70 projects that we wrote and maintain and a backlog of another 12 waiting to be started.
BWI has the same problem, I’ve been approached multiple times by them for this project, which from my knowledge is being intensely worked since many years.
German engineers typically point at politicians to blame for projects being late. But they share the blame. Over-engineering and lack of push-back against feature creep seem to be standard. Often times, the feature creep is homemade, by the engineers themselves. Other countries get things done simpler and thus faster. Be a bit pragmatic and boom, it's live and works. In Germany you first need to create a bunch of Arbeitsgruppen in a new Bundesamt fur Warmeluft and protocols and certificates and meetings and Pflichtenheft and by the time this thing has grown to 1000 pages you realize that your team is much too small and you need to hire more people and it just keeps growing.
Meanwhile, other countries have offered a web portal for years with a digital version of the Patsientenakte and all prescriptions in one place. Works. Not in Germany though.
> On the other hand, the task is enormous, we were discussing last week that if we had double the man power, we would still have the same workload, because we push back on a lot of things. We have about 70 projects that we wrote and maintain and a backlog of another 12 waiting to be started.
Yes, see interamt.de for open positions. You have to be fluent, I’m afraid, everything is done in German and you need to understand what’s needed and relay your own thoughts properly. There are many specific terms and processes and abbreviations
I took a quick look at some positions in Munich and the pay did not look very competitive with industry. However, public service has other advantages, and if you prefer to not rent your soul to Capital like so many of us do, I think the salaries looked pretty nice compared to other government jobs. Which is pretty much the deal everywhere, right?
(You can find the rate tables by doing a web search for the code listed next to “Entgelt/Besoldung.”)
I got a kick out of the fact that Street Cleaner came up in my search for “IT and Telecommunication:”
As a user of some public sector German IT Services (provided by dataport to be specific) I have to say that I wouldn't work on them for double my current wage.
The jank was incredible and just using them you could feel the spaghetti code, incompetence and age. My advice would be to stay away as far as possible. As a user and as a developer.
I wouldn’t generalize it. In our agency, we keep everything very modern, especially the tools and infrastructure, but also processes. We go to workshops and conferences and then implement what we learned.
Yes, I’ve seen some creepy stuff like 100kb of information on one line and a definition file saying from which column to each column one can find information, but we don’t do that.
With this approach, it's not likely to ever improve. If they can't get good talent to come in and "fix" things, it will probably only continue to get worse
Indeed. But that only affects me in so far as I can't avoid using the services they offer.
Besides that it is not my problem nor am I in a position to make it my problem.
I actually like the idea of becoming a public servant and bringing innovation to places that really matter for basically everyone around me, but salaries are not even in the same ballpark even with IT-Zulage.
It's not the IT salaries that are the problem, it's that many places working on government IT projects in Germany range from slow, backwards and incompetent to outright toxic. These are not environments that attract the best people but usually clueless YES men.
Yes, that’s what I heard, too. I’d probably give it a try, though, as I know similar structures from my work in FinTech, where we integrated with quite „conservative“ banks as well.
I kind of have a knack with finding the right knob on such people to get to the desired goal.
It bears repeating: this is not the case everywhere and the same principle applies to the private sector. You can usually tell from the job description and the interview
do you happen to know the salary for let's say a senior software engineer working in a big city? I would like to work for the public sector but salary was always ridiculously low
Presumably budgets. Over the last decade or so, German politics developed the fetishization of the "Schuldenbremse", an attempt to reduce the national debt (which is already fairly low) no matter what. Unfortunately the way they went about it was not to reduce overheads or make processes more efficient (if you want to do anything here in Germany, there's a decent chance there is a form for it), instead they basically cut down on any investment. Fundamentally this means that there is a massive investment backlog in the digitalization of the government and education, in internet, rail and road infrastructure etc.
And now every project seems to maximum demands, minimum budgets and zero flexibility. To make matters even more absurd, we have a ridiculous amount of federal levels, each with their own responsibilities and "approaches" to digitalization (and responsibility to save money).
For example, my mom is an office worker on a city level. The neighboring city developed a software for some process related to state law and offered it to our city. Our city, being the genius it is, does approach this state mandated process a little bit different. Instead of using the software the neighboring city developed and adjusting to their (almost identical) process, they choose to make their own software. But because they have basically zero development experience and engineering resources, they are looking to outsource. But because they don't have the budgets, they are looking for government support programs (that apparently even exist).
So yeah, even easy things are over complicated here
It's likely more sustainable to have people long term and not expensive consultants who come in, finish a project and leave again with no knowledge being retained in the team.
I'd also guess that these projects are not very isolated but very integrated with a lot of other processes and internal projects, so it's not just about converting some specs into code in a vacuum and then leaving again.
They absolutely do. I have friends working as private sector IT consultants with federal agencies as one of their clients. These projects lock them into idiotic bureaucratic processes and extensive internal politics (more than in private sector). You can help improve quite a bit but it's like moving a plowing truck through pure molasses instead of snow.
The teams are often led by government officials who will do everything to keep things as they are to protect their position, of course with little to no repercussions.
Things can change. Easy to forget that Alan Turing and a certain German called Konrad Zuse both get credit for having invented the modern computer. Generally, people seem to like to give that honor to Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse does not get a lot of love. Not that it matters either way; but this is a country that co-created modern computing. Pre and post-war Germany featured a lot of rapid change and technical innovation.
I'm based in Germany and I share the sentiment that things have been a bit backwards here in terms of a widespread reluctance to let go of paper based administration. This was awkward 14 years ago when I moved here and at this point it's just beyond pathetic. But things are changing. Germans are well aware that people outside of Germany are noticing how far behind they are and are shaking their heads at those silly naive German paper fetishists. So, there's a lot of domestic pressure to actually start fixing this. The covid crisis in the last few years forced a lot of Germans to do things with their phone that until then were completely unheard off in this country. Like paying for stuff or proving that they didn't have covid. That used to be a thing where paper and rubber stamps were the only acceptable solution.
So, I look at this as something that can change quite rapidly after not having changed much at all for decades. The will and money are there and Germans are starting to remember that they can actually get some stuff done when they put their mind to it. We're also seeing this with the current energy crisis. That crisis has unlocked budgets all over the public sector. And "digitalization" (as it is referred to here) is part of those budgets. Germans love efficiency and people have been pointing out that they haven't been very efficient. Which is embarrassing and annoying. So, they are fixing it now. There are now countless of bureaucrats tasked with actually showing some results for the inflated budgets they've been given. We're talking hundreds of billions of euros here. It's not all going to be spend wisely but some of it will yield results.
>Easy to forget that Alan Turing and a certain German called Konrad Zuse both get credit for having invented the modern computer.
Nobody forgot that, just that past successes are in no way indication of future successes.
Otherwise SV would have been in Germany/UK instead of California. But that hasn't happened.
Same how in the late '80s to early '90s everyone was saying that Japan's tech sector and economy would completely overtake the US's and yet that hasn't happened but the reverse happened. From then on US tech sector steamrolled everything. Will that last? Maybe, maybe not.
From my experiences with DMG Mori and Siemens employees servicing my equipment and managed by a 100% electronic appointment booking and part ordering systems, German society is wholly and irrevocably doomed by the move away from physical paperwork.
All German productivity will end and even German language itself will be replaced by grunts and shrugs.
In the end, I got rid of my DMG Mori machine with its Siemens control and replaced it with a Taiwanese machine that functions reliably.
The large degree of federation in the German government is something that has traditionally shown some of its ugliest sides when in comes to digitalization (e.g. every state comissioning their own underpowered solutions which are 95% identical in spec instead of pooling resources).
I think that's exactly why Matrix might be a good fit, as the technical federation aligns well with the pre-existing social federation. I'm really optimistic for that project!
