> I actually think Germany would be really good at digital infrastructure if they stopped being afraid of friend computer.
They still have the automotive / electrical engineering mindset on computers and software. Software in Germany is built to achieve a means to an end. It is never the end goal itself.
>Software in Germany is built to achieve a means to an end. It is never the end goal itself.
Well, that's how it should be, I don't write software to worship any software deities, I use it to get a job done. If you don't you end up with that 700 dollar useless gadget that was basically a python API wrapper in a box that everyone rightfully made fun of.
We can do a lot of things better in software in Germany but treating it as an engineering discipline is a good thing, I think even the US is probably past the peak of the zero interest free money toy product phase and people are focusing more on real industry again.
What he means is that Germans are less susceptible to the SV bullshit artists that are hyping up their bubble unicorns for VC money, inflating companies with workers just to sell them at peak of the hype before cutting all those “positions” and then en-shittifying the product.
Technology coasted for a few decades gaining public’s trust as an unquestionable improvement over the past. That reputation is wearing out faster than I’d like to admit.
I hear from friends and family that SV big tech are increasingly equated with surveilence, credit card leaks, and destructive games of billionaires detached from reality. I had a long potluck talk with a stranger that was convinced ChatGPT is analogous to another crypto scam. It blew my mind and opened my eyes that could be a popular opinion.
I agree Germans are less susceptible to SV bullshit artists, but they also miss out on the upside for game changing ideas. Whether this is a net negative or net positive is yet to be determined. Up to this point, it has been Germany’s financial loss to over index on the engineeriness. Maybe it is America’s loss to over index on the financial outcomes and the truly world changing ideas and those very same ideas can be a net negative. I would have said 2 months ago that you would be hard pressed to find people on this message board who would agree with the latter, but I think that may have changed significantly recently.
As a German coming from Mannheim, and now living on the Canadian West coast, I have to say that this is exactly the mindset that makes it so difficult to innovate in Germany. While people have a top education and know everything they need to, they don't have a "digital mindset". I think of myself now as computing process, and see myself as a cyberneticist in the German philosophical tradition of Hegel, Marx, Hilbert, Gödel and Bloch, but even I more often than necessary mistrust innovations.
Almost all the science fiction and cybernetic work of the last 75 years came either out of the Eastern block, or out of the US. There is basically no German sci fi vision, and there is extreme reluctance to speculative, big picture thinking as it is pursued in Silicon Valley. Software companies grow quickly and need a very different approach. Silicon Valley mostly understands this scaling aspect and winner take all markets really well. German investors are cheap and extremely risk averse, I tried to build a software company in Germany and it is hard.
While a lot of the current AI work was also done in Germany, e.g. by Schmidhuber, Germans are stuck in their business model. I recommend Münchau's book "Kaput" (or one of his podcast interviews) on how poorly Germans have adapted to the non-industrial aspects of a modern economy (read: "services"). I really hope that more tech founder thinking like Benz, Bosch or Siemens returns to Germany in a modern form. But I don't see it yet, and Germans are still super reactive and conservative to larger changes. The Greens tried to think a bit out of the box, and were heavily punished for it. In general there is basically no political representation for building a new successful economy. At best there is this nice little narrative about the long established "Mittelstand", which has produce almost zero software companies. The first step right now would be to own the idea of the EU, and wanting to win instead of complaining.
I'm not German and have only made a couple of short visits to Germany, so I have no basis on which to judge your statement that Germans don't have a digital mindset.
But if that is indeed true, I find it equally interesting the Germany has been an important center for the development of electronic music. Berlin in particular is "arguably the world capital of underground electronic music" (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/21/arts/music/women-djs-berl...)
No, he lives in Switzerland now (Lugano as far as I know). Switzerland is a big magnet for European talent, as is Germany to a lesser degree. My point though was that Germany was not lacking the thinkers to drive a technological revolution, it is rather the society that does not really have the mindset for radical changes and forward thinking.
> Software in Germany is built to achieve a means to an end. It is never the end goal itself.
How do explain the explosion of non-embedded software companies in Berlin in the last 20 years? On the continent, it is hard to beat the Berlin tech scene for start-ups.
They still have the automotive / electrical engineering mindset on computers and software. Software in Germany is built to achieve a means to an end. It is never the end goal itself.