The main reason middle managers hire ineffective developers in Germany and elsewhere is that the job market is in a state of permanent crisis: the demand is so high that now everyone calls "senior" the people who cannot even estimate the performance of an algorithm or didn't bother to learn something new in the last 5 years. This applies both to developers and to managers and is complicated by the fact, that large and medium corporations usually don't speak English (so cannot benefit from European open labor market) and thus cannot easily import talent from abroad.

Another part of the problem is that in many industries there's a strong lobby of local companies which like medieval guilds block any new competitors from entering the markets. APIs and open standards still barely exist - you cannot simply plug in your new fancy service into an enterprise environment, but you have to pay plenty of money to some Verband to get some crazy XML specification for file exchange. After all I've seen in IT in Eastern Europe (most of all in Russia) and USA, I'm feeling like I'm still in XX century.

There are quite a few good German developers who know enough about the car industry to stay far away from it because it's so broken. As a lowly developer, you can't fix it - you'll just get chewed up.

I've been working in the car industry for 5 years and the last 2 with a big German car manufacturer which gave us a lot of money to set up something on the side which would work better. Once we showed that we probably can do it (after 1,5 years) they started getting interested in the project and that's where the problems started.

Long story short they are forcing us to do things as they always been done even though they asked us to change them in the first place.

That happens all the time. German car companies are buying working companies and messing them up or starting new daughter companies to "do it right this time" but the contagious rot always kills those attempts surprisingly quickly. I guess that is what another poster mentioned as the changes that are currently happening. But it's not helping yet.

EAitis at its finest.

The problem with those Eastern European developers is not that they are bad developers - they are pretty good value for money in and of themselves. The problem is that they are wrapped up in the structures that are killing German automotive software. They are probably the ones that get hired to implement the crap that architects made up and that """only""" needs implementation, no questions asked. Just write the code.

Good software development just isn't structured like that at all.

Can confirm - in many industries regardless whether one works in Germany, Czechia, Slovakia, or Poland, the directory will be German. The difference being in Czechia, Slovakia, and Poland the cost-cutting will be more aggressive and the decision making will be more strictly top-down. Something among the lines "just write this bloody thing, you C/Java/Angular whore".

I can second that.

No, there is. At least the jobs the Romanian gets are the cheap versions of the ones Germans have and the demand is so great that people with no IT knowledge get employed in projects where they do more wrong than right. The good developers are rare these days (most have already emigrated, the rest are in process) and the "cheap by the dozen" ones are not worth considering.

The shortage of developers in Germany is exactly the reason why people from Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa are hired in the first place. There's plenty of reports and publications discussing this shortage from last 10-15 years - it's not new and it has never been solved.

Just an example: https://www.handelsblatt.com/today/companies/wirtschaftswund...

I don't know what kind of CTO you are (I'm CTO too), but if you were hiring recently in Germany, you should be able to notice the average time to fill a senior software engineer position is several months. This is the reality in which we live.

Completely wrong: there is no shortage of developers, there is a shortage of competent people. Huge difference. Not a CxO myself, but high enough to feel the pain of hiring good people, especially when HR does not allow to pay them properly - for them all developers are the same, so they all get about the same salary.

Ok, that also fits my understanding of the market - I don’t receive all the applications, because our HR team is good at filtering. Unfortunately, German businesses are very strong in salary negotiations, so it’s a whole big thing to sell the idea of fair market compensation inside the company.

is that not the case everywhere?

Our company is trying to hire 50 more developers until end of the year and its hard, we get them from all over the world, especially India and Africa has a lot of good talent nowadays but also east europeans. But it's still hard to find good people.

Hey I'm a full stack dev looking forward to move to europe; I consider myself "nicht schlecht" as a developer; already lived 1 year in Germany (worked as an intern in VW) and would have to study the language again but could be up and running before the end of the year. Hopefully your company is looking for some C# devs among those 50, email in my profile

> subpar academic CS

There is a lot of really good CS/math research coming from German uni's, I would not call it subpar.

Academic CS in Germany is world-class.

Yeah, which areas?

"model-driven development"

The academic side of things? :)

as someone who worked at a German car company, I agree with this. There's a lot of middle managers who don't really understand what problem needs to be solved first in order to ship high-quality software. There has been a lot of movement internally, though. I sure hope they move fast enough to stay relevant in the next 10 years.

> If good software is produced in Germany

It is not. I worked in 3 people startups, 15 people web shops, 50 people IoT shops, and very very big enterprise software corps in Germany and I can tell you what you say can be copy&pasted into any of them. The only advantage of smaller companies is that they can't afford to have as much middle management. Therefore the "visionaries" are forced to live closer to reality and work with small teams. But they certainly don't like it and move to your model as soon as possible.

Well, I know of at least one highly effective development company that twice erred on the side of introducing a new management layer too late because nobody particularly wanted another layer.

I think we actually did a pretty good job at 6wunderkinder with wunderlist.

> How does a middle manager expand their empire? Certainly not by leading a small, effective organization. The head count needs to grow, so the middle manager wants ineffective developers.

I've seen this in every company I've worked in. Importance of projects is measured in how many people work on them; you'd think that creating efficiencies and managing the work in an extra small team would be valued, instead you fall into complete irrelevance.

I wonder what’s the majority of the source code in German like? Is it mostly in English or German?

European English for code. It's sufficiently different from American that it's sort of got its own rules at this point. It's difficult to understand sometimes.

Most docs at my >200 dev shop including contractors are in German though.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-02/the-en...

Based on what I've seen source code is almost exclusively English, apart from a few identifiers here and there that are hard to translate, e.g. legal terms.

Where I’m at, the source code is English even though I’m the only non-German in the company (and I have been learning German for a while). Documentation is a mix of English and German.

Majority I would suspect in English, but there is plenty of "German" source code, including hilarious mixes of both languages in method names etc.

English