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.