> What is wrong with IT culture at German car manufacturers?

Don't know about BMW in particular but I went to university in close vicinity to another large german car manufacturer. They do basically nothing in house. Everything is outsourced to suppliers (who often outsource their stuff again). There is enormous price pressure among the suppliers and no real room for culture. Also Java, everything is Java.

But the companies are slowly seeing that its a problem and start building up their own dev teams with "hip" offices in Berlin and so on.

Of course there are always exceptions.

> But the companies are slowly seeing that its a problem and start building up their own dev teams with "hip" offices in Berlin and so on.

Yeah, they look exactly like this: https://welcometobusinesstown.tumblr.com/post/111400877481/t...

Indeed, if you read the employee reviews on Kununu of MB's hip internal Berlin startup you'll find the same toxic culture has been carried over from the Mothership. The problem is German bigcorps don't know how to do culture in modern software. They want to carry the same level of strict manager focused micromanagement from the factory production lines to the software developers.

It's latency, as the key fob has to communicate with the German servers, and that round-trip takes a while.

.......

I'm only kind of joking, I don't know the real reason, but I dislike the fact I can't just get a simple mechanical car. It worked for decades, why did we need to add janky software to everything?

Hey, it's not easy REST-ing in German:

{"AnfrageArt":"Personenerkennungsschlüsselanforderungsanfrage", "ParameterListe":["HerstellerSpezifischePersonenkraftfahrzeugidentifikationsnummer":"1NXBR12E31Z463785"]}

}

This is giving me flashbacks to reverse-engineering some German-made code with only a veeery basic understanding of German and no technical dictionary. Google Translate usually had a seizure with technical terms and by the end I was just going by the "shape" of the code, despise having full function names. What a language!

VCDS flashbacks.

Well I am in Germany, round-trip should not be a problem -.-

It first sends to one of the Chinas, then USA, then Germany again /s

Oh I don't know, the same culture that skips over insuring that a VW e-Golf or Audi e-tron does not put up warnings to get the oil changed. Yes, they really do prompt their owners to have an oil change and service.

It simply can come down to not having a change management system let along a project management system that is effective. then there is the opposite systems, the ones where getting even a minor change in can be frustrating and results in many not bothering to fix the simple issues.

Wait are you complaining that the car tells you to take it for service? I have a 2009 VW and I actually really like this feature. I just wait for it to say service is due in 30 days and schedule something with the shop. Modern cars only need service about every 12 months so it's nice to not have to try to remember.

He's complaining his electric car, that doesn't have engine oil, is telling him to get his engine oil changed.

Tested a KIA e-Niro during the weekend and it had gas stations in the points of interest list on the infotainment system. Cute. :) To their defense, many / most gas stations sell lots of useful stuff and have services apart from gas so there is that.

> What is wrong with IT culture at German car manufacturers?

Generalized: What's wrong with the software engineering culture at hardware manufacturers?

It's not just German manufacturers. I drive a Lexus and I can relate to a lot of the things being said here. The car is wonderful but the software feels like an afterthought.

Java ?

What about java?

Java allows you to do some small errors in its complex classes and works around them silently however, this causes performance impacts.

These performance penalty get really magnified when a lot of small errors are done on a less powerful hardware.

I've found out this the hard way when I was developing Java GUI (Swing mostly) apps, and messed up the initialization sequence of the GUI a few times.

While I ses you've been downvoted, I am really curious why do you believe that? Do you have an actual, concrete example?

FWIW, it would be very weird, since Java is strongly typed, and while you can introduce bugs, not any more so than in any other, esp dynamically typed languages.

I've written quite a few Java Swing applications during the years after graduating and getting my MSc (approximately 3 years).

There's always a standard procedure to get a Swing main window running. IIRC you get the window, the canvas (layout?), layout manager then, you create and push your elements into the layout, fiddle with them, and lastly, set your window visible.

You can flex the process between getting the window and starting to push your elements into the layout. You can make Java implicitly create the missing parts without connecting to a variable.

If you do that, everything works as expected but, with a slight performance penalty. Everything will be ever slightly laggy. On the other hand, if you do everything by book, things run smoother. I experienced this with the apps I've written.

Some people believed me, some people don't. Some believed me after I showed the situation to them. This effect diminished in AMD64 era, and became unnoticeable after Intel Core series processors came to existence.

It was Java 6 times, so I'm not sure whether it's applicable.

That's the little lesson I've learned during developing with Java: Pay attention, do once, do right.