I mean, Fraunhofer is a major German research org and it should be in their business to promote such solutions. To fire something like this out, in front of the people who definitely attended those universities, that was shocking.

To this day I don’t know if I was simply naive or if my question was stupid in any way.

Students can get doctorates directly from German universities and research is done there, but it's just not organized like American universities. Prime prestige centers are research institutes and they're spread around the country.

What is fairly common is employers reminding employees to take their vacation days before they expire. Vacation days from year n expire in April or so of year n+1. That is intended to prevent postponing vacations to never (maybe until switching jobs).

All this talk about labour laws etc. its like people hallucinating, cause in my world this just aint real.

Complaining without asking for legal help, well don't complain.

And given we are talking about IT here, IG Metal is another place to get help.

That looks like a case that needs to be reported to work inspection authorities.

I am surprised from this quoted comment. Are German unis really bad? Why is there such a perception?

The Fraunhofer CEO probably meant that the research part of German universities is bad, which is their main "competitor". This is still a ridiculous take and I attribute this to the general arrogance that was already mentioned by GP.

Most US courses did not count as credit for my masters because they are too easy to get 100% in and they rarely cover even half of the average course load at TUM.

Though most of those measures are about research output (# papers published, # high-impact papers, # awards won by faculty weighted by award prestige, # post-docs placed to tenure-track positions, # conferences chaired, # journal editors...)

:shrug:

That's one of the things that are really hard to compare, I guess.

It shouldn't need to be said, but no amount of Nobel prizes in the world is going to make one whit of difference for introductory calculus instruction. When the prime research centers are decoupled from the universities and these silly little metrics, it's no wonder that European universities are "bad."

It's like saying that American universities are the best on the "amount spent on American football facilities per student" ranking. It's true, but the other universities might not be competing on that particular metric and focusing on other ones.

That doesn't seem like what they're optimizing for. Public institutions tend to optimize for maximum budget, maximum head count, and maximum power.