A friend is working for Mercedes research. He can confirm all your points.

I also worked in the German car SW industry and can confirm what he said. They just don't value SW development. The only way to make decent money there was to become a manager and climb the corporate ladder. Programming was never valued and always under the pressure of off-shoring or throwing the work to talent on a visa from abroad who won't have high expectations. The closer you were to the money, like financial controller as said by the sibling, or upper management, the more you were valued, while the closer you were to "the trenches" the less you were valued.

I lived 9 years in Germany, now in Poland. For me the fact that in Poland a programmer earns significantly more than a Financial Controller was an initial shock a few years ago. But now I understand the problem is with Germany’s stubborn attitude towards everything IT, IT is just considered easy and not “real engineering” and a thereby a cost to reduce. Financial Controllers pushing numbers in Excel files are adding a lot more value, apparently in ways I still don’t fully understand. Honestly, with those salaries and that culture Mercedes is probably not getting the best talent out there.

Absolutely the truth has been spoken! In my experience the management are physics or mechanics engineers. The rest, I can only confirm. I would buy any day of the week a mechanical thing from Germany tool, or whatever. But when it comes to software NO F*ING WAY! Absolut trash.

For more details, see my other posts on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34164748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34901394

It is not just Germany, but software development culture everywhere else that is not Silicon Valley tends to be like you describe. There has not been great Nokia software, great Samsung software, great Sony software. Only hardware. This is why challenger banks and banks app are so popular in Europe: they have a UX that works - something that old organisations constantly fail to produce.

Cars are just one piece in this greater cultural phenomenom. There is a reason why e.g. Android Auto is better, with all its flaws, than the competition. There is a reason why people like Tesla's software.

> 3) My hypothesis of why German IT products are almost always horrible is that they're rarely thinking from customer's (or developer's!) perspective. They may be proud of some specs of their products but the overall thing is then often just a bunch of related subsystems "pragmatically" tied up with some duct tape.

While that is commonly true, I've also found that driving a modern Audi or a Mercedes is still much better thought out from UX and comfort perspective in comparison to many vehicular products from Sillicon Valley collaborators. Software might be a bit laggy, but many times there are plenty of nice user respecting features that you won't find in modern agile products (basic operations like "reroute me around this closed road" or opening a glove compartment are stupidly complicated or impossible on brilliantly developed products like Tesla).

The Germans also have one other benefit: my car UI doesn't just randomly completely change with updates like Android Auto or Tesla UI does. I'm not a guniea pig for some product manager trying to get his promotion with redesigns.

There has to be a balance somewhere between the dinosaur process of German brands and coked up 5-second attention spam of Sillicon Valley products.

"chop off left pinky" - that's an interesting thing to say. Have You by any chance been working for a small Japanese outfit these past few years?

No it's a shout-out directed toward all the emacs users out there

I've been working a few years in various SW-related roles in the broader MB ecosystem. It helps to understand those german car manufacturers are not monolithic entities, there is a confusing system of subsidiaries dealing with software, often overlapping in scope and competing over projects. Hence, a MB software engineer would often work at DFS, DMS, MBition, FreeNow or one of those shops. By design those do not adhere to corporate standards and they emulate start-ups, i.e. k8s, aws, slack, table tennis, bro culture, beer.

It's a curious setup because most of those subsidiaries ("corporate startups") are huge money sinks and produce little of value. Salary is decent/good, the offices are lavish, and the tech can be interesting. The downside: you cannot shake the feeling of being on a large playground with rich, generous but eventually indifferent parents. I'd say in germany, it's a good place for juniors to pick up some technologies and skills, quite a few former colleagues ended up at prestigious tech companies later.

Core technology like autonomous driving, Engines, CAN, etc... is developed in-house with more rigor, compliance and process, and the disregard for "software engineering" is also due to those agile software subsidiaries producing sloppy 2nd tier, unsuccessful auxiliary technology like apps, services or entertainment stuff. Unlike maybe Tesla, MB or BMW could not afford the reputational damage for selling half-broken autonomous driving.