The German authorities have no incitive to digitize and fix the broken bureaucracy because for one, in their mind there's nothing wrong with it because Germany is Europe's wealthiest country so it can never be wrong, and secondly, digitizing bureaucracy means increased efficiency which means less public servant jobs and they don't want that. What they want is more bureaucracy and more cushy public servant jobs pushing pencils on great benefits. If they wintered to fix bureaucracy they would have don it already.
In German state and traditional company culture, digitization is seen as a threat, not an asset. I remember a few years agon when my gf at the time was working at a big German industrial automation company and she was struggling a lot with some horribile ineficient work process involving
copy and pasting shit to and from Excel and some VB scripts. So being still locked down to a degree and bored out of my mind, I replaced all her Excel madness with some python scripts that streamlined everything. She took that at work and proudly showed it to her boss hoping for some recognition and he said "if you wanna keep your job, don't bring stuff like this at work, we don't need it, there's nothing wrong with the way we currently do things", and then it hit me that current German software innovation culture is completely FUBAR.
> in their mind there's nothing wrong with it because Germany is Europe's wealthiest country so it can never be wrong
There's literally not a single political party that doesn't admit that Germany is being too slow here or that doesn't admit that it's embarassing. On a national and on a local level. You can Google that if you don't believe me.
> digitizing bureaucracy means increased efficiency which means less public servant jobs and they don't want that
Also wrong. There's plenty of unfillable public servant jobs in every city. Public servant jobs are not what they were in the 70s.
> In German state and traditional company culture, digitization is seen as a threat, not an asset.
Also wrong. Germany just upgraded too early, then let everything run and stopped upgrading because the current system works. That's all there is to it. It's also the reason why Romania has faster internet than Germany, for example.
> work process involving copy and pasting shit to and from Excel and some VB scripts
You're in for a wild ride when you find out what kind of IT infrastructure the world uses.
Your whole post is anecdotal and when you try to get to your own interpretation of German culture or why problems exist, you're wrong.
Don't get me wrong: Germany's digital infrastructure _is_ horrible. Just not at all for the reasons you mentioned.
One of the biggest reasons why digitization in Germany is so slow moving is that every municipality can (and does) decide on how to digitize individually.
There is no mandate for the upper levels of government to dictate which solutions are being used on a local level. Combine that with need for tendering on every single solution and you've got a big mess of small companies underbidding bigger companies that could unify the software landscape and instead build a cheaper, small solution that has zero interoperability with the neighboring municipality.
The need for fax et.al. is not because people don't know how to use computers, but because there's thousands of applications fulfilling the same exact job, but are incapable of talking to each other. Paper is currently the only compatibility layer that works everywhere.
There are ongoing efforts to provide a common data exchange format (technical working group) as well as redesigning how the software for government is being build (tendering processes, public money - public code movement, et. al.)
German government is currently incapable of doing its job in a way that is legally required, missing deadlines and not providing citizens with the services that they are entitled to because they are unable to manage the workload due to the paperbound processes. There is zero fear of humans being replaced by machines. It's rather that more and more humans are leaving government due to burnout.
But two weeks of dev time for every municipality adds up quickly.
The issue is that germany is deeply federated, different decisions are made at different levels. This could translate well into software by having the higher levels create interop standards and reference implementations that allow for plugins while the lower levels use the reference implementations (with plugin extensions for the myriad of special of special cases) or just implement their own according to the standard.
But unfortunately it doesn't translate because the german state either picks the cheapest contractor (which almost always leads to blown budgets and delays) or they pick by nepotism.
They are also dead set on waterfall projects and don't seem to realize that if they keep blowing budgets anyways, that might not be the best strategy.
> One of the biggest reasons why digitization in Germany is so slow moving is that every municipality can (and does) decide on how to digitize individually.
I find myself chuckling a little at this, because this is a common excuse for things being slow moving (or just wildly inconsistent from place to place) in the US. It's somehow comforting to know that countries of all size and population that are organized like this will still have the same problems.
To be fair, though, the US and many decent-sized municipalities do actually have a pretty good digitization story. I'm actually having trouble thinking of routine government-related things that have to be done in person... or even by mail. I guess you have to send mail to apply for or renew your passport (though the State Department already has an online form that fills out a printable application for you). And you have to go in person to get a marriage license (but I think that's a feature, not a bug; and hopefully that's not a routine activity, anyway). I had to do an interview to get my Global Entry (eliminates most of the wait at immigration when re-entering the US) thing approved, but the application process was all online, and my recent renewal was completed from my couch.
Otherwise...? I've set foot in a DMV perhaps 3 times since I moved to California 19 years ago (once when I first moved, to take the written driving test; once when I lost my driver's license and had to prove who I was to get a new one; and once when I had to apply for the ridiculous new "REAL ID"). I file my income taxes online, and whatever money I'm due or owed gets electronically transferred. I pay my property taxes online. I activated the electric and gas utility service (not quite government, but adjacent) online when I last moved. Mail forwarding when your address changes is done at the Postal Service's website. I even signed all the paperwork to buy a new home online (if you have a mortgage lender, they'll want some things signed in person, but they can someone to your house for that, and at any rate the government-related paperwork is all handled by a title company for you, at least where I live). You can even pay parking ticket and driving infraction fines online, if you don't want to contest them.
The online systems to take care of this stuff do all vary in clunkiness to some degree, but some of them are quite modern-looking and have decent or even good UX. The federal government even has 'login.gov' now, which they're slowly (very slowly) getting various agencies to adopt so you have a single sign-in. I don't think states and municipalities are allowed to use it, though.
Romania has better and cheaper internet because of the wild Wild West when everybody and every firm were allowed to pull cables anywhere they pleased. People would buy a 100-200mbit b2b connection for 40 euros and would split it between 15-20 people for 3-5 euro each. It was deregulated for so much time that when the regulations finally came everybody was already connected to fast and cheap internet and they were so used to it that whichever company tried to increase the price and lower the speed would see really shitty returns.
That’s why Digi exploded and Telekom (Romtelecom) needed years to take off. The Greek CEO of Romtelecom would hold meetings in 2008 with upper management where he would dictate loudly that Romanians only want stable internet with great customer care and that’s the direction he is leading the company. That proved not to actually be the case and he unceremoniously left the company afterwards.
Source: I lived all this and was close with the domain
With the ISDN (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Services_Digital_Ne...) network, Germany had the most advanced digital switching infrastructure in the world. It offered two 64kbit/s lines into every household, and that in the 80s. Unfortunately, due to political decisions that were highly influenced by Leo Kirch and his commercial TV provider (Premiere), Germany's public telecoms infrastructure was a) privaticed into Deutsche Telekom and b) shifted to put copper TV cable into every household instead of fiber.
In east Germany, after reunification in the 1990s, Deutsche Telekom started to introduce a fiber into every home (OPAL - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optische_Anschlussleitung) but then they shifted their focus to DSL and reusing the old copper wires for telephone lines and abandoned this. No, not only abandoned. They opened up the streets again to lay new copper wire.
We're talking about people, not parties, and I've definitely met people who have this view. To them, the German way is the proper way, and any way that's easier must be cheating or skipping something.
Of course they want digitalization, but they want a German digitalization. A good and proper German one, and not a flimsy foreign one.
Of course this is nationalistic cope, but it's pretty common.
Completely agree with you. I think it's just a problem of incentives for the people who make this decisions and work at these positions. "Verbeamtung" (tenure) also doesn't help.
When you're a bit older and have done more consultancy, you'll realize this isn't the case.
It's just that most people are quite conservative, the middle manager your gf approached was the wrong person, the manager didn't want the headache of the discussion that happens with their superiors (who wrote it, what happens if it goes wrong, where's it sending the data, how much money does he want, etc.) and also simply don't trust some random like you.
If she'd been an external consultant talking to the upper echelons, they'd definitely want this, but not as some random python script. Probably as a nice easy to install Excel plugin.
So you were talking to the wrong person.
What she should have done is use the script to work less and get accolades for being a fast and efficient worker, and never shown it to her boss.
By the way, that's exactly what I did for a g/f myself 4 or 5 years ago, and I specifically warned her not to tell her boss about it as it'd be seen as a problem, not a boon. She loved it, turned a week's worth of work into 1/2 an hour, letting her get on with the bits of the job she actually enjoyed.
As someone that haven’t ever been to Germany or interacted with any German government, but works with different governments a lot, it has really become apparent that Germans love telling the rest of the world how bad their bureaucracy is, then go on to describe something that sounds entirely common. It’s like New Yorkers telling you how good and unique bodegas are, and it turns out they either grew up in New York City or some one-traffic-light town and just haven’t had any worldly exposure.
Your personal anecdote as another commenter pointed out says much more about your lack of consulting and general workplace experience than it does about German bureaucracy. It all sounds very typical and again what I’d expect as someone that can count on one hand the number of people in Germany I’ve talked to professionally.
No, it really is bad. I've lived in the UK and in Germany and Germany is definitely worse. I don't know why you would have such an opinion on something that you, by your own admission, know nothing about.
If anything the opposite of what you're saying is true. Everyone abroad thinks Germany is so efficient and Germany has this amazing reputation, but the reputation is a lie.
Perhaps that's true of what the the GP is talking about, but if we consider the article we're discussing here, this requirement when you move to fill out a paper form when you move to a new house, and then wait possibly months for an appointment to bring that form in person to hand to a government official... dear god, that sounds Kafkaesque.
And I say this as an American who was under the impression that some significant bits of the US government bureaucracy are pretty wild. This German thing takes the cake.
Regardless, it's a little weird that you accuse GP of expressing an uninformed opinion about German bureaucracy when you admit that you only have limited secondhand experience with it yourself.
It's nice to know that here in the US we're closer to Sweden than Germany.
I think in most places the buyer of a vehicle still has to mail in a paper form (though if you buy from a car dealership, they'll take care of it), but at least in California, the seller can do their part of the transaction online (which is mainly to inform the DMV that someone else has the vehicle, so you won't be held responsible if something bad happens involving it).
And we don't have to register our moves at all; the government mostly doesn't care if we tell it where we live. Some agencies like the DMV do want to know our address so they can mail us a new driver's license or ID card when the old one expires (but these address changes and license renewals we can do online). The Postal Service will forward our mail to our new address for 3 months if we ask them to, but we don't have to if we don't care.
Obviously the government can and will eventually find out where you live if they need and want to, but there's generally no registration requirement.
It's much worse than you think here. Germany is in the stone age when it comes to digitalization. As an example, most immigrants will be waiting months to hear back from the Auslanderbehorde - and the only way to get them to reply to you within 2 weeks is to send them a fax.
While I seriously sympathize with some of the above (and below) descriptions of byzantine German bureaucracy and its broad lack of digitization, there's another side to it all that's hard not to appreciate slightly in the context of our creeping, already vast, global surveillance state of constant digital monitoring by thousands of actors both private and public, or both and feeding off each other's surveillance carrion...
German administration is already understaffed, and this will get much worse due to increasing retirement and additional complex regulations and laws.
They only chance is simplifying processes and make them more efficient (which includes "digitization"). But apart from staff, this needs strong leadership and expertise, and is made complex by the federal structure.
> secondly, digitizing bureaucracy means increased efficiency which means less public servant jobs and they don't want that
Increased efficiency doesn't have to mean fewer bureaucrats. It can (and usually does) mean that the same number of bureaucrats achieve all-new levels of intrusiveness.
I'm reading Stasiland right now (strong recommendation), and I shudder to think of what the Stasi could do with today's means.
However, in this case, it would mean that machines handle CRUD while humans can tackle the edge cases. Bureaucrat time should not be wasted on typing a printed form back into a computer.
The German state is already incredibly efficient at coming after you with threatening letters for not submitting the right tax paperwork in time on the 50 Euros earned form your online side-hussle. If only the same efficiency would get ported to everything else that benefits the tax-payer.
They're so efficient that sometimes they'll come at you even when you did nothing wrong. My tax advisor had his accounts frozen and sued them for damages. The same happened to me because of a clerical error on their end. They freeze your account and it's up to you to figure out why.
The problem is that the "political will" to change (especially in things like this which is municipal) is mostly due to older people who haven't filled an Anmeldung in 30yrs at least and who probably still pay 500EUR for a 3 bed apartment and thinking it's expensive
> The German authorities have no incitive to digitize and fix the broken bureaucracy because for one, in their mind there's nothing wrong with it because Germany is Europe's wealthiest country so it can never be wrong
This is not true. The head of the Berlin Ausländerbehörde is well aware of the issue and frequently says that we need to digitalize in front of the cameras.
According to contacts on the inside, they are operating at full capacity with a personel shortage and have zero slack to stop and fix things.
They have every incentive to fix things, not just out of sheer embarrassment, but because more and more people are suing the state for failure to act (Untätigkeit). I wanted to make this lawsuit process as seamless as possible, but it would not help anyone.
to be fair, it's way easier now to do your taxes (as a private person). We can do it completely online with no paperwork involved and its actually quite alright. so some innovation is happening, even in the public sector.
what happens in the company is another thing. it really depends on the people working there.
They'd love to "digitise" but their problem is that there is ZERO Software culture in Germany. Likely they'd have some shitty accounting or consulting firm with their 24 yr old associate who can do some Java code something for 10 Billion EUR. It'll take 10 years and obviously won't scale or work properly.
That's why it still hasn't happened. There is no one who can write a requirements doc with much useful content in it besides "make it digital" either.
When they wanted a mobile app to warn of Covid risks nearby they found no one who could write mobile apps besides SAP (not a mobile nor end-user company) and Deutsche Telekom (a Telco, used to be state-owned back in the day). That'll tell you how this will go.
I heard through the grapevine of the Berlin tech scene that actually both SAP and Telekom failed to deliver a working COVID Warning app.
A small software company in Berlin purportedly ultimately 'fixed' the app for around 3 million EUR but this was kept under wraps (the app ended up costing 220 million taxpayer money by the end of 2022).
Not sure if this is true but it sounds like it absolutely could be.
> She took that at work and proudly showed it to her boss hoping for some recognition and he said "if you wanna keep your job, don't bring stuff like this at work, we don't need it, there's nothing wrong with the way we currently do things", and then it hit me that current German software innovation culture is completely FUBAR.
This seems like a very justified reaction and could happen in any sane company in the world. If that company is using excel and VBA, then because this is what they know and where they have experience. Python is a foreign technology, and likely nobody in that company knows how to handle it. Also, the existing solution is battle tested over a long time, it's working, people know how to handle it, it's a well moving gear. Changing it for some unknown gear, from some unknown person, is insane, no good company would do that, this is too much of a risk.
It seems, you just don't understand the bigger picture of legacy systems, and the risks and costs of changes.
Your thinking is very common in Germany. It is correct in a primitive sense: change is costly. But it misses an additional layer of thinking, which is that not changing is even more costly sometimes. The problem was not that the company was happily using Excel and VBA, it is that the process was clunky and required expensive humans in the middle. If it could be easily automated in Python, it could also have been easily automated somehow else, and that change was worth exploring.
With your logic, Germany has justified maintaining fax machines and printing online forms. Embracing change is an uncomfortable process, but not doing that is even worse.
Like the rest of the world.. I mean, we have companies like Microsoft, who basically live from staying compatible back till the beginning of time. Cooperate-world is strongly focused on stability and the ability to control your turf, everywhere.
> But it misses an additional layer of thinking, which is that not changing is even more costly sometimes.
Interesting how you completely missed the point. I was not talking about the change, but the way it happened, and the reasoning for it.
> it is that the process was clunky and required expensive humans in the middle.
Actually, we don't know that. We know nothing about the reasoning for the process, or the details, or the company.. We only know the story of a 3rd party, who stumbled over their own ignorance.
> If it could be easily automated in Python, it could also have been easily automated somehow else
Yes, unless the company has some inhouse-knowledge of using python, it should have been automated with something else, like VBA, which they already are using. And it should have been done by someone from the company, not some strange from outside. As a long-running company, it's nonsense to use technology for inhouse-task, where you have no expertise at hand. This is just harmful and an additional burden longterm.
This is highly useful. You could take the idea, generalize it to be reusable for any German form, and make a plan to develop such a thing as open source with funding from: prototypefund.de as their applications close end of the month.
Yeah, I know all about that. I've just seen my ex girlfriend go through the process of finding something nice that isn't excessively overpriced, which was exceedingly grueling, even more so considering that she makes 2.5x what I do. In the end the only decent opportunity was taking an appartement in her current building, skipping the entire selection phase as they already know her (which she knows is unfair).
I've already accepted I'll have to overpay short-term rentals for months and bot the shit of out Immoscout to have a chance.
Just a quick thank you. I don't live in Germany, so it doesn't affect me. But I'l sure you will make a lot of people's days just a little less miserable - so thank you from then. Nice write-up, too.
The worst thing is that this differs by state. In Hessen the communal IT provider (ekom21) offers the service to fill out the entire form online in a UI that resembles yours, but then you still have to go to the "Meldeamt" to sign it (although you do that digitally on a tablet there) because currently the "schriftform" (means: manually signed) is required. It might be changed in the future to be "textform" (means: must be written down) and then it can happen completely digitally.
Unfortunately, from the bigger cities I checked (Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Kassel, Gießen, Marburg, Wiesbaden), none of them used that service, only some smaller districts like Bad Vilbel[1] or Limburg[2] offer the service.
I built a digital form filler for a poorly-designed that every Berliner must deal with. I explain what I did to make it clearer and easier to fill.