Comment by julianpye | Hacker News Reader

Comment by julianpye | Hacker News Reader

I worked together with many Japanese CE companies during the transition to MP3. At first I was surprised why they were so slow to adapt and were happy to work with the music industry who tried to ban unprotected MP3s and planned to sell MP3s for $5. It went against everything that consumers wanted at the time.

But... once you saw that these companies employed so many terrific engineers who could build tiny miniaturized drives for tape decks, laser pickups that could withstand vibrations, etc... it was understandable. All these engineers, of which many were in their 50s were about to lose their value and their expertise. The company tried to retrain quite a few of them to S/W engineering. It was heartbreaking how ashamed many of them were about their struggles.

The German ethos is quite similar to Japan. A prime responsibility is employment and valuing their workforce. That is why they are so fearful of a change in the entire eco-system of the internal combustion engine.

German here and no offense taken, but: What are your grounds for assuming that it is a nation's work ethos that is keeping companies from innovating? How is a multinational's German work ethos keeping it's Indian or US-American employees from innovating? Why aren't German Ford-Workers failing in Germany because of their american work ethos?

It is a rather cajoling prejudice. But in my experience of working in big multinational companies (DAX or DJI enterprises) change isn't prohibited by management's guilt or a society's taboo of layoffs. Instead it's the sheer number of employees, responsibilities and added layers of business-structure.

What's adding to the complexity of business structure is that with every country it operates in, new regulations and country specifics are to be dealt with. No new merger or acquisition will result in equilibrium of efficiency. You may have to - out of the most ridiculous reasons - work with a team that's located in another company, city or time-zone - or complete different culture, which means more overhead.

I think this work ethos cliche stems from a misconception. Yes, in Japan as in Germany old employees are guarded like infants. But that's often due to the old contracts that they got [1]. Those were granted seldomly since. Instead most of these companies (or rather their work pipelines) are filled with temp staff, external contractors and suppliers. There is no "ethos" protecting those people from being fired immediately.

[1] Contracts of war-torn countries. Contracts of countries that just years before believed that they would rule the world and now had to beg for glimpses of sovereignty. Rebuilding the economy was more than about jobs. It was about the gaining back sovereignty. That's why firing those 50 year olds is more expensive than keeping them. And thats why the companies at the same time try to dodge the necessity of having to employ someone just because some external market demand.

Forget the ethos part and read the first two paragraphs. He's saying that there are a bunch of older people who know one domain and they aren't ready for the transition to the next.

Then he says that he sees a parallel in where Germany is today. Frankly, so do I. VW bet on diesel and gamed the system. It's not the cheating that is the big problem, it's the investment in diesel when cities are full of smog and the world is moving to electric.

In 10 years, heck, maybe in a year or two, that is going to look like a really really bad idea.

You think VW gamed the system alone? The whole EU regulation regarding cars (pollution and sales among most notable topic) have been made for, if not by, the EU car manufacturer cartel. No wonder those dinausores do not want changes. And pressuring politics by waving jobs loss is their regular argument.

On the other hand, Daimler is pretty well established in autonomous driving (specifically trucks). I don't think any of the German car makers are incapable of providing a good electric car but I think Tesla is way ahead of all of them due to their culture and "software mindset" for lack of a better word.

From my outsider looking in perspective I'd say BMW is the furthest along the engineering-software spectrum as they are very active in Usability/UX and some other areas.

Reminds me of a two pictures a guy took to document his toys for his renters insurance. In 2000 he had twelve electronic devices, in 2010 he had six. Half the devices had been rolled into his smart phone.

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