Germany, seeking independence from U.S., pushes cyber security research

True that I generalized too much. But, I did so for brevity of my point. Comparing EU salaries with US is not apples to apples. Because EU has different cost of living regions & benefits vs similar differences in US. However, as a personal anecdote from someone who moved from SouthEast USA(Raleigh, NC) which I consider as neither too high end like Bay Area nor too low like somewhere in Montana to Denmark, which is rather higher cost example within Europe, I see a big difference in the money I can retain every month after my expenses. Admittedly, I did not count healthcare costs because it was covered almost entirely by my employer in the US. Here, the Danish government does from my taxes..

If I were a young new graduate tech engineer with aspirations of being among the best, and getting paid well, from anywhere in Europe, it seems almost 90% logical to look at moving to US. Cultural, political and family reasons to stay in Europe is a different story.

I have a friend in DK, who bluntly said that "he will not consider the US in the argument because of Trump, and the society that would elect an idiot like him". People have different priorities at the end of the day. But, money wise, it is still the US of A...

In Amsterdam, you kinda have to learn the language to live for real with locals (though many stay years there and don't).

Compare contractor pay with US. Contractors have to pay their own taxes, health insurance etc.

I know more European devs who live and work in the Bay Area than I know Americans who live and work in the Netherlands. And I'm in the Netherlands!

There's clearly more people being drawn to SV than away from it. I bet salary is a major component.

I fully agree with the GP. European tech bigco's need to get their shit together and pay competitively.

I'm a German who had a green card in the USA. I gave it up and moved back home to Germany. I value the European lifestyle over the American. I make less but I'm happier with being treated well.

+1 As someone that moved to Germany 8 months ago the biggest shock is the sort of culture being cultivated in the work place.

German culture in the work place is hierarchical and extremely "old school" in my experience. Yes I know you hear about all the "cool" startups in Berlin but they are the exception and need to conform at some point if they want to do business with larger organizations that actually have money.

There is a wealth of talent here but this talent simply does not fit the "desired" culture. I would go as far as saying that hacker culture is the complete opposite of what the average German company wants to deal with.

You are in for a shock when you start dealing with the government departments here. They make the private companies look like bastions of liberalism. I could write a book about my experiences dealing with different government departments and agencies.

If Germany wants to attract talent (or start making use of home grown talent) they need to start accepting that these people do not want to fit the mould.

I think you are somewhat correct with your brainstorming scenario, but Germany was still plenty innovative in the last century.

Software technologies like MP3 came out of Germany. Companies like SAP and Hetzner are successful and german. Berlin has a healthy startup scene. Green technologies and automotive is dominated by Germany.

Overall I think Germany has plenty of risk taking engineers but the capital is more risk averse than in the US. Capital includes angel investors and pension funds and everything in between.

I think you need to experience more European tech companies. Crazy and new ideas are very much appreciated here, but they also have to be funded, you can't just go hog wild and worry about the budget later.

>"Risk-taking, innovation, doing crazy "unthinkable" things is something that has simply deserted the European DNA a long time ago"

I dunno, just off the top of my head, I'm thinking about Spotify, Skype, Sitecore, Endomondo, Just-Eat, Unity, Tradeshift, Trustpilot, GoMore, Zendesk, TC Electronic, Soundboks, Navision, Vivino, and that's just Scandinavian and primarily Danish(-started) companies off the top of my head.

Perhaps your beef is more with German corporate/startup culture, and not European culture in general? We're very different from North to South, East to West :-)

> Almost all the important technical inventions of the 20th century happened outside Europe.

Evidence please?

Seehofer wants to create an entire agency. Makes sense given that this is national security matter, I can't believe he'll (be able to) outsource this.

And the other points are still valid even if outsourced, as the requirements will be part of the outsourcing contract.

I can't find the name for it right now, but for me that has been a common way to think about why some "news" items stick around, even when they're total BS.

People read an item within their own field and go "what a load of crap, they can't even get the basics right rage" then they turn the page, read something from a different field and go "my, that's so interesting, these people really know their stuff!"

It's the same about finance (outside of the FT and WSJ). A journalist once defined the profession as "the art of explaining to others what one hasn't understood".

I realize that it's extremely difficult to switch software systems that have grown over decades to something completely different and you can't do that over night.

But then I see cases like the Munich project where they have been using Linux for several years[1], saving 11 million Euros in the process, until Microsoft moves their HQ to Munich and suddenly the council decides to switch back to Windows.

In Germany at least there is tremendous potential for cost savings if it were possible to develop one FOSS set of software for municipalities and share it across the country instead of paying millions in licensing costs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

Thanks for taking the time to write out your experience, it really makes me think.

> so a lot of those non-Microsoft software actually still run on Microsoft

As a FLOSS advocate myself, this matters less than you seem to imply. Microsoft is publicly traded, they'll pivot to goat herding if that's the way to maximize profit. So avoiding it is (imo) less important than avoiding their lock-in products. If Azure has little lock-in, might as well use it, icky as it may feel to me personally. It's not inherently anti-FLOSS, because Microsoft is not inherently anything.

> If we file a primary incident report to Microsoft, Seattle will be on the phone with us until it’s fixed. What Linux house will offer this service?

I think both Redhat and Canonical would love that business.

I'm not looking to argue as you seem to know what you're saying, but on the financial side, how many millions are spent on Windows, Office and other licenses every year? I'd say it's worth doing the math.

I mostly agree with what you say about being difficult to switch to Linux, and I also think that the switch to Linux should be done almost all at once throughout the EU at the institutional level. And the EU should be funding a certain "EU Linux distro" that all local administrations within the EU use.

I don't think it makes sense for a particular European country to develop its own distro, and certainly I don't think a state or county should be developing its own distro either, as it happened in Munich. Munich having to support its own distro is pretty crazy. At the EU level, administrations would get all the support and funding they need, pretty much.

I do think it's probably better to have a EU-developed distro than using Fedora or Ubuntu, though. Ubuntu at least already comes with proprietary software and licenses, so I'm not sure it would be that much better and trustworthy than Windows is in terms of national security. Let's imagine a war between some EU countries and the US in the future - would Ubuntu be free from manipulation? I'm not talking about hacking, which is to be expected, just good old hands greasing or compelling of the company to create malicious code.

Having an EU-wide distro that all administrations use and rely on would also have some other "unintended" but positive consequences, such as states not being as interested in quitting the EU, since all of their institutions rely on the EU distro. It wouldn't be the deciding factor in such cases, but I'm sure it would play a major role.

Now, do I think Munich gave up its distro because it was "too difficult and expensive"? No, absolutely not. The deal-breaker, or should I say "deal-maker" was the fact that Microsoft promised to build a whole headquarters there! And then suddenly Munich switched to Windows.

I strongly believe that without that coming into play, Munich would've just pushed through with the Linux distro, since they'd already been using it for the past 10 years, or worst case scenario they would've switched to Ubuntu and Libreoffice.

Microsoft used this as a PR technique "see, Linux doesn't work! Look at these guys, they've already switched back to us!" But it only happened because they made a major move to convince them to switch back to Windows, but 99% of the public doesn't understand or know that, so they believe Microsoft's PR, which seems to have worked very well, because it sounds truthful, even if Linux being hard to use and whatnot wasn't the deciding factor.

Microsoft did something very similar when it began patent trolling Android OEMs. They knew most companies would scoff at them and their patent trolling attempt, so they first got some highly strategic wins. First they got HTC to agree to pay the royalty, and then Samsung, the largest OEM.

Now you, and 99% of the people who don't know the whole story would say "but that sounds about right, looks like those companies thought Microsoft's patents were real so they agreed to the deal, no?"

Wrong. What Microsoft did was give these companies something very compelling in return - something where the net winner wasn't Microsoft in the deal, but those companies. If I remember right, HTC got free Windows Phone licenses for a while, and Samsung got a similar deal, and also free or very cheap laptop Windows licenses. There may have been other benefits for those companies, too.

So basically Microsoft didn't care it had to pay these companies to accept their patenting deal (however little sense that may make at first glance), because they knew that later they can push the story that these companies agreed to their patent licensing deals, because their patents are real and they are afraid of getting sued by Microsoft. Plus, they'd get to go to other companies and say "Look, Samsung and HTC, the most important players in the Android market agreed with our licensing deal, and you won't? Are you sure you want to go down that path?!"

Is that a bug or a feature, though? Organizations often get stick in their ways. It might be easier to start from scratch if you want something new.

>If national critical systems are running Windows or other US closed source tech, then technically yes. The US is potentially in control of these systems.

What? So because US govt't systems run (or ran) Kaspersky (or TrendMicro) that means the US is (was) controlled, technically by Russia or Japan? Huh!

Good point I forgot to mention.

Microsoft Windows‘ unstoppable telemetry is another really important note!

Also somehow every experiment that tries to free us from this spyware (e.g. Munich Officials tried to use Linux) gets overpowered with someone throwing money at politicians who immediately change back everything to Windows...

>all the US needs to do is have Microsoft, Google, or whatever tech company is in control of a system of interest to insert malware or give the US government the private data it requests

Don't even need that. Just utilize one of the numerous vulnerabilities before it's patched.

Germany was occupied for decades after WWII. However, it's hard to imagine that it's still under US occupation now. I mean, how could something like that remain secret? But on the other hand, how would I know?

And see "We're all living in America" aka "Amerika" by Ramstein <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rr8ljRgcJNM>.

It has military bases and surveillance systems there so I'd say yes.

I'd also wager that if they tried to force the US to leave, the US would respond with aggression, most likely economically.

I don't doubt it, but for the very best the multiplier is greater than that, and not moving becomes harder. The difference is between lifetime wage slavery and financial independence at that point.

Me too, but we've had a strong sequence of "the US is a horrible place to live" stories on the media for decades now, so that point of view is rarely objective.

I have friends that don't want to visit the US solely because of Trump being elected. Very smart software engineers.

Politics and worldview doesn't correlate at all with ones abilities, although this is often portrayed that way.

>I wonder what causes this anomaly?

Compared to the US, you will not find many rich people in Germany. At the same time you will also not find many poor people. Generally, people are quite equal in Germany.

After a recent stint living in Berlin and working for a German company I think it also may have something to do with the quality (and price) of higher education and the open EU job market. Many people I was working with were in their late 20's on their first job as a junior because they stayed in school much longer than they would have in the U.S. because it's a very low cost (and more of a societal expectation in Germany to have at least a Masters) so you've got a broader highly educated workforce rather than the U.S. where a bachelor/masters from an Ivy or Stanford will set you dramatically ahead of others. Also, you have a lot of highly educated people coming in from Italy, France, Greece (these are the most common ones off the top of my head I remember working with) that have an even worse labor market at home and are willing to work for less.

We're not talking about individual preferences, but about country-size statistics here.

And statistically, my bet is that most folks will put their dislike of the US in the backseat when offered a 4x wage increase.