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Comment by qzw | Hacker News Reader

Wait, the Germans, of all people, don’t have a standard government design system? Next you’re going to say the Swiss also don’t have one, and I’ll have to throw out my entire set of national stereotypes!

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Of course we do.

https://styleguide.bundesregierung.de/sg-de/

Edit: under “Hilfsmittel” there‘s a “Web Component Library”, hidden behind a login.

We Germans probably have a standard design system for the documents we send by Fax...

Or print out hundreds of pages of documents nobody reads and awkwardly wait while someone painstakingly scans each one to “have it digital”.

1. Our population is quite old thus many people in key positions are quite old and missed the transition to the digital world.

2. So. Much. Bureaucracy.

3. Another factor that doesnt help is that the government pays quite poorly compared to the private companies. Any semi talented dev will find a better position than working for the government

The bureaucracy can be a good thing, because it also makes it harder for the government to get information on its citizens, and I think this is deliberate after WW2. Making it hard to exchange information is annoying (I've heard fax machines were still in use during the corona pandemic) but serves as an additional layer of protection from hostile governments. Time will tell if digitizing everything in for instance Denmark (my country) was a good idea.

Number 3 is the same in Denmark. You can almost double your salary if you work for the private sector.

As someone from Germany I'm sometimes surprised what stereotypes exist outside Germany about it.

I can assure you standardizing things is not something Germany is good at.

Public sector and the old people are not good at modern solutions, but German officials and companies in general are still very driven in organizing and standardizing the soul out of everything.

The beautiful thing about standards is that there are so many of them.

> Next you’re going to say the Swiss also don’t have one

Well... at a federal level there is, but it's a confederacy so most of the time you're interacting with a local canton which has it's own set of systems.

It's not entirely surprising. Germany is a federal republic, somewhat similar to the US, with some degree of autonomy for its member states. Switzerland is a confederacy.

This needs correcting. Germany and Switzerland are both federal states, they occupy the same spot on the notional spectrum. <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/The_path...> The comment would have a point if either state was unitary, but this is not the case.

Switzerland was a confederation prior to 1848, the now inaccurate name stuck for I assume sentimental reasons. The issue of republics is orthogonal to the topic under discussion.

My point is that they're both not the most centralised form of government. Even if Switzerland is officially a federation instead of the confederacy its name suggests, the point still stands.

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