The Five-Year Engineering Feat Germany Pulled Off in Months

There's no incentive to improve it and lots of disincentive to change at all. In software projects I was often brought in by clients when the CEO realized they had fallen way behind competitors. What you would find was layers of process built over years as an immune response to any mistake ever made. No VP was willing to put their name on removing any part of that process because the upside was "things are 5% more efficient" and the downside was "Sheila removed the process and it broke, so she should be fired".

I'm fully convinced you'll find teams with that work ethic in the UK as well, and it's not common in Germany, otherwise projects here would be done in a tenth of the time all the time, but they're not.

It's much like when a building collapses and you believe people to be under the rubble, you're working at a different pace than if you're knocking down some old factory and then look to clean up the bricks.