Silver Lake to buy Germany's Software AG in $2.42B deal

Letterbox bullying is a thing in Germany. It's their tiny fetish they'll teach you.

How many Waldorf-Frommer letters so far? :-)

Same as japan. it works.

4. SW companies and consultancies lobby for more regulation & bureaucracy

Not really. Germany's bureaucracy stems from the Prussians, and they perfected it to an art form in the 19th century when SW companies and consultancies were practically unheard of.

Seriously though, as long as you try to navigate the process (and maybe even ask for help and advice) and not try to outsmart the bureaucrats (which seems to be a favorite pastime all over the world), it can be a really smooth experience where you encounter helpful public workers where you wouldn't expect them.

German bureaucracy is like doing side-quest busywork in RPG videogames.

Correct. It's nearly as bad as trying to get user support from Google.

I've dealt with bureaucracy in four countries and think Germany isn't so bad. I imagine it sucks if you ask them to speak English or make any sort of derogatory comments. My experience is more middle-of-the-road — some good experiences, some bad. Asking the bureaucrats how to achieve [whatever] helped sometimes, even if they winced at my grammar or pronounciation in the first years.

Nowadays it’s the US at the forefront of actualizing Kafka’s vision of social interaction.

One fine example is the phone/cable/newspaper/etc. contracts that you can’t cancel without spending 20+ minutes on the phone with a desperate customer service agent.

Buying a car. Doing anything at a bank. Renting an apartment. Moving in and out. Doing your taxes. A lot of the daily life in USA is stuck in a bad 1950s time warp combined with a vicious cycle of MBA optimization to squeeze out every penny from you.

Consider this anecdata. My car got stolen recently and I had to fill out a 40 pager for my insurance claim. Of course, they sent it as a PDF, yet I had to fill and print to send via snail mail. Of course, with another 20 pages of copies about inspections, overall history of the car and photos.

A week later the police sent me another 40 pager to fill via snail mail. Where I had to fill exactly the same information by hand - again send it back with the same 20 pages about inspections and so on. Of course, the insurance needs to be kept up to date with the latest information the police receives, so I had to copy the whole thing and sent it to the insurance again.

If you don't call that bureaucracy, I don't know what qualifies as such. I don't even talk about the process of unregistering the car, which is another similar story.

Would you recommend working there? Not necessarily as a developer. I don't care about "disrupting the industry" or "making the world a better place through minimal message oriented transport layers", I just want a comfy well paying job with great promotion prospects.

That they have impossibly generic names? Every time this company's mentioned people probably thing they were referencing software development in general.

The concept is called "hidden champions" and they exist in Germany all over the place: companies that run impressive revenue and profits and sometimes keep surprisingly big parts of the economy (domestically or even internationally) afloat by simply doing their work that everybody depends on - and that nobody (outside their circle) has ever heard of.

Software AG isn't _quite_ that because hidden champions tend to be privately owned while SAG is publicly traded and was big in the M&A space, but they're still close enough in my opinion. Private companies in important niches of the economic fabric can work for a long time without anybody but their employees and direct commercial partners ever hearing about them.

On the other hand, such companies tend to over-specialize and aren't very flexible when it comes to adapting to market shifts. Take automotive for example where there are a bunch of companies (that you likely never heard of) that do marvels in mechanical engineering for the big brands (that you have heard of): A fair amount of that is falling apart with the move to the much simpler electric designs where that kind of process simply isn't necessary anymore.

As an example, when people are concerned about the German industry and economy taking a hit by the move to EVs, it's not so much Daimler's (et al) hesitancy to move to EVs that they're thinking of, and worrying that they might not make it, it's that cottage industry of specialists which support Daimler et al that becomes redundant. That hesitancy to move off the well-trodden path might, in part, be motivated by a desire to keep that ecosystem alive, maybe due to political encouragement, maybe because it's the devil you know, maybe out of concern for the economy and workers.

A very german phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions

It really depends on the financing terms. If the purchase was made with too much debt, then you need to bounce as there is only one way the business’s trajectory will go.

With near 0% interest rates, revenue multiples went crazy, and most of the time, the purchase price was too high to do anything other than squeeze employees and customers and try to pawn off the business on greater fools.