https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fKhUyF0xbM
I wonder how the situation will develop across Europe and the US.
If you’re a young person who has learned front-end development, you’re more likely to have picked up English along the way than German. English exposure is casual (documentation, tech communities, American pop culture); German exposure outside of DACH requires seeking it out.
I work at a big, traditional German manufacturing company, and the “old” parts of IT (infrastructure, SAP) generally talk amongst themselves in German and produce obviously translated English documentation stuffed into badly-organized PDFs, while the newer parts (machine learning and its cloud-based infrastructure, web and app development) are a glorious mix of languages and cultures, with English as the means of communication (German colleagues occasionally having arguments and explaining complex things to each other in German) and documentation of varying quality accessible and searchable as HTML.
Several colleagues in the “new” part of IT who speak just enough German to deal with the Ausländerbehörde and order at a Biergarten, but have to interact with our local internal customers in English. They get hired anyway. They’re offered German courses, but as a side benefit, not required training.
Not speaking German well puts a ceiling on your career here, but certainly wouldn’t stop someone getting hired for a hard-to-fill technical role.
English is the new lingua franca, and I'd bet English terms will have as much sticking power 1000 years from now as latin/"Italian" does today as a result.
Why did Latin stick around so much? Basically because no 2 european countries spoke the same language so it was the only way long-term communication was possible, voth over time and distance. Additional causes were the church clinging to latin, and knowledge in books was in Latin. Both of these were self reenforcing.
So in a future with 100s of tiny languages, English might stick around for a long time. If however a new great empire rises ( China? Arab? Something on nobody's radar?), the days of all previous great languages are over, including English.
And English already spread to all continents, something Latin didn't have at the time.
If e.g. Mandarin Chinese were to become lingua franca they'd have to first simplify the writing system. It's just too much effort for a foreigner to learn. Excluding the Japanese for this, since they share a lot of the writing system. They might have a chance.
Vietnamese shows that you can communicate in a language that was entirely written in Chinese characters before if you add word separation, tone markers and latin characters. Pinyin with tone markers and word separation is quite readable. It could be a way forward.
Korean also has letters and used to be Chinese characters. It's definitely possible but the move would have to come before widespread adoption could happen.
I know plenty of people who tried to learn Chinese for 2-5 years and plainly gave up because it's too hard.
English on a similarly basic level can be adopted in ~6 months with less effort. It's not the same.
Arabic could more easily become a lingua franca by virtue of a) already being widespread, and b) having pretty good standardization already.
If India rises they're already using English to communicate, because Hindi only gets you so far. It would probably be more stickiness for English.
I've seen a few languages lose lingua franca status in their subdomains in my liftime: French as the ex-language of political power in Belgium, and German as the ex-technical documentation language. In fact, seeing more and more Chinese appear in electronic spec cheats, I've wondered if such a change isn't already happening for English. As always, the cultural core of the power in vogue will be the last to notice the disappearance of status.
There was a document regularly appearing here on HN: The fate of empires, linked below. If you follow it's rules, you'd expect a new power appear out of nowhere. So for a new lingua franca, we just can't predict what will be the choice, but the existing big languages might be the worst candidates.
I believe English will be lingua franca until a new empire will rule the world. If the USA disappears and balkanization follows, English will have a long life. But if a global invasion from a new culture comes, English is done for.
I'll respectfully disagree here. English is one of the worst choices for a latin alphabet based lingua franca, as a mix of germanic and romanic languages, with inconsistent to non-existent rules, differences between sound vs written character.
In Chinese (and Arab) you not only have to contend with a different alphabet to learn but (at least for Chinese - don't know for Arab) also a completely different style of putting these symbols together to make sense. English at least shares that with other Euro languages and even if you get the structure a bit wrong (you can easily tell German or French sentence structure in an English sentence in many cases) it's still easy to comprehend well enough.
What I do think though is that Chinese or Arab might still take over simply because of numbers of speakers of them being more and dispersing and taking over that way. Firefly universe style.
I picked up English very easily despite all the "oh it's all just exceptions". It feels natural even.
Latin on the other hand took much more effort.
French I never could quite get through. Reading sorta works sometimes given Latin, English and German knowledge. The whole language sorta always feels weird though. Can't bring myself to even try any longer.
Either that, or native English speakers are lazier than native German speakers, and would rather work out how a non-native speaker is trying to use our language than try to understand that other person's language or a third language we both kind of speak.
Also worth bearing in mind that Pax Britannica was quickly followed by Pax Americana, both English speaking countries.
The major problem with this though is the massive and unparalleled extent of the British empire. English is the first language for most of two continents (NA and Australia) and official languages for significant portions of another two (Africa and Asia).
That global scale is unprecedented in history and it’s hard to see how English would be dislodged without a significant societal collapse.
Point being it seems more likely that English would be replaced by a language that doesn’t exist yet, rather than an existing language.
So after a year or two, most left.
On the other hand, many new graduates are complaining that they can't find a job, while most of them fail at fizzbuzz (I hate the silly brain-teaser interviews just as the next person but fizzbuzz, come on!), rest get totally demotivated when they hear that they can't just code 100% greenfield projects and/or show zero interest in learning anything that's not React.
I'm known to be lazy, but I came here 14 years ago as the kid who develops small business sites in Perl/PHP and had the motivation to learn German, learn all the -ends (back, front, embedded, had the "chance" to do weird stuff with RFID gates and such), learned to do ETL stuff, involved in consulting, architecture and so on... Many colleagues did the same as well. Currently in a lead position but I've learned a lot how the Java ecosystem works and involved even in JSF in my current job!
My point is, I never had the worry to be irrelevant because there were always something next, but currently most juniors just want the one true and tested way to go forward.
I sincerely don't get why.
In Switzerland, my minimum salary expectation was 30k more a year if working in English for a US/International company remotely or here, that was extremely realistic and someone in Germany would be looking at a much larger loss in pay when working for a German firm.
If they are making that choice they may think local job and culture should be rubbing off as a benefit, so you only need to send them to one general event to show their limited potential upside isn't making progress per year despite high cost per year.
By the way, I never heard anyone complain about their salary on the exit interviews. It's almost always the bad integration to the rest of the team/company, and sometimes having to deal with technology they'd rather keep away from (JSF! :) ).
I know the salaries the company offers aren't comparable to what is offered across the pond but they are quite competitive in Europe.
You are showing them that they aren't getting that if they occasionally go to the all hands and realize they have no idea what's going, aren't really able to participate in the larger context and don't really see a way that will improve.
They could continue to look for another local employer that does better at integrating them or they could stop considering integration with any local employer and get an immediate pay rise.
I'm curious where you would put the top pay of say a senior front end or back end engineer in Germany. I would say the Swiss market has a funny soft limit about 130CHF that's similar to the US around 160USD, where HRs level of fidgety in negotiations escalates fast.
Most Germans I know who have gone back and forth between Switzerland and Germany were very unhappy with German compensation but not happy with their integration in Switzerland.
The last sentence is particularly true: lots of important things are being said in French among French-speaking people.
Spoken French is also quite complex because it makes use of many references (usually shared by people of similar age) and relies a lot on second degree (what you hear is not what is meant). This is probably the most complicated part.
My wife learnt to speak French and she initially had issues to understand people nt because she was lacking words but because what she was hearing did not make a lot of sense. It is because it was either a reference or (less common because people knew she was not a native speaker) second degree).
Finally we decide in France to make our own life difficult by reinventing a lot of technical computer-oriented words, but this si the same in German.
The last sentence is particularly true: lots of important things are being said in French among French-speaking people.
Spoken French is also quite complex because it makes use of many references (usually shared by people of similar age) and relies a lot on second degree (what you hear is not what is meant). This is probably the most complicated part.
My wife learnt to speak French and she initially had issues to understand people nt because she was lacking words but because what she was hearing did not make a lot of sense. It is because it was either a reference or (less common because people knew she was not a native speaker) second degree).
Finally we decide in France to make our own life difficult by reinventing a lot of technical computer-oriented words, but this is the same in German.
difficult by reinventing a lot of technical computer-oriented words, but this is the same in German.
Sure there was the odd professor that would call a stack a "Stapel", but nobody but him would call it that. Now of course the parts of CS that are pure maths, you are correct that they all have German words. But they're had that for hundreds of years. Actual computer-oriented run-of-the-ill words like you describe? Lots of Denglish!
I actually find that I can talk and converse perfectly at work because of it. Never lost for words. But in regular conversation outside of work I do search for words sometimes still.
“Kellerspeicher”, certainly
And although I check virtually all the boxes of your backend tech stack and education requirements plus a lot of JS/TS and Angular experience, I would not consider applying. The job ad explicitly mentions a location. So this reeks of a position with no real "home office". I once interviewed with a company which advertised as full-remote and then when it came to the offering was only granting flexibility nominally, but was legally a when push-come-to-shove-your-butt-is-in-our-office-seat contract. Also, it is in my eyes not sensible to exclude the developers with a vocational education (Fachinformatiker Anwendungsentwicklung or MATSE) with your degree requirements.
Your advice on improvements to the job ads, I take with me with pleasure. I'll talk to the HR. That ad is supposed to say front-end developer for front-end components! Well.
To put it bluntly, yes, economically Germany wants skilled immigration, but socially it doesn't.
I think you mean "Zeitverschwendungwerbegeldergenerator" ;)
How about another view point: there is no such thing as "attracting too much talent", this is the free market at work, and USA and Germany both attracted the exact amount of talent they deserve based on the pay and working conditions they offer for skilled workers, fair and square, and that's considering that getting a US work visa is insanely more difficult than a German one which is a rubber stamp since they left the immigration flood gates wide open to attempt to fix the "labor shortage" which is just corporate b.s. for "we want to get away paying shit wages and need more people desperate enough to accept them".
And I don't mean poor pay in absolute terms, because obviously Germany can compete with USA on pay, I mean pay in relative terms an national levels. SW devs are still paid blue collar wages in Germany when you look at how expensive everything is, especially buying housing. While in the US SW dev is a top % pay relative to the national wages levels and expenses. German workers in finance, controlling, marketing, management, get paid way more in Germany than SW devs which are treated more like cogs.
There's also the somewhat racist traditional old-school German culture at play that sees anything non-German as being of lower quality, including products and also people, making it more difficult for foreign talent to rise through the ranks and get top positions in German companies, as opposed to immigrant friendly countries like US, UK, Canada, Australian that don't have such tough glass ceiling for skilled workers. Case in point, the CEOs and execs in many US, UK, Canadian tech companies have migrant background while in big German companies they're as white German as it gets, with the newsworthy exception of the CEOs of BioNTech and Crytek who're Turkish.
For many SW engineers in Eastern Europe emigrating to Germany is no longer attractive. Take home salaries 50% more than back home, with a 100% in cost of living with ridiculous hoops to jump through to find a decent rental, and 300% in housing price increases. Germany wants workers but doesn't have the housing to attract them because it's also trying to use immigration to enrich the landlord gentry at the same time by squeezing the migrant workers.
When I (an Eastern European) was working for a US tech company, the colleagues in Dallas-FW area owned big houses in the suburbs (on mortgages obviously) while the colleagues in the Munich offices were all stuck renting with no prospects of ever being able to afford to buy something in the greater Munich area unless they had well-off parents, which migrant workers obviously did not. Munich land prices per square foot/meter are similar to SV but not the wages. Absolutely insane.
Germany is just not an innovative powerhouse in the international SW sector that's capable to generate the biggest returns and pay the best wages, nor does it have a great housing market, or the lowest taxes, or the best openness to employing migrants in top positions. Considering all this, they will continue to have a skilled workers' shortage for the foreseeable future that will decimate their international competitiveness. Sure, they make Zeiss mirrors and Trumpf lasers, but those niche low-volume precision manufacturing sectors don't scale as well as SW, which makes it a much more profitable industry that's dominated by the US.
But you don't have to take my word for it, the comments on that Youtube video you shared tell the exact same story.
Not entirely sure why your comment gets downvoted because this is accurate. Pay in germany is at the same level or lower than most east eu countries, in tech, after factoring in the cost of living. Workers in other industries face abuse on a regular basis, at least based on what i was told by many of them ranging from taxi drivers, to factory workers, to phd students. This supposedly allied country is so hostile that when an east european reaches a leading position it makes the news. Instead germany ends up attracting bad apples since no self respecting person wants to work there or in similarly hostile north European countries (ie Sweden). They treat people like cheap labour, get what they pay for, and then complain.