Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

Germany is extremely well positioned to rise again economically in the next five years or so. It's attracting migrants from all over Europe, it's located quite nicely in the middle of the continent and it's currently building a massive capacity of renewable energy.

The only real problem right now is efficiency of spending. Nearly all public sectors (defense, housing, transportation, education, healthcare) bemoan significant lack of financing and workers. Yet, Germany spends enormous amounts of money and employs record levels of workers there. It's like all the money and workers just vanish. This leads to the situation that it's currently difficult to hire in Germany.

This process leads to the attraction of skilled workers especially from eastern Europe. I don't know where this ends, but I doubt the spending and employment will get significantly more efficient. Instead, Germany might very well attract additional millions of well-educated Poles, Ukrainians, Romanians, etc.

I wouldn't be surprised if by 2030 we see a Germany with a population of 90M people absolutely dominating the European market.

I help German immigrants for a living. It's currently one of the hardest countries to settle in due to the archaic and labyrinthine bureaucracy. Berlin's immigration office is completely unable to handle its workload, delaying immigration to the point people just give up and leave.

I've been here long enough to apply for citizenship, but Berlin has a backlog of 26,000 applications and literally refuses new ones until they centralise the processing. The new central office is expected to handle 20,000 applications per year.

This is the city where you need an in-person appointment weeks in the future to register your address, a key process that many other things depend on.

All of this can only be done in German, of course.

If Germany wants to attract talent, it has to meet it in the 21st century.

Maybe Berlin has just reached maximum occupancy? I mean, we'd all like to live in our favorite dream city, but how long is that sustainable long term, if we all move to one city?

Germany seems like it wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants more migration to put downward pressure on wages and upward pressure on housing prices, but that's it, it does nothing to actually make life pleasant and attractive for the people moving there to live and work, in terms of taxes, bureaucracy and housing, so you just feel like cattle, exploited for your ability to pay taxes to the state and to pay someone else's mortgage.

Berlin is not full. The bureaucracy is inefficient and understaffed. Almost all of it is still paper-based and rely on in-person appointments. Like I said, it needs to enter the 21st century but it's just not happening.

This was a problem a decade ago and nothing really changed.

>Berlin is not full.

Is it tough? There would be tones of empty rental apartments on the cheap if it weren't full, but the obscene state of the housing/rental market right now vastly contradicts you, and it's not because of bureaucracy, it's because there's too little places to live relative to the insane demand of people wanting to live and move there. Maybe you live in a bubble and haven't looked at the rental market in a while?

I don’t think the city is full, just poorly run. The rest of your comment I agree with though.

>I don’t think the city is full

Yeah but then why is finding housing nearly impossible? It's not like tones of apartments are sitting empty without occupancy because "the city is inefficient but not full".

I mean Berlin is just catching up to other European capitals in that regard. The weird thing about Berlin was always how cheap it was, which was basically an accident of history.

Berlin is infamously badly governed. It should not be considered representative of Germany as a whole.

Other Ausländerbehörde are just as bad, although other services are indeed far worse in Berlin.

i would not be so hopeful. A big problem is that germany does not operate in the global lingua franca - English. This really shows when countries like Australia and Canada - combined, both have a population less than germany’s - are able to attract the best and brightest from around the world.

Another problem is one that plagues all old world countries - societies are based around ethnicity.

These combine to mean that Germany and the EU in general are not attracting the best from abroad. The region is often the second or third choice of the educated migrant. Don’t believe me - look at the EU’s own internal migration numbers and the stats for immigrants from outside the EU. Internal EU migration is pretty low relative to countries like US (states vs countries, sure) and the immigrations from outside are largely poorly educated.

This shows in Germany’s immigration policy - they have been reducing barriers to entry for over a decade now and are yet struggling to hire foreign talent. This begs the question - why?

Eastern European people are very much german orientated. Most speak better German than English. So no you are not right. Germany is immensively popular by tech migrants from Russia. Poland, Hungary, Czech etc.

> Most speak better German than English.

That's not true, at least not in Poland.

Also, current German take-home salaries for coders are lower than Polish (gross amounts are similar, but in Poland a lot of coders are self-employed, with very lox taxes), with vastly higher costs of living. If anything, Germans programmers should emigrate to Poland - they're not getting a great deal in their country.

I’m intrigued — can you provide some numbers, e.g. some typical hourly rates and/or monthly wages for some typical programming jobs? Or maybe you have some sources (I’ll be able to help myself with Google Translate if they are Polish).

Bog-standard seniors in Poland typically make 18k-25k PLN per month, which translates to 216k-300k PLN per year. If you're self-employed in software, you will pay roughly 2k of flat fees per month (health insurance, social security etc.), plus a flat 13% tax. So, your net take home pay will be 163k-237 PLN, or 13.5k-19.75k PLN per month. That's 3k-4.43k EUR take home pay per month. My understanding is that it's not that much lower than what you can get in Germany, while real estate and other costs of living in Poland is much cheaper than in Germany (real estate in Germany is probably easily twice the price in Poland).

The main advantage of Western Europe is the lucrative contract market, where you can make much more money than in usual full time employment. A lot of these contracts are non-remote, so you have to live in a big city in Germany, UK, Sweden etc. to get them. However, some are remote friendly and still pay 500-600 eur per day. I personally work these contracts from Poland, pay my 13% flat tax rate, and am the wealthiest person I know in my age group thanks to it. The disadvantage of this strategy is that, if the economy is in recession (like right now), the contracts dry up first.

I agree, actually think Poland is one of the best countries in Europe for future digital sector, it's more open to dealing in English language and more open to change when it comes to business. As levels of living rise, I'm fairly confident it will be attracting more and better talents than other old EU countries. Other East Europeans are treated much better in Poland than Germany (West Germans don't even treat East Germans that well).

>astern European people are very much german orientated.

Not true in Romania at all. We're latin and way more US/angloshpere oriented than German.

Where did you get your information? You're probably thinking only of the parts of the former Austrian empire which used to speak German, but the youth there is also more Anglo focused than German, and it's only a samll part of eastern Europe

It is true in Romania, too. Since the ethnic Hungarian population isn’t Latin, interest in the German language has always been higher among them, and Germany has been a magnet for Hungarian emigration from Romania. But even leaving language aside, I know a number of ethnic Romanians from Cluj and Timisoara who moved to Germany, especially Berlin a decade ago when it was viewed as the hipster capital of Europe and still regarded as a cheap place to live.

Sure, but the German speaking population in Romania is also due to it being part of the former Austrian empire, not because Romanians have a natureal affinity towards German.

It’s not necessarily a matter of being part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but the role of German as a major European language of culture and learning, one that for Romania’s ethnic Hungarian population was never quite replaced by French. German has been popular in Bulgaria, too, and Germany a major destination for Bulgarian emigration, in spite of that country always being well outside any German-speaking empires.

>German as a major European language of culture and learning

Maybe, but that was not my experience growing up in Romania, unless maybe you refer to some niches of highly educated and cultured people in some posh circles of academia, but I'm talking more about the average joe. English was by far the most dominant foreign language learned by the youth due to the influence of Anglo entertainment industry, followed by French as a distant second, and then German.

The fact that more people emigrated to Germany than to France or the UK (maybe, I don't have statistics) has nothing to do with people's affinity for that country's language or culture, but to the economic opportunities available to them there. Most people didn't study German before emigrating to Germany, but learned it there out of necessity. This might just be my circles, but nobody I knew growing up had any affinity or interest for the German language or German culture as it was seen as an ugly and difficult to learn language of boring hard-working people who are only famous for building great cars and for that other thing (no offence, but that was the stereotype amongst clueless young people), people only wanted to learn German to emigrate there later in life for economic reasons.

>German has been popular in Bulgaria, too

Do you have a source on that? Like I said before, a country being a popular destination for labor immigration doesn't mean that foreign language is also popular in that country.

German was and remains a common foreign language in Yugoslavian, Bulgarian, and Polish schools. Even if people might pursue English especially in their own time, they still often get German at school, which in turn equipped people to emigrate to Germany. The impact of German on the society of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria has been so strong, it’s not uncommon for a traveler to be greeted in German first even by young people, and only then will that person switch (or try to switch) to English. You make bold assertions, but other people here can see you don’t have any actual familiarity with the wider region (or even how ethnic-Hungarian schools in your own country operate).

In former Yugoslavia I feel like the parts that weren't part of Austria-Hungary are even more German-centric than the parts that were - Many Austrian companies (UNIQA, RBI, Strabag, Buwog, etc.) dominate the playing field while other, much bigger European counterparts like BNP (French) don't really put up a competition. (i.e. in Kosovo, part of Ottoman rule)

In summer time all you see are German, Austrian and Swiss license plates, the DACH area has always been a No. 1 destination for expats / refugees from the region and German language proficiency is quite high.

>e In former Yugoslavia I feel like the parts that weren't part of Austria-Hungary are even more German-centric than the parts that were

Yeah, but how much that has to do with the German language influence itself, and how much to do with mass emigration there due with the proximity of former-Yugoslav countries to DACH countries following the wars? For most people, being 4h drive away from home, is better than flying to Netherlands/UK, nothing to do with their preference for German language.

Plus, former Yugoslavia isn't really all for Eastern Europe. Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, the Baltics have little affinity to the German language and they're huge population centers.

> Many Austrian companies (UNIQA, RBI, Strabag, Buwog, etc.) dominate the playing field

Because these large and ultra corrupt Austrian companies know how to play the corruption game in the Balkans. Funny how Austrian companies are so big there but not in other countries. Why is that I wonder.

>These combine to mean that Germany and the EU in general are not attracting the best from abroad.

How many skilled Eastern Europeans have you met who still want to move to Germany? This was the dream ~10 years ago but most white collar EE engineers I know take one look at the wages and housing situation there and make a 180 back home.

Since when is it a problem for a country to operate in its own language? Especially one which is spoken by 100 million people? Have you considered that people who migrate to a new country for work might even try to learn the language? Who says English must remain lingua franca in Europe?

But beside all that, everyone with a basic education in Germany does speak good English if needed.

I speak German, but only after being here 7 years. Are you seriously taking the side that a new immigrant in the country should be able to navigate a complicated immigration and registration process, documents and interviews in German? It’s not an easy language to learn and the expectation should not be that you’ve somehow mastered it before moving to the country. Your second point is also irrelevant since officials in most government offices are not technically allowed to offer services in English.

If you want people to learn then offer a migration path in English and offer a state funded language course similar to Sweden’s SFI. Some Germans still really delude themselves into thinking they’re language is relevant outside of German speaking countries.

7 years is too long in my opinion, but better late that never I guess. I don't know whether Germans delude themselves about the relevance of German abroad, but I understand that some people delude themselves about the relevance of other languages (English) inside Germany.

What I say is valid for all countries, i.e. if you move to France/Italy/Netherlands/Denmark you should learn French/Italian/Dutch/Danish.

> 7 years is too long in my opinion, but better late that never I guess.

I said I speak German, not I started learning German. I don’t think C1 after 7 years while also working a full-time job and eventually starting a business is all that bad. This is the expected path for a skilled migrant to keep their visa status, there isn’t exactly the opportunity to do an immersion course. How many languages do you speak?

I didn’t anywhere allude to the importance of English in Germany outside of offering a path for immigrants since it’s somewhat of a modern lingua franca.

> What I say is valid for all countries, i.e. if you move to France/Italy/Netherlands/Denmark you should learn French/Italian/Dutch/Danish.

At least two of the countries you list offer immigration services in English. Again, no one is saying you shouldn’t learn the language.

>7 years is too long in my opinion

Then you haven't met most expats in Germany, who, especially in the tech sectors in the big cities, can only manage to order a beer in German after 7 years. Which is understandable, even if you take courses, when your expat friend group is all in English and your workplaces is also all in English, there's not many opportunities for you to perfect.

Also, the necessity of learning a new foreign language and navigate a completely different bureaucratic labyrinth every time you move for work to a different EU country is what's holding the EU development back versus the US.

Imagine if someone from Ohio had to learn a new language when moving to California for a a job. As an European, I think EU countries should give up some slack on the national pride, and be more open to standardizing bureaucracy in English to gain a competitive edge on labor and capital mobility against the US, even though I know nationalistic countries like France and Austria would rather die on that hill than adopt a foreign language as an alternative to their own.

> Since when is it a problem for a country to operate in its own language?

Since it wants foreign workers because they can't afford their own kids.

Germany is not the only country on the brain drain market, and does not enjoy a domineering position either – thus, it should make some efforts if it wants to maintain its market share.

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