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Comment by nforgerit | Hacker News Reader

German here. Austerity? Over-regulation? An oligopoly of tech-incompetent local enterprises? Just guessing here.

As a student in 2007, I started being an avid follower of what Big Tech was doing and was flabbergasted that local tech enterprises didn't seem to notice or change anything. In CS at university they didn't teach programming (only as an aside) but all the funny theoretical OOP fluff that the community rightfully started ditching and frowning upon.

Given software is slowly eating everything, I am not surprised in the result. Probably 7/10 of my fellow CS students will not be remotely able to explain how a given software works under the hood.

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None of the above. The true reason is that Germans are too conservative to invest in tech. You cannot have startups without investors and Germans will keep money in the bank, buy real estate, even invest in index funds, but startups give them too little of a guarantee of a return. You can remove overregulation, whatever it may consist of, but there will still be no funding at least not when compared to the US.

But German economy is actually fine, moving slow and steady is their way and it works for them. I also don't really think universities should spend so much time on "programming", they are not vocational training programs. I wrote software and got paid for it before I studied, and didn't go to a university to learn that. If there's one thing German society can do with young people it's to teach them to take more risks. But programming can be learned from a book.

That would have been true for most majors.

The universities and colleges around the world have not adopted to the new reality where knowledge up to Master Degree level is essentially freely available to everyone with an internet connection.

But colleges are still needed - if only for human reasons. And that's where I believe they should emphasize. A place where young people discover what they want to do and weigh their options. Instead of being assigned a major and mostly determined coursework.

> In CS at university they didn't teach programming

That's quite alarming.

There is a myth at German universities, that programming is too practical. So basically you brew there computer scientists with couple internships where they see how programming works.

My career coding was a product of a bootcamp. Bootcamps have a well deserved reputation for pumping out unqualified candidates.

Having said that the bootcamp I was a part of was hosted at (not really run by...) a local US university. I've worked with computer science graduates from there, good people, capable ... but man many of them should have had a semester of a bootcamp IMO, on top of their more traditional comp sci education.

I would jump at the chance to get a formal comp sci education, but I think all universities could use a heavy dose of “practical application” type courses.

> There is a myth at German universities, that programming is too practical.

Am I understanding this correctly that students don't get programming assignments?

This is false. In Germany there are Universitäten and Hochschulen. Hochschulen are more practical, at one of these you have programming assignments or projects in nearly every subject. Universitäten are more about the theory but they still have some programming assignments, maybe one subject every semester. At some Unis CS is just a part of the Mathematics department so that is also a factor which makes them even more theoretical.

That is the theoretical construct in the German system. However the differences are fading and to me it does not seem to be like German universities, as actors of (self-proclaimed) highest art in their topics, are doing very well.

Btw: Though I enjoyed Maths much more than CS, I wouldn't have understood Linear Algebra without watching the MIT Open Courseware thingy by Gilbert Strang. I think that's saying a lot about the German art of teaching (at least at that time).

I'm not sure which university they are talking about, but both the universities I went to had both smaller (like weekly) programming assignments and large projects.

Sounds like a dream. They didn't have that at my time (2007) at Karlsruhe. Programming was negligible and could be overall circumvented by picking the according courses.

They do, but at least 15ys ago at university of Karlsruhe (which they laughably renamed to KIT at that time) people could circumvent most of the programming tasks. I looked up the current curriculum a couple of months ago, and they at least seem to have expanded from "3 weeks Java embedded into another course" to a full-blown one semester long programming course.

If you ask me, they should make programming the fabric of almost all exercises/tasks, be it in math, cs or sth else along the lines. This would, however, require professors who are in to that kind of stuff and most preferred singing powerpoint-karaoke.

Germany is an economic lion held back by its inability to digitize (even when it does it's half measure still attached to the past) and its development of deep relationship with untrustworthy countries (Russia being the prime example.) Trying to buy the 49 Euro Ticket can be done online but still requires approval by a human and an IBAN. That's my current favorite recent example of Germany making absolutely no sense relative to its peers.

The Bahn app has a human approver in the loop when buying the 49 Euro ticket?

I didn’t hear about this certain case but I’d not be too surprised here. Given Germany has been unsuccessfully trying to digitize their government services, there’s been many cases where people filled out PDFs online, which got printed on paper on the other side, sent by fax to another authority, there scanned and then worked on to finally send paper mail to the initial requesters.

Strange, I bought mine via an app and paypal.

The official Bahn and even the MVV require an IBAN. To get my ticket, I had to wait 3 days using the MVV app to get a person to approve it.

I used also an official app of a public transport provider and I pay via paypal. The ticket is immediately active.

'IBAN' is a bank account number. So you had to have a bank account - most people have one. The 'ticket' is actually a subscription.

There are now 11 million owners of a subscription of a Deutschlandticket. Start was 1st May 2023.

Yeah, this kind of article would never fail to mention Russia and Putin. But what is never mentioned:

1. Germany has no energy sources. USA had blown up the pipelines delivering cheap energy from Russia that German industry needs badly (so, German industry has been closing and has declining output since), also in just as brain-dead move Germany closed all its nuclear plants.

2. USA is deliberately suffocating German economy. First, dieselgate. Then, "fine" for Deutsche Bank for "provoking crisis of 2008". Then making Germany loose access to cheap energy and providing money to German industrial companies that want to move their plants from Germany (where they have no future due to lack of energy and other resources that were imported from Russia) to USA.

German here.

> USA had blown up the pipelines delivering cheap energy from Russia

Well, did they? I know this theory but AFAIK they could trace it back to some people in Ukrainian military. Western secret services (afair from Netherlands) even warned them twice that this was being planned but they didn’t react.

> USA is deliberately suffocating German economy.

Sorry, but those are ALL mistakes made by Germans themselves. They have been cheating, they have been lobbying the German governments to ease transformation cost for short-sighted profit, the (conservative) German governments acted to slow down renewables while quitting nuclear power earlier than planned. I think it’s not a coincidence that Putin started the war on Ukraine just at the time, Germany phased out its last nuclear power plants. It’s all stupidity on the German side, esp. when Merkel is still claiming that “she always knew who Putin really was”.

> Well, did they? I know this theory but AFAIK they could trace it back to some people in Ukrainian military. Western secret services (afair from Netherlands) even warned them twice that this was being planned but they didn’t react.

Such operation can't be performed by amateurs from a rented yacht. It requires experience and resources available only to few countries on Earth.

Also, it was just a version published by Western media without any hard evidence.

> Sorry, but those are ALL mistakes made by Germans themselves.

It's not possible to tell if they are unless there's an investigation, but there would be never such an investigation because Germany is an occupied country for 78 years.

It's quite clear from the consequences, that Olaf Sholz, Annalena Baerbock, and other German politics do things that affect German industry and economics negatively at the same time improving US economy and making Germany more dependent on US.

Well, that's too much in the realm of conspiracy theories told by right- and left wing extremists in Germany.

Let me just say one thing: It doesn't necessarily take the US for German leadership to shoot their feet.

There is no evidence that the US blew up the pipeline other than a crackpot journalist (citing a single source he can't name) that did something 20 years ago and has come up with nothing since. "Germany has no energy sources," is just false, they were warned for decades on this topic. They had plenty of time to diversity, but they didn't.

"USA is deliberately suffocating German economy."

This is just patently false.

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