Comment by dhruvrajvanshi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dhruvrajvanshi | Hacker News Reader

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I'm also an Indian guy working in Germany paying "obnoxiously high taxes", and my experience has been quite different.

> The only upgrade is in cleaner air to breathe and safety from crime

- Easy access to parks

- Good public transport (I used to live in Delhi, and it has an okay metro connectivity, but nowhere close to what even smaller German cities have).

- Traffic. I liked living in India, but holy shit, the traffic is the worst.

- It's a whole lot quieter which I really care about. I can hear birds chirping right now very close to Berlin's city center.

- Lots of activities to do if you're young.

- I know people complain about beauraucracy here, but I would be very surprised if India handles incoming migrant cases really smoothly either.

> But the worst part of all this is - the vast majority of Germans think this is all acceptable and okay. If you go to the /r/germany or /r/de subreddits, any thread with genuine complaints will be drowned in responses from native Germans who foolishly believe that Germany is a great country to live in because they either don't have these problems, or they know how to work the system and get their results.

Maybe it wasn't what you said, but how you said it. I'm judging based on your tone in this post. If you're this rude to people, expect them to dismiss your opinion even if you're making valid points.

It's not only rosy for me either.

- Cellphone coverage and mobile data is strangely expensive here for reasons I don't understand.

- Finding appartments is really difficult. But it's a problem that all big cities in Europe face. I wish some of my taxes would go towards making affordable mass housing.

- It's hard to learn a new language as an adult (not really the fault of Germans). You definitely run into German fairly often, websites, talking to cashiers, etc.

P.S. Obnoxiously high is a stretch. Yes, in India your taxes max out at 30% percent (roughly), which isn't nothing but you don't get much value out of it. In Germany, it maxes out at 45% but it pays for good quality education for everyone.

There are a lot of things you don't get in big cities in India, which you can easily get if you're in a small town or a village. Parks, trafic, quiet are all part of that.

That said, there are indeed a lot more things that are in general better in Germany than in India, and this rant of mine was the result of a year of frustrated dealings with German bureaucracy (not that that makes any of the points I raised invalid though).

> Maybe it wasn't what you said, but how you said it. I'm judging based on your tone in this post. If you're this rude to people, expect them to dismiss your opinion even if you're making valid points.

Actually, whenever I've had in person conversations with Germans, after they get to the point where they realize that immigrants don't have the same experience as they do, they quickly accept that there should be change. However, the vast majority needs to understand this and push for it. Otherwise there is zero political will to fix these things. And the large majority don't have a friendly neighbourhood immigrant who will sit and tell them all the problems they face.

> P.S. Obnoxiously high is a stretch.

If you are single, you get zero benefits out of the system and are just paying into a pot you cannot touch. So yes it's obnoxiously high when you consider you don't see much benefits from it. I do understand the social nature of contributions, but that doesn't make my wallet hurt any less whenever I receive my paycheck.

I didn't include the things you listed as problems because these are there in any country you would want to move to (except maybe cheap/better mobile internet). It's okay to have to learn German - it's the language of the country I chose to live in, and it is in some ways a much more logical language than English .

Housing crisis exists pretty much everywhere. Again can't see any political will anywhere to change this - which surprises me as this is something that arguably impacts Germans more than immigrants.

> That said, there are indeed a lot more things that are in general better in Germany than in India, and this rant of mine was the result of a year of frustrated dealings with German bureaucracy (not that that makes any of the points I raised invalid though).

And as a German let me say that you are totally right, when it comes to the bureaucracy. While most of the time the bureaucracy doesn't fell too bad for standard German citizens, I can well imagine that it is horrible for you and that it feels really oldfashioned.

All other points are not wrong but debatable, which dhruvrajvanshi already did. The problems that our nations face are both abundant but also quite different.

As an aside: I also perceived you're post as too blunt and slightly unfair, just as some of the people in the sub-reddits probably felt. On the other hand sub-reddits are full of awful people and I can imagine that you have to deal with a lot of rudeness and prejudices yourself. I could understand where you were coming from and understood why you expressed yourself in this way after beuing frustrated by the German Bureaucracy. The quoted clarification was useful.

Just one note on my experience finding an apartment as an Ausländer there, I overpaid and had few options until I greatly grew my local network. So many apartments changed hands between friends/friends-of-friends -- person moving out introduces new person to landlord basically -- that they never make it to any property listing. And these are the best and cheapest apartments. Landlords I dealt with owned one or two apartments, instead of whole buildings so that approach worked well for them.

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