„Das haben wir schon immer so gemacht. Das haben wir noch nie anders gemacht. Da könnte ja jeder kommen.“
In English, this roughly means:
"We have always done it this way. We have never done it differently. Anyone could come along and say that."
That explains a lot.
There is a bit of dominance power play where you each try to establish that your rules have the most authority. Appeals to correctness are best done with an authoritative determination on said correctness. One way to avoid the power play confrontation is by letting them make the new rules which incorporate the changes you want.
It’s different to the Russian powerplay on who can get away with telling the biggest lies without being called out on it. The more outlandish and obvious the lie the stronger the signal of dominance.
The most important thing is getting the others to want to learn.
We‘re constantly playing catch-up but are actually quite alright at it (see EVs).
When you outline why it’s bad and show how you would significantly speed up over 1000 engineers at the company with minimal work the answer is to leave it the same as is and “fix the issue” with some new process.
Needless to say once my shares vest this year im gone. It is really such a bad environment to work in.
I should note that the shares have been on a decade decline and i was brought in to fix these exact issues but no one at the company cares or puts in more than the bare minimum before clocking out for the day. I can’t fix an issue if people think it’s ok to spin up a new k8s instance for every single service, are ok spending a month after starting asking to be put in the right AD groups, and hand deploy almost everything.
If you don’t have buy in and authority from senior management (CIO / CTO level), just give up.
If you thought you did but you’re still unable to enact change then you need to go back to senior leadership with everything translated into dollars. Not “better” or “faster”! Has to be “cheaper”!
Chesterton's fence is about knocking over established things without knowing why you are doing so. In engineering there are often good reasons to try new things, so you need some willingness to leave behind what you known.
Germany is still the third largest economy in the world, if it wants to remain there it needs to be able to adapt. German companies are definitely suffering from having large parts of the organization with people with that attitude, who don't want to learn new things and who don't even want to know if there might be a better way.