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Comment by intunderflow | Hacker News Reader

Germany, Austria, Swiss (swiss-german) mentality

In a nutshell: German speakers mentality

But I mean what is that mentality

As a french speaking Swiss I'm pretty biased, but I'd say it comes down to salary thriftiness to the detriment of innovation, practicality to the detriment of flexibility, and perfection to the detriment of velocity.

If you happen to want your supplier to be slow, extremely reliable, and you don't mind paying for the high profit margin they expect to be able to extract, you'll be a perfect customer of a DACH-mentality company. There are hundreds of niche categories where they dominate the market, including machine tools, forging, factory automation, etc.

But don't write off DACH: there are plenty of companies in DACH that run circles around their competitors by blending typically DACH traits with agility.

French speakers are a serious mystery to me. They are much better stewards when it comes to tech and cooperation but they are so much stuck up with their need to "speak french" that it hinders any progress.

At least DACH made the progress of opening up. It would be ideal to combine DACH liberalism for language and french attitude towards tech and innovation.

> they are so much stuck up with their need to "speak french"

But.. ..why would you want to speak anything else? Who settles for the mediocre?

"How dare these people want to speak their language rather than mine?"

> But don't write off DACH: there are plenty of companies in DACH that run circles around their competitors by blending typically DACH traits with agility.

For future career possibilities worth investigating, would you care to name a few good examples/companies you are aware of?

Extreme frugality and risk aversion, cash (and revenue) is the only KPI to success, digitalization = just make it a PDF and don't change the process thus any process is still equally slow.

Is this why so many German companies expand to Japan :?

Cheap. Loving embrace of arbitrary rules.

In a stable manufacturing business, it’s a superpower. In tech, not so much.

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