[Daimanta]

"The whole process should be in English. I don’t care that it is Germany. English. English. English. I speak decent German, but the vocabulary of company incorporation was not covered in my Volkhochschule classes nor Duolingo."

The process is difficult because I refuse to learn the language of the country. My first reaction was "What an absolute asshole", my second reaction is the same but with a paragraph of text explaining the reasons he's an asshole.

[Major_Grooves]

That is wilfully distorting what I have written.

I have learnt German. I speak fluent German. I am German.

The language is only one part of what makes it complicated. It is very difficult for Germans too. Nevertheless, the whole process should be translated into English if the country wants to attract foreigners to come here and set up companies.

Current status is that people are warned against incorporating here.

[q-big]

> I have learnt German. I speak fluent German. I am German.

As a native German speaker, I really would not consider

> I speak decent German, but the vocabulary of company incorporation was not covered in my Volkhochschule classes nor Duolingo.

to be fluent in German. In such kind of language discussions, I often see that in the USA vs Germany, there seems to be a quite different understanding of fluency in the native languages:

- In the USA, you are considered to be a fluent (English) speaker when you can talk somewhat freely with the fellow countrymen

- In German(y), you are considered to be a fluent speaker when you are able to speak the language on quite a high level

[G3rn0ti]

> In German(y), you are considered to be a fluent speaker when you are able to speak the language on quite a high level

That reminds of an old joke: The ultimate test of your German skills is listening to „Jan Delay“ and understand a word he says. (being a famous German hip-hopper that tends to talk „through clenched teeth“)

[marcus0x62]

> - In the USA, you are considered to be a fluent (English) speaker when you can talk somewhat freely with the fellow countrymen

American here. I would not consider such a person to be fluent in English, and I don’t know anyone else who would, either.

We don’t have our own special, lesser, definition of fluency.

Based on your written grammar, I would not consider you fluent in English.

[the_common_man]

What was wrong with his written English, that you consider it not fluent?

[marcus0x62]

Writing "somewhat freely with the fellow countrymen", while not wrong, is unnatural. Same for "In such kind of language discussions". Those constructs aren't wrong, or even particularly bad, but to me they immediately out the writer as someone who does not have native-level fluency.

[q-big]

How would you formulate these phrases then?

For the phrases that you list, I actually did look them up in the dictionary beforehand when I wrote my comment to be sure that I express them correctly in English.

"fellow countrymen": according to https://www.dict.cc/?s=Landsleute "fellow countrymen" is the English translation of the German word "Landsleute".

If you tell me that in the phrase "In such kind of language discussions" I forgot an "a" (i.e. "In such a kind of language discussions"), you are surely right. Otherwise: according to https://www.dict.cc/?s=solcherart "such a kind" is the English translation of "solcherart".

[sgt]

You should have put it in another way, then.

Anyway, the main issue here doesn't seem the language, rather that the process itself is complicated no matter how you look at it.

I think that should be the point of focus which I guess you did, but the rant about German was a bit distracting.)

[Major_Grooves]

yeah I did edit the article afterwards to admit the comment was flippant and explain what I really meant.

Language is the small part of the problem here. Really, it is the process that is bad.

[Ekaros]

If the foreigners aren't ready to spend couple thousand in fees to setup a company are they worth it in first place? Germany isn't exactly poor. And in general it might be better for them to garner those that can follow their rules and operate in their system.

Setting up limited liability company or equivalent would any way be couple thousand max? If someone wasn't going to invest this much, how much were they going to do anyway?

[petre]

> the whole process should be translated into English if the country wants to attract foreigners to come here and set up companies

Good luck with that - Ausländern setting up companies in Germany without speaking German. They'll probably incorporate in Estonia or Ireland. It's way easier to set up a company in post communist Eastern Europe.

[Major_Grooves]

well that was rather my point. Estonia makes it easy for non-Estonians to incorporate there. Germany should do similar.

[rvnx]

The fun fact: when you live in Estonia, you get German gov-supported Facebook Ads to incorporate your company in Germany.

For example, recently getting a new one: https://start-ups.invest-in-bavaria.com/

[kaashif]

I find that ad funny.

> Don't believe everything about Bavaria. Just believe the facts.

Maybe it's because of the article I just read, but I'm reading that like "Don't believe everything you've heard about how Germany is a terrible place to do business."

Presumably if New York or San Francisco had ads encouraging people to start companies there, they would want people to believe everything they've heard.

[blueflow]

Dann lern halt Deutsch anstelle im Internet rumzuheulen, dass Menschen in einem FREMDEN Land nicht deine Sprache sprechen. Junge, wenn du kein Deutsch kannst, hol dir halt einen Übersetzer oder komm halt nicht her.

Wäre es gleichermaßen zu erwarten, das ich in Großbritannien eine Firma auf Deutsch registrieren kann? Ich denk, das wäre vermessen.

[Major_Grooves]

I kinda suspect you did not read the actual article, based on what you write here.

Also - this is an international site - you should really write in English.

[blueflow]

> Also - this is an international site - you should really write in English.

That was bait to expose your double standards. Germany is a German-speaking country, if you want to do business here, you should really do it in German.

I could criticise your approach with the founding, but the other comments did that well enough. I'd largely parrot https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33588536 .

I think "Entitlement" captures the essence of your article well. You did not research how to do it and created most parts of the mess yourself, and then blamed it on the german system. Of course this is going to aggravate people, me included.

If i was you, i'd take the article down because i would not want to be seen as a incompetent founder. Its one thing to fail at challenges, its another to put it online where people can find it when they google your name.

[Scoundreller]

I mean, even in anglo countries, most native English speakers won't have the vocabulary for company formation. Then there are legal terms that don't really translate well.

Then sometimes DIYers get punished because the official instructions are vague/ambiguous, obviously never went through a UAT session, and/or fail to mention a questionable policy change that they informed every lawyer of through unofficial channels, but didn't feel the need to, you know, actually publish... (fuck you Canada Border Services Agency).

I'm going through a process for a small slavic country's citizenship, and all the forms need to be in that language. Many of the native speakers I talk to still get slipped up on some of the terminology because they didn't go get much education there before they emigrated.

[MoSattler]

On one hand everyone in Germany is complaining about Fachkräftemangel, on the other hand the attitude is "In Deutschland haben wir Deutsch zu sprechen!".

I think if any foreigner comes to our country with any form on entrepreneurial spirit, we need to support that and not make it unnecessarily difficult.

And frankly, the German used in these kind of transactions can even be hard for us German native speakers.

[makeitdouble]

TBF, if a foreign entrepreneur doesn't have any mean to overcome the language barrier (either learn the language, have a dedicated translator or hire a lawyer), how successful will they be with understanding their bank account contract, properly filing their tax, passing contracts with local entities etc. Any single paper that will have an official value will be in german as well.

It loks to me like a decent filter for companies that won't make it very far anyway.

[MoSattler]

> how successful will they be with understanding their bank account contract, properly filing their tax, passing contracts with local entities

All these things should be available in English, if GER is serious about overcoming the skilled labour shortage.

[littlecranky67]

> The process is difficult because I refuse to learn the language of the country. My first reaction was "What an absolute asshole"

To be fair, I think within the EU we definetely need a right to deal with all legal matters in english (at least inofficial translations). And I say this as someone who is native in German, speaks two other EU-official languages, and currently resides in another EU country which language I do not speak. "Learning a language" is just not something that you do overnight, it takes decades, especially when you are busy being a full-time entrepreneur. And within the EU, the idea is to boost cross-border entrepreneurship and economic growth. Wasting time on learning yet another language will not make me contribute to the economy.

[johannes1234321]

> within the EU we definetely need a right to deal with all legal matters in english

German is by far the most common native language in the EU. (Germany, Austria, parts of Italy, Belgium, Denmark, ...) whereas English as native language is a small thing since Brexit with only Ireland and Malta.

But that aside: Translating legal texts with all details and traditional interpretation and adaptions by court rulings is a complicated thing. There can be a lot of nuance in each detail. And also once you do that you have to allow proceedings in English for the complete chain. From the clerk in the government office to the constitutional court.

But I think Germany would be somewhat open to that, but others, like France? Hard time to imagine them accepting anything but French.

[chrisseaton]

Wouldn't it be better to welcome and accommodate educated and enthusiastic foreigners who want to invest in your country and its people, rather than being a language purist for the sake of it?

Can a country like Germany afford to be picky with people trying to invest in it?

[q-big]

> Wouldn't it be better to welcome and accommodate educated and enthusiastic foreigners who want to invest in your country and its people, rather than being a language purist for the sake of it?

The same could be said about anglophone countries concerning people who don't speak English.

[sdiacom]

A country like the economic and industrial powerhouse of the European Union?

Yes, I think they're doing fine without business owners who are not interested in being business literate in the market they intend to participate in.

[t8sr]

Germany hasn't created any new Fortune 500 companies in a long time, and it (I grant you, along with the rest of Europe) is increasingly lagging behind the US and South East Asia. 10-20 more years like this and the gap between Germany and the US will be as large as the gap between Western and Eastern Europe was in the 90s.

The German economy desperately needs modernizing, and the German state is not helping. It's wild to me that Germans don't even acknowledge the problem.

Not for nothing, but crossing the border between Switzerland and Bavaria is like time travel: on one side everything runs on diesel, all transactions are done in cash and nothing can be done online, and outside of Munich you're lucky if you can get DSL. On the other side of the border, everything is automated, everything is online and there is gigabit fiber and 5G in every village. Oh, and everyone speaks English.

The only difference is Switzerland has a free market economy and Germany has cartels backed by the German government.

EDIT: I apparently picked a fight with the German online brigade. I think it's part of the problem that so many Germans are personally offended when inefficiencies in their government are pointed out. This just proves my point: criticize the UK/US/Dutch/whatever government, and British/Americans/Dutch people will show up and agree with you. Criticize the German government, and 20 Germans will show up to tell you why you're wrong and Germany is actually a global leader in whatever you're talking about.

[quonn]

> and it [...] is increasingly lagging behind the US

Nothing new, that was also the case in the 90s. It's actually surprisingly robust. It does not create Fortune 500 companies, because it instead creates a very large number of medium size businesses (a few hundred or a few thousand employees only) that specialise and often become global market leaders. Because there are many different ones that model is robust and the work is labour intensive and creates both white collar and blue collar jobs.

So not just bad. And let's not forget that it's a small country. The US has 4x the population, even Japan has 50% more. To say nothing of China, India, etc. Yet Germany is still #4 in terms of GDP.

[t8sr]

AFAIK the strength of German SMBs is often overstated. When you look at what's been driving economic growth, it's mostly been creating new, large companies like Google and Amazon. Germany used to be good at doing that: SAP, VW, many others. But not for the past 20-30 years. Why? Because establishing a new large enterprise is most readily done by inventing a new sector of the industry. But Germany's (and Europe's) regulation regime, risk aversion and slow processes prevent that from happening. Maybe Google couldn't have been German, but Deepmind could have been.

But it's hard creating something new, when new technologies are banned by default and you are required to file tons of paperwork before doing anything. And it's also hard when the type of people who form startups are not moving to Germany, because they can start a company in the UK or Israel with 20 pounds by filling out an online form in 5 minutes.

[ahartmetz]

Since you mention DeepMind, DeepL is German (Cologne). It is the best translator for the languages it supports. Source: I have a sister who is a professional translator. She uses it to get a rough version and then polishes it up as needed. No other tool produces a rough version that is good enough to save time.

The DeepL founder is, from his name, probably Polish.

[q-big]

> because they can start a company in the UK or Israel with 20 pounds by filling out an online form in 5 minutes.

Starting a company in Germany is much easier if you don't need limited liability (which GmbH and UG (haftungsbeschränkt) do offer).

[kaashif]

> So not just bad. And let's not forget that it's a small country. The US has 4x the population, even Japan has 50% more. To say nothing of China, India, etc. Yet Germany is still #4 in terms of GDP.

This can be corrected for by looking at GDP per capita, where the US is at $75,180 and Germany $48,398. Perhaps 2022 is a special situation due to the dollar surge and Ukraine war, but in 2021 the picture was different, but still not great: Germany $51,238, US $69,227.

My point isn't that GDP is everything (it's not), but if you say "the US has 4x the population", you should at least attempt to correct for that and look at per capita numbers.

[quonn]

I looked at global ranking based on GDP.

[ChuckNorris89]

> Yet Germany is still #4 in terms of GDP.

And Nokia was the #1 phone maker in the world in 2009, and Japan was the second largest economy in 1988 and predicted to overtake the US, and what did that mean today?

Current leaderboard position is not a guarantee for future success. GDP isn't everything to measure future success, and Germany could very well sink much lower in a decade or two along with most of Europe.

[blibble]

a german company probably wouldn't be listed on the fortune 500, a list of american companies

[ChuckNorris89]

F500 is a global list, not a US one.

[t8sr]

Yes, obviously I meant Fortune Global 500. The point stands.

[wink]

I think you're missing the key point that Germany doesn't have many unicorns or Fortune 500 companies, but a mass of lower tier family-owned businesses.

Which is a fair criticism, and I'm not invested in any form, but I guess judging a country's economy on the factors it hasn't optimized for is a bit weird.

Btw, I fully agree on the bureaucracy points, I'm not defending anything here :P

[origin_path]

Switzerland is maybe a bit better than Germany but the differences are small. The bureaucracy around running a company is still light years worse than the USA or UK.

Forming a GmbH or AG still requires the involvement of notaries, for example, still involves significant amounts of paperwork, and still requires up-front 20k CHF (afaik not delayable). The UG holding company isn't apparently useful here and there's no mandatory IHK equivalent but the rest is similar.

But where things really start to hurt is the mandatory insurances and pension payments that are required the first time you hire someone i.e. yourself. Not only is it very expensive (~25% of salary), it's so complicated you can't actually do it yourself and neither can your accountant, so they all go via insurance brokers. In other words there's two different firms between me and the insurers, all of whom are adding huge delays and costs. The agreement with just one of these insurers is 25 pages of highly technical German.

Oh and don't even try the barrel of laughs that is issuing employees with equity, let alone options.

It's the slowness that gets me. The tax office is backlogged by years. Even a professional, decent sized Treuhand (roughly = accountant) will routinely do things like go on holiday for a month, come back, get sick for a couple of weeks, go on holiday again, etc. The mere process of setting up the company and fully completing that setup took me >1 year this time. And that's assuming you actually get competent help: I'm now on my third Treuhand because the first two made huge & obvious errors in their work (e.g. lots of typos in submitted documents, calling me Frau instead of Herr, unable to answer basic questions etc).

But this is not specific to forming companies. Swiss bureaucracy is hilariously kafkaesque and slow in other ways too. Recently I got a letter that my C (work) permit would expire in a month, so here is an invite to book an appointment with the local government office to come in and get another. I go online to book, which you can at least do, and discover they have no free appointments at all for a month and a half. OK, whatever, I book the first available slot. When I turn up they immediately fine me for being "late". I explain that I've come literally as soon as they allowed me too (you need the mailed invitation to turn up), but the lady shows me the fine print where it says that I have to inform them if I can't come within a month for any reason and that this, apparently, includes reasons they already know about like "we don't have enough staff to see people". They then charged me a few hundred francs for the privilege of getting my documents renewed, booked me another appointment to get a photo taken (another few weeks of delay) and of course during this time I can't travel outside the country because my documents have expired.

Problem is, everything here is like this. Every interaction with the government will take months, require the payment of hundreds of francs and involve Brazil-esque procedures that mostly involve manually schlepping printed papers between the huge and numerous government offices that dot the highly expensive real estate of the city. In many ways the internet never really happened here beyond online calendars so the offices often don't communicate with each other using wires. It literally often boils down to "print it out, stamp it, give it to you to deliver".

[t8sr]

It’s interesting that we have such different experiences. When I had to get a residence permit in Zurich 9 years ago, the process took one visit to the Kreisburo, they spoke English and I was out the door in 15 minutes.

Maybe the system got overloaded later? Or maybe it differs per canton?

[origin_path]

Both, I think.

[chrisseaton]

Someone else posted a link where they're specifically requesting people start their companies there... in English.

https://start-ups.invest-in-bavaria.com

[blackbear_]

Business is not the only sector where language is such a hindrance. I am a foreigner and came to Germany to do a PhD, I work 60 hours per week for a miserable salary and I do not have the time nor energy to learn German after work. About half of my colleagues are international and in the same situation. If you want Germany to stay at the forefront you need people like us coming here and carrying your economy forward.

[data_maan]

Let me tell you, no matter how miserable your salary in academia in Germany is - it is more miserable in the UK (higher living costs at slightly lower salary, which is around 1250 GBP for most students). I actually know Germans from top UK universities that are considering going back to Germany after they finish. So, same problem here, after Brexit: UK needs people to come and move things forwards, but the place is rotten enough that it doesn't happen.

This is not about "the grass is greener on the other side", it's more about: The only place in research you really can make $$$ seems to be the US and, maybe, Switzerland.

Or does anyone know any other country?

[chrisseaton]

UK PhD students don’t get a salary they get a stipend.

[data_maan]

Incorrect. Some get a stipend, but some are also hired as part-time research assistants, on a salary that is equivalent to a stipend after deducting a few meagre pounds as tax. It depends on who provides funding (a research council, your supervisor from his grant etc).

In either case: It's low. Very low.

[Major_Grooves]

yes, they do well.

However, I think they would do better by making the business registration process more accessible to outsiders.

[quonn]

It would be nice and I'll fully support it. But I think those outside founders would benefit more than Germany would benefit from them. For those who actually want to create roots in the country, create jobs, generate taxable income - well, for those the incorporation will be a very small roadblock. Tiny compared to everything else.

[nibbleshifter]

I simply took my (sustainable, profitable) business to Ireland after getting sick of dealing with German nonsense.

The value prop to me of being in Germany was entirely negated by the hostile environment towards getting anything done that wasn't paperwork.

[quonn]

I‘ve been running my company in Germany for years and do absolutely zero paper work. Zero. As I said, I spent a few hours to incorporate and we pay external services to do the work to keep it running (taxes, insurances). And I refuse to believe that you don‘t have to file taxes in other countries, sorry. It‘s just ridiculous.

[Major_Grooves]

that is pretty much what I mean.

People take what I wrote as an insult to the German language and country. I love Germany, and the language. I learned it and gained German citizenship. I want the country to succeed and do well.

Currently, the business registration process is a hindrance. They should take a leaf from Estonia's book and simplify the process. Including making it possible to navigate the whole process in English.

[blueflow]

Its not an insult to Germany. Its an insult to people from non-english speaking countries. The normal situation for most people across the world is: you go to another country, you don't share any language with the people there, and as the foreigner, there is no option for you but to learn the local language.

You have the privilege of having English as mother tongue, you can go to another random country and you'll have people speak your language. And yet you complain that the foreign authorities don't work in your language. This is what aggravates people on reddit and here.

[sbacic]

> Its an insult to people from non-english speaking countries.

No it is not. It may be an insult to people from larger countries who have been pampered all their life, with all the content they consumed being in their native language, being led to believe that their language is somehow equal to English. It is not.

I am Croatian. I don't expect anyone to learn my language, even if they're coming to live here. In fact, considering how difficult it is, we Croatians usually tell people not to bother. I do expect that when I travel, I can use English, the de-facto lingua franca, to find my way around and communicate with locals. I expect signs and information to be in English. Most amusingly enough, people from smaller countries _get_ this. They understand that if they want to participate in a global society, they need to learn English. People from big countries don't.

[7373737373]

I think you should overthink your aggravation and classification of the want for language compatibility and ease of business as an "insult"

The process of founding a company doesn't have to be as difficult as it is, and the more people can take part in it, the better it is for Germany!

[blueflow]

Its not even half as difficult as the article portrays it to be, most of the issues steam from a lack of research on how to do it.

[7373737373]

I'm glad you found the process easy

[7373737373]

This is an excellent point - if the processes were already digitized, if it wasn't necessary to interact with almost a dozen institutions in person or on paper when founding a company, translation would be trivial, because it would just be a matter of i18n of a website!

[sgt]

Where is Germany the company listed again, NASDAQ? I want to invest. /s

[robocat]

There are plenty of foreign companies listed on American stock exchanges using “American Depository Receipts”: for example the 100 billion dollar German company SAP is listed as an ADR on the NYSE (although not NASDAQ, sorry) https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/SAP

There is a list of 460 foreign companies cross listed on US stock exchanges, and that list includes a handful of german companies, although somewhere else said that there are 21 German companies listed using ADR, so perhaps the list is incomplete? https://stockmarketmba.com/listofadrs.php

[chrisseaton]

Have you never heard of foreign investment? People bringing their capital, but also their skills and knowledge? Despite scare-mongering about immigrants, it's often a really great thing that we should encourage.

[riedel]

The process is painfully difficult also for a native speaker. I can totally relate to the report as a German, whose wife went through the same fun recently with her GmbH. Actually, the process for liquidation of the limited can easily be worse. Things btw get a lot easier if you just do not open a limited (e.g. an engineering office). So all this is seems on purpose: if you survive the purgatory and are willing to burn money continuously to finance the system, you deserve some trust. That it does not make much sense in the modern global startup world is another story.

[firecall]

ad hominem attacks on HN should be avoided.

Critique the article, don’t insult the person!

We can make online discussion a nicer place! :-)

[luckylion]

You can take your driver's license test in dozens of languages in Germany. English is the lingua franca, we should make it possible to do all common business tasks in English, because we want people to do business, and all hurdles should be removed as much as possible.

[umanwizard]

It’s not unreasonable to expect a country that wants to attract foreign investment to make it possible to interact with the bureaucracy in English. Whether Germany wants to attract foreign investment is of course their own decision to make, but I’m assuming here that they do.

It would be nice if a neural international language like Esperanto had caught on, but it hasn’t. In actually existing reality English is the global common language.