[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.