[wink]

> And then there's the wait time for everything. Appointment for visa extension: 8 months. Driving license conversion: 1 year. German exam: 5 months. What, you want the results for your exam also? Better wait another year then. Honestly Germany is a shit show, and if I hadn't already invested so much time, money and energy into this god forsaken country, I'd be out of here in a heartbeat.

I don't want to downplay any of this and I mostly agree with your points, but as a German the only "related" things I have to do is renew my ID and passport every 10 years and I've never had to wait such a long time (I think we're due to a change in our driving licenses, but that's one time, and I've not touched mine since I got it over 20 years ago).

My point being that we're not talking everyday things. Also not sure how long you've been here, before covid I could usually get one of these appointments in the next few weeks, like.. 2 or 3, which I found pretty reasonable. (just checked online, next available appointments are Tue-Fri next week). It was really bad in 2020-2022.

So maybe it depends on your city and the exact document you need to have renewed. I'm not saying this is a great country with low bureaucracy or that we're downplaying anything per se - but I've never heard a foreign national coworker complain that much, so maybe my town was just better at this all the time?

[bgdam]

> I don't want to downplay any of this and I mostly agree with your points, but as a German the only "related" things I have to do is renew my ID and passport every 10 years and I've never had to wait such a long time (I think we're due to a change in our driving licenses, but that's one time, and I've not touched mine since I got it over 20 years ago).

Exactly. This is precisely my point. Germans don't realize that there are such big problems for immigrants because they don't go through any of it. And immigrants can't vote, and those who can vote don't face the problem so then problem never gets fixed.

[wink]

Well, you originally put this as your talking point, more of a general rant how everything sucks, and then we should assume that your pain points with immigration are the main point.

I just found https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/28347/umfrage... - which looks like a big jump (e.g. comparing to France https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/461789/umfrag... )

In a perfect world I'd assume this would be fixed slowly as this seems to be a recent trend, but I'm not hopeful.

Also I'm pretty sure there's currently no way to vote in any election that would make any process more digital and faster and less bureaucratic, so while that doesn't help you, you're not missing anything here. (Yes, the FDP and Lindner especially have ran their campaign on some pipe dreams but my personal opinion can be summed up with: lol.)

Fixing this needs a general shift of thinking first, then the stuff that is only relevant to 3% of the population (also maybe in their first few years, so even less?) will follow.

[bgdam]

> In a perfect world I'd assume this would be fixed slowly as this seems to be a recent trend, but I'm not hopeful.

Yes, I thought the Ampel coalition's push for digitization was a great start to this. And then I read last week that they slashed the budget and pushed it back again. So I'm losing hope too.

[lispm]

There is still money from the current budget.

The problem is that digitalization is just one of the problems we have.

Currently we are paying billions for energy related issues, for the Ukraine war and investing lots into the military industry and in energy infrastructure transformation. We had three years covid slowing things down and creating various large problems: inner cities have huge problems keeping businesses alive (because people stay home and shopping moved to online) and there is a huge housing crisis due to large amounts of people coming germany (demand) and low building activity due to shortage of materials/labor and price increases. This all costs huge amount of money.

Germany is disrupted by the Ukraine war started by Russia and the economic boycott against Russia.

Digitalization is important, but people feared more about cold homes and about lack of electricity, than lack of public service digitalization.

[wink]

That's a bit of a cop-out though, because computers and the internet have existed for long enough that we could have had something before 2014 :P