[mschuster91]

> It's an interesting model, I remember folks on HN calling for more companies to try it since it seems to have had some success in Germany, but I predict a lot more security bugs and unmaintainable code in the near future.

German here. The secret sauce behind the Duales System is that it's, as the name suggests, a split system - one part of the training is at government-run schools ("Berufsschule"), and the other part at the company that trains and pays you. And since the curricula are virtually the same across the schools, even if they're a bit outdated, they still produce decent graduates.

[alasdair_]

Can you list some things graduates of this “secret sauce” have built?

[mschuster91]

We don't make glamorous "unicorns" in the US style as we lack both the financials (aka enormous amounts of dumb money floating around waiting to be invested - remember, we don't have 401k, we have rolling-contribution pensions so no need for that) and the culture (we're very risk averse)... but our "Mittelstand" has produced hundreds of small and medium size companies that are world leaders in their respective market [1], often dominating their market with 70-90% [2]. And the foundation of that, especially for the older companies, isn't academics, it's trades, training and apprenticeship. Many of the Mittelstand companies, you enter in your youth and remain there for the rest of your life.

Our pride as a nation, our role models, is not a few people who struck it right to become multi-billionaires, our pride is the millions of people working for the Mittelstand and the consistently high quality of the stuff they produce. Boring, but wildly profitable and very, very resilient.

PS: You actually might know some of these things our tradespeople built. BMW/Audi/Mercedes/Volkswagen cars, MAN trucks, Rheinmetall, KMW and ThyssenKrupp military hardware from tanks to the massive Panzerhaubitze 2000, Diehl's IRIS-T anti-air defense, Heckler & Koch/Walther guns, anything with "Siemens" on it built before Siemens fell to MBA shenanigans, all developed and prior to globalization also built in Germany. And a lot of it, especially the military tech, is up to par with what the US military builds - for IRIS-T SLM and PzH 2000, the Ukraine war shows that they are even better to some experts.

One thing we sadly lost was pharmaceuticals - up until the 60s-70s, Germany used to be the "apothecary of the world" [3], but we lost that to India and China.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions

[2] https://hbr.org/1992/03/lessons-from-germanys-midsize-giants

[3] https://www.deutsche-apotheker-zeitung.de/daz-az/2018/daz-44...

[bvvg]

Very likely core-competence in technical work, which is priceless in my opinion.