[anovikov]

Well, this working culture makes result slow and expensive, and as a result, in many cases uncompetitive, but it does a good job of avoiding fuckups and while slow and expensive, things usually get done predictably, on time and on budget. Which probably makes it better than American reckless "fake it till you make it" approach in most of the complex projects.

[tietjens]

I am familiar with this response but I can’t take it seriously. The country is looking at something like -0.4% growth this year. “On time and on budget” really? Like the Berlin airport? Like the digitalization budget that hasn’t been spent? There is no spirit of pragmatism here. Only a fear of not following the rules.

[freshbob]

No, it absolutely does not. It might have in the past, when industry was booming in Germany and setup costs were huge and mistakes were very, very expensive. However, they've pretty much lost the race when it comes to software and digitalization, where setup cost is pretty much non-existent, mistakes are inexpensive (fail early, fail fast), and ROI are generally multiples of 100%.

[anovikov]

I had an experience with a German client in a software project. It freaked the hell out of me with slowness of decisionmaking, long contract every point of which as it turned out, was material, in a nutshell it was a 50/50 coding vs lawyer job and took 5x the time same thing would take with an American client. It also made me next to no profit.

But, unlike a lot of things we write for Americans, that one turned out to be actually workable, usable in their (rather large) product, and runs happily to this day almost 5 years later. I count it as a success and attribute it mainly to this boring, overly conservative and procedure-ridden work process.

But yes, i agree, that for software projects, virtues of this approach are more limited than in "hard" engineering, and probably do not outweigh downsides in many cases.

[chrisandchris]

I think scope, budget and time is a triangle. You have to choose 2 of it, and 1 is always lost. There's almost never a on-budget, on-time and on-scope project.