[freyfogle]

I have lived/worked/banked in four countries (UK, US, ES, DE).

Germany is not at the cutting edge, but it is far from the worse. The interactions I have had with bureaucratic systems in Thüringen have all been entirely fine. Friendly people, clear process, done quickly. Obviously that is only an n=1. It is a rural area that is not overloaded as Berlin is.

Which country would you consider "modern"? My experiences:

In the UK the way you prove who you are is literally a physical copy of your water bill.

Spain, some things work well enough, others are insane.

US, massive variability from state to state and government department.

[nicbou]

My biggest gripes, summed up:

- The requirements are arbitrary, undocumented, and largely depend on how the case worker feels on a given day. Common wisdom is to bring far more documents than asked for, just in case.

- Everything is paper-based. You are expected to act as a transport layer between offices that won't talk to each other. Everything is mailed, because digital communications are distrusted and digitalisation lagging far behind.

- Everything takes far longer than it should, partly due to the above, and due to chronic understaffing of government offices.

This is a problem in all major cities, and many of the smaller ones. In this case, n is a pretty big number backed by the many relocation consultants I work with. You got lucky, and I envy you.

[freyfogle]

Oh for sure it could be much better in Germany, and I hope that rapidly becomes the case. Definitely digitization needs to come faster.

My complaint is simply people imagining it is perfect elsewhere. Really that is not the case, no where is perfect. All the people chiming in about the US being so easy, yes, wonderful. Now let's talk about healthcare and how your health insurance is tied to your employer. Everyone who is extolling how simple the UK is, that's lovely. What a shame about brexit though.

The point is there are major pains absolutely everywhere.

[theshrike79]

> My complaint is simply people imagining it is perfect elsewhere. Really that is not the case, no where is perfect.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

In Finland I can't remember the last time I filled a paper form for anything. And I've gotten new debit and credit cards, opened bank and stock holding accounts for me and my family, renewed _very_ expired passports, applied for multiple loans (200k€+), started a company and worked with medical services (recipes, doctor appointments)

The only things that required physical presence were getting my kid's first debit card and fetching the passports, everything else was fully digital and remote.

[kristofferR]

Yeah, same in Norway. I think the last time I dealt with paper was in 2012, when I had to sign a document to get a .no-domain (before they changed to digital signing). I just signed it with Photoshop instead, since I didn't bother printing and then scanning it.

Everything is digital/easy here and has been it for a long time. Old people can still get a waiver to get government snailmail instead of secure digital mail though.

[chironjit]

You're missing the point here. It's bad, and it affects people's lives. It also fuels populist sentiment because people blame immigrants for problems not entirely related to them.

Worse still, if a german says fuck it and wants to run his business in Estonia, the org still has to pay taxes in germany

The only silver lining to all this are Spaniards, Greeks, etc say the system here is better than in their country, but I think you should strive to benchmark up and not down

[mhitza]

> Worse still, if a german says fuck it and wants to run his business in Estonia, the org still has to pay taxes in germany

Why? Doesn't Germany have treaties with Estonia to avoid double taxation?

[chironjit]

There are CFC tax rules in Germany (like in some other countries). So though corporate taxes in Estonia are zero*, you will likely be subject to the German corporate tax system if the majority of the beneficial owners are based in Germany.

[j7ake]

Within Europe: Austria, Switzerland, UK, NL are better than Germany for bureaucracy. Brexit may be an issue for Europeans, but the system is now more fair for non Europeans who want to go to UK.

Outside Europe: Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore is better than Germany.

[Rinzler89]

> but the system is now more fair for non Europeans who want to go to UK.

What wasn't fair before and what makes it more fair now for non-EU people?

[mike_hearn]

> Everyone who is extolling how simple the UK is, that's lovely. What a shame about brexit though.

A part of the argument for Brexit was to enable simplifications of bureaucracy (obviously not for the specific case of someone in the EU migrating there, but for everything else). So that's not necessarily a great argument.

It hasn't been capitalized on to any great extent yet because the current government is weak and spent most of the time distracted by COVID. But the potential for simplification is actually there now, whereas previously it was often blocked by EU law.

[jll29]

The UK's big opportunity was: to be the "best" EU country by having the most reasonable (informal, common-sense based) interpretation of EU rules permissible, and to benefit from intra-EU trade and freedom of movement.

This opportunity was sadly squandered due to populism (and Steve Bannon's Cambridge Analytica financed by Rob Mercer), with the result that now tons of migration from India and other Asian places is arranged to fill the gaps that the European workers that left created.

So let's see how life will be at the front doorstop of the EU of which it isn't a member anymore, say, in 10 year's time, compared to how it was 2016. From what my journalist friends are telling me, for once food theft has skyrocketed, because many cannot pay their grocery bills.

[mike_hearn]

Trading with the EU is no harder outside than inside for the UK apparently. If that were the case then there'd now be less of it but after a brief adjustment period the proportion of UK/EU trade has remained constant. The EU rules are oriented towards the needs of Germany and France, so goods trading was "harmonized" around their processes and services trading (where the UK is strong) was never really addressed at all, by the EU's own admission.

Informal/reasonable interpretations of EU law don't work. To even bring that up as an idea shows the culture gap that drove the UK out. The culture in Britain is incompatible with that. What happens is activists go to the ECJ and get a ruling that's unreasonable but formal, which the UK civil service (which likes clear rules) then goes ahead and implements strictly whilst other countries with different cultures would just ignore the rules. This process was called "gold plating". The result was the UK would end up with the worst possible outcome: a reputation for fighting against bad rules and being generally disagreeable/uncooperative, but then actually enforcing those rules when they pass anyway. The approach used by many other EU countries was to all agree on how wonderful the new rules were and then widely flout them, hence why obscure topics like fishing took on surprising prominence in the Brexit debates, the flouting of those rules was a long term and neuralgic issue that typified the problem.

Ten years from 2016 is only two years from now. There won't be any big changes in two years. The UK economy has closely tracked the rest of Europe and isn't doing any worse post-Brexit than other countries, or even sometimes slightly better (nothing to write home about compared to the USA of course, though how much that's due to US deficit spending is open to question).

> From what my journalist friends are telling me

Journalists?! They are widely distrusted for good reasons! You certainly shouldn't be learning anything about Brexit from them, they will happily say all kinds of nonsense that isn't true to try and defend the EU.

[Rinzler89]

What exactly did EU law block in the UK that wasn't blocked in other EU countries?

[hiq]

To your counterexamples: if you move to the US or the UK for a job, you don't really suffer directly from Brexit or healthcare being tied to your unemployment. Sure, these could make things worse in certain cases (let's say you get laid off while in the US and end up having to get your own healthcare for a while).

The thing with bureaucracy is that it's part of normal life, there's no way around it. You can assume there's a 20% chance you'd get laid off in the US and that it would be bad, but there's a 100% chance you'll have to get a work or residence permit or something else in Germany, and it seems that the default is a painful process (reading the comments here).

> The point is there are major pains absolutely everywhere.

There are still places such as Switzerland where things are better though.

[gentleman11]

I’m a full time software developer, the lead programmer actually, but I don’t have health care. I have important unfilled prescriptions because of lack of money. So how exactly does a lack of health care not affect people?

[throwaway2037]

    > I don’t have health care

Are you based in the US? How is this possible? I thought it is a requirement to have healthcare now.

[shiroiushi]

No, it's not. For a while, it was mandatory or else the IRS would fine you (so, it wasn't really mandatory, you could just pay the fine). Now they've dropped the fine. But that's at the federal level; some states still have an individual mandate and will fine you.

You can try to argue that the fine is a mandate, but many people found that it was much cheaper to just pay the fine than to buy insurance coverage. Of course, this means they have no health insurance coverage which obviously has big risks, but for many people, the only insurance plans they had access to were literally unaffordable (i.e., higher than their rent, so it was a choice between having a place to live, or having health insurance with a high deductible and copays).

[mike_hearn]

Swiss bureaucracy isn't really better, in my experience. It's not as overloaded but things are still somewhat German-like.

[hiq]

When doing what for instance?

I've never founded a company in Switzerland but it didn't seem that hard, talking with people who did. As an individual most of the things I've had to do (residence permit, taxes...) are also quite straightforward.

[mike_hearn]

I've founded two. It's much harder than it needs to be, although whether it's worse than Germany or Delaware or whatever I'm not sure. The prevalence of quasi-mandatory middlemen whose only task is dealing with the complexity is a bit of a giveaway that it's not easy.

Individual interactions with the government are also frustratingly bureaucratic. The prevalence of fetch quests is a lowlight. Different departments don't talk to each other, maybe they think email is insecure or something, or maybe because every interaction with the government comes with a 30-90CHF+ fee. So I often find myself manually schlepping rubber-stamped documents from one part of the canton to another and paying for the privilege, something that is much better done by computers. A whole set of processes work like this and must be wide open to fraud.

Sometimes departments even expect you to send memos around to themselves. An example of one recent interaction that typifies the whole experience (loosely translated to English):

Clerk: You're late, you will have to pay a 50 CHF fine.

Me: <checks watch> I'm right on time and have been waiting to be called forward for 15 minutes.

Clerk: You were supposed to come within two weeks of the invitation, which was sent 3.5 weeks ago.

Me: I booked this appointment on the same day I received the invitation, which was also the same day it was sent. And today was the first available appointment slot.

Clerk: It says here on your invitation <gestures to fine print> that if you can't come within two weeks, you have to write us a letter to tell us why not.

Me: Ahhmmm.... to double check I'm not misunderstanding this, you expected me to write you a letter informing you your own calendar is full, a fact you already knew? And now you're fining me for not doing that?

Clerk: Yes. Will that be card or cash?

My wife went through something very similar in the last couple of years where her permit expired during COVID because she couldn't get the bureaucracy to pay any attention. She filled out the forms on time, was told to wait. She phoned them, was told her case was in progress, COVID delays etc and she should wait. Eventually she told me about this, we went to the office in person and was informed there was no record of any such interactions and she wasn't even in the system at all. Clerk acted like this was clearly our fault. I told the clerk to please make a record of the fact we'd been there and tried to resolve the situation in person, "I don't have permission to make notes on her file". OK, maybe that's why there are no records of previous interactions then? "Can't say". After that I decided that from now on every interaction is via registered mail. Make them think we're collecting evidence for a legal dispute. Things were suddenly resolved.

I'd love to say the above were unusual but it's really not. Every interaction with the Swiss government I've had tends to be like this if it isn't already digitized: it will be slow, it will be expensive, and it will contain at least one infuriatingly unreasonable gotcha that makes it even slower and more expensive. If a process is digitized on the other hand then it's going to be much better, Switzerland seems to have pretty competent government IT overall (when it exists).

[TheCapeGreek]

>The requirements are arbitrary, undocumented, and largely depend on how the case worker feels on a given day. Common wisdom is to bring far more documents than asked for, just in case.

Years of derision of Greece and its processes and bureaucracy, vindicated... by having the same problems!

[dpeckett]

I can confirm that moving out into the bacon belt of Brandenburg drastically improved the quality of my public services interactions (as an immigrant). Getting an anmeldung done didn't require a 3 hour ordeal and the local Ausländerbehörde answers their emails.

My favorite Berlin anecdote is when my wife (then girlfriend) and I first arrived in Germany, she was unemployed for the better part of a year as no-one would give her a chance. She actually got quite depressed about it, and reached out about state sponsored integration courses as the language lessons she was taking were expensive and she wanted to do something more holistic. The authorities told her in no uncertain terms that they didn't care and that there were no places available.

My biggest bugbear with Germany is that the state intrudes extensively in your affairs, most of the time they are being benevolent but that intrusion brings in a tremendous amount a bureaucratic baggage. And that baggage is slow, paper based, and becomes a significant barrier for doing anything. In many countries the kind of paperwork you have to slave over here just doesn't exist in the first place.

FWIW my wife and I got married in Denmark. It was impossible for my wife to provide an up-to-date (less than six months old) translated copy of her Chinese birth certificate. Theoretically she could have traveled back to china (in the middle of the pandemic) and begged her backwaters local police authority to print a new copy but they weren't obliged to issue her one. Denmark was happy with her passport and some declarations from the local authorities in Germany.

Some days I really wonder why I continue to put up with the hassle, probably just sunk cost at this point and stubbornness. Wouldn't recommend Germany for anyone with a low frustration tolerance.

[sofixa]

> It was impossible for my wife to provide an up-to-date (less than six months old) translated copy of her Chinese birth certificate

I find this hilarious. It's the same in France, you need an up to date "original" of your birth certificate. But why? It's just saying you (full names) were born in XXX on a specific date. There's nothing about it that could change, really. In the country I'm from, your parents get one original on birth, and you can ask for copies from the town hall. But in France multiple administrations were extremely bothered that they weren't "original" (because they say DUPLICATA on them, and in French you get a shitty A4 with a stamped signature one can print at home, but they insist on an original) and weren't in French.

[dpeckett]

I actually looked into this, apparently its popular across western Europe (not just Germany) and a relic of historical times when the states didn't have centralized birth and death registries. I believe the limited validity and Apostille requirement is a medieval method to combat fraud.

As a new world Australian, the fact this remains in force is completely insane. In Australia the authorities can trivially query the birth and deaths register to verify the validity of certificates.

In Germanys defense, centralized registries were used by the Nazi regime to facilitate the Holocaust.

Anyway Biometric passports/ids pretty much completely supersede this use-case and can be as equally decentralized.

[sofixa]

> Anyway Biometric passports/ids pretty much completely supersede this use-case and can be as equally decentralized.

Those are already in place in France, but some administrations still ask for a paper original (or scan of original) of your birth certificate. However some others have implemented some government-backed scheme where it automatically fetches your birth records from a government source (idk how it works behind the scenes) and it just works.

It was the same with a proof of where you live, it had to a be a bill in your name for electricity or something similar, but now it can just query popular sources such as the main electricity provider and just work.

[aleph_minus_one]

> My favorite Berlin anecdote is when my wife (then girlfriend) and I first arrived in Germany, she was unemployed for the better part of a year as no-one would give her a chance. She actually got quite depressed about it, and reached out about state sponsored integration courses as the language lessons she was taking were expensive and she wanted to do something more holistic. The authorities told her in no uncertain terms that they didn't care and that there were no places available.

Honestly, as a native German this anecdote rather sounds like your girlfriend saw the good side of the German bureacracy (and life) (you likely haven't seen the bad side ... ;-) ): the girlfriend asked for something and got a direct honest answer. This is German directness, which I would rather consider a German virtue, but often confuses people from other countries where answers tend to be more sugar-coated.

[trueismywork]

Lol no. German directness like most other things is a myth. It only shows itself often enough because people who "show" that directness are just rude and can get away with it. I have now had multiple people in power being extremely indirect about things that would make their position weak.

In rest of the world, the behavior of being "direct" only when there's no negative consequence is just called being a jerk.

[dpeckett]

We're talking about an interaction with the authorities here. In all developed western nations I am aware of (there's maybe 4-5 countries I've interacted with personally) public authorities will communicate in clear and direct language.

No the point is my wife was struggling, and she asked for help integrating, and the state refused to help her integrate. Even as a hardcore capitalist you should be in favor of getting immigrants into the labor market ASAP.

The irony is that fifteen years ago when she was a new immigrant to Australia, the state sponsored TAFE system was amazing for her, taught her English, and totally turned her life around.

[ProjectArcturis]

If that was the good side, I certainly don't want to see the bad side. Maybe they gave her an honest answer, but the better answer would have been to help her learn the language.

[data_maan]

Duck this German "virtue"!

[dataflow]

Interesting, so this means you can go to another country just to get married there? There's no requirement that one of you have some kind of tie to the country (working, or resident, etc.)?

[dpeckett]

Yep the Danes are an entrepreneurial bunch, strict cash for marriage document type deal (but all done very professionally, not some vegas chapel pony show).

[Symbiote]

The prices look very reasonable for Denmark, where everything is expensive.

I'm sure the local governments know it's a good source of tourist money though, hotels, restaurants and so on.