[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).

[throwaway2037]

Wow. That fine sounds crazy. Thank you to share. I had no idea. What does IRS do with the fine?

[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!