[kabes]

I worked for a big Belgian technology company in the past. It was surprisingly lean in terms of management structure. Then Philips television, which had a big division not too far away, went bankrupt and a lot of those people got absorbed into our company. Within a couple of years the Philips people were able to transform the company to be very management/top heavy until nothing worked anymore.

[joe_mamba]

> Within a couple of years the Philips people were able to transform the company to be very management/top heavy until nothing worked anymore

You see the same pattern with Siemens and a lot of their spinoffs: Continental(VDO), Infineon, Qimonda, Gigaset, Healthineers (yes, that's a real name that somebody got paid to come up with), etc

THe ones without some major moat like trains or energy, got slowly run into the ground becoming irrelevant or stagnant, or ended up being shuffled between various foreign PE groups as they couldn't make them profitable.

Bizarrely, even Healthineers which should be booming due to healthcare being a super profitable industry with a massive regulatory moat, has hit a 5 year low in its stock price.

Remember how Siemens used to make mobile phones? Yeah, well ironically, Apple's in-house modems are the former cellular modem division of Siemens-Infineon that Intel bought and then sold to Apple.

There's something with the management from these massive German conglomerates that just lacks any sort of vision, and over time end up producing bloat, inefficiency, bureaucracy and stagnation while the same staff ends up flourishing and producing top notch tech when under a US company like Apple. Wondering if it's what they teach in business schools over there or if it's the culture, or both.

[lnsru]

I work for a small German company. Some time ago the owner sold it to big bloated company. At the time under the owner the management circle was 6 people, now it’s 17!!!!! And the revenue is lower with bigger headcount, because managers manage and do not work.

I almost cry at work from sadness. So much potential wasted, the company has great market access and still good name. Polishing old products would make this hockey stick revenue growth. But with management explosion everything is being wasted. Meetings about meetings, no product upgrades and total stagnation. While managers fight over parking spots near front door for VIPs.

[joe_mamba]

I know. I work for a mid sized German company in the auto industry, and when our SW project was going to shit due to insufficient resources and mismanagement from the start, what they did to address it was not to add more developers, but add two managers from other projects to our daily standup, which became a 45-60 minute daily, and I'll let you guess if that improved the product deliverables and team morale.

Germans just don't seem to get that successful SW was built by empowering the geeks working in "the trenches", and not by suits with business degrees in running conveyor belt assembly factories where everyone is a fixed cog that needs to follow a strict process thought out by someone above them.

[saidinesh5]

Wow. That reflects my experience with another mid sized German company in a similar industry.

Their original roadmap for their next gen products was not good and the product was getting delayed by a few months.

They brought in a new manager to fix the timeline. Instead she increased the bureaucracy. OKR tracking every other week. Hired a scrum master. Brought in external "certified code reviewers", delayed the project a little more and ended up cancelling the project within a couple of months. "Hardware products are not as profitable as proprietary cloud software as a service company anyway".

[joe_mamba]

>external "certified code reviewers"

That's another big issue with Germany, is they obsess over certifications when hiring, as if they're some confidence of high quality hiring bar, when a lot of those certifications and degrees in the IT industry are just scams.

I think it's caused by the fact that firing a bad hire is super difficult past the probation period, and since HR/recruiters are clueless on screening what makes a good SW dev, so they just go with filtering for credentials to cover their asses, in case of a bad hire they can say they followed the process and screened for the ones with credentials.

[f1shy]

That plus the german system of "Zeugnisse", which if you squint you will see that is totally against GDPR and even constitution: whereby you get marked (for life) by your employer with a document that has the same validity as any other public document, they "document" your performance (according to you current boss, anyway, in case you do not have a good relation you don't get a good certificate) in a language which is absolutely in code and not meant to be read by you.

A bad "Zeugniss" could leave you out of the work market for years, and all is needed for that is a boss that does not like you. Moreover, you can only understand that the document implies you are not good by decoding it with special tools in internet.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

“ which became a 45-60 minute daily”

I remember at one company I worked they had figured out how to get a project back on track: standups twice daily and justifying everything you did in the few hours before.

[nntwozz]

What would you say...you do here? — Bob Slydell

[joe_mamba]

I figure that is sarcasm.(I hope).

[belter]

https://youtu.be/_iiOEQOtBlQ

[acdha]

To be fair, the cycle of adding overhead until efficiency improves is the norm in American companies, too. There are a handful of companies which do better but don’t make the mistake of assuming even a majority do.

[locknitpicker]

> when our SW project was going to shit due to insufficient resources and mismanagement from the start, what they did to address it was not to add more developers, but add two managers from other projects to our daily standup, which became a 45-60 minute daily, and I'll let you guess if that improved the product deliverables and team morale.

That's what you do if your goal is to blame developers for the project failing, and you double-down on management to underline the root cause as developers going off rails and thus the fix is to reign them in with management. The managers jumping on board have no downside as the project was either doomed or they flexed their superior management skills to revive the project.

[lonelyasacloud]

> There's something with the management from these massive German conglomerates that just lacks any sort of vision.

It's a universally hard tendency to resist as enterprises grow into big organisations.

Company starts small and lean; people involved in making product also do most of everything else. Over time specialist HR, Finance, Legal, Marketing etc functions are added. All try to do their best but all with their own non-product agenda. All usually hired and sitting at or close to the same top table decision making process, all diluting and distracting from the vision/mission of what was important to the organisation in the first place. Eventually, the company's top-level decisions becomes more about that than the product.

[yobbo]

> bureaucracy and stagnation while the same staff ends up flourishing and producing top notch tech when under a US company like Apple

Apple orders a widget from them which can be sold in an established product with existing customers. The magic was creating the Apple brand and iPhone product.

I think the problem with old European "conglomerates" is that no one has the mandate/legitimacy to make a multi-year/decade tech investment equivalent to the iphone. "Decision makers" are likely to have been promoted from other professions than engineering/products, and people promoted through management/sales lack competence and legitimacy. Their job is to apply old and approved templates for decision-making, while paying dues and respect to appropriate people.

It fails when templates for decision-making don't exist. Spin-offs or acquisitions based on new tech, rather than existing products/markets, can't work with this type of management.

I have also gotten the sense that management positions are given as rewards for "long and loyal service". It is effectively an incentives program, with the implicit assumption that management decisions don't really matter. This is not far from the the truth in old industrial companies with few but huge returning "captive" customers, which is typical in Europe eg Siemens, or high value luxury brands in fashion/jewellery/liquor/etc.

The meaning of the word "verwaltung" is different from the American "management". Verwaltung implies "preservation of stability" whereas "business management" implies something like "figure out how to sell more stuff".

[alfiedotwtf]

> It fails when templates for decision-making don't exist.

I've noticed a strong signal throughout my career - a sure-fire way to abandon ship - when a company focuses most of its energy on branding and treats selling and building as a nuisance!

Pro tip: when a company cares more about changing its company logo rather than finding Product Market Fit, it's time to update your LinkedIn profile and reach out to hiring managers.

[jansan]

Siemens Energy (which meanwhile is completely separated from Siemens) did a massive cleanup of their management overhead two or three years ago. They cut several layers and a lot of managers got downgraded or let go. Looking at their stock performance it seems they did the right thing.

I really hope that other German enterprises will use this as an example.

[megablast]

How is stock performance any indication of a company having too many managers.

[joe_mamba]

It isn't. Stock price just measures investor confidence. Sometimes firing managers leads to more investor confidence. Most of the time it's a crapshoot but it's the best objective indicator we have for comparison.

[legulere]

It can also be a measure of other market factors. In the case of Siemens Energy the high demand for electricity generation capacity from AI certainly plays a role.

[cm2012]

It means their financials improved

[mns]

As I was following Siemens Energy in these years, I remember them getting a huge bailout, or you can call it help or whatever, at one point and from there on the stock price started going up.

[jansan]

It was a government guarantee in November 2023, which was never used, but allowed them to borrow money from banks for new projects. Demand was never a problem, but they were on the brink of collapse due to hidden quality problems at their subsidiary Gamesa. Somehow they seem to have solved this.

[alias_neo]

> Qimonda

Sorry for the tangent, I haven't heard this name in over 15 years, I interviewed with them the summer before the final year of my BEng, and was offered a job in China to allegedly built a real-time voice/video communications system between what they said were their three facilities in beautiful looking part of China I can't remember the name of now.

Looking through my Gmail, it was 2008 they offered my the position; and looking at the Wiki page, I'm glad I didn't take the offer, as it appears it didn't last much longer?

[joe_mamba]

Thanks for sharing. You know what's ironic about Qimonda? China bought their IP after they went under, and used it to build two domestic NAND and DRAM manufacturers that are set to become giants.

Funny how China has the vision to use, finance and monetize where western governments keep failing.

That's what hurts the most to see. EU says they want a strong domestic electronics industry, but with the exception of ASML, they really don't do nearly enough to grow it or even to maintain it.

[alias_neo]

It's certainly been interesting to watch over the span of my career so far.

It's really quite interesting thinking back to that time for me in University, every few years something happens that sparks a memory; right now, it's that roughly 2007-2008 my professor was telling me about this "rollable" screen technology that was going to enable rolling/folding phones at some point in the future; a little earlier he'd been telling me about this funky new thing called 'Organic LED' that was going to enable "printing" flexible circuits

He's an FREng (Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering) and was one of the people involved in the invention of the silicon chip.

Had a Gandalf look to him and was a real fountain of knowledge, I lucked out to get the guy as my professor.

[joe_mamba]

Yeah, there was a lot more mentorship in the industry back them.

[yomismoaqui]

Say what you want about China's monoparty system, but it enables planning that spans decades.

Our 4 years terms is short slighted by design.

[locknitpicker]

> Say what you want about China's monoparty system, but it enables planning that spans decades.

That's not a trait of a monoparty system, or even any totalitarian autocratic system. There are democratic multiparty systems which have plans that spans decades, and autocratic totalitarian regimes that barely put together a coherent multi-year project.

[joe_mamba]

I don't think this case has much to do with the mono party system but with the state taking interest to support a local industry at a loss but for future security.

Like for example the French government massively supported its aerospace and nuclear industry, and German government gave massive support to its legacy auto industry and they're not a mono party totalitarian system.

So it can be done even in democracies, but you need visionary leaders to spend money wisely on future industry bets and not just on buying votes from pensioners.

The big issue EU now has compared to the past when it kickstarted its nuclear and aerospace industry, is the massive burden of the welfare state that leaves little money for investments into other ventures, and boomers who are the largest beneficiaries of that welfare state, also account for the majority of the voter base, so the major EU economies France and Germany are stuck in a quagmire where the party who wins the elections is the one who goes more into debt for the welfare state.

[anal_reactor]

It's easy to blame the welfare state but IMO the problem is the general culture of being extremely risk-averse beyond reason. Same reason why big US companies lose the ability to innovate. Europeans just hate doing things the new way even if it's better.

[ako]

So bailing out large corporations is a good thing?

[ccozan]

EU has 7 years planning interval. Is not bad and tends to overlap the usual 4 years legislature in member countries.

[newsclues]

Companies are on quarterly schedules.

Countries/cities/counties are often 4ish years.

XI has been the head of the CCP for 14 years

[fancyfredbot]

I'm glad the EU isn't subsidising European DRAM and NAND. Those are typically very low margin business. It's unlikely the EU could have competed with China because of labour costs/rights.

Today we have a shortage in this sector and margins are good so it seems like a good idea. But it's likely a European company would have regularly lost money over the last 20 years and become an unpopular drain on EU finances.

[joe_mamba]

>Those are typically very low margin business. It's unlikely the EU could have competed with China because of labour costs/rights.

Well, you can apply this logic to a lot of other industries, like cars for example, they're also quite low margin products now when you ignore the stealership price gouging and artificail protectionism. The problem is if you just let all your manufacturing industry die out of greed and ship it aboard to cheaper labor, you're leaving yourself exposed to geopolitical rivals or even to allies who decide not be your allies anymore because they know they got you by the balls now and can squeeze concessions out of you. <flashbacks of EU's energy ties with Russia>

Then what do you do?

China is willing to play and loose the short game in order to win the long game, while EU is only focused on the short term gains while it's been slowly bleeding leverage and influence to rivals in critical sectors that you can't easily reshore back on a whim in case of another once-in-a-lifetime pandemic or "special military operation".

China's EV success didn't come out of nowhere, it just leveraged all the low margin electronics industry the west didn't want anymore and shipped to CHina, and look at their EV industry versus the EU one today.

Same with Taiwan's success in the semi industry. They started by manufacturing on the cheap dated processes acquired from Philips and RCA, and look at TSMC now.

We're not talking about outsourcing manufacturing of cheap clothes and sneakers here. DRAM, NAND and micro-electronics in general is quite an indispensable part of or modern civilisation and defense now, even without the AI bubble. The longer you ignore your domestic capabilities because the profits aren't as high as you want, the harder it's gonna bite you in the ass later when the shit hits the fan.

[fancyfredbot]

If we want to invest in independence then that's fine - let's not confuse it with nurturing a successful business.

I felt OP was suggesting that a European manufacturer would have flourished if properly supported by a visionary government, and I think that argument is mistaken.

You are arguing that globalised supply chains are risky, which is something I can agree with. If europe protects its DRAM manufacturer it is going to be less reliant on China but we should not confuse that with the European company flourishing. It seems likely such protection would be an expensive venture which absent any global conflict would produce more expensive products and make a loss while doing so.

[accidentallfact]

It seems to me (and maybe I'm wrong), but it seems to me that "a lack of IP" increasingly means "we have no leverage to get the licences that we need" in China, and "we have no idea how they used to do it" in the west.

[direwolf20]

China doesn't need licences. They can just violate western IP law and make lots of money. As every country without a need to placate the IP industry does.

[joe_mamba]

You can't steal everything if you intend to export. That's why they bought Qimonda's IP portfolio, so they have valid licenses when they start to sell their products in the west and not get banned for IP theft, although I assume the US & allies will just ban them anyway for another dozen reasons out of protectionism.

[zeristor]

Same as it ever was.

China is going through the burgeoning phase previous countries have gone through. Although China’s scale is far larger, once there’s a couple of economic troughs things will be different.

[tietjens]

Can you name these two manufacturers?

[joe_mamba]

Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp. (YMTC) (NAND)

ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) (DRAM)

[nagisa]

CXMT (dram) and YMTC (nand).

[vachina]

My guess is German labor laws do not allow hustling. Progress will be slow if everyone kinda just coast on cruise control.

[piva00]

Labour laws have much less of an impact than the work or overall culture.

Sweden has quite strong labour protection but can be much more innovative than Germany because there's much less emphasis in respecting titles, seniority, and authority than the Germans. German education has a big emphasis on bowing down to authority from early age, Sweden is much more lax (and even though Jantelagen isn't a big thing in modernity it still can affect modern Scandinavia in general).

Blaming labour laws for issues arising from culture is a tired jab, it's not the culprit. You can find that out by working for a German company vs a Swedish one, it's starkly different.

[joe_mamba]

>German education has a big emphasis on bowing down to authority from early age

Ah, good ol' legacy of the education system implemented by Prussia, who wanted an army of conformist soldiers following orders, and not free thinkers risking to upset the apple cart. Great mentality if all you want is waging war though :)

And this mentality persist to this day, where given a set of rules, other successful related cultures like Dutch, Brits or Swedes will first use common sense when interpreting and applying them, whereas Germans will tend to blindly follow those rules by the book even if they don't make sense in that specific context.

It's difficult to uproot people from their ways, when they've only lived in Plato's cave allegory.

[bandrami]

> Great mentality if all you want is waging war though

Arguably not; in the end it produced a brittle general staff who could not accept that they needed to rethink all their war plans based on the political constraints of time (ironic since Clausewitz came out of that exact tradition).

[yobbo]

"Law of Jante" (jantelagen) is a double edged sword and can work in favour of innovation. In good cases, it means both subordinates and bosses intuitively understand that titles are theatre, and anyone can present new ideas and challenge old ideas.

[piva00]

Yup, that's my experience after 10+ years in Sweden. It's a double-edged sword in case its tenets are used to shut diverging opinions but overall, and again in my experience, I've seen it much more as a pervasive culture of listening to others, considering their opinions even if they are below in the totem pole, and even the "consensus building" culture that many despise I've experienced in the form of convincing others why your opinion is sound.

It feels to me a decent approach for equalising anything that could devolve into hierarchical thinking. As you mention it also has another edge which can indeed be a hindrance but I haven't experienced that side (at least not yet).

[direwolf20]

German people have strict laws but, especially hackers, they do not always follow them.

[Nevermark]

> Healthineers

I love the name! It makes me laugh!

Might not be the branding they were going for, but they should lean in. Lot's of spontaneous singing and dancing. :)

[f1shy]

The problem now seems to be that that kind of management is in charge in the government...

[Nevermark]

The US could certainly use more engineers and less lawyers and financiers in government.

Some actual problem solving at the top, communicated in a way that makes sense, instead of waves.

To get dangerously close to political topics: I love Pete Buttigieg for being a wonk but likable and understandable. And cool as a cucumber. All that is so rare, when it should be pervasive.

(Whatever his other pros or cons - I am not an expert on him.)

More of that, please.

[tedggh]

Former Siemens employee here. There was a point in time my engineering team was 5 people and we had 3 project managers. No joke. If you have watched Office Space that’s pretty much how it was. They would stroll (very slowly) around with a mug asking how was going and timesheets. The thing is at many of these organizations there’s really no way to increase your hourly rate and bonuses unless you get into management. My team put a lot of overtime that was not always compensated. We often made more take-home money than PMs but worked disproportionately more too, so at an hourly rate we were much lower. There’s also a stigma about being in engineering by 40, so you see many experienced engineers in their 30s getting their PMPs and pushing in their performance review for management positions. Leadership in engineering once you reach principal is director, and there’s usually one director per BU. Principal vs Senior doesn’t have a life changing salary difference either, about 20-30% and you stay there until you retire or die. There are exceptions like Microsoft that offers partnerships, which are incredibly difficult to reach, but at least the possibility is there if you want to stay in the tech side and make a lot of money.

[alfiedotwtf]

The telco space is weird... I've been on a team where we had a Delivery Manager, Scrum Master, Project Manager, Software Tester, Performance Tester, Integration Tester - all to "manage" 2 ICs - one developer (me) and one devops.

... the saddest bit was that apart from me and devops, everyone else had nothing to do all sprint and so instead created multiple mandatory meetings throughout the sprint to which we had to spend half a day creating slides when the meetings could have all instead been done over email.