I would have a hard time believing that. I work with a company that hired a lot of germans and they have the worst developer experience onboarding and general infra of any place i have worked.
When you outline why it’s bad and show how you would significantly speed up over 1000 engineers at the company with minimal work the answer is to leave it the same as is and “fix the issue” with some new process.
Needless to say once my shares vest this year im gone. It is really such a bad environment to work in.
I should note that the shares have been on a decade decline and i was brought in to fix these exact issues but no one at the company cares or puts in more than the bare minimum before clocking out for the day. I can’t fix an issue if people think it’s ok to spin up a new k8s instance for every single service, are ok spending a month after starting asking to be put in the right AD groups, and hand deploy almost everything.
That’s the norm in most places. People are comfortable with rote, repetitive work like manual deployments. If you automate that away, then the only things left are the unique, unpredictable, and uncomfortable parts. People don’t like that and will actively resist.
If you don’t have buy in and authority from senior management (CIO / CTO level), just give up.
If you thought you did but you’re still unable to enact change then you need to go back to senior leadership with everything translated into dollars. Not “better” or “faster”! Has to be “cheaper”!
In many cases it isn't. As long as technological innovation doesn't slow down this attitude will haunt a company/individual/nation.
Chesterton's fence is about knocking over established things without knowing why you are doing so. In engineering there are often good reasons to try new things, so you need some willingness to leave behind what you known.
Germany is still the third largest economy in the world, if it wants to remain there it needs to be able to adapt. German companies are definitely suffering from having large parts of the organization with people with that attitude, who don't want to learn new things and who don't even want to know if there might be a better way.
