A very nice read and pretty much my experience. I have been here for a quarter of my life now, I do not think I can live anywhere else now. People may not like me being here because of my skin color or whatever but I do not mind. I keep to myself and follow all the "rules" I can. In fact, I like most of the rules, rules are good because they ensure order, fairness and equality.

Will a little bit of empathy be nicer, sure, but I cannot complain. Speaking of which, a lot of German natives complain and some are even leaving the country (around 100k left last year), but honestly I have visited / lived in nine countries, and people have no idea how good they have it here. I came here with a bag, twenty euros in my pocket and a job offer, a dozen years later I have pretty much all basic comforts and stability one can dream of, my kids have a bright future waiting for them, all this is not possible in many countries.

> Speaking of which, a lot of German natives complain and some are even leaving the country (around 100k left last year), but honestly I have visited / lived in nine countries, and people have no idea how good they have it here.

The grass is always greener on the other side ... until you actually dare to find out. Having lived and worked in many a country, I second your opinion that it is often about trade offs. Problems will come and go. You have to choose the problem you want to work with.

Germany certainly is one of the top countries to live in.

My opinion (immigrant for the 2nd time, currently in Germany since 2013- so I've lived in 3 countries when counting my native one):

Basically, all rich/"western" countries are pretty decent. Some better than other, but they're all 'ok' or rather they all have plenty of 'ok' options for people able to work at somewhat in-demands fields (despite the financial situation of the last couple years a career in tech or tech adjacent generally still fits that category).

If you go somewhere where there's "real" problems, countries like Egypt, India, Ethiopia (altho of course there are nice areas in these countries too) you realize most of the time you'd rather live in any rich country than in a poor country. And there are more people worldwide living in countries ± like India than in countries ± like Germany.

"The grass is always greener on the other side ... until you actually dare to find out. "

Definitely. I hated germany and after school the first thing I did, was to go away as far as possible. Good for getting perspective. There are things that work nicer elsewhere and things were we actually are pretty advanced.

I had the same experience with my own country, Australia. I enjoyed moving to the Bay Area for work, and I treasure the couple years I lived there. But I also really enjoyed moving back to Australia again.

I feel like it’s impossible to truly understand your home country unless you’ve spent enough time abroad to see it with fresh eyes.

I think I'm going through the same experience with my home country (USA). It has all kinds of issues that have been discussed at length, and I thought when I left I might be leaving for good, but I think I'm going to be back there in a couple of years.

I moved to a beautiful mountain town in New Zealand, and I know I'll treasure the time I spent here for the rest of my life, but I find myself missing America more and more.

I think there are two aspects. First, quite obvious, everyday life and overall infrastructure is really good. It is clean, well maintained in most places. And there are only few countries where all open landscapes are yours to have. Germany is one big park. You have a small garden? No problem, every forest or unfenced meadow is yours to use and to enjoy. The other aspect, which makes people leave, is the direction in which things are going. It feels like things get a little worse every day. Bureaucracy was never easy in Germany, but since Covid, it feels like certain parts of it have mostly stopped working. All that while they add more taxes, more regulation all the time. This is what drives motivated people out.

"And there are only few countries where all open landscapes are yours to have."

Well, I am into wild camping and here germany is definitely not so open. You have to be very well hidden.

Come to Norway.

Gladly every time I can manage.

> The grass is always greener on the other side ... until you actually dare to find out.

Yes this is the core problem.

The grass used to be very green in the "first world" (North America and Western Europe) but it is now getting dangerously yellow.

Instead of asking themselves the hard question why the grass is getting yellow the people in charge try to prove it is fine by bringing cows (it is an image here) from the "the third world", and say look the grass is not getting yellow because those cows like it.

This is why you usually see the collapse of the rose-colored glasses effect in third generation of immigrants.

So yes the grass can still been seen as relatively green in Germany, but I have regularly traveled there for decades and I can tell you as an external observer the country looks like it is going to hell over time.

You get a similar effect with westerners going to East Asia. A lot of them like it very much there wearing rose-colored glasses and can't figure out why the locals believe the future is dark for them.

Uh, I think you’re misunderstanding.

3rd gen immigrants aren’t impressed because they literally have no idea what it is like to live back in the ‘old country’.

Go back (to actually live there) and often those 3rd gen immigrants will definitely have a different perspective than they used too.

‘Native’s’ in 1st world countries often just don’t really understand the reality of the situation, and are the ones with the rose colored glasses.

Or do you think someone complaining about, say, the UK, will legitimately find things easier in India?

Because I’ve lived in Both; and nah dog.

The bigger issue here IMO is the fraying social contract and exposure to narcissistic manipulation due to social media and the ‘algorithm’.

It’s ragebaiting everyone about everything.

Combined with the bill ‘coming due’ for a lot of debt fueled overspending, and population collapse, of course.

There are also circumstances and other factors that may be unknown to you when you move to a new place (your first flatmate, the city you move in, the company etc), or factors you did not choose or had little control of up to some age (the area you grew up, the people around you etc) that can affect one's experience. The article's author also talks about that.

A person who moved to ostwestfalen or in a small town in eastern germany will probably not have the same experience as a person moving to hamburg (no offence to any of these places). A person moving as an intern to a relatively international environment will not have the same experience as a person who moves to a 100% german environment. It definitely matters how you act in your environment, but the environment restricts what you can get out of it as experience. Similarly, this applies to moving to any country, but also to where you were born.

Imo and ime people who do not get a good experience out of a country (the one they were born in or where they moved) is most of the times not about having unrealistic expectations of other places (they may have, but it is not the point) or they do something wrong, but due to a big chunk of factors and general character/compatibility issues that one has little control over, and may even be unaware of until that point. This holds for the "success stories" as much as the "failed" ones. It is hard to accept sometimes because having little/no control over stuff can be uncomfortable. The experience of different people can be different for things out of each one's control mostly.

In any case, getting different experiences in places out of where one was raised can always be helpful and help one grow.

I am one of those who left. Very happy where I am now. As some say, if you want to see all German stereotypes fulfilled, go to Switzerland!

I think a lot of the complaining comes from high taxes, remembering the "good old times" and just from being German. Germans love to complain.

I left Germany for a few years and came back. There are very few other places I could imagine to live in. Maybe Norway, Canada or Switzerland. I hope Germany gets its things together, the recent uprise of xenophobia and social polarization is concerning. I grew up in a Germany where it didn't matter where you came from or what you looked like.

Germany has been shifting wealth from middle class and lower class to the rich for a long time now and is at the forefront of inequality increase in Europe. All the xenophobia and polarization is happening for a reason. The people are no longer happy with their lives here. It is a result of decades of bad politicians and policies, bad election results, and mismanagement of the whole country and immigration and integration policies. Getting out shit together will require a massive mindset change, that personally I don't really see coming. We can forget all the mainstream parties like CDU, SPD, Greens, AFD, Left. They won't and don't want to bring us out of this situation. What they will do is continue the course of retiree pleasing policies, to catch tons of votes, while the rest of the country continues to go to shit.

Spoken like a true German. All goes to shit. All the time.

I, a German, went to Switzerland for vacation once. I talked to a Swiss guy about how I like Switzerland and all that. I told him how impressed I was with how organized everything is and how well everything works. The train system and public transport in general is wonderful compared to the one we have in Germany, for example. To my surprise, he said something along the line of "yeah well, it only looks like that from the outside".

Perhaps the tendency to complain is a necessity to achieve a high level of efficiency.

I moved from Sweden to Switzerland, and I don't know what that guy was talking about.

Switzerland is an extremely well run country.

I suspect natives have a more nuanced view of their home country, compared to expats who end up getting a tinted view. At least it likely takes a long time for an outsider to truly understand how things work. Reading the newspapers isn't representative, you know...

The natives have their own biases.

If you call "must more anecodtal knowledge" a bias, I give you that.

I mean it helps that there's around 9M people living there, 1/10th of Germany or about the same amount as London or New York.

Also helps to accumulate wealth by taking care of global blood-money and being a diplomatic hub :) and let's not forget the tons of gold we got gifted about a hundred years ago, sadly can't quite remember where we got that from.

> Also helps to accumulate wealth by taking care of global blood-money and being a diplomatic hub

People say that, but ETFs that invest into plain old boring sectors of Swiss industry give long term returns half way between USA AI insanity and everything else in the world. So they must be doing something right with their industrial economy as well.

we got some huge, international companies here. pharma, banks, insurance, food and beverages, resource trading and a more-or-less stable political system.

https://companiesmarketcap.com/switzerland/largest-companies...

It also helps that Switzerland has a decentralized and direct democratic system of governance.

The rest is just noise.

Do you know, that by now Switzerland frequently refuses German trains to enter the country, because of delays? They don't want Deutsche Bahn mismanagement and delays to affect their own train network. Very reasonable to put a stop to this.

What they do is very interesting, though IMO "refuse to enter the country" sounds harsher than it actually is.

If an inbound German train is late to Basel by more than 20 minutes, the Swiss run their own substitute train from Basel (they keep rolling stock on standby). The replacement train runs to the original timetable so that local passengers are unaffected. The late train is then pulled out of service at Basel (there are frequent onward connections).

They do something similar at Schaffhausen.

Trains that are late into St. Margrethen are made to queue behind local traffic.

That sounds like an excellent solution for locals.

But it also seems very inefficient because of the need to keep rolling stock in reserve, ready to go just in case. That’s a lot of maintenance, staff, and machine time to burn.

It was the locals who decided that it was worth the extra hassle and expense (and that doing the same thing at St. Margrethen wasn't).

There was probably a referendum at some point. :)

I am not sure whether the stats are comparable, but I read somewhere that about half of Deutsche Bahn trains are late into Basel (and there are many trains a day). While I don't know this for a fact, it wouldn't surpise me if patterns of delays are relatively predictable and can be planned for.

There was some talk about just ending those routes at Basel at some far-away point in the future, but I'm not sure if that's something that's been decided.

> But it also seems very inefficient because of the need to keep rolling stock in reserve, ready to go just in case. That’s a lot of maintenance, staff, and machine time to burn.

Considering how often the Deutsche Bahn isn't on time (I say this as a German), the SBB should have use for this rolling stock nearly all the time - so it's rather efficient. :-)

That inefficiency is the very reason, why the Swiss have a more reliable network. The DB used to have all these inefficiency too and was reliable. Then they decided to cut all that and that's the current state now.

Personally I think that there is no "real inefficiency", the money just achieves something else, that you don't consider the goal yet. Sometimes that is making someone else richer, sometimes that is making the system more reliable in ways you couldn't plan.

Inefficient compared to what? DB being on time is not an alternative that the Swiss can choose.

Yes

As southern European that has lived a couple of years in Switzerland and eventually moved into Germany, I always mention that from flexibility and rules point of view, being in Germany versus Switzerland, feels so much better in Germany.

Sorry for the stereotypes, it was just how it felt dealing with everything, which is how everything gets to be so organised in first place, and the difference on similar matters in Germany, still I go back into Switzerland with some regularity.

Swiss voted against tax reduction in the past. I do not know of that many countries, where people would have done that. So the way they think is a bit different.

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/poison-withholding-tax...

If you have a high ROI it's a bad idea to stop putting money in. Logically all people should be for high taxes, but they are not, because they don't believe that their taxes fund things they profit from and that it's easier to put less money in, then to fix that.

A normal sized plot with a house listed to be torn down on in outskirts of Zurich costs 7mil. A 2 bedroom apartment on the countryside costs 2mil. You will not pay this in a lifetime from 2 good level swiss salaries.

Are you Swiss? I'm no expert but from talking to Swiss people, their mortgage system is very different from the American one, and people are in no hurry to pay off their mortgages, and often they're never really paid off. Americans might find that appalling but the Swiss people I've spoken to find it normal. Tax incentives also help with this.

It is the UK/Nordic system which I find morbidly bad. It already assumes you will never pay off the property and you pass it down to family and children, possibly multiple generations. It allows for property prices to go to the moon instead of incentivising for affordability. Makes for a system giving up owning property. How did we humans come to this.

Allowing financial system abstraction on one end, and allowing our brains to rot on the other.

Swiss people often don't see how awesome swiss is themself except they have been away for a longer while to see how shitty every other place tends to be.

Ex. Most people here think Europe is generally this clean. They never bothered looking out of their car in literally any other neighbor country.

Source: Austria living in Switzerland who also lived in Thailand, Malaysia, Czech, .. for a while.

> Perhaps the tendency to complain is a necessity to achieve a high level of efficiency.

I am pretty convinced about that. Especially after having lived and worked in other countries where people like to complain less. If people will just accept and not complain, problems also will not get fixed.

    > I grew up in a Germany where it didn't matter where you came from or what you looked like.

This is bullshit. Ask any Turkish heritage person who grew up in Germany before the 2010s. It was rough. You basically lived in a parallel society.

Well, same here. I hate living here to be sure because of the slowness and the way future looks bleak because of inability to change. But.... I am pretty sure I would hate living in other places even more. And the only reason I hate it here is because I see how good we have it here, and how much better it could be if we just got off our fear of change and actually tried to move with times.

Also, Germany is one of the few countries where I have rarely been told to go back to my own country when I criticize something here, instead people say "Yeah, it is shit, but it is what it is eh?"

Just nitpicking on the "quarter of my life" point: being in my forties, I spent 3 of the 4 quarters of my life (so far) in 3 very different places in the world. The 4th quarter is a rounding error of those three. I don't think the fact of spending a quarter of one's life in one place actually says anything other than the fact that this place is livable enough.

Can you elaborate? I don't quite grasp what you mean. Do you mean that the first three quarters of your life were more formative/adventurous and the last quarter was more driven by inertia and routine? I can relate if so, just not sure if that's what you mean.

In my forty something years of life so far, a quarter is a little more than 10 years. I lived the first quarter + ε in one place during my childhood, then moved to a different city for the college and lived there for another quarter + ε, and I'm spending a quarter + ε in a completely different country. The sum of these three ε cover the remaining quarter.

The fact that I spent a quarter of my life in three different places does not mean I'm forced to stay in any of these places for the rest of my life. I might as well move with my family and live in another place for some extended period of time.

Are they different ε or the same?

TBH, if using quarter here is just shorthand for "a decade", so it might be easier just to say plainly "I spent over a decade in each of A, B and C".

Sure, I was just nitpicking on the phrase of the original comment that apparently put some extra weight on the fact that it was a quarter of life.

Just say thirds.

I've found that the rule-following in Germany is way more consistent than in the country I grew up at in Latin America, plus people is much more willing to help you actually follow those rules. This helps reduce the amount of (bad) chaos in your daily life tremendously.

> rules are good because they ensure order, fairness and equality.

They most assuredly do not ensure equality, which is exactly why there is such a push to eliminate standardized tests from college entrance criteria:

The Time Is Now: Eliminating the LSAT for the Sake of Diversity - https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/2023/03/09/the-time-is...

ABA votes to end law schools' LSAT requirement, but not until 2025 - https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/aba-votes-end-la...

Universities Dropping Admission Tests Experience Boost in Student Diversity - https://scienmag.com/universities-dropping-admission-tests-e...

Eliminating Standardized Tests To Achieve Racial Equity In Post-Affirmative Action College Admissions - https://www.forbes.com/sites/shaunharper/2023/07/09/eliminat...

I'm living in Berlin for 13/45 of my life, but I don't think I will ever feel integrated. As much as I tried to get around and adapt to the local culture, I quickly found myself only connecting with non-Germans, most of them from Southern Europe, and on a smaller scale from Poland and the Balkans.

> living in Berlin ... I don't think I will ever feel integrated.

I’d understood this was a typical Berlin experience even for German.

    > I don't think I will ever feel integrated.

Do you speak German well? That is biggest barrier for most.

Would like to hear your thoughts on why that is the case.

I was going to respond with "Protestantism", but then I realized that I also lived in the US for ~5 years and I had no problem to adapt there. Mind you, I wouldn't go back to live in the US unless you were paying me a lot of money to do so, but at least there I felt integrated.

But honestly I don't have a better answer. Despite all my sincerest efforts, I never got the German idea of humor. I never understood their lack of flexibility in social settings. Their relationships with their family members (especially parents) is completely alien to me. I certainly don't like their "one-size-fits-all" for all sorts of socio-economic policies and how that translates to the EU. I am still annoyed by the fact that I can not find a way to go back to swimming in some structured capacity: it's either the overcrowded public pools or the "you need to be at competition-ready level to join a Schwimmverein". I find it weird that I've been living in the same building for 7 years and I know basically nothing about my neighbors - except the ones living under me who repeatedly complained about us being loud (we were not) and only stopped after taking us to court and losing the case.

> I never got the German idea of humor.

A lot of foreigners say that. Actually mostly english speaking ones. I never heard a turk say this. Perhaps it's linked to the willingness to learn the language, which is often low with english-speaking people?

No idea, but back to the story: my answer to this "I don't get the humor" is: I don't get spanish humor.

And the simple reason is that I don't speak spanish good enough. I get SOME of the british & US humor. But only a bit ... my language skill, albeit perhaps ok if you look at it, is still not good enough to detect the subtle details. IMHO that is the reason why e.g. Mr Bean was easy to export: he doesn't talk :-)

In any case: to get the local humor, you MUST learn the language and even the culture quite good. Otherwise, you simply don't get it.

> I find it weird that I've been living in the same building for 7 years and I know basically nothing about my neighbors

Isn't this just par for the course when living in dense settings?

I've been living in my current apartment for more than three years, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't recognize most of my neighbors if I randomly saw them in the street. We say hello when our paths cross coming and going, but that's it.

Many people come to the cities specifically looking to be more anonymous. You can't have that if everybody knows everybody.

German culture is very functional, rigid, and dry, and it serves people with that kind of mindset very well. However, it clashes strongly with typical Southern cultures, so it is no surprise that the parent mentioned this. People who value the "softer" aspects of life are not going to feel at home.

There are certainly exceptions, and YMMV.

The question is... what about the german culture do you know?

Do you know the "functional" Brother Grimm's tales?

Or the "dry" humor of Dieter Hallervorden if you're a bit older? (okay, Christian Ehring from extra3 is perhaps really dry ...)

Do you know the rigid songs of, say Nena or Einstürzende Neubauten? Or is the music of BAP functional to you?

Are the books of Andreas Eschbach dry? Or the lyrics of Ingeborg Bachmann?

Maybe local customs like or the cologne "Karneval" are dry you then? These days we have CSD's all over the place. Maybe not original german culture, but perhaps the german adaption is too rigid?

Do you actually KNOW german culture? Have you been here in school, for example? My guess: you don't really know german culture, at least not so much that you found stuff in it that you enjoy. But you certainly miss your home culture. This is the culture where you were brought up, where you know the language, the norms, the taboos etc. And something else is then alien to you, not comforting. But you already adopted german directness to express this non-comforting state in harsh and ugly words :-)

I've been living in Germany for more than a decade, and I've been exposed to many aspects of it, and lived also in several other countries.

For those who also lived in southern countries, what I mean with "rigid" and "humorless" (among the other things) will sound very familiar. I've talked about this topic recently with a few friends from southern cultures, and they also shared the fact that (among the other things) expressing themselves the same way they did in their own culture, would be considered crass/inappropriate (to say the least), and in some contexts even abusive (happened to me).

Sibling poster highlighted how culture can be intended "in the sense of "expected norms and behaviors"; that's also part of it.

It's not a matter of not knowing the language. I grew up in Brazil but studied in a German school from grades 6-12. I used to watch Deutsche Welle more than I'd watch canned US sitcoms on cable.

I can understand a joke, and I can even (most of the times) understand the intention of the joke. But it doesn't mean that I find it funny.

As for "culture", I don't think we are using it in the same way. I mean in the sense of "expected norms and behaviors".

Let me give you one example: BBQ "culture". I really like to grill in the summer time and my birthday is in June. So I put these two together and made a tradition to have a BBQ party for my birthday.

Maybe you are not aware, but Brazilian BBQ is a multiple-hour event. It is not just a matter of cooking a pile of meat and getting stuffed, it is an opportunity to get the group together, socialize, and to slowly enjoy the food throughout the afternoon. Also, people can coordinate about the side-dishes all they want, but usually the host of the party "runs" the grill.

So, to get to the anecdote: one of my first birthdays here I invited a bunch of people to my place. I told them "Don't worry about the food or drinks. I got plenty for everyone."

Anyway, it was the time of the party and people started showing up. But remember what I said, this is an day-long event. By the time people started to arrive I had most of the things already set, appetizers on the table, drinks on the cooler. Everyone there (Italians, Turks, the Greeks, the Spanish, my Polish coworker) understood their "assignment": enjoy the moment and trust the host (me) that food would be coming along...

..except this one (German) friend of my (Italian) flatmate. The dude showed up one hour after the first group of people, all stressed about "being late" (he wasn't, it's a long party, there is no set time to arrive or leave), carrying a couple of "Nackensteaks" and asking whether he could "have some space on the grill to cook his food". I told him "hey, relax, there is some food over there and more meat is coming already, I can cook these steaks you brought afterwards".

He refused, he just wanted "his" steaks. No particular reason, just because he thought that was "his" share. I let him cook his steaks, he got some of the side dishes, sat down on the table by himself and had his lunch. Only then he decided to join the rest of the people in the party.

My flatmate just looked at me and said "they really don't get it...". I shrugged, and went back to the grill.

BBQ culture is different in different parts of the world - I experienced what you describe in Switzerland once (bring and grill your own food). Where I’m from, it’s bring your own booze but host is expected to provide all the food. Where my partner is from, you’re expected to bring either dessert or salad - but not booze or stuff for the grill. I think you’re reading too much into some fairly minor difference in etiquette. If you want to experience real culture-shock, try using a sauna in a German-speaking country…

Oh, it's not a "culture shock" kind of thing. I actually had no issue whatsoever going to a Sauna or even going swimming on the FKK hours. Like I said, I studied in a German school so I kinda knew these things are just a natural part of German life.

And it's not like I was "bothered" by him bringing his own food or wanting to cook it. It just seemed the guy was completely missing the point by being too focused on the "meal".

I just want to give one example of what I meant by "cultural differences", not that this one story cemented my opinion of Germans. Somewhat like trying to explain to an Italian that the North American idea of "getting coffee" means grabbing a Starbucks and walk around - or worse, driving to get it on a drive-through.

I'm from Germany. never really went anywhere else much, and I basically only knew it your way, growing up.

I also went to some "BBQ" once, where it was "eat your own food", but that's just a sign, that you don't trust each other and don't know each other well.

So I would say, that's just this guys and maybe some others customs. It would be rude for other Germans too.

> he got some of the side dishes, sat down on the table by himself and had his lunch. Only then he decided to join the rest of the people in the party.

Did you already stop eating? This sounds like he assumed you were already done with the meal part, so he tried to catch up and then join. If you were still eating, then this guy is just very weird and rude.

---

> this is an day-long event

So if you invite me for "Grillen", I assume it's taking ~3 hours. If you mean "day-long", maybe the German mind comprehends it better, if you say you are hosting a party and do also do a BBQ.

Being German who lived in other parts of the world myself, and someone who likes food and considers the typical German BBQ an abomination I can feel your pain.

But is this not more of an example of you wanting to do things the Brazillian way rather than German's unwillingness for you to integrate? At any rate, the Nackensteak guy is a total dick!

Also don't forget, a lot of those Italian, Turk, Greek, Spanish and Polish coworkers may well be Germans...

> the typical German BBQ

Maybe this is just an East/West or North/South thing. I am German too and would find that just very weird and atypical. Maybe something you would do in a company setting, where you don't actually want to go, but just keep your job and don't create enemies, so you come and keep the lowest profile possible.

That's a pithy description of it all. If I hadn't met my (Greek) wife in 2015, I've probably would have left long ago.

And to come of think of it, I think there is another aspect that influences this: Germans are not having as many kids as the immigrants, so the overwhelming majority of the kids in the kitas and schools are from immigrant families or immigrant/native mixed parents. This means that (at this stage in life) any new friends you get to make are likely through your kids, and even there the pool is selected against Germans.

That's a very Berlin-centric observation. Berlin is special; it's hard to extrapolate to the rest of the country.

Maybe, but a quick AI-assisted research says that Bremen has an even higher rate of births from non-German mothers than Berlin, and the data does not make the distinction between citizenship and immigration status.

What do you mean with „Germans“? In my friends group, in my son‘s football club, in school, most kids have a so called migration background, but the parents are mostly second generation and mostly assimilated. So what?

If we split between second-generation (i.e, both parents born in Germany) as "native" and everyone else (i.e, anyone with at least one parent not born in Germany) as "immigrants", I'd guess that number would skew heavily towards "immigrants" in all major cities. I could be wrong, but I haven't found a way to reliably check the data.

Doubtful, honestly, though from what you described with Berlin, this feels like more of a problem of Berlin being a very transient city. A lot of people never fully settling there, especially so called expats, despite living there for decades. A lot of people being part of the cosmopolity, moving from one hype city, one startup, to the other. That’s okay, but it doesn’t work for everyone.

Your view of current immigrants is not that different from the Germans in the 70s who thought that the Turks and Vietnamese looking for jobs in Germany would go back to their homes after a while. Some of them did, but enough of them stayed to become a substantial part of the population.

Anyway, like I said there is a good chance I am wrong about it Germany in general. But I'd argue that in Berlin that is pretty much the case, regardless of how large the "transient" people are compared to "longer-term settlers". Once people start having kids they stop hopping around, so I'd guess that the amount of "non-native" children that dominate the schools have immigrant parents who are mostly settled.

Not the OP but to give you an example. Spines on books in German are written one way along the spine. While generally in English books it's the other way round.

https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/1n5booe/do_all_ger...

Both have their trade-offs and most cultures are chill about it, but a lot of Germans will swear by the way it is done in Germany being the logical method. It is a vrry homogenizing culture that way.

It also goes for most things in life like sentence case vs title case for headings. Pairing of flavors in dishes (although that is changing).

All in all, it gives you the idea of "there's a german way to do things which is the correct way, please adjust."

To be clear, there are some German ways which I think have much more far reaching consequences, and one about should argue about them, like attitude toward labor laws or LGBT stance. (And whichever way you feel about it, you can agree that the stance has far reaching consequences). And Germans will club all of the different level of seriousness together at the same level with whether you have a accent in your German, for example, when considering how integrated you are.

And that is incredibly frustrating and makes one feel left out. And it is not just immigrants. I know people who moved from Hamburg to Erlangen who felt more left out than me who moved from India to Erlangen (mostly because I had a German girlfriend at that point.)

what are you talking about bro, I think you're really getting carried away here. Nobody cares about the direction of writing on the spine of a book. And your thing with sentence vs title case doesn't make sense because German doesn't even have that distinction.

I'm also a foreigner in Berlin, and my guess is twofold:

1. Their German isn't good enough, which limits the pool of people you can connect to

2. They only or mostly hang out in the expat-scene, which limits the pool of people you can connect to

no, it's the Berlin experience, even for many Germans

1. speaking German doesn't matter too much in Berlin, except older "Berlin Berlins" most people speak conversational English. I have even seen cases of _all_ personal in a caffe not speaking German..., more then once.

2. Over half the people in Berlin are "expat-like": ~20% of people in Berlin are not from Germany, 30-40% or so are not from Berlin and only there fro some years/decades to study or similar. And the distribution isn't uniform across Berlins, i.e. the areas you are most likely to end up as an (actual) expat (or similar) are the ones with way higher ratios. Like if you connect someone in such a area (weather physical or area-of-life) it's actually surprising if that person if "from" Berlin. Like you as a person "from" Berlin are more a special case then idk. someone from Poland ;).

> 1. speaking German doesn't matter too much in Berlin, except older "Berlin Berlins" most people speak conversational English

This depends on the context: it doesn't matter to speak German in the stage of life where one doesn't interface with the administration (and therefore, older generations). But for those who settle, and are past that stage, German is a requirement.

> German is a requirement.

should be,

but de-facto isn't, like seriously you can live decades in Berlin without learning German. As a German I could fully stop understanding German from tomorrow on and in any situation except my parents it would work out, with only very limited issues here and there. Most which normally solvable with camera based translation apps (e.g. Google Lense), and some other by deciding which part of Berlin I spend my time in.

and legally it's only required if you try to get a German pass

1) I am certified C1 German - studied in high school for 6 years. Granted, I don't like speaking German and will use English when possible, but it's not a matter of not being able to connect with them.

2) Shortly after moving in, I started dating a German woman. Lasted close to a whole year. That was more than enough time to meet a lot of her friends, I got to meet her family, etc. That was more than enough time and opportunities to get a good insight into "native German" lifestyle, culture and values.

Want to try again?

    > Granted, I don't like speaking German and will use English when possible, but it's not a matter of not being able to connect with them.

Why do you live in Germany? Why not somewhere else?

Because I have not been able to convince my wife to move to Greece.

Also, the fact that I am not integrated does not mean that I am unhappy here.

wowow C1 and dated a German? Sorry, you are basically a native

You take that back, right now!

You don’t know Germany, you know Berlin.

You don’t have insight into German lifestyle, you have insight into that one woman’s family’s lifestyle (and only less than a year, you’re not a family member at that point).

I'm not claiming that I know all of Germany or all Germans, I am just refuting GP's guesses.

Also, she wasn't the only German that I've met and it wasn't the case that I only met native Germans through her personal network. I also worked at Deutsche Telekom and Mercedes Benz. I've had the opportunity to interact with lots of people outside of the work environment.

I have been living in Berlin since my birth and your experience is one _many Germans have in Berlin, too_. Berlin is it's own thing, both in good and bad, I would not treat it as representative for Germany at all.

1. Berlin is the _least_ German Germany city, by far.

2. around ~20% of people living in Berlin aren't from Germany, I can't find the numbers but I think another 30-40% where not born in Berlin and likely won't stay more then 10-20 years. So _most people in Berlin are there temporary_, with people constantly moving in and out.

2.2. and the distribution of people long term living in Berlin and such being there temporary for studies, party, work, etc. isn't even across Berlin. In some areas you might mostly find people not "from" Berlin. To a point when meeting people in Berlin they sometimes are quite surprised if someone actually is from Berlin and not just lives there "for now"...

2.3. and in some parts of the city a non small part of "Berlins" born here are have parents or grandparents from Turkey which moved here in the 60th.

3. Berlin has a lot of sub-culturs which can be grate and fun, but also a common background rule is "you do what you want and I want I want" this can be really grate, or terrible as (not sure how to say it) the background social network which tends to integrate people into a local society is somewhat absence. Or to put it differently a lot (but not all) of people don't care about you, they won't harass you for being different, but they won't help you either if you don't happen to be a close friend. On the other hand in many other parts of Germany people are more strict about "you somewhat fitting in" but in turn if you try might also help you in the most unexpected ways (as I said I'm not sure how to best express this, this point is starkly oversimplified and can be misread in a lot of ways).

4. through Berlin has _a lot_ of different faces, some even people living there for decades might not have seen. So if you are in the right corner/community 3rd might not apply to you at all. Trying to describe Berlin in one way is a bit like pretending all of Germany is Bavaria.

5. Berlin is a swamp. Not just because the name might be based on birl~„Sumpf“ in some partially lost old languages. Or because some parts have frequently ~80+% Air Humidity (in fall/spring/warmer winter days; at ground level). Or because of it being the political centrum and as such associated with all the non Bavaria specific political corruption. But also because people "become marshy" (not good translation) here. I.e. they come here and then slowly and continuously slow down and get stuck here, never really arriving, but also not getting forward or backward.

Now this isn't complete and more focused on the bad parts, Berlin can also be grate, for a large city it's extremely green, most side streets and many main streets have road side trees and there are ~2000 additional "green areas" (like e.g. parks, but some very very small). There are tons of places to enjoy the evening in all kinds of ways, ton's of culture from clubs to theater, opera and shows. A lot of history. A lot of sub-cultures of all kind etc. But also it is just green (not flowery), you might not care about most culture things and just because there are many sub-cutlures doesn't mean it's something for you or you manage to connect to them. Also it's kinda dirty and this has gotten worse thanks multiple factors including the current city Government cutting costs in the wrong places...

Eh, anyway, my recommendation is:

- If you want to experience Berlin go to Berlin, if you want to party/enjoy evening non stop for a few years also go to Berlin, same for students where a Uni here matches their goals nicely. But if you want to experience Germany, then don't come here.

- If your life is stuck in Berlin (no matter if you are German or not) seriously consider leaving, for some people Berlin is long term poison which slowly eats away their happiness. There is a reason a large part of people in Berlin only stay there for a few decades at most.

- Don't expect to meet Berlins is Berlin (it's less then half the population in some regions way less). And in some areas of life don't even expect to meet/connect to that many "typical" Germans.

"Berlin is the _least_ German Germany city, by far."

Isn't that a common complaint in the lot of countries - people complain about London in the UK in a very similar fashion?

It's a very common complaint in countries where one city is disproportionately dominant (London for the UK or Dublin for Ireland, say). It's arguably a bit more surprising for Berlin, because Berlin isn't so disproportionately huge (Berlin's metro area is 6 million out of 80 million, versus London's 15 million out of 70 million or Dublin's 2 million out of 5 million), and because Germany has other comparably sized cities (Hamburg's metro area population is about 5 million). You'd expect it to be a bit less of its own place just on that basis.

Nah, there is a very strong reason to support the "Berlin ist eine Insel" saying. Are you forgetting the fact that Berlin was literally isolated from the rest of Western Germany and controlled by 4 other countries until some decades ago?

Let's not forget East Berlin with its 1.2 million population and as the capital of the DDR that was very nicely integrated into the DDR. While both parts of Berlin were obviously isolated from the BDR, West Berlin was supervised by 3 countries. Just to avoid any misunderstanding by people who were not able to visit both parts during those historical times.

IDK if it's a complaint about London per se, but it's definitely not typical of much of England.

And yes, you can say the same about e.g. Amsterdam vs. The Netherlands. And others.

But also, neither of them were literally isolated like West Berlin.

Yeah, "Moscow ain't Russia" is an idiom.

I think the main problem is to see Berlin as a city. Even the official city is more a bunch of divided, but connected middle-sized cities. For example, the City Berlin has ~3.7 Million citizens, which is nearly double the size of the next biggest cities (Hamburg 1.8 Million, Munich 1.5 Million). And the region Berlin even has 4.7-6.3 Million, depending on which parts you add. Half of the German states have fewer citizens.

> 2. around ~20% of people living in Berlin aren't from Germany,

Notable part here: that's not even the highest amount in Germany. There are many cities with similar or higher numbers. But to be fair, depending on the region, there are likely many people from neighbouring countries which will have less problems with integration because of their shared cultural background. Berlin is for historical and political reasons a big melting pot of different cultures. It's not the only one, but a bit different because of it's size.

> people have no idea how good they have it here.

Whenever I tell Germans that I'm Canada, they almost always respond with "Canada!? It's such a wonderful country, what are you doing here??" as if they couldn't possibly imagine what a Canadian might like about their country.

Sure, Canada's a great place, just like Germany. Also just like Germany it's far from perfect, and sometimes one is just after a different tradeoff.

Perhaps you just hated shopping on a Sunday! Sunday is for doing absolutely nothing at all.

> a lot of German natives complain and some are even leaving the country (around 100k left last year)

It's actually 300k, but 200k also returned. The "funny" part is, there is even a long-running TV-show (20th season this year) about people leaving the country, not sure if other countries have something similar. But realistically, expats seems like a common phenomenon in rich countries. Some people just seek the adventure.

I also like watching the Austrian (actually a tip if you know German, check ATV) and the swiss edition. Pretty sure swiss has at least a German and a French one, maybe even another one. So yeah, there is that.

> and some are even leaving the country (around 100k left last year)

They have them in Spain, and they are retired. Do you want them back?

I’m living in Spain and for daily life I speak more German than Spanish. They are taking over.

Curious to get some perspective: How viable would starting a career in IT/Technology in Germany be as a mildly autistic American with an inability to learn foreign languages? I hear many opinions about this ranging from "English is commonly spoke, you'll be fine" to "You can visit but you will be unable to settle down due to xenophobia". The EU is incredibly appealing as someone highly dissatisfied with the trajectory of the US, and though I am aware many European countries are slowly following the same trajectory at least it'd give me a few more years of "this is fine".

My family pre-immigration 150 years ago still exists in Germany and now appears to own a large road-construction concrete company. I wonder if that string is worth pulling.

> Curious to get some perspective: How viable would starting a career in IT/Technology in Germany be as a mildly autistic American with an inability to learn foreign languages?

In my observation, in Germany the tolerance for the symptoms associated with mild autism is a little better than in the USA. On the other hand: if you aren't able to learn the German language fast: forget it.

Also be aware that starting a career in Germany is much harder than in the USA. On the other hand: once you are in, it is rather easy to stay in your job (in particular at a big company where there is a strong Betriebsrat (work council)) as long as you work somewhat dutifully and don't do anything really stupid. Just don't expect to move up the ladder (moving up the ladder or switching companies every few years is rather uncommon in Germany, so don't come with such an expectation).

> My family pre-immigration 150 years ago still exists in Germany and now appears to own a large road-construction concrete company. I wonder if that string is worth pulling.

This "I had ancestors in country X" seems to be a common sentiment among US-Americans. As a German I can really not understand how US-Americans get the idea that anybody in this country cares about that. If you really cared about the country, you would learn the language to a near-native level and get deeply into the country's culture.

Very fair. It is mostly just amusing to me to share an uncommon last name with the signage on an company's building.

Learning the language is vital here. Most things are not in english but only in german. Every official letter you receive will be in german.

Looking for an apartment? Better speak german with the landlord.

You may get through for a few years in an international city like Hamburg, Berlin, München if you find a job at an international company. But long term? Learn german or you will suffer.

> Every official letter you receive will be in german.

Is that different in any other country?

Would you expect to be able to recieve them in spanish, while living in France?

There is also https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leichte_Sprache , which many official websites provide, seems even to be mandatory for some services to have that option on offer.

It seems unwise to go to a country without a plan to learn the language. If you are as unable to learn languages as you stated, then I suggest living in English speaking countries for life

Unwise, sure, but there are precious few options for English native countries, particularly when my partner has a skin condition that makes persistent cold temperatures untenable.

New Zealand, Australia, many NZ and US dependencies in the Pacific, South Africa, some Caribbean countries and territories?

> In fact, I like most of the rules, rules are good because they ensure order, fairness and equality.

I'm sure some of the more entrepreneurial minds will argue that many of those rules stifle innovation and progress. But also on a personal level, at least to this returning German, some of the rules seem silly at best and at worst cause some underlying sense of oppression. Why, e.g., is there a Meldegesetz/Meldeamt? I survived for 25+ years in California without such.

There are safety/freedom tradeoffs and whether they are worth it, everyone has to decide for themselves (at least Germans are granted the liberty to leave, if they don't like it). Many Germans long for a more adventurous life, but in the end most prefer to visit, rather than emigrate to, foreign shores.

One thing the Ortsamt/Meldeamt is good for, you don't have to register to vote. You get a note in your mail when there is an election. The note informs you about the date and where your designated polling station is located and it somewhat serves as your voting-ID at the station.

Yes, there are good rule and bad rules (and rules that were once reasonable but changes in technology or society rendered them suboptimal).

As an immigrant to Germany, I wish the authorities would think more about the chilling effect every new rule has on activity (add another item to your to-do checklist, and less people are likely to even start). A prime example is trying to open a company in Germany vs some other countries (not even going as far as the US, it's enough to compare with Finland or the UK).

> As an immigrant to Germany, I wish the authorities would think more about the chilling effect every new rule has on activity (add another item to your to-do checklist, and less people are likely to even start). A prime example is trying to open a company in Germany vs some other countries (not even going as far as the US, it's enough to compare with Finland or the UK).

Also many Germans think this way. They have just given up that the politicians will ever change that.

Yes, if one compares in the downward direction of living standards, there are many countries doing worse, no doubt. It is also a fact however, that we massively neglect our education system, and have good grades inflation in many places. Record numbers of 1.0 (best grade) students, while secondary schools ("Gymnasiums") and universities complain about the quality of students, despite their grades, with the gap widening.

And the education system is not the only thing that is down in the drain and worsening. Take Deutsche Bahn for example. Its management levels paid themselves millions in boni, while at the same time the infrastructure is kept at a minimum repair and renew level. Literally every time I take a high speed train (ICE) it is hours late, so much so, that I am even discouraged visiting people, because I already am traumatized from trains being late and spending the whole day on trains, when I should only need 4h. Infrastructure inside cities is also in many places waaay behind what it could be and already is in many other countries, while being hopelessly expensive to use. Countries with much fewer people and GDP have managed to build better and more affordable infrastructure in their capitols. Check out Madrid for example. Metro there is great, and comparatively cheap to use.

The job market situation is really bad currently as well. Even highly skilled people cannot get a job now. Unemployment benefits have been massively reduced lately. The people who do get a job or have one face stagnation in salary, while there is inflation, and this has been going on for a decade or so. Purchasing power of the people is diminishing. Groceries and staples are getting more expensive. In short, most people's economic situation is worsening.

For young people it is almost impossible now to buy a house in many places. What our parents could afford and realistically pay back in loans has become a distant dream for the current generation. Only with 2 solid and good incomes one might dare it in some more rural area perhaps.

The point is that our living standards are decreasing, due to the global economy situation and mostly due to massive mismanagement of the reality in politics, corruption, money pocketing. Soon we are at real risk to lose even democracy.

Digitization is also lagging way behind. The stereotype is, that we still use fax. Well, it's not too far off.

Do we have it better than people in many other places? Still yes. But there are also countries now laughing about us and our stupidity, who have managed to overtake us, or maybe I should say we have managed to fall behind them. It is really no wonder skilled people are leaving Germany left and right, front and back, when they are much better paid elsewhere. Now people, who originally came from Poland to Germany, due to better living and better prospects, are returning to Poland Warsaw.

> And the education system is not the only thing that is down in the drain and worsening.

Which is simply wrong --- or at least only true if you look at only part of the education system.

But in Germany, there is also an education system to become Geselle, Meister, Techniker, Fachwirt --- things that many other countries don't have. And somehow people always ignore that.

And the Deutsche Bahn ... perhaps not the shining example. But ... look at France. They hardly have trains, e.g. there are small towns that only have 8 trains a day. To go by TGV from Bordeaux to Lyon you must pass Paris, hundreds of kilometers depart. It's like going from Kassel to Hamburg must go via Berlin. Also, the trains in UK are bad. And some countries, like Spain, or Greece, also hardly have tracks AND trains. While here, we actually tracks "everywhere" and even a bit too many trains, therefore the delay. But you can reach your destination, while in other countries there's no way. 5 weeks ago I went with ICE from Kassel to Regensburg --- for a mere 26 EUR (one way) because I booked in advance. Where else do you get that?

Employment situation bad... and yet there are some groups that constantly look to employ you. Every Aldi, Lidl has posters looking for people. The Bahn searches train drivers. Lot of transportation companies look for lorry drivers. The unemployment rate of Germany is at 3.9% -- only 7 EU countries better than us. Our 3.9% is e.g. better than the US. Did the situation get worse the last 3 years? Sure. But why? I'd point to Putin and Trump and some Mullahs (end of cheap gas, nonsensical customs, havoc in the straits of Hormuz).

Purchasing power wise Germany is at location 8 in the EU.

But hey, the typical complaining german gives to me the impression as if we're still the "Herrenrasse". We must always #1. As soon we're not #1 the end is nigh :-) Place 7 of 27 is totally bad, apparently.

However, if you select something in isolation, and then compare ONLY to the best, then you will always find that you're lacking. You had a 2 in english .. but there was this guy that had a 1 (in Germany that is better). You had a 2 in physics, but this lady had a 1. You had a 2 in sports, but again there was someone with a 1. And so on. And suddenly you think that you're the last of the students, because always there is someone better than you.

No, you must look at ALL the candidates, not just at those that are better. Compare the Bahn not just with Switzerland. Compare it with UK, France, Greece, Estonia Or ... heck, even the passenger railways system of the USA which sucks bollocks.

We have a similar system in Portugal for Ausbildung (Técnico Professional), I wished more folks would pay attention to it, as it also suffers from the same problem that everyone just wants to go to the university instead.

Trains are great and the network covers most of the country, not like in Portugal that is only the costal cities and a few lucky ones on the countryside, however in the 20+ years I lived here, they have certainly been through better times.

> But in Germany, there is also an education system to become Geselle, Meister, Techniker, Fachwirt --- things that many other countries don't have. And somehow people always ignore that.

Why do you think I was ignoring that?

The reality is, that here almost everyone thinks that they must go to university. Their parents also tell them that, because of increased requirements that businesses put up as lowest bars. Parents become helicopter parents and will try to make your life difficult, if you give their very extremely specially gifted child a bad grade. Teachers are no longer as respected by the parents, as they were in the past, and are way too soft on the grading. Good grade inflation is the result, even when the children/pupils do not actually achieve good results. Ridiculous things like some secondary schools only accepting 1.0 graded pupils in Berlin happen. When I went to school, in my whole city there were perhaps 10 pupils with a 1.0 grade (mean of all subjects) per year. You could definitely not run a school with that as source material.

At the next level, at the universities, they are also complaining about the students coming with inflated grades from secondary schools. German universities are considering establishing entrance exams and are at risk losing their international status, by accepting too many not great students. Quality of university education suffers.

On the other hand we have the small businesses, which teach the trades, which complain loudly, that they don't get qualified people to teach. If almost everyone can go to university, even if only for some MBA, then this is what we get. Those businesses teaching the trades (ausbildende Betriebe, Ausbildungsbetriebe) are complaining about very basic skills like language skills, reading understanding, focusing on something, simple calculation, etc., that they find lacking in the people they are supposed to teach. These problems also extend to immigrants, who simply haven't had a proper chance to learn the language, or come with completely different educational background.

If you ask me, we should only welcome as many people, as we can offer proper language courses and other required courses to, so that people who come here have an actual future, and don't simply disappear in subcultures. I want people who come here to have a good future, by being part of society and by having stable jobs, adding to our society as a whole. If they can't have jobs, then coming here will only result in more strain on our already severely strained social net. Figuratively speaking, a massive amount of effort is needed to pull that cart out of the mud. Years and years of mismanaged immigration to fix.

> And the Deutsche Bahn ... perhaps not the shining example. But ... look at France. They hardly have trains, e.g. there are small towns that only have 8 trains a day. To go by TGV from Bordeaux to Lyon you must pass Paris, hundreds of kilometers depart. It's like going from Kassel to Hamburg must go via Berlin. Also, the trains in UK are bad. And some countries, like Spain, or Greece, also hardly have tracks AND trains. While here, we actually tracks "everywhere" and even a bit too many trains, therefore the delay. But you can reach your destination, while in other countries there's no way.

You got a point in that we still have something that is more than elsewhere, granted. But the criticism is about how much worse it has become, compared to what we already had decades ago. Colossal mismanagement of a public good. Germany (everyone involved in managing DB and current and past governments) does seemingly not understand, how important a working public infrastructure is, for a country to prosper. They only see Q1,2,3,4 numbers. Worsening infrastructure is not something that makes a country attractive. Qualified people will consider moving elsewhere. People cannot rely on DB to get to and fro their job office, or will simply be late every now and then. Living in a neighbor town becomes infeasible, due to unreliability of DB. We are basically working on getting everyone to drive their own 4 person city tank (that disease also has caught on here...) alone, to and from their work place.

> 5 weeks ago I went with ICE from Kassel to Regensburg --- for a mere 26 EUR (one way) because I booked in advance. Where else do you get that?

I got a last minute ticket from Berlin to Kassel recently for 22 EUR, also one way. But the issue is not only the pricing. The issue is the non-existent reliability. A trip that should have taken 2h53min took 4h37min, because of delays and the train already starting with 14min delay in Berlin. On my way back I was not so lucky to get a last minute ticket, and chose to take regional trains, which took me 8h+.

But to answer the question where else one gets that: In China, eaaaasily. Of course salaries are different there, no question, but for some 15 EUR I can travel through half of China, in approximately the same time, that I need in Germany, to cross half of Germany, and the train will be at the station on point, not starting 14min late. It will usually halt at the station with the carriages exactly aligned at the numbered markers at the station. I won't have to run all the way to the other end of the train. I won't have to hurry up and down some stairs, because of some last minute notice, that the train arrives at another track today, which then is corrected back again, causing me to run back to the original friggin track. That's just stuff that happens with Deutsche Bahn for some reason.

> But hey, the typical complaining german gives to me the impression as if we're still the "Herrenrasse". We must always #1. As soon we're not #1 the end is nigh :-) Place 7 of 27 is totally bad, apparently.

Well, #1 is the goal, obviously. Why should Germany not try to be the best? It is silly to not aim high in that regard. We should very much look at Japan (train sevice, making use of cultural goods, attracting visitors), South Korea (Internet, everyday convenience), and China (infrastructure, modern cities, getting construction projects done) and ask ourselves, what is going wrong here. The problem is not necessarily that we are not currently #1, but that things are decaying and we are falling in many rankings:

    Education (falling in international comparisons, especially severe)
    Train service (only gotten worse in the last decade, redefinitions of what is "too late" don't help)
    Cost of living (has increased a lot, including groceries)
    Wealth of young people (countries inside the EU, of which one might not think so, have higher average wealth of young people than Germany, for example Spain and Italy)

Young people these days can mostly only dream about living in their own home. Most are forced to rent, and rent is ever increasing, while salaries in many areas are stagnating. We are far away from being able to afford, what our parents were able to afford. But I think that is the case in many countries these days, and not only a Germany thing.

Easier said than done, but don't let the racists take your enjoyment of being here or anywhere in the world, for that fact.

It is because of you guys, who love rules so much, that the poor Germans get such a bad reputation. ;)

Could you elaborate? Who pays for what exactly?

I am kinda triggered by that comment because you make it look like it's easy or inexpensive. It's not.

I also came to Germany with just a suitcase and a backpack. I paid for my tickets, paid for mandatory health insurance that covered timeframe before I started my job, paid my rent, paid government for processing/issuing my residence permit, etc. I've paid taxes and health insurance every single month since then, haven't used any unemployment benefits once, took a single sick leave.

You might argue that I "stole a job", "worsened housing crisis", or something along these lines. But there are plenty of data points that disprove majority of such arguments.

I think it depends on the job one has. Working as senior software engineer for international companies? Any western european country is nice and all. Top p90 salary. English only needed. Working as a bank cashier? Well, then you will notice the difference between let say Germany and Portugal. Low salary. Need proficiency in the local language, etc.

It is truly a great city to live in. I have only visited it a few times, I wish I could live there.

This is a total mess IMHO.

- The make around 5 billion in revenue per quarter - The problem according to them is profit margin - around 150-160 million

So first of all, they are big! Secondly they are not at a loss. They just have a "thin, non-growing margin". So to fix all this they are trimming down, so they can "return to growth" (which I think is ridiculous).

Some points -

- They are huge business even now - 5 billion per quarter revenue is no joke

- They did not have to buy all those studios

- They looked at Netflix, and wanted the sweet monthly subscription cash stream

- Then they did not have to give away popular games day one on Game Pass

- And finally, they did not have to raise Game Pass prices to improve the profit margins. Of course, consumers pulled out.

- Once again, short term vision, crazy decisions, bad spending spree and a constant need to "make numbers go up" and who has to pay for all this?

150M at 5B revenue is not great: that's 3% margin!

The bigger issue is that console manufacturer revenue is highly cyclical. This is hard to see in e.g. Xbox and Sony since they are both part of a larger conglomerate, but really obvious for nintendo.

You generally have a cycle of - "Launch": high marketing costs, low/negative HW margins - "Mid-cycle": lowering manufacturing costs, large game sales, high margin DLCs - "end-of-cycle": falling HW sales, fewer exclusives (-> preparation for next gen), fewer consumers (-> waiting for next gen). Here you usually have maximum profits since you don't subsidize HW and marketing is minimal (platforms are already locked in)

Generally you have to establish a big userbase during the mid-cycle such that you can levarage it during the late-cycle to be able to afford next-gen. Xbox has the big issue that their mid-cycle was catastrophic, which means they now don't have the console base to get into the next generation: If they have 3% margin _right now_ in the end-of-cycle where marketing and development costs are at their lowest, this does not bode well for the overall health of the business.

> "Mid-cycle": lowering manufacturing costs,

That was true historically but is no longer the case. Even last gen manufacturing costs didn't go down as much as they used to. This current gen they actually increased multiple times.

And they have hiked the prices of the current gen very late in the cycle to reflect component costs.

The cheapest xbox should cost 129. Instead it is $399. That is how consoles work. It gets cheaper, the back catalog grows and now you have a mass market item that ideally could source games from anywhere.

Consoles losing physical media and not allowing 3rd party app stores, or gasp, the ability to run user programs is going to kill the consoles. Expensive and marginal future utility.

Exactly, it seems their only way to make money is charging for online play which used to be $5/m and now $10/m for Game Pass Essential. Now that their high console prices aren't getting new players, the only play is to squeeze the existing ones and increasing the cost to play online.

They actually tried this a few months back when Game Pass Ultimate went from $20/m to $30/m. I cancelled my sub and went to essential. Then Asha backtracks and reduces it to $22/m and people are like wow, she will save Xbox. No, it just shows me they probably saw so much churn, especially from long-time subs, that they backtracked.

I've always thought it was borderline crazy that Xbox charged a monthly fee and I never had an Xbox for that reason. It always made me wonder how many people they failed to bring into their ecosystem for that reason.

As far as I understand - that fee is not mandatory.

To play online, you do need to pay them. But for local games, no fees after buying the game.

Cheapest will be 499 dollars from August 1st.

>150M at 5B revenue is not great: that's 3% margin!

Oy vey maybe this kind of money grubbery is not good for our society.

> Oy vey maybe this kind of money grubbery is not good for our society.

No, it's a signal from the market that the product being sold is not wanted by the market.

They've mismanaged all their IP pursuing that yummy subscription revenue. Turns out gamers really don't like to buy subscriptions. As a poster downthread pointed out, the games that are not always-on and subscription-based are doing fine. It's the recent AAA model of subscription that is bleeding money.

Oh yeah I forgot 5 BILLION dollar in revenue is a signal that the market does not want your product

> Oh yeah I forgot 5 BILLION dollar in revenue is a signal that the market does not want your product

Doesn't matter how big the revenue is if the market is not interested at the price you are selling.

I mean, by your logic, if I sell a dollar for 64c, and do $5b revenue, that's an indication that the market does indeed want the product, but not an indication that the market wants the product at the price you need to sell at to stay in business.

They are not selling at a loss though. The real issue here is that businesses such as Microsoft do not exist to serve a market or make enough money to survive and pay their employees. They exist to increase the value of their owner's shares. This is predicated on an unsustainable model of continual growth, with the expectation that every market they operate in can produce high margins and endless expansion. But demand is not infinite and persistent high margins are the exception, not the norm.

Maybe it isn't a loss, but as an investor (never directly in them), I consider 3% profit margin a bad sign - at that return I'd prefer a savings account: FDIC insurance means that after accounting for risks the savings account is better. I know stock returns don't directly track profit margin, but that is one input into the complex consideration of stocks.

You are right, and this is why not everything should be a stock. Whatever they will cut to avoid emitting "a bad sign", may involve:

* firing people * making services worse * sacrificing their own future

Whether it actually does involve those things is effectively arbitrary, because the consideration of the "bad sign" is also arbitrary. If there is no objective value judgement of their operation there is no objective value judgement in their streamlining either, so all bets are off.

no percentage no good

"complex consideration"

Overall they are not selling at a loss, but parts of what they're selling are being sold at a loss. The market is telling them to slim the f- down and get rid of those money-losing parts.

This is all normal and justifiable. Where is the logic that corporations need to preserve dysfunctional parts of their operations?

Corporations don’t need to, no. But they are systems, and it’s a beginner mistake to assume changing one part is going to affect the whole in some simple, predictable, logical way.

That sounds like an extremely lame excuse to preserve money losing activities.

I'll counter by saying that pruning off failing things is not only good, it's the core of capitalism. Creative destruction, as Schumpeter called it. You get efficiency by hunting down and eliminating inefficiency, redeploying the resources elsewhere.

> pruning off failing things is not only good, it's the core of capitalism

It's quite serious that you see "being good" as something inferior to "the core of capitalism".

Also, the core of capitalism is making money for private individuals, nothing more, nothing less. Whether that's done with or without "failing things", is really beside the point.

The core of capitalism is about where ownership of capital (value producing assets) resides, that is, by private individuals.

What private individuals choose to do with their capital, chase infinite growth and profit or sit on it, is up to them. This is as opposed to say, state ownership of capital.

People confuse the stock market with capitalism. You don't need a stock market for capitalism to function. Publicly traded companies in the United States are legally bound to maximize profit (Dodge vs. Ford Motor Co.)

> You get efficiency by hunting down and eliminating inefficiency, redeploying the resources elsewhere

Plants do this. What’s it got to do with capitalism?

Error is rampant. I saw a quote saying the difference between a good business and bad one is the good one makes the right decision 60% of time, the bad one 40% of the time.

So errors abound, and have to be subsequently corrected. This correction process is as natural to capitalism as breathing is to you being alive. Without it, things would rapidly grind to a halt. We see this in sclerotic centrally planned economies where errors persist for much longer.

No? By that logic you sell a dollar for 103c and that's not enough to quench your greed.

Obviously both statements are gross oversimplifications. But I could not help myself and let that slide just like that.

Just to add to your comment, people do sell dollars for $1.07, they are called mortgages. I've heard it's a pretty big business.

What they do is they sell a dollar for 1.07$ future dollars (and, realistically, less than that because of defaults but whatever).

It's a lot more than $1.07 future money, a mortgage is more like $2 or these days $5

If you're offering even 25 year 75% LTV mortgages at such a low interest rate it's $1.07 future money you're going bankrupt. And these days people are taking 30 year, 95% LTV or even asking for 40 year 100% LTV which is fully batshit.

I'm sadly not living in one of the very nice-to-live Nordic countries.

This level of greed is also relatively new, and was pretty well managed by previous (30~ years ago?) administrations. There's an obvious direct correlation between the rapid growth in wealth of the top 1%, businesses becoming increasingly anti-consumer, degrading quality of life amongst the average person, etc. It isn't something inherent to capitalism, it's something inherent to unmanaged 'trickle down economics' capitalism and societies built on individualism above all else.

> No, it's a signal from the market that the product being sold is not wanted by the market.

to me, it is really a signal that the cost of production is high - ala, they're inefficient, rather than the market not wanting the product.

The issue is both. They're inefficient in that they hire too many people to work on things people don't want. They collate all of their workforce and capital into projects that will perform poorly, rather than splitting that up between different projects that will individually vary but have a much healthier release and lifetime. The thing that people very high up in the organization lose a view on is that while there are operating costs to running multiple individual small projects, overall they balance themselves out because the risk isn't concentrated and each budget is an entity unto itself that doesn't affect the others. A supermassive failure like Concord however takes everyone's budgets and puts it into one giant project that has to succeed well beyond reasonable or even sustainable returns because now you have the costs of the core developers, the half dozen assistant studios, and the dozens to hundreds of asset producers on contract. And because of that you have to target as many demographics as possible, which for marketers means shaving off as many of the pieces that are necessary for complex mechanisms functioning within their niche but are incongruous with the other complex mechanisms that have been deemed as appealing. In other words, they're gambling their entire income on the equivalent of a spaceship boat plane car that can't land on water, can't re-enter the atmosphere, can't drive on the roads because it's too big, and is awful to fly because it's all of those other things.

It ultimately depends on what sort of Skinnerbox you're running tbh.

Players purchased roughly $6.8 billion worth of the Roblox in-game currency Robux in 2025, a massive 55% year-over-year increase.

What's not to understand that when you're having to spend 4.85B in order to get 5B in revenue makes your business quite risky. You want to be operating on larger margins than that

Pretty normal margin in some kinds of businesses, like supermarkets. Then again, supermarkets aren’t likely to see all their customers leave at the drop of a hat.

The scale is also very different. Costco earned $70.53 billion in a recent quarter (not 5B here). Their operating margin is 3.93%, which is also healthier.

Yes very different business models. Supermarkets have the benefits of frequent repeat customers

The awareness of a poor return on investment is a good thing for society. We want to do more with fewer resources.

Making terrible decisions, such as investing in distractions for your company and consumers, and then letting your workforce pay the tab.. is the thing that is not great for society.

>We want to do more with fewer resources.

Who is the "we" here? Because the profit margin not being high enough is certainly not a problem for consumers. The only people who should care about that are the company's shareholders and "shareholders" certainly isn't synonymous with "society".

Of course it is a problem for consumers if it bankrupts the company. Healthy company is better than no company. And I mean healthy, not greedy.

It's pretty difficult to go bankrupt turning a profit.

Making a thin 3% profit that can go negative when the wind blows

Making crazy changes like squeezing out every last dollar out of your existing, loyal customers (looking at any PE firm ever) certainly affects the wind I'd wager.

Absolutely, and plenty of companies have made that mistake.

But the point is locking up money in a 3% margin business doesn’t impress investors.

So you either need to improve the margin with lower costs or higher price (or both). Or bail from the market entirely and put your money in something that makes more money.

What makes more money? The investment is all in AI because TINA - There Is No Alternative. There's too much money in the system to cover all reasonable investments, so it fills up all reasonable investments and many unreasonable ones too.

While AI may seem like it’s sucking up all investment, the retail trade industry was 2x the entire IT industry investment according to the BEA

Yes, but making just 3% could mean tomorrow you’re in the red.

Our society has a finite capacity to do projects and to run industrial processes. We want that finite capacity to provide as much quality of life as possible (and as much expansion of our capacity to do projects and run processes as possible), and achieving that is a thorny intellectual problem, which for many centuries in our society has been solved mostly by lawyers and judges knowledgeable about corporate law, stock markets, corporate managers, accountants and investors. This entire ecosystem is predicated on the assumption that investor will try to maximize their return of investment, which is strongly correlated with profit margin.

It absolutely became a problem for consumers.

Is a low profit margin a problem for consumers or is it the company's "money grubbery" of not being satisfied with that profit margin that is causing the problem?

When XBOX fires a bunch of people and shutters studios leading to fewer games with worse support, that's a problem for consumers.

I think people often forget that in a society we rely on companies making and serving things. They make our food and our medicine and build our homes and make our games. It's a good thing when their finances are healthy. It's a bad thing when they form monopolies and rent-seek.

> How is making more and more every fiscal year "healthy"?

Because if they didn't make a return on their investment, they would invest their money elsewhere. When you have money you want a return. You can invest it into games, or cars, or phones, or mining, or healthcare. Whatever you invest it in, you want to be justified for your risk because you can lose money. Sometimes you can lose all of it. If you're really risk averse you just put it all into a bank account on low interest. A lot of European investors do this, which is why their technological innovations are falling well behind the US.

If you want more games with better support, we all benefit if they're making a profit on their investments.

I agree. The numbers need to go up every year without thinking about the health of the economy, and the Average Joe is delusional.

Would you accept 3% return on your money, especially if the investment was risky?

> Once again, what is the actual problem here?

I told you very plainly: fewer games with worse support.

I think a lot of people in the gaming community would agree that Microsoft has ruined, or hindered (instead of helping) many studios they bought.

The mistake isn't shutting stuff down, it was overpaying for the stuff in the first place. This most recent action is unwinding the earlier mistake.

One of those terrible decisions was probably hiring too many developers, how do you suggest they fix that issue, besides changing leadership?

Many of those developers may not have the job elsewhere, or job paying much less. They now have the experience working in a proper software engineering environment.

Our society uses return on investment (which is correlated with profit margin) to decide what projects and what processes our society's workers will focus on.

So for example, if I can make twice as much money as a software developer as I can as a musician, that is strong evidence that my doing the former kind of work will benefit society about twice as much as my doing the latter kind of work.

I disagree. "Benefit society" means something that can't be defined or tracked so easily. And consumer behavior is heavily biased by things that aren't optimized to benefit society. I have in mind this book, Hooked by Nir Eyal: https://www.nirandfar.com/hooked/

We should try our best to improve our society. Sometimes that will mean doing things that are economically inefficient. Your example of Stanford professor Nir Eyal is an excellent illustration: by advising corporate managers and product designers how to fulfill their role in our economic system more efficiently, Nir Eyal made our society worse.

We should expect more from our elite professors. Nir Eyal should've known better than to make a career out of studying how deliberately to addict users. But we should also expect our professors, politicians and policymakers to understand the basics of our economic system and to understand when a proposed change to our society sounds good or feels good, but has severe adverse effects on economic efficiency that outweigh the societal benefits. Those aren't the only proposed changes we should avoid, but they form an important class of them.

Margins that low are dangerous because businesses can often see year to year margin variance higher than that.

So? Why is it impossible for businesses to do long-term accounting?

> Why is it impossible for businesses to do long-term accounting?

3% is pretty close to 0% which is very close to -1%. Think of it as a 3% margin for error.

They have been doing long term accounting, and that's why they're resetting their business

Many reasons:

- Investors bail - You run out of cash

Not exactly - stocks are already sold, you don't run out of cash from the stock price going down. You only run out of cash if you want to sell more stock to raise more cash (this happens, but it is somewhat rare).

However the owners are still going to be mad because their cash is down and they will demand changes to fix that.

I wouldn’t call issuance of new stock rare, it’s a major funding mechanism.

Not to mention a company with thin margins is going to have a hell of a time raising money through debt.

3% is lower than buying US Treasury bonds? Effectively zero risk zero effort return vs running a business.

https://home.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/...

5B revenue is not the same as 5B in the bank collecting interest.

Indeed, I had a brain fart. Thank you.

But doesn't that make situation even worse? They likely would be 100B+ market cap/total asset value if spun off into independent company, but not able to generate even 1B in annual profit? Activision Blizzard managed 1.5B income/20% margin by themselves before being bought by Xbox -- and somehow whole of Xbox now earns less?

Blizzard managed to so thoroughly destroy itself that I'm not sure the comparison is fair. It's a ghost of what it once was in gaming.

It didn't destroy itself, it was intentionally harvested and the husk was sold to the highest bidder. The original leadership is long gone, the shareholders got their money back long ago, and the staff has turned over significantly. The Blizzard of yore is long gone, and that's ok.

I would be afraid that the size of the revenue versus the margin would make small fluctuations in revenue create large fluctuations in margin.

is it somehow lost on you that you're commenting on a vc's website

HackerNews is where I find informed commentary on tech stuff because places like reddit are hollowed out and useless for it. I don't care one bit about cretins like VCs.

>HackerNews is where I find informed commentary on tech stuff b

Unfortunately that hasn't been the case for most subject in over 10 years. But I have yet to find a better place though.

    > 150M at 5B revenue is not great

Considered as a raw percentage in a vacuum, sure, I guess, but we're talking about...

- A company which has undertaken a concerted, long-term effort to consolidate the industry under its umbrella (something they themselves call out as a problem in this post), reducing consumer choice

- A company which has captured a significant chunk of the console market. They're one of the big three (alongside Sony and Nintendo), and have been since the early 2000s, arguably, for crying out loud.

At a certain size (typically as measured by market capture) the expectation for growth needs to be reality checked. This is still $150M of pure gravy every single year. Sure, this is going to a corporation, but that's more money than most people could possibly dream of earning in ten lifetimes.

Every year. For a company that's already putting money towards opex in the form of developing new games and new content for existing ones, for a ridiculously broad portfolio.

To be clear: it is Microsoft's and Xbox's prerogative to pursue more profit, but I reserve the right to call this out as absurd under the circumstances.

If you want to make the argument that Xbox has suffered from a lack of focus in the past decade (... or even longer), or that there's been mismanagement (I would say since around the time 343 got created), then those are fair arguments, though I don't think those are justifications, on their own, for cutting thousands in headcount.

Allowing this org to balloon to fourteen levels of management on any vertical is a joke. Allowing the absorption of so much of the game dev industry and still being unhappy with $150M in annual profit after being such an active participant in the oligolpolization of console gaming is just a bit unserious.

> This is still $150M of pure gravy every single year. Sure, this is going to a corporation, but that's more money than most people could possibly dream of earning in ten lifetimes.

That actually seems... tiny? Xbox is nearly 17,000 employees. That's like $8k in profit per employee. That's worse than big box retailers and like 1/100th of what is common in big tech and (to the letter's point) far worse than their biggest competitor.

Like sure at least you can say they aren't losing money, but Nadella can't be looking at that after just spending 75 billion on Activision Blizzard and be happy with it as the status quo.

EDIT: BTW these numbers you quoted from OP are quarterly, not annual

At some point you end up hitting the law of diminishing returns. I think this is a case of that.

I agree that at some point you do, but again I think the fact that Sony Playstation is doing this with larger annual revenue, less studios, AND better margins is an indicator that it isn't the problem here.

> This is still $150M of pure gravy every single year.

The issue is rate of return. They are evidently spending $4.85bn on Xbox per year. The US federal interest rate is 3.5% so if you just put that money in US bonds you would get about $175M per year of much purer simpler gravy.

Russ: "Anyway, next thing you know, we IPO, stock triples in a day and AOL gobbles us up. All of a sudden, I'm 22 years young and I'm worth 1.2 billion. Now a couple decades later, I'm worth 1.4. You do the math."

Richard: "Okay. Well, that's a gain of $200 million over 20 years. Um, 16.66 repeating. That's less than 1% return. Inflation is, like, 1.7. I think CDs are 2%. So that's less than a CD."

I know this is a TV show reference and a point about investment strategy but...

If I had 1.2 billion dollars I wouldn't care what investment strategy I had. I've got enough to spend $30k a day for 100 years. At any age, that'll do.

In generally spending increases to cover income. 30k per day sounds like a lot, but it isn't hard to spend that once you get used to having that much to spend. Your mansion with the heated indoor pool is expensive to maintain. Plus you probably have a vacation mansion someplace. Then you see a nice yacht and think "why not" - more costs. You aren't flying coach to get to all those things - and one day you realize your bills are more than the 30k/day you have to spend and you are broke despite being objectively rich.

It sounds like a nice problem to have, but it appears to be very stressful from what I can tell. (I'd still like to have it, and like most I think that I personally wouldn't get that far over my head)

You are correct that we really don't know how we'd act unless we were in that situation. And like you, I hope I'd be vaguely sensible.

Two things, stand out to me though.

1. how you frame it might help with how you spend it. Which is to say that when shopping for a mansion "I've got 1.2 billion" likely leads to a different outcome than "I have 30k per day. I'll have to save up for it."

2. once chasing money is not a major thing in your life, what do you do for meaning?

> but it appears to be very stressful from what I can tell.

sounds like there is a win-win in there somewhere. I wonder what that would look like.

for real though, what are we talking about here? 30k a day is not enough because ... habits? plus, it's incredibly hard to spend that much. that's exactly why, after a certain point, it's basically impossible to get rid of wealth.

What does enough mean? That's why I didn't use that word. Beans and rice is enough, but I'm glad I can afford nicer food. I don't need as large a house as I have and yet my house is modest by modern standards, and I would like larger.

I'm not arguing your idea that there is a point where you no longer can find anything to spend money on. However that point is different for different wealthy people and I don't know and you don't likely don't know either where your limit is or my limit would be. It would not surprise me if I personally had the money and decided to buy a yacht and then later sold it when I realized that while it sounds good I wasn't actually using it. But I don't know. Maybe if I had the money to afford a nice yacht I would use it all the time. Similar for those mansions. Would I live in a mansion or would I buy one first test symbol and then realize I didn't actually care and downgrade? I know someone who has made a lot of money remodeling the mansions of rich people who have decided downsize. For them downsize includes a master bedroom that is bigger than my entire house. And there were other bedrooms in that mansion, but it is still a down size.

Well, maybe we need to decide as a society what exactly enough means. I'd argue that anything above 100m is excessive, especially while other people are literally starving. But sure, let's say anything up until the first billion.

I can't argue the point as well as educated economists can. I'd like to point you to Gabriel Zucman, for instance. What really got me in the end is this: he proposes a 2% wealth tax. It's not a number out of thin air, he actually reasons very well how he got there. You know how much the average billionaire wealth increased over the last years, annually? It's 6%. So it's not even suggesting "you need to have less". It's suggesting "you should accumulate more a little slower than before".

Also, sorry, I really can't emphasise with people who got so used to having a yacht that they cannot imagine life without one anymore. It's peak consumerism, individualism, capitalism. My take is that we need to rethink _some_ things.