Axel Janssen wrote:
1. I wouldn't take the offer, until some of the economic problems are solved here. Might change in 2 years or so.
5 years and then leave the country? Well, if you really plan to network here and use your contacts for your own company or in some sort of management/sales job in your own country, this might work, but very dificult and questionable if you have the energy for that, if you are doing sophisticated software architecture/design/programming.
I worked for three months in Germany, and the experience has left me with very mixed feelings. I am an American of mostly German extraction (my people came from Franconia), and I entered Germany with positive feelings. I had worked in Italy, Belgium, and Belgium for a long time, and I had visited Germany several times as a tourist and enjoyed the country.
I spent 3 months in Stuttgart working with Alcatel, and made the following observations in my time there:
Germany is in many ways the most tolerant and open society I have seen. Open to ideas, open to refugees (at least at that time), open to many things. I worked with people of many nations all living in Germany. Particularly Eastern Europeans and Irish, all working in tolerable harmony. The German laws try to be irreproachably fair and largely succeed. There is much to admire.
And yet Alcatel was a profoundly unequal company. I saw no 'auslanders' in the management ranks and few German women were in management. The responsible positions were purely in the hands of German males. Eastern Europeans and Irish were used for coding and did not seem to go any higher (such as onto the design team). I saw
no German coders and only one German 'hands-on' employee of any kind, an Oracle DBA who was second-rate and appeared to be aware of the fact. The design staff was exclusively German/Austrian/French. Implementation seemed to be regarded as a non-professional activity and coders were of low rank in the company order.
The suggestions made by implementors and subject matter experts were often completely ignored, and the 6 week summer vacation break caused the most amazing schedule disruption, with one set of designers and managers going on their six-week holiday to be replaced by another team returning from their holiday. There was no hand-over and no warning to the other members of the team (such as myself and my colleagues).
The Germans were polite most of the time, but our low status within the Alcatel heirarchy was made clear on a number of occasions.
One story I have concerned an analog telephone line. We required dial-up access to the internet to recieve email and to peruse our company intranet, but Alcatel's PBX system would not support this. We began by doing it from our hotel rooms, but this was like burning money by the sheaf, which was blowing a hole in the expense budget. Therefore Alcatel ordered analog lines put in (a 4 week wait) and in the meantime we were told to use a line which the fax line used (in another building). That line would simply not work. Remember that this worked fine at the hotel, so the problem isn't with our equipment. I reported this fact to the project manager, and his reply was extraordinary. He said that Deutsch Telecom had installed the fax line, and DT simply did not make mistakes like that. Therefore I was mistaken. And no, he would not walk over with me to the other building for a demonstration. The line worked, I was mistaken, and the case was closed. !!!
We continued to burn money until DT got around to installing the analog lines....
It is possible that this may not have been a 'German' thing but possibly a 'Swabian' thing (Stuttgart is in the state of Baden-Wurtembuurg aka 'Swabia'). I have heard other Germans muitter about Swabians! Or it may be an Alcatel thing, or some combination of the above.
If I were offered a position in Germany I would make the most careful investigations about what kind of organization I was joining and what status I would have. I would certainly wish to meet the manager I would be reporting to before agreeing to terms!
[ August 02, 2003: Message edited by: Alfred Neumann ]
