[HN Gopher] I digitalized Berlin's registration form
___________________________________________________________________
I digitalized Berlin's registration form
Author : nicbou
Score : 517 points
Date : 2023-09-19 08:24 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nicolasbouliane.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nicolasbouliane.com)
| stackedinserter wrote:
| It's a solution of a problem that shouldn't exist at the first
| place.
| nicbou wrote:
| This is a pretty specific problem to solve, but I thought you
| might have a laugh at our desperately broken bureaucracy on our
| behalf.
|
| I built a digital form filler for a poorly-designed that every
| Berliner must deal with. I explain what I did to make it clearer
| and easier to fill.
| klaustopher wrote:
| The worst thing is that this differs by state. In Hessen the
| communal IT provider (ekom21) offers the service to fill out
| the entire form online in a UI that resembles yours, but then
| you still have to go to the "Meldeamt" to sign it (although you
| do that digitally on a tablet there) because currently the
| "schriftform" (means: manually signed) is required. It might be
| changed in the future to be "textform" (means: must be written
| down) and then it can happen completely digitally.
|
| Unfortunately, from the bigger cities I checked (Frankfurt,
| Darmstadt, Kassel, Giessen, Marburg, Wiesbaden), _none_ of them
| used that service, only some smaller districts like Bad
| Vilbel[1] or Limburg[2] offer the service.
|
| [1]: https://onlineantrag.ekom21.de/olav/zuziehen?mbom=6440003
| [2]:
| https://www.limburg.de/redirect.phtml?extlink=1&La=1&url_fid...
| "Voranmeldung eines Zuzugs"
| nicbou wrote:
| In France, they have the postman come to your house and
| verify your identity. It's such a brillian way to verify
| things without wasting anyone's time.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| The German authorities have no incitive to digitize and fix the
| broken bureaucracy because for one, in their mind there's
| nothing wrong with it because Germany is Europe's wealthiest
| country so it can never be wrong, and secondly, digitizing
| bureaucracy means increased efficiency which means less public
| servant jobs and they don't want that. What they want is more
| bureaucracy and more cushy public servant jobs pushing pencils
| on great benefits. If they wintered to fix bureaucracy they
| would have don it already.
|
| In German state and traditional company culture, digitization
| is seen as a threat, not an asset. I remember a few years agon
| when my gf at the time was working at a big German industrial
| automation company and she was struggling a lot with some
| horribile ineficient work process involving copy and pasting
| shit to and from Excel and some VB scripts. So being still
| locked down to a degree and bored out of my mind, I replaced
| all her Excel madness with some python scripts that streamlined
| everything. She took that at work and proudly showed it to her
| boss hoping for some recognition and he said "if you wanna keep
| your job, don't bring stuff like this at work, we don't need
| it, there's nothing wrong with the way we currently do things",
| and then it hit me that current German software innovation
| culture is completely FUBAR.
| mattmanser wrote:
| When you're a bit older and have done more consultancy,
| you'll realize this isn't the case.
|
| It's just that most people are quite conservative, the middle
| manager your gf approached was the wrong person, the manager
| didn't want the headache of the discussion that happens with
| _their_ superiors (who wrote it, what happens if it goes
| wrong, where 's it sending the data, how much money does he
| want, etc.) and also simply don't trust some random like you.
|
| If she'd been an external consultant talking to the upper
| echelons, they'd definitely want this, but not as some random
| python script. Probably as a nice easy to install Excel
| plugin.
|
| So you were talking to the wrong person.
|
| What she should have done is use the script to work less and
| get accolades for being a fast and efficient worker, and
| never shown it to her boss.
|
| By the way, that's exactly what I did for a g/f myself 4 or 5
| years ago, and I specifically warned her not to tell her boss
| about it as it'd be seen as a problem, not a boon. She loved
| it, turned a week's worth of work into 1/2 an hour, letting
| her get on with the bits of the job she actually enjoyed.
| raverbashing wrote:
| The problem is that the "political will" to change
| (especially in things like this which is municipal) is mostly
| due to older people who haven't filled an Anmeldung in 30yrs
| at least and who probably still pay 500EUR for a 3 bed
| apartment and thinking it's expensive
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| > She took that at work and proudly showed it to her boss
| hoping for some recognition and he said "if you wanna keep
| your job, don't bring stuff like this at work, we don't need
| it, there's nothing wrong with the way we currently do
| things", and then it hit me that current German software
| innovation culture is completely FUBAR.
|
| This seems like a very justified reaction and could happen in
| any sane company in the world. If that company is using excel
| and VBA, then because this is what they know and where they
| have experience. Python is a foreign technology, and likely
| nobody in that company knows how to handle it. Also, the
| existing solution is battle tested over a long time, it's
| working, people know how to handle it, it's a well moving
| gear. Changing it for some unknown gear, from some unknown
| person, is insane, no good company would do that, this is too
| much of a risk.
|
| It seems, you just don't understand the bigger picture of
| legacy systems, and the risks and costs of changes.
| epups wrote:
| Your thinking is very common in Germany. It is correct in a
| primitive sense: change is costly. But it misses an
| additional layer of thinking, which is that not changing is
| even more costly sometimes. The problem was not that the
| company was happily using Excel and VBA, it is that the
| process was clunky and required expensive humans in the
| middle. If it could be easily automated in Python, it could
| also have been easily automated somehow else, and that
| change was worth exploring.
|
| With your logic, Germany has justified maintaining fax
| machines and printing online forms. Embracing change is an
| uncomfortable process, but not doing that is even worse.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| > Your thinking is very common in Germany.
|
| Like the rest of the world.. I mean, we have companies
| like Microsoft, who basically live from staying
| compatible back till the beginning of time. Cooperate-
| world is strongly focused on stability and the ability to
| control your turf, everywhere.
|
| > But it misses an additional layer of thinking, which is
| that not changing is even more costly sometimes.
|
| Interesting how you completely missed the point. I was
| not talking about the change, but the way it happened,
| and the reasoning for it.
|
| > it is that the process was clunky and required
| expensive humans in the middle.
|
| Actually, we don't know that. We know nothing about the
| reasoning for the process, or the details, or the
| company.. We only know the story of a 3rd party, who
| stumbled over their own ignorance.
|
| > If it could be easily automated in Python, it could
| also have been easily automated somehow else
|
| Yes, unless the company has some inhouse-knowledge of
| using python, it should have been automated with
| something else, like VBA, which they already are using.
| And it should have been done by someone from the company,
| not some strange from outside. As a long-running company,
| it's nonsense to use technology for inhouse-task, where
| you have no expertise at hand. This is just harmful and
| an additional burden longterm.
| fh973 wrote:
| German administration is already understaffed, and this will
| get much worse due to increasing retirement and additional
| complex regulations and laws.
|
| They only chance is simplifying processes and make them more
| efficient (which includes "digitization"). But apart from
| staff, this needs strong leadership and expertise, and is
| made complex by the federal structure.
| ulfw wrote:
| None of that is true.
|
| They'd love to "digitise" but their problem is that there is
| ZERO Software culture in Germany. Likely they'd have some
| shitty accounting or consulting firm with their 24 yr old
| associate who can do some Java code something for 10 Billion
| EUR. It'll take 10 years and obviously won't scale or work
| properly.
|
| That's why it still hasn't happened. There is no one who can
| write a requirements doc with much useful content in it
| besides "make it digital" either.
|
| When they wanted a mobile app to warn of Covid risks nearby
| they found no one who could write mobile apps besides SAP
| (not a mobile nor end-user company) and Deutsche Telekom (a
| Telco, used to be state-owned back in the day). That'll tell
| you how this will go.
|
| https://news.sap.com/2020/06/corona-warn-app-deutsche-
| teleko...
| virtualritz wrote:
| I heard through the grapevine of the Berlin tech scene that
| actually both SAP and Telekom failed to deliver a working
| COVID Warning app. A small software company in Berlin
| purportedly ultimately 'fixed' the app for around 3 million
| EUR but this was kept under wraps (the app ended up costing
| 220 million taxpayer money by the end of 2022).
|
| Not sure if this is true but it sounds like it absolutely
| could be.
| nicbou wrote:
| > The German authorities have no incitive to digitize and fix
| the broken bureaucracy because for one, in their mind there's
| nothing wrong with it because Germany is Europe's wealthiest
| country so it can never be wrong
|
| This is not true. The head of the Berlin Auslanderbehorde is
| well aware of the issue and frequently says that we need to
| digitalize in front of the cameras.
|
| According to contacts on the inside, they are operating at
| full capacity with a personel shortage and have zero slack to
| stop and fix things.
|
| They have every incentive to fix things, not just out of
| sheer embarrassment, but because more and more people are
| suing the state for failure to act (Untatigkeit). I wanted to
| make this lawsuit process as seamless as possible, but it
| would not help anyone.
| tmpX7dMeXU wrote:
| As someone that haven't ever been to Germany or interacted
| with any German government, but works with different
| governments a lot, it has really become apparent that Germans
| love telling the rest of the world how bad their bureaucracy
| is, then go on to describe something that sounds entirely
| common. It's like New Yorkers telling you how good and unique
| bodegas are, and it turns out they either grew up in New York
| City or some one-traffic-light town and just haven't had any
| worldly exposure.
|
| Your personal anecdote as another commenter pointed out says
| much more about your lack of consulting and general workplace
| experience than it does about German bureaucracy. It all
| sounds very typical and again what I'd expect as someone that
| can count on one hand the number of people in Germany I've
| talked to professionally.
| calmoo wrote:
| It's much worse than you think here. Germany is in the
| stone age when it comes to digitalization. As an example,
| most immigrants will be waiting months to hear back from
| the Auslanderbehorde - and the only way to get them to
| reply to you within 2 weeks is to send them a fax.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| While I seriously sympathize with some of the above (and
| below) descriptions of byzantine German bureaucracy and
| its broad lack of digitization, there's another side to
| it all that's hard not to appreciate slightly in the
| context of our creeping, already vast, global
| surveillance state of constant digital monitoring by
| thousands of actors both private and public, or both and
| feeding off each other's surveillance carrion...
| twixfel wrote:
| A wonderful excuse that German people like to wheel out
| to try to put a positive spin on being stuck in the 20th
| century.
| calmoo wrote:
| Everything is Datenschutz.
| kelnos wrote:
| Perhaps that's true of what the the GP is talking about,
| but if we consider the article we're discussing here, this
| requirement when you move to fill out a paper form when you
| move to a new house, and then wait possibly months for an
| appointment to bring that form in person to hand to a
| government official... dear god, that sounds Kafkaesque.
|
| And I say this as an American who was under the impression
| that some significant bits of the US government bureaucracy
| are pretty wild. This German thing takes the cake.
|
| Regardless, it's a little weird that you accuse GP of
| expressing an uninformed opinion about German bureaucracy
| when you admit that you only have limited secondhand
| experience with it yourself.
| fl7305 wrote:
| It might be common, but the German bureaucracy is a lot
| worse than what Germany's reputation of structure and order
| would lead foreigners to believe.
|
| And while it might be common around the world, Germany is
| playing in a lower league than for instance the
| Scandinavian countries.
|
| In Germany, you need to make appointments and do things in
| person.
|
| In Sweden, you can change vehicle ownership or register
| your move to a new address online in minutes.
| kelnos wrote:
| It's nice to know that here in the US we're closer to
| Sweden than Germany.
|
| I think in most places the buyer of a vehicle still has
| to mail in a paper form (though if you buy from a car
| dealership, they'll take care of it), but at least in
| California, the seller can do their part of the
| transaction online (which is mainly to inform the DMV
| that someone else has the vehicle, so you won't be held
| responsible if something bad happens involving it).
|
| And we don't have to register our moves at all; the
| government mostly doesn't care if we tell it where we
| live. Some agencies like the DMV do want to know our
| address so they can mail us a new driver's license or ID
| card when the old one expires (but these address changes
| and license renewals we can do online). The Postal
| Service will forward our mail to our new address for 3
| months if we ask them to, but we don't have to if we
| don't care.
|
| Obviously the government can and will eventually find out
| where you live if they need and want to, but there's
| generally no registration requirement.
| twixfel wrote:
| No, it really is bad. I've lived in the UK and in Germany
| and Germany is definitely worse. I don't know why you would
| have such an opinion on something that you, by your own
| admission, know nothing about.
|
| If anything the opposite of what you're saying is true.
| Everyone abroad thinks Germany is so efficient and Germany
| has this amazing reputation, but the reputation is a lie.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > secondly, digitizing bureaucracy means increased efficiency
| which means less public servant jobs and they don't want that
|
| Increased efficiency doesn't have to mean fewer bureaucrats.
| It can (and usually does) mean that the same number of
| bureaucrats achieve all-new levels of intrusiveness.
| nicbou wrote:
| I'm reading Stasiland right now (strong recommendation),
| and I shudder to think of what the Stasi could do with
| today's means.
|
| However, in this case, it would mean that machines handle
| CRUD while humans can tackle the edge cases. Bureaucrat
| time should not be wasted on typing a printed form back
| into a computer.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| The German state is already incredibly efficient at coming
| after you with threatening letters for not submitting the
| right tax paperwork in time on the 50 Euros earned form
| your online side-hussle. If only the same efficiency would
| get ported to everything else that benefits the tax-payer.
| nicbou wrote:
| They're so efficient that sometimes they'll come at you
| even when you did nothing wrong. My tax advisor had his
| accounts frozen and sued them for damages. The same
| happened to me because of a clerical error on their end.
| They freeze your account and it's up to you to figure out
| why.
| notpushkin wrote:
| > It can (and usually does) mean that the same number of
| bureaucrats achieve all-new levels of intrusiveness.
|
| Well, this turned dark pretty fast huh.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Well, it could also mean that the same number of
| bureaucrats take longer lunches.
| VanTodi wrote:
| to be fair, it's way easier now to do your taxes (as a
| private person). We can do it completely online with no
| paperwork involved and its actually quite alright. so some
| innovation is happening, even in the public sector.
|
| what happens in the company is another thing. it really
| depends on the people working there.
| snehk wrote:
| I'm sorry, but that's just complete nonsense.
|
| > in their mind there's nothing wrong with it because Germany
| is Europe's wealthiest country so it can never be wrong
|
| There's literally not a single political party that doesn't
| admit that Germany is being too slow here or that doesn't
| admit that it's embarassing. On a national and on a local
| level. You can Google that if you don't believe me.
|
| > digitizing bureaucracy means increased efficiency which
| means less public servant jobs and they don't want that
|
| Also wrong. There's plenty of unfillable public servant jobs
| in every city. Public servant jobs are not what they were in
| the 70s.
|
| > In German state and traditional company culture,
| digitization is seen as a threat, not an asset.
|
| Also wrong. Germany just upgraded too early, then let
| everything run and stopped upgrading because the current
| system works. That's all there is to it. It's also the reason
| why Romania has faster internet than Germany, for example.
|
| > work process involving copy and pasting shit to and from
| Excel and some VB scripts
|
| You're in for a wild ride when you find out what kind of IT
| infrastructure the world uses.
|
| Your whole post is anecdotal and when you try to get to your
| own interpretation of German culture or why problems exist,
| you're wrong.
|
| Don't get me wrong: Germany's digital infrastructure _is_
| horrible. Just not at all for the reasons you mentioned.
| kioleanu wrote:
| Romania has better and cheaper internet because of the wild
| Wild West when everybody and every firm were allowed to
| pull cables anywhere they pleased. People would buy a
| 100-200mbit b2b connection for 40 euros and would split it
| between 15-20 people for 3-5 euro each. It was deregulated
| for so much time that when the regulations finally came
| everybody was already connected to fast and cheap internet
| and they were so used to it that whichever company tried to
| increase the price and lower the speed would see really
| shitty returns.
|
| That's why Digi exploded and Telekom (Romtelecom) needed
| years to take off. The Greek CEO of Romtelecom would hold
| meetings in 2008 with upper management where he would
| dictate loudly that Romanians only want stable internet
| with great customer care and that's the direction he is
| leading the company. That proved not to actually be the
| case and he unceremoniously left the company afterwards.
|
| Source: I lived all this and was close with the domain
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Germany just upgraded too early, then let everything run
| and stopped upgrading because the current system works_
|
| Upgraded too early to what? Letters and fax machines?
| klaustopher wrote:
| With the ISDN (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_S
| ervices_Digital_Ne...) network, Germany had the most
| advanced digital switching infrastructure in the world.
| It offered two 64kbit/s lines into every household, and
| that in the 80s. Unfortunately, due to political
| decisions that were highly influenced by Leo Kirch and
| his commercial TV provider (Premiere), Germany's public
| telecoms infrastructure was a) privaticed into Deutsche
| Telekom and b) shifted to put copper TV cable into every
| household instead of fiber.
|
| In east Germany, after reunification in the 1990s,
| Deutsche Telekom started to introduce a fiber into every
| home (OPAL -
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optische_Anschlussleitung)
| but then they shifted their focus to DSL and reusing the
| old copper wires for telephone lines and abandoned this.
| No, not only abandoned. They opened up the streets again
| to lay new copper wire.
|
| Now, fiber to the home is back on the table.
| klaustopher wrote:
| If you understand German and are interested in the
| history, I highly recommend
| https://cre.fm/cre191-internet-im-festnetz
| shafyy wrote:
| Completely agree with you. I think it's just a problem of
| incentives for the people who make this decisions and work
| at these positions. "Verbeamtung" (tenure) also doesn't
| help.
| thunfisch wrote:
| One of the biggest reasons why digitization in Germany is
| so slow moving is that every municipality can (and does)
| decide on how to digitize individually.
|
| There is no mandate for the upper levels of government to
| dictate which solutions are being used on a local level.
| Combine that with need for tendering on every single
| solution and you've got a big mess of small companies
| underbidding bigger companies that could unify the software
| landscape and instead build a cheaper, small solution that
| has zero interoperability with the neighboring
| municipality.
|
| The need for fax et.al. is not because people don't know
| how to use computers, but because there's thousands of
| applications fulfilling the same exact job, but are
| incapable of talking to each other. Paper is currently the
| only compatibility layer that works everywhere.
|
| There are ongoing efforts to provide a common data exchange
| format (technical working group) as well as redesigning how
| the software for government is being build (tendering
| processes, public money - public code movement, et. al.)
|
| German government is currently incapable of doing its job
| in a way that is legally required, missing deadlines and
| not providing citizens with the services that they are
| entitled to because they are unable to manage the workload
| due to the paperbound processes. There is zero fear of
| humans being replaced by machines. It's rather that more
| and more humans are leaving government due to burnout.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _One of the biggest reasons why digitization in Germany
| is so slow moving is that every municipality can (and
| does) decide on how to digitize individually._
|
| I find myself chuckling a little at this, because this is
| a common excuse for things being slow moving (or just
| wildly inconsistent from place to place) in the US. It's
| somehow comforting to know that countries of all size and
| population that are organized like this will still have
| the same problems.
|
| To be fair, though, the US and many decent-sized
| municipalities _do_ actually have a pretty good
| digitization story. I 'm actually having trouble thinking
| of routine government-related things that have to be done
| in person... or even by mail. I guess you have to send
| mail to apply for or renew your passport (though the
| State Department already has an online form that fills
| out a printable application for you). And you have to go
| in person to get a marriage license (but I think that's a
| feature, not a bug; and hopefully that's not a routine
| activity, anyway). I had to do an interview to get my
| Global Entry (eliminates most of the wait at immigration
| when re-entering the US) thing approved, but the
| application process was all online, and my recent renewal
| was completed from my couch.
|
| Otherwise...? I've set foot in a DMV perhaps 3 times
| since I moved to California 19 years ago (once when I
| first moved, to take the written driving test; once when
| I lost my driver's license and had to prove who I was to
| get a new one; and once when I had to apply for the
| ridiculous new "REAL ID"). I file my income taxes online,
| and whatever money I'm due or owed gets electronically
| transferred. I pay my property taxes online. I activated
| the electric and gas utility service (not quite
| government, but adjacent) online when I last moved. Mail
| forwarding when your address changes is done at the
| Postal Service's website. I even signed all the paperwork
| to buy a new home online (if you have a mortgage lender,
| they'll want some things signed in person, but they can
| someone to your house for that, and at any rate the
| government-related paperwork is all handled by a title
| company for you, at least where I live). You can even pay
| parking ticket and driving infraction fines online, if
| you don't want to contest them.
|
| The online systems to take care of this stuff do all vary
| in clunkiness to some degree, but some of them are quite
| modern-looking and have decent or even good UX. The
| federal government even has 'login.gov' now, which
| they're slowly (very slowly) getting various agencies to
| adopt so you have a single sign-in. I don't think states
| and municipalities are allowed to use it, though.
| konschubert wrote:
| Building a form like Nicolas did can totally happen on
| the municipal level. This is two weeks of work for a good
| developer. Totally affordable.
| nicbou wrote:
| More like one week, while travelling, and most of it was
| obsessing over design details.
| konschubert wrote:
| You're probably faster than the typical "good developer"
| I had in mind.
| nottheengineer wrote:
| But two weeks of dev time for every municipality adds up
| quickly.
|
| The issue is that germany is deeply federated, different
| decisions are made at different levels. This could
| translate well into software by having the higher levels
| create interop standards and reference implementations
| that allow for plugins while the lower levels use the
| reference implementations (with plugin extensions for the
| myriad of special of special cases) or just implement
| their own according to the standard.
|
| But unfortunately it doesn't translate because the german
| state either picks the cheapest contractor (which almost
| always leads to blown budgets and delays) or they pick by
| nepotism.
|
| They are also dead set on waterfall projects and don't
| seem to realize that if they keep blowing budgets
| anyways, that might not be the best strategy.
| konschubert wrote:
| If you make it centralised, it becomes a huge project
| that costs hundreds of millions.
|
| I agree that this would be ideal, but on a local scale,
| these projects are easier to manage.
| tormeh wrote:
| >There's literally not a single political party
|
| We're talking about people, not parties, and I've
| definitely met people who have this view. To them, the
| German way is the proper way, and any way that's easier
| must be cheating or skipping something.
|
| Of course they want digitalization, but they want a German
| digitalization. A good and proper German one, and not a
| flimsy foreign one.
|
| Of course this is nationalistic cope, but it's pretty
| common.
| Angostura wrote:
| Just a quick thank you. I don't live in Germany, so it doesn't
| affect me. But I'l sure you will make a lot of people's days
| just a little less miserable - so thank you from then. Nice
| write-up, too.
| lasagna_coder wrote:
| This is highly useful. You could take the idea, generalize it
| to be reusable for any German form, and make a plan to develop
| such a thing as open source with funding from: prototypefund.de
| as their applications close end of the month.
| toddmorey wrote:
| This is great! Impressed by your work to make arriving in
| Berlin easier, especially for foreigners.
| Bayart wrote:
| I've been planning to move to Berlin and your site [1] is a
| life-saver.
|
| [1]: https://allaboutberlin.com
| Bissness wrote:
| Best of luck finding an apartment
| Bayart wrote:
| Yeah, I know all about that. I've just seen my ex
| girlfriend go through the process of _finding something
| nice that isn 't excessively overpriced_, which was
| exceedingly grueling, even more so considering that she
| makes 2.5x what I do. In the end the only decent
| opportunity was taking an appartement in her current
| building, skipping the entire selection phase as they
| already know her (which she knows is unfair).
|
| I've already accepted I'll have to overpay short-term
| rentals for months and bot the shit of out Immoscout to
| have a chance.
| FearNotDaniel wrote:
| > German apartments don't have apartment numbers. If your name is
| not on your mailbox, postal workers can't deliver your mail.
|
| This can also cause delivery failures the other way around - a
| friend in Germany once sent me a package but didn't bother
| writing the apartment number on it because she assumed the
| postman would use my name to find the right box. Instead it got
| sent right back to Germany. (Austrian bureaucracy is just as
| unforgiving as German, they just have different rules to
| follow...)
| flurdy wrote:
| My sister sent a parcel this week with presents for my
| daughter's birthday (Happy birthday Ruby!), from Norway to the
| UK. She filled in all the spoiler customs parts but must have
| gotten stressed and completely forgot to write our street name
| and house number. Just my name, post code and country.
|
| 3 days later our postie knocked on our door and asked if this
| parcel was for us!
|
| We don't live in a big city but still it is a town of 20,000 so
| not that rural where everyone knows you, so I was impressed
| that they cared enough to try to figure out the address.
| Granted the post code narrows the search down.
|
| I am certain had it been shipped the other way the post office
| in Norway would have rejected it immediately for not being 100%
| by-the-book.
| prennert wrote:
| As long as the postcode is complete, there are only few full
| addresses that the postie needs to check against. If you got
| a letter the same day to your full address and your name is
| unique, then it would be fairly quick to find you.
|
| BTW in Scotland at least, during the Christmas period, it is
| customary to leave a Christmas card for the postie outside
| with a small bank note in it. An easy way to say thank you
| for their efforts and to ensure that the postie will remember
| your name even better next time ;)
| swores wrote:
| Customary (and extremely welcomed by the many postmen &
| women I've had the pleasure to know, my father having
| worked for Royal Mail / CWU) in England as well as Scotland
| (and I'm sure in Wales/NI too - probably elsewhere as well,
| and even in places where it's not customary it won't do any
| harm to thank people providing year round services to you
| with a small gift once a year!)
|
| Also, while I agree with you that in this case (having a
| full postcode as well as name) it would have likely been an
| easy task for the local postie, Royal Mail do actually have
| a small team* of people who work in figuring out more
| tricky ones, so if a local person can't work it out for
| being on their beat it can be sent to the "address
| detectives" (great title!) to try to solve.
|
| This is a great example of that from a year or two ago,
| including a few other similar stories at the end:
| https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/07/lives-
| across...
|
| * _My knowledge is both 20 years out of date and fuzzy in
| my memory, so I 've no clue how big a team it is nor if
| there's enough confusingly-addressed items to need anyone
| working on it full time, or if it's just one aspect in a
| wider set of responsibilities that a team does when
| needed._
| throwaway_no wrote:
| > I am certain had it been shipped the other way the post
| office in Norway would have rejected it immediately for not
| being 100% by-the-book.
|
| The postal office in Norway tries hard to deliver to the
| correct destination. I've heard of similar stories where they
| only had a name and a city to go on, and it was delivered at
| the correct location. During Christmas, they even have a team
| of dedicated "detectives" who tries their hardest to figure
| out who the packages should be sent to.
| flurdy wrote:
| Maybe, but Norway do make it harder for themselves by
| having just a 4 number postcode that could include many
| thousands of addresses. A UK postcode is often down to just
| one street or similar size.
|
| Once, someone I knew in Norway (ok, my sister again...)
| somehow managed to combine her old and new address when
| ordering something online. And that parcel back and forth
| between 2 cities for a long time... :)
| ralferoo wrote:
| > A UK postcode is often down to just one street or
| similar size.
|
| It's even better than that. Unless you are incredibly
| rural or the street is tiny, most streets have at least
| two postcodes - one for the odd side and one for the even
| side. In most cases, there's only about 15-30 houses in a
| postcode, any more on a road and it's split up into
| smaller chunks.
| ahoka wrote:
| I have a theory that if a postman wants to deliver something,
| then it will be delivered. Unfortunately, this is not always
| the case.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| Adding small texts about the importance of the input you
| provide is missing in so many forms. OP handled it perfect
| here.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| Whereas the Irish post office (An Post) seem to pride
| themselves on solving puzzles to deliver to ambiguous
| addresses.
| jpsouth wrote:
| Same for England from what I gather, probably not on the same
| scale as Ireland though.
|
| I wonder if some of the countries referenced in the thread
| have different laws regarding opening post - in England it's
| illegal to open post that isn't addressed to you, so if the
| postie did make a mistake it's not the end of the world as
| the receiver would just pop it back in the letter box (in an
| ideal world)
| Tenoke wrote:
| > German apartments don't have apartment numbers
|
| They do (at least sometimes?). They are just not listed
| anywhere and barely used. I have my number in my contract, and
| e.g. Vatenfall have it to connect the meter number to the flat
| number.
| xioxox wrote:
| They don't always. For my flat in a small block, it's
| "Erdgeschoss rechts" or EGR, in the contract or for the
| electricity.
| Symbiote wrote:
| In Denmark, abbreviations like that _are_ the address.
| Amagergade 5, 1. th.
|
| Means building 5, first floor, to the right (til hojre).
| henvic wrote:
| This reminds me that recently I, here in the Netherlands, had
| to send a letter and made the mistake of writing it in the
| wrong format (to/from), but still the address in where it
| should be 'from' was really small, and 'to' was really big. To
| make things clear, I decided to just prefix "To: " and "From: "
| thinking it would be enough.
|
| Surely enough, 2 days later I received the mail back at my
| mailbox. Wasted 2 euros -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| I just needed a single stamp, but they stamped on both so I
| couldn't even try to reuse it. And I also posted on the mailbox
| for "other zip code" rather than "close by zip codes".
|
| I don't know if OCR or a person messed up. Well, definitely a
| person (me)...
| croisillon wrote:
| Even within Austria there are differences: i used to live in
| Innsbruck with an address written 4-51 (meaning street number
| 4, door 51) and then moved to Vienna, street number 2, door
| number 14. But in Vienna 2-14 means the big building with
| street numbers 2 through 14. My building was not big, you could
| physically see it is street number 2. Well, i never got that
| letter.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| So how would street 2, door 14 be correctly written in
| Vienna?
| croisillon wrote:
| 2/14 is the correct way, but if number 2 has several
| staircases (typically the case of a 2-14) it would be
| 2/3/14 (or typically 2-14/3/14) with 3 being the staircase
| number
| 2716057 wrote:
| No, no, it's all wrong.
|
| Here's how we digitize our administration in Germany the proper,
| Germanic way:
|
| A fixed sum for digitization is allocated and the local
| government publicly advertises a project. A bureaucrat higher up
| the foodchain has a friend/cousin/former colleague who runs an IT
| service business side gig. Guess who will win the contract. The
| friend/cousin/former colleague starts building by outsourcing the
| project to some sweatshop. The project will exceed its initially
| planned costs and timeline by a factor of two or more. Once
| completed, the final product will consist of a clunky frontend
| allowing the user to fill a form. After the user has completed
| the form, it will be distributed via e-mail to the low-level
| clerks. They will print it out and process it by typing the very
| same information into another software running on their work
| computers. Print again. Then the user has to schedule an
| appointment at the local administrative office to get the form
| signed and stamped in person. Upon completion, the finalized form
| will be faxed to the next administrative authority in the chain.
|
| The frontend runs on a Raspberry Pi located somewhere in the
| administrative building. That server will of course be turned off
| when all administrators have left the building (save energy!),
| meaning the frontend will only be available during weekdays from
| 8 am to 1 pm.
| nisa wrote:
| Having worked in some projects related to German bureaucracy:
| It's not exactly correct from my experience but it's close - is
| usally works like this:
|
| A fixed sum for digitization is allocated and the local
| government publicly advertises a project. Nobody knows how to
| write a good tender or the tender is written in such a way that
| only some specific companies can fullfil the request (I doubt
| the cousin thing is so common but I might be wrong here) but I
| saw how people writing the tender and the companies involved
| (mostly consulting companies or some small specific companies
| that lack quality) write that thing together.
|
| Now the biggest problem: Often the lowest bidder has to win the
| tender by law - if you choose the good company often the lowest
| bidder takes you to court.
|
| The lowest bidder delivers something late and broken and is
| allowed to get more money for fixing it - often so much money
| that there is an incentive to be broken by design - i.e. high
| maintenance costs / overly complicated architectures.
|
| Everone is unhappy and it's of course not the failure of the
| broken tender or the shitty company - so there needs to be a
| follow up project that fixes the issues that again is won by
| the shitty company.
|
| To see how expensive and crazy this gets: einmalzahlung200.de -
| a form where you could apply for 200EUR for heating costs /
| covid assistance costs multiple million Euros - some
| consulatancies were involved. It couldn't handle the load but
| was celebrated to be next level because nothing had to be
| printed out.
|
| It's not that Germany lacks talent or even companies that could
| deliver good quality but the process is broken.
|
| Another problem is data protection law - this is a good thing
| in Germany but it's often used as an excuse in the bureaucracy
| and a weapon to fight progress.
|
| For me it feels like the public administration was made to be
| helpless and the public money is stolen by consultancies and
| shitty companies.
| nicbou wrote:
| > Another problem is data protection law
|
| I want to emphasise this for non-German readers.
| "Datenschutz!" has become a sort of one-word meme to explain
| why everything still runs on fax.
| mousetree wrote:
| My favourite, taking a photo of a nice outdoor scene with
| random people in the background, someone will always run up
| to you shouting "Datenschutz!"
| OoooooooO wrote:
| Doesn't matter because Panoramafreiheit.
| usrusr wrote:
| Harmless, in my experience. The gloves come off when
| there's not a person in the picture but _a car_.
| sib wrote:
| Say more?
| fbn79 wrote:
| Same for Italy... just add more shit
| thinkindie wrote:
| not entirely true. Italian living in Germany, Germany
| approach to digitalisation is by far the worse. There are a
| lot of things that have been done better in Italy (e.g. the
| e-ID Card) and worst case scenario you can still send a PEC
| or an email to the PA because they must have it.
|
| In Germany, you can sometimes write an email but they will
| ask you to sign a paper where you recognise that email is
| not a trustworthy medium compared to a random email
| delivered by the postperson in your mailbox (or not)
| without a receipt whatsoever. Oh, and fax machine is still
| a thing in Germany.
| nforgerit wrote:
| German here. I'll have to dissent on the buddy-business part.
| That's not how Germany works. It's the opposite, which turns
| out to be even worse:
|
| As a bureaucrat that wants to solve a specific problem, you
| form a project and are required to make a public submission.
| Those submissions have to adhere to very formal predefined
| legal standards (in order to omit corruption) which make them
| incredibly time-consuming paperwork. For some projects you'll
| be even legally required to make a EU submission which is even
| worse. Some German smart-asses "solved" that by creating a
| skeleton agreement with a handful of BS consulting companies
| (McKinsey et al.) which therefore win projects in a round robin
| fashion whilst adhering to some random requirements, e.g.
| "cheapest wins".
|
| So what we get after all is 20 years of all federal states and
| municipalities being bullish of their own solutions, hundreds
| of failed digitization attempts for minor features as well as
| major services, ~3.5B EUR poured into BS consulting shops and
| nothing that remotely works end-to-end.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| This Youtube describes how that scenario plays out in defense
| contracting in Germany
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jDUVtUA7rg
|
| "Perun" used to be a video game streamer but thanks to the
| Russia-Ukraine war he now one of the best warbloggers and
| even does appearances together with top generals and pros
| like Anders Puck Nielsen.
| dauertewigkeit wrote:
| Both you and the GP are correct. I know of instances of both
| scenarios.
| mawadev wrote:
| That is true and in the end the Chief-Executive-Intern-
| Junior-Fullstack-Developer from
| hungary/poland/croatia/romania will do it for the german
| consulting company bc in-house german developers are too
| expensive.
| cromka wrote:
| Can't speak for others, but Polish engineers aren't and
| haven't been cheaper than German for a while now.
| pzduniak wrote:
| Perhaps you're comparing _good_ engineers. That's not who
| we're talking about here :)
|
| There's tens of thousands of fresh IT graduates working
| 2.5k EUR/mo jobs (or less) - and you can replace any
| engineer with a finite amount of these guys.
| golergka wrote:
| > There's tens of thousands of fresh IT graduates working
| 2.5k EUR/mo jobs (or less)
|
| That's a senior developer salary in Portugal (in
| Farfetch, no less).
| morelisp wrote:
| > There's tens of thousands of fresh IT graduates working
| 2.5k EUR/mo jobs (or less)
|
| Also in Germany.
| BurningPenguin wrote:
| Maybe in the North, but in Bavaria it's the "good buddy"
| scenario.
| croes wrote:
| Especially because the main criteria is the price.
|
| So the cheapest wins, and most of the time the price
| estimation was a lie and you need lots of additional payments
| or you need to start all over again.
| jlangenauer wrote:
| To be fair, this is how most "advanced" economies operate.
| It's identical in Australia (although there the consulting
| companies run the sweatshops directly so they can skim more
| cream off the top). Same in the UK.
| josephg wrote:
| Australia also has the Digital Transformation Agency[1] to
| do things in house like the UK does it. I'm not sure how
| many government IT projects use them though. Some
| departments also seem to have their own (competent) in
| house software teams, like the ABS, the DSD (Aussie NSA)
| and the ATO (aus tax office).
|
| And thank god for that, because there's also an ungodly
| number of consultants milking the Australian taxpayers for
| all we're worth.
|
| [1] https://www.dta.gov.au/
| Angostura wrote:
| gov.uk is largely in-house.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| What frightens me is comparing the snail-like rate of
| progress in the post-modern era with the rapid progress
| during the 20th century, regardless of economic and
| governmental system. It's like the a hand brake was simply
| engaged. I get it that people in power want to stall things
| so that they can skim money for their own purposes, but
| doesn't anybody else get just bored by the lack of
| progress?
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > but doesn't anybody else get just bored by the lack of
| progress?
|
| Be the change that you want to happen. Where possible
| implement it in software with your friends and publish it
| on the internet. Thus: I am not bored by the lack of
| progress, instead I am rather overworked by implementing
| parts of this in my free time after work.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Of course! My comment was not about software since I'm no
| programmer, but about progress in the general sense. Why
| don't the people who are involved and take decisions
| within large civic projects get bored with the slow rate
| of progress. Like after they've stolen maybe a few
| millions for themselves and their friends, why not get on
| with it and actually start working? Is it necessary to
| stall progress for years and decades just for the joy of
| stealing? At least when it comes to IT, the rulers have
| very few means available for them to stall progress in
| general, so it becomes very obvious when they're doing it
| within the places they can control.
| rocketbop wrote:
| There's no real desire within the German civil service to
| make anything more efficient, partially because it would
| inevitably result in redundancies, partially because of a
| general malaise and sense of apathy.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Yes, but where does that malaise and apathy come from?
| I've certainly seen my share of it, dealing with
| government and large corporations, but not exclusively
| there.
| golergka wrote:
| You're looking at already developed countries. If you
| look at digitisation of government services in Russia or
| virtual currencies and online banking in Nigeria, they
| will be much better than their first world counterparts.
| moomin wrote:
| Well, the UK does both. It has both incredible barriers to
| entry that exclude anyone other than consulting firms whose
| central skills is dealing with them from participation, and
| it also has VIP lanes for routing work to your mates.
| ido wrote:
| So why are online gov services still so much better in
| the uk then in Germany?
| tim333 wrote:
| We have this stuff
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5911218
| jetbooster wrote:
| The only cynical solution I can think of is someone is
| getting obscenely rich by keeping Government Digital
| running effectively
| michaelt wrote:
| In terms of motivation, online services _do_ save the
| government money on administration costs like manual data
| entry, costs of returning forms that have been filled out
| wrong, etc. And every government likes efficiency savings
| much more than increasing taxes or reducing government
| services.
|
| In terms of implementation, the government employs a
| small number of competent people directly - the
| "Government Digital Service" - who accomplish some
| projects.
|
| Other IT projects are done by organisations like
| Accenture, CSC, Atos Origin, Fujitsu and BT. They are
| generally paid _more_ if the project is _late_ or _buggy_
| , with predictable results. But they'll often produce
| something eventually, if enough money is thrown at them.
|
| The "VIP lanes for routing work to your mates" are more
| for things like buying overpriced PPE during the
| pandemic.
| BucketsMcG wrote:
| 1) Most of uk.gov is actually designed and built in-
| house. 2) Germany, as a nation, got to about 1991 and
| collectively decided "This is nice, let's keep it like
| this". Even the most technologically progressive regions
| of Germany still think it's 1997. Elsewhere, it's like
| the wall never came down.
| tormeh wrote:
| Honestly, this just reflects the age of the population.
| Change is more painful when you're old, so stasis becomes
| more attractive. Usually Germans like the general idea of
| improvement, but they hate change.
| patrickk wrote:
| The joke about the Merkel government was that if the
| French state is founded on the concept of 'Liberte,
| egalite, fraternite', the German state is founded on
| 'Stabilitat, Stabilitat, Stabilitat' even in the face of
| badly needed change.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Ah, so that's why Germany and Japan have such an easy
| trading relationship.
| tormeh wrote:
| Yes, finally someone else with whom to fax.
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| Anyone here who has written a fax gateway (receive TIFF
| of fax, do OCR, save somewhere and convert to PDF)?
|
| _raises hand_
|
| (fax is alive and well in Switzerland)
| ethbr1 wrote:
| This boggles the mind on the cultural-legal implications
| in fax-centric countries of doing:
|
| Fax to TIFF to OCR to PDF to internet transfer to TIFF to
| fax
|
| But anyone still requiring fax would probably just be
| happy "it came out of a fax machine / software."
| tormeh wrote:
| Fax is a secure channel, apparently, which of course is
| complete horseshit. It uses the phone network, which is
| only marginally better than the internet. Many know that
| email headers can be faked, but not so many know that
| phone numbers can, too.
|
| Legally I guess this becomes the problem of the party
| that introduces the intermediate stages. The other party
| doesn't need to care.
| slim wrote:
| hylafax?
| moooo99 wrote:
| Very cynical but it feels very accurate
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Even the most technologically progressive regions of
| Germany still think it's 1997. Elsewhere, it's like the
| wall never came down.
|
| It is in my opinion a little bit more complicated. The
| central issue is: _many ideas for digitization that other
| countries or private companies do or have done are very
| privacy-invading._
|
| Germany had two surveillance states on its soil in the
| 20th century (of which one ended only a little bit more
| than 30 years ago). Additionally, lots of German citizens
| remember the aftermath of the dragnet investigation to
| fight the RAF in the 80s. So privacy and the
| possibilities of surveillance are very sensitive topics
| in the German population.
|
| Additionally, basically every German citizen knows that
| when data accumulates, politicians _will_ find a reason
| to use this data to spy on the citizens (prosecution of
| criminals ... blah blah). Thus there is an insane
| distrust in the German population in the politicians.
| Just to give a more recent examples: when the TollCollect
| system for truck toll was introduced, there were from
| beginning on concerns that the billing data will become
| abused. The politicians appeased the citizens that this
| will never happen. Of course it did happen:
|
| > https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/verbrechensv
| orbeu...
|
| "Rasterfahndung, heimliche Online-Durchsuchung,
| Datenauswertung der Lkw-Maut - Bundesinnenminister
| Wolfgang Schauble und die Unionsfraktion drangen auf
| zahlreiche Verscharfungen der Sicherheitsgesetze. Die SPD
| will mitziehen - aber nicht beim Datensammeln zur
| Verbrechensvorbeugung.
|
| Entsprechende Plane prasentierten Unionspolitiker nach
| Informationen des SPIEGEL in einer Koalitionsrunde am
| vergangenen Donnerstag. Unter anderem sollen dem
| Bundeskriminalamt die Rasterfahndung und die heimliche
| Online-Durchsuchung von Privatcomputern erlaubt werden.
| Ausserdem sollen die Daten der Lkw-Maut dabei helfen,
| Verbrechen aufzuklaren."
|
| DeepL translation: "Grid searches, secret online
| searches, data analysis of truck tolls - Federal Interior
| Minister Wolfgang Schauble and the CDU/CSU parliamentary
| group are pushing for numerous tightening of security
| laws. The SPD wants to go along - but not with data
| collection for crime prevention.
|
| According to SPIEGEL, Union politicians presented plans
| to this effect at a coalition meeting last Thursday.
| Among other things, the Federal Criminal Police Office is
| to be allowed to conduct dragnet searches and secret
| online searches of private computers. In addition, the
| data from the truck toll is to help solve crimes."
|
| > https://www.zeit.de/online/2007/37/kommentar-online-
| durchsuc...
|
| "Das Computer-Ausspahen wird also kommen. Wieder einmal
| wird der Gesetzgeber das Grundgesetz einschranken. Es mag
| nachvollziehbare Grunde dafur geben, wenn es darum geht,
| Terroristen davon abzuhalten, Hunderte von Menschen zu
| toten. Aber es braucht wenig prophetische Fahigkeiten, um
| vorauszusagen, dass es so kommen wird, wie es in der
| Vergangenheit immer gekommen ist: Erst versprechen die
| Innenpolitiker und die Sicherheitsbehorden hoch und
| heilig, das neue scharfe Schwert nur bei den ganz
| gefahrlichen Straftaten und Verbrechern zu benutzen. Doch
| dann kommen die Drogenhandler, die Kinderschander, die
| Betruger und schliesslich die Steuerhinterzieher. Und
| plotzlich sind auch Onlinedurchsuchungen ein ganz
| normales Instrument polizeilicher Ermittlungen.
|
| Das war so bei der Kronzeugenregelung, bei der
| Datenspeicherung zur LKW-Maut und bei der
| Telefonuberwachung. Die gehort langst zum polizeilichen
| Alltag und wird von Richtern routinemassig genehmigt.
| Auch beim Grossen Lauschangriff drangt die Union seit
| Langem auf eine Ausweitung. Ihr passt es uberhaupt nicht,
| dass die Polizei die Mikrofone ausschalten muss, wenn die
| belauschten Gesprache privat werden."
|
| DeepL translation:
|
| "So computer spying is coming. Once again, the
| legislature will restrict the Basic Law. There may be
| understandable reasons for this if the goal is to prevent
| terrorists from killing hundreds of people. But it takes
| little prophetic ability to predict that things will turn
| out the way they always have in the past: first, domestic
| politicians and the security authorities promise on high
| and holy to use the new sharp sword only on the very
| dangerous crimes and criminals. But then come the drug
| dealers, the child molesters, the fraudsters and finally
| the tax evaders. And suddenly online searches are also a
| normal instrument of police investigations.
|
| This was the case with the leniency program, data storage
| for truck tolls and telephone surveillance. This has long
| been part of everyday police life and is routinely
| approved by judges. The CDU/CSU has also long been
| pushing for an expansion of the large-scale eavesdropping
| program. It does not like the fact that the police have
| to switch off the microphones when the conversations they
| listen in on become private."
|
| Thus: never trust a politicians: politicians are nearly
| all fraudsters who belong into a high-security jail
| instead of a parliament.
| avion23 wrote:
| This form doesn't save data.
|
| It's not about protecting privacy. Germany saves more
| data than ever and it's openly spying on it's citizens.
|
| I think it's a mixture of inability and indifference in
| the government
| isaacremuant wrote:
| As someone who has lived in the UK and other European
| countries, you don't know how refreshing is to hear honest
| and critical takes on burocracy and/or corruption in European
| countries.
|
| Too often, given the heavier US demographics of sites like
| HN, we get black or white pictures where it's either the best
| or the worst and always as some sort of political point
| related to the US.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| My buddy at Volkswagen and deutsche bank would like to have a
| word
| ulnarkressty wrote:
| Germany has quite a lush hacker culture (e.g. CCC), I'm
| wondering why some people with know-how don't just get
| together and make a bunch of solutions like the one in this
| submission.
| nforgerit wrote:
| Because the bureaucrats (mostly suits and legal
| professionals) being afraid of making compliance mistakes
| in their projects, they will only hire certified people who
| went through all the German (mostly) BS university
| education. So the overall system is optimized for hiring
| rather subservient people and sorts out potentially
| talented "troublemakers".
|
| In addition, e.g. CCC is one of those groups with well-
| educated tech talent but they have kind of a history
| getting criminalized by the German governments (starting
| from the 80s). As a result, they (to me) seem to be rather
| anti-government and focus on very valuable tech workshops
| and tech education for interested civilians.
| bafe wrote:
| The buddy thing (and most of the other aspects) is the same for
| Switzerland. Additionally, you need to integrate 26 systems
| built with different technologies, one for each Canton. And
| some of them won't even have an API but will upload the data
| using CSV in a FTP folder
| jskherman wrote:
| I believe this is just reality for a lot of Governments with
| procurement biddings. Just replace here the IT solution with
| other projects like construction (very profitable or so I
| hear), mining, office supplies like laptops, and etc.
|
| It's such a cliche that I'm already tired at this point. I'm
| completely baffled as to why people keep voting these people
| for over two decades and obeying the vote-buying (when they can
| easily just keep the money and vote for the better/lesser evil
| candidates).
|
| At least in Germany, it's a lot less _blatant_.
| askonomm wrote:
| Coming from Estonia it is hard to believe how Germany still
| requires you to show up at government entities. I thought
| Germany was a very advanced country. I've done everything
| online for the past 10 or so years, having to only show up to
| the police to retrieve my new national id card or passport once
| it's ready, but every other service is entirely online:
| https://e-estonia.com/solutions/
| patrickk wrote:
| A lot of the bureaucracy is a badly disguised jobs program.
| There would be so many people out of work if there was actual
| work to reform some of these ossified government services.
| konschubert wrote:
| None of these people would be out of work, we have more
| than enough jobs.
| senand wrote:
| I had to laugh out loud. I want to say that's unrealistic, but
| alas, it unfortunately is not.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Except it won't be a raspberry pi, because one of the people
| will have convinced upper management that the load MAY be
| excessively high so it needs to be a mainframe grade high
| available cluster that will need to be requisitioned first.
| kakwa_ wrote:
| Given the project will probably take 10 to 15 years to be
| completed, honestly, they are probably not wrong.
|
| By the time it's ready for production, the latest Raspberry
| Pi will probably be about as powerful as the fancy cluster.
| [deleted]
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| When the wind stops, the form goes offline because the Pi uses
| 100% renewables. Last month the form went offline during a
| windy period because the neighbours complained about the wind
| noise the micro-sized windmill was producing: nimby.
| throw71649 wrote:
| Actually the whole government digitalization in Germany isn't
| as backwards as it seems. In some cases it might be even
| cutting edge solutions. One positive example is for instance
| Elster, the tax declarations are paperless since years, saving
| lots of money for tax consultants.
|
| But "consumer facing" solutions anyway have some unmovable
| roadblocks which is privacy for the better and the worse.
| Ultimately there's still quite some suspicion among most people
| towards full digitalization. And it's not completely without
| reason. Every time some new piece of consumer-government
| Infrastructure is added, CCC is finding at least one very
| serious bug that isn't fixed for a considerable amount of time
| - or never. (De-Mail, digital Passport - both probably should
| be core parts of such solutions anyway) Again, there are also
| positive example like the Corona app where the design was
| changed after criticism.
|
| That said, I don't think a municipal government has many
| degrees of freedom for any convenience solution. (So even if
| anyone is best buddies with an IT shop, it just won't happen)
| hansoolo wrote:
| Spot on!
| hit8run wrote:
| Detailed insider information! One detail missing: you forgot
| fax support.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Here's how we would do it in Norway
|
| 1. Problem is widely known. Everyone knows it sucks, and people
| in charge are starting to think "Maybe we should get that
| fixed"
|
| 2. The gov. hires McKinsey to get some strategic advice on the
| mater. They'll spend hundreds of thousands of NOK (1 NOK [?]
| $0.093 / EUR0.087) , maybe even a couple of million, on the
| strategic consultants. They'll present the gov. with N
| different options, with the most obvious being number one - _"
| Yeah fix that problem, here's our report to back that up"_
|
| 3. Relevant gov. minister will order the correct department or
| directorate to start the project, whom in turn will take a
| glance at internal resources, before swiftly reaching out to
| Accenture, Capgemini, Sopra Steria, and similar IT-consulting
| firms.
|
| 4. The consultants start to work with the
| department/directorate, where months will be spent on gather
| specs, planning, project work, and all that. Regular team
| meetings, flying the consultants out to wherever the
| department/directorate is located.
|
| 5. Implementation starts, after 1-2 years. Depending on the
| consulting firm, a MVP is presented withing a couple of months.
|
| 6. After 2-3 year, the (still minimal) product is ready to be
| released to the public. Millions of NOK has been spent. The
| product is officially owned by some product owner in the IT
| department of the directorate.
|
| 7. The consulting firm will work on the project for 5 years,
| until the contract is either renewed, or some other consulting
| firm wins the new bid.
|
| 8. After 10 years or so, the product is probably completely
| absorbed by some larger IT-project or portal, designed to
| consolidate products.
|
| In the end, tens and tens of consultants have worked on the
| single-page form.
| brap wrote:
| Yet for some reason Europeans feel so strongly against
| privitization of public services
| jamil7 wrote:
| Which is a good thing, since it's ultimately a failed
| concept.
| nisa wrote:
| Most of these shitty online services are already run by
| private consulting companies that burn your tax money.
| tormeh wrote:
| And yet you as an individual has no freedom to choose which
| company's interface you want to use for the government. You
| get the government-appointed shitty one.
| brap wrote:
| You're right, but this is not what I mean by privatizing.
|
| In this scenario you described, the government has a
| monopoly and you as a citizen don't get to opt-out or
| switch to the competition. You will pay for whatever
| garbage service they provide you with, unless you want to
| go to jail.
|
| There are no consequences to wasting your tax money. These
| private consulting companies are just the means to waste
| it.
| johneth wrote:
| Government tends to do what only government can do (e.g.
| issue passports, driving licenses, file taxes, etc.), and
| things where natural monopolies exist (water supply,
| trains, roads).
|
| What exactly would you privatise? (read: hand over
| obscene profits to a rent-seeking private entity).
| dfox wrote:
| In the various libertarian ideologies there is the idea
| that only thing that government needs to do is to
| "notarize" contracts. This is on the first approximation
| true, but said government needs to somehow derive the
| authority to do so. That authority comes from
| government's ability to somehow disperse violence, which
| in itself requires quite extensive support infrastructure
| needed for the government to function. And when such
| infrastructure has to exist anyway, somehow providing
| access to it for the citizens is a good idea both
| politically and economically.
|
| Another function of government is, like it or not, in
| somehow providing legal tender and in the process
| regulating it. Efficient free markets need fiat medium of
| exchange, however counterintuitive that might seen.
| Because otherwise the trading parties would not have any
| common value reference, and sooner or later the market
| itself will create something akin to a government and
| state. Which is well, probably how the idea of
| governments and states started some thousands of years
| ago.
| Jean-Philipe wrote:
| I actually had to work with two German government agencies,
| digitalizing parts of their work flow and it was surprisingly
| pleasant. The gov employees were super happy I saved them a lot
| of work and made their daily lives easier. My clients (small
| software shops) got to set up and maintain the server for them.
| There was some bureaucracy hurdles my clients had to tackle,
| but no show stoppers.
|
| I think the biggest problem for government agencies is to find
| a nice software shop that actually cares and delivers value.
| They usually have no way of telling who will be good and who
| will rip them off. Gov agencies are so easy to get ripped off
| and nobody will take responsibility when things go south.
| danjac wrote:
| Maybe the best way is to avoid these consultancies altogether
| and create a government digital agency (whether at local or
| national level). Motivated and well-trained civil servants
| familiar with the bureaucracy and terminology who can
| maintain and improve services in the long term. The UK .gov
| project seems to point the way.
| nickkell wrote:
| They have one already, but it's probably not as big:
| https://digitalservice.bund.de/
| nicbou wrote:
| I have worked with some of those people, and I can say
| that the agency is in really good hands.
| jupp0r wrote:
| This is largely impossible in Germany due to government pay
| rates being a fraction of what a competent person would
| earn in industry. There is very little flexibility in this
| due to equality principles. Sports is an exception, so they
| could fix it if they wanted to.
| nisa wrote:
| I don't think that's true - the pay is still good for
| eastern germany and outside of bigger cities and if there
| would be an honest effort I'm sure they'll find qualified
| personell. Additionally it's possible to have a non-
| profit company or a corporative.
|
| And maybe that keeps the enterprise java and cloud
| architects away so projects could actually succeed
| without complexity or cost explosion :)
|
| I guess it's because the state is forbidden to compete
| with the private sector by law/regulation (thank you
| neoliberals / capitalists...) so it just can't start
| something like this and the other big problem is due to
| the federated nature of german governance everony like to
| be the king in their area of control and collaborative
| projects tend to fail due to that. That was a huge
| problem during covid when every health department did
| their own thing regarding managing the data...
|
| Additionally lot's of the personell that would be in
| charge for that is unfortunatly either delusional or
| incompetent from my limited experience so this could also
| backfire and turn into a subsidy for the buddys of the
| person.
|
| But it's even basic things that are broken. Why has every
| city / municipality reinvent the wheel and organize their
| it stuff on their own... a non-profit or coop on the
| state level could just support them, do procurement and
| initial setup - this would result in more security and
| stability and less costs. There now some talks in that
| direction - it's 2023
| gwright wrote:
| > There is very little flexibility in this due to
| equality principles.
|
| I can imagine a lot of ways to interpret this but none
| really make sense in the context of your post.
|
| What "equality principle" leads to a conclusion that a
| government employee doing X must be paid a fraction of
| what a private employee doing X is paid? I'm confused.
| dmoy wrote:
| Equality among tiers of government employee. A similar
| though less pronounced issue exists with the US and the
| General Schedule. Entry level SWE who get lucky and enter
| at like grade 9 make maybe 50% of what they could at
| FAANG as a new grad. For seniors it's even worse.
| jupp0r wrote:
| There are salary tiers that are the same across all
| government employees. A new grad software engineer with a
| master's degree will earn the same as a new grad
| biologist, even though the outside government salaries
| for the two might differ by a factor of 2. There is no
| practical way of paying somebody more than this narrow
| wage band even if it's impossible to fill the position
| with somebody competent. You end up not having good
| engineers working for the government, unless they are
| willing to take an extremely steep pay cut.
| gwright wrote:
| OK, I'm not sure I would describe that phenomena as an
| "equality principle" though. That is just a misleading
| label for a misguided bureaucratic rule.
| nisa wrote:
| Very happy to hear that! Heard similiar stories but usally
| it's on a lower level where things can go right more often
| than not. The bigger the projects the bigger the problems.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I am not sure why you keep calling France "Germany :)
|
| The two organizations in France who specialize in this are the
| ministry of health and education.
|
| For health we have incompatible backend systems for a start.
|
| Then there was a large project to digitalize the patient files.
| Millions of euros flew in, an atrocity was born, nobody used
| it.
|
| After a few years, a brand new project was recreated, millions
| flew in and another abomination was born. I asked today at the
| pharmacy if I can use the digitalized version of my
| prescription (read: a picture I zm invited to take from within
| the app) and after a moment of reflection to understand what I
| was asking for they said absolutely not and that the app is
| crap, completely useless for health. My MD said the same.
|
| I am waiting for the next project and will try to get it, I
| have a raspberry pi I do not use.
|
| Education. We have platforms for regions that brings exactly
| nothing (nobody know what it is for) and in this you have an
| unrelated application with the actual information from school.
| It comes from a private company which is comfortably installed
| in the ministry so they provide the same shitty application
| every year. The "platform" I mentioned earlier was announced as
| collaborative and whatnot, yet it crashed on the first day of
| COVID lockout despite not providing any functionality, but
| blocking everything else.
|
| Ah, our taxes system traditionally crashes the day before the
| deadline.
|
| Ah, our gov't decided to digitalize our identity papers. 10
| years after other countries in Europe (I saw the Polish system
| which is great). But wait! You expected that you could actually
| use this to identify yourself? Hahahahahah... Sorry. It is
| explitely stated that the app will not be used for
| identification purposes. So what the fuck is it expected to be
| used for?
|
| I am angry because despite my utter love for my country,
| anything related to digitalization is run by complete idiots
| who have no idea about what a computer is.
|
| I would love to be proven wrong by an application that works so
| that my patriotism can revive.
| Escapado wrote:
| For anyone thinking this is satire: It's suprisingly close to
| the truth. We have Elster for electronically submitting taxes.
| Apparently the Elster Project started in 1996. And all it is,
| is a digital version of the manual tax forms. It's entirely
| stupid. When I file my taxes I still have to leave out 12
| random pages (instead of Elster figuring out that I don't need
| to file them and simply not show them to me). And last time I
| called the tax office the woman on the phone told me she can't
| answer a specific question I had because she would need to get
| my printed out file for that from the cabinet down the hall so
| I will have to call again later. 27 years. This is where we're
| at.
| nicbou wrote:
| Elster is still among the best digital products Germany has
| to offer. Pretty much everything else is worse.
| jona-f wrote:
| Can anyone tell me why it is named after a bird known for
| stealing? Is this a deliberate joke? How did that get
| approved?
| radiator wrote:
| It is an acronym, ELektronische STeuerERklarung
| mejutoco wrote:
| I do not disagree that sometimes German bureaucracy is not
| the most efficient.
|
| But. I have used Elster and, while it is true it looks old
| and overly complicated, it actually works great.
|
| You get _a lot_ of very useful warnings about fields that
| cannot be 0 or must at least be x, based on some other
| distant field. You can save previous forms and start from
| them (for recurrent things like VAT quarterly declaration).
| You can save progress and log in using certificates, change
| to be notified electronically instead of per physical mail.
|
| IMO Elster would be even better if they would _never_ change
| the number of the fields. If you buy a book about German
| taxes (I know, fun) they can say fill in field 47, and it it
| prob now 49 because the fields changed.
| Escapado wrote:
| Very valid points. But I would argue that guiding the user
| through a set of basal questions to exclude a bunch of
| fields and pages would do wonders for the whole thing. I
| get by alright but most of my friends and family find it
| utterly complicated and have to consult a tax advisor
| because they don't even know which fields are even relevant
| to them and the explanations in them often leave them with
| more questions than they had when they started.
| alexdbird wrote:
| > guiding the user through a set of basal questions to
| exclude a bunch of fields and pages
|
| The UK tax return (AKA Self-Assessment) follows this
| pattern and it definitely makes it better. It still lacks
| clear explanations of every field though.
| jupp0r wrote:
| Have you ever done taxes in another country? US taxes are
| not known to be super easy but the sheer ease of filing
| them compared to filing German taxes completely blew my
| mind.
| pimeys wrote:
| Or Finnish taxes. You don't need to file anything, it's
| automatically done for you. If you need some money back
| e.g. driving for work, you fill a quick form digitally
| and that's it.
| mejutoco wrote:
| Maybe my expectations were low ;)
|
| I did them in Spain. Honestly German taxes were a bit
| more intimidating (so many fields, tk is different) but
| in the end you only need a few. As a salaried employee
| you can use taxfix and get it done in 20 min.
|
| In Spain they were easier, but also I could not expense
| many things as a contractor. In Spain they would send you
| a draft, and you can request a meeting to help you do
| them (few people do this). This was smooth. You show at
| your timeslot and a friendly person is there for any
| questions. Before you leave, the definitive version is
| done.
| jcarrano wrote:
| The part about typing it again by hand and printing it is very
| real!
| nisa wrote:
| It's scary - if you apply for government student assistance
| you can apply online and it get's printed out - they had to
| employ people for printing!
| https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/funk/studenten-
| bafoeg...
| odiroot wrote:
| You forgot to mention that McKinsey gets involved.
| purpleidea wrote:
| Are you related to Luc Boulianne from Montreal? (Worked at
| McGill.)
| nicbou wrote:
| Nope. I'm from a different region, although I lived in Montreal
| too.
| schacon wrote:
| We did this as well several years ago, even with an iOS app, a
| guide to the process and a German cheat sheet: https://amty.io
|
| Every new Berliner feels this pain, but the worse part is getting
| an appointment. Not just for your Anmeldung, but for anything you
| need to do here.
| nicbou wrote:
| Yes! I used to link to it. I'm also a big fan of Chatterbug.
|
| For the appointment, there's this:
| https://allaboutberlin.com/tools/appointment-finder
| lzzzam wrote:
| Lovely project! Same annoying form in Austria as well. Thanks for
| it! Does the tool also suggest how to properly fill the form when
| you have your main residency in another country?
|
| The first year I moved to Austria I still had my main residency
| in Italy, and filling the paper unproperly could have impacted my
| taxation. Please have a look at DTA if you don't know what I
| mean.
| gabeidx wrote:
| I've used All About Berlin several times during my years in
| Germany, it's an invaluable resource to anyone who wants to live
| there.
|
| The other day when I needed this exact form, I realized how much
| time it was saving me and donated some to show appreciation.
|
| Thanks for your great work @nicbou!
| vxNsr wrote:
| It's funny, I used to work in the US for a germany company that
| had a similar process for many things, IT forms were pdfs that
| needed to be printed and hand signed, if you used an older
| version the form was rejected and you needed to fill out a new
| one. It appears to be a cultural thing.
| corbezzoli wrote:
| Nit: I'd probably avoid saying "you're done" when nothing was
| done, the user still needs to deliver it themselves. Saying
| "done" makes it look like it took care of it all, to a distracted
| person.
|
| I'd say the opposite: "Warning, you're not done!"
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I was trying to think of how to word what _has_ been
| accomplished (and finished, as far as the website is concerned)
| and was having a hard time of it, but your idea to just flip
| the whole thing on its head and say "warning: you're _not_
| done" is just so elegant in its simplicity. Well done (pun
| intended)!
| xyzzy4747 wrote:
| Is there an actual purpose for Germany requiring this other than
| allowing the Gestapo to track you down?
| nicbou wrote:
| This is in poor taste.
|
| It's used for a number of reasons, like planning things
| relative to the number of people living in an area. It also
| becomes your official address where the government sends all
| your important mail. It's also how you get registered for
| church tax.
| xyzzy4747 wrote:
| How is it poor taste? There's a lot of history of German
| police arresting everyone who registered themselves as a
| certain demographic.
| raybb wrote:
| Reminds me of last year when I made a small site to help find
| appointments slots for the municipality in Brussels.
|
| Website was taking so much effort to see the appointments and
| people said throughout they day they randomly opened so many of
| my classmates were checking all the time. So I made this to see
| appointments on one page instead of clicking many boxes.
|
| https://blog.rayberger.org/automating-ixelles-appointment-ch...
| nicbou wrote:
| I did that too: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/berlin-
| burgeramt-appointme...
|
| It took me a few months to get it sanctioned by Berlin's IT
| department, and I could not replicate that success with other
| services. However it's a start.
| ogou wrote:
| This is cool. The real trick is getting a Burgeramt appointment
| to submit this form. The official portal for that is a punishing
| exercise in bad UX. Basically, there are very few appointments
| available, so you have to keep refreshing the calendar page and
| hope that one of the dates is linked. It took me 2 weeks of
| opening that page multiple times a day and refreshing over and
| over. It gets hammered by bots as well and if you don't click the
| link fast enough it will disappear. There are multiple bots
| available on Github and I think there is also a Chrome extension
| now. But, they all do the same thing (refresh the page) and will
| get your IP banned if you run them without long timers. I tried
| all of it and the only thing that worked was having a Favorite in
| mobile Safari that I opened whenever I had idle time. I finally
| got one in a coffee shop and nearly knocked the table over
| because I was so happy.
| nicbou wrote:
| I made a tool for that:
| https://allaboutberlin.com/tools/appointment-finder
| Bissness wrote:
| Bravo!
|
| Burgeramter are most of the time a fucking joke. My registration
| in Berlin took months after I already moved there, the waiting
| times are just that long, and this seems to apply to many cities.
| I live in another city now, and my ID card has been expired for
| months now (which, legally, is a misdemeanor). There isn't a
| single free appointment anywhere, citywide. You can attempt to go
| personally there in the early morning, yet here is what I
| encountered: arriving half an hour early to the Burgeramt: THIRTY
| people waiting there, squatting in the hallways, all the way out
| to the door. On another day, arriving an HOUR before it opened:
| 12 people already waiting. It's all a joke. And this isn't a
| recent phenomenon - it's mismanagement for decades, the people
| responsible should all be fired (but of course that isn't
| possible).
|
| There should be a "Minister for Time", who has the authority to
| crack down on such bullshit, not only in the German state
| bureaucracy, but also in the medical system (good luck getting
| any quick care here!). Both have taken to a level that is
| undignified, and wastes person-years of sitting in depressing
| places. Waiting should be an exception, not the norm, and there
| need to be metrics against that which have consequences.
| gorbypark wrote:
| I am always in a similar situation in Valencia (Spain) when
| trying to book appointments. Fortunately, there is an
| integrated appointment system here and it's fairly trivial to
| automate checking for open appointments using their API. I can
| usually get one in a few hours by checking once per minute for
| free slots.
|
| I also wrote something similar for getting a NIE appointment
| (foreigner's ID card) by using puppeteer (headless Chrome for
| node) to actually fill out the website for me, about once per 3
| minutes (max without getting rate-limited).
|
| I'm fortunate to have the skills to do so but I feel bad for
| the rest of the people who have to check websites for weeks at
| a time to get appointments.
| ahf8Aithaex7Nai wrote:
| Try registering or deregistering a vehicle in a major German
| city. That once took me three months, because I simply couldn't
| get an appointment via the web interface set up especially for
| that purpose. Since Covid, the process is kind of broken, at
| least in my city.
| csunbird wrote:
| You might have chosen the worst example for your point, it is
| super duper easy to register a car online. I registered both
| of my cars online, the papers arrived in a week but I was
| able to drive and insure the vehicle without any
| interruptions. They give you a printout to carry around while
| the original registration papers arrive, but the police
| already knows whether the car is registered or not and will
| not bother you.
| nicbou wrote:
| This is a fairly recent development. The wait times for
| registering a vehicle were downright absurd.
|
| By the way, the Kfz-Zulassungsstelle is allegedly one of
| the best-organised offices on Berlin. It's all downhill
| from there.
| thesimon wrote:
| > it is super duper easy to register a car online.
|
| If you are in possession of the title of the car, yes.
|
| However if you lease a car, the leasing company will just
| post the lease to the Zulassungsstelle so that you will not
| be in possession of the title at any time. So it will
| require you to go there in person.
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| German here and a Berlin "native". In Germany, it is common
| knowledge that Berlin bureaucracy sucks even more so than on
| average. Part of it has to do with (Western) Berlin's history
| of being an island receiving a lot of subsidies. Nowadays,
| after re-unification, it still receives a lot of federal
| subsidies but for being the new country's capitol. As a
| consequence, Berlin's public sector is relatively large but not
| in the relevant branches and also lacking really competent
| personnel. So while Berlin spends Billions on paying public
| servants it cannot even maintain its basic public services,
| sadly.
|
| I bet you would have had a much better experience everywhere
| else (even in Potsdam, Berlin's neighboring city).
| Goz3rr wrote:
| I ran into something similar as a Dutch person trying to buy a
| car from Germany. The initial plan was to drive the car back
| from Germany, but to do this I had to get an export license
| plate. This can only be done in the municipality where the car
| was sold, and they told me I was lucky because I could get an
| appointment quite quick, which was a month and a half from now.
| I would also have to bring the car to the Strassenverkehrsamt.
| How I would have gotten the car there was also a mystery to me,
| as I did not have a license plate and to get a license plate I
| would have to bring the car there. If I did somehow manage to
| do that though, I would have to get a physical license plate
| made and then get temporary insurance. Not a single German
| insurance company said they could insure the temporary license
| plate, as I was not already an existing customers of theirs. I
| ended up just renting a car transporter and bringing it home
| that way.
|
| The process of getting a license plate once home was actually a
| breeze. I used the website of the Dutch Vehicle Authority to
| make an appointment (for the following day at 2pm) and they
| gave me a temporary license plate. I simply had to write this
| on a piece of cardboard and put it where the license plate
| would go. Called the cheapest insurance company to get
| temporary insurance, which was no problem, and simply drove the
| car to get it inspected.
| nottheengineer wrote:
| There are red license plates for this exact case. Car
| dealerships generally have them to allow for test drives and
| bureaucracy drives.
|
| If you buy a car (which is currently unregistered) from a
| private person that doesn't have those, you just did
| something that the bureaucracy didn't foresee and at that
| point, the best course of action is to avoid as much of it as
| possible.
|
| At this point I have no hope that any of this will getter
| unless the german state collapses completely.
| thesimon wrote:
| Dealer plates cannot be used for export.
| vasco wrote:
| To be honest though as a foreigner living in The Netherlands
| who doesn't speak a word of Dutch past "lekker", your
| bureaucracy and general services are probably one of the best
| in the world. Even your weird medical system is amazing when
| you actually need help - which I did and got top tier care,
| extremely fast. The Netherlands should just export their
| whole system to all of Europe, including the way information
| is documented in English in every official website.
|
| On top you got a culture of being on time, which is prevalent
| everywhere, and you wait for stuff very seldomly, and only
| for a few minutes. Waiting for anything was one of my biggest
| irks in my home country, the fact that I can make an
| appointment, be there 5mins early, and get the service, blows
| my mind.
| rcbdev wrote:
| I doubt many foreign governments would agree that all legal
| matters should be documented not only in the language of
| that country but English as well.
|
| While some countries provide a non-binding translation for
| many things, someone could set the precedent in court that
| the English translation if relied on by enough people is
| somewhat binding or similar - Result would be two slightly
| different (mis-)understandings about the law, due process
| and bureaucracy from official sources. That could be have
| unforseen consequences.
|
| Just because many people happen to speak English doesn't
| mean everyone has to.
| morsch wrote:
| I can get an appointment for a new ID next week. Major city in
| Germany. Ymmv.
| [deleted]
| wdb wrote:
| Hah, yeah, renewing ID card or passports needs to be planned
| well ahead. I think my government advices few months ahead of
| expiring.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| In Berlin you can usually book a same day appointment for some
| city services including registration in the morning at
| 8:00-8:05, when they release few more slots. Sometimes you may
| need to go somewhere like Alt Tegel quickly, but that worked
| for me several times.
| abdusco wrote:
| The trick is to look for appointments early in the morning.
| People who think they won't be able to make it to the
| appointment that day cancel theirs and there's a bunch of
| openings every morning.
| pjmlp wrote:
| This, it requires getting up around 6 AM or so, however there
| are always several slots made available for the same day,
| think last tickets sale for a concert.
| nicbou wrote:
| This is not true. I tested it before:
| https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/berlin-buergeramt-
| experimen...
| inductive_magic wrote:
| I mean, from what I hear Berlin does take the cake on this one,
| but yes: its a country-wide phenomenon.
|
| For what its worth, I was pleasantly surprised by the things
| you can do digitally in Kiel.
|
| Schleswig-Holstein, Niedersachsen, Hamburg and Bremen have
| "Dataport", a publicly owned company which does a lot of the
| tech for public institutions in the area. While they are not
| operating at the efficiency of a normal company, they seem to
| be fairly useful. I'm not sure if something similar exists for
| other regions in Germany.
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| For Berlin specifically it is important to note the city-
| state was super broke until around 10 years ago. Many causes
| for this including mismanagement by the government, but the
| main cause is the GDR, how Berlin was divided, and how very
| little industry settled in or around Berlin.
|
| Now this has changed a lot in the last decade or two, but it
| has been accompanied by avg. yearly net migration of 80k
| people which is putting a major strain on all public
| services.
| koevet wrote:
| That's exactly why you want to roll out a digitalisation
| plan and not throw billion of euros of tax payers money
| away
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| A big issue of Berlin's failure is within Berlin's
| constitution:
|
| Berlin isn't centralized, but the districts (Bezirke) have
| quite some freedom to structure their work (similar to
| "kommunale Selbstverwaltung" in other states) and how they
| run the administration offices (Burgeramter etc.) which
| then leads to city administration passing a law for
| something and each district implementing it differently and
| city administration having no authority to override
| district decisions, while taking the blame.
|
| Fixing this requires a change to the constitution, but that
| requires a 2/3 majority in the city assembly
| (Abgeordnetenhaus) or a referendum. Getting the majority is
| hard as there are varying differences (from parties being
| happy about number of posts to full, like district mayors
| etc.) and "dislike" between districts (East/West,
| center/outer, ..)
| PinguTS wrote:
| The trick is not to go to the main registration side but to the
| small local offices in the outer areas. Like in Nuremberg not
| going into the city center but to Katzwang or Grossgrundlach.
|
| Sometimes you can got there without appointment and you can go
| in, because they have nothing to do and they are waiting
| happily for you and they are very friendly.
| CalRobert wrote:
| That brings to mind the romance of waiting in the immigration
| queue in Dublin at 4 AM with my wife so we could get registered
| by the end of the day.
| https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/20853936/ . Simpler
| times.
|
| Of course, the Irish government did eventually put in place an
| appointment booking system that was so comically bad bots would
| take all of the appointments immediately for resale on Facebook
| marketplace. It never crossed their mind to use a CAPTCHA. I
| only got my own appointment by writing a scraper for it.
| m_fayer wrote:
| I did that in Berlin about a decade ago and I think that only
| stopped happening here around 2018. I have fond memories of
| thermoses, multiple layers, a long grumpy queue trying to
| keep itself warm in pitch darkness. And then when the doors
| open, everyone rushes in to grab one of the few paper
| appointment tickets. Didn't manage? Then try again the next
| day.
|
| And that was actually a much-missed office hours system. If
| you had to see someone without waiting months, you waited
| from the middle of the night. Now you're just screwed.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Really glad I took my business to the Netherlands and not
| Germany.
| fsniper wrote:
| That appointment system is the worst online registration
| system ever. In fact I suggest people having trouble to move
| outside of the Dublin area to avoid it. Then you would only
| need to call the garda and an immigration officer handles
| everything. You just visit the station on the appointed date
| with your documents.
|
| I hate phone calls more than anyone, but this experience is
| far ahead of the appointment system one.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Of course, when I tried to register in Tullamore years
| later the immigration officer fobbed me off until she
| tried. Thankfully the one in Athlone eventually took pity
| on me and let me register there.
| fsniper wrote:
| Oh sorry to hear that. Unfortunately this is also typical
| Irish experience. No standards across different regions
| :(
| CalRobert wrote:
| Incompetence and unprofessionalism were rampant. Also:
| typo - I meant until she retired, leaving Offaly with no
| immigration officer. I had to call a TD to get sorted.
| Peak Ireland.
| Vingdoloras wrote:
| Here's what I do when I need to go to a Burgeramt: For every
| type of appointment you can make, there should be an official
| website containing links to each Burgeramt's calendar page.
| Bookmark that website, not the individual pages. Find one or a
| few locations you'd prefer, then open each calendar in a
| separate browser! Opening multiple in one browser doesn't work,
| as it remembers your last selection per browser session. Next,
| keep refreshing and checking the calendars every 30 minutes.
| Slots free up pretty often, but they're also full again soon
| after. If you're lucky, you can figure out when canceled
| appointments are entered into the system for your location (for
| mine it was 10AM every day). Around that time, there's a good
| chance you might even get a few slots that are only a week or
| two into the future. Once you figured out when slots open up,
| check around that time daily. Book the first slot you can get,
| then keep doing this for a few days and book any slot that is
| better than your previous one (but be nice and cancel the old
| slot).
|
| It's a lot of work, and it shouldn't be necessary, but I'd
| never go into a Burgeramt without an appointment and this
| method has worked for me every time so far.
| nicbou wrote:
| I wrote a tool for that:
| https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/berlin-burgeramt-
| appointme...
|
| It's officially sanctioned by the city, but it's capped to
| one request every 3 minutes to avoid replacing the official
| website. Every few months, I ask them for permission to add
| other services, and I get ghosted.
|
| However, the tool is open source, so you can just `pip
| install` it and run it on any appointment type you want.
|
| https://github.com/nicbou/burgeramt-appointments-websockets
| ravdeepchawla wrote:
| Maybe this was you as well https://www.reddit.com/r/berlin/
| comments/q7ekx8/1010_is_the_... :-)
|
| Your form helped immensely in the anmeldung process last
| year for me. Keep fighting the good fight sir.
| nicbou wrote:
| Yep, that's also me! Glad it helped
| kioleanu wrote:
| You can automate that with a browser extension that checks
| the page and plays a sound when it changed
| seb1204 wrote:
| You make great use of modern technology and ingenuity.
| Congratulations, everyone should do the same. Sarcasm end. As
| a German living abroad I look in horror at the stories I
| read. Where I live changing the official registered address
| is a log into the gov services site, change it and two weeks
| late I get a letter with ned address stickers for my driver's
| licence. The driver licence on my phone does not need a
| sticker obviously.
| RileyJames wrote:
| This, with a little more automation, is exactly how I was
| able to book a covid quarantine hotel to return to NZ.
|
| It felt pretty unfair that the average user was at an
| impossible disadvantage because the system had no protection
| against automation.
|
| It was quite obvious others were already running automation,
| but I only booked for myself and then turned it off.
|
| I was impressed NZ got a highly functional system up and
| running extremely quickly, but it became a game of high
| frequency trading.
| mo_42 wrote:
| I appreciate your work much. I think it would really be a
| pleasant experience completing not only the Anmeldung but other
| things you provide on allaboutberlin.com.
|
| From a pragmatic perspective this is the right thing to do. But I
| think people of Berlin should strive to abandon such bureaucracy
| completely. In other countries, there's no such thing as an
| Anmeldung and it doesn't look like such countries are falling
| apart (because of this). Why not simply get rid of this and let
| the people do meaningful work?
| sublimefire wrote:
| I used to work in a small company that digitized paper/pdf forms.
| We used json schema forms in React which allowed us to recreate
| complicated schemas along with the conditionals to show/hide
| sections and do complicated calculations. The forms would be
| rendered on the fly based on the underlying schema.
|
| The main customers were from the local government who wanted to
| digitize and increase the efficiency of dealing with some forms.
| I mean we are talking about forms that are 5-50 pages long with
| just a few people who know how everything is supposed to work. In
| some cases a processing of a form would be extremely expensive.
| The product saved a lot of public money.
|
| But it is extremely hard to sell to such orgs, requires tight
| collaboration to understand all of the edge cases. Not only that
| but it is necessary to interact with gov before they even start a
| procurement process, not just because you want to increase the
| chances of winning but because they just do not know what is
| possible to begin with and how to ask for it. Also, there is some
| competition to outbid the others which sounds like a good thing
| but it also reduces the chances that a solution will be
| transformative as it is quite hard to spell it out what you want
| so that it is of good quality.
|
| The next time you complain about poor digital services remember
| that it is hard to compete in that field and the cheapest almost
| always wins. This does not mean the best though. Also, I
| encourage you to try and bid on some local projects to improve
| our shitty old systems.
| kwanbix wrote:
| As a foreigner who moved to Berlin 6 years ago, congratulations.
|
| This is brilliantly done.
|
| It is so crazy that the biggest economy in Europe is so non-
| digitalized.
| wheybags wrote:
| > Or why not skip paper entirely?
|
| If we're talking about actual reform, the obvious suggestion is
| to skip the entire notion of registration, no?
| fabian2k wrote:
| Registration is very useful, e.g. it means that you can easily
| vote in all elections without any additional steps. You
| automatically get a notification in your mail and don't have to
| do anything else to vote.
| [deleted]
| reacharavindh wrote:
| Yes, as a non-European expat moving to Denmark in 2017, my
| experience was eye-opening.
|
| I needed one physical visit to the International affairs
| section of the citizens service(Borger service), where they
| took my biometrics, and issued me a CPR number(a national Id
| equivalent I that of social security number in the US, or
| Aadhaar ID in India), and another set of codes called Nem-Id
| which serves as a second factor authentication for all things
| online. That's it.
|
| I could go online, login with my CPR number, and use the Nem-ID
| as the second factor auth, and register my address, bank
| account, immigration details, driving license etc.
|
| Need a bank account? Open one by using the CPR number and
| second factor auth using Nem-ID.
|
| Same goes for phone connection, internet at home, whatever
| else.
|
| Need holidays? Paid for by the government, and I login using my
| CPR number ti check my state of holidays. Independent of my
| employer.
|
| Childcare benefit? Apply using the CPR number online.
|
| Need to find a daycare(Vuggestue) for your kid? No need, login
| with the kid's cpr number and apply, and you get assigned to
| one of the neighborhood ones.
|
| I move to a different address within Denmark? Change the
| address in that borgerservice portal, and that's it. Even my
| internet provider sends a bill to the new address
| automatically.
|
| End of the year, I get a tax report from SKAT(tax authorities)
| because they already know all my details as they are linked
| with my CPR number. All I need to do is report any corrections.
| If not my tax reporting is done by default.
|
| When my kid was born in Denmark, the nurse came with a bag with
| a stork doll, and an envelope with..... CPR number :-)
|
| It was a pleasure how things were digitized in Denmark.
| Mashimo wrote:
| As a German living in Denmark I often wonder why we Germans
| don't do it a bit like the danes .. it's just a hop over the
| border and ask them ;_;
|
| Also if you change to a different bank or want a different
| "main" bank account both your monthly payments and wages get
| applied to your new bank account without you having to inform
| anyone.
| diegoeche wrote:
| denial. Look at all the other Germans saying "But all other
| countries are the same, it's not just Germany".
|
| As a non-eu person living in Germany. It was easier to go
| to Denmark to marry because of the unreasonable paperwork
| in Germany. Like "Get a certificate you haven't been
| married in any country you have lived". Many countries
| don't issue those certificates.
|
| Every scandinavian person knows how a good digitalized
| country looks like, Germans just can't even accept they are
| inefficient.
| emj wrote:
| It sounds really nice when you say it like this, I've always
| felt bad about all the hoops you have to go through as a
| foreigner in the Nordics. I wish I had time to rate countries
| on different bureaucracy flows like the ones you list; child
| care, immigrant, bank account, id theft, police report,
| filing and paying taxes as a employee, handling sales tax.
| You get so blind to these small inefficiencies.
| jcarrano wrote:
| While I laud your effort, having had to do such a chore myself[1]
| you are missing the point of bureaucracy. The whole point is to
| make work for bureaucrats, and the easier and more pointless it
| is, the better. There are also other issues remaining, like the
| fact that you need to involve your landlord[2].
|
| Do you think anyone at the Burgeramt has any reason to change
| their easy "just type stuff and press buttons" job to anything
| resembling real work? Bureaucrats wield political power, at the
| very least because they vote like anyone else, but they also have
| more direct influence than average people. Politicians have no
| incentive to go against them and, as long as they promise that
| everything will remain the same, they will have the support of
| the paper-stamper class. The bureaucrats form a distinct social
| class with their own interests.
|
| If there was any will to solve the problem, it would have been
| done already, even without technology. Most people think that
| taxes are levied to pay for services, but it is actually the
| other way around, bureaucracy is there to justify the taxes.
|
| [1] I had to go to Lichtemberg because it is was the only office
| with an appointment in a reasonable time frame.
|
| [2] There are people selling registrations now.
| nicbou wrote:
| This is not true. Civil servants hate drudgery as much as
| anyone else, and there plenty of work to go around. The chief
| complaint of Auslanderbehorde employees is that the work keeps
| piling up.
|
| You must involve your landlord because you need some proof that
| you live where you are registering.
|
| Sometimes the simplest explanation is the most likely: that the
| system is a disorganised mess, and that those most affected by
| it (including bureaucrats) are incapable of fixing it.
|
| Yes, there are also people selling immigration office
| appointments. If there is desperation, there is a business.
| OliverJones wrote:
| There's a book by Jen Pahlka called Recoding America.
| https://www.worldcat.org/title/Recoding-America-:-why-govern...
|
| Germany seems to have similar sorts of federal / state /
| municipal government issues and other bureaucratic constraints as
| the US. And, this article makes it clear it has the same sorts of
| opportunities for improvement.
|
| Maybe it's time to establish Programmieren fur Deutschland as a
| parallel org to Code for America.
| em1sar wrote:
| [dead]
| scotty79 wrote:
| > When you move in Berlin, you must register your address.
|
| What happens if you don't? I'm from EU, I should be able to move
| and live within it wherever I please.
|
| EDIT
|
| Apparently you can't open bank account or enter any legal
| agreement without anmeldung.
| thelastgallon wrote:
| These digitization/paper-work/wait problems, 1000x for
| immigrants.
|
| Added bonus of uncertainty and significant stress, you never know
| how these delays in processing are going to impact your status.
| nicbou wrote:
| Yes, and this is why I spend so much time on those problems.
| Germans can afford to wait, but immigrants need everything at
| once and can't afford the delays.
| Tenoke wrote:
| In 2020 I did my Anmeldung by just sending them an email and not
| going in-person. Too bad they didn't keep the Covid workaround
| even after setting it up.
| matttproud wrote:
| Bureaucracy in Germany felt to be equal in magnitude to what I
| was used to from the United States (which is to say: bad), but
| the character of the bureaucracy's toil in Germany felt
| incredibly archaic.
|
| I hate to give the author of this tool any despair: if you think
| managing your Wohnsitzanmeldung is hard, wait until you decide to
| move away from Germany (to another country) and attempt to
| sever/cancel your contracts. The cancellation process is
| nightmare mode.
| durnygbur wrote:
| [dead]
| kelnos wrote:
| I'm surprised to hear that. As far as I know, the US doesn't
| have anything quite as ridiculous as this particular thing, at
| least not for something routine as moving to a new house.
|
| The last time I had to visit a government office for something
| routine... well, I actually don't recall when that last was.
| Most things are done online, with only a small a few requiring
| me to mail something out as well.
|
| I guess this is also location dependent; a small US town
| probably has less digitization than a large US city.
| nicbou wrote:
| Don't forget to ask for a pension payments refund!
| https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/pension-payments-refund
| alistairSH wrote:
| Do Germans have to repeat the process to update their driver's
| license or other paperwork upon changing address?
|
| Here in the US, we would normally... register the new address
| with the postal service (online), update the address on our
| driver's license and car registration (online if same state, in-
| person if new state), send an email to employer with new address
| details.
|
| So as long as it's a move with a state, it's not too bad. Name
| changes (marriage, etc), gender changes, out of state moves, and
| other "edge" cases can be quite a bit more painful.
|
| And of course, updating addresses with utilities/ISP and other
| non-governmental entities varies quite a bit.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| FWIW, I have never bothered updating the car registration
| address and never had a problem. The DMV/MVD knows who owns the
| car (tied to your state id or driver's license) and the latter
| has been updated. I don't see a real need to update the former.
| nicbou wrote:
| They put a sticker with your new address on the licence. The
| address change is not that bad honestly.
| emj wrote:
| Static PDF or text is a good protection against Murphys law!
| Having done forms like this I have learned that the hard way. If
| you want to save state on the server like you mention e.g. QR
| code, you need to save the form as a PDF or a readable text file
| and not only as data that is rendered by some frontend framework.
|
| This means you can have multiple people digitally sign or even
| fill it out, then they can sign the text representation which is
| easier than a digitally signed PDF or json. You need this because
| when you update the backend and frontend between logins and there
| is always somekind of mismatch that will happen. This is
| especially hard when you have non linear form entries or optional
| parts like the C/O part in this form, there is always something
| that slips through the crack in regression testing.
|
| Last time it happend to us someone had upgraded the front end
| calendar month chooser. It was well tested, but that ment another
| optional date picker was updated and testing did not happen
| there. Then organizational and technical Murphys law struck
| meaning complete data loss for people affected by that.
| nicbou wrote:
| > you need to save the form as a PDF or a readable text file
|
| Why?
|
| In this case, the data will live for a few weeks at most. The
| goal would be a QR code that contains the data as a hash:
| https://forms.berlin/#[form data]. This is to avoid storing or
| seeing any user data.
|
| I was also considering a P2P solution with WebRTC. This would
| let you transmit your form without the server seeing the data.
| You'd just need to both visit a URL at the same time.
|
| The idea is that I can't store private information, and the
| Burgeramt can't install any new software.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| None of this ever happens if you use an RDBMS and put
| everything in strongly typed columns, regardless of how or
| where you are generating the forms or UI (backend or front
| end). They can be stored encrypted with a js/user-only
| #fragment if you don't want the server to see the data.
| tnolet wrote:
| You should charge $500 a pop for this. People will pay
| nicbou wrote:
| I'm sure they would, but this website is free by design.
| [deleted]
| raister wrote:
| Now they'll think: "it's time to change the form"...
| VSerge wrote:
| yup, I can imagine some adversarial changes being made to the
| effect that the document generated by this online form can be
| refused by the administration in question.
|
| OR if there are people interested in efficiency in this
| administration, despite what the current state of things would
| suggest, they could embrace this development, buy the rights to
| this and implement it on their website for everyone to enjoy.
| One can dream.
| nicbou wrote:
| Such people exist. I have a few acquaintances in city
| government. They're interested in helping, although some are
| either busy, tangled in red tape, or unimaginative. They are
| definitely not hostile through.
| tanbog5 wrote:
| Lol. My berlin friends will live this.
| burren wrote:
| What libraries did you use in Vue for the UI components?
| Interface is so clean.
| nicbou wrote:
| It's all made from scratch.
| 0xCaponte wrote:
| Nicolas, you are the hero we didn't now we needed.
| Caoste wrote:
| Love this! Someone should start building a hub for such tools
| that help you deal with our german bureaucracy.
| Caoste wrote:
| This is great! We should have a hub of such tools that help you
| deal with our german bureaucracy!
| 0xCaponte wrote:
| Nicolas, you are the hero we didn't know we needed.
| wwalexander wrote:
| Even just turning a PDF form into a properly-configured,
| digitally fillable and signable form is a massive usability
| increase, and of the forms I fill, I rarely encounter one with
| all fields properly editable from the outset. We're in a strange
| halfway place where everything is digital, printing is obsolete,
| everyone has asymmetric cryptography and biometrics in their
| pockets, but we're emailed forms that we must print, wet-sign,
| scan and email back (unless we're tech-savvy enough to edit PDF
| forms and the recipient is tech-savvy enough to accept digital
| signatures).
|
| I ended up reworking the entirety of my many-paged lease
| agreement at my last apartment so that I and my roommates could
| more easily fill it out and revise mistakes. I recently had to
| fill out a new patient questionnaire, and while someone had
| clearly tried to digitize the form, it was rife with issues that
| made the inputs unusable that I had to fix (such as radio buttons
| being mis-grouped).
|
| Making a functional PDF form is not only nice for those filling
| them out, but also allows for easier automation when ingesting
| the forms. I wish that those whose entire jobs revolve around the
| processing of forms would put in a modicum of effort when
| creating them. Maybe I'm underestimating the difficulty of these
| things for the layman who hasn't touched digital UI stuff.
| wdb wrote:
| Doesn't sound much different from Switzerland
| graup wrote:
| This is cool! Note that this problem is fairly specific to Berlin
| (and probably some other places in Germany). I just moved to
| Heidelberg, and this city offers registration appointments both
| via video chat as well as in-person, with slots available next
| day.
| kinnth wrote:
| You genius! This caused me so many headaches each year!
| abujazar wrote:
| This is good design. I love when developers are primarily
| designers.
| based-nerd wrote:
| LOL. Big Government in action is exhilarating to watch.
|
| I wonder what would be more difficult, getting your owners to
| adopt your digitization or to abolish the requirement altogether.
|
| Its probably racist anyway.
| aforty wrote:
| You want people to not register and let the city know that they
| are residing there?
| sib wrote:
| Sure, why not? As long as the _country_ knows that they are
| in-country...
|
| If I move to a different place in the US, I don't have to
| register with the city or state.
|
| (Of course, if I have a driver license, I do have to update
| that address within some period of time, and, if moving to a
| different state, I'd have to get a new one.)
| cinntaile wrote:
| Nice job. I will upvote anything that reduces the unnecessary
| bureaucratic load on citizens.
| dctoedt wrote:
| For some U.S. tales, e.g., the challenges of digitizing
| California's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
| sign-up process, see the excellent _Recoding America_ by Jennifer
| Pahlka, former deputy CTO of the United States and now the
| founder of the non-profit organization Code For America. [0]
|
| (Memorable passage: A civil servant described a complex
| government policy as having been "vomited" onto an impenetrable
| sign-up form -- for my contract-drafting course, I stole that as
| the label "barf clause" to describe long, wall-of-words
| provisions such as the 357-word "Fragment 1" in an example I had
| students rewrite in class last week. [1])
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.com/Recoding-America-Government-
| Failing-D...
|
| [1] https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/#guar-wow-1
| durnygbur wrote:
| [dead]
| fl7305 wrote:
| "The Burgeramt also wants to know that you live on the second
| floor on the right."
|
| Meanwhile in Sweden, the government instituted a nationwide
| "Dwelling Units Register", where each apartment etc is uniquely
| numbered.
|
| There is a precise way to number apartments based on the floor
| number, order of front doors on each floor etc.
|
| Do you live on a steep hill, and have to go down two floors to
| reach your apartment which has windows facing out the other side
| of the building? No problem, the numbering system handles that.
|
| https://www.lantmateriet.se/en/real-property/property-inform...
|
| https://www.lantmateriet.se/globalassets/fastigheter/fastigh...
| morsch wrote:
| > People leave that out, so they get asked (in German) during
| their appointment.
|
| Can't say that ever happened to me.
| kharak wrote:
| I've never known these kinds of systems exist. Love it. Like a
| common interface or index. Something like this should be
| implemented everywhere.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I spent a year living in Germany and I am pretty certain that if
| I had overstayed my visa one day somebody would have shown up at
| my door to check in on me.
|
| Contrast that to the US where I had a neighbor who was always
| bringing people in from Poland who were overstaying their visas
| and there didn't seem to be any effort to stop this. (e.g.
| despite all these strange schemes to make sure people get
| photographed, scanned, probed, etc. when they leave.)
|
| (There was that time one of his "guests" was out in the road with
| an associate and revving the engine of a pickup truck while it
| was up against a thick wood beam that was braced against a tree.
| I asked him what he was doing and he said "I'm trying to make
| straight the bumper", and in that case broken English was the
| least of his problems.)
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I've actually heard a lot of success stories regarding
| chassis/frame/body straightening on trucks with trees (lots of
| YouTube videos but here's a rare blog post [0]). The hilarity
| ensues when one attempts to straighten the chassis of a unibody
| vehicle in the same manner (true story, and no, it wasn't me).
|
| [0]: https://blacksprucehound.com/2018/01/16/redneck-vehicle-
| fram...
| melx wrote:
| Kudos on the nice UX for dropdown with countries. I wish more
| websites do it. Usually, it's "United States" at the very top,
| and 194 other countries in a loooooong list.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Oddly enough it doesn't list countries where most people are
| likely to come from right at the top. That makes it ill
| designed still.
| melx wrote:
| The OP wrote this is based on "navigator.languages" feature
| in the visitor's browser. So if your preferred language is
| set to e.g. French, then you shall see France at the top of
| dropdown.
| hk__2 wrote:
| > So if your preferred language is set to e.g. French, then
| you shall see France at the top of dropdown.
|
| If it's French _from France_ , yes. This is the second part
| of the language code: fr_FR is French from France, fr_BE
| from Belgium, fr_BF from Burkina Faso and so on.
| melx wrote:
| Good point! But what... if it's French Belgian person
| from France... is this still "French from France", or
| "French from Belgium" ? The Belgian person lives in
| France ;-)
|
| Also, you missed other language codes for French: fr_BI,
| fr_BJ, fr_BL, fr_CA, fr_CD, fr_CF, fr_CG, fr_CH, fr_CI,
| fr_CM, fr_DJ, fr_DZ, fr_GA, fr_GF, fr_GN, fr_GP, fr_GQ,
| fr_HT, fr_KM, fr_LU, fr_MA, fr_MC, fr_MF, fr_MG, fr_ML,
| fr_MQ, fr_MR, fr_MU, fr_NC, fr_NE, fr_PF, fr_PM, fr_RE,
| fr_RW, fr_SC, fr_SN, fr_SY, fr_TD, fr_TG, fr_TN, fr_VU,
| fr_WF, fr_YT.
| hk__2 wrote:
| > But what... if it's French Belgian person from
| France... is this still "French from France", or "French
| from Belgium" ? The Belgian person lives in France ;-)
|
| This is accessory; the goal is to suggest relevant
| options for someone based on the language they configured
| their browser with.
|
| > Also, you missed other language codes for French: [...]
|
| These are combinations of a language code (fr) and a
| region code; the list is not standardized and could
| theorically be extended to all the regions with an ISO
| code. What's interesting here is the region code, not the
| language.
| nicbou wrote:
| As an official policy, I do not recognise the existence
| of Belgium.
|
| However I am Canadian and I speak French. It will
| recognise fr-CA as "Canada".
| martin_a wrote:
| I think this has been taken care of:
|
| > I use navigator.languages to get a list of supported
| languages. For example, en-CA, fr-CA, de-DE. This gives me a
| list of countries the user might have lived in. I suggest
| those countries at the top of the country list.
| layer8 wrote:
| Not for people like me who always set their browser
| language to en-us (or just "en") because they mostly peruse
| the internet in English.
| nicbou wrote:
| Then you'll have to press one or two extra keys on your
| keyboard.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Yep, as a techie I don't see the problem either, but the
| person who started this subthread apparently minds that
|
| > Usually [you get] 194 other countries in a loooooong
| list
|
| (cue this website having precisely that list)
| nicbou wrote:
| I use navigator.languages to guess the user's possible
| countries. It's not perfect, but the cost of guessing wrong is
| low. I've used the same technique to show currency conversion
| tooltips in the content.
| TheHappyOddish wrote:
| Even better are the ones where you pick your country and the
| 'state' dropdown is still US states and 'Other', and you're
| prompted for a 'zip code'. What does American mail have to do
| with a zip anyway?
| kelnos wrote:
| Not sure if your question is flippant/rhetorical, but in case
| you're genuinely curious: ZIP stands for Zone Improvement
| Plan, the initiative that set up the "postal codes" that we
| call ZIP codes.
|
| I don't quite recall, but I think ZIP may actually be a
| backronym; in US English, "zip" is a word that also means "to
| move quickly", and they wanted to evoke a feeling that postal
| mail gets delivered faster when you include the ZIP code,
| which makes sorting mail more efficient.
| lucb1e wrote:
| That's... exactly what this is as well? Are you getting a
| different UI that I'm not?
| mkreis wrote:
| If you have different browser language settings, then yes,
| you are getting a different UI.
| melx wrote:
| I'm from UK, and I got "United Kingdom, United States,
| Germany" as three first countries.
| lucb1e wrote:
| It still shows the "194 other countries" in a long list,
| which is what the person complained about. (I don't mind
| that btw, but the logic of the person who said that this UX
| is different escapes me)
| lippihom wrote:
| My German passport expired a few years ago and in Berlin the wait
| time to get a new one was months. Flew to Boston for work (on my
| American passport), and had the German embassy there do it... in
| 48 hours. Berlin is peak-level incompetent.
| wdb wrote:
| Wow that's quick! I am impressed you were able to get an
| appointment at the embassy. Embassy is worse than the local
| city council back home.
|
| My country they say new ID card or passport within four weeks
| but never happened.
| iknownothow wrote:
| I hope this starts a trend of digitizing many aspects of the
| German bureaucracy, official or otherwise.
|
| I've sitting on my hands for the last three months to fill out
| some paperwork. Additionally, I have to apply for this specific
| appointment via email a few months in advance and it takes weeks
| for them to reply and if there's any back and forth, that's a few
| more weeks.
|
| I love Germany, love the bureaucracy too, I just hate the lack of
| digitization.
| brnt wrote:
| The budget for the digitization ministry was just slashed down
| to 1%, so I wouldn't get my hopes up.
|
| It would make sense for EU member states to collaborate more
| closely on the systems, since they all need to solve the same
| problems why not share? The Netherlands does a pretty good job
| at digitisation (it has gone the other way: it's hard to get
| someone in meat space to look at you issue if the system didn't
| provision for your situation). Why reinvent the wheel?
| nicbou wrote:
| That's right. They slashed the budget from 300 million to 3
| million.
| olabyne wrote:
| In France we have a fair amount of bureaucracy too. But a least
| the government is trying to digitalize a bit now. Taxes are
| quite easy, healthcare is ok, some documents like car
| registration too. But we have a long way to go for all the
| local weird processes (from Region, Departementn and cities)
| konschubert wrote:
| It shows the absolute inaptitude of our Government if for all the
| hundreds of millions that they spend on the "digital
| transformation of the Government" every year, they cannot hire
| one guy who does exactly what Nicolas did here.
| lasagna_coder wrote:
| to be fair, many countries' governments have this same issue,
| and even when they do something the UX feels like something
| from 2002. The thing is, its complex, often the job pays way
| below market rate and government jobs often have rigid salary
| tiers, hiring might not be done like a normal tech co. as you
| might also have specific public servants to do it, and then you
| have culture, which might rule out certain people or cultivate
| attitudes towards work. Beyond that, in developed democracies
| like Germany, what gets funded long enough to be pushed to
| production can depend on election cycles and public opinion.
| Additionally, the big 4 have a big presence in developed
| countries and they often get these 100 million <currency>
| contracts to do stuff like that and... enough said.
| nicbou wrote:
| This is a major problem. It's hard to attract talent when you
| have low incomes and an inflexible work culture. The
| incentives just aren't there.
|
| Let's say Berlin wanted to hire me tomorrow to do the same
| exact work for them. That would mean return to office, fixed
| schedule, a return to rigid corporate culture, and a
| significant drop in income.
|
| A friend of mine works in government IT, and the stories are
| both hilarious and sad. Some people in the Greens are afraid
| of Wi-Fi waves...
| lasagna_coder wrote:
| Well yes, a certain number of the public service or
| political parties will believe things that are simply false
| (whether legitimately or as a means to serve their goals),
| in fact, many political parties in Germany and other
| developed countries are based entirely on false premises to
| the extent of being named after them. But this is actually
| the point of democracy, so as much as the observation is
| humorous it also highlights a certain level of naivety.
|
| Digging even a little into German history reveals why the
| whole digitalisation and bureaucracy situation is the way
| it is. In fact, it also shows a side that if one doesn't
| believe that our tech-centric disruption culture is a
| corruption of society and people, then one might actually
| be the one who is delusional. Remember, there's a whole
| class of people out there who depend heavily on things
| working the way they do - no so much for gain, but for the
| benefit that any 'digital' alternative may cripple them
| (e.g. many elderly, disabled, and poor members of society).
| To some, providing a secondary tool isn't simply an
| alternative, it's the first step towards a complete
| replacement of the thing they find more useful (a good
| example of this is 'cashless societies').
| tormeh wrote:
| Not to mention being in favor of homeopathy. The only
| people who annoy me more than the greens is all the other
| major parties. Should have moved to the Netherlands...
| konschubert wrote:
| yes, this isn't against Germany specifically.
| kebsup wrote:
| In Munich, the legal requirement is to register within two weeks,
| but the waiting time to schedule an appointment is more than two
| weeks. Luckily, no-one cares. Some of my Erasmus classmates did
| not register at all.
| prasoonds wrote:
| It took me over 3 months to register (which is shocking in
| itself) - perhaps things are not so dire in Munich
| lasagna_coder wrote:
| I think this is uniform across Germany, and I think the legal
| requirement might be either be registered or have an
| appointment to be registered, similar to other legally required
| appointments, which (from my understanding) causes issues
| regarding endless-reschedule loopholes.
| pratio wrote:
| Amazing! I've always admired your work, allaboutberlin is a
| fantastic resource.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-09-19 23:02 UTC)