It is, I guess it's depending what you wish to achieve. I'm a independent software consultant based in Germany (no employees etc, also not selling any SaaS or anything) and I've got a liability insurance to cover any mess ups.
Well, parents could also set some ground rules for iPad usage and enforce them! I don't think another screen is a good solution to get someone off a screen. You can just play a normal board game with the kids.
We are talking about a splinter party (BSW) from the main left party (Die Linke) which is a kind of anti-woke- and anti-immigration-party that spouts basically the normal Kremlin propaganda lines about Ukraine. There is of course anti-US sentiment there since is secondary to their main issue, peace at any cost so that Germany can get cheaper energy again.
Note that I'm not a German national but I live in Germany (former DDR / East) since 9 years.
This really took me back. Back then before Git was a big thing (2010/2011-ish) I had the misfortune to work at a very large user of IBM Rational ClearCase and it was so awful. However it was so bad and so expensive that I managed to get tasked to "fix it". As part as figuring out how to do this I travelled to GitTogether 2011 from Sweden. Lots of Git folks from those days where there, at least I remember Junio, Peff and Shawn Pearce being there. I was so energised from it all I went back and formed a small team that migrated a colossal code base (oh the horror stories I have) over to Git over the next 2 years. The most rewarding thing I did early in my career.
So thank to all of you that made this possible by creating Git, Gerrit and all the life saving tools this industry was missing! The passing of Shawn Pearce was really sad, but he won't be forgotten!
I work remotely from Germany but I have only worked for US based companies for this reason. There a handful of German companies being remote though, Giant Swarm for example.
I got different answers from the people I talked to, the lawyer, accountant and insurance broker all told me different things, i.e. if I was to start a GmbH, a Gewerbe or be Selbständig/Freiberufler. In the end I went the Selbständig-route and it has been good so far.
Also since I have been 100% working for US based companies remotely I needed to figure out tax implications and there most of the time I had to research things own and explain to my accountant due to the the accountant not knowing English. I guess I could find a better accountant but now after a year the accountant knows how things work and I'm too lazy to switch now.
Other than that getting the insurances in place and bank accounts took some time, but not too bad in the end. But a guide would have helped. :)
I think I remember my previous employment contract here in Germany stating that talking about salary was a fireable offense. Can't remember anything similar in Sweden. Just some datapoints.
I'm skeptical that this will turn into a conviction. The deep pockets of the auto industry takes them a long way into the different state and federal governments in Germany.
I don't find Swedes so reluctant to speak about salaries anymore, I think it has changed the last 10 years or so. Maybe this is just my reflections as a Swede though. I mean, your income tax return is public information so if someone wants to get a good idea on what other people maybe, it is really not that hard to look it up if you really want.
I currently live and work in Germany and I know that here it is much more tight lipped, it might even be a fireable offense for you to talk about your salary, which might explain why people don't really talk about it.
True, it causes problems with recruitment since it is very hard to get people to drop up to a week of holiday to join us. I would love to have 28 or 30 days..
Pretty sure I have to pay for health insurance with my actual salary in Germany, the employer does however cover half the cost of it. It does not come included (e.g. 100% payed by the employer) like with the national insurance system in Sweden. Also, I might be mistaken but only 20 vacation days are required by law and I have 24 days currently.
I do agree with the first grade medical card and the general cheapness of the country.
Sure, that should be enough for home user. But even in my part of the woods (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern) which is quite rural with smaller villages lacking even these type of connections. There was a story in the local newspaper of a stonemasonry in a smaller village which was having problems perform work for clients in Berlin and Hamburg since the upload speed to the companies machines was to slow. So it's not only "innovate" companies suffering from the lack of infrastructure.
As recent transplant to Germany from Sweden (moved here about 2 years ago) I observe these things daily. Cable connection being 'state-of-art' for Internet access and bad phone reception more or less everywhere. Not being able to count on good speed LTE walking around in the second biggest city in the country, is weird.
I would say large parts of this is cultural. Germans are not so quick to hop onto new things and are suspicious what problems new technology brings, especially with regards to privacy and 'Datenschutz' / data protection. Swedes on the other hand love new things and with a national number given out by birth privacy is not that big of a deal.
German companies also have a large accessible market of German speakers (~100 million) so the need to go global is not as acute as for companies from smaller economies.
This. I work at a big Erlang shop and the "dependency handling" is either git submodules or rebar which is glorified submodules. I think this is due to packaging not being sexy enough to work on, much more fun to think about the internals of the Erlang VM.