As an EU citizen, I can't tell you if it's true for the immigration office.
But for anything else? Kind of? If you want to move, you have to make an appointment in person to tell them. But it is also retroactive, so you can move and then make an appointment in 5 months and it's fine. The paper that says where you live is very important but it's also easy to get, you just have to show up. Not any time but the times for that are plentiful enough that it works out.
What makes my blood boil is the paperwork for when your kid is born. It feels like they should just be able to retrieve everything from their database but you have to submit a load of documents anyway and it has to be original.
Also, don't try to get married in Germany. Just go to Denmark, much easier, despite the delays if you get something wrong. You can do the whole thing in English and you don't have to translate anything for Germans after, if I recall correctly.
If you don't have to deal with the immigration office, it's fine. If you do, then good luck. I heard it's a pain. For example, in Bremen, it takes at least 2 years to process a citizenship application. It should take a year at most. So I guess if you ever wanted to sue someone and win a slam dunk case, you could do that in Bremen. In Berlin, the citizenship application takes only a few months.
Just for reference IKEA tend NOT to include wall fasteners (or anything alike, e.g. nylon inserts) that alone is a way more involved process (incl. leveling that I mentioned in a top post) than connecting a mdf-board plate (parts) with dowel pins (many parts) and metal screw(s) (even more parts).
Lol. Honestly, I love Munich, but I totally understand why certain movements galvanized there :p its easy to be on a high horse on a rich land - if something is not right, must be someone else's fault.
>It is not so much that, but rather that if you hire average people with average skills or people that require training you go out of business because the shop next door won't.
If only workers would form some kind of a community, which would take monthly contributions and that would then be used to upskill. It would unite most, if not all people in the same industry.
Are there countries where trade unions are still active in training? Most places I see they are entirely focused on wage bargaining, and are happy to gut training for the young if they can maintain the generous pensions of the old.
Trade unions in the US do educate and train apprentices, I’m most familiar with the IBEW (electricians).
Local IBEW halls have apprentice programs (JATC is an common name for this program) where the apprentices go to class at the union hall one day a week for 20 weeks a year and spend the rest of the time working in the field.
I am pretty sure that sheet metal workers, pipefitters, and plumbers unions offer similar programs.
> - Razor-thin margins so shops can't afford to pay well
> - Having a shop in China machine the parts for you can be quite acceptable, especially in higher volumes
Yes, in some circumstances, your idea can work. To a degree. But there are plenty of trades and whole industries where domestic employment has fallen by 100X or more, because global capitalism found plenty of cheap workers in distant countries. Where 10X (or more) lower pay didn't seem so bad, compared to their local alternatives.
My point is that the expertise drain is going to hit those other countries too, within our work-lives given the demographics of China, Korea and Japan. The same thing is happening over there to even worse degrees, youth unemployment is already massive problem in east asia and when all those trained workspeople and engineers leave the work force in ~30 years.
Sure then that expertise could migrate to other countries, possibly some in Africa. But the demographics slow down is probably already going to afflict those countries before the expertise leaves east asia in the first place.
I truly believe that within 40 years we are going to have a massive infrastructure maintenance problem, where the world will run dry of trained professionals to maintain everything that is already built. And, like I mentioned above, the wealth inequality will reduce because the owners of capital will need to pay premium rates for qualified workforce (think how cobol is today).
I feel like this advice is not very useful because when you call yourself a software engineer or programmer, you are doing it in order to sell a service.
Your customers are companies looking for someone to slot into a box called "software engineer" and so you sell yourself as such. Nothing wrong with that.
We should also note who Patrick was at the time. He was an SEO consultant and in general a business development expert. It just also happened that he was able to code. And he was very very early to the field. An SEO expert was barely a thing.
So if your only skill is software development, then of course you would call yourself that. And if your main skill is SEO or some other marketing channel, then you call yourself that.
I think the real takeaway from the advice "don't call yourself a programmer" is to search the market for higher paid opportunities, where you can still leverage coding. And you can call yourself a programmer while doing so.
People can choose to use online services to game or other various ones for compute. The demand is surely more elastic than food and fuel after a natural disaster. The consumer can also forego any purchases.
But for anything else? Kind of? If you want to move, you have to make an appointment in person to tell them. But it is also retroactive, so you can move and then make an appointment in 5 months and it's fine. The paper that says where you live is very important but it's also easy to get, you just have to show up. Not any time but the times for that are plentiful enough that it works out.
What makes my blood boil is the paperwork for when your kid is born. It feels like they should just be able to retrieve everything from their database but you have to submit a load of documents anyway and it has to be original.
Also, don't try to get married in Germany. Just go to Denmark, much easier, despite the delays if you get something wrong. You can do the whole thing in English and you don't have to translate anything for Germans after, if I recall correctly.
If you don't have to deal with the immigration office, it's fine. If you do, then good luck. I heard it's a pain. For example, in Bremen, it takes at least 2 years to process a citizenship application. It should take a year at most. So I guess if you ever wanted to sue someone and win a slam dunk case, you could do that in Bremen. In Berlin, the citizenship application takes only a few months.
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