"...notaries, historically the highest-paid freelancers in the country. On average, they earn €356,000 per year. Or, put another way: the equivalent of 37.4 years' salary for a childcare worker."
A German notary handling a €1 million residential purchase typically earns 3 to 6 times as much in fees as a Dutch notary handling an equivalent transaction and assuming the same legal responsibility.
Running a business in Germany is for a closed inner circle. The apparatus is not meant for broke college students turning their weekend project into a company.
I've run a tech business on three continents, and nothing comes close to the Kafkaesque labyrinth of the German world.
Everything is unbelievably complicated and over-engineered, and every layer is immune to change. Every rule was rational when it was added, and now everyone has a financial stake in continued complexity. The German notary is the highest-paid notary in the world, and the highest-earning professional in the country.
That said, I think a lot of the frustration comes from a mismatch of expectations. Germany wasn't designed for randos to start companies and thrust change on society. All the bureaucracy is a filter, and what it filters out is change itself.
You were never supposed to incorporate a company. You were supposed to get a job at Volkswagen.
I am in the process of moving my startup from Canada to Germany. I started in India, so I have experience running a bootstrapped business on three continents. I am not looking for funding, and in fact use the business profits to invest in other companies.
Dealing with German bureaucracy is the hardest thing I have done in my life, perhaps second only to bootstrapping my business. Bureaucracy isn't a side effect of poor planning; it's tool to control individual liberties and capital, without going full communist.
For the first time, I am considering selling my business. I want Europe to succeed, but I see no way how. Any little faith I have in EU actually resides in a handful of underdogs like Estonia and Poland.
Most of that €70B is going in the pockets of bureaucrats and consultants, assuming any startup sees a dime within 3 years.
This is the cycle of JavaScript frameworks. You create something deceivingly simple that tramples upon idiomatic usage but looks great for a todo app. Beginners realize the hard way that this doesn't scale because deep reactivity shouldn't be a default, they no longer know what a vanilla JS variable should behave like, and code is un-readable.
Let the bundler minify your JavaScript. Less characters !== simple.
Salaries for what? Marketing? Obscene bonuses? Downtown office buildings? It is a manufactured need.
I am simplifying things but if we had a public owned payments system that wasn't a profit centre the costs would be far less.
Even within the developed world the costs are very different between Europe and the US. Your fees are paying for someone's hefty bonus and lobbying expenses.
When you pay a merchant $100 with your card they get about $97. When this $100 has exchanged hands 50 times only $15 remains. The bank owns the other $85.
Cash is a hassle but it cuts out the middlemen. We need a unified payment system in western countries, but it's almost impossible given how much of a chokehold big banks have over our economy.
https://www.wiwo.de/erfolg/beruf/grosse-einkommensunterschie...
A German notary handling a €1 million residential purchase typically earns 3 to 6 times as much in fees as a Dutch notary handling an equivalent transaction and assuming the same legal responsibility.