[stnikolauswagne]

The irony is that a lot of the consulting shops that specialize in assisting the mittelstand are utterly horrendous money pits. In my capacity as CTO for a german mittelstand company I have had to fire over 80% of the consulting shops i worked with for either blatant incompetence (developing a plugin that fits none of the design document, deploying it straight to production and in the process blowing up the entire API) or insane overcharging (24 hours of billed work for an adjustment that took me less than an hour of time to reimplement when the next update inevitably broke their adjustment). Everyone else I have talked to in the field has had similar experiences, with truly positive experiences being very rare, yet all the owners I talk to refuse to hire qualified in-house staff because the prospect of paying 60k+ for a SWE is unthinkable.

[zasdffaa]

Sounds like a halfway house of getting good working relations with contractors (as individuals not companies) might be a way out of this. I mean a working relationship, not just one based entirely on pay.

(disclaimer, worked as a contractor)

[pjmlp]

I have been doing consulting in Germany since 2007, after the Nokia sites in Germany went bust.

Usually it boils down to escalations where management gets some goodies from the offshore agency and then everything is good again, from management point of view, naturally.

[ChuckNorris89]

>the prospect of paying 60k+ for a SWE is unthinkable

Everything wrong with EU/German tech industry and why it will never catch up to the US, in a nutshell basically.