My experience with German colleagues is not efficiency; but they do have a remarkable ability (in my field) to read a 400 page regulator rulebook and overlay it on a 200 page design document and pinpoint the rulebook edge cases not covered by the design...

> I have yet to find the mythical efficiency everyone was talking about.

Comes down to a misrepresentation of history. Germans were never known to be efficient, they were known to be precise with everything, including bureaucracy. This happens to be handy with machinery, but not much else.

The efficiency is a thing of the past, an mainly when dealing with manufacturing, which we were really good at.

The world got faster, but german industries and politics never got the memo.

Another recent example : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/06/10/germanys-h...

They laid 600+km of cables wrong ultimately delaying the project by 6 years.

There is no efficiency to be found.

It's a "cover your ass" mentality that resists any changes.

It's a mistake to think Germany is efficient, I don't know where they got that stereotype.

Germans are thorough, not efficient.

It’s from >50y ago, then became a meme detached from reality. And for some reasons people are still repeating it even if they know literally nothing about the country

Germans a rule based and were really precise which came in handy like 50 years ago. The modern German is not flexible enough for the modern job market. German companies are also not flexible enough to compete. Germany goes downhill for a reason.