Both can be true, and what you described is, in my opinion, one of the primary causes of insane bureaucracy in Germany. This inflexible mindset is what causes the relentless enforcement of bureaucracy and procedures in Germany, there is very little leeway here in terms of bending the rules, making exceptions, turning a blind eye. This cultural inflexibility, traditionalism and risk-aversion all ties together into a paperwork and red-tape nigthmare.
This couldn't be more incorrect. I document German bureaucracy for a living. The hardest part of my job is that every state, city, office and case worker applies the rules differently, making it really hard to predict a specific outcome. In most cases it plays in people's favour, unless the case worker is particularly grumpy and you happen to hit one of their pet peeves. I struggle to document the variance for Berlin alone.
The biggest issue with German bureaucracy is that it's largely paper-based and has little to no automation. In many cases, digitalisation when it happens just means sending documents digitally instead of delivering them during an in-person appointment. This leads to very long processing times that are constrained by available labour.
I’m familiar with your site and appreciate it a lot, and I don’t dispute anything you said, but that does not contradict anything in my comment. Those people you mention who apply the rules differently everywhere are inflexible and unwilling to give leeway or look further then their own way. This is a cultural issue in my opinion and can explain most of excessive bureaucracy here. You’re also talking specifically about the ausländerbehörde, which is one manifestation of bureaucracy here, there are many other forms.
My experience was a bit different. For example, the immigration office accepts almost all applications in the end (over 95% according to their stats). They make all sorts of exceptions in the applicants' favour. The Bürgeramt, the Ordnungsamt and the Arbeitsagentur are the same. They huff and puff and make an exception "just this time", every time. The inflexibility is an act, unless you're being difficult (from their point of view). Then you get the least charitable interpretation of their directives.
Against all expectations, German bureaucracy is very "vibes-based", specifically because it's full of humans. It's predictably unpredictable. You rarely get the downside of digitalisation where "computer says no", because a human is deciding your fate and can be convinced to give you leeway.
The bigger issue at least for me is speed. The uncertainty of human decisions is magnified by the weeks-long delays. A missing document is a big issue when bureaucracy has a 4-8 week ping. That is of course if the case worker doesn't shrug and give you what you want anyway.
I think that German bureaucrats choose the path of least resistance. Most of the time it means giving you what you ask for.
When you get the short end of the stick, a letter from your lawyer can make it abundantly clear that giving you what you want (and faster) is the path of least resistance.
This inflexible mindset is what causes the relentless enforcement of bureaucracy and procedures in Germany, there is very little leeway here in terms of bending the rules, making exceptions
This. I have worked in a Germany university and in all the supporting administration, nobody wants to make choices or take responsibility. E.g. I had some blatant cases of plagiarism and when going to the examination office (where it should be reported), they would do nothing. And when I asked whether there shouldn't be any repercussions, their answer was "there ought to be repercussions", the subtext being: but I'm not going to be the one enforcing them, because if I do and the student files a complaint, I'm going to have to defend my choice.
Or sometimes we had to order GPU servers for the department. We requested quotes from multiple companies (since we knew what we need) and would then send them to the financial administration with our preference (good price + service options). Rather than saying: LGTM, seems you did your work, they would spend four (!) weeks asking new quotes and processing them. And then they would happily come and say, "we found a cheaper option" and the cheaper option would be saving 100 Euro on a machine that cost something like 25,000 and was most likely just the natural reduction in prices in four weeks. At any rate, it is this weird mix of needing to assert themselves, following whatever rules to the letter, and not wanting to make 'bold' choices etc. Meanwhile a whole research group is under compute capacity for a month and the work of the financial department certainly cost more than 100 Euro in hourly wages.
Also, every process uses paper. Heck, once I got my tax number, to my surprise the person from the administration pulled my personnel file out of a filing cabinet!
I wish that this was just the university, but from friends that went into industry, I hear that a lot of German corporations are pretty much the same.
I've seen it described as "Germans are not efficient, they're methodical". There is a lot of truth to it, but Germans are also making all sorts of exceptions either for convenience or expediency, making the method unpredictable.
I challenge this:
How do you measure processing time?
From first customer interaction? Or from all input data are present?
I assume in most situations they are not present upfront.
Therefore it’s a tedious back and forth. Sure, that compounds with the roundtrip time.
Digitisation is a trap because it doesn’t change the paradigm to full-kit upfront necessarily. Digitisation can be a nice entry-point to this, but unfortunately digitising data does not necessarily introduce the full-kit.
The system needs to be designed in a different way:
“We guarantee processing within x hours (weekdays) from the point you’ve provided us a full-kit.”
This, in turn, requires thinking backwards from the result through all steps, resulting in a definition of what a full-kit entails. Of course this requires a different (system) thinking which is contradicted by the rigid hierarchy (and no, doing away with the hierarchy isn’t a solution either).
Work force would not be busy 80% of their time = capacity to go back and forth to figure what’s missing and switch around cases. When starting with full-kit, 80% of their wasted time becomes processing time. In turn, their throughput was 20%, it goes up to 100%, or x5.
