I've heard somebody describe it as "they are using methods that have been known not to work for 20 years".
But they know that. That was the idea behind Cariad. Having a new company, unburdened by what other parts of the company are doing, which is doing just software. Giving them the freedom to do things a different way has always been the intention.
What you are describing is not an automotive problem, it is a Europe wide problem. Software Engineers in Europe, in general, are pretty bad, often cling to outdated methodologies and tend to create overly complex and overly useless systems. There are hundreds of examples for this, throughout European industries and governments. "German engineering" has not translated into software at all.
Consider also the salaries of European Software Engineers, even in the most wealthy countries, like France and Germany, it averages around 50k to 60k, it is not the highly lucrative career it is (was?) in the US.
Really? Every large Software project I have seen from the inside was as total architectural mess.
>Software salaries are actually pretty good for Europe now, as far as I know, especially... in automotive.
Not compared to the US. In the US a software engineer in a good position makes exceptional money, especially compared to other engineers. In Germany that is not the case, especially in automotive, where salaries are often union negotiated and Engineers are all on identical pay scales.
>The inital Cariad CEO was just some nondescript car industry guy - they may have tried to have a different culture, but why put a guy in charge who represents the old culture? The current Cariad CEO is a mechanical engineer by education and previously worked in production and logistics. It's baffling. They can't be that stupid (right?), so I think it's mechanical engineering resisting a loss of power and importance.
I just think that there really isn't anybody else. Is there any person somewhere in the German industry who has the ability for leadership and great software expertise? The biggest Software company in Germany is SAP and surely, hiring some SAP manager would have been an even worse decision.
Regarding the Cariad CEO, they could have hired someone from the US software industry or from a smaller company with a reputation for quality - these do exist, DeepL or Ableton for example (though leading such a small place must be quite different from a large place).
> "German engineering" has not translated into software at all.
Anecdata: in my 10+ years experience, the worst UX, UI, code and SWEs I've seen, are all German. I'm not saying there's absolutely no good ones here and there, but in general it seems the love for a very complex written/spoken language (riddled with rules and exception) and bureaucracy has translated 100% into software. The interfaces, the code and coding style most of the times give me a 1980s vibe if I'm lucky, or just scare me off altogether in most cases. The code tends to be more complex, abstract, hard to read and comprehend, for no good reason.
The US Software industry has succeeded because it is very open to rapid changes, which the nature of software allows, given the right environment.
>The code tends to be more complex, abstract, hard to read and comprehend, for no good reason.
That is exactly the incompetence I am talking about. This gets extremely bad if governments are developing software solutions, where they outsource to a variety of contractors, who all are somewhat incompetent, but together manage to create a real mess. A mess so bad that every user feels the jank.
