Wouldn't wanna live there permanently. Wouldn't want to have been born Japanese. But my god the products and services are head and shoulders above my baseline expectations; it's simply nicer.

The lack of communication was probably the worst of all. Announcements saying to take alternative means of transport. The DB Navigator app insists that everything is still running and it was impossible to get clear info as to whether RE trains were also affected.

Eventually we took a Miles car home and because of this and past unreliability I'm, sadly, thinking about getting a car instead.

That's not to say that the help-vampires the parent mentions don't exist. I think we culturally are afraid of pushing back against them: telling them to RTFM and then come back.

> lots of amazing engineers have an awful taste in everything that is not their immediate field of knowledge or interest

which one is it?

I'd dread managing technical people in a field I have no experience or knowledge; in my experience, especially in tech, such managers are often held hostage by engineers who stubbornly don't want to do things, tell fibs about feasibility, ... The other side of that is that such managers often make progress making said engineers promises that often turn out to be carrots on sticks or outright lies.

If you can't go with in the trenches, what good are you and how do you expect to build a trusting relationship?

So.. a smart phone?