PS: An average net salary in that city was about $1700/month at the time.

As above comment mentions, N-years people sometimes have circumstances that make language learning difficult. My initial comment proposes to be polite (in my own definition, admittedly) and make effort to include them in conversations (in work environments - you do you in social env), especially when all parties know that all parties can speak perfect English.

Do expats in Germany walk around with "I've been in Germany X months" clock on their foreheads? :) Of course you learn eventually... some faster than others. And some not fast enough before "maybe I should just work in Switzerland" kicks in.

Germany is in deep demographic and economic crisis, mostly due to talent shortage. If it has any ambition to maintain being #3 economy (by GDP), while simultaneously paying cushy pensions to a growing pool of retirees, it must either very quickly build talent (but it has a very limited pool due to demographic), or accept high levels of immigration. The US is in better position because, let's face it, English is the widest spoken language professionally. If Germany's pitch is just "please come here to work for less money, speak German day #1, and enjoy batshit crazy bureaucracy with years to process residency", it's just not going to work. Something has to give.

> understand as much as you can, and say what little bits you can, in German, not in English. Then study, study, study as much as you can in your time alone

That's the whole point to add to "why people leave Germany". It's a difficult language and not everyone have time to "study, study, study". It leads to isolation, expat bubble, and leaving.

At work we speak English, everybody speak English all the time, all docs are in English, all meetings are in English. There's an occasional German email every now and then but people will switch.

When we go to a "team building" retreat, all the same teammates that happily chatted with us expats in English just switch to German 100%, full stop. You can come and stand at the edge of a group chatting in German and they will look at you and continue, knowing you stand there not understanding, without batting an eye.

Now I work in Germany. Vacation and sick leaves here are... very generous. In fact I'm writing this while on vacation. In my company it's often hard to set up a meeting with 4+ people because for months in advance at least 1-2 are on vacation.

I don't want to express any opinion on this.

One interesting thing is how people here say "work smarter, not harder". I don't know how they imagine China, but I promise you people work smart AND hard there.

The results are obvious.

- Arc discrete (!) gaming (!!) GPUs are canceled,

- consumer gaming (!) SoC Serpent Lake w/RTX in 2028,

- Arc is continued in mobile, professional, iGPU, and DC GPUs,

- Arc team is just fine, Intel cut some jobs but not "the whole team".

Can you point to a source of these wild claims?

- Happy Vodafone customer having 40 Mbps on a good day.

I switched to a large company from a series of startups (including my own), it is definitely a big change, and "efficiency" is not the thing anymore.

Now I can spend days fighting with some gnarly IT security problem to load an internal Python package cross-org with a Managed Identity token issued to Build Pipeline that is scoped to a Service Principal with a wrong checkbox, or something equally cryptic and useless. Nothing of it would be even remotely possible in a startup. Is it "performative"?.. I think not. Is it efficient or necessary? Probably not, but who knows. Chesterton's Fence and all that.

Example 1. Someone reached out to me on LinkedIn "from HN", when I replied to their initial message they just said "You look like an AI trawler" and disconnected.

Example 2. I read a popular non-English tech blog aggregator which also encourages comments and discussion. Since ~1.5 years ago every other comment is "thank you author, but if I wanted to read AI I would as AI" or some variation thereof.

Would it be some kind of "reverse psychosis"?