Just saw a video and certain instruments/displays on trains (original ICE 3 for example) run with Windows 3.11, so thats probably why they are searching for one
Eventually AI’s gonna be so cheap, someone reading this thread could just be like “eh fuck let’s see if the first episode is good” and then just paste that comment into a website somewhere, wait ten seconds, and click the big play button next to “Season 1, Episode 1”
I know a guy fitted for the job. He's well versed in MS-DOS, Win 3.1, 3.11 etc. Hell, he's even fluent in German, but he's due a hip and knee replacement this month...
Since its foundation in 1994, Deutsche Bahn (DB AG) has been a public limited company and accordingly has a dual management and control structure. It is wholly owned by the federal government. The Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport (BMDV) is responsible for managing the shareholding.
The secret is to develop your software, then fire all the developers. Then it never changes again!
Come to think of it keeping developers on staff, and familiar with the codebase enough to debug it efficiently, almost guarantees they’re gonna be adding new features. “Well we’ve got this talent sitting around …” and then it’s new features and ….
I mean I guess this is evidence they’ve managed to isolate themselves from dependencies they don’t control. It’s the external dependencies updating and losing support that causes at least the minimum of codebase maintenance.
The fact they’ve stayed on this older platform indicates they’ve managed to avoid that constant upgrading. Because if any part of the system has to upgrade, it tends to pull the rest of the system with it.
This gem requires this version of ruby requires this operating system etc.
Or maybe they’ve isolated the parts really well and this is just some window3.11 container that’s one of a hundred services.
I’d love to go back to tech without the constant insomnia and panic attacks.
lmao, 60k eur tops.
wages in Germany suck ass, earning at least something is possible if you are running independent consulting or climbing corporate ladder, having some unique expertise or going extra mile as an employee is pretty much pointless.
How much of that 60k is left after taxes? Is it enough to live on, or buy a home, or buy a home and support a family, or none of the above?
EDIT: Thanks for the responses everyone, very informative and interesting. That's the kind of perspective that may not often be shared and helps understand costs of living.
For the Deutchlanders wondering about the USA's taxes and my question.... 60k would be enough to live on in most of the USA but might not be enough to buy a home or raise a family. But it's highly dependent on your area's cost of living, and the USA is massive with many different areas and tiers of costs of living.
My example for tax costs: I make more than 60k and I only had to pay about 20% of it to taxes and retirement for 2023, in the USA. In my low cost of living area, 60k would be enough to buy a house and support a family but it would have to be on a very frugal budget. I bought my house when I was making about 45k but my spouse also had an income of almost that much.
Depends extremely on where you live. In Bremen you will be fine, in Schwerin you will be comparably wealthy, in Munich you might have to start collecting bottles on the street for some extra money.
60k is about 30-35k after taxes and mandatory insurances, depending on your tax class (Single, Main earner in a marriage, ...). Your questions: Yes if you're not in a particular expensive town., No, unless you've got huge savings or an inheritance. Depends on what you want for your family - you might get by well if you're living in a LCOL area, otherwise... Not so much.
Taxes 11.262,97 € (includes 929,97 € church-tax that you can get rid off by leaving your church)
Pension insurance 5.580,00 €
Unemployment insurance 780,00 €
Health insurance 4.847,85 €
Long-term care insurance 1.249,37 €
Those are all the compulsory insurances.
Having a partner in marriage who earns less than you and / or children will increase your net.
For the average German in your average City that's somewhere between just short of wealthy and wealthy. There are poorly paid IT specialists who earn gross what you would take home net. It's definitely enough that you can live quite good if your significant other works too and more than enough to raise a family. The median household income in Germany is 42k gross.
Also remember this is only the employee side of what you cost your employer, because they'll have to double up your insurances, so you would cost them 75k a year.
35 to 40k (if your spouse is choosing tax class with a higher rate) after taxes or around so, depends on many factors - German tax code is complicated.
Is it enough to live on
Generally - barely above "paycheck to paycheck" level, but highly depends on location. In Munich you'll be fucked with this type of salary.
or buy a home
lmao no. Houses are mainly for older and retired people or rich, vast majority of active workforce are apartment renters, more fortunate ones were able to save/get help from relatives for mortgage. Total home ownership rate in Germany is 46.7%, lowest of all OECD countries - and that's including older people who got their homes during better economic times. Neat trick about Germany is that you have to have both stable job at big company and a lot of cash on your hands to cop a mortgage, since 20% downpayment + taxes/fees and other bullshit that run at around 10% of the total price make good barrier.
buy a home and support a family
Not really, adults in the household have to work, 60k is not 'breadwinner' type of salary at all. In general, tech workers aren't special in Germany, if not for US companies branches they'd be earning the same as everyone else and in many industries (like transportation), where pressure from international market is not present that much, they still do.
It was good while it lasted, but Germany is heading into some pretty interesting times in general, younger population is absolutely fucked.
The fact they're still running on dos is a clue that either they can't figure out how to upgrade or they don't want to upgrade or they simply won't allocate the budget to upgrade.
It generally boils down to money. Shops like that are toxic. They somehow don't have the budget to keep their business afloat, means you're not getting a raise.
If you take this job, you're obsolete. Getting the next job will be tough. You're interview at the next potential role what did you do at your current role? I ran dos on 30 year old machines. Interviewer: I'm sorry, but we need someone with experience in Windows ME.
If you take this job, you’re obsolete. Getting the next job will be tough.
There is a meme that COBOL programmers still make bank to this day because no one learns COBOL and old enterprise systems run on COBOL. How much of this is true?
It's going to be a mess of things written in 6 different languages, magic numbers all over the place. Unit tests? Predates all that. Even if you tried, the first you'll know about an error is when you turn the news on and there's two trains upside down and on fire.
It is definitely the exact opposite of this. Even though I understand why you would think this.
The thing with systems like these is they are mission critical, which is usually defined as failure = loss of life or significant monetary loss (like, tens of millions of dollars).
Mission critical software is not unit tested at all. It is proven. What you do is you take the code line by line, and you prove what each line does, how it does it, and you document each possible outcome.
Mission critical software is ridiculously expensive to develop for this exact reason. And upgrading to deploy on different systems means you'll be running things in a new environment, which introduces a ton of unknown factors. What happens, on a line by line basis, when you run this code on a faster processor? Does this chip process the commands in a slightly different order because they use a slightly different algorithm? You don't know until you take the new hardware, the new software, and the code, then go through the lengthy process of proving it again, until you can document that you've proven that this will not result in any unusual train behavior.
BMC is doubtful, other sources indicate that the hardware is from 1996, so it's not just old software. So I'll guess a KVMoIP device is bolted on (probably a relay on the power input, VGA, USB for keyboard and 'floppy' (Win3.11 was well before USB, but the hardware from 96 may have USB and the BIOS would likely make it viable for a DOS to use it).
