My experience with German colleagues is not efficiency; but they do have a remarkable ability (in my field) to read a 400 page regulator rulebook and overlay it on a 200 page design document and pinpoint the rulebook edge cases not covered by the design...

> I have yet to find the mythical efficiency everyone was talking about.

Comes down to a misrepresentation of history. Germans were never known to be efficient, they were known to be precise with everything, including bureaucracy. This happens to be handy with machinery, but not much else.

The efficiency is a thing of the past, an mainly when dealing with manufacturing, which we were really good at.

The world got faster, but german industries and politics never got the memo.

Another recent example : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/06/10/germanys-h...

They laid 600+km of cables wrong ultimately delaying the project by 6 years.

There is no efficiency to be found.

It's a "cover your ass" mentality that resists any changes.

It's a mistake to think Germany is efficient, I don't know where they got that stereotype.

Germans are thorough, not efficient.

It’s from >50y ago, then became a meme detached from reality. And for some reasons people are still repeating it even if they know literally nothing about the country

Germans a rule based and were really precise which came in handy like 50 years ago. The modern German is not flexible enough for the modern job market. German companies are also not flexible enough to compete. Germany goes downhill for a reason.

> The optimal solution is just to leave Germany

Just go to one of them Baltic states. They actually have a functioning electronic ids and other necessary infrastructure.

There’s no reason to live in Germany if you’re working with international clients.

Can't you just incorporate a Wyoming LLC (zero corporate tax + federal tax because you're non-resident in the US) then just open a Wise account?

Wyoming LLC gives passthrough taxation, and because you're in Germany, you'll be subject to German corporate and personal taxes alone, I presume?

Edit: changed from just personal tax to personal+corporate

In Romania it's so bad that there are companies who will handle everything for you, even if technically the chamber of commerce has a digital interface as well. Everything is handled online and you get digitally signed papers in a reasonable amount of time.

This is probably the solution, an EU-wide company that has local offshoots and can handle the bureaucracy for a fee.

As far as I know, incorporating a BV in the Netherlands can be done in 1-2 weeks, with a lot of less pain. Many services are integrated and available online.

Estonia makes it very easy.

But you can't. It's not like you can bribe the bureaucrat working on your form, and there is no regular fast pass.

Yes , but cfc rules are mostly targeted against passive income and exclude active companies. They wouldn't matter in that case anyway as he would shift the tax residency to Germany by managing & controlling the company from Germany.