Probably the old-school mentality of pay hierarchies: Managers must earn more than subordinates. Thus if the salary expectation of a high skilled engineer is higher than some of the management class, it's often viewed as obscene. Usually as an engineer you achieve certain salary levels only with additional management duties.
Not only that but them being stubborn and with a superiority complex. DACH companies rule EE with their capital and often manage to prototype and execute very much innovative features focused on convenience in the EE region (with local engineers etc). But this will never transform into something bigger because management wont allow non DACH people to assume executive roles + conservative market in their countries.
It's an interesting phenomena but to be honest you need a leader with a vision to change the course of history. Circa 2006-2012 everyone orbiting the DACH sphere of influence believed they need to speak german even in tech jobs and then due to USA's influence and huge market we realized we actually dont give a crap about DACH that much. Thus it spawned companies in EE,Baltics and everywhere else with a focus on mostly american market.
And then all of a sudden due to lack of workers and other factors even DACH began to change and basically accepted English as the defacto working language in tech.
Unfortunately it's a small change, too little too late as they say. Without proper transeuropean companies and unified market we will never be able to challenge competitors from Asia let alone the USA.
Also by default DACH companies are very limiting to foreigners to go higher. Sure they hire a lot of engineers but you will never see overachiever Indian CEO or Asian CEO or even board members.
As a french speaking Swiss I'm pretty biased, but I'd say it comes down to salary thriftiness to the detriment of innovation, practicality to the detriment of flexibility, and perfection to the detriment of velocity.
If you happen to want your supplier to be slow, extremely reliable, and you don't mind paying for the high profit margin they expect to be able to extract, you'll be a perfect customer of a DACH-mentality company. There are hundreds of niche categories where they dominate the market, including machine tools, forging, factory automation, etc.
But don't write off DACH: there are plenty of companies in DACH that run circles around their competitors by blending typically DACH traits with agility.
> But don't write off DACH: there are plenty of companies in DACH that run circles around their competitors by blending typically DACH traits with agility.
For future career possibilities worth investigating, would you care to name a few good examples/companies you are aware of?
French speakers are a serious mystery to me. They are much better stewards when it comes to tech and cooperation but they are so much stuck up with their need to "speak french" that it hinders any progress.
At least DACH made the progress of opening up. It would be ideal to combine DACH liberalism for language and french attitude towards tech and innovation.
Extreme frugality and risk aversion, cash (and revenue) is the only KPI to success, digitalization = just make it a PDF and don't change the process thus any process is still equally slow.
