A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work

I was thinking that it seems strange to fire a 10x dev that has regular one-on-one meetings with a VP. OP could have contacted said VP and outlined that he was worth keeping, until I got to this line :

>the law enforces a social scoring system to determine who is affected, prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable employees

This is the reason OP got laid off, if all he says about his high performance is true. The good old positive discrimination making unintended victims. Germany just lost a 10x dev's productivity for this.

While I agree with the spirit of the law and don't have the details of this case, it is quite the sad situation for everyone involved.

Let us face it, the European welfare model is a blind alley. No one in the world is going to copy this from us again, now that it is clear that it makes us

a) uncompetitive - taxes too high, too much protection for people who might not merit it;

b) less likely to start new businesses - in theory, you can have a great welfare system and a great atmosphere for enterpreneurship, but in practice, the former will usually stifle the latter, as the "eat the rich" types will dominate the discourse;

c) extremely vulnerable to the aging problem. Too many pensioners, not enough kids, not enough highly qualified migrants who have zero reason to subject themselves to lower compensation, higher taxation and, on the top of all, interaction with bureacracy that insists on the local language. OTOH hardly literate people from Afghanistan or Niger don't mind any of that; the German / Dutch / Swedish welfare system will take care of them even if they do nothing and/or immerse themselves in the black market.

IDK how to get out of this pickle, the local population is addicted to high welfare spending and other onerous protections like to crack and won't vote against it, even though it is becoming clear that as we fall more and more behind the US, we won't be able to afford a system like that.

Robust welfare states can be only carried by robust economies and a lot of young workers. Those conditions existed in the 1960s or 1970s, and our current systems are downstream from that, but the foundation is eroding with every passing year.

The final collapse will be pretty ugly, something like Argentina, but full of 70 y.o. paupers. Weaker spots in the EU already have a huge problem providing healthcare to the elderly, or even anyone. On paper, it is an universal right, but in reality, there simply aren't enough doctors to carry this obligation out.

The Czech Republic is somewhere in the middle, nowhere near as bad as rural Bulgaria, but try finding a dentist who accepts insurance patients outside the major cities like Brno and Prague. That will be an exercise in the impossible.

Yeah the system doesn't work. Nothing has convinced me more of that fact than living in Germany has. If your system only works for a single generation in which you have an unusually large working population and relatively few children and relatively few old people, then your system doesn't work. The German system never worked, it was always just running on borrowed time.

The system that Bismarck established in the 19th century "only works for a single generation" - sure.

Back when the life expectancy at birth was forty you mean? And the system has expanded greatly since then. Handouts for almost everyone except normal workers who pay the highest taxes on labour in the world after Belgium. And yes the system has stopped working now the population has stopped growing. Germany as an antiquated boomerocracy is unrivalled as far as I am aware.

Life expectancy at birth is irrelevant, people who die in infancy don't consume many resources at all. What matters is the percentage of the population that's of working age, and here Germany is fairly typical for a developed country.