I'm living in Stuttgart as an expat, so reading this brought me the same reaction. "ja, nacht Berlin!" "Yay, Stuttgart!" and all that.
But I'm disappointed there isn't more of a tech scene here. Stuttgart does have a lot of great schools, but this is an engineering town, not an IT city. Industry here revolves around Damiler and Porsche. The students are all in mechanical engineering, it seems. I'm thrilled to read something about this area, but I have to say, I'm awfully puzzled at the same time.
There is IBM and T-Systems nearby (Böblingen/Leinfelden), but that's mostly 'business' IT catering to Daimler/Porsche/Bosch rather than people doing anything exciting :-/
I've found the same here in Hannover. Most bigger companies are either automotive related because of Wolfsburg or related to insurance companies. So most automotive IT jobs require some kind of embedded programming experience. There are a few small web startups but not much for regular "application" developers IMHO.
So very true, I live here as well and noticed the same things. Even the local hackerspace (which is Germany's 2nd biggest) is very hardware oriented, it seems. Mechanical engineering is just very strong here.
I'd be very interested in more interesting things to work on, but as it is, its mostly big business IT with lots of Java and XML.
maybe having different strengths than other "startup capitals" is something good, the only thing is that not many of those people with that knowledge take the decision to create a startup of their own.
look at the latest trend of startups that have hardware as part of their product and the internet of things movement, that will require different skills and there's a lot of that in stuttgart :)
I've been working in a small IT company in Stuttgart for the last five years and I have exactly the same problem. I'm looking forward to the days when we will start to see some exciting IT start-ups near Stuttgart - if they are ever to come =)
I went one day to the stuttgart hackspace (http://shackspace.de/) and they gave me a nice introduction and tour, it's really big, they do really cool stuff.
Its definitely big and active, not dead at all. The people are very open and most quite friendly, I can recommend it. Its just more on the hardware side of things, or at least thats the impression I got.
That has been my reaction living here as well. Being a software engineer is actually a discussion topic when meeting new people, compared to the normal "Oh? ok."
With the volume of engineers in this part of Germany I would have imagined the IT/Software scene would have been even somewhat existent.
Have to disagree here. Every time I found the time to bootstrap an event (like techtalks, user groups) it worked. The demand is high and a lot of folks around here are doing IT. For one, hockeyapp is based in Stuttgart, as are many other companies. Nobody talks about it, that's the issue.
I live in Stuttgart too, and I know for sure a few people that would love to attend more talks/events but shackspace does not look very active and it's hard to get informed if/when interesting events take place.
true. a year ago we had this nice hn-meetup, but i didn't follow up (sorry..). why don't we .. meet and discuss this problem? i am really interested in a good solution.
sorry for replying on your comment, hn's flamewar-protection prevents me from replying to the child comment directly. I am not planning nor considering to attend the lean startup bullshit bingo parade event. My impression from other events wasn't the best, I think we should have a seperat meeting in another location. my two cents.
