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**Natalie Pistunovich:** Were there Java meetups in Berlin at the time? |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Yeah, I've been to Java meetups -- not so much in Berlin. Back in those days I'd been living near Nurnberg, and I've been to Java meetups there. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Around what year was that? Was it the 2000s? Before, or after? |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Around 2010. I moved to Nurnberg from Berlin in 2008, and moved back in 2015. And so like 6,5 years. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** And so until 2008 you were then in Berlin, so it was a lot of Java. |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Yeah, at least my projects were all Java, yeah. But of course, other languages, too. As I said, C\# would have been sometimes easier to get a position for. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** When I joined the Berlin ecosystem in 2013 or so, I saw a lot of PHP everywhere. |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Ah, okay. Yeah. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** When did that happen? When did you see that transition happen? |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Oh, PHP -- I mean, this was a completely different community, I think. I think we never really had a competition between those. Bigger corporations and those who were willing to invest money, they used Java, and then \[unintelligible 00:14:21.11\] agencies and people who wanted to get something quickly ... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** And would you say that Berlin, let's say before 2010, so like in the '90s and in the 2000's, was it more startups, or was it more corporates? |
**Ole Bulbuk:** The startups started a bit later. I think in the 2000s it was more corporates. At least what I saw. And then small \[unintelligible 00:14:56.14\] companies doing something. When I left, there were the first startups. I think SoundCloud was one of the first. I've been eyeing Berlin, also possibly going b... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Yeah. |
**Ole Bulbuk:** And then a few years later I took another look at Berlin, and I thought "Hey, it has developed in a good way, and I am happy to go back." |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** \[16:09\] So around the 2010s is when Berlin started getting some startups, and it also started -- it translates basically to more PHP developers... But also, that's around the time that Go was joining the awareness of the world... So Go kind of became online. And this is also around the time t... |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Possible. I mean, we had Ruby a lot also. Not only PHP. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Oh, true. True. Very good point, yeah. |
**Ole Bulbuk:** A lot of these startups, when they aren't very technical, they have been using Ruby a lot. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** True. |
**Ole Bulbuk:** And sometimes PHP. And then very technical ones, like SoundCloud, they used Go. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Yeah, there were some early adopters of Go in Berlin, among other startups. |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Yeah, and this is good for us though, right? We are still living a little bit of that... Like \[unintelligible 00:17:27.05\] We still have him at our meetups sometimes. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Yeah. A co-creator of Prometheus. |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Exactly. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Which is written in Go. |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Yeah. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** So in the early 2010s, going down the history lane - so around that time basically more startups started being created in Berlin, it was not just the corporate world, so it translated technologically to not just Java, but also Go, more PHP, more Ruby, as you said... And then how did you see the... |
**Ole Bulbuk:** I think it all matured a lot more, and we have - especially in the Go community now - adoption beyond the classical startup community. It's not only real startups, or ex-startups like Amazon or Google that are using Go, but we have some kind of old-school companies also. |
I've been to an old-school logistics company, invited for an interview, and they were using Go sometimes. So that's really nice. I am quite happy that that broadens, and adoption goes up, because it changes the community too, and you have different topics, to see what is useful now, and so on. We have to adapt as a mee... |
**Break**: \[19:04\] |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** I think one interesting thing about Berlin becoming more of a startuppy ecosystem in the tech is that there were a lot of people who immigrated to Berlin, and that kind of made Berlin very -- it probably definitely was very international, but also the tech of Berlin remained very international.... |
I only worked in startups in Berlin, I never worked in a large company, but I can say that in all those companies that I worked it was at most one third German speakers. Do you think it has something to do with the adoption of languages like Go and like Ruby? |
**Ole Bulbuk:** You mean the internationality with -- |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Yeah. |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Somehow it's linked, but I don't think it's a cause and effect directly. I mean, the traditional companies and the startups compete for employees I think in a bit different way. The traditional companies say "Okay, you get some okay(ish) salary, and you can stay here for many, many years, and you will b... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Yeah. |
**Ole Bulbuk:** So this is a bit of different market, and they are more international since they say "Well, it doesn't matter where you come from. In the end we need your code; this has to be good. And when you can work well along with all the others, we are fine with that." So they can get great employees from all aro... |
But in the traditional companies they have a culture where everything is in German, and this would be very difficult for them to compete on that level. So they are just two different markets, I think. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Yeah. To the listeners who are not familiar with the concept of -- or generally with how German work contracts work, it's common that you get a contract that mentions a probation period of average six months, during which it is possible to terminate the employment within a week, or a couple of ... |
\[24:12\] But then after those probation six months it's becoming kind of permanent position, and then as an employer it's becoming significantly harder to fire. So you have to show that you have brought it to the attention of the employee that the performance is not as expected, and then you created a working plan tog... |
And from the employee side, for you to quit it's something like three months notice as an employee, and if you're in a management position, it can also be six months notice... So it's very different from some of the scenarios from other places might know. |
So when you say all of this stability - this is the thing that people definitely would like in a company, and it's not unusual that people work 5 and 10 years in the same company, even if it's a technical company; it's not necessarily a startup, but it's a technical company. |
So these types of contracts are a legal requirement in Germany, so you have the same, also in a startup... But I guess less people are looking for that. And especially if we kind of go back to ten years ago or so, when Go just started and some companies here adopted that. The people who would be keen on trying this and... |
So that's kind of how startups got this interesting culture that is a very Berliner thing; everybody has an accent and speaks like in a third language... And not just a programming language. \[laughter\] Would you say this is the same what we see in our meetups, that this is people who are international people, who usu... |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Yeah, definitely. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Would you say that the Go developers that you know switched mostly from Java, from Ruby, from PHP, from some other language? |
**Ole Bulbuk:** They have many different backgrounds, I think. It's from JavaScript, from Ruby, PHP... Yeah, quite a lot from Java also. I can't remember a single Java project that I did in almost 20 years that I nowadays wouldn't rather do in Go... So yeah, probably it's natural that we have a lot of ex-Java developer... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Yeah. Interesting to see. Would you say that you saw some startups built with Rust recently here? |
**Ole Bulbuk:** I know some companies who are hiring Rust developers, but I don't know if they are pure Rust companies, or something like that. I suppose Rust would be too tedious to develop your whole business on it. But some very technical parts probably make sense, and can pay off. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** The Go companies that you know from Berlin - would you say there are more that started in Go, or would you say that there are more that changed to Go, or something in between, that some just rewrote or added services in Go, so something in between? |
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