the most annoying colleague...
Issue #113 (12 Aug) – HR & Recruitment jobs; why do you need a mentor?; Coffee with Leo; startups that most impressed; why fees matter in finance; dishwasher life hack and more.
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Programming note: “What would you ask about a company you are interested in?” project got a great number of responses (160+). I really appreciate your additional input. A couple of questions are almost tied, so it’d be great to break the tie: It’s three minutes and six clicks. You can do it for another week!
I’m also working on another article: Why do you need a mentor? I’d like to try out a community blog post. If you’d like to contribute, here are two questions. I’ll include your opinion as long as you don’t try to sell us something.
🎨 🖌️ We’ve also got a special afterwork event for you on Tuesday, the 27th! We’ll do a street art tour with Tina and meet-up in Kreuzberg! And the greatest part: you will be able to create your own unique tag together with the local street artist Assi! We’ll finish with an optional dinner at Al Catzone, a vegan Napoli-style Pizzeria! Limited tickets, hurry up.
🌟 Handpicked community
is a place where we meet, share projects and ideas and look for help.
📨 Submit your input here. Inspiration for all the categories on the link.
🎪 Meet — tech & other events:
Vuejs // Berlin // August 2024 | Tue, 13.8 at 19.00 | Wikimedia
🚲 FutureTalk: Mobilität im Wandel | Wed, 21.8 at 18.30 | Bettertrust
ProductLab: Data Products | Tue, 27.8 at 18.00 | HelloFresh
😎 Show — Cool stuff / Shoutouts / Projects & similar:
The Kinder Rave is a day party for families on Sunday, 18.8, at 13.00, Turbulence TXL. Use HANDPICKED for 10% discount.
What does it take for hardware startups to raise VC capital in 2024? by first momentum.
🔍 Ask — for a Service / Co-founder / Project help & similar:
“I have been developing my first game for the Apple Vision Pro. I am looking for a marketing person with experience in launching games on different platforms (Steam, App Store, etc)” Mail: connect@georgi-nikolov.com
Looking for the submission link? It’s below the title ⤴️
👀 Handpicked jobs
is a rotating selection of around 20 jobs from companies I’d check out.
5️⃣ from the rotation this week: HR & Recruitment
The remaining jobs (also outside rotation) are in the Handpicked online database.
🗞 Top inspiration snippets
☕️ Coffee with Leo Dihlmann
is where my guest contributes three links and an explanation while I write a short bio.
Leo is the author of Zeitsprung, one of my favourite newsletters in German. A weekly, now going strong for almost 50 weeks in a row, focuses on biographies of interesting people you probably never heard of. It’ll also help you master the Präteritum of the German language. Here is what Leo prepared for you:
As a history nerd living in Berlin, I just have to recommend Berliner Unterwelten. Their various guided tours lead you to places usually not accessible to the public, giving invaluable insights and making Berlin's history come alive. The tours are offered in many languages besides German, including English, Spanish, Italian, French, and more.
More Berlin history, but from a British perspective: The BBC’s podcast Tunnel 29 by Helena Merriman tells the story of a tunnel dug under the Berlin Wall in 1962, allowing 29 people to escape from East to West Berlin. The 10-part series also includes the touching personal story of one of the diggers that unfolded after the rescue.
One more podcast: In this episode (🇩🇪) of the Hotel Matze podcast, Matze Hielscher interviews German bestselling fiction author Benedict Wells. The rather long episode (3 hours) offers a lot of personal insights into Wells' unconventional path to becoming an award-winning author at a relatively young age.
🇩🇪 Berlin & other good stuff
is a selection of links focused on Berlin/Germany, career, timeless content and business.
🎙️ In this shortest podcast to date, I spoke about my experience with Gen AI with Andrew from byProduct. (YouTube and Spotify)
From last week’s survey, 57% of you think banning e-scooters is a great idea, and 21% think it’s a terrible one (n=221). Are e-scooters in mid-term danger? We’re probably a few bigger accidents/incidents away from a discussion.
🚨 Join us on the street art tour around Hallesches Tor and create your own tag!
You need to read it to believe it. (🇩🇪) Someone very sick in their head, a s*ck f*ck, is poisoning trees in the southern Spandau district of Berlin-Gatow. So far, 40 trees have been destroyed by pouring chemicals into drilled holes. Damage estimate is €310k. Sick dendrophobe?
How many of the summer bucket list topics from 2023 have you already ticked off? (🇩🇪) I’ve got work to do. Same here, great suggestions for August, but in English.
I’ve got some really bad news for the Ausländer raus people. According to the German Economic Institute (IW, 🇩🇪), Fachkräftemangel will reach 720k+ in 2027, mostly in sales, child care, and social work, but also in IT. Immigration is the only way.
Markets in everything? Because of disastrous housing policies, we now have a (black) market for registered addresses (RBB, 🇩🇪), which are needed for the official Anmeldung. 🙄
Luckily, the scalpers selling immigration office appointments are out of business because the online appointment portal will never be turned back on. (🇩🇪)Career: I’ve looked into data, and these are the 10 funded startups that most impressed you in the last five months. Slay, Feather and goodcarbon are also on the Deutsche Startup’s list of 19 (🇩🇪) young “unknown” startups with potential. From Berlin, we have Terra One, Cozero, Ovom, Deltia, Cardino, ecoLocked, roclub and forward earth. “All good, but I will never understand the trend of lowercase names,” said someone smart.
Career: This will be a hard one! Which type of colleagues are the most annoying?
Career: Next-level tips on LinkedIn job search. Throughout useful tips on how to use LinkedIn’s powerful filters! Kinda reminds me of Excel filters.
Career: Two cents on software engineering: Pragmatic Engineer sees an anecdotal uptick in hiring (mostly seniors). And I really liked these predictions from Russell Kaplan on how radically the profession of software engineers will change in the next couple of years. The bottom line is valid for everyone: get into the habit of using LLMs as much as possible!
Timeless: How writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days is a collection of daily routines of some extremely famous (and mostly dead) people to show that everyone is different and there are no recipes.
Timeless: Check them fees! Why fees matter in finance. If a bank/financial advisor sold you stuff years ago, go and check how much fees are you paying.
h/t Liberty’s Highlights 📱 Weekly Social.
Reddit: Europe’s highest swing in Berlin. Yay or nay? I am a yay.
Instagram: Brilliantly on posting holiday photos. #summerholiday #vacationmode Collecting memories, not things.
YouTube: All these years we have been using our dishwasher wrong.
💬 Briefly.
😔 Bad news: Infineon -1400; Intel -15000 (not clear what is the impact on their investments in Germany); Bayer -5000; Esprit will close all German branches (-1300). Solytic (Berlin, renewables hardware) bankrupt.
Stats: In the unlikely event that everyone did the Anmeldung and Abmeldung, 3,785,274 people lived in Berlin at the end of March. Compared to the previous month this was a slight decline (-336). The share of Ausländers was 23.5%. (St. BB)
BVG was only selling 3 cash tickets daily per bus, so cash payments won’t be possible anymore after the 1st of September.
Mondu received a Dutch e-banking license;
Klarna is considering selling secondary shares prior to the IPO;
Getsafe was profitable in the first half of 2024 for the first time ever.BioNTech posted a €807M loss in Q2, while Zalando grew their revenues +3.4% to €2.6B, improved margin of 6,5% trickled to an adj. EBITDA of €171,6M.
💸 Recently funded in Berlin & Germany
is a list of companies that received funding over €1M.
Ecopals | Berlin | Sustainable road construction materials | €4M | Careers.
Ygo | Berlin | AI-powered travel packages | €2.5M Seed | Careers.
Clare&me | Berlin | AI-based mental health support | €3.7M | Careers.
ACE Alternatives | Berlin | Fund management solutions | 7-figure Seed | No careers.
PL Biosciences | Aachen | Cell culture media manufacturing | €7.8M Series A | Careers.
DC Connected Car | Nersingen (Ulm) | AI-driven remote vehicle diagnostics | €2.1M Seed | Careers.
Black Forest Labs | Freiburg | Open visual AI models | $31M | Careers.
Flowers | Munich | Digital organization management system | €6M | Careers.
DCUBED | Munich | Space exploration hardware | €4.4M Series A | Careers.
😅 Meanwhile
coming up with a subscription business—my favourite must be the underwear
✌️ Handpicked essentials and a treat:
- How to learn German and get over “Genau” and “mit Karte, bitte”?
- Signing a new employment contract in Germany? Read this before.
- Don’t make these mistakes with your side hustle!
- Berlin Salary Trends Reports: How do you compare?
- ❓Surprise treat for the curious
- The best questions to ask at a job interview
- What do hiring managers look for in CVs?
- Advertise in Handpicked?
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