By Federico Prandi.

My mother used to put stuff in boxes. Professionally. She did it for 30 years at the same small-sized suburban Italian company and while the boxes were sent everywhere in the world, my mom and her career weren’t exactly going places.

My dad, the only male among four siblings, had to drop out of middle school to help his father in the fields. Like many of his peers, he learned to think of work as something that is closely related to suffering, sacrifice and blind obedience.

Whenever I tell my parents about company breakfasts, team building events and gamification, they share a very specific look that I’ve come to interpret as “Our son is lying to us. He doesn’t have a job in Berlin. He’s squatting an abandoned building and carries stolen drugs across countries in order to pay for his groceries.”

I get that look. I do. Growing up with a blue-collar mindset made me both conscious of my current luck and weirdly aware of the seemingly absurd sides of the startup life.

This series of posts is the natural consequence of that.

CHAPTER 1: FINDING A JOB

This is going to sound obvious, but in order to work at a startup – in Berlin or anywhere else – you need to either found one or be hired by one. I’m going to focus on the latter ’cause I’m a slacker and I’ve made it my life goal to achieve less and less every day.

If you’re smart you’ve probably created alerts that fire off an email every time a desirable position is available, either through Google Alerts or more specific job hunting platforms like Indeed.de or BerlinStartupJobs.com. What you might not know, though, is that when it comes to job titles startups can be as quirky as the side character of an indie TV series.

The chances that your alert will be triggered by the keyword “customer relationship manager” are thinner, for example, than the ones for the keyword “Customer Happiness Ninja”. Stop looking for “Sales Manager” and keep your eyes open for stuff like “Customer retention power ranger”, “Office management karate kid”, “Java Sorcerer” and any title that could have easily been invented by a Dungeon Master after his sixth pint of mead. ‘Cause nerdz.

Startups want their jobs to sound so cool that it’s impossible not to want them. I’m perfectly happy with my own job, but if I ever read an ad for a “fluffer of moral erections”, I’ll drop everything and go, even if it means I end up teaching old ladies how to dance salsa in a holiday resort a la Swayze in Dirty Dancing.

The exceptions to this rule are the internships. Companies don’t even try to make these “jobs” sound cool, given that the word “intern” is at times already an euphemism for “slave”.

Centuries ago, before the invention of coconut M&Ms or, like, minimum wage, I was doing an internship. Money was so tight that I felt compelled to rewrite the Wikipedia page for the term to reflect my true real feelings about the matter.

Unfortunately a Wikipedia editor told me I wasn’t being – air quote – objective about the facts. Fine, Mr. Logic. Whatever.

Anyway, you need to really read those job postings and check off the required skills one by one, even if that’s boring. And when you’re doing so, try to be honest with yourself about your real capabilities. I once thought my brain had no boundaries, but then it turns out that things like the Norwegian language or “Ruby on Rails” (I still think that’s the name of a synthetic drug) cannot be learned overnight.

Bummer.

Once you’ve found a position that seems perfect for you, don’t just start shooting off applications like crazy. You need to pick the right startup before even letting them pick you. Of course you wanna be employed by a winner and there’s one basic criteria to discern whether an internet company is gonna take over the world. Mark my words: It’s all in the name.

Look around: the “General Motors” days are over. Don’t look for class, meaning or authority in a name. The startup world is now calling for “Goojdi”, “Faamp”, “Leerk” and “Huora” (which was gonna be the name of my own startup until someone told me it literally means “whore” in Finnish). In other words, you need to look for a name that sounds like something between the first words of a baby and what your cat may have written while walking on the keyboard.

The only acceptable alternative to this are Latin words. A lot of startup founders pick these, probably by listening to Harry Potter spells and noting down stuff that sounds nice. Sometimes it works, but other times your web agency ends up being called “ferocity” in Italian.

Roar.

In the next episode I’ll teach you how to actually apply for the startup job of your dreams.

Federico is an Italian in Berlin. He blogs, tweets, infiltrates the German language, and is currently employed at a cool internet company based in Berlin with a million open positions.

If you liked this, check out our observations on the Berlin startup scene, and get more practical advice about landing a startup job (with more GIFs!).

Photo by Linka A Odom

[EDIT: this competition is now closed. Click here to see if we’re running any open competitions]

Letters from Berlin is a collection of 12 weekly essays, each focussed on a different district of the city. Bringing together photographers, filmmakers, writers, translators and theatre directors, Letters from Berlin (published by The Pigeonhole) reflects the many creative facets of this uncanny city, creating an album of vivid snapshots. 

Enjoy an excerpt from one of our favourite essays, Marcel Krüger’s walk through Wedding, and enter our competition to win a free subscription to the series.

Links, links, links, links,
Ein Lump wer kapituliert.
Links, links, links, link!
Der rote Wedding marschiert!

– Erich Weinert, 1929

Wedding was a raw expanse of towerblocks, tattoo pits, kebab shops. Nogoodniks in mauve-coloured tracksuits decorated every corner. We had a properly respectful air as we passed through. This was how Berlin was supposed to be. […] The rearsides of the towerblocks loomed either side of a dirt pathway itchy with catkins beneath our sandals, and the word ‘proletariat’ rolled its glamorous syllables over my tongue.

– Kevin Barry, from ‘Berlin Arkonaplatz – My Lesbian Summer’, 2012

…Sometimes I think that while Berlin is the ever-changing Moloch on the plains of Brandenburg and the wetlands of the Spree, its outgrowth Wedding has remained endearingly static over the last fifty years. Maybe it always had a certain roguishness that prevented beautification and change. Wedding is allegedly always up-and-coming. ‘Der Wedding kommt’, Wedding is coming, some of my friends used to say when I visited Berlin for the first time in 2001, staying near the fleshpots of then ungentrified Prenzlauer Berg. Some keep repeating it to this day. Der Wedding kommt.

It’s Sunday, by now after lunchtime and I’ve walked a bit: it’s definitely time for refreshments. I take a detour from Seestraße and step into a neighbourhood brewery, Vagabund Brauerei on Antwerpener Straße. Three American home brewers opened a small taproom here in 2013, and they serve their own craft brews together with classic German and Belgian beers.

Like many other working-class areas, Wedding has a long tradition of brewing, which is slowly being rejuvenated. On nearby Müllerstraße is Eschenbräu, one of Berlin’s first craft breweries, open since 2001, and also close by is the best small beer speciality store in Berlin, Hopfen & Malz. There’s also the VLB Berlin (Versuch- u. Lehranstalt für Brauerei in Berlin), which provides research, training, education and service for the brewing industry. Founded in 1883, it moved to its current location on Seestraße in 1898, and until 1981 it even operated the Hochschul Brauerei, or brewery university, where students could try brewing different types of beer, which were then sold to the public.

Vagabund Brewery has become a poster child for the local craft beer scene. It has been featured in articles in The New Yorker, Forbes travel, Der Spiegel and a plethora of German newspapers feting the craft-beer trend. One could easily say that Vagabund is a pub catering only to moustachioed expat drinkers and not to locals and is therefore a prime example of gentrification pushing out existing social structures, a topic hotly discussed in Berlin. As I enter the bright interior of the taproom, almost deserted so early on a Sunday afternoon, I’m glad to see both Matt Walthall and David Spengler, two of the three owners, manning the bar. We soon start chatting about beer and gentrification.

‘So often people ask us about this “trend” of locally brewed craft beer,’ Matt says. ‘David and I studied history, and that is part of what draws us to brewing: there’s so much history involved. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, every Berlin neighbourhood had its own brewery – so, for us, the whole appeal is not about being trendsetters. We clearly see ourselves as part of a tradition.

‘We didn’t plan to come to Wedding specifically. We looked all over Berlin for a year and a half, but we couldn’t find the right combination of brew room, taproom and a big enough basement. I was actually the one who was the most sceptical of Wedding – I thought of Bernauer Straße, Plattenbauten and so on. And then I moved here and now I’m the biggest promoter. Wedding still has a strong community feel to it, and there are no areas here where whole blocks have been bought by developers, like in Neukölln. And it’s one of the few places in Berlin where the classic population structures have not been pushed out – the majority of our neighbours have been here for twenty or thirty years.’

Indeed, the neighbouring commercial establishments are a strange mix of shisha bars, corner pubs with Sternenburger posters (‘Sterni’ is the cheap and mass-produced Berlin beer preferred by many inhabitants of Wedding) and bookmakers with bright neon signs reflecting off the street’s wet cobblestones. Three years ago, a man ran amok on the street here, armed with two knives and an axe, and was shot by the police. But in general nowadays, things are fairly quiet.

‘We love how laid back the street is,’ David chips in. ‘Sometimes when I’m in some of those “happening” districts down in the southeast of the city, I’m amazed because there’s just so many people. In our little promenade street, it’s much more laid-back and chill. I also like knowing the people from the neighbourhood and even having a drink with them sometimes. I think that might be harder to do somewhere else.’

‘In the beginning I was quite nervous about whether the neighbours would accept us,’ Matt admits. ‘There was this elderly woman walking past the shop every day when we were renovating, and she was always giving us this look, and I thought, “She probably hates us.” Then one day when I was outside cleaning the windows she came up to me and said, “Oh I’m so glad that you kids are here now!” Afterwards we learned that the previous tenants were Hell’s Angels.’

I ask David how he feels about gentrification, especially in Wedding.

‘I guess some people would consider us gentrifiers,’ he says, ‘but really, that word just plain sucks, along with its negative connotations. We didn’t take over the entire block with the intention of knocking down all the old buildings, building new high-rise apartment complexes and charging three times the rent. That, to me, is “gentrification”. We just built a small brewery and bar in a place that once sold heroin out the back door. If a small, independently owned coffee shop or bookstore or chess store opens up, is that also gentrification? Where is the line, the gentrifi-demarcation? I made that last word up, by the way.”

We both laugh, and I drain my glass. Time to walk more of Wedding. I finally hop on one of the trams and travel along Osloer Straße to the former border, clanking past the Currywurst booth on the corner of Prinzenallee, where sausages are served with the hottest sauces in Berlin; they have names like ‘Pain Is Good’, ‘Ground Zero’ and ‘Holy Shit’. We cross the Panke, the small, ancient river that runs all the way from Bernau in Brandenburg through Pankow and Wedding until it ends in the Berlin-Spandau shipping canal, another former border between East and West. I switch from tram to U-Bahn and emerge onto the corner of Brunnenstraße and Bernauer Straße soon after.

After the Second World War, Wedding became part of the French sector of Berlin. French troops occupied a large military complex near Tegel airport and erected a cultural centre complete with a 15-metre-high faux Eiffel Tower on Müllerstraße. They protected the Western Sector, but the development of prospering Wedding still lay in the hands of the West Berlin city council.

The buildings on the north side of Wedding’s Bernauer Straße and the street itself, including sidewalks, were in the Allied sector, while the buildings along the southern side were in Soviet territory. When the Berlin Wall was erected in August 1961, many of those who lived in these buildings frantically jumped from their windows before the buildings were evacuated and the windows bricked up. Wedding was also the western terminus of one of the first refugee tunnels dug underneath the Berlin Wall. The tunnel ran from the basement of an abandoned factory on Schönholzer Straße in the Soviet sector to another building in the West, passing underneath Bernauer Straße. Though well constructed and successfully kept a secret, the tunnel was plagued by water from leaking pipes and had to be shut down after only a few days of operation. Near the spot on Bernauer Straße where the tunnel ended, a section of the Wall has been reconstructed as one of the official memorials to the division of Germany.

A few weeks before my walk, I was talking to Sven Goldmann, a journalist for the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, who remembers growing up in Wedding during the Cold War: ‘My grandmother often reminded us how good we had it,’ he told me. ‘In the Thirties, Wedding had been a communist area and dangerous. People were shot here. Every third man was out of work and the women were sitting at home. Well, my grandmother was old. The younger generations had a better time: all the communists were living behind the Berlin wall, and there were no people out of work here. As kids we were happy: our parents worked at the Wittler bread factory in Maxstraße or at the Rotaprint printing press, and we played football on the many empty spaces among the buildings. Well, at least until the builders came and we had to find another pitch.’

As Annett Gröschner writes in City Spaces: Filling in Berlin’s Gaps (Readux, 2015; trans. Katy Derbyshire), when the Wall was built, the neighbourhood around Brunnenstraße ‘lent itself to urban planning experiments. For the reconstruction of Wedding, soon revealed as its eradication, a gigantic money-wasting machine was set in motion, private land was bought up by non-commercial housing associations, old houses demolished and new ones built that looked thin-skinned and made only for sleeping in.’ Today, this is known as Brunnenviertel, a striking conglomeration of 1970s concrete and plastic.

‘One day our teacher took us to one of the watchtowers for tourists, from where we could observe East Berlin,’ Sven Goldman said, ‘and she told us how lucky we were to have all the new buildings here while the people in the East had to live in the shabby old houses.’

After the Wall fell and capitalism had defeated communism, Wedding suffered. In a united Germany, Berlin companies no longer received state subventions, and many of the factories in Wedding closed as business was outsourced. In the last twenty-five years, unemployment in Wedding has been at a steady fifteen per cent, and even though there are initiatives by both state and city to tackle this, it seems many people here will remain without jobs for the foreseeable future. Petty crime is also widespread. Soldiner Straße near Gesundbrunnen, for example, had such a bad name that footballers at the 2006 World Cup described it as ‘Berlin’s Soweto’. Around the turn of the millennium, various groups were formed in an attempt to bring some positive energy to the area. The arts initiative Kolonie Wedding, founded in 2001, set up studios and galleries in what would be otherwise empty shop fronts and once a month hosts coordinated vernissage weekends with walking tours between the different venues.

I take the U-Bahn and re-emerge from its depths on Nauener Platz, where the owner of the local kebab shop calls me ‘neighbour’ every time I stop by, and where a punk with beer on his breath once helped me out with washing powder at the laundrette. I reach my little apartment building again, the grey, two-storeyed one, nestled between the five-storey Wilheminian buildings to its left and right. The sun is finally out and the drunkard/madman gone, and on the other side of the street Turkish teenagers sit on benches in the park tilting their sunglassed faces skywards. As I enter the building, I find a poster hung there by Berlin police, informing me that someone has broken into our building while I have been out.

This is Wedding: fifty-year-old corner pubs that once catered to off-shift workers and now serve those in need of a drink at ten in the morning; communists, resistance fighters and morphine addicts; a mini Eiffel Tower and young Americans reanimating the age-old brewing tradition of Prussian Berlin. It’s not a particularly nice place, but it is a prime example of the fascinating ruggedness often associated with Berlin that is fast disappearing from many other places throughout the city.

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An insider’s view of the Berlin startup scene by Abby Carney, with some practical job-hunting tips – and GIFs curated by When You Live in Berlin.

I moved from Atlanta to Berlin last summer to intern with a particular startup. But after nearly a year of working and socializing in what quickly became the cramped quarters of the startup bubble, I have lost a bit of the bright eyed naivety that led me here.

I have nothing but good things to say about my former employers and the friends I’ve made through startups, but having led one version of the typical expat’s life within the tight tech scene of entrepreneurs and endless hack days (who knew so many things could be hacked?), I can honestly say that all that glitters isn’t gold. And if you feel like your job/life lacks risk and thrills, I’d advise against yearning for the exciting life of a startup employee, because it comes at a cost, and so much of the hype is just that – hype.

Prior to my move, I read article after article, dug up every TED talk, interview, and minutiae of information that would give me insight into the famed Berlin tech startup sector. After being in it, meeting people at different companies, and seeing things up close, I came to realize that startups (at least in Berlin) are often times rampant with sexism, unprofessionalism, and confused 20-something boys in high-level positions – afraid to ask for help when they need it, and reluctant to take counsel or constructive criticism. Peacocking for investors and venture capitalists is what they do best – because their livelihood ultimately depends on impressing these people – and watching this pan out is like watching women dolled up for beauty pageants, sucking in and strutting around in uncomfortable gowns and unnaturally high heels.

Entrepreneurship and innovation are good! Technology is vast and amazing, much like the universe itself. But I now see startups for what they are – new business ventures that are fully reliant on investors, and are not yet profitable. This is why people work themselves into the ground, rarely leaving the office save for meetups, parties, and networking events… It’s not Hollywood, as some would have you believe, and these CEOs aren’t necessarily any smarter or more on the ball than anyone else. A great many of them don’t have a clue what they’re doing, and their worst fear is that you’ll find them out.

It’s not all good, and it’s not all bad. Taking part in startup shenanigans and seeing it all up close and personal has given me a more balanced perspective. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz when Toto knocks down the screen, revealing the great and powerful Oz to be just a little old man with a control panel, the pageantry of startups in Berlin can be a bit of a sham and a lot of smoke and mirrors. It’s necessary to pull back the curtain to determine who really knows what they’re talking about. Much of the time, these small companies are successful not because they are run by smart, talented, hardworking folks, but because they are young, beautiful, well-spoken Soho House regulars. Not to say that the two camps can’t exist within the same business, but in my Berlin experience, I’ve found the occurrence to be rare.

Do your homework

So, if you’ve made it this far and despite the disclaimer, you still think Berlin startup life is for you, my advice to the potential budding startup employees out there is to perform a background check on the companies you consider working with. Doing your homework means being thorough – befriend the startup gossips and get the scoop on everyone in the village. Despite appearances, it’s a small town, and it’s good to know who you’re crawling into bed with.

It’s true of any business, corporate or fledgling, that who you work with and for is crucial to your success and happiness within the organization, but especially in startups. When work is typically done in close quarters, teams are small and the line between work and home becomes seriously blurred, it’s important to join a team of people you trust, admire, and respect. A lot. So if possible, find their former employees, people who have been laid off, or who have moved on, and quietly find out what you might be getting yourself into. Simply perusing their press page isn’t going to yield the sort of answers you’re looking for.

Seek diversity

Don’t be blinded by the free Club Mates and fancy espressos. Pay attention to who’s on the team. Age is just a number, but in some cases, it matters. A startup with the wisdom and leadership of someone (or a few someones) who’s been around the block a time or two is a huge asset, as there are no shortcuts to experience and maturity. They’re gained the old fashioned way – over time. A few tree rings means your startup of choice is run by insightful, intelligent folks who will likely value you and your skills. Be looking for female employees too, particularly in leadership roles. According to the research, teams with greater gender diversity generate more innovative thinking in problem solving.

Find a balance

Also, resist the urge to drink the Kool Aid. What I mean by this is simply to keep balance in your life. Actually have a life that exists outside the office. There’s something genuinely beautiful about the way many startup teams feel close to each other, like a family, and they spend most of their time together during their off hours as well. But the downside to this is that you will create a bubble for yourself, and sooner or later you’ll burn out. Find at least one hobby, group, or activity that you keep separate from work so that you don’t go crazy. And for heaven’s sake, try your best not to date your co-workers. Berlin is a big city, and there are plenty of fish in its murky sea. Better to throw a line in the Spree than in your own workplace.

That being said, enjoy your time working to create something you feel connected to. It will be perhaps some of the most arduous and soul-enhancing endeavor you’ve ever been a part of, working for a startup. If you’ve counted the costs and are in for the wild ride, why not give Berlin startup life a try?

This was going to be a post about how shitty customer service is in Germany. We’ve all heard about, or experienced, things like: surly bar service, valuable deliveries that dropped off the grid without a trace, unanswered emails, ignored tweets, blah blah blah…

…it all started, as it so often does, with an undelivered package. The bourgeois tosspots that we are, we subscribe to a certain service that delivers recipes and their ingredients to your door – at least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. This time, they promised to deliver during certain hours, and didn’t. When I emailed their support team, I was told that the delivery had been confirmed for a different time slot, and I should have been waiting for it. I asked them to check the confirmation message I’d originally forwarded them for proof to the contrary, and the email chain went dead.

I gave them a few days before following up via email. Where was my response? Where was my refund? And the answer to the other question I’d asked? Hearing nothing back, I took to Twitter. After a few unanswered tweets, I started to @-mention their UK and US teams (a move I learned from the indomitable @Fauxlie_). Sure enough, the Brits intervened, suggesting I call the German team. In no mood to ease the situation, I sent a shitty tweet asking why I shouldn’t expect to have my problem resolved via the email support channel they do in fact offer. (I’ve since apologised for that – they were just trying to help.)

And then, after a long, frustrated rant to Zoë, it occurred to me: all of my interactions with this company had been in English. Sure, I apologised at first for my crappy German (auf Deutsch) before asking that we switch to my native language. But I might have been even more annoyed if the response had come back in German. And, despite my natural aversion to actually speaking to people, the real thing stopping me picking up the phone was the knowledge that we’d quickly reach the limits of my second language, and I’d have to suck it up and ask, “können wir Englisch sprechen?”

This is bonkers. If I was in England, and didn’t speak any English, there would be a 0.001% chance that someone would be willing or able to speak to me in my native language. Yet here, in the German capital, I get by perfectly well with not-that-great German skills. I’ve rented an apartment, registered as a resident, got a dog, started a blog and a business, paid my taxes, and yes, even had my groceries delivered – all by subjecting people to my crappy German, persuading or paying people to speak echtes Deutsch on my behalf, or just expecting everything to be done in English.

This shit doesn’t fly in other places, or in other languages. I work for a company whose customer happiness (oh yes) rating always tops 90%, and we support millions of people all over the world almost entirely in English. I should remember that for a German speaker to be writing or speaking in English, even with the help of Google Translate, they’re going the extra mile. I’m not meeting them halfway, not remotely. If my email or tweet is dropped, it’s probably not because the person the other end is terrible at their job, but because my query is automatically the trickiest one in their queue.  

But I don’t remember that. We don’t remember that. As visitors to this country, no matter how permanent – hell, as owners of businesses here – we get used to a certain amount of English fluency from everyone we interact with. A couple of years ago we published a guest post that I don’t fully agree with, in response to an Exberliner attack on Melbourne Canteen for having (at the time) menus in English only. While the original article was gratingly holier-than-thou, I find it hard to stand behind our writer’s argument that English is more useful to Germans than German is to English speakers. Presumably, that’s the same stance of another business outed recently as having no Deutsch menus, despite proclaiming themselves to be “100% Neukölln”. It seems that expats’ aversion to German is becoming institutionalised.

Yes, as Berlin becomes more and more international, with new arrivals sharing English more than any other language, it’s possible to envision a day when our common tongue is the city’s second semi-official language, as Spanish is in California. But for now, we’re in Germany and we should (try to) speak German. Anyone who is willing to switch to English with you should be treated like the angel they are – after all, they are part of the reason why your dumb ass is able to remain here.

Remember when you moved here, and you were amazed by how perfect everyone’s English is, and how readily they resort to using it? Hold onto that feeling, cherish it. And repeat after me: when someone is using their second language in a country where you should be speaking their mother tongue, they’re incapable of bad customer service. Just by communicating with you on your terms, they’ve already gone the extra mile.

The more observant of you will have noticed that we’ve turned off comments here on überlin.

Maybe you found you couldn’t enter a competition, because I’d forgotten to turn comments back on in those rare cases where we still allow them. Perhaps you were particularly incensed by the latest thing this expat/hipster/douchebag/gentrifier/all-of-the-above had written. Or you might just have been wanting to tell us how much you love us, but couldn’t. Well, here’s why.

Firstly, and most obviously, internet comments are infamously terrible. Sure, most of our commenters have been very supportive and positive, but a minority have split hairs, gone on inexplicable tangents, ranted, singled us out to blame for the (inevitable) changes happening to Berlin, and one even told us in no uncertain terms: go home.

The main reason for this shittiness is that people aren’t accountable when they’re anonymous. If no one knows who you are, you can be as hateful, reactionary, incoherent and misinformed as you like.

Of course, we ask commenters to provide their names and email addresses, but we have no way of verifying this. Even if we used something like Facebook login to verify people’s identities, the Zuckerberg dodgers could use their invented FB names to shroud themselves in semi-secrecy. Besides, even if we could achieve total transparency and accountability with comments, we’re not sure that we should be insisting that people, especially Germans, share their personal data in this way.

So, given a choice between anonymous comments and no comments, we went with the latter.

Another reason for switching off comments is that we’re no longer focused on producing content that provokes comment. Depending on your perspective, we used to be great at/notorious for hilarious/reductive observations/stereotypes about Germans and Germany, and at times, we’ve been guilty of full-on trolling. These days, however, we’re more interested in showing off Zoë’s beautiful photos of places, people and their dogs, and getting to the heart of what inspires the creatives who call Berlin their home.

This is great content, and we think it’s very shareable, but it doesn’t require your input. If you like something, great – feel free to share it with others on Twitter, Facebook, email or whatever. If you don’t like it, that’s fine too – just look away.

And that brings us to the final reason we turned off comments. We received too many comments like “this comedy piece on going to a German supermarket doesn’t discuss the impact of LIDL’s pricing policies overseas”, which could all be translated as: “I’m annoyed that this article isn’t about something else that I’d rather be reading”. I found myself arguing with these people, then trashing their comments (as they were about an entirely different subject than the article, they weren’t relevant), and then deciding: we don’t need this.

As content producers, we accept the fact that we’re doing all this for free. We run überlin for love, not money, and the fact that our content is kostenlos allows it to reach far more people than it would have in the days before a free, open, democratic(ish) Internet. The problem with this is that people don’t always value what they get for free. And if it isn’t exactly what they wanted to see, they’ll be sure to tell you. I wonder if the editors from Lawnmower Monthly receive letters saying “Dear Sir/Madam, I bought your magazine and was disappointed to find absolutely no photos of monkeys riding motorcycles…”?

The point is: everyone absolutely has the right to their opinion. They just don’t have the right to make people listen to it. We spent five years building this site, filling it with content and growing its readership. If you don’t like something on the site, by all means tell the Twitter followers you earned through your own hard work – hell, tell us. But you don’t get to take the megaphone out of our hands and use it to broadcast your own opinions, while hiding behind the mask of anonymity.

Hence (with a few exceptions): no more comments here on überlin. In the month or so that we’ve been without comments, we haven’t missed them at all. We still get plenty of feedback via social media, and we’re always thankful for that. If you have any comments about this post, or anything else we’re doing, hit us up on Facebook  and Twitter. The (on-site) comments are dead; long live the (off-site) comments!

If you have even a passing familiarity with the Berlin startup scene, you’ll have seen this blog post on The Guardian website, written by someone who recently returned to the UK after a brief immersion in the city’s tech “bubble”. Well, The Local asked for my reaction – as someone who has a lot of contact with expats in the startup world and part of the team about to open Berlin’s first tech campus – and I thought I’d share it here. Read their response “Ten points in defence of Berlin’s startup scene” here, and my comments below.

The Guardian article contains nothing we haven’t heard before. As one of Berlin’s biggest English language blogs, we attract a lot of questions and enquiries from the group to which the writer (who we know) belongs: young non-German speakers who are early in their careers, and attracted to the city’s competitive creative scene. Their observations are valid, but represent a very narrow experience of the Berlin tech ecosystem, one with fairly predictable outcomes.

If you land an internship at an English-speaking company, you are likely to remain in that bubble, speak (and hear) very little German – and you’re most at risk of losing your “job”. We know lots of people who have discovered that “the streets are not paved with gold”, and have had to move back home or onto somewhere where they can more easily lay the foundations for their career. But we also know plenty of people who’ve landed (very) real jobs at successful companies, who have stable work and are appropriately rewarded for their experience and qualifications.

We’re sick of the mainstream media cycle of hype and backlash when it comes to Berlin in general, and the startup scene in particular. No one in their right mind would believe that Berlin is the next Silicon Valley, or the only European startup hub that matters – but, equally, no one should dismiss it as just a hipster party town. We turn out innovative, productive businesses with global impact (SoundCloud, 6Wunderkinder, ResearchGate), and we’re only going to see more success like this. But we still have a long way to go…

To the Berlin startup community we say: ignore all of this. Keep your heads down and keep up the good work. To anyone thinking of moving to the city to follow their startup dreams, we say: don’t believe the hype! Follow the advice of this article and do your homework, find a company that you fit with and feel passionate about, and enter the Berlin startup scene with open eyes and realistic expectations. Good luck

Illustration by Josh Bauman.

by Paola Moretti.

My father is one of those men who are terrible at choosing presents for women. I’m not sure whether his insistence on giving me perfume, dresses and cute necklaces is a hint that I should be a little more feminine, or if he simply has no clue about what I actually like. This year, he gave me a glittery nail polish which I liked only because I have a taste for tacky stuff. Two years ago, he bought me a style guide written by Angelika Taschen, The Berliner, where one can find such observations as, “ For the Berliner the quest for the perfect purse is more important than the quest for the right man. The metropolitan animal needs to bring its stuff always with it, so the bag needs to be a proper one.” Let’s just say that my father has a peculiar sense of humour as well.

When I read the book’s subtitle, “The guide to the alternative chic”, I thought: this is the end. If Berlin was about to become a Mecca for style, when just a while ago I could walk around completely unnoticed in neon-yellow leggings, matching rubber kitchen gloves and a bright blue dress, it meant that something was changing. Indeed, the running joke about Prenzlauer Berg’s Latte Macchiato mums was over. At that moment, the press focused on the hatred of tourists which, expressed through stickers and graffiti, telling them that they were no longer welcome. It had become a local pastime to pick on the new representatives of categories such as the “Club Mate generation”, “New York artist”, “South European student”, or anyone else suspected of feeding the ravenous beast of gentrification by paying above-average rents, occupying hitherto-neglected neighbourhoods, or opening upmarket bars.

Berlin became the place to be. Old-school Berliners were bewildered and, I must admit, I didn’t join in the raging aggressiveness towards every single change, I was a bit worried. The city, at least to me, had been a stargate to a utopian dimension. You could feel that history had had taken another course here. Its environment and inhabitants hadn’t been infected by the fever of globalisation and consumeristic craving. The German capital was a small loophole in the West’s capitalist system. Things I had only heard about from my older friends, such as underground movements – which in Italy were long-time dead, or had been absorbed by a fashion industry which repackaged them and tossed them to the masses – here were still thiriving in their original forms. Berlin was cool because “she” was the anti-cool. Then, she became glamorous and lost some of her charm. Gradually, she became less unique, less radical. She was slowly letting herself be undermined by imported trends, swayed by a progress which didn’t always mean improvement.

Just like when in junior high you fall in love with your desk mate: a bony girl with no breasts and protruding shoulder blades, but nice and sweet. Everybody laughs at you because you like her, but you don’t care. In high school, she becomes a hottie, a real heartbreaker who forgets what kindness means. And then you feel that mix of bitterness and pride: you’re proud because you foresaw her potential back when no one else could, but you feel sad because she is no longer who she used to be. She stops using her cousin’s hand-me-down sweaters, in which she looked like a potato sack, and starts wearing tight tops. She learned how to use tweezers on her eyebrows, and now she has highlights in her hair, the original copper-like colour of which was naturally beautiful.

So it is with Berlin: she is young, a 25 year-old girl who not so long ago was disfigured by a wall. She has just found herself sexy and wants to party, to take advantage of any situation. Thus, Kneipes close and cocktail bars open; currywurst booths disappear while burger joints pop up everywhere. Sandals with socks remain, but just because they seem to be fashionable now.

But it’s just when you get used to the tables full of Macbooks in cafes; when you are no longer surprised by salespeople not understanding German in your local vintage shop; when you basically take for granted the availability of various pieces of the world patch-worked together in one city; when you finally understand that you can find whatever you like, even those things which are not cool anymore and never again will be – well, then, the media announces: “Berlin is over”. In 2014, the Tagespiegel said that “Berlin isn’t the coolest city in the world anymore”, just after Rolling Stone called Berghain “a club full of tourists” . Each time I hear these utterances, I imagine Manzoni’s characters with their bells, ruefully wandering through the village picking up the dead bodies left by the plague. What I never understand is whether the pandemic is Berlin being cool or not cool anymore.

Many local newspapers greeted the news happily; club owners worried right away about their future incomes; some sighed with relief, others felt mocked: they had just found a WG! Most readers probably simply shrugged. I insist, like the devoted classmate who tenderly looks at the sharp bones coming out of his childhood love’s back, or like my father, who next year will give me a bracelet with pendants for my birthday, that I will keep looking for those things which make Berlin my city. Because love is resistance and the first love is never outmoded.

Originally published in Italian on Il Mitte. 

By Federico Prandi.

My mother used to put stuff in boxes. Professionally. She did it for 30 years at the same small-sized suburban Italian company and while the boxes were sent everywhere in the world, my mom and her career weren’t exactly going places.

My dad, the only male among four siblings, had to drop out of middle school to help his father in the fields. Like many of his peers, he learned to think of work as something that is closely related to suffering, sacrifice and blind obedience.

Whenever I tell my parents about company breakfasts, team building events and gamification, they share a very specific look that I’ve come to interpret as “Our son is lying to us. He doesn’t have a job in Berlin. He’s squatting an abandoned building and carries stolen drugs across countries in order to pay for his groceries.”

I get that look. I do. Growing up with a blue-collar mindset made me both conscious of my current luck and weirdly aware of the seemingly absurd sides of the startup life.

This series of posts is the natural consequence of that.

CHAPTER 1: FINDING A JOB

This is going to sound obvious, but in order to work at a startup – in Berlin or anywhere else – you need to either found one or be hired by one. I’m going to focus on the latter ’cause I’m a slacker and I’ve made it my life goal to achieve less and less every day.

If you’re smart you’ve probably created alerts that fire off an email every time a desirable position is available, either through Google Alerts or more specific job hunting platforms like Indeed.de or BerlinStartupJobs.com. What you might not know, though, is that when it comes to job titles startups can be as quirky as the side character of an indie TV series.

The chances that your alert will be triggered by the keyword “customer relationship manager” are thinner, for example, than the ones for the keyword “Customer Happiness Ninja”. Stop looking for “Sales Manager” and keep your eyes open for stuff like “Customer retention power ranger”, “Office management karate kid”, “Java Sorcerer” and any title that could have easily been invented by a Dungeon Master after his sixth pint of mead. ‘Cause nerdz.

Startups want their jobs to sound so cool that it’s impossible not to want them. I’m perfectly happy with my own job, but if I ever read an ad for a “fluffer of moral erections”, I’ll drop everything and go, even if it means I end up teaching old ladies how to dance salsa in a holiday resort a la Swayze in Dirty Dancing.

The exceptions to this rule are the internships. Companies don’t even try to make these “jobs” sound cool, given that the word “intern” is at times already an euphemism for “slave”.

Centuries ago, before the invention of coconut M&Ms or, like, minimum wage, I was doing an internship. Money was so tight that I felt compelled to rewrite the Wikipedia page for the term to reflect my true real feelings about the matter.

Unfortunately a Wikipedia editor told me I wasn’t being – air quote – objective about the facts. Fine, Mr. Logic. Whatever.

Anyway, you need to really read those job postings and check off the required skills one by one, even if that’s boring. And when you’re doing so, try to be honest with yourself about your real capabilities. I once thought my brain had no boundaries, but then it turns out that things like the Norwegian language or “Ruby on Rails” (I still think that’s the name of a synthetic drug) cannot be learned overnight.

Bummer.

Once you’ve found a position that seems perfect for you, don’t just start shooting off applications like crazy. You need to pick the right startup before even letting them pick you. Of course you wanna be employed by a winner and there’s one basic criteria to discern whether an internet company is gonna take over the world. Mark my words: It’s all in the name.

Look around: the “General Motors” days are over. Don’t look for class, meaning or authority in a name. The startup world is now calling for “Goojdi”, “Faamp”, “Leerk” and “Huora” (which was gonna be the name of my own startup until someone told me it literally means “whore” in Finnish). In other words, you need to look for a name that sounds like something between the first words of a baby and what your cat may have written while walking on the keyboard.

The only acceptable alternative to this are Latin words. A lot of startup founders pick these, probably by listening to Harry Potter spells and noting down stuff that sounds nice. Sometimes it works, but other times your web agency ends up being called “ferocity” in Italian.

Roar.

In the next episode I’ll teach you how to actually apply for the startup job of your dreams.

Federico is an Italian in Berlin. He blogs, tweets, infiltrates the German language, and is currently employed at a cool internet company based in Berlin with a million open positions.

If you liked this, check out our observations on the Berlin startup scene, and get more practical advice about landing a startup job (with more GIFs!).