German engineering practice treats the standard as a floor rather than a target, and specifications are commonly written above the required value. The norm states what is sufficient. A German specification states what the engineer was willing to sign.
engineering
The university of applied sciences
The Fachhochschule is a parallel higher education system, oriented to application and practice, with professors required to have years of professional experience outside the university. It is not a lesser university. It is a different route to the same depth, and German employers read the two differently rather than ranking them.
The standards committee
German standards are written by committees within DIN, drawn from industry, research, government and consumer bodies. Firms send their engineers and pay for the seat. A place on the committee that writes the standard is worth having.
The engineering title
The German engineering degree title, abolished in most states by the Bologna reforms in favour of Bachelor and Master. The change was argued about for years and mourned publicly by engineers and their associations, on the grounds that the old title meant something specific and the new ones do not.
A country that holds a public argument about a degree abbreviation has a strong relationship with formal qualification.
Standardization
The German Institute for Standardization maintains tens of thousands of standards covering materials, processes, dimensions, testing, terminology and safety. A standard is a detail that has been settled once so that nobody has to settle it again, and Germany has settled a great many.
Network planning
Netzplantechnik. Network planning technique. German project management teaches critical path analysis under its own name, with its own DIN definitions, as part of engineering and business curricula. The dependencies between tasks are modelled explicitly before the work starts.
Endurance testing
Dauerprüfung. German manufacturers run endurance testing — doors opened and closed hundreds of thousands of times, engines run for thousands of hours, switches cycled to failure. The failure point is found deliberately, in a laboratory, before a customer finds it.
The work breakdown
Der Projektstrukturplan. The work breakdown structure. A German project is decomposed into work packages, each with an owner, a deliverable, a duration and a number. The plan is not a list of tasks. It is a structure, and the numbering shows how each piece hangs off the whole.
The inspection associations
Der TÜV. The German technical inspection associations trace back to the steam boiler inspection societies of the nineteenth century, formed after boiler explosions. Today they test vehicles, lifts, pressure vessels, playgrounds and medical devices. An independent body decides whether a thing may continue to be used.
Tolerances
German mechanical drawings specify permitted deviation for every dimension, using standard tolerance classes. Nothing is simply a measurement. Every measurement carries the range within which it remains correct.