have you ever faked a sick leave?
Issue #125 (18 Nov) – 20+ jobs, Design focus; Coffee with Ana; a call for a favour; best burger?; public toilet situation; Christmas markets; fake jobs?; standing desk = sitting.
Programming note: This week I had the chance to talk about Handpicked at Motion.Lab. It was a cool experience that reminded me of how I used to enjoy making slides and how much easier it is to do newsletters than hardware. Massive respect to everyone building tangible products!
🌟 Handpicked community
is a place where we meet, share projects and ideas and look for help.
📨 Submit your input here.
🎪 Meet — tech & other events:
Nucleate Berlin · Activator Kickoff | Thu, 21/11 at 17.00 | Alexandrinenstr
The High-Performance Organization: 4 Ways to Transform Your Organization in 2025 | Thu, 28/11 at 17:00 | CIC Berlin*
Building Viral Consumer AI & Apps | Wed, 27/11 at 18.00 | Slay
Deployment with confidence - In-Person Berlin Meetup | Thu, 28/11 at 18.00 | N26
this could be your event - advertise it
😎 Show — Cool stuff / Shoutouts / Projects & similar:
Silicon Allee and Fraunhofer HHI’s accelerator for your deep tech & AI startup. Deadline: 26th of Nov.
🔍 Ask — for a Service / Co-founder / Project help & similar:
(Inspiration: looking for co-founders, project partners or freelancers; search for tech & non-tech related service. Support for your hobby projects, ideas, and groups.)
Phew! Nobody asked for anything; maybe it was the grey sky’s fault.
Looking for the submission link? It’s below the title ⤴️
*Sponsored
👀 Handpicked jobs
is a rotating selection of around 20 jobs from companies I’d check out.
0️⃣ from the rotation this week: Design & UX/UI
I was too aggressive on the number of links, so you will find all the jobs in the Handpicked online database.
You can also submit a job.
👋 Guys, girls, non-binary pals… listen up, I need a favour.
I’d love to reach a few arbitrary milestones related to numbers that nobody but me cares about.
100 testimonials - I am missing 15; you can contribute yours here. It can be anything that comes to your mind. (If you ever submitted before, please don’t submit again, thanks)
2,000 followers on the LinkedIn page - you can follow it here.
10,000 subscribers to this newsletter - this one will be the hardest! You’d need to go the extra mile and ask a couple of friends or slap the link on some social media. I am adding this share button because it might help:
I promise I’ll only ask next time when I am close to 20,000 subscribers.
Thank you so much! ❤️
🗞 Top inspiration snippets
☕️ Coffee with Ana Regidor
is where my guest contributes three links and an explanation while I write a short bio.
Ana is a fantastic event program curator. She is also Berlin's host of Creative Mornings, a great Friday morning format I have yet to attend, but so far, have heard only amazing reviews. I’m sure you will be able to guess where she’s from based on her suggestions:
Brung Gallery (an art gallery in Charlottenburg) – The perfect spot for a Thursday evening! This new Berlin gallery is all about ‘naughty art’ —I even picked up my first art piece here! I highly recommend stopping by at their next vernissage for a drink and some Thai food!
El descontento by Beatriz Serrano (a book) – This one’s in Spanish (but the English version is coming soon!). El descontento tells the story of Marisa, a thirty-something navigating agency life with tranquillizers and YouTube. It’s a darkly funny, relatable take on everyday struggles, and you can read it in just 4 hours!
Un tema al día (a podcast) – Even after 15 years in Germany, I still tune into this podcast for my Spanish news fix. Each episode dives into a daily topic with depth and context, all in just 15 minutes. I really like this kind of journalism. A great way to stay informed—or to practice your Spanish!
🇩🇪 Berlin & other good stuff
is a selection of links focused on Berlin/Germany, career, timeless content and business.
🍔 Weird. I don’t know why and when, but somehow, “best burgers in Berlin” was on my list of content to do, so I wrote an article about the best burgers in Berlin. I’d give it a 7/10. How about you?
Last week’s poll was the most popular in the history of this project (n=450+). Only 20% would consider working 80+ hours weekly (12% only for themselves, 8% if they pay well). 66% would not do it, out of which 38% never ever! 72 votes on LinkedIn had very similar results.
It’s hard to believe how good public toilets are in Japan and how bad the ones here. Why is that so? The Berliner has some answers. Also, “Paris is a city of 2.1 million compared to Berlin’s 3.78 million people, but it has 435 public toilets to Berlin’s 475. That’s 6.72 toilets per square kilometre, unlike our measly .73 for a much larger urban area.” Meanwhile, Tokyo has 8 public toilets per square km plus loads of accessible ones (in department stores, konbinis, subway stations etc.)
For those who wanna hit the Christmas markets already in November, because why not, here is a great chronological overiew of the openings. 1st of November (!) for two!
Wild numbers! Look at this chart on the rise in number of sick days in Germany since the pandemic (maybe partially also because of digital reporting and more consistent data?). “Workers missed an average of 19.4 days because of illness in 2023.” (FT) I somehow doubt that we’re all simply more sick.
This poll just… offered itself? (answers are anonymous)
Career: Remember some of those jobs that are always reposted on Linkedin? Some could be fake with an intentionally slow interviewing process. “Using a novel dataset from Glassdoor and employing a LLM-BERT technique, I find that up to 21% of job ads may be ghost jobs, and this is particularly prevalent in specialized industries and in larger firms.” (paper) The methodology is pretty weak because it’s impossible to verify if the position was filled or not, but the findings remain worthy of consideration.
Career: Well, who would have thought, but standing desks might be as bad as sitting all day. The key is to move often. Go! Get that coffee now!
Career: Give your kids international-sounding names, please, wrote the founder of Handpicked Berlin, Igor. “Job applicants with less fluent names experience lower callback rates, and name complexity explains roughly between 10 and 50 per cent of ethnic name penalties” (paper).
Timeless: A reminder on the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, which states that as an expert reading an article from your area of expertise, you easily find them error-ridden and full of misunderstanding, but when you read the next article outside of your area of expertise in the same newspaper, you suddenly start treating it as credible. “You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
Timeless: A
bitcheesy video withslightlyannoying background music, but a great lesson on justice. I love the first comment.📱 Weekly Social.
Reddit: A useful tip for your next territorial dispute with a rhino
Reddit: Apparently dog poop situation in Berlin improved compared to 10y ago, but it still sucks
Twitter: Who can make thousands of people sing long after their death? Mama... (see the first comment for the full version, too!)
Elsewhere: Passport Photos by Max Siedentopf.
💬 Briefly.
😔 Bad news: SMA Solar (Kessel) will let 1100 people go (2/3 in Germany), citing a challenging market environment—it’s the last public German solar company. (HB) It makes you wonder what this means for the rest of the chain and the pumped-up startups.
Stats: Deutsche Bahn reported improved long-distance punctuality in October: 70.1% of passengers on time, ICE/IC trains at 62.9% vs 58.6% last year. Fine, but compare ICE with Shinkansen’s less than a minute per year per train (ok, they have separate tracks, but still). Ok, I will stop with Japan, promise. 🤞 Good news: Deutschlandticket stays in 2025.
VW increased its Rivian investment to $5.8B, up $800M from the initial plan. VW is basically buying into Rivian’s EV software architecture. Not bullish for their software division Cariad, which employs 5,500! Some could move to the joint venture based in Palo Alto, California (later also in Europe).
Amazon Fresh will be no more in Germany. But Amazon Haul is eventually coming to compete with Temu. Tja.
Congrats to all pre-March 2021 and post-July 2022 Klarna employees with stock options. I hope you can cash in well after the 2025 IPO in the US.
Berlin wants to invest €12,5M to be able to host a couple of NFL games starting in 2025 and until 2029. (berlin .de)
Solaris seeks €100-150M in funding by year-end or potential sale. Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, or SBI named as possible buyers (Business Insider)
Planqc received a €20M contract to develop a 1000-qubit quantum computer by 2027. (Sifted) Cool, but you’ll need to move to Bavaria if you want to work there.
DeepL launched Voice for real-time speech and video translation.
Berlin-based fintech Ride sold for €630k in insolvency proceedings, far below €8M raised.
Dutch neobank Bunq launched a stock trading feature that should soon expand to Germany. (both Finance FWD)Air-taxi saga contd: Volocopter might be taken over by Chinese Geely at a $110M valuation, down from $1.8B in 2022. (Bloomberg) Meanwhile, Lilium faces class-action lawsuits claiming they misrepresented funding progress between June and November 2024. (Sifted)
Meta was fined €798M by the EU Commission for abusing market power in online classifieds.
Faircado, a Berlin-based secondhand browser extension, acquired UK-based Beagle.
💸 Recently funded in Berlin & Germany
is a list of companies that received funding over €1M.
Tourlane | Berlin | Travel experience booking platform | €25M Series D | Careers.
Klim | Berlin | Regenerative agriculture platform | $22M Series A | Careers.
mediaire | Berlin | AI-powered radiology solutions | €12M | Careers.
Quantune Technologies | Berlin | Miniature infrared laser spectrometers | €8.5M Seed with a grant | Careers.
KUGU | Berlin | Real estate emissions management platform | €8.5M Series A | Careers.
Valuedesk | Bielefeld | Performance management SaaS platform | €5M | Careers.
Foodji | Munich | AI-powered food vending automation | €25M | Careers.
Tozero | Munich | Battery recycling technology | €11M | Careers. (bottom of the page)
Feld.energy | Munich | Agricultural solar solutions | €1.7M Pre-seed | Careers.
Hula Earth | Munich | Wildlife conservation monitoring platform | €1.6M Pre-seed | Careers.
MONA AI | Saarbrücken | AI recruitment automation platform | €2M Seed | Careers.
😅 Meanwhile
that audience member who looked interested in your presentation stopped nodding.
✌️ Handpicked essentials and a treat:
- all the Handpicked articles
- How to find a great company to work for?
- How to learn German and get over “Genau” and “mit Karte, bitte”?
- Berlin Salary Trends Reports: How do you compare?
- ❓Surprise treat for the curious
- The best questions to ask at a job interview
- Write it down now! Or why you should journal at work?
- What do hiring managers look for in CVs?
✨ Berlin Events Weekly: the best resource for events in Berlin ✨
♡ 20% Berlin: all the Berlin news twice a week, in English! ♡
Btw, my short interview will be featured on Jazzradio.net (106.8) on Tuesday, 19.11 at 19.00. Thanks for reading and pressing the like button.
It is surely the grey sky’s fault :D
Also: I loved this one!
Hangover sick leaves are way more common than you think 😆