I wish it would be like that but my experience is that even average IT people are quite interested in what they do. (I'm still a student so my sample size is not that big).

I find it's heavily dependent on the company. Companies that see IT as core to a successful business tend to attract 10x programmers. If you are still in school then my advice is to learn to interview a company while you are interviewing for a job. Find the place that's going to push you more, regardless of pay.

Same here. The German Wikipedia page for LOC (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lines_of_Code) says that usually 10-50 LOCs per day are normal which would be 70-350 LOC per week.

seems okay to me.

Sometimes I hack away 100s of lines a day and sometimes I search for problems for days without writing a single (persistent) line of code.

I think the longest span I went was about 3 weeks till I tracked down a bug in a legacy system and wrote about 4 lines to fix it :D

And sometimes I search solutions to a problem for days which results in only writing a single line of code.

You should check out https://github.com/tymm/directory-history then. It makes your history matching sensitive to the directory you are in. That means that commands will show up first which were typed in the directory you are in.

I don't want to miss this plugin and can't really understand why not everyone wants it. I guess I am a little biased though since I wrote that plugin ;)

Yes. I didn't want to manually switch between global and per directory history all the time.

Thanks! Understandable. I feel the same way. This was just the easiest and fastest way to do it for me. But yeah, maybe I will try to pack everything into one big zsh plugin file in the future.

I always had the feeling that 9 out of 10 startups in Berlin are founded by business students from private universities like WHU. Is this a misperception or is the hacker-businesspeople-ratio really better elsewhere?

I can not answer your question, but I want to add that Berlin might be the city with the highest hackerspace density: http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Berlin

The whole Bay Area has.. not that many (well, they have one biohackerspace).

I'm not from berlin, but my perception is the same. There are a lot of smart hackers in germany in general, but many of those do software for fun or idealism.

Because there are not many VCs in germany, those VCs (i guess) don't trust tech people as much as business people. There are a lot of successful ecommerce companies in germany, a little number of tech based (wunderlist/soundcloud) and a lot of stupid social networking companies that make no money at all.

I could be totally wrong, but that's my perception.

This was strongly my impression as well. A bunch of business guys who have seen The Social Network a few too many times chasing the worst ideas imaginable.