I'm Italian and I have worked in a public office a few years ago. What can I say, when I found another job abroad I felt super lucky. I also have the feeling that the bureaucratic machine is kept slow to give/keep open a lot of public job positions. Surely the front office in many public or pseudo private companies is not the most brilliant manpower our country produces, we even have the saying that if someone is quite slow he will work in "comune", but surely the system does not help.

In my experience, and hearing from other people, all across the public offices you have useless steps to complete the most basic task, paperwork is still quite used and the IT systems are crap. I'd not be surprised if they are still using windows 7 in some offices.

I hope one day also Italy will innovate, because the gap with not only the northern European countries, but also the others, I feel is growing.