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It totally depends. If you are working and living in one of the big centers like Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin or Hamburg, chances are good that you find work in a
by geff82 8y ago
It totally depends. If you are working and living in one of the big centers like Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin or Hamburg, chances are good that you find work in a company that accepts English-only speakers and usually you can live day-to-day life in English, too. But of course I have to say that you should try to learn the language if you want to stay in Germany longer than just a year or two, as this will open up even more job opportunities (and potentially higher salaries). I personally work in a 100% English environment in Frankfurt (while being German myself). Working for smaller companies without working knowledge of German is difficult. German is not a dead language, so in smaller, non-international companies, people speak it all day long. On the other hand, the supply of talent is so tight that even smaller companies now adapt and accept non-German-speaking foreigners.
In Berlin, you can certainly work and live a 100% English life. Then again, salaries are lower there as you compete with cheaper workers from Poland and other Eastern European countries.
- outworlder 8y ago> But of course I have to say that you should try to learn the language if you want to stay in Germany longer than just a year or two Of course. But being able to at least perform basic functions while also adapting to a new country is important(and it is overwhelming already without language issues). After a while, you're doing yourself a disservice by not learning the local language. My aunt lived in Japan for close to two decades. She can't speak Japanese and knew barely enough to get by. She never really had to, as she's married to a native japanese, which doesn't help matters. But that's absolutely not the way to go.
- geff82 8y agoYou will absolutely get around Germany using English :) no worries.
- JanSt 8y agoI'm not yet buying tight talent supply. Does your company offer 90-100% remote work (from Germany/EU/similar timezone)? If it doesn't the market isn't really tight. Software can easily be done from anywhere you want with few meetings necesarry (well, maybe for teambuilding ;-))
- geff82 8y agoThat is this HackerNews mindset. Software can be done from anywhere, sure, and big German companies get it coded in India or East Europe. The high paying IT jobs here are not coders who produce software, but architects, business analysts, project managers, scrum masters, product owners, data scientists, IT consultants who work together with the client in person. The coding and system administration is offshored in a lot of cases.
- JanSt 8y agoIt's way cheaper to have competent software engineers than to add layers of analysts, managers, scrum masters or architects (who copy well known patterns). Most SEs are highly qualified not only on the technical side but also on the business side and possess quite a bit of domain knowledge. Besides that, most of enterprise IT is not rocket science, is it? ;-)
- geff82 8y agoSure you could make Enterprise IT a lot more leaner and probably add a lot of productivity doing so. This is, by the way, my private field of research: how can friction in Enterprise IT be avoided (my position is that you could do IT in big enterrise better with about a third of the people). But yet we are talking about the reality that we have right now, and right now (and probably in years to come) a lot of those in-between-IT-people are wanted and they make good money (what my entire original comment was about).