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Infineon is a publicly-traded company. A part of Infineon was sold to Intel, who in turn sold a part of that to Apple. Anyway: The long-standing presence of I
by gyulai 7y ago
Infineon is a publicly-traded company. A part of Infineon was sold to Intel, who in turn sold a part of that to Apple. Anyway: The long-standing presence of Infineon and a whole ecosystem around it (business partners, educational opportunity, etc.) means that Munich has hardware talent, and despite Munich being the most expensive and high-paying city in Germany (next to Frankfurt), salaries are still low, and real estate is still cheap, compared to the valley. That's what I mean by "special opportunity" if you look at it from Apple's point of view.
- ChuckNorris89 7y ago>real estate is still cheap, compared to the valley Everything in the world is cheap compared to the Valley, that any comparison is pretty much a meme at this point. You can't possibly tell me with a straight face that Munich real estate is cheap even when you account for local salaries. Munich is the embodiment of the Bay Area in Germany when accounting for living costs, except without the high paying jobs. I have multiple friends who moved there to work in engineering after graduating and they're starting to move elsewhere once they enter their 30s because they got tired of living in shared apartments(WGs) and realized they could never afford to buy anything worthy of having a family unless you're lucky enough to get into an executive position at a top company since ICs there aren't valued as much as they are in the valley so their salaries stay low and job hopping for better pay is frowned upon.
- thecleaner 7y agoWhy is job hopping frowned upon ? I mean this seems to be some ploy to prevent workers from increasing their market value. It seems weird that salaries are shit in Germany when in fact the country touts itself as one of engineers.
- ChuckNorris89 7y agoIt is a ploy to keep wages low and unfortunately it seems to be working as most employees have bought into this belief that nobody will hire you anymore if you job hop every 2-3 years, at least in traditional German engineering companies, although it might be more lax in Berlin's hip software scene. Germany is indeed a country of engineers, but poorly paid ones.
- TulliusCicero 7y agoAnd yet Germany's engineer salaries are still substantially better than, say, France, let alone Spain or Italy. In the large, European salaries for technical professionals are just way worse than American equivalents.
- gyulai 7y agoFirst off: I have lived & worked in Munich and done exactly what you describe (now live in the countryside working for a remote company) but it is still only a minority of people who [can] do that. It is certainly not the case that everybody is doing it. The ecosystem is alive and well. In my various data sources tracking job advertising, Munich has been and continues to be where almost all of the interesting jobs are based in Bavaria, and I'm not seeing falling real estate prices at all. > Munich is the embodiment of the Bay Area in Germany I'd argue that in many ways it is worse than the Bay Area in the sense that the pay-differential, though in existence, is not nearly as pronounced. Stack Overflow keeps pestering me with emails about jobs that it has classified as "high pay jobs" for Munich. The salary beneath those job ads is usually something like €80k/year before taxes (which are extremely high in Germany). This must seem like a steal to a company like Apple. And this is in a city that has one of the best technical universities on the planet, an extremely vibrant engineering scene, and offers a better quality of life than the Bay Area at lower prices to any senior Apple executive who might want/need to move there from the Bay Area. -- My initial statement holds in that this is a "special opportunity" for Apple, that must be worth capturing for them.
- ChuckNorris89 7y agoHow is €80k an extremely high salary in Germany when a nice apartment in Munich is closing on €800k? Fells like a place with Bay Area prices but without the pay.
- gyulai 7y agoI'm saying TAXES are extremely high. Getting paid €80k/yr before taxes in Munich is a bad joke, but is unfortunately where the market is. Many people are living that bad joke. -- Stop disagreeing with me, please, when there really is no disagreement here.
- ChuckNorris89 7y agoI'm sorry, I didn't mean to sounds like I was disagreeing with you. May I ask how did you get a remote position in Germany?