Maybe. I was the CTO of a startup in Berlin until about 18 months ago, and built a engineering team of 13 people. There was certainly competition for engineers,

Maybe. I was the CTO of a startup in Berlin until about 18 months ago, and built a engineering team of 13 people. There was certainly competition for engineers, but it never took 6 months to get someone on board[1]. That said, there was definite wage inflation being driven by that competition (at least in Berlin), but it still topped out at around EUR 80k (2 years ago, it may be higher now). I accept that the Berlin expat market is also a little bit different, where 3 month notice periods aren't insisted upon, and companies know how to move fast. The situation in the Mittelstand software industry could be very different for all I know. [1] The exception to this, for me, was DevOps, which took so long to hire for that we ended up developing a strong enough in-house capacity that we no longer needed them. Engineering management was also difficult to find.