Those salaries are also: 1. Unprecedented for "average" engineers (i.e. not leading their field) until very recently 2. Offered by extremely profitable big te

Those salaries are also: 1. Unprecedented for "average" engineers (i.e. not leading their field) until very recently 2. Offered by extremely profitable big tech companies or less profitable companies with giant pools of funding 3. Offered by companies that highly value software engineers 4. Offered in extremely competitive markets The vast majority of employers in Germany, and in most of the world, don't meet those criteria. It's unreasonable to compare the average German tech company to the best paying American tech companies. Compared to the best paying software jobs on earth, German tech pays pretty badly. But so do most companies. I used to live in a city with a population of ~1 million, and most local "tech" companies paid new grads $60k - $80k, with senior developers landing between $100k and $150k. That's much closer to Germany pay than Silicon Valley pay.