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No, he makes a point for leaving Germany for higher pay. As a talented individual, one needs not rely on unions to fight for some mediocre salary everyone gets,

No, he makes a point for leaving Germany for higher pay. As a talented individual, one needs not rely on unions to fight for some mediocre salary everyone gets, one can negotiate it on their own and get a salary worth the skills. Talents leaving the country is an actual problem (for Germany, not the software engineers), no wonder there’s a term for the shortage: The famous Fachkräftemangel.

kennywinker 5y ago
And yet most of those same "talented individuals" are having their wages kneecapped by wage fixing (https://time.com/76655/google-apple-settle-wage-fixing-lawsuit/ https://time.com/76655/google-apple-settle-wage-fixing-lawsu...), lack of wage transparency (this article), etc. The system we have (in north america) benefits a handful of individuals at the expense of MOST people. That's not a good system. Also, speaking as a Canadian, we've got plenty of "brain drain" here, and it's not because we've got socialist labour laws - because for the most part we don't.
- noir_lord 5y ago
  > The system we have (in north america) benefits a handful of individuals at the expense of MOST people. That's not a good system. The US system can be summarised as "Fuck you, I got mine". That said if we are honest we have to discover the positives of an individualist system vs a more collective system. One of which is that exceptional people do on average do better than they would in a more collective system. It's whether those people doing better is sufficient to offset all the people doing worse that is the debate and I think on balance no, it's not. That said I'm also not one of those exceptional people either (not many of us here actually are) so that will colour my view, I'm a decent to good developer who writes stuff that works, provides value and gets paid so to me strong worker protections whether enforced by government or union make sense otherwise the power is all on the other side of the table.
  - VirusNewbie 5y ago
    Well if you think that some combination of being exceptional, or being hardworking + a bit lucky, or some such gets you further in the US than other places, then you can bet that the exceptional and hardworking people are going to end up coming to the US.
f1refly 5y ago
The Fachkräftemangel is largely driven by pay, not by actual shortages. Nearly all software companies have open positions for a software engineer with masters degree and 10 years of experience with sap, haskell and c++, 36k anually before taxes. All those open positions go into official statistics where they appear to the public as some kind of shortage. The labour market is okay and migration statistics show that it's apparently not worth leaving germany for the better off except for migrating to austria and switzerland.

kennywinker 5y ago

And yet most of those same "talented individuals" are having their wages kneecapped by wage fixing (https://time.com/76655/google-apple-settle-wage-fixing-lawsuit/ https://time.com/76655/google-apple-settle-wage-fixing-lawsu...), lack of wage transparency (this article), etc. The system we have (in north america) benefits a handful of individuals at the expense of MOST people. That's not a good system. Also, speaking as a Canadian, we've got plenty of "brain drain" here, and it's not because we've got socialist labour laws - because for the most part we don't.

noir_lord 5y ago
> The system we have (in north america) benefits a handful of individuals at the expense of MOST people. That's not a good system. The US system can be summarised as "Fuck you, I got mine". That said if we are honest we have to discover the positives of an individualist system vs a more collective system. One of which is that exceptional people do on average do better than they would in a more collective system. It's whether those people doing better is sufficient to offset all the people doing worse that is the debate and I think on balance no, it's not. That said I'm also not one of those exceptional people either (not many of us here actually are) so that will colour my view, I'm a decent to good developer who writes stuff that works, provides value and gets paid so to me strong worker protections whether enforced by government or union make sense otherwise the power is all on the other side of the table.
- VirusNewbie 5y ago
  Well if you think that some combination of being exceptional, or being hardworking + a bit lucky, or some such gets you further in the US than other places, then you can bet that the exceptional and hardworking people are going to end up coming to the US.

f1refly 5y ago

The Fachkräftemangel is largely driven by pay, not by actual shortages. Nearly all software companies have open positions for a software engineer with masters degree and 10 years of experience with sap, haskell and c++, 36k anually before taxes. All those open positions go into official statistics where they appear to the public as some kind of shortage. The labour market is okay and migration statistics show that it's apparently not worth leaving germany for the better off except for migrating to austria and switzerland.