7 ms·

Developer Salaries Report Germany

34 points by Liriel 4y ago

EnKopVand 4y ago
I’ve been around the Danish SWE industry for a few decades and we get yearly reports on average pays from unions like these: https://www.prosa.dk/raad-og-svar/loenstatistik-a https://www.prosa.dk/raad-og-svar/loenstatistik-a And unless the average pay for developers in Germany is significantly lower than it is in Denmark, then this advert for honeypot.io is really sort of shooting itself in the foot. Because the average wages you seem to be capable of getting through them are lower than what you should be getting. I mean, 45.000 euro a year is lower than what a freshly educated nurse makes in Denmark as a comparison point. It’s sort of sad to use nurse wages as a statement of a low wage, but that’s the world we live in.
- pyrale 4y ago
  Salaries (and cost of living) are significantly higher in Denmark than in Germany, it makes little sense to compare numbers without that context.
  - emptysongglass 4y ago
    We're still getting wrecked compared to Americans. I get enough recruiters in my inbox that I'm just flatly stating I won't consider less than 100,000 DKK a month. With taxes as high as they are, that's a take home of less than 50,000, which is 6800 USD a month, which is just 81,000 USD a year. That in itself is a travesty but most shops here are trying to get devs at 45,000 DKK a month here pre-taxes. And they wonder why it's so difficult to fill empty spaces at their companies.
    - kasrkin623 4y ago
      Holy hell and there are no tax breaks? Like could you invest in some insurance or something to get a tax return?
      - emptysongglass 4y ago
        The number of deductibles we can take advantage of are tiny. You can browse all of them in less than a minute and they aren't significant. You can, however, put it in your pension and that's how most do it but I'm of the opinion that waiting until I'm at death's door to enjoy the good life is a waste of a good life.
      - EnKopVand 4y ago
        There are a number of tax-laws that you can utilise if you know what you’re doing and you work for the right companies. You can invest 14% of your yearly pay in stock options or regular stock if your company has financial programs to deal with the legalities, of those 14% the first 57000kr will be taxed at 25% and the rest will be taxed at 42% when you sell the options or stock. Other than that you can deduct things like your mortgage, and you can put more money into your pension investments, and a range of other things. Most of these are methods that a lot of people don’t know about, mainly because they are financial tricks that nobody teaches you about. You have to understand, however, that a lot of us Danes are quite happy with our high taxes because it pays for everything. I have ADHD for example, and though I don’t need it, my Elvanse medicine cost me around 80kr because the state pays the other 2400kr. We’re of course not always happy with how the politicians handle our taxes, especially these days where they seem increasingly unable to meet citizens need, leading to many smaller towns setting up communities to run things like schools because the public schools are closing. But over all, I think that even though we have 13 different political parties were basically mainly different branches of social democrats.
    - pyrale 4y ago
      > most shops here are trying to get devs at 45,000 DKK a month here pre-taxes. Do companies pay something on top of this like pension scheme or medical insurance? If not, that feels really low even for juniors.
      - emptysongglass 4y ago
        Medical insurance is covered by the state. We have public pensions furnished by the state but those amount to very little on their own. 90 percent of Danish workers are covered by occupational pensions that are (usually doesn't have to be) a mix of a mandatory contribution by the employee and employer. So the result is a percentage of your wages end up in this occupational pension that gets added to the public pension when you retire. But because our elderly are getting older, the age at which you can retire is getting pushed up and up.
        pyrale 4y ago
        Ok, I was trying to compare that to french salaries, where companies pay into retirement, health and jobless schemes. The numbers look slightly better than what they're in France factoring in CoL, but that's probably more telling about our housing situation than about tech salaries.
- Tarsul 4y ago
  from my German perspective the numbers in this article look representative. The 45k you quoted were the lowest number for people without much experience (but still: German wages are not quite as great as one would maybe expect, I'll give you that. But that's across the board, not only IT.).
genousti 4y ago
That looks pretty accurate for the tier of companies that are valuing devs to a nothing. Old derelict european companies mostly that believe managers are the kings and everyone else is a cost center. Hell even functional pm or agile coach get better salaries than good devs. This is why europe cannot compete with usa (hell not even with canada or australia) If you want to make double triple that it is simple. Work for an american company in europe or have some friend in a european company that will make you manager while your job is to underpay talent in tech.
fbrncci 4y ago
I do think that European salaries are slowly breaking the mold. I'm being employed by a German company, where the lower end of a managements salary on those charts is the minimum norm for a backend developer. I know that this is the 'avg' salary of course, but when I specified to recruiters that I would not settle for less than 80-90k EUR with 5 years of experience, I still got enough job interviews (in Germany). I still wonder whether I got a too good of a deal, or whether tides for European developers are changing.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  I suspect it really depends on who you come in contact with. Native market I still see massive amounts of penny pinchers looking for top talent while doing almost everything they can to stall the important details for as long as possible. Yes, that means rather rushed job interviews filled with questions and lengthy processes to not even have any idea what the entire package will be prior to getting an offer, only for that offer to be middling and mediocre. Location also matters. Several locations pay far better than others, sometimes for no reason whatsoever beyond culture. CoL in several big cities isn't that much worse than the ones with relatively big tech salaries, especially for those willing to transit, hybrid roles and such. Yet the pay can easily be 25% less or worse. As for getting bites from beyond the native market or low quality global / continental markets, no clue. Guess my profile just isn't sharp enough.
  - TurboHaskal 4y ago
    > Native market I still see massive amounts of penny pinchers looking for top talent while doing almost everything they can to stall the important details for as long as possible. Yes, that means rather rushed job interviews filled with questions and lengthy processes to not even have any idea what the entire package will be prior to getting an offer, only for that offer to be middling and mediocre. I have noticed this trend as of late and while normally I would say it is the candidate's fault for not asking these questions early on, it is not as if you had any chance to do so as the first interview rounds are done with engineers and potential colleagues. They want to leave the big money talk to the end, and that, coupled with the hesitancy to even post salary ranges, can make for really frustrating and disappointing experiences after exhausting hiring processes.
utku1337 4y ago
The all developers I know in Berlin are making much much more than this.
daemin 4y ago
I wonder if this sort of research is more focused on appealing to companies rather than employees, as I often see averages which are much lower than what can be considered the current market rate. Therefore research like this gives companies numbers which they can use to justify lower salaries to new employees and lower raises to existing employees, especially if a company wants to pay the median salary, or at the 75% mark. I always hear stories about people being paid significantly more than these sorts of surveys suggest.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  Odds are you're living in a bubble, or the people who talk about money tend to be the ones earning more. Average wages really are that low, median wages even more so. Most developers do not talk or negotiate. One colleague I knew, by far one of the best in the company given his YoE, basically accepted his contract under the assumption of 'yeah I assume everyone just takes that, so I did as well'. This was a guy who was otherwise incredibly critical and vocal about anything. In that same company, they did 'research' average salaries (they just asked some other company with data), bluntly said in a meeting with developers 'so we know your salaries are lower than market rate, but we're not going to increase them immediately'. The only rational behavior I took from all this is the ability of established employers to just wave their hands at most of it and still be able to give everything at or above upper management fat wages / profits, given the 'peasants' will just accept things.
  - daemin 4y ago
    Maybe a bit of an expat bubble? But where I am some new big players have come in and are paying significantly more (50-100%) than the approximate market rate for very experienced people. The absolute numbers (when converted to appropriate currencies) are comparable to what people can get in native English speaking countries. Some companies do try and adjust for cost of living differences, meaning they offer less here versus some other more expensive locations, but that opens up another can of worms.
ThePadawan 4y ago
I'm German, but have spent my whole adult life studying and working in Switzerland. Cost-of-living is high, but salaries are higher. I regularly check the Numbeo comparison to a city like Munich [0] and the results are still the same: Given a Munich salary of X, you earn more than 2 * X in Zurich, and spend less than 2 * X. At the end of the month, you're left with alpha * (2 * X) where alpha is a percentage value based on your thriftiness. So even if you are just as thrifty as in Germany, you are still left with double the savings at the end of the month. From what I've heard of the job market relationship between Canada and the US, Germany and Switzerland seem to be in similar shoes. Brain drain towards Switzerland/US because the salaries in Germany/Canada aren't terrible, just terrible compared what you could earn in a neighboring country. Apart from that, I would be curious to hear if Germany is suffering the same cognitive dissonance in media that we get here in Switzerland: Somehow, there are never enough candidates to fill all positions in the Software sector, but neither salaries nor perks are increasing. In my experience, companies insist on moving away from WFH in favor of having everyone come to the office again with a complete lack of empathy that that could even be considered unattractive. One notable company I talked to said that for all their teams of ~5 employees, the 1-2 per team based in Switzerland would have to commute into Zurich, while the other 3-4 would work remotely from Bangalore and Romania. When I pointed out that at that point, surely the Swiss employees should be able to work remotely as well, I was told that was not an option. [0] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Switzerland&country2=Germany&city1=Zurich&city2=Munich https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  >Apart from that, I would be curious to hear if Germany is suffering the same cognitive dissonance in media that we get here in Switzerland Not Germany but this is definitely happening in The Netherlands. Salaries are marginally, mostly begrudgingly, increasing. Even managed to squeeze a few words out of hiring managers looking to expand to Southern Europe specifically to capitalize on Spanish and Portuguese developers willing to work for current Dutch salaries. They would rather outsource before making the local market any better.
  - 4y ago
nibbleshifter 4y ago
> Berlin offers developers the biggest bang for their buck, with high offered salaries and a low cost of living. That's not really correct (speaking as a former Berlin resident who left mid pandemic). Berlin has become incredibly expensive due to the housing crisis, and developer salaries just aren't making it worthwhile living there - as opposed to other cities where you pay about the same rent/bills, but make 50%+ more. Berlin can be cheap rent-wise if you are willing to live in a WG (shared apartment), or manage to take over someone else's lease. If you are a new resident, or move to a new apartment there? You are basically fucked. London gives better "bang for buck", financially speaking, than Berlin these days, and I never thought I'd be saying that.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  > If you are a new resident, or move to a new apartment there? You are basically fucked. It's funny how Berlin/Germany just can't manage to point the gun away from it's foot when it comes to building affordable housing and energy independence. It's as if Germans have some economic masochistic tendencies and just enjoy being gouged until they can't afford to live anymore, thinking that salvation consists in more regulations, instead of just investing in housing/energy.
  - nibbleshifter 4y ago
    I was living there during the Berlin city governments (failed eventually) attempt to control rent by just regulating it down - they assigned an actual value to each apartment, and mandated that was the new rent. Naturally, the estate agencies took them to court over the extremely debatable constitutionality of this. We kept paying our old (not revised) rent based on some legal advice while the court case went on. The difference was close to a thousand euros per month (dramatically overvalued tiny, old apartment) People who switched to the lower rent, ended up being forced to make back payments, which financially crippled a lot of people I knew there. This happened alongside corona, so it wasn't like people could just easily hold on to money.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    This is not unique to Germans, FWIW. RE is increasing all over Europe yet companies are trying to keep pre-COVID packages with a 'hybrid working' label added on. Yes, those same packages that were already low enough to make things uncomfortable in certain areas.
the_monocle 4y ago
I may be an extreme outliar, but these numbers seem quite low to me? The highest salaries listed there were about 30-40% lower than my new grad salary. Granted it’s an offer for an american big tech company, but even many of my peers with less than stellar CV’s did better than the data shows.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >american big tech company, US big-tech definitely skew the statistics and don't really represent the norm in EU/Germany. Traditional German (tech) companies, not just IT, pay piss poor salaries in comparison to the US ones in EU.
  - the_monocle 4y ago
    I do agree but American big tech does hire quite a bit here, no? Amazon, google, msft, meta all have fairly big offices all over Europe. And many other big tech companies aswell, especially since fully remote jobs becoming way more common.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      >Amazon, google, msft, meta all have fairly big offices all over Europe Yeah but what is the percentage of EU devs working at FAANG EU offices from the total number of devs in Europe? <1%? I think you might be living in bubble if you assume everyone is making bank because FAANG have a couple of offices in the EU (most are in UK/CH which aren't in the EU) >fully remote jobs becoming way more common Fully remote jobs aren't common at all where I live (Austria) and have many negative consequences since you have to be self employed as a contractor, so you pay more taxes while missing out on pension, PTO, sick leave, parental leave, and other such benefits normally guaranteed by law for employees.
alismayilov 4y ago
Is there particular reason that old report was shared instead of the new report (https://cult.honeypot.io/reads/developer-salaries-2022-report-germany/ https://cult.honeypot.io/reads/developer-salaries-2022-repor...)?
Aeolun 4y ago
Developer salaries in all of Germany strike me as low enough that it should see all it’s top talent leaving the country.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  Germans don't usually emigrate en-masse for better wages, especially if they have a comfortable family life and relatives here, with an inherited house waiting for them. Sometimes they might go to Switzerland for a sting to make some money and save up for a house down payment for back home.
  - TurboHaskal 4y ago
    > with an inherited house waiting for them Thanks for the laughs.
- rtpg 4y ago
  Lots of people do not need to earn the global maximum, but merely enough to live at a certain comfort level, and in a place they want to live. No amount of money saves you from dealing with many of the consequences of bad urbanism in most of the US for example. But also if you earn 3x the median in your country you tend to be able to live comfortably, even if that number is low compared… well compared to the US basically.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    €22k is the median in Germany? I feel like that’s a few thousand euros more than minimum wage?
    - rtpg 4y ago
      Sorry, I was talking about in general. Eyeballing things from this article and [0], it seems like devs are maybe taking in 10k Euros over the median salary in Germany. Feels like it would be hard to describe this as big bucks! Opportunity costs etc. But I do think it's important to qualify this with the idea that you're still earning a good amount of money relative to other people living in the country so you're probably going to be OK (especially if you don't have super high ambitions requiring money). [0]:https://housinganywhere.com/Germany/average-salaries-in-germany-2021 https://housinganywhere.com/Germany/average-salaries-in-germ...
lakomen 4y ago
I wonder, what are those management jobs that earn so much more and what's required to land one?
- bakuninsbart 4y ago
  Team lead/ project lead; in my experience these are very often positions filled with people who have a strong tech background. Basically, the unicorn of someone who is good with people and understands the technical requirements in depth.
usr1106 4y ago
Managing roles get paid more. I would not have a problem with that, if they were good. Few developers/teams are self-organizing so they would productive without. However, while working over 30 years as a developer (and fighting all the time to avoid manageral responsibilities) only less than a handful managers were really worth their money. (At least one of them even paid poorly for the typical discrimination reasons of being a woman from Vietnam[1]) Often enough you can be happy if they don't cause more bad than good for the development and stay out of your way. Edit: [1] Example is not from Germany but another European country. But I doubt it's hugely different anywhere.
oceanofsolaris 4y ago
I think that it’s weird to aggregate salaries like this without taking into account that there is a huge amount of variance between companies. For concrete companies, it’s easy to look up salaries in Glassdoor etc. and you can see that FAANG pays much better than this, even in Germany. Smaller companies on the other hand probably often pay worse than this.

34 points by Liriel 4y ago

I’ve been around the Danish SWE industry for a few decades and we get yearly reports on average pays from unions like these: https://www.prosa.dk/raad-og-svar/loenstatistik-a https://www.prosa.dk/raad-og-svar/loenstatistik-a And unless the average pay for developers in Germany is significantly lower than it is in Denmark, then this advert for honeypot.io is really sort of shooting itself in the foot. Because the average wages you seem to be capable of getting through them are lower than what you should be getting. I mean, 45.000 euro a year is lower than what a freshly educated nurse makes in Denmark as a comparison point. It’s sort of sad to use nurse wages as a statement of a low wage, but that’s the world we live in.

pyrale 4y ago
Salaries (and cost of living) are significantly higher in Denmark than in Germany, it makes little sense to compare numbers without that context.
- emptysongglass 4y ago
  We're still getting wrecked compared to Americans. I get enough recruiters in my inbox that I'm just flatly stating I won't consider less than 100,000 DKK a month. With taxes as high as they are, that's a take home of less than 50,000, which is 6800 USD a month, which is just 81,000 USD a year. That in itself is a travesty but most shops here are trying to get devs at 45,000 DKK a month here pre-taxes. And they wonder why it's so difficult to fill empty spaces at their companies.
  - kasrkin623 4y ago
    Holy hell and there are no tax breaks? Like could you invest in some insurance or something to get a tax return?
    - emptysongglass 4y ago
      The number of deductibles we can take advantage of are tiny. You can browse all of them in less than a minute and they aren't significant. You can, however, put it in your pension and that's how most do it but I'm of the opinion that waiting until I'm at death's door to enjoy the good life is a waste of a good life.
    - EnKopVand 4y ago
      There are a number of tax-laws that you can utilise if you know what you’re doing and you work for the right companies. You can invest 14% of your yearly pay in stock options or regular stock if your company has financial programs to deal with the legalities, of those 14% the first 57000kr will be taxed at 25% and the rest will be taxed at 42% when you sell the options or stock. Other than that you can deduct things like your mortgage, and you can put more money into your pension investments, and a range of other things. Most of these are methods that a lot of people don’t know about, mainly because they are financial tricks that nobody teaches you about. You have to understand, however, that a lot of us Danes are quite happy with our high taxes because it pays for everything. I have ADHD for example, and though I don’t need it, my Elvanse medicine cost me around 80kr because the state pays the other 2400kr. We’re of course not always happy with how the politicians handle our taxes, especially these days where they seem increasingly unable to meet citizens need, leading to many smaller towns setting up communities to run things like schools because the public schools are closing. But over all, I think that even though we have 13 different political parties were basically mainly different branches of social democrats.
  - pyrale 4y ago
    > most shops here are trying to get devs at 45,000 DKK a month here pre-taxes. Do companies pay something on top of this like pension scheme or medical insurance? If not, that feels really low even for juniors.
    - emptysongglass 4y ago
      Medical insurance is covered by the state. We have public pensions furnished by the state but those amount to very little on their own. 90 percent of Danish workers are covered by occupational pensions that are (usually doesn't have to be) a mix of a mandatory contribution by the employee and employer. So the result is a percentage of your wages end up in this occupational pension that gets added to the public pension when you retire. But because our elderly are getting older, the age at which you can retire is getting pushed up and up.
      - pyrale 4y ago
        Ok, I was trying to compare that to french salaries, where companies pay into retirement, health and jobless schemes. The numbers look slightly better than what they're in France factoring in CoL, but that's probably more telling about our housing situation than about tech salaries.
Tarsul 4y ago
from my German perspective the numbers in this article look representative. The 45k you quoted were the lowest number for people without much experience (but still: German wages are not quite as great as one would maybe expect, I'll give you that. But that's across the board, not only IT.).

genousti 4y ago

That looks pretty accurate for the tier of companies that are valuing devs to a nothing. Old derelict european companies mostly that believe managers are the kings and everyone else is a cost center. Hell even functional pm or agile coach get better salaries than good devs. This is why europe cannot compete with usa (hell not even with canada or australia) If you want to make double triple that it is simple. Work for an american company in europe or have some friend in a european company that will make you manager while your job is to underpay talent in tech.

fbrncci 4y ago

I do think that European salaries are slowly breaking the mold. I'm being employed by a German company, where the lower end of a managements salary on those charts is the minimum norm for a backend developer. I know that this is the 'avg' salary of course, but when I specified to recruiters that I would not settle for less than 80-90k EUR with 5 years of experience, I still got enough job interviews (in Germany). I still wonder whether I got a too good of a deal, or whether tides for European developers are changing.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
I suspect it really depends on who you come in contact with. Native market I still see massive amounts of penny pinchers looking for top talent while doing almost everything they can to stall the important details for as long as possible. Yes, that means rather rushed job interviews filled with questions and lengthy processes to not even have any idea what the entire package will be prior to getting an offer, only for that offer to be middling and mediocre. Location also matters. Several locations pay far better than others, sometimes for no reason whatsoever beyond culture. CoL in several big cities isn't that much worse than the ones with relatively big tech salaries, especially for those willing to transit, hybrid roles and such. Yet the pay can easily be 25% less or worse. As for getting bites from beyond the native market or low quality global / continental markets, no clue. Guess my profile just isn't sharp enough.
- TurboHaskal 4y ago
  > Native market I still see massive amounts of penny pinchers looking for top talent while doing almost everything they can to stall the important details for as long as possible. Yes, that means rather rushed job interviews filled with questions and lengthy processes to not even have any idea what the entire package will be prior to getting an offer, only for that offer to be middling and mediocre. I have noticed this trend as of late and while normally I would say it is the candidate's fault for not asking these questions early on, it is not as if you had any chance to do so as the first interview rounds are done with engineers and potential colleagues. They want to leave the big money talk to the end, and that, coupled with the hesitancy to even post salary ranges, can make for really frustrating and disappointing experiences after exhausting hiring processes.

utku1337 4y ago

The all developers I know in Berlin are making much much more than this.

daemin 4y ago

I wonder if this sort of research is more focused on appealing to companies rather than employees, as I often see averages which are much lower than what can be considered the current market rate. Therefore research like this gives companies numbers which they can use to justify lower salaries to new employees and lower raises to existing employees, especially if a company wants to pay the median salary, or at the 75% mark. I always hear stories about people being paid significantly more than these sorts of surveys suggest.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
Odds are you're living in a bubble, or the people who talk about money tend to be the ones earning more. Average wages really are that low, median wages even more so. Most developers do not talk or negotiate. One colleague I knew, by far one of the best in the company given his YoE, basically accepted his contract under the assumption of 'yeah I assume everyone just takes that, so I did as well'. This was a guy who was otherwise incredibly critical and vocal about anything. In that same company, they did 'research' average salaries (they just asked some other company with data), bluntly said in a meeting with developers 'so we know your salaries are lower than market rate, but we're not going to increase them immediately'. The only rational behavior I took from all this is the ability of established employers to just wave their hands at most of it and still be able to give everything at or above upper management fat wages / profits, given the 'peasants' will just accept things.
- daemin 4y ago
  Maybe a bit of an expat bubble? But where I am some new big players have come in and are paying significantly more (50-100%) than the approximate market rate for very experienced people. The absolute numbers (when converted to appropriate currencies) are comparable to what people can get in native English speaking countries. Some companies do try and adjust for cost of living differences, meaning they offer less here versus some other more expensive locations, but that opens up another can of worms.

ThePadawan 4y ago

I'm German, but have spent my whole adult life studying and working in Switzerland. Cost-of-living is high, but salaries are higher. I regularly check the Numbeo comparison to a city like Munich [0] and the results are still the same: Given a Munich salary of X, you earn more than 2 * X in Zurich, and spend less than 2 * X. At the end of the month, you're left with alpha * (2 * X) where alpha is a percentage value based on your thriftiness. So even if you are just as thrifty as in Germany, you are still left with double the savings at the end of the month. From what I've heard of the job market relationship between Canada and the US, Germany and Switzerland seem to be in similar shoes. Brain drain towards Switzerland/US because the salaries in Germany/Canada aren't terrible, just terrible compared what you could earn in a neighboring country. Apart from that, I would be curious to hear if Germany is suffering the same cognitive dissonance in media that we get here in Switzerland: Somehow, there are never enough candidates to fill all positions in the Software sector, but neither salaries nor perks are increasing. In my experience, companies insist on moving away from WFH in favor of having everyone come to the office again with a complete lack of empathy that that could even be considered unattractive. One notable company I talked to said that for all their teams of ~5 employees, the 1-2 per team based in Switzerland would have to commute into Zurich, while the other 3-4 would work remotely from Bangalore and Romania. When I pointed out that at that point, surely the Swiss employees should be able to work remotely as well, I was told that was not an option. [0] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Switzerland&country2=Germany&city1=Zurich&city2=Munich https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
>Apart from that, I would be curious to hear if Germany is suffering the same cognitive dissonance in media that we get here in Switzerland Not Germany but this is definitely happening in The Netherlands. Salaries are marginally, mostly begrudgingly, increasing. Even managed to squeeze a few words out of hiring managers looking to expand to Southern Europe specifically to capitalize on Spanish and Portuguese developers willing to work for current Dutch salaries. They would rather outsource before making the local market any better.
- 4y ago

nibbleshifter 4y ago

> Berlin offers developers the biggest bang for their buck, with high offered salaries and a low cost of living. That's not really correct (speaking as a former Berlin resident who left mid pandemic). Berlin has become incredibly expensive due to the housing crisis, and developer salaries just aren't making it worthwhile living there - as opposed to other cities where you pay about the same rent/bills, but make 50%+ more. Berlin can be cheap rent-wise if you are willing to live in a WG (shared apartment), or manage to take over someone else's lease. If you are a new resident, or move to a new apartment there? You are basically fucked. London gives better "bang for buck", financially speaking, than Berlin these days, and I never thought I'd be saying that.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
> If you are a new resident, or move to a new apartment there? You are basically fucked. It's funny how Berlin/Germany just can't manage to point the gun away from it's foot when it comes to building affordable housing and energy independence. It's as if Germans have some economic masochistic tendencies and just enjoy being gouged until they can't afford to live anymore, thinking that salvation consists in more regulations, instead of just investing in housing/energy.
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  I was living there during the Berlin city governments (failed eventually) attempt to control rent by just regulating it down - they assigned an actual value to each apartment, and mandated that was the new rent. Naturally, the estate agencies took them to court over the extremely debatable constitutionality of this. We kept paying our old (not revised) rent based on some legal advice while the court case went on. The difference was close to a thousand euros per month (dramatically overvalued tiny, old apartment) People who switched to the lower rent, ended up being forced to make back payments, which financially crippled a lot of people I knew there. This happened alongside corona, so it wasn't like people could just easily hold on to money.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  This is not unique to Germans, FWIW. RE is increasing all over Europe yet companies are trying to keep pre-COVID packages with a 'hybrid working' label added on. Yes, those same packages that were already low enough to make things uncomfortable in certain areas.

the_monocle 4y ago

I may be an extreme outliar, but these numbers seem quite low to me? The highest salaries listed there were about 30-40% lower than my new grad salary. Granted it’s an offer for an american big tech company, but even many of my peers with less than stellar CV’s did better than the data shows.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>american big tech company, US big-tech definitely skew the statistics and don't really represent the norm in EU/Germany. Traditional German (tech) companies, not just IT, pay piss poor salaries in comparison to the US ones in EU.
- the_monocle 4y ago
  I do agree but American big tech does hire quite a bit here, no? Amazon, google, msft, meta all have fairly big offices all over Europe. And many other big tech companies aswell, especially since fully remote jobs becoming way more common.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >Amazon, google, msft, meta all have fairly big offices all over Europe Yeah but what is the percentage of EU devs working at FAANG EU offices from the total number of devs in Europe? <1%? I think you might be living in bubble if you assume everyone is making bank because FAANG have a couple of offices in the EU (most are in UK/CH which aren't in the EU) >fully remote jobs becoming way more common Fully remote jobs aren't common at all where I live (Austria) and have many negative consequences since you have to be self employed as a contractor, so you pay more taxes while missing out on pension, PTO, sick leave, parental leave, and other such benefits normally guaranteed by law for employees.

alismayilov 4y ago

Is there particular reason that old report was shared instead of the new report (https://cult.honeypot.io/reads/developer-salaries-2022-report-germany/ https://cult.honeypot.io/reads/developer-salaries-2022-repor...)?

Aeolun 4y ago

Developer salaries in all of Germany strike me as low enough that it should see all it’s top talent leaving the country.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
Germans don't usually emigrate en-masse for better wages, especially if they have a comfortable family life and relatives here, with an inherited house waiting for them. Sometimes they might go to Switzerland for a sting to make some money and save up for a house down payment for back home.
- TurboHaskal 4y ago
  > with an inherited house waiting for them Thanks for the laughs.
rtpg 4y ago
Lots of people do not need to earn the global maximum, but merely enough to live at a certain comfort level, and in a place they want to live. No amount of money saves you from dealing with many of the consequences of bad urbanism in most of the US for example. But also if you earn 3x the median in your country you tend to be able to live comfortably, even if that number is low compared… well compared to the US basically.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  €22k is the median in Germany? I feel like that’s a few thousand euros more than minimum wage?
  - rtpg 4y ago
    Sorry, I was talking about in general. Eyeballing things from this article and [0], it seems like devs are maybe taking in 10k Euros over the median salary in Germany. Feels like it would be hard to describe this as big bucks! Opportunity costs etc. But I do think it's important to qualify this with the idea that you're still earning a good amount of money relative to other people living in the country so you're probably going to be OK (especially if you don't have super high ambitions requiring money). [0]:https://housinganywhere.com/Germany/average-salaries-in-germany-2021 https://housinganywhere.com/Germany/average-salaries-in-germ...

lakomen 4y ago

I wonder, what are those management jobs that earn so much more and what's required to land one?

bakuninsbart 4y ago
Team lead/ project lead; in my experience these are very often positions filled with people who have a strong tech background. Basically, the unicorn of someone who is good with people and understands the technical requirements in depth.

usr1106 4y ago

Managing roles get paid more. I would not have a problem with that, if they were good. Few developers/teams are self-organizing so they would productive without. However, while working over 30 years as a developer (and fighting all the time to avoid manageral responsibilities) only less than a handful managers were really worth their money. (At least one of them even paid poorly for the typical discrimination reasons of being a woman from Vietnam[1]) Often enough you can be happy if they don't cause more bad than good for the development and stay out of your way. Edit: [1] Example is not from Germany but another European country. But I doubt it's hugely different anywhere.

oceanofsolaris 4y ago

I think that it’s weird to aggregate salaries like this without taking into account that there is a huge amount of variance between companies. For concrete companies, it’s easy to look up salaries in Glassdoor etc. and you can see that FAANG pays much better than this, even in Germany. Smaller companies on the other hand probably often pay worse than this.