Hamburg is close to the coast, not too big and from what I've heard a couple of startups make a nice living there. The german variant of Über is based in HH IIR

Hamburg is close to the coast, not too big and from what I've heard a couple of startups make a nice living there. The german variant of Über is based in HH IIRC. I don't actually think that Berlin is struggling. It's hard to hire as a small company because there's bigger fish in the pond that can offer better pay/more interesting projects but if you're at least semi-well connected you should be doing ok. It's just that Berlin has been extremely cheap for quite a while and is now catching up to what I actually regard as a rather average level. The cited example of a PHP Dev with 2 years experience and a 180K wage is certainly an outlier. Experienced devs should probable average at around 60K/year, costing the employer at around 100K.