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Comment by Escapado | Hacker News Reader

I mean even in germany it's not easy. The average salary of a SE here is about 65k before taxes. Most senior engineers I met make about 80-85k before taxes (~50k after taxes) (I am located in hamburg). Even for well booked freelancers about 1 in 10 people make more than 200k a year (140k being the average which results in about 72k profit after taxes).

I just had a quick look at google, netflix, twitter and facebook and they don't even offer any SE positions here. Amazon has some in Berlin but they pay around the same salary as stated above.

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Amazon pays a lot more here in Berlin. People in Germany forget to add stocks to the total compensation. Source: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Amazon/salaries/Software-Engi...

Otherwise, in Berlin there are other bigger tech companies and with remote opening up more and more the salaries tend to increase. Currently the biggest companies in Berlin when it comes to compensation: Microsoft, GitHub, Airbnb, SAP, Wayfair, Amazon, Datadog (Remote), Snowflake, Shopify (Remote), Hubspot (Remote), Spotify (Remote), DigitalOcean (Remote), MongoDB, Stripe (Remote). I wrote an article about it here: https://www.kevinpeters.net/top-tech-companies-berlin-2021

Most of these companies offer more close to 90-100k or even more (depends on the stock). So it is not FAANG but it gets better and better throughout the years.

Thanks for your perspective! I had no idea the stock compensation was THAT high. Sheesh I might want to reconsider my current situation!

Btw, I should probably not post this but we share the exact same name and work in the same field. :D

That's just not very much money, ouch. At least compared to here in the US where VC money is sloshing around so much, driving all compensation higher.

With everything being remote right now, people have been taking jobs on the California wage scale, but living in Peoria.

To be fair, living costs are also much lower. I'd estimate living costs in the US to be on average at least 30-40% higher, plus high property costs in the Bay Area. Germany has some expensive areas but most parts are still relatively cheap compared to many US cities or places like London or Paris.

And in low CoL areas in Germany there are almost no IT jobs and pay less than quoted above.

To be fair, property prices in Germany (buying) are insane, and if you account for that, it makes the salaries seem low. Munich is currently on par with the bay area per square footage/meters, at much lower salaries.

And unless you've been grandfathered into a rent controlled apartment, inner city rents for newcomers are overpriced AF, especially after the new rent controll law kicked in in Berlin, further restricting supply and increased the prices for newcomers.

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