Developer Salaries Report Germany
cult.honeypot.io
cult.honeypot.io
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?cou...
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.
Get offered 85k and 87k…
Yeah, no.
I recently got offered 45-55k for a relatively high pressure, high tech, domestic fintech as a mid-level developer. That package was already 'average' pre-COVID, except it didn't have the 'hybrid work' slapped on it. Oh, and a laptop from the company is a benefit (what, am I supposed to just conjure code in the air?)
Unfortunately, I know enough people will say "What? But 3.5k+ gross is a lot!", not understanding their attitude will continue this behavior and will keep wages low across the board.
Meanwhile hype driven recruitment is the norm. I've come to the conclusion that those companies aren't really looking for people to hire but use job abs as a means of free advertising their oh do modern companies.
So sick and tired of reading countless DevOps Kubernetes Microservice AWS GCP Azure AI ML Blockchain finance job ads. And you have to be proficient in their proprietary cloud service they use to create apps and services. Sorry but there's just so much ignorance out there and I'm tired wasting my time reading those. My time is better spent on working on my own stuff than reading those arghh infuriating job ads that make me feel like the least 18 professional years are worthless and doubt myself as a human being because clueless idiots are ever chasing after the next hype and requiring their applicants to do the same. Sick and tired and angry.
I am a (former) Indian living in Germany, I know a lot of Indians here, everyone is earning more than the salaries mentioned in the graph there.
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.
And they wonder why it's so difficult to fill empty spaces at their companies.
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.
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.
Do companies pay something on top of this like pension scheme or medical insurance? If not, that feels really low even for juniors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, those same packages that were already low enough to make things uncomfortable in certain areas.
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.
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.
For every developer not willing to go through that process, odds are they will find 5 who will, while having their current employees accept doing more work than they realistically should to offset cases of 'nobody wants to be hired'. When the inevitable burnouts come in, managers seem to just ignore it and accept it for what it as 'that's just part of life' or something.
For every company willing to disclose things upfront prior to the first interview, there will be a few dozen who'd rather do the whole song and dance trying to stick to their culture or worse, proactively use sunken cost fallacies to reel you in.
Of course the more experience you have, the more you can fight against this. But I suspect even most seniors struggle with this. Many would rather jump ship to management / pseudo-management or accept things as is than talk and fight back together.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I always hear stories about people being paid significantly more than these sorts of surveys suggest.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for the laughs.
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.
I feel like that’s a few thousand euros more than minimum wage?
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-germ...
But that did not work out.