Europe Joins The Talent Wars | Hacker News Reader

Europe Joins The Talent Wars

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31 pointsed20918 comments

Is it just the capitals / large cities that struggle? There must be pockets of talent all over the UK and Europe.

I particularly don't want to move to a capital / large city. But I would move for a company based near the coast for example.

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.

Love Hamburg, a great place for sure (I freelance there). Although best kitesurfing spot is about 150km up the road at st peter-ording. But actually I meant Uk coast to stay near family :)

Quoting the CEO of 6Wunderkinder as "Berlin needs less hype" is a paradox in itself.

100k for a 2-year experience php dev? Can anyone corroborate that claim?

Possible, he might be a very bright and promising kid. Average: certainly not. I regard this as statistical outlier. I'd offer 50-60k max for a 2 years php dev. We do have a large influx of people from Spain and Greece lately - they're legally allowed to work here without any visa and the unemployment rate drives them here.

However, if those numbers are cited it's difficult to know which side you're hearing. An employer in germany has to pay health care and social security etc., which adds another ~40% on top of the wage - so they might have cited that number to compensate for differences in the american model (private healthcare paid by the employee).

Senior level software engineer here- I just relocated to Berlin from SF and I'm not seeing it. I've also talked to a lot of other programmers / employers of programmers here and no one has ever spoken of salaries that high.

If these salaries were real, I would not be trying to do side-projects full time from home!

Care to share what range are the salaries are in?

From what I hear I'd place the average for a solid experienced dev at around 40k-60k Euro per year with a pretty wide spread [1]. It's hard to tell though, I might be living in a bubble :)

[1] 3+ years, at least one larger scale project. Knowledge of more than 1 programming language

Other comments in the thread seem to fit what I'm seeing in job postings and from word of mouth. 50-60k EUR gross, maybe you can do better, maybe not. I could be totally wrong though, as the poster above me just said 40k.

If you want to make a ton of money as a programmer, the US is still where it's at IMO.

It may be new to TechCrunch, but there's been a talent deficit in London for years now.

Fortunately, the government is doing its best to help UK businesses by shutting down the Tier 1 (post-study work) visa, making it almost impossible for young non-EU graduates to live, work and settle in the UK.

It seems that, unlike UK, Germany does make right moves in this direction, lowering the salary threshold for what is called "highly skilled professional", which allows people to get work permit easier and to bring their families with them with less problems.

where are these companies posting jobs?

And yet I regularly get recruiter emails looking for "rockstar" developers who'll work startup hours... for £25k (~$38k). Thanks, but no thanks.

You hit the nail in the head here. From what I saw while living in London, Singapore and now in Germany is that the problem is not with the talent, but with the right compesation. There are so many hackers out there, but "rockstars" or "ninjas" for 25K GBP is an insult.

Wow. 180k. Where can I apply?

Don't get too worked up. High cost of living plus high taxes mean your take home pay is considerably lower than what you get in the USA.

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