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Comment by pearjuice | Hacker News Reader

>As any other placement service, we take 1/3 of the first year salary (paid by the employer).

Wait, what? I don't know what the average salary is for junior-to-senior programmers in Germany, but 1/3th of it can't be a little...

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AFAIK, this is also how Hacker School NY works. I'm not a recruiter, nor want to be one :). I've never been recruited either. It sounds like a lot of money to me too, but it's the industry standard. On top of consuming all my free time the last 2-3 months, flying/hosting residents, paying for office space, etc is a significant cost. We hope that after the first batch, people are so appreciative that they will find it criminally bad if there's no next edition of the retreat. Making some money will give us the freedom to fly the best people, and provide the best experience possible. This is not a non-profit, but it's not run with the only intention of making money.

So where do the sponsors come in play?

A typical salary for a software developer is between 35 and 40k Euros in Germany. Of course, if you've got a special skill set you can make a lot more. To people coming from the US, those salaries often appear to be "shockingly low" at first. Of course, this is before they take into account all the benefits, and this includes --- to pick three random examples --- not having to step over homeless people on the way to work, very low crime rates, or an extensive public transport system.

By the way, the few Americans I know who moved to Europe don't complain at all about the nominal wage differentials.

This is not about the nominal wage difference between America and Europe but about them taking 1/3 of that 35 to 40k.

My answer was referring to your comment that you didn't know what the average salary of a junior-to-senior developer in Germany was.

From the company, not the participants of the retreat! That percentage is also not unusual; 1/4 - 1/3 of the first year's salary seems like a pretty common range. Who would you rather have your future employer pay that fee? Some annoying headhunter, who only connects 2 parties or a skill-boost camp that supports your growth as a developer over several months. Just my 2 cents.

That's not 1/3 of that 35 to 40k. The employer pays the fee, not the employee. This is very important. We don't want you to make less money; in fact, if that was the case many people who are already in highly paid jobs would not do it (myself included).

Funded startups that are looking for the top talent, at any cost, are the ones that I assume will benefit the most. For them, 1/3 of the 1st year salary is an investment. Better pay that rather than having to have the position open for 6 months (time is money). Hiring is extremely hard, and the people you want to hire... are by definition almost never looking for jobs. These are the same people that are attracted by the idea of spending 3 months mastering a bleeding edge technology.

Also, 35 to 40k sounds really on the low end. I don't think I know anyone making that little. And this is Berlin, where salaries are lower than in the rest of Germany. 50k seems to be rock bottom for a seasoned front-end engineer, more for backend, even more for specialty stuff such as data science.

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