I'm German, but have spent my whole adult life studying and working in Switzerland.
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.
Yes it does, suffer.
The media is always doing their "There aren't enough specialists" chorus, meaning "we want to pay less than we are right now by hiring cheap labor from India" and similar low wage areas.
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.
>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
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.
I recently applied to two positions in the Netherland. Stating I’d need at least €100k to make it worth moving halfway across the world (and I’d still be losing out). All is roses and sunshine, companies agree (or at least, recruiter tells me they agree), and both interviews go well.
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.
We're still getting wrecked compared to Americans. I get enough recruiters in my inbox that I'm just flatly stating I won't consider less than 100,000 DKK a month. With taxes as high as they are, that's a take home of less than 50,000, which is 6800 USD a month, which is just 81,000 USD a year. That in itself is a travesty but most shops here are trying to get devs at 45,000 DKK a month here pre-taxes.
And they wonder why it's so difficult to fill empty spaces at their companies.
from my German perspective the numbers in this article look representative. The 45k you quoted were the lowest number for people without much experience (but still: German wages are not quite as great as one would maybe expect, I'll give you that. But that's across the board, not only IT.).
> Berlin offers developers the biggest bang for their buck, with high offered salaries and a low cost of living.
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.
> If you are a new resident, or move to a new apartment there? You are basically fucked.
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.
I was living there during the Berlin city governments (failed eventually) attempt to control rent by just regulating it down - they assigned an actual value to each apartment, and mandated that was the new rent.
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.
This is not unique to Germans, FWIW. RE is increasing all over Europe yet companies are trying to keep pre-COVID packages with a 'hybrid working' label added on.
Yes, those same packages that were already low enough to make things uncomfortable in certain areas.
I do think that European salaries are slowly breaking the mold. I'm being employed by a German company, where the lower end of a managements salary on those charts is the minimum norm for a backend developer. I know that this is the 'avg' salary of course, but when I specified to recruiters that I would not settle for less than 80-90k EUR with 5 years of experience, I still got enough job interviews (in Germany). I still wonder whether I got a too good of a deal, or whether tides for European developers are changing.
I suspect it really depends on who you come in contact with.
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.
> 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.
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.
Taxes is not the only one, social security fees are quite high too. That might sound bad for a healthy young person. However, when you end up of no longer able to work for whatever reason, the likelyhood to end up under bridge is much lower than in many other countries. And even if you get cancer the hospital bills you have to pay yourself will be marginal. My father who is 88 had 2 bigger surgeries last year basically for free. And it's been more than 20 years that he has paid those fees that might sound high to others the last time.
I may be an extreme outliar, but these numbers seem quite low to me?
The highest salaries listed there were about 30-40% lower than my new grad salary.
Granted it’s an offer for an american big tech company, but even many of my peers with less than stellar CV’s did better than the data shows.
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.
I do agree but American big tech does hire quite a bit here, no? Amazon, google, msft, meta all have fairly big offices all over Europe. And many other big tech companies aswell, especially since fully remote jobs becoming way more common.
That looks pretty accurate for the tier of companies that are valuing devs to a nothing. Old derelict european companies mostly that believe managers are the kings and everyone else is a cost center. Hell even functional pm or agile coach get better salaries than good devs. This is why europe cannot compete with usa (hell not even with canada or australia)
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.
Managing roles get paid more. I would not have a problem with that, if they were good. Few developers/teams are self-organizing so they would productive without.
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 wonder if this sort of research is more focused on appealing to companies rather than employees, as I often see averages which are much lower than what can be considered the current market rate. Therefore research like this gives companies numbers which they can use to justify lower salaries to new employees and lower raises to existing employees, especially if a company wants to pay the median salary, or at the 75% mark.
I always hear stories about people being paid significantly more than these sorts of surveys suggest.
Odds are you're living in a bubble, or the people who talk about money tend to be the ones earning more. Average wages really are that low, median wages even more so. Most developers do not talk or negotiate.
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.
Readit News
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.