Rest assured 6-digit salaries are quite common in areas like Munich, and if you work for US companies like Google or Microsoft they can be double or triple that, or even more, through stocks. The sad truth as well is that there are not enough successful and large tech companies in Germany that you would see those there as well.
Google is hiring in Munich too. I couldn't find public salary information on salaries there though. I'd say it's competitive enough that I'd be willing to relocate from London there.
The example holds for Hamburg, and is pretty close for Munich or Frankfurt. (I've spent four years working in Baden-Württemberg and four in Berlin.) Tech salaries are just a lot lower in Germany. In comparison, in the US, there are a number of cities where wages are pretty close to Silicon Valley. I believe NYC is a bit higher. If you want to compare finance to finance, I assure you that salaries in New York are higher than they are in Frankfurt.
1. Unprecedented for "average" engineers (i.e. not leading their field) until very recently
2. Offered by extremely profitable big tech companies or less profitable companies with giant pools of funding
3. Offered by companies that highly value software engineers
4. Offered in extremely competitive markets
The vast majority of employers in Germany, and in most of the world, don't meet those criteria. It's unreasonable to compare the average German tech company to the best paying American tech companies.
Compared to the best paying software jobs on earth, German tech pays pretty badly. But so do most companies. I used to live in a city with a population of ~1 million, and most local "tech" companies paid new grads $60k - $80k, with senior developers landing between $100k and $150k. That's much closer to Germany pay than Silicon Valley pay.
I personally know people have made 6 figures in non-senior positions in Berlin working for German subsidiaries of multi-national companies, just "Software Development Engineer". I don't know if that happens through job listing offering 6 figure salaries or entering at a lower salary and getting raises.
You mean in Munich, right? Anywhere outside of Munich €100k is a really high salary for a software engineer. Not impossible to get, I know of a few companies that offer that kind of compensation or even higher and are located in Berlin (though all of them have their HQ in the US), but that's very high income compared to the rest of the market.
In any case, the point is that with €100k/year you can really have way more than a decent life. More like a very, very comfortable life.
Yeah, easy to say but unless you're in the top percentile of highly sought-after specialists in a hot area, you're not making a dent.
The problem is, due to the hype of tech careers, free education, easy immigration and lack of VC funding in (most of) Europe, there is an oversupply of entry to mid level talent and a shortage of good companies, so if you refuse to bend over to each company's bullshit then it's no problem as they have 99 more candidates waiting in the pipeline and some will.
When I was living in Munich it baffled me how some companies there could get away with paying experienced people only 50k and still run a successful business and not have everyone straight-up walk away from them.
That's a long road. Very few tech firms generate the kind of money from tech abroad like many US firms do. You won't be earning 300k in a non-US company in Germany very very likely when looking at similarly-levelled roles (to exclude high-powered roles) compared to the US. You'll be looking at 1/3rd the total comp max in many cases and that'll already be a very good salary in the field. And possibly higher taxes, no effective investment-based retirement schemes, and other disadvantages.
US firms have a very long way to fall before they get even the least unattractive, relatively. A young person emigrating from Germany to the US working in a (now) good tech job there making 150,000 plus benefits will be out-earning their age cohort back in Germany 2-3x at the start of their career. Heck even at 120,000 that's likely 2-3x what a somebody with a Bachelor's here would get. That's a tremendous difference no career-focussed person would shy away from wanting.
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.
It is absolutely possible to get more than 5k after taxes as base salary in Munich as a true senior software engineer. Lots of what TFA calls "tier 3" companies are in Munich.
I live in Germany, and I do compare salaries to American numbers. This is the very reason why I will never work for German companies ever again, because I'm not willing to be dependent on wage labour until the end of my days. I am working remotely for a US startup, who a) value my skillset instead of using antiquated tech, and b) who pay twice what I made before in Germany, and c) recently made me a cofounder.
German startups aside, our big multinationals happily create teams working in the the US and Germany, while paying their German employees a fraction of their American colleagues. I know of cases in pharma, automotive, and erp.
I'm loathe seeing this contentment with the wage situation in Germany. If wages for in demand fields like Software engineering are essentially flat for 30 years and €70k are considered an amazing salary, how exactly are wages supposed to rise in service sector fields, for example for caregivers? Salaries as part of gdp have deceased over that time range, but the prevalent ideology among my crowd is that one shall not work for money, because that's apparently a dirty thing to do.
Software engineers not pushing for significantly higher wages and gaslighting people who do makes them accomplices to the wage surpression that is rampant in Germany and the EU at large.
I can’t speak for other fields but tech scene in Germany and EU is a joke and there is no way one’s compensation matches US. I had a job offer in Munich and considering how low the quality of housing is you end up still paying more than €1300 for a 1 bed flat. (This was my market search back in 2018)
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