Yeah, the numbers in Germany are not so rosy. If these numbers are true, we are looking at -
- An "average" salary of around 65K / year
- This after (an average of) 5-6 rounds of interviews
- 6 months of "probation", with only 2 weeks of notice
- And all after 4-6 years of degree/s and 4-5 years of experience (so around 10 years of investment)
Then after taxation 65K annually means around 3500/month in pocket. Then with the current prices - around 1200 goes in rent alone. Not a lot of room to spend after that. Then, prices keep going up and even a simple (new) car is around 20,000. Not to mention the stress / savings you have to keep since people can be let go anytime. To top it, there is a ceiling in Germany - unless you are extra-ordinary forget making above 100K ever even after 25 years of experience.
IT / software dev is a "barely survivable" kind of job in Germany right (sadly) now. I do not recommend it to kids in school/uni anymore (again unfortunately).
It's the median salary: 50% of people earn more than 62.4k. 10% earn more than 80k. It's still low compared to the US, but what isn't?
For this, you get proper health and unemployment insurance, usually 30 days of paid vacation, up to 6 weeks of sick leave with full salary, up to 10 days to take care of sick children with full salary, paternal leave, the right to work part-time if desired, and so on. I don't know where you get the "people can be let go anytime" have from, because Germany is pretty famous for its "Kündigungsschutz" and it's very hard to let people go because of performance issues alone, which is why things like stack ranking and performance improvement plans pretty much do not exist here.
I can understand if young people without kids do not care about these things and just want the money. However, once you get older, you'll see the advantages.
I agree with you partly. The benefits are great & fairly above international norms. But I do not agree with the "firing protection" anymore. Last year alone I saw thousands let go in Berlin in fairly large organizations like neobanks for example. I myself saw my previous employer let go of 30% of the staff over the year. A simple Google search of - "Berlin IT firings 2025" will give you a picture.
"The union" should be "a union", of which, companies are rarely a part of ie zero.
Their workforce may be a member of a union, some equals in grade may belong to different unions.
Whenever I read those reports I can't help but wonder who they are actually asking. I'm definitely in a bubble working in Munich and either for US subsidiaries or at least close to them (automotive, ai, robotics, aerospace and others) - but it's a pretty big bubble because it's easily thousands of engineers within one or two hops. And we all make north of 100k€! No-one with more than 5-10 years of experience would accept an offer below 90k and I know a lot of folks that earn 150k+. The statistics always feel very low-balled
This experience is common in my circles even in the US as well as those I know in Europe. May be a bi-modal distribution where some industries are vastly underpaying while some industries are the opposite and paying well above the average. This seems to have happened in a lot of career spaces. The vast majority will be in the first group too, which is why sampling would get a result like the one in the survey?
Germans won't tell you how much they earn, ever. It keeps salaries down in all industries.
These fucking Tarifvertraege have kept salaries from growing, too. The people would have pushed a long time ago but the truth is masked well enough.
Those who don't believe the shit, earn more. It is sad and the change and progress happens elsewhere. Enjoy one or two decades of German companies looking like they still matter. Nobody will account for the reasons later on. It's a shame.
And an average of 65k to the average person is gooood.
> Many of my colleagues cracked 100k€ this year without being AT and having crazy high position ratings.
And for each of those guys there's 2 people working for 48k and happy about it. They've been at the same shop for 15 years, in a team of the only 3 people doing software in the entire company. Probably somewhere a bit rural, and/or north of Frankfurt.
But are they? A Berlin startup was paying this average salary to the Indian/Pakistani devs they sponsored and fully expected to jump ship in the next 12 months. Why would they not pay 70k-75k and have your pick in the upper half of the domestic market.
It's a bit more complicated than this. First, averages hide a lot of variability, both in skillsets and salaries. You have SWEs earning very high income. Also there's the question of opportunities. Some of these SWEs/devs could have had better prospects in different fields, while others not. And there's also the question of whether you like what you do. For many people, programming is a passion.
What are some jobs that pay significantly more? Is it easier to be a factory worker? (I suppose factory workers cannot be let go as easily.) Does work in finance, or in medicine, or some other highly educated job pay materially more?
Yes, medicine pays better, median is around 100k but with significant back loading towards the second half of the career.
Finance can be (much) better, but feels like far fewer jobs, especially outside Frankfurt. I'm not sure finding a high paying finance jobs is easier than finding a software job at the German office of an American firm (which pay similarly well).
> I suppose factory workers cannot be let go as easily.
It's important to look at comparable companies. If you're a SE at a company with many factory workers, firing the SE is usually equally as difficult as firing the factory worker. They usually have the same protections and are in the same union. Software shops just tend to be smaller and those have lower job security.
> - 6 months of "probation", with only 2 weeks of notice
Talk to Arbeitsamt, hiring in Germany is a huge risk as soon as your company is 10+ people. By the way, the two weeks notice goes both ways. There’s a risk on both sides.
> - And all after 4-6 years of degree/s and 4-5 years of experience (so around 10 years of investment)
Everyone is a Doktor there so your investment is most likely worthless. You did your reps at the Uni, profs instilled into you that you’re crème de la crème, but can you do the job, or are you just good at following orders.
What plan? I do not know what reality people live in. I am an Indian myself, migrated 12 years ago. There are around currently 20000 students from India in Germany. I have talked to a dozen of them in my neighborhood, only 1 in 10 can even find a job post graduation in current market
Not sure of where you are coming from. But thousands come in and go every year. A few hundred are able to land a job after graduation / post-graduation (in Germany). Zero is not theoretically possible with so many universities looking for international students.
Canada, where immigrants came in under various immigration programs? As far as I know Canada and India don't have a trade agreement comparable to the one India has no with the EU. Hopefully one day. Apples to Oranges comparison though I think.
(I'm aware of companies abusing the LMIA system and I'm not saying that this or that level of immigration is sustainable)
That sounds about right to me, maybe a tad too low. In my experience it's more like 2-3 rounds of interviews and 70-75k€/year with 5 YoE and a college degree, which amounts to 3700€/month net income and you can't expect much improvement on that even with 25 YoE unless you become some sort of corporate middle manager.
Very interesting. It would be great if this works with a "higher" level library like Pixi.js or Phaser.js, that way one could build with ease in JS/TS, using a rich library/ecosystem and still distribute a "native" app (it probably already works with these libs but not sure).
Phaser is not supported right now because phaser is still using a WebGL renderer from my understanding (maybe in a v2.0.0 adding ANGLE + WebGL support is an option, but debating if that's a good idea or not).
Nope, I would probably even quit at 250K of savings. Take some time off, then maybe learn pixel art / design , and spend 2 years to make a game or SaaS to get around 2k income per month for 2 years and then repeat the cycle. The initial money secures basic housing and bills, and the small monthly income is good enough for me.
My biggest question now is - since now anyone can build a SaaS, and since everything is now optimized not for "employment" but for "enterprise" (run your own business), just how many 1-2 person companies can we build? I mean how many genuine sell-able ideas are there. Can we as a society have a 100,000s small software enterprises (and not a few hundred employing 1000s)?
I would love to start my own SaaS company, even if it generates $1000 a month I will be elated. And I have 20+ years of experience programming and in FinTech, but what do I build? Not to mention, without sales & marketing nothing will really work.
Two of the startups are lead by non-technical founders who have strong industry specific experience (legal and finance). The third has a partner that has industry experience (is the ICP).
So you definitely still need strong sales and marketing and a deep understanding of a business domain.
1 person and AI is not sufficient to create a business.
Very impressive! Worth noting that HTMX also has a WebSocket extension - https://v1.htmx.org/extensions/web-sockets/ so one could potentially also do "live views" in more performant runtimes like JVM or Node.js
My first version of Django LiveView used HTMX. WebSocket connectivity is one aspect; there is another part of logic and architecture where it falls short.
Debian is not far behind, it's just on a really long release cycle because that is what it is designed to be. Debian trixie has mostly the latest and greatest from 6 months ago.
I spent ages submitting the bug report with various log files, /etc/fstab that worked vs. the one that didn't. Detailed steps to reproduce, specific kernel versions, snapshots of /etc/ /usr/share/etc and so on. What the problem was, how I resolved it.
Created an account to submit it all to Fedora(/Redhat/IBM). And it just got marked wont fix. Apparently the filesystem guy didn't think it was a filesystem problem (despite being caused by fstab) and just closed it.
Apparently getting stuck in the below loop is an acceptable response due to a typo in /etc/fstab.
--
Reloading system manager configuration.
Starting default target.
You are in emergency mode. After logging in, type "journalctl -xb" to view system logs, "systemctl reboot" to reboot, or “exit” to continue booting.
Cannot open access to console, the root account is locked. See sulogin(8) to continue.
Press Enter to continue.
Reloading system manager configuration.
Starting default target.
You are in emergency mode. After logging in, type "journalctl -xb" to view system logs, "systemctl reboot" to reboot, or “exit” to continue booting.
Cannot open access to console, the root account is locked. See sulogin(8) to continue.
Sometimes is the only form when you spend time, write really good report and get just „go f yourself, not a bug”.
He could call it "enshittification going in Fedora community", but went straight and honest.
A few things - they're custom builds - my main server has ECC ram in a Gigabyte gaming motherboard, and does mail/files (now just ripped DVD's & Blu-rays), its had ZFS for ages. Ran low on space and bought a Beelink ME mini, and moved stuff across. That was the smoothest build ever. Booted off a USB stick, it detected all 6 nvme drives and was up and transferring stuff onto it in record time. Not the cheapest way to go about things for $/TB, but I could afford it. Store audio and general backup on these (mostly read, rarely write) with the movies on the spinning rust server. Both raidz1-0.
Plus an offsite virtual web server/backup mail server.
Not using jails or anything fancy. Just leave them alone aside from running freebsd-update and pkg update commands occasionally. Stable as.
The only complicated part is that on a couple of systems the motherboards the realtek network card isn't detected and so to bootstrap the install process the easiest way is to tether a phone via USB in order to get a network connection to then pkg install the driver for it.
Can dual boot my main PC into FreeBSD desktop mode - trying to wean myself of Windows 10, but as I said gaming/audio just works, so its the default boot device. Gaming on FreeBSD is problematic, I did manage to play Factorio for 15 minutes, but then it locks up complaining about a missing ALSA file, its acknowledged that its suboptimal and gaming Linux is just easier than continually messing around trying to get all the bits working consistently. Some people insist on it, but it still seems too precarious for me.
Hence considering Cachy OS. Wanted to triple boot my desktop machine, but turns out the motherboard despite having four slots for drives, doesn't actually support more than 2 of them. Uh, thanks Gigabyte...
The media PC is a ASUS NUC 14 Pro Mini running CachyOS, mostly happy with it compared to other distro's but they all have their quirks. Plus it hard locks occasionally when streaming (e.g. Netflix). Just remembering which package manager and how to use it is a minor challenge. I remember the era where there was basically just .deb and .rpm
I haven't used a laptop in ages, and dislike using a smartphone. I want my multi-monitor setup. I still remember thinking how dumb it was we had 1600x1200 and 1920x1200 and then they standardised on 1920x1080.
Ironically, Apple's Cinema Displays which cost a lot back in the day - mid 2000's did do 1920x1200 via DVI and we've got a few that still work to this day. My wife was in Apple-land because of her profession (graphic design), and I couldn't resist, Apple wasn't quite as evil back then. I think they have Sanyo displays in them. So props to those designing hardware that just keeps going.
Probably downvoted for resorting to juvenile name-calling when someone else didn't diagnose and fix a problem in your local installation of a free software project for you.
I assume you have never seen the German software recruitment process. 6+ rounds spread over 3 months (with no ghosting in the middle if you are lucky). Here is the current process -
- Apply online
- Initial screening with recruiter if they like your resume (book a 45 mins slot)
- Take home assignment or online assessment (2 -4 hours)
- First technical screening interview (1-1.5 hours)
- Second technical interview (system level, deep dive, 1.5 hours)
- Product manager interview (1 hour)
- Senior leadership interview (1 hour)
- Final offer
Between all these rounds, you need to book meetings and it usually takes 1-2 weeks between rounds.
- An "average" salary of around 65K / year
- This after (an average of) 5-6 rounds of interviews
- 6 months of "probation", with only 2 weeks of notice
- And all after 4-6 years of degree/s and 4-5 years of experience (so around 10 years of investment)
Then after taxation 65K annually means around 3500/month in pocket. Then with the current prices - around 1200 goes in rent alone. Not a lot of room to spend after that. Then, prices keep going up and even a simple (new) car is around 20,000. Not to mention the stress / savings you have to keep since people can be let go anytime. To top it, there is a ceiling in Germany - unless you are extra-ordinary forget making above 100K ever even after 25 years of experience.
IT / software dev is a "barely survivable" kind of job in Germany right (sadly) now. I do not recommend it to kids in school/uni anymore (again unfortunately).